Anyone in the world can give in to temptation and say, “Oh, I guess that’s right, I haven’t enough understanding; I haven’t enough wisdom; I haven’t enough spiritual power; I haven’t enough dollars or pounds; I haven’t enough companionship.” Anyone can give in to temptation and accept the appearances at face value.
But ye, the disciples of Christ, ye must not do your alms in public. Ye must not pray for more food, or clothing, housing. You must not take thought for what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink, or wherewithal ye shall be clothed. Your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of these things, and He has provided them for you in the beginning before time began, and they are now established in your consciousness.

Now, if you take the position of a human being, to whom something must be added, then you lose whatever little of understanding you have. If you take your position on the divinity of your being, and its fullness and completeness, then instead of trying to demonstrate toward you, you begin to spend out from you. You commence to share truth; you commence to share pounds or shillings; you commence to share books; or you commence to share companionship; or you commence to share service, but from the basis that since I have this fullness and completeness, I can share it, and I can share it to whatever extent is flowing from me.

Now when I take that position in life, that I am the center through which God is flowing, there is no limitation to what I can give, or share or be or do, because I’m claiming nothing of myself. I am claiming the allness of God as the measure of my individual capacity. And I don’t start by writing out checks for a million dollars which I haven’t got. I start by sharing one shilling, if that is the measure of my today’s capacity. And some day I increase it to two and five and ten, until I arrive at the fullness of realization.

And so it is, if I have studied a short while and know some truth, I share that little truth with those who desire it, knowing that even as I share it; it multiplies in me.

I wonder if you will be surprised if I tell you a secret. You have undoubtedly seen or read the books, The Master Speaks, Consciousness Unfolding, Metaphysical Notes, God the Substance of All Form, Spiritual Interpretation of Scripture. Well I’ll tell you the secret. When I gave those classes, I didn’t know any of those things. They came to me while I was talking. They came to me while I was on the platform. They came right out through me. If I’d have known all that in advance, I’d have gone off to a monastery and sat on it.

I wouldn’t have known what to do with all of that that is embodied in those books. But I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that. The class Spiritual Interpretation of Scripture; I can tell you about it. Four couples came to me and said, “Would you teach us what you know about the Bible?”

I said, “Certainly, come to my house some evening for an hour, and I’ll tell you all I know, because I can tell you everything I know in one hour.” “Oh no, no. That’s not true. You know something that we don’t know.”

I said, “Look, please believe me, that so far as I know there are two statements in the Bible that I know, and only those two statements. If there’s any more, I’m not even aware of it, but those two statements are important.” One of them is, Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostril, for wherein is he to be accounted of. I knew what that meant. I had been taught that that meant stop looking at man whose breath is in his nostril and trying to heal him, or improve him, or reform him. Leave him alone. Begin to learn about spiritual identity, and mortal man will die daily. That I knew.

And I knew that, My kingdom is not of this world. That I knew too, that the Christ kingdom had nothing to do with human things; that we only could know and enjoy the fruitage of the Christ kingdom as we rose above human sense. We couldn’t draw it down into the human world. But if we drew it to ourselves, we would still be in the world, but we’d not be of the world.

Well, they didn’t believe me, and so they asked for this instruction, and I said, “Well I’ll tell you what we’ll do. I don’t know why you want it; I don’t know what it is you want, because I really know very little. But the month of April is coming. Supposing we take one night a week for four nights, and I really and truly mean this, that I can cover the whole Bible in those four evenings, an hour an evening.” “Fine, let’s do that.”

Well, a week before we were to begin, I sat down in my office and I talked to God as if He were sitting at the other side of my desk, and I said, “Father, look, what do these people want of me? You know that I don’t know the Bible. You know that there’s very little in it that I have ever understood … few passages, and that’s all. What is it that they want? Now I know you sent them, but what for, because I don’t know, and I don’t know what to give them. Now what is going to happen Friday night when we meet? Please, please tell me.” I did a little begging and pleading. Oh, I suppose you’ll tell me that I say in the books you shouldn’t do that, but this is a little different thing. This is when God and I get together very humanly, and we talk, just brother to brother, man to man. Then I really ask Him for things, like this.

And so I sat with the Bible in my hand, waiting, waiting, waiting, and finally I opened it, and I opened very close to the Ten Commandments. And I read around there, and I didn’t quite know what it was, so I said, “Well I know what I’ll do. I’ll go back to Moses, from the very beginning of Moses, and I’ll read all the way through, and see if that’s what God is trying to tell me.” And I read from the beginning of Moses and I got through the Ten Commandments, and all of a sudden, something struck me very strange … these Ten Commandments aren’t spiritual. How could you tell a spiritual man not to steal, or to honor his mother and father, or not to commit adultery?

That’s kind of nonsensical isn’t it? You don’t talk that way to spiritual people. Why there’s nothing spiritual about this at all. Then it dawned, “Ah ha! The law came by Moses; Grace and Truth came by Jesus Christ. Ah ha! In the Old Testament, in Moses, here we have the law of good citizenship, of good men and good women, but under Christ we are no longer good men or good women; we are spiritual beings. He was revealing spiritual Sonship.”
“Thank you Father.”

And so Friday night, that was our lesson, that the Ten Commandments, and any law, was just an attempt to make us better humans, better behaved humans, more honorable humans, but that the time must come when we must rise above that unto our spiritual identity, in which we would be neither good nor bad; we would be eternal, immortal, spiritual being.

And so the next Friday night came, and before that, of course, God and I got together again for another hair-pulling match, and this time when I opened the book, it was to the story of Ruth and Naomi. And I read it through, and I thought, now that’s a strange thing to give me. It’s beautiful there, I will never leave thee nor forsake thee, or Whithersoever thou goest, I will go, but why? And I read it through again, and again I caught it; there never was a Ruth. Ruth is the Christ in individual consciousness that never leaves you. And when you’ve lost your family, and you’ve lost your fortune, and you’re down there at the crossroads, not knowing which way to go, the Christ is right there within your being, and it says, I will never leave you: Your people will be my people, your home will be my home, and we’ll even die and be buried together. Wherever you are, I the Christ am with you, and don’t try to get me to leave you, because I won’t.

And I saw the story of Ruth and Naomi as the story of a human being who had risen from nothing to material prosperity, to family prosperity, to family happiness and completeness, and lost it all. And then finally had to say, “Where am I with my wealth and my family? Now I’ve got none of them. Ah, but I have one thing left, something as disdainful as a daughter-in-law; something that we ignore like we sometimes ignore daughters-in-law. And what is it? The Christ. The Christ that loves us like daughter-in-laws sometimes do love us when we don’t recognize it.”

Now then … it’s a long, long story, but by the time the four weeks were up, we had thirty-two people meeting. And instead of once a week, we had to have twice a week. And within four weeks more, we had fifty people meeting, and we had to meet three times a week. And then we got a larger place, where we seated fifty-five, and we met six times a week, every night of the week for sixty weeks, and every night the Father gave me a Bible story, which you’ll find in that book, Spiritual Interpretation of Scripture, and there wasn’t a single week that I knew that until God gave it to me for lessons.