I wish I could have been on the Week 9 webinar but the lateness of the hour meant I could not find WiFi anywhere in the hidden corner of Tenerife where we were staying. It was the first webinar I had missed and it showed me how difficult it is to try and catch up. Anyway I am getting there, running to keep up was hard enough and running even faster to catch up seemed too big an ask but I just did the week 10 assessment and new encouragement has come in like a flood.

I have just slipped into the top bracket that says I am on my way, and I genuinely feel that I am. This whole exercise has been such an uplifting experience for me. For a  number of years I have felt that my life was coming to an end…I know that 60 is quite young in today’s world but with a few health issues…some of which I now believe are the figment of the combined imaginations of myself and the doctor, and a few difficult times at work and in the church too, (sorry to disappoint anyone who thinks church people are all sweetness and light but pastors are fair game in hunting season) I was just getting more and more convinced that it was almost time to go home.

I was hauling myself to my feet slowly, things were gradually picking up, work got better, the hunters left the church and God sent some sheep to replace them: and actually it’s a pretty happy family now, so things were picking up, slowly, one step at a time. But in the last 9 weeks they have taken off, the Master Key, the MMA has made so much that was already there in my mind, but hazy and a little dull leap out into the brilliant sunlight. Just like in Og Mandino’s Scroll 1.. I awake each morning with a vitality I have never known before. My vigour increases, my enthusiasm rises, my desire to meet the world overcomes every fear…Fear has been replaced with renewed faith…I have clarity of vision… I have massive goals, I am totally convinced that they are not just possible but that they must be attained,  and not as a chore or a task that I need to do to fill my time or to build myself a monument but as a service to the community, and to all the people who are waiting for the benefits our business will bring them. We are going to help hundreds of families to build viable, enjoyable businesses and to achieve goals they can only dream of right now… but on the way we are going to help those people develop so they are not phased by the money when it comes rolling in like the tide, they will know who the source is so they don’t worship the money but will use it to enjoy the abundant life they were designed for and to bring blessings to all around them.

I have learned from Scroll 2 that most of all I must love myself and when I do I will zealously guard my body, my mind, my soul and my heart but although I am to love myself it is because unless I do I cannot really love anyone else.

Solomon the wise king tells us to “Guard your Heart above all else for it determines the course of your life.” Proverbs 4:23.  I always knew in part what he was trying to tell me but now I know for sure…now I understand what Paul meant when he said “Don’t you realize that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who lives in you and was given to you by God? You do not belong to yourself,” 1 Corinthians 6:19  Well who do I belong to then?  I belong to God but through Him I belong to all humanity…we are all linked and we are all supposed to love and to serve one another, thats why Paul also wrote  Don’t you realize that all of you together are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God lives in you? 1 Corinthians 3:16.

There is no escaping the scripture, the words of Solomon, and Jesus and Paul can either be trusted completely or not at all. Jesus said the kingdom of God is within you…he also said you cannot see the Kingdom of God unless you are born again,  Og says in scroll 2 “I look on all things with love and I am born again”. God is love and as he expands the capacity of our heart to know and love him and our neighbour as ourselves the kingdom of God is manifest in the earth. Jesus told us to pray, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”. He also said forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors…if you do not forgive , your heavenly Father cannot forgive you. The law of Forgiveness named explicitly as an unavoidable condition for the abundant life.

There are no workarounds, no short cuts, no ignoring the words of the Master or His eternal work at the cross, the crossroads of time. Love and forgiveness are the only way to truth. If you are looking for prosperity it is hidden in plain sight… Jesus himself told us how to find it…Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things will be added to you.

“Successful men make it their business to hold ideals of the conditions which they wish to realize. They constantly hold in mind the next step necessary to the ideal for which they are striving. Thoughts are the materials with which they build and the imagination is their mental workshop. Mind is the ever moving force with which they secure the persons and circumstances necessary to build their success structure and imagination is the matrix in which all great things are fashioned.” Charles Haanel  The Master Key 8:24

An interesting word ‘matrix’…I still haven’t really got my head round the films.

Nearly 30 years ago my wife, who had been barren 5 years after surgery, chemo and radiotherapy had just about won the battle with Hodgkin’s Disease. Miraculously she gave birth to our first daughter.  We had been told by all the experts that a child would never be possible and after 5 years we had come to believe it. Then one evening in a Wigan Hotel an after dinner speaker turned our beliefs and  our lives upside down, or maybe I should say the right way up. He was a carpet salesman from the other end of the country who knew nothing whatsoever about me or about Steppy’s medical history when he told us quite plainly that she would have a baby within a year.  I did not see anything funny about teasing a young woman on an issue that had caused her so much emotional distress and I was not very happy with the man. He stood his ground, was bold as a lion and insisted that ‘his Jesus’ could do anything and impossible was not a word in his vocabulary.

Well, John Bryant, as was his name, turned out to be correct, Deborah was born just nine months and a few days later by a caesarian section in Hope Hospital, Salford. A further 7 children came forth from that barren womb over the years but the reason for me telling the story here concerns the word matrix. Before Deborah was born we were convinced, mainly because of various prophecies that had been given to us, that she would be a boy. One such prophesy went along the lines of, “the man child that opens the matrix shall be called holy unto the Lord”

So Steppy really struggled and was convinced that they had mixed the babies up in the hospital. It was not that she was ungrateful but that she was so convinced it was to be a boy who we would dedicate to serve God. Then God actually spoke to me, which I found hard to believe back then but find easy to understand these days.

He said the promise was the man child that opens the matrix shall be called holy  to me. I said, Yes Lord but Deborah, for I had named her without even consulting Steppy, isn’t a man child. And the Lord said quite clearly, like another man speaking to his friend, no and she hasn’t opened the matrix either, the next one will and you will name him Joshua. I had never heard of the matrix, it was the word used for the womb in the King James Version of the Bible, written back in 1611. Pardon my ignorance. 18 months later Joshua was born, and despite all the protests of the doctors one of them was willing to go against the hospital policy and let her try for a normal birth.

The matrix is the secret place where life takes shape from a tiny seed. A place where what seems impossible comes into manifestation. Even where there have been no problems, behold the miracle of a human being coming into the world. A vehicle fashioned to carry an eternal spiritual being around for his sojourn on the earth. To think that the successful man, according to Haanel, builds his success structure with mere thoughts in the mental workshop which is the imagination, thoughts combined with faith and almost anything is possible for him. Think then of all the vast universe, the little blue plant less than a pinprick in its midst, the vast oceans and the mighty mountains on that little pinprick a home for the most wonderful of all creations, the man made in God’s image.

How can I be so sure…could it not have all been spontaneous…green slime and 460 million years and who can tell what might happen? What do you take me for? Only a fool would say in his heart there is no God.  All of this had to be conceived in a mental workshop with thoughts as building blocks and faith as mortar. Only God could do this and then give His man the ability to use the very same tools in his attempt to rule in the earth, have dominion over it, to tend and keep it according to the maker’s instructions.

It has taken me longer than in previous weeks just to sit down to write this post. I have been greatly moved and have seen new light. My understanding is being opened more and more and it is glorious.

As I am thinking about the restoration of the building where we meet as a church and sometimes catch myself wondering how will it be possible, I am encouraged to know that I don’t have to know. It is enough to know that God knows. And God has shown me that my request is nothing that He has not heard and answered many times before but He has graciously taken me back to the first time.

In part 7 of the Master key 2. Haanel says “Make the pattern clear and make it beautiful; do not be afraid, make it grand; remember that no limitation can be placed upon you by any one but yourself; you are not limited as to cost or material; draw on the infinite for your supply, construct it in your imagination; it will have to be THERE before it will ever appear anywhere else. 3. Make the image clear and clean cut, hold it firmly in the mind and you will gradually and constantly bring the image nearer to you. You can be what you will to be.

Moses was taken up in the Spirit when he went on the mountain with God. He came down with Ten Commandments written on Stone Tablets but also with a pattern in his mind to build a dwelling place for God that the Israelites would be able to move with them as they travelled. When God moved they picked up the tabernacle, a complicated operation fully describes by Moses, and each person had their part to play as the whole community of several million people moved with Him, following His presence signified by a pillar of fire by night and a pillar of cloud by day.

I had always thought that Moses had seen an actual tabernacle in Heaven and the one he made in the wilderness was copy of it. I am not inclined to believe that it was such a mental image in the mind of Moses as Haanel describes: beautiful and grand, without limitation as to cost or material. You can read how a bunch of refugees wandering around the wilderness came up with enough wood and linen,  silver and gold and every other thing needed to manifest the vision and even how people were taught skills beyond human capability to put it all together in the book of Exodus.

So if Moses saw it so clearly in his imagination and the clarity of it brought about its perfect physical manifestation it must be the pattern given to us by God through scripture to manifest the calling on our lives.  The Psalmist says if we delight in Him He will give us the desires of our hearts and I have always understood, mentally and experientially that meant He put the desire there in the first place.

The apostle John in his 1st Epistle wrote “…we are confident that He hears us whenever we ask for anything that pleases Him. 15 And since we know He hears us when we make our requests, we also know that he will give us what we ask for.

There are two things to note here and Haanel points both of them out. 1. Our will must be in line with the divine will…and…2. it does not happen by magic…generous people brought the materials that God had provided and willing people did the work as God gave the ability.

So Moses had the idea by inspiration, He visualised it until he could see it in every detail and like John says he already had it at that point though it was not yet visible to the physical eyes. Maybe  people close to Moses thought he had flipped as he described it to them in great detail but he was not fazed.

Faith was the substance of the very thing for which Moses held a sure and certain hope.

Since every single item in the tabernacle has its purpose and each tells a prophetic story of the coming Christ it seems even God Himself is practicing what He taught Moses and is teaching us. He planned from the beginning that all those who believed in the redeeming power of the Only Begotten Son of God would themselves become the tabernacle of God on earth. Some people once said to Jesus “We want to perform God’s works, too. What should we do?”  His reply is quite surprising. there was no difficult task to perform, no hoops to jump through.  Jesus simply told them, “This is the only work God wants from you: Believe in the one he has sent.” John 6:28

The pin fell out of my watch yesterday and the watch dropped off my wrist. I saved the watch but I couldn’t find the pin and it turns out that it’s not so easy to replace. I will persevere though,  I love that watch because it has significant meaning for me. It’s a Raymond Weil bought in Cyprus in the year I turned 50 but more importantly it marks the time my oldest daughter went over there to work and the first of our 8 children left the nest.

Why bother with a story like that in week 6 of the Master Key experience? Well I think it is pretty significant actually and I have long since stopped putting these little things down to coincidence. This is the week we talked about not running our lives by the clock but by the compass. The clock is relentless and unforgiving and time is definitely an important measure but have you ever noticed how work has a habit of expending into and then beyond the time allocated to it. Have you noticed that the time we think a task will take is almost always an underestimation. Well in this last few weeks, using the methods taught in the course I have been getting so much more done and still have had time to sit and think.

Someone said, “Think? Whats all that about? I don’t have time to just sit and do nothing, thinking,  dreaming more like.”

And believe me, I do know where he was coming from, life can be such a rush,

Remember the words of Cliffs old song; Time Goes By                                                                                                Sitting on a log, watch the world go by                                                                                                         Fat old frog thinking: My oh my                                                                                                                 Funny thing that human race                                                                                                                        Rush here, rush there, get no place

I think the fat old frog was probably right… we all have this amazing capacity to sit quietly and receive from out of our own memories, experiences, previously acquired knowledge, new combinations, new uses and what seems like good ideas. But there is a limit to that isn’t there. It has to be in there to be able to come out. We can go beyond that, we can read new material, everything is written down somewhere, the second wisest man who ever lived says there is nothing new under the sun. But I will say if a poor uneducated man were to try and read some great piece of literature from one of the great books for instance he would not gain anything from it. His capacity to lean is governed by what he already knows. His capacity to learn is limited.

But if we can sit quietly, and reverently, David the King put it this way, “Be still, and know that I am God”. Things from outside of our current clan be revealed to us. We pick up most of what we know through our 5 senses, sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell, and we would not want to live without them would we, though many do and perhaps more fully than those of us who have it all. But there is another sense in which we can commune with God, in this place we know things that we have not learned. They are revealed to us by His grace. I have known this for many years but my ‘use’ of it has been sporadic because I have only seen it as a mystery. I was happy with mystery but not complete. When Jesus said “Out of your belly shall flow rivers of living water” I thought I knew what he meant. When He said “I AM the light of the world” and later “You are the light of the world”, and, “Let your light shine before men”. I just thought He meant live a good life as far as you can and set a good example.

What I missed is when He said “I and My Father are one” and “if I go to my Father I will come and we will make our home in you” that he was saying all the fullness of heaven will be available to the earth though you. Not just through me.  Jesus had the Spirit without measure. It seems that I have it in the measure that I can “Believe in my heart”. What I have learned is the spirit lives and connects me to God… and through God to all people and in fact to all of creation because God is everywhere present, all knowing and all powerful.

But what does it mean… “Believe in your heart”?  It was always a mystery…but now I know that the place I feel stress, the place I feel fear, the place I feel elation, somewhere right in the middle of my body…”out of your belly shall flow” there is an organ no-one seems to want to talk about. It is not mentioned in my version of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, Its not the 24 volume World of Science I own. I looked at anatomy web sights that seem to be very authoritative and I searched and was told ‘no results were found’. The Solar Plexus seems to be a bit of a mystery and yet Charles Haanel wrote about it in the Master Key over 100 years ago in 1912. I have not the time or the knowledge as yet to explainMy Solar Plexus but now I know I have one and doors are opening.

The time is important…but I know I am an eternal being …so now I am moving according to the compass and not the clock. No more Rush here rush there get no place… I am definitely moving in the right direction, a direction that I have determined for myself.

Reading the second scroll from Og Mandino’s The Greatest Salesman in The World  three times every day I am repeatedly telling myself: my heart, my Inner Man. “I will Greet each day with love in my heart.”

God is Love. Can I also say in agreement with Jesus. “I and my Father are one”?