Neville Goddard Audio Lecture: Repentence, A Gift of God (1972)

About This Lecture

This 1972 lecture recovers the true meaning of repentance from its moralistic associations. The Greek word, Neville explains, is metanoia, a radical change of mind or attitude, a turning that goes right down to the root of one's thinking. To repent is not to feel sorry, to grovel, or to dwell on past failures; it is to adopt a wholly new state of consciousness. Read this way, the first command of the gospel, repent for the kingdom is at hand, becomes not a call to remorse but an invitation to change one's inner state immediately, and Neville frames this reappraisal as the practical heart of prayer.

Neville holds together a paradox the title names: repentance is at once man's responsibility and a gift of God. It is your responsibility because no one can change your attitude for you; you must deliberately reappraise your situation and assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled in place of the state that troubles you. Yet it is a gift because the very power by which you imagine and change is God in you, granted freely so that anyone, at any moment, regardless of past or circumstance, may begin again. The capacity to repent is therefore grace, while the act of repenting is duty, and the two meet in every conscious change of mind.

The lecture is among his more practical, often described as a how-to-really-pray talk. Neville teaches that since all states of consciousness externalize themselves, a genuine change of attitude must in time produce a corresponding change in the outer world; nothing remains as it was once the inner state behind it has truly shifted. He urges his hearers to take any situation they dislike and mentally revise it, repenting of the inner state that produced the unwanted scene and persisting in the new and better one. This is the same disciplined imagining he teaches throughout, here cast in the language of repentance: to mentally rewrite the events of the day so that they conform to the world one desires rather than the world the senses delivered.

The deepest note of the lecture is its mercy. Because repentance is always available and costs nothing but the willingness to change one's mind, no condition is final and no failure is the last word. The listener is free at every moment to assume a better state and let it harden into fact, which is why Neville calls it the perpetual gift of a second chance. To apply the lecture is to make repentance a daily habit: notice the state you have been occupying, refuse to justify or relive the scenes you do not want, deliberately adopt the feeling of the fulfilled wish, and persist in that new attitude. Change the consciousness and the world must follow, for repentance, rightly understood, is simply the freedom God has built into every person to turn and become new.

Key Scripture

Neville grounds this lecture in Matthew 4:17, Mark 1:15, Ezekiel 18:30.