A: Now, this is one of the most important subjects in the entire work of The Infinite Way. It is one of the things that, when I mention it, every one of you in this room will say, “Oh, I know that.” And yet, you have not followed it through so that it has become a part of your very being, or rather, the other side of it has not yet been completely eliminated from your thought.
God does not give! That is so fundamental in this teaching. God does not give! God does not give supply. God does not give money. God does not give employment. God does not give food and clothing and housing and raiment. God is Spirit. God gives Himself. That’s all that God has to give—his own being, which appears as your life and mine. In The Infinite Way, you have—and repeated in the other writings—that one of the things that brought The Infinite Way into experience was the word “as” and the word “is;” that one of the first revelations given me was that there is not God and man.
There is God expressed as individual being, as individual you and me; God expressed as this universe. Then God has no you or me to give. God has only Himself to give. God has no food, clothing, or raiment to give. God has Himself, Spirit, to give. We interpret that in the forms necessary to our experience.
I suppose the simplest illustration of that is this: If you were in need of money, and you were going to go to God about it, why should God give it to you in dollar bills when the pound sterling is the international currency? Now it would seem strange to get it in dollar bills, or if you were in Germany, to get it in marks. Why? Why?
And do you think that God does give you dollar bills, or pounds sterling, or marks? Strange, no. And in all my life, God has never given me fish. It so happens I don’t like fish, but I don’t think God knows that. God doesn’t give food, and clothing, and housing of one sort or another. We receive God’s gift of God Himself. That is the only gift we can receive, and we can’t receive it from something separate and apart from our own being. We really receive it as a conscious activity of our own consciousness. Therefore, supply is our consciousness of supply being externalized or made manifest for us.
Now, if we interpret this in terms of flesh, or vegetables, or fruits, that represents not the form that God gave it in, but the only form in which we could receive it—that is, the level of our own consciousness.
There again, we have the story of Peter and John at the Temple Gate Beautiful and the beggar holding out his hand. “Silver and gold have we none,” and then they gave the beggar at their level of consciousness, which was what? Spiritual understanding, the understanding of the presence of God. That’s all they gave him, but the beggar interpreted it as a new pair of legs, and he jumped up dancing.
Now, I’m sure Peter and John were quite surprised at the exhibition. So the point is, they weren’t thinking in terms of muscles, bones, legs. They were thinking in terms of God’s gift. Scripture says, “Man shall not… (and it’s out of the words of the Master) Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” And therefore, do you not see that God does not give you bread, but God gives you the word of God, and this appears to you in the form necessary to your unfoldment and your experience of that moment?
Now, the reason this is important is this—and this statement, you’ve read it over and over and over again in the writings—“You cannot meet a problem on the level of the problem.” In other words, if you say, “I lack food” or “I lack rent,” certainly, if I have the money for these things, I can give it to you, but that is not meeting your problem spiritually. That may be a “Suffer it to be so now” for a few days, but that is not meeting your problem. I have to meet your problem for you, not by providing you with physical things, but by giving you “every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God,” and then, this interprets itself to you in the terms of your daily experience.
Surely you remember how many times this past week I’ve referred to praying for horses. Now, just because the need appears to be horses, we don’t pray to God for horses. We may think the need is for horses, but we go to God and say, “I am not telling God my need. I am going to God for the realization of God’s grace.” It may actually come forth in the form of horses if that’s our need, but as you know, it did not come forth in that form. It came forth as automobiles.
Now, with all of our roads cluttered with automobiles, supposing we were to pray for more automobiles instead of leaving it to God’s grace, and then find that we have airplanes and helicopters, and say, “Ah, that was a better solution than a lot more automobiles on the road.”
Now, so it is. Once you understand the nature of God, you would never pray to God for food, or clothing, or housing, regardless of how hungry you were or how much rent you owed. Never, never! You would only go to God for the realization of God, for the realization that “God’s grace is my sufficiency,” for the gift of God, for God’s presence.
Then you would find that your prayer would be answered, and the fulfillment would really be a fulfillment. It would not necessarily be that which you asked for, but something far beyond your imagination, or mine, or that of any individual. So, you see that we must never lose sight of the fact that God is Spirit, and we must never lose sight of the fact that when we have God consciously realized, we have all that God is and all that God appears as. In other words, my conscious oneness with God is my conscious oneness with everything, and that appears in its due course as money, or transportation, or whatever the need may be. And be assured of this: We have no way of knowing what that need is.
1This copyrighted excerpt is from Recording 292A: 1959 New York Closed Class, “Spiritual Supply and Its Demonstration.” It is posted with kind permission from the Estate of Joel Goldsmith, which holds the copy protection on the recorded classes and the copyright on the transcripts. The full transcript of this recording is available at The Infinite Way website or by calling 1-800-922-3195.
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