It is not enough merely to gain a reasonably accurate vision of the basic principles of the Divine Pattern. We must reach a point where we recognize the nature of man's variations and his deviations so that we can intelligently work to correct them. Merely acknowledging them, merely seeing them is of no value. Attempting to arbitrarily upset them or override them, accomplishes nothing. We must learn how to deal wisely with them.
In our consideration of Biblical history we have recognized the pattern outworking up to and including Jacob's Blessing, as it is called, upon his sons. There is a great deal here that we might study yet more, but I think we will pass it by for the moment, and if time permits we may touch upon some of the other points later. But we recall that Jacob left this sphere of things and there was the burial; they had the body embalmed and the Egyptians mourned for him three score and ten days—seventy days—three score and ten days, and Joseph took “chariots and horsemen; and a very great company and went up to the threshing floor of Atad, which is beyond Jordan, and there they mourned with a great and very sore lamentation: and he made a mourning for his father seven days. And when the inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites, saw the mourning in the floor of Atad, they said, This is a grievous mourning to the Egyptians: wherefore the name of it was called Abel-miz-raim, which is beyond Jordan. And his sons did unto him according as he commanded them, and they buried him. And Joseph returned into Egypt, he, and his brethren, and all that went up with him to bury his father, after he had buried his father.”
So, that particular point was passed and then we note the influence of internal trends in the individual. “And when Joseph's brethren saw that their father was dead, they said, Joseph will peradventure hate us, and will certainly requite us all the evil which we did unto him. And they sent a messenger unto Joseph, saying. Thy father did command before he died, saying. So shall ye say unto Joseph, Forgive, I pray thee now, the trespass of thy brethren, and their sin; for they did unto thee evil: and now, we pray thee, forgive the trespass of the servants of the God of thy father. And Joseph wept when they spake unto him. And his brethren also went and fell down before his face; and they said. Behold, we be thy servants. And Joseph said unto them, Fear not: for am I in the place of God? But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive. Now therefore fear ye not: I will nourish you, and your little ones. And he comforted them, and spake kindly unto them.” It is interesting to note the pattern of Joseph's expression carrying out the pattern of the Divine Attitude:
“Fear not:
for am I in the place of God?
But as for you, ye thought evil against me;
but God meant it unto good,
to bring to pass, as it is this day,
to save much people alive.”
YouTube Audio
Now there is one of the points where all responding ones tend to fall down, tend to fail to grasp adequately the significance of this important aspect of the Divine process of outworking. In this connection we recall the text, “All things work together to perfection for those who love and serve the Lord.”
All things work together to perfection for those who love and serve the LORD
This does not mean that everything is going to be the way you would like it to be, it does not mean that it is going to be comfortable and entirely satisfactory to the concepts of your mind, or that you will have what you want, whenever you want, the way you want it. It means that human beings think evil and try to produce evil—and even though there may be many things that are not according to the right pattern of function in relationship to your own personal problems, your own personal life in relationship to others, will be caused to bring forth a blessing if you stay centered and let it be so.
The human mind is inclined to judge and say, “Well now, this is against me. That, I do not like. The other thing is contrary to God's Will.” Suppose Joseph had said, when he was in the pit and heard his brothers talking about selling him as a slave, “Well I know it is not God's Will that my brothers should sell me. What an insulting thing. What a degrading thing is this. I know this is not God's Will.” No, it was not God's Will, it was not His Design. It was merely the manner in which He utilized the situation. God does not produce the ill thing. The ill thing, whatever it may be, or may have been, is not and was not necessary, but since that is the case by reason of human function, God can and does use it to advantage. It is a process of out-maneuvering man.
If you function effectively with God, regardless of the oppositions and the difficulties and the problems that arise, either now or in the days of your ministry that are ahead of you, you will find that, staying centered, God is capable of out-maneuvering man, out-maneuvering the intents and purposes of human beings so that He can cause that which man does to bring forth a blessing. But it does not mean you are going to have it, all the way along, the way you think you would like to have it. It will not be the best that could be probably, in many respects, but all things work together to perfection for those who truly love and serve the Lord. And what is perfection? I believe you have studied this somewhat in your Class work, but perhaps it would be well to re-emphasize it a little.
What is perfection?
Perfection is not, as far as we are concerned, some ideal future state. As far as we are now concerned, the Edenic State, that which is to be after the restoration is complete, is not perfection. What is perfection, as far as we are concerned now? Perfection is right function under the circumstances as they are, the right attitude in meeting problems that arise and dealing with them. Right function in circumstances as they are, is perfection.
In other words, we use perfection in dealing with that which is not right and we do not have to have everything right in order to have perfection. If you think that you have to have everything right all around you in order to function in perfection, you are wrong—you do not. You learn to function in perfection in relationship to all adverse things, all ill things, all things that are not as they ought to be. It does not take a perfect environment in the sense of having everything on a perfectly pleasing basis to function in perfection. That which is perfect today probably would not be perfect tomorrow, probably would not have been perfect yesterday. That which is perfect today is the right meeting of the situation as it is today, including all of the ill things, all of the adverse factors.
We must not think of perfection as a fixed and static thing, as something final, as something that simply does not change. The perfections of God are forever changing. We may say that there are perfect basic laws that never change, yes. Those laws do not change but the patterns of their application are forever changing and it is because of this that human beings so readily develop false concepts about what the perfect law is; they see its working in a given circumstance and they jump to a conclusion, “This is the eternal law.”
All they have seen is an application of its working in relationship to a specific condition and generally speaking, the human vision is not great enough to comprehend all of the factors which were being dealt with in that specific application of the perfect law. And once you begin to see this, you can readily understand how human beings, approaching the problem from the wrong direction, are subject to, well, all sorts of fantasia. It becomes something that produces all sorts of appearances, and the human beings may be ever so sincere and earnest and believe that they know what they saw, and to some extent maybe they did, but all they saw was the working, without a comprehension of the reality of the law. In this connection we might well take just a moment to recognize a particular concept or idea which should be helpful to you in the days to come. I think we will undertake to use an illustration or two.
If any of you have ever functioned in relationship to irrigation, Just as one illustration, you have a ditch which is bringing in your head of water. From that main supply ditch you establish certain laterals. But when the head of water first starts coming through the ditch it is usually full of trash, twigs, dirty, completely unsatisfactory for releasing out into these little ditches for irrigation of the plants which may be involved. Now the ordinary human being sees that dirty head of water coming down the ditch and he begins to tear his hair and rend his garments and get all upset and bothered; he says to himself, “I expected some good water here that I could use and look at this dirty head of water coming down here. Shut it off! Shut it off! It is no good.”
In the vibrational sphere of things when the current starts moving, the first manifestation of it is generally a dirty head of water of some sort. It is full of trash. It is not in any sense a revelation of what is back of it. The first current coming through always has the job of cleaning up something, clearing out something, and it is never, in appearance, what it is going to be. When the wind starts to blow, a breeze comes up, at first there may be a blowing of loose leaves and twigs all over the place, but once they have been blown away there is no manifestation of such things. A clearing. So that which first appears in the working of the power of God is not to be misunderstood. It will never come out the way you think it is going to, not to start with anyway, and probably never anywhere along the line because you will need to gain a larger vision. Unless you have had experience, unless you know, you will develop some concepts with respect to that which is to be, which are not true. So do not let such things upset your pattern of consideration.
Now to take this same idea into a little different field, suppose we have a mass of raw material. We might carry this out to a particular orbit in relationship to our own sun. There is evidence that a planet was demolished, there was a collision of a planet or perhaps something else, a comet—we are not going into that at the moment—but whatever it was, a planet blew up, was broken all to pieces, and in the orbit where this planet belongs, revolving around our sun just as our earth does, we have the planetoids, and these irregular bodies—some very small, some down to dust particles in fact, gravel, all different sizes, and some chunks quite large, a good deal bigger than a house for instance, and some of them a great deal larger than that, like this mountain out here—start suddenly floating into space, great chunks of this planet, and they are out there now, moving around in their orbit, started out in the orbit but there they are, the raw material. Now just suppose we should reach a point in the Cosmic outworking of things where the time had arrived to gather up all this raw material and put it together in the form of a planet. It is a little larger order than I suggest should be assigned to you at the moment, but it is an idea—and one of the things that needs to be done some day. Now, we have the sun, and we have the planets revolving around the sun at different distances—we will not attempt to portray that in any true sense at the moment—but the idea that these planetoids, chunks of an exploded planet, are circling around the sun in a particularized orbit. If we were going to start gathering that up to re-establish a planet pattern, what would we do?
Well, we would have to devise some means of exerting force on physical substance. We will skip that part of it for the moment. You might go out and try it so I will not tell you about that. But it would be a process of gathering this substance together, and as it came together it would have to be whirling like a great whirlpool. There would be a suction pattern involved, and it would have to work on a sort of funnel pattern, something like the principles involved in a nebula; and all of this whirling around, revolving, gathering the substance up to one point, would make it appear like a horrible, well, mess of chunks of material and dust and one thing or another, everything swirling, and nothing very fine about it.
And suppose you folks were getting this job done, and hard at work at it, and I came along and looked at it and said, “I thought you were going to make a nice planet? I thought you were going to have something lovely here? What is that mess? There is not any planet here. These chunks do not know where they are going, they do not know where they are going to land, it is just swirling, swirling. There is no planet, there is nothing. And here you talked about having a planet.” And I started treating you with scorn. It would show how little I knew about creative processes, would it not? Because it has to be swirling and in seeming turmoil before all of the factors can come to point; the gravitational factors, so that all this substance can be welded together, as it were, drawn to a particularized pattern. And the form of the planet has to appear before you start being concerned about getting vegetation on the outside of it, putting animals on it, or whatever other pattern of creation you are going to have. There are many forms of creation other than what we have here and man is inclined to think that if there is not a creation like we have here, well it is not a creation, there is no life, etc. But you would have to get the substance together before you could begin to people your planet, get the animals established, the vegetation and what-have-you.
Now this process of swirling, utter confusion from any ordinary standpoint, could be called evil. [greatcosmicstory.blogspot.com/nothing-is-wrong.html] But perfect function on your part in the focalization of the creative power of God, would mean that you would have it swirling until that part was done. But suppose you started to get this swirling process under way and this person said, “Well now, I do not like this business. I am going to go over here and create a flower. There should be a flower that should go on this planet. That is a mess. I am going to create a flower.” And this person left his job and said, “I am going to create an animal and then a bird. I am going to have things ready. I will have a pair of them. I do not think that is ever going to work. I do not know where I will put my bird when I get it done.” But anyway, they started leaving their jobs. What would happen? The whole thing would go to pieces. So there would be chaos instead of seeming chaos.
Perfect function then is on the basis of the immediate need. There might come a time later on when it would be perfect function for you to create a bird or a flower or something of the sort, but if you started creating birds and flowers while you were supposed to be getting the planet ready to start with, maybe some angels with little white coats would come along looking for you. The point is that it would be plain crazy. Perfect function at any moment of time is on the basis of the circumstances as they are, regardless of whether they are good, bad or indifferent, regardless of whether they are pleasing to you or not, or pleasing to anyone. Perfect function in any moment is correct function in relationship to that situation, and if you are going to evaluate the situation you should not be nearsighted while you do it, because the situation might include a lot of factors that you start to ignore.
If you see some particular point in a situation and say, “Well now, I do not like this. Perfect function, Uranda said, is action with respect to the situation as it is. Now here is the situation. I am going to do something about it.” That is not the situation. It is only a part of the situation. It is only one aspect of it, one point of the situation. Do you know the whole situation? Correct function is in relationship to that which is brought to focus in the realm of your understanding and vision and correct action. And that which is the focus point in relationship to yourself may contain the essences of all the factors, but if you are not alert you will overlook them and you will be trying to do something with a situation on a basis which is totally wrong, because you have not stopped to consider the fact that the focus of a situation as it comes to you, as it comes within the range of your observation, and perhaps influence of action, must not be assumed to be the whole thing.
If someone drove a nail through a wooden wall and you saw just a point of that nail sticking through the wall, you would know better than to assume that that point was all there was to the nail. You would know that there was a lot of the nail that is not visible, and the head of it was around on the other side. You might be able to drive it back a little bit, but if you wanted to extract that nail from the board you would have to go to the other side of the board and pull it back. The focus of the situation as it comes to you is only that, and do not assume it is the whole thing. It may contain essences of the whole thing and if you are alert you will know what to do about it. But right function in relationship to the situation as it is, not merely as it seems to be, is perfection. Perfect function on the basis of what is the actual fact, not merely the appearance of the moment.
The impulse of the human mind or heart may be to do thus and so, but you learn to distinguish between the impulses which arise on the basis of reaction to external things and the impulse of the spirit of God. There is an important point! Very important. You learn to distinguish between the impulses which arise in yourself as a human being, on the basis of a reaction to external things or to some factor within yourself, and the impulses which come to you through the working of the spirit of God. Actually, it is very easy to make that distinction, to distinguish between them, but you cannot put it into just so many words. I cannot say a sentence or two here and clarify the matter for you; no one can. It is something that works out through training. You have to be assisted along the way. It takes training and experience and application.
So you learn to distinguish with respect to the impulses which come within the realm of your awareness, and you learn to act on the basis of that which comes to focus in relationship to yourself, but you are taking into consideration all that is focalized in that which you see, and perfection in function is right action in relationship to that which is at the moment, and an hour later it will be different; it will not be the same. Tomorrow will be different. Factors will change. Nothing is static. So right function in one moment is never arbitrarily right function in another. No. Some people imagine that if it is perfect action, well then, perfect action is perfect action and you can indulge in perfect action any time. Well, you can, but it is not the same thing as it was yesterday. It changes always. And so perfection of function depends upon the factors with which you are dealing.
And so we have the Word here, of Joseph, “But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive.” And so we begin to see how all things do work together to perfection for those who love and serve the LORD, for those who are properly centered, and who are servers, and only for them do all things work together to perfection.
“And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, Come and see.” This invitation was extended to the opening of each of the first four seals: Come and see. We have had the opportunity of seeing something this morning which is indicative [greatcosmicstory.blogspot.com/the-four-horsemen.html] of the opening of the seal. When the seal is opened something may be seen. We saw something; therefore the seal is opened to the extent of our seeing.
We are aware of this particular cycle in motion as it relates to human beings everywhere, ourselves included. However we have recognized that there are two possibilities here: the disintegrative cycle or the integrative cycle. The one described in this beginning of the 6th Chapter of Revelation relates to the disintegrative cycle. This is what is seen; this is what is made evident. It is apparent to us in these days. By reason of our consideration this morning we saw how it fits with what is happening now, both in the individual and collective sense, all relating to the passing of human nature. We came and we saw this, because the seals are open and it’s happening.
Perhaps it might be helpful to remember some words from the 91st Psalm: “Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked.” The reward of the wicked relates to this cycle of the dissolution of human nature. We see this, but only with our eyes, rightly. It should not engender fear. It should not require our emotional involvement at all. We are of value in the integrative cycle because we are not in the disintegrative cycle. If we are emotionally moved by the disintegrative cycle we are involved with it. If we are honest with ourselves we will acknowledge that we have been involved with the four horsemen, and still are to some extent; we give weight to what is present in the field of disintegration. We do this every time we enter into judgment.
If we feel that it is important to us that we should criticize and condemn all the wrong things that we think we see, not only in the great wide world out there but in our neighbors close at hand, and in ourselves even, we are giving weight to the unreal which is in the process of dissolving. To the extent that we give it weight we delay its dissolution, because we are charging it with our life force. If there is emotion of some kind present relative to such things our life force is pouring into that and what should be passing away is sustained.
Now over the years we have all been guilty of doing this, and perhaps we may find that our guilt is not so far in the past either. Every time there is judgment of the old world which is passing away we contribute our life force to maintaining it, and that is a direct contradiction of what we may insist that we are here on earth to do. Clearly enough there are vast numbers of people on earth, virtually the whole population of the world, who are doing just this. If we have a keen and sensitive awareness of the horrible state into which the world has come and we see this reflected in those around us closer at hand and consequently judge it, condemn it, then we are liable to do one of two things: make the attempt directly or indirectly to destroy what we have thought was wrong—that’s one way that human nature approaches the situation—the other way is to reform it, to try to make it over to make it better. There are indeed many earnest and sincere human beings in the world who give themselves wholeheartedly to such endeavors. We might well be reminded of the prophets of Baal, who leapt upon the altar which they had made with much zeal, trying frantically to make something happen that wouldn’t happen. Such endeavors all relate initially to a horse of another color, a red one. [greatcosmicstory.blogspot.com/stay-with-white-horse.html]
If we have seen these things relative to the cycle of disintegration, I am sure we would all acknowledge that we are not at all interested in participating in that cycle but rather in playing our parts in the cycle of integration. There is a division of ways which occurs after the white horse. The white horse and the rider thereon have opened the way for something creative to happen. If, out of habit, there is a human nature endeavor in the usual way of the world, then there are those who take the path of the red horse. If on the other hand there is a willingness to continue to yield to what was made available by reason of the rider on the white horse, then the cycle of integration may begin to be experienced. If there are human beings who do experience this on earth then that cycle of integration is at work within the body of mankind. If no one does that, then it isn’t at work and there’s only the one possibility, which ends up with a pale horse.
So we are concerned with the cycle of integration, the true creative cycle, the path of which leads into the experience of the firmament. While horses are not used to symbolize what occurred in that First Chapter of Genesis, obviously there was power at work: “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light,” At that point you could say a white horse—white light, Christ Power. The evidence of the working of that power put in an appearance as light. The same power continued to work but its action was summarized by the words: “Let there be a firmament.” Here is power at work again. This is the way of the cycle of integration, the true creative cycle; so we’re not going to leap onto red horses and ride off in all directions, but stay with the true creative cycle. We do not leap onto the red horse if we stop judging what is happening in the old world, whether in the old world as a whole or in old worlds in an individual sense.
As long as we are judging we are giving weight to the old world, we are pouring our life force into it; and we will get into a battle at times, or we will be very diligent in endeavoring to make people over, particularly the people who are right close to us in our environment. If you indulge in this endeavor at all you’re on your red horse. If human nature behavior of others looms large to you it is because your own factual human nature is large. If your human nature is dissolving then the human nature that you may observe around you will cease to carry weight. It will not remain the impulse for your endeavor either to destroy it or to change it. There will be no such impulse anymore. As long as there is such an impulse it reveals itself, more delicately perhaps these days, as gentle criticism, gentle condemnation, gentle judgments in general, but it’s the same thing as if you went out there with your sword on the red horse and started lopping heads. We’re not in the business of reformation.
Human nature is to pass away. Let it go. How do you let it go? Because you stop paying so much attention to it, you stop giving it so much weight. And when you give it weight you will know you are doing that by reason of the emotion you feel. Emotions of various kinds rise up in you on occasion in consequence of elements of human nature behavior that put in an appearance around you. That’s so isn’t it? All right, the very fact that there is an emotion here in that way indicates that you are giving your life force in support of whatever it is that is present in your environment, in the behavior of others or in the circumstances or whatever, to which you are objecting. There’s quite a bit of objection, isn’t there still? This is a denial and a betrayal of the reason that we are here.
The instruction was given and was brought to focus in the words: “Feed my sheep.” If you’re busy making people over, or trying to—you won’t be very successful anyway—or even have a grander project to make the world over, you have no time to feed my sheep. We have the urge to do this because we love the LORD. The question asked first was: “Lovest thou me?” Peter on that occasion tried to pass it off, “Yes, of course,” and when the question was asked repeatedly he got a little impatient, as was his wont: “Certainly I love you. Let’s get on with the business.” What is the business? Feed my sheep. “What is the other fellow going to do?” It was John in that instance, insofar as Peter was concerned. “Mind your own business. What are you going to do?” That’s the only question that anyone has to answer. What am I going to do? Feed my sheep. Take care of what should be taken care of, and leave alone what is no longer any of your business: namely, human nature behavior, human nature circumstances, human nature affairs. You may be under the necessity of handling what’s in your environment, but on what basis? Why? Feed my sheep.
In every circumstance, in every person, everywhere, there is present the truth, the spirit of God. Nothing would exist but for this fact; it’s all there. There is what is characteristic of the spirit of God present everywhere. The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. [greatcosmicstory.blogspot.com/the-kingdom-of-heaven-is-here.html] This is present everywhere. It’s present in people everywhere. It is more evident in some than in others but it is there, and should be the most important thing to us. All too often it hasn’t been, because the material factors, the behavior of people, the external forms of things, were given the weight. As long as a person is doing that, he has no weight left to give to the truth, the elements of reality that are always present, the Kingdom of Heaven that is in fact at hand and for which we have direct responsibility.
The elements of reality are present everywhere and we are charged with the responsibility of providing space for these elements to emerge into larger expression. These things could be said to be seedlings in some, little sprouts in others. Round about there may be many other things which are not what they should be, but here and there are these beautiful growing seeds of the Kingdom in people. Are you going to say of someone, there’s no seed there? It would never be true, unless his toes were turned up; then there’s nothing more to be done. But as long as life is present the seeds of reality must be present. I’ve said they are better hidden in some than in others, but part of that hiding is consequent upon a pall that we ourselves may have placed upon these things because we have been giving weight to the material forms and to the material behavior that we see, or think we see. All too often it is imagination anyway: we’re seeing through our own distorted consciousness. Feed my sheep.
We’re not here to feed the goats, the unreality, the ill behavior. We feed it when we fight it or even if we just emotionally object to it. Only with thine eyes shalt thou see such things, not with thine heart. Withdraw attention from all the things that should pass away. The things that become most obvious to you as needing to pass away may take the form of someone else’s behavior. Withdraw your attention from it. Don’t try to shoot it down; don’t try to make it over. No one of us knows what it should be made over into anyway. If someone tries to make something over in this way, it is to make it over in order to suit his own concept of what it should be, which is not at all what it should be anyway.
Can we not leave people alone in the sense of leaving their human nature characteristics alone? Sometimes we have to deal with them a little because they bang up against us, but if they do so, we handle them, not because they carry any weight to us but because something needs to be done, that’s all. And there’s no emotional content to what we do, at least not in reaction to what bumped into us. If in handling the thing there is some necessity for an increase of power in our experience then there will be an emotion, but that’s not a reaction; that’s merely a by-product of the fact of power being generated and forthcoming in whatever action is being taken. The emotion didn’t come out of the circumstance; it was part of the movement of the creative power; there’s a vast difference. Most people don’t know the difference because they never allowed the movement of the creative power in any large enough sense. We have vast experience of the other: feelings generated by the material forms around us. Let them go. That is what must pass away. Let it pass away. It will, if human beings would only let it. But no, they think they know better: “That person said something that he or she shouldn’t have said!” One might ask the question, “How do you know?”
The point is: In the human nature world people are going to behave in human nature ways. That’s the way it is. Let it be that way. Human beings have produced this old world because of human nature behavior and they live in that world on the basis of human nature behavior. It’s all part of the old world which is passing away. Don’t try to reform that human nature so that it won’t pass away. It doesn’t matter how carefully you may adjust it, take it all to pieces and put it together again—quite different apparently—it's still human nature, made of human nature substance, and it will remain a part of the human nature world. “Come out of her, my people.” Let that world pass away. We let it pass away because we’re not involved in it anymore, we’re not trying to do anything to it anymore. We’re not trying to make it into Utopia somehow by instituting some special political or economic or religious system. It has to pass away.
We do pay attention to this business of feeding my sheep, of enfolding, protecting, what is precious in the sight of the LORD in people. There may be one little precious shoot in a person; that occupies your whole attention insofar as that person is concerned. It may be surrounded by a whole mass of garbage; that’s of no interest to you. It isn’t the garbage that is important. You can’t make that into anything of value. But there’s a little shoot there somewhere. Find it. Take care of it, enfold it, protect it. Feed my sheep. Don’t feed my goats—just the sheep, just what is true, what the reality is, what the seed of the Kingdom is, or the sprout of the Kingdom. We have to wait perhaps, insofar as many people are concerned, for the seed to sprout before we can do anything, but when it comes up through the ground it needs to be enfolded. There needs to be a heaven there for it to come into and we provide that. We encourage those concerned to recognize what it is that is happening, so that they also may become increasingly responsible for what is happening through themselves. Feed my sheep. Withdraw support from the old world which is passing away.
I’m not saying that you should throw over all your material responsibilities, because your material responsibilities provide one way of finding the sprouting seeds of reality which are present in the world. If you withdraw from the world you’ll never find them. We’re not withdrawing in that sense; we’re just withdrawing our support insofar as that old world state is concerned. The old world behavior, the old world attitudes and viewpoints—we no longer give them any weight. We speak the Word, “Let there be light, let there be a firmament,” for what is true with respect to this person. All the rest is of little consequence. We may have to clear it out of the road at times in order to preserve the plant but as long as it is not interfering with the growth of the plant, just let it pass away of its own accord.
We begin to see that there is a much more practical business to feeding my sheep than we may have thought. I suspect that many think of feeding my sheep as giving someone a piece of literature. That conceivably might be the right thing to do on occasion but that is a very little thing compared to what is really necessary: providing what is needful to keep sacred things sacred. There tends to be a good deal of bumbling in this field, and unfitting things are done and said with the best of intentions. Yes, we might need to learn still, but for heaven’s sake, we’ve had plenty of opportunity. Most have been houses divided, giving support to their own human nature characteristics.
We understand. We have seen the disintegrating state and the cycle that carries the rubbish away, but we also are aware, in our own experience, of the true creative cycle which leads out of light into the firmament of heaven, for which we are responsible. We are responsible for the light; we are responsible for the heaven; and without participation in the light and in the heaven we cannot feed my sheep. The way is clear. Let us acknowledge the reality of it in all our ways. We are here to minister, not to be ministered unto. This is not to say that others will not minister unto us, and we rejoice and are thankful for this—many have certainly ministered unto me—but our purpose on earth is not to be ministered unto. This may be necessary in order to assist us in the process of ministering, but we are here to minister.
I thought I would begin to mix in some other material, in a sense parenthetical but in a sense not. Servers, no matter what their sphere of service, need very much to be aware of the trends of movement in the world pattern. It is not enough for us to merely learn to check and more-or-less determine the trends of movement and working in the physical body of the individual. We need to keep a finger on the pulse, not only of persons and groups and communities, but our nation particularly, and the other nations in the world so that we may be able to function intelligently in relationship to the vibratory factors involved in the world body of humanity. It is not so much from a political standpoint that we are interested in all of these things, but because we are a part of the world body of humanity and because our function is primarily to serve that world body of humanity, and we must be able to comprehend, and analyze, and appreciate the factors that are at work in relationship to this world body of humanity.
I have here an article entitled, “Red China's Man With A Long Rope,” and this is taken from the April 26 issue of the Denver Post, and written by Lawrence Martin who is associate editor of the Denver Post. It Is obviously a compilation of facts and factors and I would like to read it to you this morning as one point of analysis in relationship to the influences at work in the body of humanity.
[Uranda read the article, which outlined political, economic, and social dynamics brought forward by Chairman Mao Tse Tung and the Chinese Communist Party in 1954, as they related to the foment of internal and geo-political chaos with far-reaching implications for the world body of mankind—Russia, Korea, Taiwan, America, and for the Body of the Son of God in particular. The article isn't reproduced here but it can be heard on the YouTube audio recording —
YouTube Audio
There is the article. And as we have been studying some of the peculiar patterns of outworking in world history back at the time of the beginning of the Children of Israel, we have watched some of the trends that were taking form at that time, some of the vibrational factors at work, we should be in better position to see something of the significance contained in this brief analysis.
Whatever we do, whatever we undertake in the creative pattern of our service, we have to take those things into consideration. If we, here, a small group in Eden Valley, undertake to function in a pattern which disregards these factors in Asia, we will defeat ourselves. We need to understand something of the factors at work in Europe and other parts of the world. We need to recognize something of the foment of human feeling and attitude which has come to the surface in Africa. We need to understand something of the nature of the feeling, the attitude, the trends at work in India. We need to pause and consider the effect on our Program in the western hemisphere in some of the South American countries, some dictatorship patterns. Americans are sometimes inclined to feel that the revolutions and upsets in the pattern in some South American countries mean little. But all of these things are factors in the world pattern and we should not ever forget them.
We need to have a deep awareness of the problems that confront the world as a whole, our own nation in particular, in relationship to communism. But the evil of communism is not the only evil that is at work in the world. When we were going through the pattern of history established in world foment working around Hitler and Mussolini, we were familiar with the word “fascist”—that the fascist patterns are not dead. There may have been an operation and something of the malignant tumor may have been removed from the world body, but the roots of it were not, and it is not dead. There are these malignant growths in the world body, cancerous in nature, and inevitably, if they are not controlled and dealt with, they would produce the death of the world body.
From the standpoint of dealing with malignancies is recognized in relationship to the individual that the sooner, whatever treatment is going to be utilized, it is begun, the better. When we look at it in this way we realize that while there may be some ways of relieving, or in a limited sense curing, some malignancies, fundamentally, in relationship to the world body, we are dealing with an incurable disease. From the standpoint of the world body itself, it is an incurable disease. Only under the hand of the Great Physician can the world body begin to be healed. And once we begin to truly sense our own relatedness in service and living, to all of these factors in the world body, we can see that supporting, by our attitudes and functions, even the tiny rootlets of that which appears in its extreme form, in communism [or Fascism] for instance, puts us in a position where we cannot deal with such things effectively.
We have been considering recently, some of the principles involved in relationship to purity of heart and this should emphasize the vital, practical need for that purity. If we would serve effectively in relationship to the world body which is so in need of the ministrations of the Great Physician, we must ourselves let these tiny rootlets in the emotional realm be cleansed away, cleared out; for if we cannot let the rootlets be healed in ourselves, cleared away, made to be of no effect, removed, how can we hope to be of any value as instruments in the hand of the Great Physician to perform the essential operation, removing the malignancies which beset the world body of humanity. There are so many things we might examine from the standpoint of the world picture. We will not take too much time at the moment, on that score.
One other point that we must of necessity begin to consider in relationship to these trends and attitudes, and that is the influences of religious concepts. But you will recognize that it would have been futile to attempt such an analysis or examination of factors at work in the world body, until we, as a Class, had reached a point where we could begin to clearly see the factors, the basic factors of the Divine Pattern with which human beings must learn to conform. Otherwise it is merely a process of comparing on a basis of personal opinion, preference and prejudice, one religion with another, and the analysis gets nowhere.
There are many people in the world who have a remarkable grasp of religious history and they can tell you about the various trends and cycles and dates and what-have-you, but the value is not there because they have no basic norms with which to compare that which has been and that which is; and they have no clear recognition of that which ought to be. And so gradually our own studies have been bringing us to a point where we could comprehend the basic principles which should be in operation in the world body of humanity. Then we can begin to see the variations, the tangent patterns, the distractions, the things that spoil, and we can begin to know how to deal with such things. It is not enough merely to gain a reasonably accurate vision of the basic principles of the Divine Pattern.
We must reach a point where we recognize the nature of man's variations and his deviations so that we can intelligently work to correct them. Merely acknowledging them, merely seeing them is of no value. Attempting to arbitrarily upset them or override them, accomplishes nothing. We must learn how to deal wisely with them.
