Neville Goddard Lectures: “We Came Out From the Father and Return”

08 May Neville Goddard Lectures: “We Came Out From the Father and Return”

6/28/68

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Now, I do hope that you will keep this alive forever. No one knows, really, what moment in time they’re called to depart this sphere, no one knows. I tell you I’ll be here based upon human concepts in September, but who knows? No one knows. We depart on time and we enter on time. And he who started a good work in us will continue it until he brings it to perfection; and that perfection is that he has completed the image of himself within us, and that image is now endowed with life within itself. It is no longer a simple animated form; it is a life-giving Spirit. And so, when the work is completed and it has performed certain functions in this world, well then, it departs, and he who started it knows when it will depart. So I can only say I’ll be back in September, based upon my own knowledge and possibly wish, but I do not know. And no one knows, may I tell you.

Now, listen carefully for this is a simple, simple—and yet it is a mystery—it’s a simple story, but it’s all a mystery. The gospel which seems to be a little story, secular story, is a mystery to be known only by revelation. “I came out from the Father and came into the world; again, I leave the world and I return to the Father.” In these four short phrases we have the pre-existence of Christ, we have the incarnation, we have his death, and we have his ascension…in these simple four phrases. Now, what does it mean? I could put this into not the first-person singular but the first-person plural, we came out. For we are told—and what I just quoted you came from the 16th of John (verse 28)—but we’re told in the 1st chapter of Ephesians, “He chose us in him before the foundation of the world” (verse 4). So we, all of us, were chosen in him, so I could say we came out from the Father and we came into the world; again, we are leaving the world and we are going to the Father.

Now, what does it mean? Let me use just a simple analogy. Take a plant…the plant contains within itself all the suckers…that which we can take and transplant. While it exists within the plant it partakes of the life of the plant; but when it is transplanted, well then, that which partook of the life of the plant becomes, by the transplant, the parent. It becomes the parent. It was God’s purpose to give us himself…and God is a father. The only way he could do it is to send us out from himself; and yet he who sent us never left us, he’s within us, and like the sucker, contains within itself everything that the parent plant grew…if its flowers were red, white, blue, whatever they were. When it’s transplanted, and for a moment it seems to die…for this is the secret of life, life through death…and the seed falls into the ground and dies to be made alive. So the seed comes out containing within itself all that the parent contains. When it dies and is made alive and it grows, it is itself the parent containing everything that was in the parent stock.