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***The following is an unedited auto-generated transcript and may contain serious errors and speakers other than Dallas Willard. It is included here to assist your study. Please check the original audio for an authentic record of the event.

Dallas: In general, I have a book of Matthew for you, but if you take all the building outlines and give you something to argue with, revise, and make something better out of it, but I want you to get a sense of the whole book. I hope that you are reading this book day by day and week by week, obviously once a week, that you read over the whole book of Matthew. And as you do, you should begin to get a sense of the articulation of the book in different sectors, what is happening in one part of it, and how it changes in another part of it. This is important to understand, the ministry of Jesus, because unless you get the impression of how it’s progressed from time to time, like the time when it’s been raised up to the setting, to existence, setting, or going to go in today, you begin to study how people began to receive opposition, and how people were getting to host, and they wanted people to kill you. And that’s a very different kind of work when you live as a sort of outlaw than when you hear about the toast of the town. Now, what Jesus had sometimes, Jesus was thought of as the greatest thing that ever happened, and then they began to silence that really ought to get rid of the man because he was very dangerous. And as you see the different teachings at different times, you get a sense, more of a sense, of what Jesus actually thought.

Now, you know, this is the issue we face as a study. What did Jesus actually teach? What did he teach? The point of studying the New Testament is to understand. We are not to simply slide into the presupposition that, well, what we believe and what we are doing is what he taught. When in fact you begin to look at what he taught, you begin to see that there may be quite a difference between what he taught and what we are doing and what we are believing as, quote, Christians today. So the object of studying is finding an outline. And if you use an outline to do this, you stand a much better chance to pick up the track of what it was to say.

Now, the point of view that I’ll be giving you this outline is not so you will know the truth about it all. I’ve put down at the bottom how to use this outline. Notice, try to work out one that reflects the contents of the Gospel of Matthew. But if you could take this outline as a kind of challenge, and you could say, well, this looks so hot, I’m going to do one better. And if you do that, you will really learn something. You take the materials of that Gospel and you put them in your mind and you turn them around and you make them your own until you get an understanding. And you put that down on paper and it’s better than this.

I mean, there are a lot of things about this outline which ought to give you the beginning. For example, if you will look, the headings break on the chapters. There are all the headings break on the chapters. Now that will make you think there’s something wrong with this outline. It’s really helpful to suppose that the contents of the Gospel break on the ends of the chapters. You know, the chapter divisions weren’t put in just a few centuries ago, in the verse that they didn’t. I mean, Jesus, you know, he didn’t say verse 13. He didn’t say that in the verse 13. And that was as is, only two centuries ago. Now, it’s not that I think that this outline is so bad. I’m just trying to give you an impression of how you might use that outline for your own purposes in coming to grips with the contents of the Gospel of man.

So I urge you to do this. Take this outline. And you’ve been reading the whole Gospel now some ways. As you continue to read it, see if you would rather outline the contents of the Gospel in some other way. And then ask for you to make your main division of the Gospel. Then, as I say here, take each main heading and bring it down comically into subdivisions that are manually as possible. That is, like the one here, I have a set of heading four. The work is too great for view to so long, so helpers are selected and put. Then, who is it? Now, you might think, right, and then you say, well, I’ll take chapter 10 and I’ll break that down as carefully as possible and head it to something and I’ve got content of what it says. Down in all parts. The object of outlining is to give parts to the thing. Right?

The Gospel is actually very complex in division. Very complex. The way you understand complex things is you break them into their parts and you try putting them together in this way and putting them together in that way. Like Rick here can take a very complex electronic device and take it apart and he learns something when he does that. Isn’t it new? He learns something about that whole thing. And he’s at such an advanced level that he can probably take anything apart that he seems to have worked back together. He worked better than he did when he took his time. I hope I came out of the factory.

Understanding is a matter of taking complexes and breaking them into parts. This is sort of a given verb. When you take a particular verb and you can break it down into parts and get a lot of depth and understanding. It’s interesting when I hear this part of something and I hear this part and I hear this part. It’s like saying blessed are the poor in the spirit or blessed are the poor. Well, there’s the kingdom of heaven. Break that down into its parts. Blessed are the poor in the spirit. You put those together. Take the Lord’s prayer and break that down into parts. Think about each element, our thoughts, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. That’s the way you can understand it.

So this is why I want you to take this and make now a project of understanding the Gospel of Matthew by using this outline as a kind of course to argue against as you devise your own outline of the Gospel of Matthew. I wonder if I could at this time just ask, I don’t want to embarrass anyone, but do you feel like this is something you can undertake, you’re willing to do? You’d be willing to do. I’m going to take a pencil and paper or a typewriter and paper or whatever and do it. Can you do that? Let’s see how many outlines we can come up with now in the next couple of weeks and compare them as a discussion. And it will probably be a good idea to devote one of our Friday evenings now to dealing with these outlines that people have come up with.

I’m not going to ask you to sign a pledge of commitment that you’re going to devise an outline, but I really hope you will. We’re meeting on Friday evenings at seven thirty over in social hall the rest of this month and the first couple of weeks in September when we come to the end for the course of study. And if you want to come, you’re certainly welcome. We don’t charge any more for that than if you just come to the summer school. But if you come, there will be an occasion to discuss and try to get questions that you have originated as you’ve studied and statements that you’ve originated, understanding that you’ve come to have a chance to lay that out and share it with one another. So I hope you will be looking forward to that.

All right, now to the lessons for today. We’ll turn in the Gospel of Matthew to the eleventh chapter. The eleventh chapter of Matthew. Everyone has an outline, I hope, of the lesson, a source of opposition to the word and power of the kingdom of God.

This lesson opens with a very poignant occasion. An old friend that Jesus has been thrown into jail and his ministry has been effectively ended because he reproached Herod for insects. Herod had taken his brother Philip’s wife, and that was an incestuous relationship, and John the Baptist reproached him for it. Consequently, he was given a lot of harassment. Eventually, as you see in the fourteenth chapter of Matthew, he was thrown into jail and eventually he was beheaded because of the animosity of this woman. That took Herod’s marriage. And sometimes before this, John the Baptist’s ministry had been going downhill and he himself had said that in an earlier time when he spoke with Jesus, he must decrease that he may increase. John the Baptist’s ministry was the ministry of introduction. And everybody except in political campaigns and places of that sort, people who introduced say a few words to get out of the way. John the Baptist’s mission was to make the waypoint for the Messiah, Jesus to come. When he had come, the John the Baptist was set aside. His work was great, but it was not one which was to go on at the same time as Jesus, as many of John’s disciples became Jesus’s disciples.

Now, John had begun to have the doubts in the eleventh chapter of Matthew. After Jesus had sent his disciples out and he departed to teach and preach, John heard in prison the second verse of the works of Christ and he sent two of his disciples and his question was, aren’t thou he that should come or do we look for another?

Now, you may think this is strange because after all, John was the one, was he not, who said we hope that God will take away the sins of the world. He was the one who initially identified Jesus as the Messiah. Jesus came to be baptized. He said, oh, I have need to be baptized with thee because he knew who he was. He recognized him. And in the background, there of course, lay long days and hours of fellowship between Jesus and John. John did not recognize Jesus because he saw a certain smile on his lips as he walked by or something like that. They are hard as the Messiah. He recognized him because he knew him intimately. They were kings. Do you know them? They were cousins, distant cousins. And they had in very great light because many days in their time, they grew in the idealism of young men as they grew together. John was a little bit older as his ministry began. And there was a time when he was a part of Jesus. It was very similar. They were renewed in some sense. And John recognized him in the spirit of Jesus. He recognized him in him. The one who was coming to defeat sin, made all life clear. Cleared his soul to be all the destruction and corruption that had come into him.

But now he says, are you ready to come on? And it’s good to stop over there just a minute because you see, we have to understand what hard times it does to our faith. And we mustn’t be upset about questions which come very often when time changes. Very often our difficult times are made more difficult because we get into statements of self-determination, self-activation, condemnation. Because we have now. John was in prison. And the truth of the matter is, John had not fully understood what the signs were. And the question he’s really asking here is, if you were to decide why aren’t you taking over the nation of Israel, why aren’t you leaving? Why aren’t you doing what the Messiah is supposed to do?

Jesus gives you a beautiful answer. The world will show John again those things which you do here at the sea, the blind and the seizure of sight, the lame walk, the dead fear, the dead are raised up, the poor have the gospel preached to them, and blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended. That’s the answer. The Messiah was to bear all these things, to clear all of these things. And what he’s doing here is he’s gently reminding John of those portions of the Old Testament which describe the Messiah in these terms. And you remember the 61st chapter of Isaiah, which is quoted by Jesus in the opening of his ministry, Luke the 4th chapter, the Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel of the poor, sent me to heal the broken heart, to preach the deliverance of the captives, to recover the sight of the blind, to set a liver to them that are bruised, and to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.

You see, Jesus in his answer to John is just kind of paraphrasing me now. So he’s just gently reminding his cousin here, in his time of distress and doubt which he’s going through, yes, I am Messiah. He’s saying to him gently, he’s saying, John, remember what Messiah is supposed to do. Messiah is not supposed to get up on something like a horse and ride roughshod all over the people who don’t like you, you know. That is what Messiah is going through. He’s just gently reminding. It’s a beautiful way that he does what you think to do anything justice. Why, he doesn’t rail. John, he doesn’t say, what in the world is the matter with him? Why, I thought he knew who I was. He doesn’t get on you like that. A loving one, yes. I don’t know. Look at what I’m doing.

Then, just leasing into reflection about the ministry which he has had and the ministry that John has had. And this is, I really love this passage because there’s so much beauty and tenderness in it. It’s almost as if Jesus is kind of talking his eyes and mutes over this in verses which probably is one that you go out in the wilderness to see. So all these people, John, have been heard by him. And John didn’t go into the cities. He went out in deserted places. Out where they hold loom entities now, that sort of thing. He really went out on the desert and if people wanted to hear him, they had to come to him. He didn’t move around in places like the river. Why don’t you go out on the desert? You go out to see the wind blowing the grass. Is that what you want to hear? They will. And so he goes out and interprets what John is saying as well.

And this leads into what we want to come in today. Jesus is really coming out with a kind of foolish response. And an evil response of people to the ministry of God. John Boggess was a very different kind of man than Jesus was. He was clean. John Boggess ran around dressed in horse hair. He didn’t dress at all. It ain’t only natural food, believe me. And not the kind you can buy at the railroad and school store. The kind you can pull out trees and all the branches and things like that. And he ate it that way. He was a stranger. A lot of it he was a master. Never touched liquor the same day. And had hair probably longer than my son. John Boggess was a really extreme, odd person. I mean we would think he was completely out. We might not even let him in the building. And he was just really being knocked up here. I mean there are a lot of churches which churches would lay in the building. They would meet him at the door and say, Hey little fellow, what do you mean by a church dressed like that or acting in this way or without shaving or whatever?

And Jesus was different. Jesus was a very gentle man. Very pleasing. Lovely to be in his company. He knew how to joke. And he was pleasant with all of it. He was lovely in his appearance. People were attracted to him. In addition to the fact that he would empower God. And his words and deeds were tremendous in their effect. Jesus was very good.

Now Jesus says to the people, What in the world do you want? John Boggess came to you here in the 18th verse. John came neither eating nor drinking. Now that didn’t mean he never ate anything. Obviously he did eat. It means that this was not his way to become a feasting, drinking soul. And you say what? This man is a devil. This man is a devil. He’s a snack. He’s out of his mind. Why? Because of his behavior. Okay? Now comes Jesus. Eating and drinking. And you say, this man is a devil. A lying devil.

Now Jesus is coming at what we want to dwell on today. Which is the opposition to the truth of the kingdom. He’s coming at the fact that the world and the human heart being what it is. The truth is going to have a very hard time no matter how it presents itself. And he said very rightly, wisdom is justified in your children. And there are other, I think, better translations of that in effect. But you people are so smart as you can justify any contradiction you utter. The fact that you don’t lack anything in the way of truth. You all find an objection to it even if those contradict one another. You are so smart that you’ll be able to figure out some of my best buying into this. Wisdom is justified by her children. And as people who have this air of smartness about them, being able to condemn everything, all will be able to figure out a way of justifying it. They’ll be able to figure out a way of showing that they’re right. They’ll be able to explain why the person who does drink is wrong and also the person who doesn’t drink is wrong. Who does eat is wrong, the person who doesn’t drink is wrong. There’s no middle ground there. But they’ll be able to figure out some way of explaining that.

Now that he begins to upgrade the cities where his most mighty works were done, these were cities which would arrive around his home ground. And probably if you had to name one city which was Jesus’ hometown, it was Capernaum. It was not Nazareth. Nazareth actually is an area. Capernaum is closest to being what Jesus’ hometown is. He condemns all of these and says, Look, if these ungodly places elsewhere had had these mighty works done, they would have depended on that. What’s the problem? The problem is the people who live there have leaders who are too smart. They’ve blocked the way of the truth. If you said elsewhere, You shut up the kingdom of God against me. You won’t go in and you won’t let others in. He was speaking to the leaders and the teachings which they gave to the people.

Now, this gives Jesus an occasion, of course, to operate in these cities, but strangely it then turns into thankfulness because of the 25th verse. He says, I thank you, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hid these things. The things that Jesus taught, the mystery of the kingdom of God, is hidden from the wise and the prudent. Now, if you want to get the sense of those, you must always be met as one of those who think they are one thing, one of those who think they are one thing. Nothing wrong with wisdom. It’s true. The wisdom that hurts is that that isn’t wisdom. It’s like Mark Lane stated. It isn’t what we don’t know that hurts us. It’s what we know that ain’t so that hurts us. It’s all this wisdom that ain’t wisdom that hurts us. It’s all this prudence that isn’t prudence that hurts us. And the world system is built upon wisdom which is not wisdom. Just look at the condition of people who follow the leaders of mankind. Just look at them. And find if they’re happy, healthy, wise, whatever. Just look at them. Look at them as they go to war and look at them as they rock in peace. Look at them as they live and as they die and ask yourself, are the people who leave these wise? And the answer will be no. The people who leave these, do they know what they’re doing? No. Jesus’ word, they are blind leaders of the blind. Now they don’t know that. And they’re very sincere often. That doesn’t change the fact. They can be sincerely wrong as they are.

So Jesus is thankful because he now realizes that the success of his work depends upon the cooperation of the spotter. And where those understand, he knows that this is the work of God. That’s because thou hast hid these things from the wise and has revealed them unto babies. It’s an open secret. The kingdom of God is an open secret. Babies have it until they learn otherwise from their elders. We’re going to have one lesson on children in the kingdom of heaven, possibly two weeks from today. And we’ll get further into what Jesus thought about children and what he thought about children in the kingdom of heaven. But here he says he revealed them to babies. Now you ought to think about that. Babies understand the kingdom of heaven. Babies understand. Even so far, because it is good. In other words, this is because it is the right way to do it. It’s a good thing. God understands. God knows that this is the good way to do it. Because the end result of working in these terms is much better than trying to base it upon the wisdom of this work. Letting all of the people have all of this wisdom and prudence lead the way.

Now then he moves on then into his invitation, and notice to whom this invitation is. Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. I lead to a lot of people out there. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly apart, and you shall find rest unto your souls. Because my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

Now what does that contrast it to? What does his yoke contrast it to? Well, if you look at the 23rd chapter of Matthew, you’ll find it looks contrasted to. Jesus spoke to the multitude, saying, The scribes and Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. All therefore whatsoever they bid you, observe, that observe and do. But do ye not after their works, for they say, and they do not. Now notice, for they bind heavy burdens, and grieve you to be born, and lay them upon men’s shoulders, but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers. They do all of their works to be seen.

Now then remember, my yoke is easy, my burden is light. Remember that the mystery of the kingdom is something that babies don’t understand. Babies. Very well the burdens come, they come from men using other men, women using other women, men and women using one another, parents using children, and children trying to use parents. That’s what a burden is. His yoke is easy, and his burden is light. And as John says in his first letter, his commandments are not grievous.

And that’s why there is in the way of Christ a yoke. Because in the way of Christ all of the burdens of sin have been drawn. And the natural joy of the goodness of creation flows out of the heart. And you don’t have to pump it into you with drugs or pooped up services or gathering of some sort or another because there is a simple natural joy of life which babies have. Babies have joy, isn’t this that? They have joy. They have their little tempest too. And it’s possible to beat the joy out of them in one way or another. I’m not talking about spanking them, I’m talking about arranging life and the circumstances of life in such a way that they become these dreary, sad little children. It’s possible to do that, but naturally they have joy. The yoke is easy, this burden is light.

I’ve seen that call forth from some opposition from the world system because we’ve just seen the lion’s throne happen. Now we have one system which comes to you with these great, back-breaking burdens. We have another system which comes to you with an easy yoke. What does the yoke do, by the way? The yoke itself isn’t the burden. A yoke is a way of binding two animals together, isn’t it? You bind two animals together. So they work together. A yoke is like you put it on two rocks and two courses or something like that. We’ve all seen Westerns and we’ve seen how they get together. This is a yoke also used to tear it up, or an individual would tear it up. Yes, it can be used then, that’s right. You can fix something around their neck or you can do it for a human. Yes, that’s very good. Bob’s illustration here takes that, the case of people carrying a yoke across their shoulders with a water bucket on one side and a water bucket on the other, and you can carry a wire. There are all sorts of interesting things in the yoke, but the yoke here is a yoke of union, where you tie one person to another. You see, it isn’t our yoke, it’s his yoke. It’s something we share. And we take that yoke and it’s easy and burdensome.

So we have those two opposing systems. Now, it’s no wonder you get a clench out of that. And I’ve outlined here on your lesson sheet for today the last three main points, those two, three, and four, and three main sources of opposition to the truth of the kingdom of God. And I really wish I had time to go into all of these and I just don’t. Maybe I can get into some points of each of them. At least I won’t take off with those two, a first main source of opposition, which I call the world.

Now, you may remember from past lessons that I’ve always defined the world where you organize flesh. Flesh is the natural abilities of human beings. The law is an encapsulation of the flesh. The law always tells us what to do with our natural ability. We’ll see cases of hearing. Jesus ran and slapped that into the world when he hit the barricade and hit on. That was the world that he ran into. Now, you see, the world may be religious. Religious flesh, organized, is just a part of the world. We mustn’t think that religion and the world are two different things. We like to do that when we flatter ourselves with thinking, well, we have religion and we’re not of the world and so, so, so. But the truth of the matter is that if you look at religion, you see that it runs upon the principles of the world by art. That is, it depends by far solely on organized human abilities. That’s why you have in religion so much string pulling and button pushing.

I’ve got a beautiful illustration here that I want to share with you this morning of the flesh in religion. You see, this sheet, I’m trying to get it copied, but I waited too late yesterday and I didn’t get it copied, so I’ll get it copied. Why a big pink envelope? Why a big pink envelope? The major key in promoting systematic giving in the churches is an envelope that persuades people to use it. We can improve this persuader. A Hallmark farm salesman, whom I once met on a plane, summed it up sufficiently. Small envelopes in your church inspire a psychological illusion to get small envelopes. The master testified using the giant pink envelope brought in $5,000 more for us. Now you know, $5,000 is a lot of money. Currency and family size checks can be inserted without closing. And you can write your name legibly. Motivation researchers have found that mail-back cards and magazines are returned in much higher percentage if colored pink. Why? No one seems to know, but the fact remains they do. Since people subconsciously or otherwise respond to pink, why not use it? It’s not anymore.

Each individual receives, there’s a system, each individual under the system receives a giant pastel envelope for his use each month. Each Sunday’s envelope is a different color. And they are mailed out to them. They don’t even have to come to church with this thing. They’re mailed these out to them, and they see this huge pastel envelope, and they say, immediately, I must write a check. And they put that in and they can mail it back. Churches using this system for the first time can generally expect an increase of seven to twenty percent. This is significant gain for so small an effort. It is designed to encourage members who never give or who give only occasionally to give regularly and to give generously. And what I say about pulling strings and pushing buttons, I’ve never seen a better illustration of the flesh than this.

Most people when they hear the word flesh, they think one of two things, either sex or gluttony. And that’s flesh for this. But the flesh that is spoken of in the New Testament consists precisely of just these natural, the way we’re naturally wired up to respond. And this is a beautiful illustration of flesh.

Now this doesn’t have a thing to do with your spiritual well-being. It’s just that there’s this button which large pink envelopes push. And so we lay the large pink envelope on you as money comes in. And you know, what does it matter if you’ve got the money? What does it matter if you’ve got it? That’s a lovely illustration of the flesh.

Here are the advantages. The account number, name, and address is printed on each envelope. Children like to receive mail with their own names on it. And notice that one. The point is that a little child received something in his name on it. And gives him money. And I find that one, I find that sick. Excuse me, sick. An adventure apparently. One is. But the heartbreak thing to me, Harry, is the heart of this little child. There’s something happening to get that out of you. The heart of that little child.

Now there isn’t the faintest suggestion that this is going to mean anything spiritually to anyone. It’s just the idea that there’s a button pushing. And the little child will. I’ve seen this happen with our children. Becky in particular just recently. There’s something in the alternative. The request for money. And boy that envelope appears with money in it. Now I don’t like the money. But I think it’s terrible to play on the heart, the natural heart, the strength of a person this way.

And I ask now envelopes. They’re quick and easy to open. You don’t tear your currency because the envelope is large. These are the advantages. One church which has never used box envelopes before now calls it the best thing we have ever heard of. And you wonder what have they been listening to? That’s the best thing ever. That’s almost like President Nixon’s statement that the greatest event in the history of the world is when these guys would have landed on the moonwalk and came back. You wonder where he, what he had been thinking of.

Church, now look at one of them. They were ready to kill this man because he wouldn’t keep his sight. And once they were hungry one day they were walking through a green field and they just reached out with their hands and pulled off some grain, rolled it around, hit the husk off, put it in their mouth, fed themselves. And Pharisees and sons said, oh look there, look, look, look there. You don’t know. And a gut response came out. They were mad. They were fighting mad.

Another case, Jesus came in place with his eating, sat down to the horse’s hand and slapped him. Now it wasn’t that their hands were dirty. You must understand that. Okay. It wasn’t that their hands were dirty. The washing in question was not washing to get their hands clean. It was ritual washing. Ritual washing. When they saw that, oh, did they ever get on their case? The elders forced their hands. They teach others to wash their hands. Now what do you mean coming in here and not washing your hands? Jesus was in Jerusalem and they said, why do your disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? Now that’s what’s here just means. Other people, the past, the tradition. For they washed off their hands when they eat. Your disciples no worse when they eat.

Well, Jesus really put one on here. He twisted their tail, as it were. Because he said, why do you transgress the commandment of God? See, here’s the opposition. Commandment of God on the one hand, the tradition of the elders on the other. That’s the opposition. Jesus comes representing the commandment of God, which is love. And especially responsibility towards all those around you. In this case, responsibilities to your elders. They had a rule, you see, which allowed them kind of like the big, neat envelope. Because they had a rule which allowed you to give the support you might otherwise have used to help your father and mother. And if you would give that to the synagogue, well then you could say to your father and mother, I’m sorry, but I’m giving what I’ve given to you, I’ve given it to God. Sorry about that. Actually, it’s thought that the rule was that they could give slightly less to the synagogue than they would have given to their parents. And count that dookie cupboard.

See, that’s like the big, neat envelope. There was a button there that said push, pull. And they would get the cash registered. Jesus, why do you transgress the commandment of God? Put up in his place a tradition. Jesus is implicitly saying, here, there are a lot of things more important than washing your hands because the elders did it. But as you get the truth, as well as Isaiah the prophet is saying, this people draw nigh to me with their mouth, but their heart is far from me. They honor me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. And this phrase, which I hope that you will remember, the opposition summed up here at 9th verse, conveying who they worship to be, teaching for the commandments for doctrines, doctrines meaning the truths about God, teaching for the truths about God, the commandments of God.

Now, you should always have that opposition in mind. You should always ask yourself, where in our life, for example, today, where do we have the commandments of God? And where are we in the traditions of men? Jesus, on repeated occasions, was threatened to death and finally he was killed because he ran contrary to the traditions of men.

I want you to look, if you will, at C under Roman number 2, because if you, you see, if you look back at these things in that time, so obviously, there’s no sense in getting worked up about washing your hands. What made those people do that? There’s no sense in getting worked up about a person being a little praying or silent. What made those people do that? Right, right, that’s exactly right. They didn’t do it now. But there’s an association, you see, of their duty with feeding. And people are trained to have deep revulsions against what is difficult to revolve against. It’s human nature to do that.

We do this with our children, for example. We train our children by faking, sometimes faking, by faking a feeling of anguish or disgust or something when something wrong is done. We will think that and project it onto the child and the child will learn the behavior that goes with the expression, disgust, feeling, revulsion, or whatever. We train our children as well, whilst children are trained. Their feelings are trained into them. Their feelings are trained into them. And then these feelings are associated with certain acts. All of them are acts which we don’t do. Because after all, we do the right thing. That’s the way we train ourselves that way. It’s important. I’m not knocking this. Please understand, I’m not criticizing this. I’m trying to just call your attention to the fact that this is the way it happens.

We are trained as children and we train our children to feel in certain ways. We associate feelings of revulsion and hatred and so on with certain types of behavior. Just for example, like many people have been trained to associate revulsion and hatred for, let’s say, interracially mixed energies. Now, many people actually become sick with revulsion. When they’re faced with that sort of thing, you realize that’s true. They actually become sick with revulsion. And the point I’m trying to make is it isn’t just something in their head. It’s, as they say now, a gut response. It is a dragging feeling.

Now, the power of the flesh lies in the association of these things which are under human power to those kinds of feelings. And I hope you will read this little paragraph here. See under Roman numerals two. Blind, dragging, feeling.

Now, if you want to understand human behavior, you have to understand this point. The energy of the flesh lies in the association of these things. That’s why we can be victimized by our feelings. And this is why many people never learned to pray and never learned to sing and never learned to do many things that they need to do because they associate it with feeling right for doing them. So I don’t feel like it. How do you pray? I don’t feel like it. Why do you read the Bible? I don’t feel it. How do you act decently towards that man? I don’t feel like it. Decently towards that man. And on and on and on and on we go.

He’s enslaved. The enslavement of the flesh, the bondage of the flesh lies right here. Why was it that the Pharisees were able to bind those burdens on the backs of those people? Did they like burdens? No. They didn’t like those burdens. Why did they accept them then? Because those people had been trained to associate feelings of verbal acceptance with those who sat in Moses’ seat. And when they came around and laid those burdens on them, they accepted them because they had been trained to and their feelings not having acceptance towards those feelings.

Now if you were all familiar, I suspect, with the process of coming out of bondage to what is rightly called often superstition. Where all of us, I suppose all of us, have done silly things in our childhood, like refusing to walk under sliders or going home. A black cat crosses with both of us. Superstition is nothing but one case of this training of feelings. And if you observe a person who’s genuinely superstitious, he doesn’t even argue with it. He just turns around and goes home and that black cat crosses with him. Now why does he do that? It wasn’t because he didn’t want to get where he was going, but his feelings have been trained so that they govern him. I’m not feeling for dreams that thing that used to go, I don’t know if I’ll ever get stopped now, but well.

Now this first source of opposition, the organized structure of the flesh, religious flesh, this first source of opposition is one of the main ones. We have to understand, we’re going to understand why the kingdom, the words of the kingdom and the power of the kingdom is hindered in coming into a group today. We have to understand that. And we have to understand it in our sessions. And we have to understand it in those rounds, not understand it so we can go to the park with dynamite or anything like that or get on somebody else and rant at them. But so that we can understand what is happening in ourselves and in others.

It seems like, to take the Quaker tradition alone, if you go back and you look and see what happened when George Fox arose and started preaching, you’d see one notable thing. He was always getting kicked in the head. I mean literally, he got kicked in the head. Or worse, I mean one case, they took the big pulpit Bible and practically beat him to death. But because of the training of feelings in the religious culture of that day, in order to get where he was going, he had to upset those fleshly religious structures, which is exactly what he did. And in that upsetting, there was a great explosion of freedom. And the people who came into the group, which followed him, were people who were set free from violence.

What was that bondage primarily? It was a bondage of feeling. It was a bondage of feeling. It was a bondage of feeling. Don’t forget it. That’s what you are working with and that’s what I am working with. That’s what we’re all working with within the religious world. And if we want to make that transition from the burdens which are heavy to the yoke which is light, we must understand there has to be a great revolution in our feelings. And we must pray in that way. We must pray for that revolution. We must think because our feelings change as our understanding grows. We must expect that liberty to come where we will be the masters, by God’s grace, of our feelings and not they will be the masters.

We’ll have to continue a bit on this. I want to call this summer, the last two points of this lesson, next Sunday, and then we’ll get on with it. We’ll get on with the chapter numbers. Thank you.