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Thursday Treasures from Two Listeners
Perfect Everything by J. Rufus Mosely
CHAPTER IX - PERFECT GUIDE AND GUIDANCE*

* See Manifest Victory, pp. 169-179 and 263-269.

Jesus is our perfect guide and guidance. His guid­ance is clear to the degree of our union with Him, to the measure of our dedication to do His will, to obey His Spirit and to walk according to His light and teaching. To will to do His will enables us to know His will.

Where there is uncertainty as to your guidance turn to the Guide, desiring and asking for His highest will and wisdom for what is best for Him and for all. As you do this, you will find He never fails to guide you aright. The trouble is not with His guid­ance but with our unwillingness to obey. To use a happy phrasing of Tennyson, "He guides in various ways, lest one good custom should corrupt the world."

Where the need is extreme He intervenes directly and tells exactly what to do, as He did in the case of Saul of Tarsus, Sundar Sighn, "Sammy Morris" and a blessed company of others. He has even intervened directly for me with such certainty and authority at times that there was nothing left for me but to obey. It would have been tragic to have disobeyed.

He is always guiding by His light of love, conscience and reason that lights every life coming into the world. Where there is no other guidance that we are aware of, if we follow His light within, if we do the most sensible and most loving thing open to us, we find we have done His will.

When we yield to temptation we of course are not guided by Him, nor by our best selves, nor by His Spirit, nor by His teaching, nor by the accumulated wisdom of the race, but by desire, by the herd instinct or by the evil one. Even here He is always doing His best to help us to repent and return, and to turn our disobedience to good. He is always turning to all pos­sible good everything that is turned over to Him.

In union with Him, guidance is not only clear but supernaturally natural and spontaneous. We do His will unconsciously for the most part and see later how wisely and well we have been guided. In this union with Him we are aware that everything is working together for good. We meet the people we need to meet; we find the right books when we are ready for them, and we make all our contacts at the right time in the right way. If we find doors closing to us, we have the assurance it is because better doors are ready to open.

Confusion and uncertainty come because we have yielded to the temptation to worry instead of to pray, and to try to solve our problems and to improve our condition while away from home. When we repent and return, the guidance is clear again. Don't try to make decisions away from home, in moods of fear and discouragement. The Prodigal Son wisely came to himself and made a "bee line" for home.

The happiest type of guidance comes when we choose and invite Him to write His law in our hearts and upon our minds, and to make us happily willing to do His will. The Old Covenant failed because it sought to get obedience to commandments coming from without, before there was a love to obey them within. The New Covenant succeeds because in the new birth, and in the new life given from Above we love to do what we should do. Here every one delights in doing the very thing he is created to do and he will do it better than it has ever been done before.

Everyone is a genius when he finds his place and work in the will and wisdom of God. Here he will delight so greatly in doing his work that he would gladly pay for the privilege of doing it and yet does it so well that he cannot escape the best pay of all. He has something so good to communicate and to do, it is woe be unto him if he does not do it and communicate it.

In the deepest union, the Father seeks to please the Son and the Son seeks to please the Father. In like manner the begotten and the adopted sons of the Son will like best of all what the Son chooses for them, for He chooses always what they really want even if He opposed what for a time they thought they wanted.

Moreover as much as we like getting what we ask for if we are wise enough to ask aright, it is what comes to us as spontaneous gifts of love that pleases us best of all. The Prodigal Son only asked for the status of a servant. He was received as a son and given the best of everything. So the happiest relationship between Jesus and us and with one another and with all living things is that of spontaneous love.

It is happier to give and receive what is not prom­ised than what is promised. God of course will do all that He has promised. He is duty bound to do this much. I have the feeling that He will do far more and better. Then His joy and our joy will be full.

Duty apart from love does not satisfy God nor us. Still love fulfills duty which has only been a school master to bring us to spontaneous and joyous love.

Jesus achieved so much maturity in the early church that by the time of the first church council, as reported in Acts 15, the disciples found what seemed good to the Holy Spirit seemed good to them, and what seemed good to them seemed good to the Holy Spirit. This was high achievement both for Him and them. The disciples were on the way to the certainty Jesus had that because He pleased the Father, the Father was always with Him and always guiding Him aright.

Jesus and the Father were so much one, even when the Father seemed to withdraw and leave Jesus to make the most difficult choice of all as His own choice, it was also the highest choice of the Father. They were one in choosing. This is the highest achievement; in the field of guidance when we do His will we are also doing our will and when we do our will we are also doing His will. This union will make us as free as God and yet utterly happy that we are nothing apart from Him. Because Jesus did the highest of all when seemingly left alone makes what He did all the more glorious.

It is what our own children do when they are not aware that we are around that best reveals the children. If they do as well or better when we seem to be absent than when we are known to be present our delight in them is all the greater.

Satan and those under his influence force their wills with violence. Jesus sets us free to choose, and by choosing the highest we become free indeed, free with His own freedom, free with the freedom of God.

God is looking after us and guiding us far better and wiser than we are aware. His love, guidance, care and provision, even for the least of His creatures, is so amazing that it should bring us to faith and love and worship.

The birds go South with the weather and they move with the wisdom that could only be from Him. Even in the cells of our body, His presence and almost unbelievable wisdom are manifest.

The highest guidance, as we have seen, is the guid­ance which comes through a happy union of our spirits, minds and wills with His. Here when we best please ourselves we best please Him, and when we best please Him, we best please ourselves.

On the way to this high and happy guidance He is caring for us and guiding us even better than He is the birds, and far better than the best of fathers and mothers care for their children. He is educating us and guiding us, not only directly which is His best of all for us, but He is also educating and guiding us through the total of our experience, and through the best experience He has attained through all others.

The reason we prize our Bibles so highly is that they record so much of the best that He has given and achieved in the past.

No experience is in vain. If we have gone the wrong road, we find it out not only for ourselves but also for others and we can make it easier and happier for them and for all who come after us. If there could be a single experience in the universe that did not have a positive or negative value, there would be that much irrationality in the universe, that much which was out of the hands of God.

In our infancy, we, of course, know very little about how He has planned, provided and is caring for us. In full maturity, we shall fully understand. All the way from conception to birth and from birth to maturity, He is working for us within and from without and from above, and enlisting all the help He can get.

In the Old Covenant as we have seen, He guided largely from without. In the New, He achieves largely by causing us to love as He loves and to choose happily as He chooses. In this immediate guidance, it is easiest for Him to guide the least, and most difficult for Him to guide those who feel themselves to be the greatest.

He uses the meek and the lowly and the loving as His best bait. You can catch big fish with little fish, but not little fish with big fish.

In Jesus everything is reversed; the last becomes first and the first, last. Even His Cross for us is a Cross of life and honor and bliss and glory in its inner aspect of union with Him. His death is our life.

The Cross as a way of life, becomes the high privi­lege to love as He loved and loves, to meet all evil with good, to help finish out that which is lacking in His sufferings, to bring the unloving to love.

While the whole universe teaches what Jesus lived and taught, it is through union with Him and guidance by Him that we receive all that He is and has attained without having to go the slow and painful way of finding it out through personal experience.

By the law of marriage, by His unspeakable grace, there is for all a new birth and a new life in Him; by His presence and help and guidance we can quickly grow up in Him and become partners with Him in making available all that He is and has for all of us.

While we are taught by the whole of our experience and the race's experience, there is available for us through the Holy Spirit the perfect Teacher and the perfect Helper. We do not have to go the long and hard way. The best of all is knocking to come within us so that we can be perfectly taught by Him within, as well as perfectly guided and taught from above.

Those who are taught and led even by the best disciples of His, will be better taught and led by Him. The church is divided and largely impotent because we have not availed ourselves of our privilege of being taught and led directly by Him and by His Spirit. When we are all taught and guided by Him, we will be one. As long as we look to an imperfect leadership we will be weak and divided. As has been well said, we are not nearly so much in need of leaders as we are of followers of The Leader. A dis­ciple of a disciple is never free and vital as is an immediate disciple, and we are not a true disciple of a disciple of His until we, like the disciple, have become an immediate disciple.

There is no limit to the way He teaches. As we saw in a previous chapter, He will sometimes let us have what we think we want, to teach us that we do not want it. He gives us much rope but not enough to hang ourselves. When the Prodigal Son leaves home He furnishes the health and the means for the journey, but does not furnish enough so that he can re­main away long without returning Home.

If necessary, He will perform all kinds of miracles in our behalf, not enough to make us lazy but enough to deliver us.

Socrates found he was given a free course unless he was about to make a mistake, and then he was warned. Emerson found when he proposed a journey or an enterprise and too many obstacles were en­countered that the obstacles were God's way of teaching him that he was on the wrong path. Emerson said he did not call these hindrances laws or commandments, but grains of mustard seed, as it were, but he "obeyed them as against the combined opinion of mankind."

As Stanley Jones insists, Jesus led His disciples on so they were guided by inspired insight. He wants to lead us all so we will be, too, but on the way His re­sources of checking us as well as leading us on are limitless. He has taught me things in dreams that I was too dull to see in my waking moments. Once He gave me a dream to enable me to help a friend in great distress, and gave the interpretation of the dream in the dream itself. When I have written letters it would have been better not to have written I have been warned in dreams in time to wire the post­masters for their return. Once when I was about to do an exceptionally foolish thing that would have been hard for another as well as myself, a friend who saw the folly appeared to me in a dream as a flaming angel warning me not to do it, and afterwards I had no desire to do it.

His signals are everywhere. If we are on the right road witnesses on the right hand and on the left and in front of us and behind us are telling us so. A sure witness that we are going right is the witness of His peace and assurance; a sure witness that we are missing the highest is disturbance and confusion.

As Evelyn Underhill puts it, "Look for the signals of God." They are all around you whether you see them or not. If you are too blind to see them always do the most loving and Christ-like thing that you can conceive of and that the situation admits of and you will find later that you have done the will of God and that you have pleased yourself as well as Him.

Another good test for any motive, desire, intention or act is how it would look at the Judgment Day. As a rule the things we ourselves are ashamed of so that we want to hide them cannot even stand the judgment day of our souls. James of Harvard spoke of that appeal of the soul to the final tribunal that fully understands.

Of course we are guided not to do the things that are against the highest good of everyone else as well as ourselves, not to indulge our appetites when they are against the health of the soul, and the mind, and the body, not even to attempt to get "the sensuous sweet" and "escape the sensuous bitter." Not to try to cheat life by using any function contrary to its natural and God appointed use.

All life is a warning against folly and a call to wisdom and love. Charles Beard, the enlightened historian, thus summarizes history: "The mills of the gods grind slowly but they grind exceedingly fine; whom the gods would destroy they first make mad; the bee has to fertilize the flower that it robs; when the night gets dark enough the stars come out."

Jesus is made unto us perfect wisdom (1 Corin­thians 1:30) and guides us by this wisdom, a wisdom that is "pure, peaceful, easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits" (James 3:17).

He guides by inspired common sense, and sometimes by a sense of humor.

He leads by circumstances. He leads by closing doors as well as by opening doors. He leads us by our failures as well as our successes. In fact He is seeking to teach us by all experience as well as to teach us by the best experience.

Highest of all, He is teaching us by Himself and by His Spirit.

Sometimes He breaks through where the whole teaching and guidance is of Him. He took the lips of the prophets and spoke things that were wholly of Him and not even colored by them. He at times speaks through His children in the pure language of heaven. At other times the Light is from Him but much obscured by us.

He gives us only the pure Water of Life but when we bring our vessels to the fountain the water takes the form of the vessel; and until the vessels are made wholly clean it may appear the dirt that the pure water is washing away is of the water rather than of the vessel. Happily when the water is allowed to flow long enough the vessels are all made clean and we have the wonder of the perfect water assuming the form of many vessels.

In a similar way, the light shines in darkness but remains pure light. Truth in the midst of error remains Truth. Good in the midst of evil remains Good. Life in the midst of death remains Life, and, by remaining Life, conquers death. Love in the midst of hate remains Love and has no techniques but Love. The imperfect has to be reconciled to Perfection and put on Perfection. With God there is no mixture, but He brings out of the mixed and the messed the Pure and the Perfect.

Jesus Christ as God-with-us is Love and all the more loving because of our need and lack of love. He guides all the more perfectly because of our great need of guidance.

In my own experience He has been with me at every step of the way, though I have not always been aware of His presence and that the One who was always leading me was He. When I have asked His help in buying a mule that would be in the interest of universal benefit the mule that came was clearly a better selection than I could have made. He has guided me well even when I was not easy to lead. While I have had few business interests I have had the clearest kind of guidance concerning them. He has led me into a type of work that fits me best of all. He has given me a work that is not in competition with anybody else's work. He has led me to help all of the existing groups that I can without starting a new one. I have no hard luck stories to tell. Everything that I know of Jesus is unspeakably good. All of His leadings are precisely what I would have chosen for myself, had I had intelligence enough to have made the choice.

I find in Him everything is always getting better and better, and the whole wisdom of life is to be Jesus centered, love radiating, happy on the Way and dedicated to His best for me and for all. There is nothing lacking in His Guidance. It is Perfect.


God Calling    by Two Listeners

March 24 - Know Me

But grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
2 Peter 3:18
I am here. Seek not to know the future. Mercifully I veil it from you.

Faith is too priceless a possession to be sacrificed in order to purchase knowledge. But Faith itself is based on a knowledge of Me.

So remember that this evening time is not to learn the future, not to receive revelation of the Unseen, but to gain an intimate knowledge of Me which will teach you all things and be the very foundation of your faith.

Now unto Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever.    Amen.    Jude 1:24-25
.

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God At Eventide  by Two Listeners

March 24 - If It Offends

Question yourself as to your weakness. What caused your failure? To continue to bemoan your folly is in itself a weakness. My followers must be strong, not in themselves, but in Me.

The look at Self, however penitent, cannot give strength.

Look unto Me, and, whatever the seeming sacrifice, be ruthless with what hindered or caused you to fall.

Now unto Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen. Jude 1:24-25

Copyright 2022 Two Listeners, All rights reserved.

God Calling    by Two Listeners

March 23 - Until Your Heart Sings

He ruleth by his power for ever.
Psalm 66:7
I am beside you to bless and help you. Waver not in your prayers. They shall be heard. All power is Mine. Say that to yourself often and steadily.

Say it until your heart sings with the Joy of the safety and power it means to you.

Say it until the very force of the utterance drives back, and puts to naught, all the evils against you.

Use it as a battle cry – “All power is given unto My Lord,” “All power is given unto My Friend,” “All power is given unto My Savior,” and then you pass on to victory.

Now unto Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever.    Amen.    Jude 1:24-25


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God At Eventide  by Two Listeners

March 23 - No Personalities

Deal with each difficulty as you must.

Then live above it. Say “In Him I conquered.” The fight is ever between you and evil, never between you and another. Never make it a personal matter.

If you are fighting with the weapons of the world — envy, resentment, anger — you cannot use those of My Kingdom — Prayer, Love, Peace — which would give you a God-given conquering strength.

It is the endeavor to call both God and mammon to your aid that makes for lack of success. The world looks on in scornful pity, and My followers themselves doubt and wonder.

So often they do not see their own error, but attribute to suffering for My Sake that which may not be according to My Will.

Now unto Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen. Jude 1:24-25


Copyright 2022 Two Listeners, All rights reserved.

God At Eventide  by Two Listeners


March 22 - Love's Overflow

 
I desire the love of man’s heart in abundant measure.

Not because God would be adored for Himself and for His own gratification, but because I know that only as the love of man flows out to Me does man attain to his purest and best.

That rush of love, which follows the understanding and realization of My Love for man, sweetens and purifies his whole being.

Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.

The love you give to your neighbor is the overflow of your love to me.

Now unto Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen. Jude 1:24-25


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God Calling    by Two Listeners

March 22 - A Bud Opened

Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth; but I have called you friends.
John 15:15
To me, your intimate Friend, all Power is given. It is given Me of My Father, and have not My intimate friends a right to ask it?

You cannot have a need I cannot supply. A flower or one thousand pounds, one is no more difficult than the other.

Your need is a spiritual need to carry on My work. All spiritual supply is fashioned from Love. The flower and the thousand pounds – both fashioned from Love to those who need it. Do you not see this?

I thought of you, a bud opened, you converted that into a cheer for one you love or a smile. That cheer meant increased health. Increased health means work for Me, and that means souls for Me.

And so it goes on, a constant supply, but only if the need is a spiritual one.

Now unto Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever.    Amen.    Jude 1:24-25

Copyright 2022 Two Listeners, All rights reserved.

God At Eventide  by Two Listeners

March 21 - Simplicity

Be content to do the simple things.

Never think that if you have not the cleverness of the world I cannot use your services.

Pure sparkling wine may be in a silver goblet or in a simple glass, but, to the one who receives, it is the wine that matters, not the vessel, provided that be pure and clean.

It is My truth that matters, not the person that utters it, provided the desire is there to deliver My Message for ME.

True simplicity is found only as you live in Me and act in My Strength; for only in our close companionship can real value be achieved.

Never accept the values of earth. Be content with simplicity.

Now unto Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen. Jude 1:24-25


Copyright 2022 Two Listeners, All rights reserved.

God Calling    by Two Listeners

March 21 - All Is Well

Whom having not seen, ye love; in whom, though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory.
1 Peter 1:8
Remember My Words to My disciples, “This kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting.” Can you tread the way I trod? Can you drink of My cup? “All is well.” Say always, “All is well.”

Long though the way may seem, there is not one inch too much. I, your Lord, am not only with you on the journey – I planned, and am planning, the journey.

There are Joys unspeakable in the way you go. Courage – courage – courage.

Now unto Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever.    Amen.    Jude 1:24-25

Copyright 2022 Two Listeners, All rights reserved.

God Calling    by Two Listeners

March 20 - Help From Everywhere

I delight to do thy will, O my God.

Psalm 40:8
Your foolish little activities are valueless in themselves. Seemingly trivial or of seemingly great moment, all deeds are alike if directed by Me. Just cease to function except through Me.

I am your Lord, just obey Me as you would expect a faithful willing secretary to carry out your directions. Just have no choice but Mine, no will but Mine.

I am dependent on no one agency when I am your supply. Through many channels My help and material flow can come.

Now unto Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever.    Amen.    Jude 1:24-25

Copyright 2022 Two Listeners, All rights reserved.

God At Eventide  by Two Listeners

March 19 - Your Resolutions

By the obedience of one shall many be made righteous.

Obedience is the keystone of your arch of worship. On it depends your Love and Power.

Through that archway shall many pass into My Holy Place. Once therein their questing souls will pass into My Holy of Holies. Is it too much to ask of you obedience that this may be accomplished?

Do not fret that your life is lived in lowly places. It is not to be lived to impress this earth-plane, but to be so faithful and obedient that those for whom you desire much, shall have THAT much impressed upon them on the spirit-plane.

That much, and more, than you can desire for them.

Now unto Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen. Jude 1:24-25

Copyright 2022 Two Listeners, All rights reserved.

God At Eventide  by Two Listeners

March 18 - Joy For Sorrow

I bind up the broken hearts with the cords wherewith men scourged Me in the Judgment Hall, with the whips of scorn wherewith men have mocked My Love and Divinity down the ages.

Symbol, this, of the way in which, out of seeming obstacles stepping-stones can be fashioned, and, out of trials undreamt-of, blessings can be wrought.

Share My Life with its longings and tears, with its Joys unspeakable and its heartaches beyond human description.

Share My Joy.

Now unto Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen. Jude 1:24-25


Copyright 2022 Two Listeners, All rights reserved.

God Calling    by Two Listeners

March 18 - Your Resolutions

Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and shew thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not.
Jeremiah 33:3
Listen, listen, I am your Lord. Before me there is none other. Just trust Me in everything. Help is here all the time.

The difficult way is nearly over, but you have learnt in it lessons you could learn in no other way. “The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.” Wrest from Me, by firm and simple trust and persistent prayer, the treasures of My Kingdom.

Such wonderful things are coming to you, Joy – Peace – Assurance – Security – Health – Happiness – Laughter.

Claim big, really big, things now. Remember, nothing is too big. Satisfy the longings of My Heart to give. Blessing, abundant blessing on you both now and always. Peace.

Now unto Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever.    Amen.    Jude 1:24-25

Copyright 2022 Two Listeners, All rights reserved.

God Calling    by Two Listeners

March 17 - No Greater Joy

There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God. For he that is entered into his rest, he also hath ceased from his own works, as God did from his.
Hebrews 4:9,10
Withdraw into the calm of communion with Me. Rest – rest, rest in that calm and Peace. Life knows no greater joy than you will find in converse and companionship with Me.

You are Mine. When the soul finds its home of rest in Me, then it is, that its real Life begins. Not in years, as man counts it, do we measure in My Kingdom.

We count only from his second birth, that new birth of which I spoke to Nicodemus when I said, “Ye must be born again.” We know no life but Eternal Life and when a man enters into that, then he lives.

And this is Life Eternal, to know God, My Father and Me, the Son sent by Him. So immature, so childish, so empty is all so-called living before that. I shower Love on you. Pass Love on.

Do not fear. To fear is as foolish as if a small child with a small coin, but a rich father, fretted about how rent and rates should be paid, and what he or she would do about it. Is this work Mine or not? You need to trust Me for everything.

Now unto Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever.    Amen.    Jude 1:24-25


Copyright 2022 Two Listeners, All rights reserved.

Perfect Everything by J. Rufus Mosely
CHAPTER VIII - PERFECT PRAYER*

* See Manifest Victory, pp. 256-262.

Jesus lived and still lives and prayed and still prays the perfect prayer of perfect love and wisdom and faith and power. He also taught and teaches us how to pray the prayers that are so fully in God's will and wisdom that they are either answered at once, or are being answered, or are soon to be answered.

Moreover there is so much power in all prayers that are inspired by strong desire and backed by our best efforts that it is well to remember the wisdom and the warning in young Emerson's first sermon which was on prayer and contained these three affirmations:

1. "We are all the time praying, always desiring and going after something."

2. "All of our prayers are being answered," not literally answered, but answered in the sense of affecting us within and of producing results without.

3. "We should therefore be very careful what we pray for."

At Harvard young Emerson found so many ques­tions asked and so few answered that it brought confusion to his mind and a near breakdown to his body. After teaching for a short time in his brother's school for girls, he wrote his notable poem "Good­bye Proud World" and went to the country for the recovery of his health and for an opportunity to think things through. Providentially, he found there an enthusiastic young Methodist by the name of Tarbox, who taught him the sense in which all of us are all the time praying and the sense in which all prayer is being answered. This was the light that started off Emerson towards clarity and health, and in his first sermon, he used this light and added to it the wise counsel: "We should be very careful what we pray for."

Happily not all prayers are answered, happily for God and for mankind and especially for the ones who do the praying. Anyone whose prayers and efforts of false pride wish to inflict the worst injury possible to everything that stands in the way of his getting what he thinks he wants (in the end he will find it is the very thing he doesn't want), will find that the evil he has desired for others will come to himself. You can't make a hell for others without get­ting in the hottest spot of it yourself. But false praying, backed by false effort, does have tremendous power. Hitler was powerful in false prayer as well as in false action, and it did seem for a time that his prayers were being answered. But according to perfect law, the destruction he sought for a race and the injury he sought to inflict upon all who stood in his way came to himself. Evil reacts in large measure against those who seek to bring it to others.

There is also prayer that is not wholly good, but largely good. This kind of praying has great power, though not perfect power because not inspired by perfect love fully backed by the perfect Lover. The prayer that your boy will not be killed in battle may be answered, but it is not as good a prayer as the prayer to stop war and the causes of war and that the lives of all the boys on both sides will be spared. You can even pray for your side to win, and if the winning will be in the interest of mankind, so long as men are foolish enough to fight, your prayer will be answered.

People often get what they ask for and work for because they can only be taught by experience that much that they think they want and pray and work for is the very thing that they don't want.

The children of Israel thought that they wanted a king and the only way they could be convinced that they didn't want him was to get him. According to Genesis, Eve chose to experiment with the forbidden fruit and God did not stop her. Why? Possibly because our high destiny to be like Him requires that we shall be free to choose the wrong in order that we may know we only want the right. Anyway to be like God we have to have the freedom to choose, and no matter how badly and foolishly we choose, the all loving One is always doing His best to make the best of our worst sinning and blundering. The Prodigal Son had his prayer answered for His part of the Father's riches. The Father even furnished the means, the health and the material supplies that enabled him to experiment, and stood ready to welcome him back as well as to draw him back and to give him the very best of Himself and His possessions.

Moreover, where we are ready to accept it there are Divine interventions to save us from the worst and to bring us back Home. There are not too many miracles. If there were we might become careless and lazy. If there were not any we might be destroyed. Here as well as everywhere else He is perfect in power as well as in wisdom and love, or rather He is perfect in wisdom as well as in love and power.

When seen at long range nothing really succeeds but the good. The temporary success of evil is a part of the Divine process of defeating the evil and of even saving the agents of evil as well as its victims. It was at this point that Gandhi saw and desired and prayed and lived in advance of any other world leader. Seeing, when he read the New Testament, that the cross is God's answer to sin, he chose for his work the liberation of the victims of injustice and oppression, but to liberate them in patience and nonviolence (with soul force) and in liberating them also to liberate their oppressors. His marked success has given humanity not only a new technique for meeting evil with good, but it should greatly increase our faith and endeavors.

But we come back to Jesus as the example and in­spiration of Perfect Prayer and Praying. He prayed and taught His disciples and still teaches the prayer and prayers of Perfect Love, Perfect Wisdom, Perfect Faith and Perfect Power. In the Sermon on the Mount, He taught His disciples and He is still teaching them to pray for God's perfect will of limitless love and good-will and good sense to triumph on earth as they have already triumphed in the heaven where He is actually Lord; for the Kingdom of Heaven to come to earth, for God's great good will and good everything else to be victorious in Moscow, Peking, Tokyo, London, Washington, and everywhere else; for the hungry to be fed everywhere, for the naked to be clothed, for the homeless to be housed, for the sick to be healed, for the miserable to be joy­ous, and for unbelievable good to be received by all and given by all. In this perfect prayer is also the prayer of perfect adoration, the prayer for us to be kept from choosing evil, and the prayer for perfect forgiveness. The very nature of love requires that we love in order to receive the fullness of love, that we forgive in fullness in order to be forgiven in fullness, that we be merciful in order to be recipients of limitless mercy.

In the presence of death, He prayed the prayer of perfect knowing, knowing that the so-called dead were only asleep, and therefore wakeable; the prayer of perfect thanksgiving and perfect faith combined so that the Father always heard Him; and He used the prayer of perfect command. The mere knowing that Lazarus and the maiden were not dead, did not resurrect them; it only furnished the knowledge that they could be resurrected. Giving thanks did not resurrect them either. They were resurrected by commandment. The storm was also stopped by com­mandment and the possessed people were likewise set free by commandment.

On the last night He prayed the perfect prayer for perfect union for the disciples to have with Him and with one another, for the perfect love among themselves, and that they might be kept from the evil of this world without being taken out of it. His great concern is not to get us to Heaven, but to bring Heaven here, and for us to become co-partners with Him in the bringing.

In Gethsemane, He prayed the perfect prayer of perfect submission, the most difficult prayer there is to pray, and it was much harder for Jesus than it has ever been for anyone else, or ever will be. At first, He seems to have hoped that there might be some other way than the Cross. He had said before that nobody took His life from Him, that at His command a multitude of angels would come and rescue Him. Then His prayer becomes a prayer to be held fast to the Highest of all, and it turned out He had to go down in the deep, dark waters of death and come up as victor over death, as well as over every other enemy. He is victor for us as well as for Himself. On the cross He prays the prayers of perfect love for others and of perfect forgiveness for those humanly responsible for all that the false judgment of man, Gethsemane and Calvary, cost Him.

He did not submit to death as an escape, but be­cause He could do more by self-offering and resurrection, by the Gift of the Holy Spirit, by manifesting Himself by coming within and ultimately by coming in perfect triumph, than by remaining in the flesh as the Son of God. It was Love that brought Him, it was Love that took Him away to give the other Comforter who was to come within, and to come at the right moment in visible triumph.

Since His gift of the Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ is still with us and longs to be within us and to have us in Him, doing more for all who will receive His spirit and receive Him than He could have done for a single one of us if He had remained among us.

When I asked Him, for example, how to pray for Japan, the answer came "pray for all aggressors to surrender and all victors to show mercy." When I asked him how to pray for the United States and Russia, the two nations under special temptation, and with great privilege to go the right way and point the way, the answer is "pray for the triumph of My great good-will among all the nations," and of course among all the races, classes, groups and in the whole of life. When I ask how to pray concerning the atomic bomb and other similar new secrets in man's hands either for his destruction or for making life rich for all, the answer is "pray for all of these things to be brought under the control and uses of Love and Wisdom; for all the realms of this life and kingdoms of this world to become His."

To whom shall we pray?

Until we know that Jesus is God-with-us in perfect availability and in perfect triumph with perfect power to answer, we are to pray the Father in His name; and, as previously indicated, in His name means in His love, in His spirit, in other words as disciples of His. The good and true wife can get in her husband's name everything he has and everything he can get. She does not get it as a formula, but she gets it because of her relationship. So, as I understand, we do not get our prayers answered because we attach to them the empty phrase "in the name of Jesus" but because we are His and are seek­ing to live and pray and do everything in His spirit and in His love and under His leadership.

Jesus said to His own disciples they could not only get in His name anything that the Father had, but the Father loved them and would give them everything He had as fast as they were made ready and they made themselves ready to receive. Some of our prayers are answered even before we ask, and God even more than good human parents is always listening to answer every cry of need.

In my experience, I asked Jesus for something that I was not sure he could do—that he would come within and be within, and by abiding in me enable me to go His way as perfect love, perfect sincerity and perfect courage. In a few hours when I was made ready and helped to make myself ready by choosing to go His way, He baptized me with the Holy Spirit, manifesting Himself without and came within. This, so far as I remember, was the first prayer I ever made directly to Jesus. Since then I pray directly to Jesus, and I also pray to the Father in Jesus' name and sometimes I go directly to the Father. The early Christians did everything in the name of Jesus, even baptizing in His name. As the former president of Union Theological Seminary and a great church his­torian, McGiffert, in his illuminating book, The God of the Early Christians, says, Jesus was to the early gentile Christians "their all sufficient God" and in all high tides of spiritual experience Jesus is experienced as God, yet for intellectual clarification, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were used to express three manifestations of the one God. But God is not a stickler for formulas and is always doing all He can for everyone, no matter how He is addressed. Still when it is seen that Jesus Christ is God, in perfect triumph and availability, there is much more power in His name than in any other name.

I find myself most lifted when I desire and ask in the name of Jesus for the best He has for me and for all that He has, all that I don't know as well as all that I do know.

I have also found that the prayer of invitation after this manner has brought sanity to the insane, healing to the sick, and liberation to the enslaved:

"Jesus, I want You to come into me and reign, Be all in all, in all of me and my affairs;
Come in and be Spirit of my spirit;
Come into my mind and bring Your understand­ing and humility;
Come into my body and bring Your health and healing;
Come into my affairs and direct them;
Be will of my will—
Soul of my soul—
Brain of my brain—
Heart of my heart—
Life of my life—
Joy of my joy—
Perfect everything for all of me!
Perfect everything for the all of all."

The all-inclusive perfect desire, longing, prayer, and effort is perfect everything for everybody, and everything. You can't desire and ask and dedicate to join Jesus for the achievement of perfect everything for all without being lifted into a new world of union, love, and transforming power and presence.
 
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God Calling    by Two Listeners

March 17 - No Greater Joy

There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God. For he that is entered into his rest, he also hath ceased from his own works, as God did from his.
Hebrews 4:9,10
Withdraw into the calm of communion with Me. Rest – rest, rest in that calm and Peace. Life knows no greater joy than you will find in converse and companionship with Me.

You are Mine. When the soul finds its home of rest in Me, then it is, that its real Life begins. Not in years, as man counts it, do we measure in My Kingdom.

We count only from his second birth, that new birth of which I spoke to Nicodemus when I said, “Ye must be born again.” We know no life but Eternal Life and when a man enters into that, then he lives.

And this is Life Eternal, to know God, My Father and Me, the Son sent by Him. So immature, so childish, so empty is all so-called living before that. I shower Love on you. Pass Love on.

Do not fear. To fear is as foolish as if a small child with a small coin, but a rich father, fretted about how rent and rates should be paid, and what he or she would do about it. Is this work Mine or not? You need to trust Me for everything.

Now unto Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever.    Amen.    Jude 1:24-25


Copyright 2022 Two Listeners, All rights reserved.

Perfect Everything by J. Rufus Mosely
CHAPTER VIII - PERFECT PRAYER*

* See Manifest Victory, pp. 256-262.

Jesus lived and still lives and prayed and still prays the perfect prayer of perfect love and wisdom and faith and power. He also taught and teaches us how to pray the prayers that are so fully in God's will and wisdom that they are either answered at once, or are being answered, or are soon to be answered.

Moreover there is so much power in all prayers that are inspired by strong desire and backed by our best efforts that it is well to remember the wisdom and the warning in young Emerson's first sermon which was on prayer and contained these three affirmations:

1. "We are all the time praying, always desiring and going after something."

2. "All of our prayers are being answered," not literally answered, but answered in the sense of affecting us within and of producing results without.

3. "We should therefore be very careful what we pray for."

At Harvard young Emerson found so many ques­tions asked and so few answered that it brought confusion to his mind and a near breakdown to his body. After teaching for a short time in his brother's school for girls, he wrote his notable poem "Good­bye Proud World" and went to the country for the recovery of his health and for an opportunity to think things through. Providentially, he found there an enthusiastic young Methodist by the name of Tarbox, who taught him the sense in which all of us are all the time praying and the sense in which all prayer is being answered. This was the light that started off Emerson towards clarity and health, and in his first sermon, he used this light and added to it the wise counsel: "We should be very careful what we pray for."

Happily not all prayers are answered, happily for God and for mankind and especially for the ones who do the praying. Anyone whose prayers and efforts of false pride wish to inflict the worst injury possible to everything that stands in the way of his getting what he thinks he wants (in the end he will find it is the very thing he doesn't want), will find that the evil he has desired for others will come to himself. You can't make a hell for others without get­ting in the hottest spot of it yourself. But false praying, backed by false effort, does have tremendous power. Hitler was powerful in false prayer as well as in false action, and it did seem for a time that his prayers were being answered. But according to perfect law, the destruction he sought for a race and the injury he sought to inflict upon all who stood in his way came to himself. Evil reacts in large measure against those who seek to bring it to others.

There is also prayer that is not wholly good, but largely good. This kind of praying has great power, though not perfect power because not inspired by perfect love fully backed by the perfect Lover. The prayer that your boy will not be killed in battle may be answered, but it is not as good a prayer as the prayer to stop war and the causes of war and that the lives of all the boys on both sides will be spared. You can even pray for your side to win, and if the winning will be in the interest of mankind, so long as men are foolish enough to fight, your prayer will be answered.

People often get what they ask for and work for because they can only be taught by experience that much that they think they want and pray and work for is the very thing that they don't want.

The children of Israel thought that they wanted a king and the only way they could be convinced that they didn't want him was to get him. According to Genesis, Eve chose to experiment with the forbidden fruit and God did not stop her. Why? Possibly because our high destiny to be like Him requires that we shall be free to choose the wrong in order that we may know we only want the right. Anyway to be like God we have to have the freedom to choose, and no matter how badly and foolishly we choose, the all loving One is always doing His best to make the best of our worst sinning and blundering. The Prodigal Son had his prayer answered for His part of the Father's riches. The Father even furnished the means, the health and the material supplies that enabled him to experiment, and stood ready to welcome him back as well as to draw him back and to give him the very best of Himself and His possessions.

Moreover, where we are ready to accept it there are Divine interventions to save us from the worst and to bring us back Home. There are not too many miracles. If there were we might become careless and lazy. If there were not any we might be destroyed. Here as well as everywhere else He is perfect in power as well as in wisdom and love, or rather He is perfect in wisdom as well as in love and power.

When seen at long range nothing really succeeds but the good. The temporary success of evil is a part of the Divine process of defeating the evil and of even saving the agents of evil as well as its victims. It was at this point that Gandhi saw and desired and prayed and lived in advance of any other world leader. Seeing, when he read the New Testament, that the cross is God's answer to sin, he chose for his work the liberation of the victims of injustice and oppression, but to liberate them in patience and nonviolence (with soul force) and in liberating them also to liberate their oppressors. His marked success has given humanity not only a new technique for meeting evil with good, but it should greatly increase our faith and endeavors.

But we come back to Jesus as the example and in­spiration of Perfect Prayer and Praying. He prayed and taught His disciples and still teaches the prayer and prayers of Perfect Love, Perfect Wisdom, Perfect Faith and Perfect Power. In the Sermon on the Mount, He taught His disciples and He is still teaching them to pray for God's perfect will of limitless love and good-will and good sense to triumph on earth as they have already triumphed in the heaven where He is actually Lord; for the Kingdom of Heaven to come to earth, for God's great good will and good everything else to be victorious in Moscow, Peking, Tokyo, London, Washington, and everywhere else; for the hungry to be fed everywhere, for the naked to be clothed, for the homeless to be housed, for the sick to be healed, for the miserable to be joy­ous, and for unbelievable good to be received by all and given by all. In this perfect prayer is also the prayer of perfect adoration, the prayer for us to be kept from choosing evil, and the prayer for perfect forgiveness. The very nature of love requires that we love in order to receive the fullness of love, that we forgive in fullness in order to be forgiven in fullness, that we be merciful in order to be recipients of limitless mercy.

In the presence of death, He prayed the prayer of perfect knowing, knowing that the so-called dead were only asleep, and therefore wakeable; the prayer of perfect thanksgiving and perfect faith combined so that the Father always heard Him; and He used the prayer of perfect command. The mere knowing that Lazarus and the maiden were not dead, did not resurrect them; it only furnished the knowledge that they could be resurrected. Giving thanks did not resurrect them either. They were resurrected by commandment. The storm was also stopped by com­mandment and the possessed people were likewise set free by commandment.

On the last night He prayed the perfect prayer for perfect union for the disciples to have with Him and with one another, for the perfect love among themselves, and that they might be kept from the evil of this world without being taken out of it. His great concern is not to get us to Heaven, but to bring Heaven here, and for us to become co-partners with Him in the bringing.

In Gethsemane, He prayed the perfect prayer of perfect submission, the most difficult prayer there is to pray, and it was much harder for Jesus than it has ever been for anyone else, or ever will be. At first, He seems to have hoped that there might be some other way than the Cross. He had said before that nobody took His life from Him, that at His command a multitude of angels would come and rescue Him. Then His prayer becomes a prayer to be held fast to the Highest of all, and it turned out He had to go down in the deep, dark waters of death and come up as victor over death, as well as over every other enemy. He is victor for us as well as for Himself. On the cross He prays the prayers of perfect love for others and of perfect forgiveness for those humanly responsible for all that the false judgment of man, Gethsemane and Calvary, cost Him.

He did not submit to death as an escape, but be­cause He could do more by self-offering and resurrection, by the Gift of the Holy Spirit, by manifesting Himself by coming within and ultimately by coming in perfect triumph, than by remaining in the flesh as the Son of God. It was Love that brought Him, it was Love that took Him away to give the other Comforter who was to come within, and to come at the right moment in visible triumph.

Since His gift of the Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ is still with us and longs to be within us and to have us in Him, doing more for all who will receive His spirit and receive Him than He could have done for a single one of us if He had remained among us.

When I asked Him, for example, how to pray for Japan, the answer came "pray for all aggressors to surrender and all victors to show mercy." When I asked him how to pray for the United States and Russia, the two nations under special temptation, and with great privilege to go the right way and point the way, the answer is "pray for the triumph of My great good-will among all the nations," and of course among all the races, classes, groups and in the whole of life. When I ask how to pray concerning the atomic bomb and other similar new secrets in man's hands either for his destruction or for making life rich for all, the answer is "pray for all of these things to be brought under the control and uses of Love and Wisdom; for all the realms of this life and kingdoms of this world to become His."

To whom shall we pray?

Until we know that Jesus is God-with-us in perfect availability and in perfect triumph with perfect power to answer, we are to pray the Father in His name; and, as previously indicated, in His name means in His love, in His spirit, in other words as disciples of His. The good and true wife can get in her husband's name everything he has and everything he can get. She does not get it as a formula, but she gets it because of her relationship. So, as I understand, we do not get our prayers answered because we attach to them the empty phrase "in the name of Jesus" but because we are His and are seek­ing to live and pray and do everything in His spirit and in His love and under His leadership.

Jesus said to His own disciples they could not only get in His name anything that the Father had, but the Father loved them and would give them everything He had as fast as they were made ready and they made themselves ready to receive. Some of our prayers are answered even before we ask, and God even more than good human parents is always listening to answer every cry of need.

In my experience, I asked Jesus for something that I was not sure he could do—that he would come within and be within, and by abiding in me enable me to go His way as perfect love, perfect sincerity and perfect courage. In a few hours when I was made ready and helped to make myself ready by choosing to go His way, He baptized me with the Holy Spirit, manifesting Himself without and came within. This, so far as I remember, was the first prayer I ever made directly to Jesus. Since then I pray directly to Jesus, and I also pray to the Father in Jesus' name and sometimes I go directly to the Father. The early Christians did everything in the name of Jesus, even baptizing in His name. As the former president of Union Theological Seminary and a great church his­torian, McGiffert, in his illuminating book, The God of the Early Christians, says, Jesus was to the early gentile Christians "their all sufficient God" and in all high tides of spiritual experience Jesus is experienced as God, yet for intellectual clarification, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were used to express three manifestations of the one God. But God is not a stickler for formulas and is always doing all He can for everyone, no matter how He is addressed. Still when it is seen that Jesus Christ is God, in perfect triumph and availability, there is much more power in His name than in any other name.

I find myself most lifted when I desire and ask in the name of Jesus for the best He has for me and for all that He has, all that I don't know as well as all that I do know.

I have also found that the prayer of invitation after this manner has brought sanity to the insane, healing to the sick, and liberation to the enslaved:

"Jesus, I want You to come into me and reign, Be all in all, in all of me and my affairs;
Come in and be Spirit of my spirit;
Come into my mind and bring Your understand­ing and humility;
Come into my body and bring Your health and healing;
Come into my affairs and direct them;
Be will of my will—
Soul of my soul—
Brain of my brain—
Heart of my heart—
Life of my life—
Joy of my joy—
Perfect everything for all of me!
Perfect everything for the all of all."

The all-inclusive perfect desire, longing, prayer, and effort is perfect everything for everybody, and everything. You can't desire and ask and dedicate to join Jesus for the achievement of perfect everything for all without being lifted into a new world of union, love, and transforming power and presence.
 
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God At Eventide  by Two Listeners

March 16 - Perfect Everything

“Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in Heaven.”

That was the aim I set before My disciples when I spoke to them on the Mount.

That is the aim I set before you and every follower of Mine today.

To achieve this you would be as God.

To aim at less would mean an unworthy standard.

To keep your gaze on this as your standard means that your eyes are fixed on the Heights of God, always directed above the difficulties and the lower aims and desires and standards of others round you.

Now unto Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen. Jude 1:24-25

Copyright 2022 Two Listeners, All rights reserved.

God Calling    by Two Listeners

March 16 - Reflect Me

In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength.
Isaiah 30:15

My children, I am here beside you. Draw near in spirit to Me. Shut out the distractions of the world. I am your Life, the very breath of your soul. Learn what it is to shut yourself in the secret place of your being, which is My secret place too.

True it is, I wait in many a heart, but so few retire into that inner place of the being to commune with Me. Wherever the soul is, I am. Man has rarely understood this. I am actually at the center of every man’s being, but, distracted with the things of the sense-life, he finds Me not.

Do you realize that I am telling you truths, revealing them, not repeating oft-told facts. Meditate on all I say. Ponder it. Not to draw your own conclusions, but to absorb Mine.

All down the ages, men have been too eager to say what they thought about My truth, and so doing, they have grievously erred. Hear Me. Talk to Me. Reflect Me. Do not say what you think about me. My words need none of man’s explanation. I can explain to each heart.

Make Me real, and leave Me to do My own work. To lead a soul to Me is one thing, to seek to stay with it to interpret mars the first great act. So would it be with human intercourse. How much more then, when it is a question of the soul, and Me, its Maker, and only real Spirit that understands it.

Now unto Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever.    Amen.    Jude 1:24-25

Copyright 2022 Two Listeners, All rights reserved.

God Calling    by Two Listeners

March 15 - Your Cross Is You

And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.
Philippians 4:7

 
Remember, you are only an instrument. Not yours to decide how or when or where you act. I plan all that. Make yourself very fit to do My work. All that hinders your activity must be cured.

Mine is the Cross on which the burdens of the world are laid.  How foolish is any one of My disciples who seeks to bear his own burdens, when there is only one place for them – My Cross.

It is like a weary man on a hot and dusty road, bearing a heavy load, when all plans have been made for its carriage.  The road, the scenery, flowers, beauty around – all are lost.

But, My children, you may think I did say, “Take up your cross daily, and follow Me.”

Yes, but the cross given to each one of you is only a cross provided on which you can crucify the self of yours that hinders progress and Joy, and prevents the flow through your being of My invigorating Life and Spirit.

Listen to Me, love Me, joy in Me. Rejoice.

Now unto Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever.    Amen.    Jude 1:24-25

Copyright 2022 Two Listeners, All rights reserved.


God At Eventide  by Two Listeners

March 15 - Guidance is Guidance

Be still before Me. How often in a crisis man rushes hither and thither. Rush is a sign of weakness. Quiet abiding is a sign of strength.

A few quiet actions, as you are led to do them, and all is accomplished wisely and rightly, more quickly and more effectually than could be done by those who rush about and act feverishly.

Guidance IS Guidance, the being led, the being shown the way. Believe this.

Softly across life’s tumult, comes a gentle Voice, “Peace, be still.” The waves of difficulty will hear. They will fall back. There will be a great calm.

And then the Still Small Voice of Guidance.

Now unto Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen. Jude 1:24-25

Copyright 2022 Two Listeners, All rights reserved.

God At Eventide  by Two Listeners

March 14 - Your Weak Point

Be not overcome of evil, but overcome with good.

The instruments in your hand for good are invincible against evil, did you but use them.

Every evil you face boldly, in My Spirit, flees at once, ashamed. No evil can look good in the face. Teach to all — that good is stronger than evil. You must answer the challenge of evil.

This spiritual warfare must be ceaselessly waged by My followers. Remember it is not where you are strongest that evil will attack you, but at your weak points. Hence the need to overcome. Be ready to see a weakness in yourself, and attack that until you are victor.

Now unto Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen. Jude 1:24-25

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God At Eventide  by Two Listener
March 13 - You Are Complete

Be happy in Me. Feel that your life is complete in Me. Know the Joy of a friendship in which those who love Me share.

Know a glad contentment in the security of your protected and guided life. Value the Power that Union with Me gives you.

The greatest power that money, fame, or position of the world can give, still leaves the possessor but as a child beating helpless hands against an impregnable fortress, as compared with the Power of My Spirit, which can render a follower of Mine himself an invincible, an all-conquering force.

Now unto Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen. Jude 1:24-25

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 God Calling    by Two Listeners

March 14 - God's Touch

Forget not all his benefits … who satisfieth thy mouth with good things; so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle’s. 
Psalm 103:2,5

 
Near, all broodingly near, as some tender motherbird anxious over its young, I am here.  I am your Lord, Life of your body and mind and soul – renewer of your youth.

You do not know all that this time of converse with Me will mean to you.  Did not My servant Isaiah say, “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength.  They shall mount up with wings as eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”

Persevere in all I tell you to do.  The persistent carrying out of My commands, My desires, will unfailingly bring you, as far as spiritual, mental, and temporal things are concerned, to that place where you would be.

If you look back over My Words to you, you will see that My leading has been very gradual, and that only as you have carried out My wishes, have I been able to give you more clear and definite teaching and guidance.

Man’s ecstasy is God’s touch on quickened, responsive, spirit-nerves.  Joy – Joy – Joy

Now unto Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever.    Amen.    Jude 1:24-25

Copyright 2022 Two Listeners, All rights reserved.

God At Eventide  by Two Listeners

March 12 - The Springs of Joy

Be gentle to all.

Drink of the Living water, deep draughts from the inexhaustible wells into which the very springs of Eternal Life flow from the Hills of God.

Think thoughts of Love and Beauty. Know no limit to all you can possess and be and do. Live in My Love; surrounded by It, blessed by It, shedding It bountifully on all about you, ever conscious of It being present with you.

You are here to reflect It.

Seek to see the good in all you meet — and in those of whom you hear.

Now unto Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen. Jude 1:24-25


Copyright 2022 Two Listeners, All rights reserved.

 God Calling    by Two Listeners
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March 13 -Spiritualism

 
This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh.
Galatians 5:16

 
Wait before Me, gently breathing in My Spirit.

That Spirit which, if given a free entrance, and not barred out by self, will enable you to do the same works as I did, which being interpreted is, will enable Me to do the same works, and even greater than I did when on earth – through you.

Spiritualism is wrong. No man should ever be a medium for any spirit, other than Mine.

All you should know, all it is well for you to know of My Spirit-Kingdom, I will tell you when and how I see best. The limit is set by your own spiritual development.

Follow My injunctions in all things.

Peace – Peace – Peace.

Now unto Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever.    Amen.    Jude 1:24-25


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God Calling    by Two Listeners

March 12 - Simplicity

But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.
Matthew 6:33
Simplicity is the keynote of My Kingdom. Choose simple things always.

Love and reverence the humble and the simple.

Have only simple things here. Your standard must never be the world’s standard.

Now unto Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever.    Amen.    Jude 1:24-25


Copyright 2022 Two Listeners, All rights reserved.

God At Eventide  by Two Listeners
March 11 - Accept The Task

 
Take life as a task; each step of it to be practiced until it can be done perfectly, that is, with patience, with soul harmony, and rest.

Remember that Christ of the humble ways is with you. His “Well done, good and faithful servant,” is spoken, not to the great of earth but to the humble bearer of pain and annoyance, to the patient worker in life’s ways of service.

So even on the quietest day, and in the lowliest way, mighty opportunities are given you of serving the King of King’s. See that you welcome and do not resent these opportunities.

Now unto Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen. Jude 1:24-25


Copyright 2022 Two Listeners, All rights reserved.

God At Eventide  by Two Listeners

March 10 - Turn It To Good

Never flinch. My standard-bearers must you ever be. Bear your standard high.

Life has its dangers and difficulties, but real as these seem, the moment you see in them a power of evil which will in response to your faith be forced to work in some way for your good, in that moment of recognition evil and danger cease to have any power over you.

This is a wonderful truth. Believe it. Rejoice in it.

Now unto Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen. Jude 1:24-25

Copyright 2022 Two Listeners, All rights reserved.

God Calling    by Two Listeners

March 11 - Seek Beauty

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handiwork.
Psalm 19:1

Draw Beauty from every flower and Joy from the song of the birds, and the color of the flowers.

Drink in the beauty of air and color.  I am with you. When I wanted to express a beautiful thought, I made a lovely flower. I have told you. Reflect.

When I want to express to man what I am – what my Father is – I strive to make a very beautiful character.

Think of yourselves as My expression of attributes, as a lovely flower is My expression of thought, and you will strive in all, in Spiritual beauty, in Thought – power, in Health, in clothing, to be as fit an expression for Me as you can.

Absorb Beauty. As soon as the beauty of a flower or a tree is impressed upon your soul it leaves an image there which reflects through your actions. Remember that no thought of sin and suffering, of the approaching scorn and Crucifixion, ever prevented My seeing the beauty of the flowers.

Look for beauty and joy in the world around. Look at a flower until its beauty becomes part of your very soul. It will be given back to the world again by you in the form of a smile or a loving word or a kind thought or a prayer.Listen to a bird. Take the song as a message from My Father. Let it sink into your soul. That too will be given back to the world in ways I have said. Laugh more, laugh often. Love more. I am with you. I am your Lord.

Now unto Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever.    Amen.    Jude 1:24-25


Copyright 2022 Two Listeners, All rights reserved.

Perfect Everything by J. Rufus Mosely
CHAPTER VII - PERFECT LOVE*

* See Manifest Victory, pp. 149-157,180-198 and 252-255.

Jesus who is Perfect Everything is best understood as the Perfect Lover and Perfect Love, giving and enabling and commanding Perfect Love for one another and also for our enemies.

Since whatever He gives He is, He could not be Perfect Love unless always giving perfect Love and only perfect Love to everyone. So His commandment to love our enemies as well as to love one another is the prefect necessity of His Perfect Being. For Him to give less than perfect Love would make Him less than perfect Love. He, like us and we like Him, are what we give.

When we see this we will choose to give what we would like to be. Since we receive good measure pressed down and running over whatever we give, the only possible way to get what we desire is to give it.

Jesus gave good and only good and was therefore all good. He gave love and only love and was all love. He gave light and only light and was all light. He gave only health and healing and was all health and healing,

We will be what we want to be when we receive from Him what He is and give what we receive and give only what we receive. The Golden Rule is a revelation how to be what you want to be—by giving what you want to be and only what you want to be. It could not be otherwise. We could never be educated to co-work with Him for Perfect Everything for ourselves without also choosing, praying and working for Perfect Everything for all.

The divine Law of becoming perfect Personality and of making all things perfect is just as perfect as God Himself. The only possible way for God to be God (Love) and remain God (Love) is for Him to Love us and love the universe into loving. The only possible way to respond to His love is to love.

Everything would collapse on any other basis. On this basis the victory of love over hate, of good over evil, of life over death, of peace over war, and of Jesus Christ over the anti-Christ is sure and certain.

It is only a question how long and how much further experimenting is required on our part to induce us to join Him in giving pure good to all.

Since the means appear in the end and are part of the end, the only possible way to bring the kingdom of heaven is to give heaven and only heaven. As long as we give any hell we will be in the hell we give.

If we are sensible enough to receive Jesus Christ and His Perfect Love and to give Him and His love, and only Him and His Love, the kingdom of heaven will come to us in a day. If the entire world would do this the kingdom would come to the world in a day.

Perfect Love, because it wills and works no evil to anyone, but all possible good to everyone, is the fulfillment of the Law and the very essence of the Gospel.

Love is highest impersonal Good and works with such intelligence, wisdom, and grace that from its very impersonality it takes in personality. Highest impersonal love ultimately appears before us as Personality of all. Katherine of Genoa said, "Love is God." John says, and we know this is true, "God is love" and "love is of God." As Tolstoy put it, "Where love is there God is also." Mrs. Grace Munsey, to whom I dictated much of the first draft of Manifest Victory, said, "Everything done in love is done by God Himself."

When you follow love, the kind of love St. Paul writes of so well in the 13th chapter of 1 Corinthians, you are really following God whether you are aware of it at the time or not.

Love best defines God, and Jesus Christ best de­fines love. He defines Perfect Love by being Perfect Love.

All and more that is said of love by St. Paul, St. John, St. Peter, and the love poets is true and more than true of Jesus Christ. Jesus suffered long and was kind. As Kagawa put it, "He went" (and we might add is always going) "to the uttermost limits and possibilities of love in our behalf and behalf of all." Jesus bore all things, suffered all things, endured all things. He was always humble, He was always rejoicing. Facing the crucifixion, He kept His joy and peace and willed both to His disciples. He never failed or fails anyone. He not only fulfills the Law but brings everything to perfect attainment and to perfect union.

When everything else fails, Jesus and His love have their best opportunity to succeed.

If there seems to be failure in terms of your present degree of union with Him and of love, increase the union and increase the love. If the small doses that you have been giving have not brought the triumph, increase the dose and keep on increasing until love triumphs.

As a Methodist minister in the tobacco growing section of North Carolina put it, "You know if one of these tobacco barns were on fire a few buckets of water would not extinguish the fire but would help some. You also know that enough water would put the fire out.

Likewise we know a little love will not put out a world on fire with hate and fear, but even a little helps. We do know enough love would put out these fires." Enough love, as Emerson put it, "Will make a paradise of this old earth of ours."

If we go with Jesus, enter into ineffable union with Him and join Him in giving His perfect love and light and healing to all, we will enter into perfect marriage with Him and become loving as He is loving, healing as He is healing. Everything of His will be OUTS.

How to increase in union and in love:

1. Open wide to receive Jesus and His love. Jesus and love are longing and knocking to come in. Ask forgiveness for having kept them out. When you really want Jesus and love to come in and take entire charge you are wanting precisely what He and love are longing to do. As the colored brother put it, "Election is this way; Jesus is all the time voting for us and the devil is all the time voting against us and the way we vote carries the election." Jesus and love are all the time seeking to come in. When we choose with Jesus and love we are filled with Him and His love.

2. Choose to give Him and His love to all. As blessed as it is to receive Him and His love, it is still better to give Him and His love. Indeed, you have to give in order to continue to receive. Receiving more than you choose to give makes you like a swamp and swamps do not need more water; they need ditching and draining. The Heavenly love is never like stagnant water; but is always like a springing fountain and a flowing river. An infinity of love is ready to flow out through us. We do not have to furnish the love, we only have to choose for it to outflow. The new commandment to love as we are loved is not so difficult as the old commandment to love God with all of our being and to love our neighbor as ourselves. According to the Law we have to do all the loving: through union with Jesus, the love is given and we only have to pass it on. And by passing it on we become love itself.

3. Pray for Perfect Love. This prayer is so much in the will of God it is always heard and answered. You can have all the love you want is you want it enough to ask for it and to give it.

4. Do your part in removing the hindrances of love. Wherever you have been unloving acknowledge it and ask forgiveness, ask not only the Lord's forgiveness, but also ask the forgiveness of those to whom you have been unloving This brings flood tides of love. If anyone has anything against you go to him in love and seek to remove the hindrances or the stumbling blocks. Love requires that we get everything we can out of the way, that we make it as easy as possible for people to love, and all nigh impossible for them not to love.

5. In every new situation pray to see and to choose the most loving thing. Where evil has come to you choose to meet it with good. If you have been dealt with unlovingly choose to react especially lovingly. When we choose to love and to give His love, His love flows in and enables us to love.

6. In every situation remember what Jesus did in situations far more difficult. Also remember His teaching, if you are to be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect you will have to be loving and merciful as He is loving and merciful. Remember what Jesus did and let Him teach you what to do in every situation and you cannot escape being loving.

No matter what evil you have suffered, real or imaginary, sooner or later you are going to forgive it and you will not be happy until you do. Why delay the happiness? Happy is the man who can forgive quickly. Do not let the sun go down on your foolish­ness.
Our joy and power to help people depends on en­tering into a union with Jesus and perpetually out-flowing in His love, light, and healing.

 
Forward to Friends & Family Forward to Friends & Family

Copyright 2022 Two Listeners, All rights reserved.


God Calling    by Two Listeners

March 10 - Fruit of Joy

These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full.
John 15:11

 
You have to hush the heart and bid all your senses be still before you can be attuned to receive Heaven’s music.

Your five senses are your means of communication with the material world, the links between your real Spirit-Life and the material manifestations around you, but you must sever all connection with them, when you wish to hold Spirit-communication. They will hinder, not help.

See the good in everybody. Love the good in them. See your unworthiness compared with their worth. Love, laugh, make the world, your little world, happy.

As the ripples caused by a flung stone stir the surface of a whole pond, so your joy-making shall spread in ever-widening circles, beyond all your knowledge, all anticipation. Joy in Me. Such Joy is eternal.

Centuries after, it is still bearing Joy’s precious fruit.

Now unto Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever.    Amen.    Jude 1:24-25

Copyright 2022 Two Listeners, All rights reserved.