Where To Go When God Says, "Come unto Me"
Revision of my May 14, 2011, post: How To Get To Where God Has Called Us:
In 1982 I sat on a bus in Taipei, Taiwan, reading Matthew 6:33 while on my way to work: "But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you." I wondered, "Seek first the kingdom? What does that even mean? How does one 'go' to the kingdom? How on earth am I supposed to DO it?" The quandary reminded me of the most substantial miracle that had ever happened to me, when at the House of Praise in Kaimuki, Hawaii, I imagined seeing Jesus being scourged and crucified. I got very emotional seeing him suffer in my stead, and as he was being nailed to the cross, he turned his face toward me and said quite directly, personally, and audibly to me, "Come unto Me."
At the time, I didn't even know that was in the Bible (Matthew 11: 28). What got me, though, was that the voice wasn't my imagination's voice. It was a real, tangible voice in my brain. I heard it. I figured Jesus couldn't have transferred his voice into the nervous system of my brain unless he - the man Jesus- was raised from the dead, ascended into Heaven and seated there in authority and with the powers of God. For him to respond to what I was then thinking meant he must always be conscious of me and of what I am thinking - of what everyone is thinking - and he must be powerful to act, to transcend effectively from his sphere of spirit to this material world with concrete impact. That cinched my belief that Jesus Christ really is God and that the Bible is true.
But my Jesus had said, "Come unto Me." I wondered, "Wait. He's in heaven, and I'm a physical man on the earth. How am I supposed to get to heaven? What are the physics here? What does one do . . . to do that? It is impossible! Has he forgotten what it is like to be limited as a human here, to be a physical body as we are? I cannot ascend in the clouds like he did, even though he was a human when he did it. He was dead and resurrected! I haven't any road or path up there. I don't know how to do it!"
I wanted to obey Jesus more than anything else. I had seen him going into shock from the pain and blood loss, the rough sawn cross on his torn up back, and my heart was breaking. My heart said yes, I will come - but I didn't have a clue as to how. I only knew that I had heard Jesus speak to me audibly. Me - an insignificant bum sitting in a small house on an island in the middle of the ocean. I figured that if he was conscious of me and would even speak to me, then certainly he was conscious of and had spoken to other, much more significant people. Surely some of them have published what he said to them. I decided find what God had said to other people, and maybe one of them would explain how it is that we are supposed to "go" to him.
So off I went to Melodyland School of Theology in Anaheim, California. I became part of their innovative admissions program. With no preparation - zero college experience, I'd never taken the SAT, and I had barely even graduated from high school - they accepted me. The accreditation committee killed the experiment almost immediately, but I was grandfathered in. I started college in my junior year! (The last class I took for my bachelor degree was bonehead English Composition.)
Unfortunately, most of what I learned at Melodyland was from the literal-historical point of view - that the Bible is a factual record of history; that God is in heaven far, far away; and that he is utterly and completely separate from man in nature and in being except for Jesus' participation. Fortunately, though, the School was Charismatic and open to the Pentecostal experience. They accepted that while God the Father and the Son are away, the Holy Spirit is transcendentally present and acts among men with concrete effect. The gist was that God is divided from us whether he be inside or out, and he rules the universe by some kind of remote control. (I never have figured that out.)
Recently, I have been reading material that says our minds create the world we live in, and that the way to change our present world is to think new, better thoughts - thoughts that are in accord with the world we want to live in as though it already existed. Honestly, I have pretty much bought into the whole idea (and not blindly, either; at Melodyland I did learn how to study and investigate). I have come to understand that God is not just within us by the Holy Spirit; he actually is our imagination itself - your imagination, my imagination, and everybody else's imagination, too. 'Imagination' is inclusive of all forms of consciousness - awareness, emotion, mind, thought, dream, hope, etc. It means imagining. It flows, like "now" through time.
Imagination extends far beyond our physical bodies. Thought seems to be broadcast to and from our organically electrical brains. The Original Mind is outside of our bodies, but it is the same one that is inside. There is not really a disconnect between the two except on our side of awareness (we have voluntarily forgotten). Like I said, all imagination is God, and God extends far beyond us. He is the sender, and we are the sent . . . and he sent himself! We are not ever separate or divided from the God. Our thoughts are ever God's thoughts.
Christ is, as it were, the transcendence of God's imagination that reaches from his highest sphere of existence down to what we are made of. The "trip" is that it is all the same sphere - everything in the transcendent emanation of the Source is the same one thing - the Source! The Most High is one with what we are. Jesus Christ, being the power of God and the wisdom of God and all imagination by which God's intelligence becomes manifest, is the provider of whatever man needs for salvation - for fulfilling his destiny of becoming God himself. (The weird trip here is that we already are God, but we are maturing to become more like him.)
I have come to see that the six-day creation in Genesis, chapter 1, was God fully sensing what he was going to do and his doing it at the same time. He made a plan and imagined its fruition. He saw the end result of the creation he intended - and every which way to get there. He imagined, planned, and decreed the whole thing to be "beautiful." Therefore, it was . . . and is! Everything that can happen - every potential and its alternatives and all their effects - already exists. It just hasn't happened yet. Not physically, anyway, but in God's economy, THE FINAL, FULLY DEVELOPED MANIFESTATION OF HIMSELF THAT HE HAS INTENDED, INCLUDING ALL THE DEVELOPMENT TO IT, IS ALREADY ARRIVED AT. IT HAS BEEN CREATED. THE WHOLE OF IT IS AN EXISTENT, DONE DEAL! It already exists in his mind; we are just going through the necessary process of his experience to its predetermined completion.
God is experience everything necessary to the coming of his manifestation through the spirit which has become us in these facilitating bodies. The world facilitates the maturing experience. He has decreed the end we shall attain from the beginning, and we stand on God's promises for he is faithful to accomplish what he has determined. God has integrity and fidelity to his word: as he has said, so shall he do. That I learned in seminary and through the miracles I have enjoyed (I am sorry for all the redundancies here, but I really want you to grasp the thought here - that the predetermined end, his perfect Manifestation of himself, exists already in God's mind, and what he thinks exists. It is not just a distant, future goal. It is a special arrangement from which he will not be deterred, and that imagined Manifestation exists alive as he imagines it. That Manifestation is us risen, ascended, and seated as God [his ruling action] - conditions we are going to meet).
Regarding man's dominion over all things by thought, Charles Haanel said, "Concentration does not mean mere thinking of thoughts, but the transmutation of these thoughts into practical values; the average person has no conception of the meaning of concentration. There is always the cry 'to have' but never the cry 'to be'; they fail to understand that they cannot have one without the other, that they must first find the 'kingdom' before they can have 'the things added.' Momentary enthusiasm is of no value; it is only with unbounded self-confidence that the goal is reached" (The Master Key System, Part Seventeen, 11, emphasis mine). Oh.
OHHH! There is the path, the road, the muscle and mechanism to seeking first the kingdom of God and the going unto Jesus when he says, "Come unto Me." Here is the faith that puts the rubber on the road: Haanel's "unbounded self-confidence that the goal is reached." That is so easily misread! Did you not first misread it the other way?
It is not to have - "with unbounded self-confidence that the goal - things added - is reached." It is to be - "with unbounded self-confidence that the goal - the kingdom that God desires - is 'reached'." I.e., the goal already is - it exists in the "reached" state. Everything necessary for becoming God already is in the imagination of God. That is where the power and the wisdom of God are, for the power and the wisdom of God are what the imagination is.
MY "MIND" IS GOD. It turns out that God is not separate; he has simply fallen into being us. Our imaginations are continuously his. If we are mentally absorbed where our needs are met in our thoughts and emotions - i.e., transmuted - then we have come unto him and he has heard us. We have got to Jesus! We have attained to the kingdom we were told to seek and are come unto the king we were told to come unto.
We are the ones who call the end, the Manifestation, into existence - "not out loud, but by an inner effort of intense attention. To listen attentively, as though you heard, is to create" (Neville Goddard, Mental Diets, http://imagicworldview.blogspot.com/2014/06/mental-diets-text-improved-version-of.html). That is not a vain or arrogant boast - it is the humble recognition and submission to the fact that God is the one in us who is doing the calling!
In 1982 I sat on a bus in Taipei, Taiwan, reading Matthew 6:33 while on my way to work: "But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you." I wondered, "Seek first the kingdom? What does that even mean? How does one 'go' to the kingdom? How on earth am I supposed to DO it?" The quandary reminded me of the most substantial miracle that had ever happened to me, when at the House of Praise in Kaimuki, Hawaii, I imagined seeing Jesus being scourged and crucified. I got very emotional seeing him suffer in my stead, and as he was being nailed to the cross, he turned his face toward me and said quite directly, personally, and audibly to me, "Come unto Me."
At the time, I didn't even know that was in the Bible (Matthew 11: 28). What got me, though, was that the voice wasn't my imagination's voice. It was a real, tangible voice in my brain. I heard it. I figured Jesus couldn't have transferred his voice into the nervous system of my brain unless he - the man Jesus- was raised from the dead, ascended into Heaven and seated there in authority and with the powers of God. For him to respond to what I was then thinking meant he must always be conscious of me and of what I am thinking - of what everyone is thinking - and he must be powerful to act, to transcend effectively from his sphere of spirit to this material world with concrete impact. That cinched my belief that Jesus Christ really is God and that the Bible is true.
But my Jesus had said, "Come unto Me." I wondered, "Wait. He's in heaven, and I'm a physical man on the earth. How am I supposed to get to heaven? What are the physics here? What does one do . . . to do that? It is impossible! Has he forgotten what it is like to be limited as a human here, to be a physical body as we are? I cannot ascend in the clouds like he did, even though he was a human when he did it. He was dead and resurrected! I haven't any road or path up there. I don't know how to do it!"
I wanted to obey Jesus more than anything else. I had seen him going into shock from the pain and blood loss, the rough sawn cross on his torn up back, and my heart was breaking. My heart said yes, I will come - but I didn't have a clue as to how. I only knew that I had heard Jesus speak to me audibly. Me - an insignificant bum sitting in a small house on an island in the middle of the ocean. I figured that if he was conscious of me and would even speak to me, then certainly he was conscious of and had spoken to other, much more significant people. Surely some of them have published what he said to them. I decided find what God had said to other people, and maybe one of them would explain how it is that we are supposed to "go" to him.
So off I went to Melodyland School of Theology in Anaheim, California. I became part of their innovative admissions program. With no preparation - zero college experience, I'd never taken the SAT, and I had barely even graduated from high school - they accepted me. The accreditation committee killed the experiment almost immediately, but I was grandfathered in. I started college in my junior year! (The last class I took for my bachelor degree was bonehead English Composition.)
Unfortunately, most of what I learned at Melodyland was from the literal-historical point of view - that the Bible is a factual record of history; that God is in heaven far, far away; and that he is utterly and completely separate from man in nature and in being except for Jesus' participation. Fortunately, though, the School was Charismatic and open to the Pentecostal experience. They accepted that while God the Father and the Son are away, the Holy Spirit is transcendentally present and acts among men with concrete effect. The gist was that God is divided from us whether he be inside or out, and he rules the universe by some kind of remote control. (I never have figured that out.)
Recently, I have been reading material that says our minds create the world we live in, and that the way to change our present world is to think new, better thoughts - thoughts that are in accord with the world we want to live in as though it already existed. Honestly, I have pretty much bought into the whole idea (and not blindly, either; at Melodyland I did learn how to study and investigate). I have come to understand that God is not just within us by the Holy Spirit; he actually is our imagination itself - your imagination, my imagination, and everybody else's imagination, too. 'Imagination' is inclusive of all forms of consciousness - awareness, emotion, mind, thought, dream, hope, etc. It means imagining. It flows, like "now" through time.
Imagination extends far beyond our physical bodies. Thought seems to be broadcast to and from our organically electrical brains. The Original Mind is outside of our bodies, but it is the same one that is inside. There is not really a disconnect between the two except on our side of awareness (we have voluntarily forgotten). Like I said, all imagination is God, and God extends far beyond us. He is the sender, and we are the sent . . . and he sent himself! We are not ever separate or divided from the God. Our thoughts are ever God's thoughts.
Christ is, as it were, the transcendence of God's imagination that reaches from his highest sphere of existence down to what we are made of. The "trip" is that it is all the same sphere - everything in the transcendent emanation of the Source is the same one thing - the Source! The Most High is one with what we are. Jesus Christ, being the power of God and the wisdom of God and all imagination by which God's intelligence becomes manifest, is the provider of whatever man needs for salvation - for fulfilling his destiny of becoming God himself. (The weird trip here is that we already are God, but we are maturing to become more like him.)
I have come to see that the six-day creation in Genesis, chapter 1, was God fully sensing what he was going to do and his doing it at the same time. He made a plan and imagined its fruition. He saw the end result of the creation he intended - and every which way to get there. He imagined, planned, and decreed the whole thing to be "beautiful." Therefore, it was . . . and is! Everything that can happen - every potential and its alternatives and all their effects - already exists. It just hasn't happened yet. Not physically, anyway, but in God's economy, THE FINAL, FULLY DEVELOPED MANIFESTATION OF HIMSELF THAT HE HAS INTENDED, INCLUDING ALL THE DEVELOPMENT TO IT, IS ALREADY ARRIVED AT. IT HAS BEEN CREATED. THE WHOLE OF IT IS AN EXISTENT, DONE DEAL! It already exists in his mind; we are just going through the necessary process of his experience to its predetermined completion.
God is experience everything necessary to the coming of his manifestation through the spirit which has become us in these facilitating bodies. The world facilitates the maturing experience. He has decreed the end we shall attain from the beginning, and we stand on God's promises for he is faithful to accomplish what he has determined. God has integrity and fidelity to his word: as he has said, so shall he do. That I learned in seminary and through the miracles I have enjoyed (I am sorry for all the redundancies here, but I really want you to grasp the thought here - that the predetermined end, his perfect Manifestation of himself, exists already in God's mind, and what he thinks exists. It is not just a distant, future goal. It is a special arrangement from which he will not be deterred, and that imagined Manifestation exists alive as he imagines it. That Manifestation is us risen, ascended, and seated as God [his ruling action] - conditions we are going to meet).
Regarding man's dominion over all things by thought, Charles Haanel said, "Concentration does not mean mere thinking of thoughts, but the transmutation of these thoughts into practical values; the average person has no conception of the meaning of concentration. There is always the cry 'to have' but never the cry 'to be'; they fail to understand that they cannot have one without the other, that they must first find the 'kingdom' before they can have 'the things added.' Momentary enthusiasm is of no value; it is only with unbounded self-confidence that the goal is reached" (The Master Key System, Part Seventeen, 11, emphasis mine). Oh.
OHHH! There is the path, the road, the muscle and mechanism to seeking first the kingdom of God and the going unto Jesus when he says, "Come unto Me." Here is the faith that puts the rubber on the road: Haanel's "unbounded self-confidence that the goal is reached." That is so easily misread! Did you not first misread it the other way?
It is not to have - "with unbounded self-confidence that the goal - things added - is reached." It is to be - "with unbounded self-confidence that the goal - the kingdom that God desires - is 'reached'." I.e., the goal already is - it exists in the "reached" state. Everything necessary for becoming God already is in the imagination of God. That is where the power and the wisdom of God are, for the power and the wisdom of God are what the imagination is.
MY "MIND" IS GOD. It turns out that God is not separate; he has simply fallen into being us. Our imaginations are continuously his. If we are mentally absorbed where our needs are met in our thoughts and emotions - i.e., transmuted - then we have come unto him and he has heard us. We have got to Jesus! We have attained to the kingdom we were told to seek and are come unto the king we were told to come unto.
We are the ones who call the end, the Manifestation, into existence - "not out loud, but by an inner effort of intense attention. To listen attentively, as though you heard, is to create" (Neville Goddard, Mental Diets, http://imagicworldview.blogspot.com/2014/06/mental-diets-text-improved-version-of.html). That is not a vain or arrogant boast - it is the humble recognition and submission to the fact that God is the one in us who is doing the calling!
posted by Daniel C. Branham-Steele at
2:34 AM
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