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The two movements of breath are
breathing in and breathing out, which have been defined as inspiration and
praise. Inspiration is breathing in, naturally, but we are breathing in not
just air, but the spirit. When you are relieved of some anxiety, you breath a
sigh of relief and say, 'How wonderful that is,' don't you? That is praise. You
take a deep breath and a new fresh sense of hope and joy comes in. It is as
though you have breathed out all the fog and fear, the old Adam, and have
breathed in the new sense of being the man of God's creating.
In both the Old and New Testaments there
are a number of healings of leprosy: Naaman was healed by Elijah, and Jesus
healed lepers on several occasions. It is as though the leper is a symbol of
the human individual thinking himself unclean, unworthy, I am a failure, I am
not as successful as other people. We make ourselves lepers. We think we are
untouchable, beyond the reach of God's grace. In one case a leper says to
Jesus, "Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean." The account goes on:
"And Jesus put forth his hand, and touched him"— touched him! The very
thing most people would not do! "I will; be thou clean" (Matt 8:2). Bible
healings are so often done with a simple command: Be thou clean; stretch forth
thy hand; receive thy sight; Lazarus come forth! The Spirit, which is God, is
commanding you and me and all humanity today to be clean, to be whole, to be
joyous, to be full of hope for ourselves and our world. "It is the spirit that
quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they
are spirit, and they are life" (John 6:63). But if we do not feed our
consciousness with the spirit of God and the spirit of good, we so easily do
the opposite—we feed our consciousness with the poison of resentment, or
fear, or anxiety, or worry, or indignation about some injustice in the past and
we mull it over. We poison the system. The function of the kidneys is to
cleanse the body of outworn substances which would otherwise poison us. We have
seen kidney complaints healed when an individual says, I love to adopt the new,
the great spiritual, facts about myself, and these truly cleanse the system and
eliminate all the rubbish that I have been carrying along with me.
This law is true not only in the physical
area. We can choose the good as the reality of our being in any area of our
lives. We knew a lovely woman who was a great spiritual healer, and she was off
on holiday. When she got to the railway station, she took her purse out of her
bag to find some loose coins in the bottom in order to buy a newspaper. When
she had bought her paper, she found her purse had gone. Her first impulse was
to think, It has been stolen, I better inform the police. Then she said to
herself, How can you go telling the police that you have lost something when
your whole lifework is declaring to man that he has lost nothing of his divine
substance, and can never lose it?
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