1956 Second Steinway Hall Closed Class
Joel S. Goldsmith
150B – Your Names Are Writ in Heaven 5/5

You won’t succeed by might or by power. You will succeed only by grace. By grace are ye saved. That’s very clear…Short and sweet, but clear. By grace are ye saved. By the grace of God are ye saved when you give up your own efforts to change evil into good; when you give up your own efforts to use truth; when you give up your own efforts to think good thoughts instead of bad thoughts; when you give up all your own efforts to believe, by believing that by taking thought you can accomplish something. Give it all up and acknowledge, my name is writ in heaven. I can rest in the bosom of the Father.

I can go to bed at any minute I want, day or night, and just lie there under the covers, or under the pillows if necessary, and just hug to myself the realization, “You’re all right. Right now it’s all right. Your name is writ in heaven.” I may have to stay in this bed three days before I come to the realization of it, but if so I’m going to do it or go off to a stream somewhere, or a mountain, or a seaside, away from people, away from newspapers, and be willing to hug this to yourself. Not with a battle. No, let go of the battle, and just gently keep reminding yourself, your name is writ in heaven. God’s in His heaven, all’s well with the world. Nothing to be overcome; nothing to be destroyed; nothing to be rebuilt. Why, if bombs blew the whole world to pieces, wouldn’t take many weeks before new people were on earth. A few centuries, they’d all forget about us. We would just be statistics. But in our true identity, we would be Christ.

In our true identity, we would still walk the earth after the disaster, just as all those who have been killed in battle are still walking the earth. They haven’t gone anywhere. They couldn’t go outside of the kingdom of God if they tried, because the kingdom of God is infinite. You can’t walk outside of infinity. You couldn’t get outside of the bosom of Father Abraham if you tried. You just couldn’t, because Father Abraham isn’t a man; he’s Melchizedek; he’s the man that was never born and will never die. And that’s true of you, and that’s true of your son, and that’s true of your relatives who disappeared in war. They’ve just gone out of our visible sight, that’s all. They still tabernacle with God. They still manifest all the qualities of God. They still live here in our midst, even if unseen to our sight. If we hold them in our consciousness, they’ll never leave there. If they hold us in their consciousness, we will never leave their consciousness, and some day we’ll meet, right around the corner.

Yes, you see, there’s the secret: your name is writ in heaven. You’re eternal, you’re immortal, and if they destroy this temple that you call your body, it’ll be rebuilt again in three days, perfect, harmonious, whole, complete, functioning as God intended it to function. Not by might will you achieve this. Not by power will you achieve this, but by the grace of God: by surrendering the belief that you have physical powers, or mental powers, or spiritual powers, and acknowledging that God alone is power. By giving up the belief that you could be bad, no matter what your sins, or that you could be good, regardless of your virtues.

Only God “is”, and whatever God is, that’s what you are. Anything else is a dream world, based on a temporary belief of a selfhood apart from … a universal belief, not yours. We’re only in this room because of a universal belief that we need truth, and that we ought to study truth, and that after we study truth, we’ll get nearer heaven. No, you’ll never get any nearer heaven than you were when you were in the gutter, if you ever were there.

You were always in heaven. You never left there. The rest of this is part of that universal misconception. It’s the experience of the prodigal. Did you ever stop to think that he never was a prodigal; he always remained the son of the king? Did you ever stop to think he was always the son of the rich man, even when he was eating husks with the swine? He was heir of all that wealth; he was heir of a king. So with us.

Regardless of the husks that we eat; spiritually, morally, mentally, financially, you can’t change our true identity. Your names are writ in heaven. That’s your relationship to God, and that’s your relationship to man, and that’s your relationship to each other. That’s your relationship to you: your names are writ in heaven. Stop trying to get spiritual. Stop trying to get holy. Stop trying to get rich. Stop trying to get healthy. Stop trying to get somewhere. Your names are writ in heaven. That’s the principle of the Christ. That’s the principle of Spiritual existence, your names are writ in heaven already.

You have no power over the devil, not in Christ’s name, not in Jesus’ name, not in The Infinite Way name, or not in the Christian Science name, or Unity, or New Thought, or anybody else. You have no power over evil. There isn’t any evil to have power over. Give up the belief that there’s evil and you won’t meet it anymore. In proportion as you give up the belief that there is no evil, you will not meet it anymore. As long as a tiny bit of that universal belief is in our consciousness, we’ll manifest it in some form.

There is a passage in the Wisdoms to that effect. Why is it that people on the spiritual path, even good practitioners and teachers, still have human problems? And the answer is right there. As long as there is a trace of humanhood in our make-up, as long as there is a trace of universal belief, that universal belief must externalize itself in some form of material good or material error. And that’s why it is that regardless of how high we go in spiritual demonstration, as long as there is some trace of universal belief, we will externalize it.

We may even have the belief of being lucky, and if that clings to us, it will appear outwardly in forms of human good. It’s error, but it will appear to us as human good, because being lucky is something separate and apart from being a child of God.

So you see that we have two points now to consider seriously for this next year. One is: come to the realization of what the meaning of one is—one. Not one over another, not one against another, one. Then come to the realization that there is no good or evil in an effect, whether it’s a hand or a heart. All good is in the invisible spirit. And you see what this will do for you. You will learn the whole secret eventually, which is that our good is always invisible. We have never yet seen our good. We have seen the effects of our good, but not our good. Our good is invisible. Our good is in the word I. Now you’ve never seen I, and you never will. I is your true identity. I is your Godhood or Christhood. I is the source—the multiplier of loaves and fishes. I is that which to sense, heals the sick and raises the dead. I is that which is your salvation, and you’ll never see it. I is your supply. You’ll never see it, but living in the realization of I, you will see its effect in better health, better relationships, better supply, better everything on the face of the globe.

Do you see why the Master is always referred to as gentle? Because that’s the secret. No force is necessary; no physical force, no mental might, no spiritual power. Just the gentle realization, your names are writ in heaven.

I think we ought to meditate for a few minutes.

We had a lesson in class in the Northwest some years ago, and in it there is a tape, and the title on one side is, God Is the Only Power, and the title on the other side is, God Is Not Power. I get letters once in a while, asking me how I can be so inconsistent. God is a power. God is the creative power, the creative, maintaining, and sustaining power of the universe. God is not a power over anything, or over anybody, or to anything, or to anybody. God creates, maintains, and sustains Its own image and likeness. God manifests Itself as form, spiritual form.

But, God is not a power that goes about making bad people good or sick people well. God is not a power that punishes anybody. God is not a power that rewards anybody. The only way in which God can be spoken of as power is as a creative, maintaining, and sustaining principle unto its own creation. And remember the reason is, that there is no other creation for God to govern, or correct, or improve. And so it lies with us to correct within ourselves any sense impressions that we receive. It isn’t God’s function; it is our function. That is why in one breath we say, “you are spiritual, your names are writ in heaven,” and then in the next breath write you a nasty letter about something. Not as if it were you, but as correcting the false picture that you present.

No spiritual teacher in the history of the world has ever judged or condemned any person on the face of the globe, but whenever confronted with a picture of discord, of inharmony, the teacher wouldn’t be a teacher if they ignored it and let it go by. I get many letters from students asking why I said this in a letter, or why I said that, and frankly I don’t remember having said it most of the time, because it wasn’t to them I said it, it was to what they presented to me.

In the back of my mind I know right well that humanly I can make mistakes, even though I know that in my true identity my name is writ in heaven, and I am the Christ of God, and so it is, I know your true identity, but I know that you are not always living up to that true identity, and ordinarily it is none of my business, unless you are a student. When you come to me as a student, then you make it my business. You virtually say to me, “Point out the errors of my ways to me so that they can be corrected.”

Realize this, won’t you: God is not a power over anything and neither is a teacher a power over anything or over anybody. God, in maintaining and sustaining Its own image and likeness, in that one activity, would sometimes appear to have a whip over the money changers in the temple, which isn’t true. I’m sure the Master never physically beat anyone, but I’m also sure that with his spiritual whip he did expose the practice of money changing. So it is with us, let us realize this, wont you, we are gathered in spiritual work but for one purpose, that is that we may reveal in each other that our names are writ in heaven.

Thank you.