All Praise And Honor And Glory Go To Him
Uranda March 16, 1947
Special Sessions Riverside, California
We are not working according to the methods of man, but according to the methods of God, and the same methods outlined by the Master before His ascension have to be put to work now or it is nothing. Peter and Paul were the ones who came mighty close to wrecking the work of Christ on earth. It has taken 1900 years to get to a point where we can start what should have been started then. We have covered a lot of ground. I praise the Lord. When these things are realized we begin to be in position to do something. Until they are realized, the great distinctions between the Right Way and the way that was followed in the days when Peter took the reins cannot be seen, and until they are seen, people are going to go right on making the same mistakes that Peter and the others made. When the other disciples refused to follow through on the plan that Jesus inaugurated and refused to recognize the place of John in the plan, John had to follow the way which Jesus took. If he had not done that, this cycle would not have come. On the Isle of Patmos, he wrote the Book of Revelation and reopened the way for this cycle of manifestation, but if he had not carried through there, and set the pattern, there would not have been any way to build any salvation out of the wreckage that Peter and Paul had wrought. That would have been complete failure. John did speak up but they would not listen, even to the extent of there being no record. Luke wrote the book of Acts, and he furthered the leadership of Peter and Paul. Luke was not even a disciple and yet he wrote one of the Gospels.
The important thing is that you have learned to know Jesus Christ better than the disciples did then. Because John loved Jesus, and because John understood Him, and the rest did not, so those in the School today know Jesus better and understand Him more fully than the disciples did as a whole, and it is not until we know and understand Jesus Christ and recognize what His Life and Ministry meant, and realize that what He said is true: “Lo I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world”—that is, the end of the world of evil—that we understand what the Gospel of the Kingdom was and is. When there is a recognition of Jesus Christ, of Who He is, of what the real Gospel is, of what His Life and teaching is, of what it means to reveal that Gospel as it is in Reality, and of the Way by which that Kingdom that is at hand may come into manifestation for us, then we know the true purpose of Jesus’s Life and Ministry.
It is all done, all accomplished, and all achievement is possible through the Love and Power of Jesus Christ. The honor and glory are His, and while I appreciate recognition of my Ministry, the greatest recognition of it and the most pleasing for me, is the recognition of Him, and the proof that that Ministry means anything is the manifestation of an increased Love for Him.
I wonder if I could convey something to you. It is a little difficult sometimes for human beings to comprehend—and it is certainly difficult to put into words—but when I talk about Jesus and His Life and His Ministry and His teaching, it is not just talking about the Bible. When I say “I”, I am not talking about this outer form which came into manifestation forty years ago. I am talking about that which I Am within the form. “The Father Who dwelleth in me, He doeth the works... The words I speak unto you I speak not of myself.” The reason my Ministry has meaning for those who have ears to hear and eyes to see is because that is just as true of me as it was of Jesus, and only from the standpoint of that Inner Reality, can there be appreciation of what I mean, or what I feel, or what it is I am seeking to convey—that it is not just the words of a human being. Unless there is a recognition of that, as far as that Inner Reality is concerned, no one can realize that I stood there at the cross when He was crucified. I am not talking about a record from the Bible. I am talking about something that I saw, something that I shared and experienced, I am talking about days and months and years of living with Him while He was on earth.
There should begin to be some comprehension of the fact that all that I have done in Ministry is primarily because I love Him—because I want all praise and honor and glory to go to Him. He, the LORD of Lords and KING of Kings, went through that mockery of the trial, and went to the cross under the world’s rejection, and His disciples followed afar off, so that when He was on the cross there was only one disciple there. There was only one disciple standing by Him when He was on the cross, and I was there—and concerning that, after His Resurrection, the third and last time He was with the disciples, He made that statement, “If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee? follow thou me.”
The only one of the disciples that could bring this, of which the Bible is a record, back into a vivid expression of Reality, was the only one who stood by Him when He was on the cross. When I say these things I am not saying them because it is anything special to me that they be recognized, because it is not. It makes no difference to my Reality, one way or the other. It only means that unless that is recognized, and unless the spirit of that which I am seeking to convey is appreciated from that standpoint, the true reality of the Master cannot be comprehended, the true significance of His life cannot be realized, because it is not just someone talking about it theoretically, someone taking the Bible and reading it and deciding that it means this, that or the other thing. It is something that is. As you have recognized that there is not anyone else on earth who has opened the Bible to you as I have, there must be that recognition that it is only because there is, from the Inner standpoint, a recognition of my sharing that with Him, before there can be a comprehension of what He means to us today, so that what He did will not be in vain.
This portrayal [in John 14, 15, 16 and 17] of what was supposed to be the manifestation of His Body on earth, the means by which He could continue to function on earth in outer form, the means by which the necessary works could be accomplished, cannot be understood just from an intellectual, outer standpoint, or someone’s thinking or reading. There have been brilliant men down through centuries who have had these same passages to read and study. They have gotten certain things out of them, but though they read them and studied them and preached about them, they did not make manifest that fundamental Reality which the Master Himself was seeking to convey to mankind. He came into the world and did these things, and lived among us because He loved humanity, because He loved each man, woman and child upon the face of the earth. He manifested His Love for us in many ways, and when, in the recognition of that Love for us, we learn to really love Him, then we can begin to be a part of His Body on earth, and being a part of His Body on earth in actuality, we can begin to let His Love work through us into the world.
Human beings approaching it from an intellectual standpoint, cannot comprehend that depth of love, let alone let it work through themselves into the world, and unless that love becomes such a living, vital, constant and utterly complete, thing, so that it is that which fills our expression and holds us in oneness with Him, our words will continue to be just words and will accomplish no more than what a lot of other good people have accomplished.
My saying some of these things does not prove that they are true, and yet if my Ministry and my expression of the Word, and my portrayal of Him, do not prove it, I do not know what could. I could not help you to know Him unless I knew Him. It is because I know Him as He was, and as He is, that I can help you to come to know Him. I have outlined these things because there cannot be a true realization of the fact that I know Him unless there begins to be an understanding of these truths, and the more vividly the individual knows that I know Him, the easier will it be for me to introduce the individual to the LORD of Lords, so that each one can know Him, and so that these things can be such vital, living realities in relationship to us right now, no longer separated by two thousand years—something that is just as real and just as vital for us as it possibly could have been for those disciples; and in fact it must be a lot more vital and real than it was for any of those disciples, save one. And unless that vividness can be conveyed to the One Christ Body, so that it is just as real as it was to John, then there is no means whereby this outworking can take place now.
We have got to know Him and love Him. Time, in that sense, has utterly no meaning—because if the Master had ascended yesterday it could have no more meaning than it does. Until we get away from this tendency of thinking of ourselves as being separated from Him by 1900 years, it cannot be done. It must be just as if He had walked every step of the way here with us, or as if we had with Him then, and then the possibilities of fulfilment for us are really greater than they were for the disciples after He returned to the Father. That is why, while I appreciate your recognition of my Ministry, it really makes me feel very uncomfortable when you express so lovingly—and I am not criticizing you for it—unless the praise and honor and glory go to Him. Yes, I know, it goes to Him through me.
I have said these things because I have tried to convey to you how I feel about it
so that you emphasize in those recognitions the love and response to Him.
I am not finding fault, but I am just trying to convey how I feel about it.
Let us remember that mankind is still crucifying Him on the cross of human self-activity in the body and mind, just as surely as they were back then. When we begin to see these things as they really are and we begin to become a part of His Body in that true sense, then we find that as we look into the world of unreality we are all standing at the foot of the cross. We begin to realize that this world is still crucifying Him; and that until we, in oneness, come to stand at the foot of the cross and begin to carry it on from there, as He intended, it is as nothing, because all of the sermons and preachings and everything else that could be accomplished by an intellectual consideration of the Bible, even though the individuals loved God sincerely—all these things—until they transcend time and space and distance, and it is recognized here, we cannot fulfil that in which the disciples failed then. What I am seeking to bring into manifestation as rapidly as possible is to go back to the point before the failures, right back to the foot of the cross, and go from there without regard to any of the rest of it, and unless we can do that, as branches of the One Vine, we are not going to succeed. These are partial truths man has used, and you can work from now till doomsday and get nowhere. We have got to stop trying to build on the cycles that have gone and let the thing come into manifestation the way it should have come into manifestation then, and set new precedents, and once we get that going He will be able to do the works and get it done—but that is the only way.
© emissaries of divine light
