Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: Gods Plan Of Salvation (1964)

About This Lecture

This 1964 lecture lays out what Neville calls God's plan of salvation: the great scheme by which the infinite God willingly contracted into human form, becoming each one of us, so that we might in turn awaken and rise as God. Salvation, in his reading, is not a transaction in which an external Jesus pays a debt to satisfy an angry deity, but the unfolding of a single divine purpose hidden in the structure of Scripture and ultimately experienced from within. The plan, he stresses, was conceived by God for God's own sake, and we are not its beneficiaries from a distance but its very substance.

Neville treats the central Christian story as a pattern that must be lived rather than merely believed. The birth, the crucifixion, the resurrection, and the ascension are described not as past events to admire but as stages of a mystical experience that visits the individual when the inner being stirs to life. He anchors this in the imagery of being born from above and in Paul's labor that Christ be formed in his hearers, so that the gospel reads as the blueprint of the listener's own future awakening. What was once heard as history becomes, on this telling, prophecy of an interior event still to come for each person.

Practically, the lecture insists that the same creative power accomplishing salvation is the imagination we use every day. Because God became us, our assumptions and inner states are the very workshop of redemption. By persisting in the feeling of the wish fulfilled and by trusting the divine self within, we are not merely improving our circumstances; we are cooperating with the plan that is already carrying us toward awakening. Neville thereby fuses his familiar law of assumption with his mystical promise: the disciplined inner act that manifests a desire and the great rebirth that reveals one's identity as God are powered by the same source.

He is careful to make the plan certain and universal. No one is finally excluded, no failure is permanent, and everyone will eventually undergo the promised rebirth, because the outcome was guaranteed the moment God entered humanity. This gives the teaching its characteristic tone of reassurance. The struggles of a lifetime are not evidence that one has fallen outside grace; they are the friction of a process that cannot ultimately fail, since its author is the only actor and its actor is the only audience.

The result is a vision of salvation that is at once intensely personal and cosmic. It frames ordinary life, with all its desires and disappointments, as the deliberate journey of God awakening to Himself in man. For the listener the takeaway is twofold. Use imagination now, lovingly and deliberately, to shape a life worth living, and at the same time hold quiet confidence that the deeper awakening Scripture promises is your assured destiny, the appointed climax of a plan you did not devise but in which you are the central figure.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in John 3, Galatians 4:19, 1 Corinthians 15, Philippians 2.