Lucifer Chose to Be His Own God

Now I'm wanting to continue tonight from where I left off last time I was speaking with you, which was yesterday morning. We were seeing that there is only one person in the universe, there's only one person in the universe, the whole universe is one person, the I am, who is spirit, who is love, and the universe is his means of manifestation, and the means by which he expresses his self-giving love, because being love he is for his universe, not his universe for him, that's this one. The first revelation of his manifestation was in his own trinity, taking manifested form in his own son, and by his son he brought all the varieties of manifestation in the world, in the universe into being, including ourselves.

And part of this manifestation creation through the son was, has been the creation of this vast family of sons who are we. And the miracle of that creation is that we are destined to be co-sons with him, as he came and made this possible for us by his death and resurrection, raises up again as a brotherhood with him. So the destiny of us as co-sons is co-heirs, and our destiny is to own, develop and manage his universe.

And that means that if we are to be his means of fulfilling his purposes through the universe, we have to be the same kind of person as he is. He is self-giving love, he exists to fulfill his universe, not his universe to fulfill him. And therefore we can only be his manifested sons, his adequate sons, if we manifest the same kind of character as he has.

That is possible, because the mean of spirits is unity. We fall into matter relations which means a separation. But the heart of this universe is unity, and unity means he and we are one.

And if he and I are one, I'm in a relationship in which perfectly naturally, perfectly normally, I can forget it most of the time, I'm not really I at all. I'm an expression of Christ, an expression of the Father whose love is expressed through me. And I'm an expression of self-giving love because I'm a manifestation of him who is self-giving love.

That's a true son. And the human history is how we come to discover who we are as sons and how we function as sons. Because the purpose of God is that we should be real people, thinking, willing, acting people, not just automata.

So we have to know ourselves and know who we are and know how we function as who we are, which is sons. That's the human history. It's had to have several phases.

One has been the means by which we found ourselves as cells. In order to find ourselves as cells, we had to be tempted to be cells. That was the temptation in the Garden of Eden.

When Adam and Eve were tempted to be themselves, they found, I've got appetites, I've got eyes to see things and appreciate beauty, I've got a mind that can be developed, I'm a real person. So by the temptation to be their individual selves, they found themselves, they found themselves to be themselves and you have to know that. So we know we have appetites, abilities, faculties by which God can manifest himself through eternity.

We are real people. Then we took a step downward and yet it's been a step which has been needful in our process and that is we became captives of the God of self-centeredness. The one who utilizes freedom to choose the other way.

We have to learn that freedom means our capacity and necessity of making choices. Choices is committing yourself to something. Choice is what we call faith.

Committing yourself to something, receiving something, joining something, moving into something. We're inner people, we do that from within ourselves. So the heart of being a person is the word of faith.

The ability to speak the right word, the word of committal, the word which identifies ourselves with something, the word of faith. That's being a real person. And we have to learn how to utilize that word of faith by which we make the choices.

And so we became enslaved to the first created being who made the other choice as freedom he could do that, and freedom he could do that. The fundamental choice which stands before every person, the basic motivation of being a person is, shall I be a self-loving, self-seeking, self-gratifying, self-centered person, or shall I be a self-giving person? They're the only two possible alternatives before which all persons stand. That's why we find it so wonderful when it says that God cannot lie.

So very soon it seems that almighty God, the one in the universe, of whom the whole universe is an expression, there's something he can't be and can't do, but the Bible says he can't. Because being a person, you're only a person by your free choice between alternatives. You're conscious of alternatives and you make your free choice.

And your fundamental free choice is there. And the choice of that one is to be for others. A liar is for himself.

A person who lies, if I lie to you, I lie to gain my gains at your expense. God cannot live to gain his aims at your expense, he cannot lie. So God can only be and is only a self-giver, he exists for his universe, that's odd.

But there came into being this created person who went the other round, and formed the kingdom of self-centeredness, self-seeking, self-gratification. And that's the one who took us captive at the fall. Because all created beings are containers, they're negatives to which the positive expresses himself.

They're the branches of the vine, they're the body of the head, that to which the head expresses itself, the branch to which the vine expresses itself. So humans are negative, and we're always motivated by the God we contain. And at the fall, we became vessels that contain the false God.

That's why the Bible says we became vessels of wrath, we became vessels through whom the wrath comes. And so we became captives to the God of self-centeredness, and became people just spontaneous and naturally centered around ourselves, self-seeking, self-gratifying, with all the things that follow that. So we started our human history by being the wrong kind of people.

We first started our human history by finding we are people who have appetites and moods as faculties, and with the unlimited development which is possible for persons. We then went through the process by which we were wrong kind of people. And the value and necessity of that is, only when you know the wrong way of doing a thing can you be quite sure of the right way.

If you stand at a crossroads where there are five roads, you're only safely taking that road if you know the other four are the wrong ones. You have to find the wrong roads before you're quite sure of the right one. And so we can become mature persons if we find the wrong way of doing things before we find the right way and then discard it.

And I say this in every profession. You've always found the wrong way to handle your tools, the wrong way to do this, the wrong way to cook, the wrong way to do so, so before you're confident in the right way to do it. So this has been the history of us, the human race.

God, as love, came, we may say, to the last limit of love, when because love exists to meet need, he himself came to meet our need in this condition. Because we're an enslaved family and we can't get out of our slavery, we're destined to go where the devil longs, into darkness, weakness, weeping out of teeth, gnashing of teeth out of darkness, as Jesus said. But God, in his sound form, in the form of the Lord Jesus Christ, came as one of us because he could do so because he is the author of the human creation.

So he is able to represent the human creation. And we went, we looked last time into how he completed a deliverance for us, by death and resurrection. In a death, you leave behind all you had before.

If you die here, you leave everything behind. You go into a new dimension of life. Jesus, in his death, entered into the death we should enter into, the death of the lost condition, the death which has guilt and judgment and hell and eternal wrath involved in it.

He took it upon himself and he died on our behalf. But being God's son, who had never been in the hands of the devil, he was raised from the dead. And in his resurrection, he left behind him, like death leaves something behind, he left behind him all that will come to us through our death if we die as fallen people, in Satan.

So he left behind forever, sin will wrath and judgment will give him the whole thing went out forever, disappeared forever for the whole human race. And the resurrection is God's word of saying, it's in his sight as if we never sinned. What's called being justified in Christ, as if we never had any sin, wrath, judgment or hell.

Not only that, but even far more important than that, in his death, he represented us, and as there is in our human body, the spirit of self-centeredness, the spirit of error the Bible speaks about. And on the cross, we are like his body there, crucified with him, buried with him, risen with him. When the body dies, it dies as a spirit.

And so when his body died by representing us, he died two sins, sin is the spirit of self-centeredness which produces the sins, the sins of the hates and lies and the products, sin is the motivation, the spirit of self-centeredness. And so he completely worked out, not only taking away the consequences of our sins, wrath, judgment, hell, guilt, everlasting punishment, but he took away also the producer, the motivator of the spirit of self-centeredness which had captured humanity, that went out of humanity also. So he fulfilled a total deliverance, a total redemption, salvation for the human race.

That's as far as we got in what we were talking about last time. Now we come back to the central fact for us humans, freedom of choice. All responsibility of man consists of freedom of choice.

I don't know how to make the right choice. Choice being what you commit yourself to, your word of faith, to what you relate yourself to. What you relate yourself to, as we learned before, what you take, takes you.

You take food, food takes you. You come here this weekend, you're taken over by being here. You take a profession, a profession takes you.

So the meaning of being a human is we freely relate ourselves to something, we just put ourselves, commit ourselves to it, it takes care of us. And we become that. And because we freely took it, we enjoy being taken over by that thing, we enjoy being here for this week, or we enjoy developing our profession or whatever it may be.

This is the law of experience by which we humans develop. Now we come to the moment, the greatest moment in the history of the human person, when we made a choice. If you are, as thank God many of us are here, a saved person tonight, if you are, for the first time in human history, you transferred your attachment, your believing from matter things to spirit.

First time you stepped into spirit faith instead of matter faith. All life is faith. All life is being involved in the things which you receive and believe in.

Up to the time of the revelation to us that we're lost sinners, we were just living down here and our faith was attached to what we had down here. If you and I are saved people, a revelation came to you. It came to you so much personally.

You are a lost person, you're a wrong kind of person. You're lost, guilty, under judgement, sinner, cut off eternally from God. In some way that came right into the centre of your being.

Not just, it didn't just that you committed sins, but you're a sinner. You're basically self-certain, this is sinner, that's what we were. In some way that came to you as a revelation that you're a wrong kind of person.

And you become disillusioned in relation to where your faith was put. Your faith was just being that old kind of person. Now, if it's possible, you want to transfer your faith.

To what? That's why the gospel has come to us. Because Jesus has been offered to you, and he presented to you in the word, in the revelation of his love, and so on. Now you take a step.

Now it's a big step because you couldn't prove it. At least when you sit in the chair, you know what you're sitting on. Matter of faith relates to something you can at least see.

There's some chance it will be reliable if you put your faith in it. Now it'll take you a big step. You're moving over in your need, your hunger for God, your sense that your old life is wrong, you're moving over to someone or something you can see, to someone you never see.

See Christ, the history of Jesus finished at the cross. Human history finished there. He died a failure.

Resurrection doesn't belong to this world. The cross belongs to this matter world. The resurrection belongs to the spirit dimension.

Only those who have the spirit can see the resurrection. And now we move into him, father, son, spirit, who is the real world, the spirit world. And because you and I were in this condition of need, we took a step, we took a leap.

You can't even prove the Bible. But because it was so wonderful to us, what was revealed to us in the Bible, that God loved like this and Jesus loved like that and he offered us forgiveness and eternal life and so on, from our inner self we attached ourselves to him. Now for the first time you transferred your faith, your inner attachment, your choice, your receptivity from things down here to him.

And if you're a redeemed person, you from within yourself, somewhere along the line said, I receive you, I believe you, I accept you. That was functioning as a real person, as an inner free person from the inner self and you spoke a word of faith which relates yourself to someone you've never seen. Now then something happened, something tremendous happened.

If you're a saved person, if you're a redeemed person, it wasn't that you took him, it was he took you. Because the law of faith is what you take, takes you. You take a chair, the chair takes you, you feel it holding you up.

I told you, if you take food, you're conscious food's taking you. You come here this evening, you're conscious you're being taken, you're here. What you take, takes you.

Now, what happened on this occasion, this is the proof you're redeemed. If you took Jesus, you can't say how it is, because you moved to the spirit realm, his spirit bore witness to your spirit and into your inner self came and said, he does love me, he has saved me, his blood has cleansed me, I am forgiven, I have eternal life. Something real came to you that you can't prove in earthly terms at all.

And you came into a consciousness of an inner reality, and the inner reality is not in this world of sense at all. The inner reality is a living God, Father, Son, Spirit in what is the universal realm, the spirit realm, which is the true realm. You see, we've got things so distorted, we regard matter as real and spirit as rather unreal.

The truth is matter's unreal and spirit's real. And we've begun to move around and find reality. And if you're a redeemed person, you've entered into reality which makes you a permanent fool.

If you're not a good fool, you're not a good Christian. Because you're believing something which is nonsense, where's God, where's Jesus, where's the rest of it, nonsense, be sensible, come down here. Something's happened to you which has made him real to you, the Father, Son and Spirit are real to you.

As real to your forgiveness and acceptance, you've begun to be a new person. That's the most tremendous moment that can ever be in your human history. When you're moved over by your free choice, having become disillusioned with the wrong life, having discovered it was the wrong life, to a right life if there is one.

And the inner right life, because it's given to you in Jesus, Jesus' death which took away all the past, and Jesus' resurrection which gives you his Holy Spirit. Because the resurrection means change of gods. We wear vessels saying the Spirit of Self-Certainty, out in the cross of Jesus Christ.

In the resurrection, the Spirit of God came into place, into the same vessel. So into the same vessel which doesn't change, has come a new God, where there was the God of Self-Certainty, has come the Lord Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit. This is what we call a new birth.

Now the real importance of it is this. When we first come to Jesus, we're so selfish we can't see beyond ourselves. When you come to Jesus, you come to Jesus because you want your need met, because you don't want to go to hell, you want forgiveness, you want to be delivered from sin, you want to have peace with God, you want eternal life, you want to have heaven.

You're just selfish, that's all you want, because that's all you can see at that time. If God had come along at that time and said, I want you to be somebody for others, you'd say, well, I'm interested in being somebody for others, I'm interested in being somebody for myself. You wouldn't be interested.

But love never offers you more than you can take. So love doesn't offer you what you're going to come to. It offers you whatever you can take.

And what you can take is a saviour for you. God gives you a saviour for you, Jesus for you, forgives your sins, gives you eternal life, gives you peace, takes away the past, makes God your father. That's presented in the Bible by the one term justified by faith, peace with God.

Peace has removed the barriers between me and God. That's for my convenience. But something far more important than that has happened.

You've been caught out and hadn't realised at the time how you had been caught out. There's a nice little packet wrapped up in that. Because the law of faith, the law of reception, is what you take, takes you.

If you take food, it does what it is. If it's poisonous food, it poisons you. If it's good food, it benefits you.

You can't stop it once it's inside you. It's just itself once it's inside you. So when you take Jesus, he's just himself once he's inside you.

And Jesus isn't for you, he's love, he's for the world. He isn't a you-love, he's a world-lover. You've been caught out.

You've been captured within yourself by a person who doesn't exist to love you, he exists to love the world, and he begins to cause you to be a lover. And the real evidence you're born again is something you couldn't help. When you were born again, when you received Jesus Christ, and that came into the witness, he does love me, he has forgiven me, he did shed his blood for me, my sins have gone, I'm going to go to hell, God's my father, you couldn't help loving.

You think it was you loving, I wasn't you loving, you're just self-love. It was God's love shed upon your hearts. There was five sages, God's own love is shed upon your hearts by the Holy Spirit.

You began to love because you couldn't help it. You began to love Jesus because he died and lived for you, began to love the Father who sent him, and this is the truth, the bells are ringing, oh you want other people to know this is eternal life, this is the truth. You began to love other people.

So the proof you're a deemed person is not that you've been loved, it's that you've become a lover. Not that you've been saved, you've become a saviour. Not that you've been healed, you've become a healer.

Not made up, you can't help yourself. You've become an expression of God. God is self-loving love.

You are self-loving love. But in your self-loving love centre, because Jesus had broken the bandage that he knew of Satan and so on, you could receive him, and he came and united himself to you, he began to be himself in you, and he's other love. And you now are going to be a manifestation of God.

God is other love. And your eternal destiny is to be a son who's an other lover. And the motivation of love is love for him, love for God, and love for others and so on.

And you're going to be that. Usually, very soon after you're born again, you get a test, a test that will confirm you. That something comes into your life which is arrival of love.

It isn't necessarily a bad thing, you've left the bad things alone when you took Jesus. But there may be arrival of love, it may be an ambition, it may be sport, it may be friendship, it may be something or other, but it's a big interest to you. Not wrong, but it's like an idol which takes a large part of your heart.

Now, God only manifests himself, and you can only be a true son when God freely manifests himself by you in self-giving love. And you're caught up with him in being a self-giving lover. Now, in order to do that, he has to confirm to you that he is the center of your heart.

So, mostly by the young people, as a battle goes on, it's somewhat along the line that Jesus said, he said, if your right hand is hurt, you cut it off. If your right eye is hurt, you pluck it out. Well, your right hand's rather useful, isn't it? And your right eye's rather useful.

The point is this, if the good is hindering the better, you have to cut it out. And somewhat along the line that comes out, I had it with a friendship. And after I was saved, when I said to my friend, what happened to me, she was a good churchgoer, she didn't want that.

And the Holy Spirit said to me, you can't have both. My, I fought that. That cost me more than my salvation.

Why shouldn't I have both? A good friendship? But you can't have Christ, an empty Christ in your heart. I fought that. That was God's way of confirming to me the real love.

I tried this way, I tried that way, I tried to keep both. All the time the voice said, you can't have that, you can't have both. If you keep that, you'll lose Christ.

Thank God he spoke to me like that. And when I finally came to a realisation through a word my mother said to me, I couldn't have both, I dropped off the human love and the real love remained, which was love for Jesus, of course. Then Jesus could begin to express himself through me in freedom, because he had free will with me.

And this was his way of confirming that fact to me. So now I've sought to show you what has happened to you if you are, as many of you are, born again people. You've been through a necessary process to build you and educate you as an efficient love son of God, love son of God.

So it had taken through these processes, finding yourself as a person, finding yourself as a wrong person, being disillusioned concerning your wrongness, wanting to be the right way, finding your authority in faith, that you are able to transfer faiths related to what you wish to commit yourself to, and so as a free person you could transfer your believing in the old life to Jesus Christ. And in doing so you took this first step into the spirit realm, you began to be a spirit person. I told you from the beginning, we've got to move out from being matter people to being spirit people, now I just operate in the spirit realm, you began.

And as you received him who belongs to the spirit realm, spirit can witness to you, and he became to you what he is in your heart, a living saviour, Lord and God. And you began to relate to him who is the eternal reality, these things are made of passing shadows. You began to move out from relation to the passing shadows into relating to eternal reality.

And the effect it had on you, as I say, was not only it brought you back, it brought you into peace and reconciliation with God, but without you recognising it, you began to be an expression of God, God in human form, because you began to be other love. And it wasn't of you at all, it was contagious, you couldn't help it, you began to love that Jesus had died for you and the Father had sent him, and then because this, the bells ring, because this is true, you began to want other people to know this is true. Now there is a second phase.

There are three grades or phases in the full relationship to which we've been brought in Jesus Christ, which is necessary for us to recognise and realise that we're in them. This is the second phase. The second phase is this.

We have to have a second disillusionment, a second disillusionment. The first disillusionment was, you're not alright, even your own righteousness is a filthy rag, you're all wrong, you had to be disillusioned of any kind of self-righteousness and discover yourself just guilty. When there's nothing more you can do about yourself, when you discover you're a helpless lost sinner, nothing you can do, you're in a condition in which you can accept that he did it for you.

You can accept a substitute for it when there's nothing you can do for your own sins. When you do no more to rid yourself of your own sins, you can find that he, his righteousness replaces your sins. The second disillusionment is you've got to discover, not only are you guilty but you're helpless.

But you're helpless, that's another one. You see, Satan has introduced us into this illusory concept of living which is separation. He's moved us into this illusory life as if things are separate, nothing's separate, all one.

The whole world's unity when we see it in spirit, it's only matter, it's separate. Spirit's unity, matter's separate, it falls in one. We see a separation, we've lost sight of the one, we see a separation.

So we fall into a life where everything's separate for us, from us, including God. So even if you're a saved person, a redeemed person, you haven't yet entered into an inner consciousness of eternal unity with God. You've entered into a consciousness of a relationship, that's a step.

You enter into a consciousness you are related to Jesus Christ, God your Father, Jesus Christ your Saviour, the Spirit has touched you, has been a touch, but it's more in a sense a relationship to him, rather than he being the real you. See, when Paul was describing what he really is, he didn't say Christ died for me, he didn't say Christ isn't I me, he didn't say even Christ lives in me, he says Christ is me. That's different.

I've been crucified with Christ, he says, as far as the old life's concerned, the old life is dependent. Now I live, he corrects himself, I've got him. Now I live, he corrects himself.

No, he says, it isn't I living, it's Christ living in me, the real I is Christ. It isn't Christ for me, Christ by me, Christ near me, Christ is me. I'm in a unity in which the real I is Christ living his life by me.

That's a unity. Now, you don't enter into that when you take your first step in receiving Christ. Actually, it is a fact, but it's been too far on for you to see it.

The reason why it's too far on for you to see it, is you've got accustomed to seeing everything in terms of separation. Now, because we see things in terms of separation, we've got a deceiving understanding of where the human self fits. Now, this is what you've got to learn.

You see, we've got to learn by just being real persons. This is the whole purpose of what we're talking about, the process God takes us through. To be a real person, you have to go through three phases.

You have to go through from being the wrong kind of person in the form, to being a no-person, and then to be a right person. Now, the no-person is the problem. You've got to pass from being the wrong kind of person, as you were in your self-centred form condition, through being a no-person, which we must explain, then to be a right person.

You've got to pass through a no-person to become a right person. Now, the reason is this. The deceitfulness of sin, the sin of self-centredness, self-reliance, self-seeking, self-gratification, that's the characteristic we caught up from the spirit of error that lived in us.

We didn't need no spirit of error in us, we just thought we were ourselves. He infected us with our human selves, with their condition. Now, you see, a real self is part of a unity.

It's a unity with God. We were created in a unity with God. Now, a human self in unity with God is just spontaneously an expression of God.

Like the illustration given to us, a branch is part of a vine, a body is part of a head, they're one. And the branch is just a means by which the mind expresses itself, and the body is a means by which the head expresses itself, or a vessel containing water, if you like. We're on that level.

Now, we lost that through the fall, we lost sight of being a unity with God, and became what we thought was a separate person. Now, the significance is this. God alone in the universe is the person who is self-giving love.

If you're a part of God, your humanity spontaneously expresses self-giving love. But if you're apart from God, you can only be self-loving love. A person apart from God can only be self-interested, self-loving love.

That's all you can be. And that's all we have been. Now, the snare and deception we got is this.

We're now saved. We now have the Holy Spirit. We force this in, God can make me better, God can never make you better.

Look at yourself, you can never be even what you are, and down here on earth we always respond to what pulls out our desires, so we're always in a world down here which is pulling us out of anger and lust and hate and worry and distress and so on, these different things which get hold of us. And the trouble we have is, we haven't caught on to the fact that a human self, by itself, can only have those responses. You can only have problems with impatience and fear and hate and dislike, because all a human self, by itself, does is love itself.

The truth is, we're not ourselves. The truth is, we're Christ in us, but we don't recognize that Jesus. That's what the real person is, Christ in us.

Now, the consequence is, we go through a human life as redeemed people, when we feel we ought to be better people. The word you've got to cut out of your vocabulary is the word ought to, it doesn't belong to you. The word you've got to cut out of your vocabulary is ought to, it doesn't belong to you.

I ought to be patient, I ought to be loving, I ought to be pure, I ought to love the Bible, I ought to have power, I ought not to lose my temper, I ought not to hate, and we keep doing these things. We can't make out why it is that we do belong to Christ, we have Christ, yet we keep being angry and, as I say, showing these characteristics about us, and not able to free ourselves from them, because you never can. You can never be anything but that.

You, by yourself, can never be anything but hurt if you're hurt, angry if you're angry, impatient if you're impatient, lustful if you're lustful, unwilling if you're unwilling, not loving the Bible if you don't love it, not willing for the will of God if you don't love it. You can't change yourself, you're wasting your time. That's the snare.

You see, a human, a partful God, can only be itself, and down here, he was pulled out negatively. Now, when the human is eternally part of God, in eternal life, there'll be nothing that pulls him out, so we should just throw along the expression of Christ, but down here, we're the one which pulls us out, because this is what we're learning, why it is to walk in Christ, and learning how to minister to others in the same need. So, you see, we're caught up with a snare, about which we have to come to a right recognition, and that snare is the feeling we ought to be different people, but you never will.

The worst sin you can commit is to try to be good, because you can't be good. There's only one person who can be good, and that's God in you, not you. Now, this is the second revelation, and all through the Bible, you'll find the men in the Bible are frustrated.

They can't get what they're meant to be, what they're meant to be. They can't do what they're called to do. Moses couldn't rescue the children of Israel.

Joseph couldn't get them across the water. Abraham couldn't get his son. The disciples couldn't follow Jesus.

You never can. They can't do it. The human will follow it, so that's all he can do.

Until you find who you are. When you find you're not really you at all, you're Christ in you. You're not really you at all, you're Christ in you.

You're a human self with a living Christ in union with the real person in you. You're a branch of a vine. You're a body of a head.

Now, if we're left to ourselves, fighting against our impatiences, and fighting against our coldnesses, and feeling we ought to love God more, and fighting against our sins, you're in a hopeless condition. You fight and there you are. And that's the chapter of the Bible which ends by saying, Oh wretched man I am, who can deliver me from the body of this death? You are delivered.

But you aren't recognizing who you are. Now, you see, we live by what we recognize. We're believing in.

Now, while I'm believing in something which makes me angry, I'm angry. While I'm believing in something which frightens me, I'm frightened. When I'm believing in something which tears up my lusts, I'm lustful.

When I'm believing, my belief, attention is attracted towards something which I'm caught up by. It's no good struggling. It's no good saying you oughtn't to be like that.

That's all you can be. You've got to learn to accept yourself as yourself. You will never be changed.

It's no good condemning yourself. You're just all around who follows that way. But that's not you.

That's not you. You are Christ in you. Oh, so you are Christ in you.

That's what's happened to you. Now, what you can do in your freedom is you can transfer your recognition. You can transfer your faith.

You can say, I'm afraid of that thing. I'm afraid. All right, you are afraid.

But because you're believing in that thing, it makes you fearful. You can say, yeah, that seems real, but there's a greater reality. Christ's in me.

You transfer your believing from the thing which is making you afraid to Christ in you. Christ's courage. Christ is courage.

All right, Christ, with your courage, I'll go and do it. Are you able with Christ's courage to do a thing you can't do by yourself? Until you learn this secret, you'll be a bound-up Christian. Why? Because while you think you can be improved, you're always beating yourself up.

Why aren't I better? Why aren't I more at peace? Why aren't I more powerful? Why don't I love God more? Why aren't I like that? You've never loved the Bible. Don't try. You've never loved prayer.

Don't try. You're only wasting your time. You may want to do God's will.

Don't try and do God's will. He'll just tell you he don't like you doing his will. Be honest.

All he wants is people to accept themselves as honest about it. I was speaking to a man just recently who owns a furniture store in Columbus, Georgia, and a little group of us were Christian men having breakfast. He kept saying, I'm such a sinner.

I'm such a sinner. I didn't know him. So when the breakfast was over, I had a word with him.

I said, I hope you won't think I'm imperfect. I said, I'd like to say something to you. You kept saying I'm such a sinner.

Perhaps you know I've been forgiven. Oh, yes, he said. I'm a child of God.

My sins have been washed in the blood of Christ. He said, I've been the Lord's, my Savior. But he said, I'm not as sure as sure as I'm willing for God's will in my business.

So I took, I stuck out my hand and congratulated him. I said, congratulate me. You found yourself at last.

You're not meant to be willing. Don't waste your time. You're meant to be thoroughly unwilling.

But you've got a person inside you who makes you willing. If you turn, you say, I'm not willing. Tell God, I'm not willing to change a thing.

But say, God, you're in me, and you're a person who can cause me to be of your good pleasure. Get on with it. You'll find God will make it.

Oh, I don't mind doing that. He says, that takes the heat off. Your heat is on when you think you ought to be different.

I tell you this is your bondage. When you think you ought to be more free, more loving, and more pure, and more patient, and oughtn't to hate people so much, and oughtn't to have resentments, you're wasting your time and you always will have them. You're meant to.

This makes you a real human. So it's great fun to accept yourself. Accept yourself, but remember who you really are.

You accept yourself as that's, this is the human part, but you're no longer human. You're joined in spirit now. You're Christ in the human.

Your real self is Christ in you. Now when you see that, you don't kick yourself around, you don't condemn yourself, for goodness sake don't try and change yourself. You accept yourself, but say, hey, that's not the real person.

It's Christ in me. And as you transfer your attention from this thing which is capturing your faith and holding you to what you dislike, or fear, or why you feel dull, or depressed, or cold, why do you believe in that? It's so. When you transfer your attention from believing in that, say, I believe in Christ in you.

You'll find Christ is there. His power and His love and peace operate through you. I was speaking to a couple of businessmen.

My host was a man who owns several Colonel Sanders fried chicken stores. He loves the law and apparently tracks him with his chickens. And he had these meetings, and in the course of these businessmen, I said, you men, don't you kid yourself.

You don't like everybody. Don't you kid yourself. There's some people you hate and can't stand.

Don't tell me. You I know. There's some who like, some who dislike.

Don't kid yourself. Then I said, but remember the point is, don't try and change yourself. You just have likes and dislikes.

Just accept yourself. That's all you are. But then I said, remember, there's a secret in this.

When you're disliking a person, you've got somebody inside you who happens to love them very much. If you transfer your attention from your disliking that person to God within you, He'll begin to say, now you begin to love them with my love. And you'll begin to find you love them with His love.

So I set up these men, and about six months after, I met this friend who owns the chicken stores. He said, Mr. Webb, I want to say something to you. Of course he's a keen Christian man.

He said, I've had a snag for two years. He says, I'm a busy man. I have several stores, so I have to have a central office.

I have to have an efficient secretary to run my office. He says, for two years, my problem has been this, I have a secretary so efficient I can't fire her. So impossible, I can't possibly like her.

Can't stand her. He said, I felt, I was a dishonest Christian. Here I was piously giving tracts out in my chicken stores and couldn't love the person nearest to me.

And the more I tried to love her, the less I loved her. I'm sure the less she loved him too. And so there and there.

He said, I felt I couldn't get out of it, till I heard you say, be yourself. If you don't love a person, you don't love more. He said, I like that gospel.

I said, sure too, I don't love her. I agree to that gospel. Except you said you don't love her.

But I said, remember, there's a catch in this. There's somebody inside you who does love her. And that's Christ in you.

Oh, he said, that's fair. So he said to me, I said to God, that's fair. All right, God.

I said, I see. You put me there because you love, you want to get some of your love over towards her, through her. All right, Lord, I'm with you.

And now I'm available. You may show some of your love through me to her. And he said this.

Mr. He says, but left to myself, I shall still dislike her. Now, that's true humanity. He isn't kicking his humanity around.

Don't kick your humanity around. You see, a positive must have a negative. You can't see positive without a negative.

You can't see light if there's non-light. I mean, unless there's non-light. You can't see light if there isn't a moon.

A moon's a non-light object. Moon's are charged up. Non-light reflects back.

You can't see light. You couldn't see light down here being visible if there wasn't a non-light atmosphere and non-light earth. And light reflects through in all its colour.

A positive can only manifest, it must have a negative. You go to bed tonight. Beneath your mattress is an iron bedstead, or a wooden one.

You can't have a bed which hasn't got a soft mattress. You must conquer a hard bedstead. You've got to have both.

I hope the mattresses conquer the bedstead, that's all. But you must have both. We are God's bedsteads.

We're the human end. We're necessary. We're as necessary to God as he is to us.

He must have his means of manifestation. Now, we're his means of manifestation. So it's through our selfhood he comes.

Now then, in this disturbed world, when you're disturbed with fear, that's the very place he can overflow with his courage. When you have dislikes, that's the very place he can overflow with his loves. When you have lusts, that's the very place he can overflow with his purity.

So he has to have you and I with our normal negative human reactions as the means by which he can... through whom he can affect himself. Well, so there's a second... I'll be stopping now. There's a second stage of recognition, of awareness, to which we have to come.

We may call it by different names. Call it if you like, the depths of the spirit or full salvation. Names don't matter and you can have the name without having the fact often too.

But there's a place where God has to bring us to an awareness of a unity. Now I think I'll be picking up tomorrow morning and speaking about it. Where there's an inward awareness.

You live by an inward awareness. Then your faith is geared to the awareness, the recognition. For instance, I've already told you, if you're a redeemed person, you've come to an inward awareness of the fact that you're redeemed.

You don't have to find it. You don't have to have to work at, am I saved? Thank God he's got you. He's witnessed to you.

You're praising God that Jesus has you. Now you've entered into a fixed awareness, which is a new level of recognition. And you forget that most of the time.

Get on with the job. Get on with what you're doing. This is a kind of subconscious.

But any moment you want, up could rise, praise the Lord, he's my... God's my father, Jesus my saviour and I'm related to him any time. That can come back to you, or to witness to others, because I'm part of your very being. Now it has to become part of your very being, that God and you are one person.

That you are God in a human form. That's got to become part of your very being, you are Christ in a human form. You are only human form in the inner Christ.

When that's become fixed, then you don't have to find him, you're just aware of him. He's just a permanent awareness, recognition, behind your living, behind your human living. But I think that's what I'd better speak about a little more tomorrow morning.

So I've sought just to move you on through the meaning, the revolutionary meaning of the new birth. Which has brought you back from your lost condition to begin to be a son of God, whom God has manifested in his love. And then for us to move on until we can know the life of this liberated union, through which he can manifest himself.

And then we have to move on to another one after that. So that's all we'll say tonight.