PIVOT POINT

Ben H. Swett
Reflex Alert Barracks, Upper Heyford RAFB, UK
2 April 1964

The sudden advent of a whole new mode of communication with spirits during my 1 April 1964 attempt to write a letter to Scott surprised me. Automatic writing. Clear text. Excellent message. Good spirit. No interference. How did that happen?

The absence of interference might have been due to the fact I was working alone; no one else was there to attract a variety of spirits. But that was not the only factor. I had crumpled up several sheets of paper because I was not getting anywhere by writing alone. It happened as soon as I acted on a thought that popped into my mind: Help God help Scott.

I decided it must have been this change in my idea of prayer that automatically tuned me to good spirits and opened me to the clearest message I had yet received.

Then I took another look at the statement, "My personal purpose is not get, give," and realized that most of my prayers were in fact to get something rather than to give something--a more or less polite way of saying, "Please gimme what I want" or "Please do what I want You to do." My prayers did not conform to my purpose.

And I remembered that a good spirit named Liri had said, Help God. Give greatly.

To help God is a radically different approach to prayer. It starts by assuming that God wants people to be helped, and asks Him how to help a specific person, as His servant or agent or instrument: "Please let me know what You want me to do for this person." It also requires that we actually focus our own love on that person as we pray--and then, as demonstrated to me on 1 April 1964, it works.

I resolved to continue practicing this approach to prayer, because it is apparently a key to the Kingdom of Heaven, but it takes a pivotal change of personal theology. Instead of asserting that God is omnipotent and begging Him to do what we want done, it assumes that God needs our help in order to do what He wants done. Rather than serving God like courtiers bowing and scraping before an oriental potentate, it envisions approaching Him for guidance and then being sent away from Him to implement His guidance.

And yet this is the theology of the New Testament. God does not do everything by Himself. He sends forth those who obey Him, to do what He wants done--and this is how any kingdom actually functions. Jesus said he was sent from God to seek and to save the lost. He also said to his apostles, "As the Father has sent me, even so I send you." The whole New Testament concept of ministry is filled with these three verbs: to send, to seek, to save.

Apparently this is a mechanism that God works through: our own desire to help Him help others, two-way prayer for guidance, and free-will decision. Thus He guides His servants to benefit others and helps His servants, too. Good comes of it. All benefit.


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