Digging Pools of Still Water

Digging Pools of Still Water

by Norman Elliott

Transcribed from the original recording; may contain errors.

God, our Heavenly Father, we thank You for this day, that this is Your day, that You’ve made it, that there’s never been another day in all the history of the world like this one. Never. This is a new day. There’s been one more day of experience in this world, Lord, and one more day of You expressing Yourself as a different day, and yet if You’ve made it, it’s a perfect day. Now give us that adjustment to all of the heavenlies right now, so that this day, in not being so-called solemn and somber and religious and all that stuff, You’ll give us that adjustment to all the abundances and all the joys and all the creativities that is just pressing out in every atom of space.

Lord, in this little period of silence right now, let’s take us into Your heart, adjust us to that which is perfect, make us sensitive only to the things of perfection and joy and health and healing and abundance in every way right now for this day, so that as we walk seemingly going our own way, we’ll find out at the end of the day that it’s been Your way and that it’s been a perfect way to fulfill ourselves and everybody else.

In Jesus’ name, amen. Anyway, going on from this thing, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” There is the preamble to life. This is the attitude, the complete, total attitude about life, the thing that tones and colors everything. And then it comes from that overall infinity and infinite mess. He gets down to this part. “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still water.”

This, I think, is, you can have all of the mathematical analysis as to the size of the universe and all about nature, something that is exterior, something that really isn’t me. And I mean, you can go into all of the reasons why scientists believe in God or whatever. And that’s fine. And you can starve to death there. I mean, it’s great. It’s wonderful. As long as it’s part of something else. As long as it’s hooked up to something else. As long as there’s a marriage with this little individual personal me.

And this is what this gets down to. “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.” And if you want to get a real good idea as to what the shepherd was in the mind of the Hebrew, you go and read the 34th chapter of Ezekiel. Where it tells there, what is the job of the shepherd? The shepherd’s job is to feed the sheep. Not to feed himself. It’s to feed the sheep. It’s to give his life form. A shepherd’s job is to strengthen the diseased. A shepherd’s job is to heal the sick. A shepherd’s job is to bind up that which is broken. A shepherd’s job is to bring back the driven away. And a shepherd’s job is to seek the lost. As the sheep through shepherds, which have been operating by expediency and by selfishness on their own part, the sheep are without a shepherd and they wander. And it says that they even foul the waters of their own supply. That they use the horn and the shoulder on each other. And what ought to have been heaven, what ought to have been a perfect overabundant supply of everything becomes a battleground of famine and sickness and disease because they lack a shepherd that was true to his own job.

But… and the thing goes on then. And it says, but that in spite of shepherds who have been untrue to their calling, that God says, “I will seek out my sheep and I will lead them to pasture. And I will feed them and cause them to lie down.” Many years ago, a man came to me. He was an old minister at the Michigan camp. And he had spent some of his time with sheep. I don’t remember where, but it was out in the West. And he said, “Do you know how to make a sheep lie down?” I said, “No.” “Well,” he said, “feed it.” And this is literally true. Feed it. There’s something about a sheep. It’s a kind of a hysterical animal. And when the stomach isn’t as it ought to be, it gets up and it gets nervous and it’s just running all over creation. And they say that, not so necessarily because of lack of food, but because of the built-in temperament of what sheep are, if it doesn’t find it within a relatively short time, this thing will actually die quickly. Not through lack of food, but through anxieties and tensions, which is built up in the, and the overflowing of chemical substances from the glands of the body that have been poured into the bloodstream.

It will kill itself. It will commit a kind of a chemical suicide. So when it says here, “He makes me to lie down in green pastures,” He’s talking about me. Not about the planets or the size of the universe or anything. He’s talking about me. He’s talking about Norman Elliott, and then He might even talk about Kenneth, but I know He talks about me. And in the ultimate issues, it’s me. It’s me. All of you people left.

There’s got to be something that satisfies my own heart. There’s got to be something that satisfies whatever the kind of a peculiar temperament I might be. And it really doesn’t matter. What He’s saying is that He’s taking all of infinity and fitting it to you as if you were the only person in the whole wide world.

That reminds me, when I was a kid over in Ireland, and this is a long time ago now, but I can still remember that some young man, I don’t know how young a young man is, because I came over to this country when I was 10 years of age, so I was under that. And I would imagine that if I were eight, that anybody that would be 12 would be an old guy. But I’m not sure. But all that I know is that as far as I was concerned, in my child’s mind, he was a big guy.

And we were playing football one day, and I don’t know, there was a lull in the game. And this big guy, big fella, he came up to me, and I had known him for a long time. He was a neighbor. And he pulled out of his pocket a little New Testament.

And he told me he had something special for me. And he opened it to John 3:16. “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” And so I read it. I said, “I mean, good,” you know, and all that stuff. And he says, “Well, now, wherever it says ‘the world,’ put in there ‘Norman Elliott.’” So I began to read it. “God so loved the world.” God so loved Norman Elliott that He gave, you know. And all of a sudden, there was a great feeling of warmth. A great feeling of kindness. A great feeling of a relatedness to all of life, to people and everything else. Something that I never… I mean, it was, in a way, shocking. But it was shocking in a nice way. Shocking in a pleasant way.

And, you know, I have sneered or I have snickered or I have looked down my nose at all of these people who are… Oh, they have all of these plans about child evangelism, you know. And I said, “God, that’s for the birds,” you know. And yet, as I said, that one incident still comes back to me over the years. I can still remember that warmth that invaded me. That was inside my muscles and inside my stomach, inside my mind. And all of a sudden, the world was much less of a strange place than it was before. Yes, the repeating of these words has happened. So, yes, it has to be a personal thing. And while all of the social programs which we are… which are necessary and which have to be, unless they are based on some kind of a personal experience, they’re going to be fads which will go and come and go and come and go and go. It has to be at some time or other some kind of a commitment of me. Something that gets through to me as a person, as it is, as if I were the only person in the whole wide world. So here you have what He is. So He maketh me. And he’s speaking… he’s using me as sheep.

It means that He’s fitting all that He is. All of the infinity, all of the transcendencies and mysteries that He is, to little old me, as if I were the only person in the whole wide world. Regardless of how smart or how dumb, or how tall or how short, or how thin or how fat, or how Protestant or how Catholic, or how white or how black, or if I’m a Dutchman, or whatever it is, whatever it is, you’ll fit it as if I were the only person in the whole wide world. I think this is the thing that has to be balanced with all of our great objectives…

Analysis and programs, whether they are programs in politics or in anything else. And they said, “He leadeth me beside the still water.” There’s another… This is a peculiarity of the nature of sheep, and if you wonder why I’m standing on one leg, I’m scratching… I’m a mosquito bite. So mind your own business.

It’s a trick that I learned from Gordon Kennison, which he… where his brother… you’re… But anyway, this thing about “He leadeth me beside the still water.” Another peculiarity of sheep is that for some reason or other, which nobody knows, I mean it’s just part of the nature of the animal, a sheep, unless it can possibly help it, will not drink out of running water. Out of a stream. Now, whether this is an instinctive something or an instinctive wisdom that is built into the sheep, that if it happens to fall in, that the wool will get waterlogged and it will drown, or whatever. Anyway, that’s what a sheep is. It’s a peculiar critter. He said… But… yeah… but time after time, the shepherd will go by the side of a stream, and with his own hands or with whatever tools he happens to have there, he will dig a little hole there and the water will run into it. And you have a little pool of still water, and this is taking, well, the enormous supply of water which is in a river and the rushing water and the power of it, and it’s draining it up in order to fit this little animal that happens to be a kind of a queer little thing that will only drink out of still water.

And I can imagine that sheep being as they are, that if they can think, and I’m sure that they can think. You know, the big thing about us is that we think that in order for anything else to think that they have to think like we think.

And it isn’t so. You know, one of the amazing things is that you can take plants and you can sort of hang their roots into this kind of a soup which we make up with all of the vitamins in it and all of the minerals and the chemicals and everything that it needs, you know. And you can put in there, and this is something that our scientists have never been able to figure out, the intelligence of a plant. You can put in there a super abundance, a super abundance of a super abundance of everything. More than it could ever use in a lifetime. I mean, there’s enough there to gorge itself on and have the greatest feast that it could possibly do and become Superman and everything else.

But those roots will, out of all the, say, all the infinity or all the possibilities in that liquid, it will only take out of it what it needs. If the plant happens to be starved in for a, or happens to need a certain thing out of maybe a hundred elements in there or how many elements there might be, it’ll just take out what it needs. It will not, in an undifferentiated manner, just gorge itself on everything. It takes just what it needs. So, if that isn’t intelligence, what in the world is it? And you can go from there to rocks and everything else.

And I can imagine that these sheep, thinking, if they had to make up a rationale as to the universe in which they live, the world in which they are aware of, the world that they come into contact with day after day after day, the kind of a climate that they live in, the kind of food that they eat, how much liquid they need day after day, they could make up a very tightly reasoned universe of their own. And they would say, “Now, isn’t it just amazing that we always happen to come at the end of the day to a place where there’s still water? Naturally, therefore, God has to be like a sheep. Because, He realizes, God must like still water only, because we always seem to come to that. And God is looking after us. Therefore, you could say, God is like a sheep because He likes still water.” Oh, they could build this thing up and up and up and they could have schools of philosophy and schools of psychology and schools of this and that. And you know what? It would all be perfectly rational. It would all be mathematically reasonable.

Oh, without ever wondering how they happen to come at the end of the day to a pool where there is still water. But why it is that they always happen to come to pasture land. You know, in this verse 2, there is another. He leadeth me.

To that which will satisfy me. That which will satisfy me. The whole promises that work through the Bible and great spiritual literature of all ages, of all climates. Doesn’t matter whether it’s in China or whether it’s in India or whether it’s in the myths and the stories and the legends of the Eskimos and the Africans or whatever it is. Always. Whatever this instinct of untaughtness in us is, tells us that life tends toward fulfillment, toward satisfaction, toward wholeness, toward abundance. Sometimes we get the idea that it is God’s will. I mean that, well, that maybe if we live the kind of a life that we ought to, that we may scrape through this life, just barely getting enough to meet the necessities. That’s not what it says. It’s even in, whether it’s in this Bible or whether it’s in the Bible of other peoples all over the world, they talk about abundance.

They talk about fulfillment. They talk about the fulfillment of peace, the fulfillment of health, the fulfillment of wisdom, the fulfillment of everything else that is… that the human heart yearns for. That is going to end in satisfaction. That the intention of God is life. It is not death. For me. Not as some, yes, for the whole universe as a complete whole. But for me. And sometimes we are willing to admit that, yes, that God’s purpose and God’s plan for the world… is it. But, well, I really shouldn’t ask Him for… if I can have a… or I shouldn’t expect His help… or however you want to put… that I ought to be able to get a new automobile.

Or that I should have the money to buy my wife a brand new scrub brush. Or whatever it is. I mean, we don’t want this. We say, “Yeah, God is great, heaven is full,” you know, and all it is. But gee whiz, I’ve got to go through this work. And maybe if I make it, I’ll have pie in the sky by and by, you know, all that pie in the… I like pie, but who wants to eat pie day after day? She’s got to get sick. But this is just another symbol of the greatest of wholeness. Do you really believe, and I think this is one of the very basic things, that the will of God for you is wholeness? That the will of God for you is the fulfillment and the satisfaction of your nature?

I didn’t like God for a long, long time. Oh, yes, I went to church and everything. But I… I mean, He wasn’t the kind of a being that I wanted to hang around with on a Saturday night or on a Monday night evening.

Because I can remember that with the riots over in Ireland, there were many, many people that were killed. Both Catholics and Protestants. And I mean, this is a little hard to figure out in your own mind, unless you’ve actually seen it. Where people, I mean, people shoot each other and bomb each other. Simply because of things that happened maybe three to four to five hundred years back. Filled with all the hatred. All the prejudice. And, of course, over that period of time, shoot, it’s all gotten mixed up with politics and economics and psychology and everything else. So, which came first, the hen or the egg, is anybody’s guess? Maybe they should just wipe them all out and start over again. I don’t know.

But anyway, there they are, and I used to go, and I used to see more funerals there, and we used to love to go to funerals. I mean, kids over there did. Because over in Ireland, if there was a funeral within what seemed to be a large area, we would all go over there, and there would always be a big black bow hanging on the door, so you would know that this is it, you know. And we’d go up there, and a hammer on the door, and they would come to the door, and you would say, “We would like to see the body.”

So, in you would go, and I’d look at him, and he could look… I mean, he could be anybody else. You didn’t know him. And you would then look at it, and you would immediately sit down. Everybody would. And then they’d roll in trays, and oh, they’d pop and cookies and cake and pies, and he’d sit up there. That was the one good thing about a funeral, and it’s still a good idea.

At least there was just one thing in it which was happy. And so we’d go there, and… But with your neighbors and everything, you know, you’d go there, and the funerals were… I mean, they were just as common as it could be. And there was a lot of tragedy in it. There was a lot of hurt. There was a lot of homes that were left desolate. And it was just an old theme. I can remember it as a kid. It went around in my mind, around and around. “Well, it’s the will of God.” Shoot, you wouldn’t ascribe that to the will of the devil. If you knew of anybody whose intention, whose will, whose desire was that so-and-so has to be shot, and his family has to be made, well, lose their security, and all of these things. If you knew of any human being who was operating and controlling people on that level, we’d lock him up. We’d kill him. We would say he was insane. And yet, we have the audacity, and the awful blasphemy in me, to say, “This is the will of God.” That is the will of the devil.

Much less God. So, it took a long time for me to ever grow to the point where I could say, yeah, it really, truly… There’s no question in my mind whether I’m able to achieve it. I may not be sure, but I don’t care about that. I am convinced in my mind that God’s intention in creation for me as little me, personally me, is that I should come to fulfillment. That I should be healthy. That I should be abundant. That I should have peace of mind. That I should be poised. That I should have a joy, a bubbling joy that comes up on the inside of me. It is God’s will.

Takes a long time, or it took me a long time to really believe that. And it was not until, and you don’t believe it all of a sudden either. It takes a lot of little experiences, one or a few, all over the years. Little drops of water, little drops of sand, you know, until there comes a time when you say, “It’s true. I know it.”

One of the things that I can still remember about writing this book, How to Be the Lord’s Prayer, was that I had been on a trip. I had been on a trip that started in California and it ended, well, it went to California to New Mexico, to Alabama, to Virginia, to Boston, to New York, and then home. And the last night in the hotel room in New York City. I knew that, when I took the plane home the following morning, that, boy, that desk would be piled high enough, phone would be ringing and everything else, and I’d never get back to that thing. I said, “I gotta finish it tonight. That’s all that’s in it.” So I hired a typewriter and I did. But the whole thing about it was, I remember when, finally, I got the first draft and the last page done, and I said, “Man, it’s done.” I can still remember, it’s like big iron doors climbing shut and echoing off this clanging door shut. But when I knew right then, that one period, one chapter of my life was finished. And I think I know somewhat what that might have been. I know that in the writing of that book, I had to come up time after time to item after item after item in this prayer that you might interpret in one way, you might interpret it in another way.

You know, if you’ve got any brains at all, what the thing is that you ought to say, this has always been said, this is in the old rut, this is orthodoxy. At least it isn’t unorthodox enough to make any difference. I mean, you will still be accepted. Do you believe it or don’t you? And I never realized, even after all those years, the kind of a trauma, the kind of a little series of little killings, a series of little suicides which go on on the inside of you when you stand before all of your past and society and seemingly your parents and your church and your brothers, you know, and everything else. And you say, “I know that they all say it is this way, but I don’t believe it.”

And you get still on the inside and you face God and you say, “Father, Jesus, Holy Spirit, all the company of heaven, I don’t believe it. Do You hear me? I don’t believe it. It isn’t right. It doesn’t make sense. It’s cruel. It’s nuts. I don’t buy it. And if the time is ever to come when I am to buy it, You’re going to have to bring it out to me in some sort of a rational way, which I can buy, but I want You to know right now, I don’t believe it.” And to say that, and I’m in the really minute where you are not up before people, putting on a show, but you’re in the quietness of your own closet. And there’s a fear.

There’s a kind of a trauma that’s happening. There’s a warmth. There’s a little sweat that comes out on you. And you say, “Well, I can’t do anything else but be honest, and it’s not going to do me any good to say, I believe it when I don’t. So, I don’t believe it. Do You hear me?” And it’s happening in a series, in many little ways, time after time after time after time, until the whole thing’s over. And somehow or other, it’s been more of an experience when you got through for you than it will likely be for anybody else. And yet to the extent that it has been this kind of an experience for you, maybe that’s why it will mean that much to everybody else.

So, this is the whole thing about God’s will for you. He will fit if you want. And the first thing is that you have to believe that it is His will that you be fit. That the intention of the Creator is that you will end up and that you will come, not after you’re dead, but all throughout life, in daily… and a daily walk with Him, to daily fulfillment and abundance. That it is His will that this day, that your mind will be freed from some prison, some little prison.

From some little prejudice. From some hardness. That it is His will that this day… And you know, one of the things that makes me want to live every day the way it is now… I don’t know the Moorhead or whoever it was that wrote it, I’m not sure if I said… “What you are going to be, you are now becoming.”

That kind of gives you a thrill and it kind of leaves you cold. All at the same time. What you’re feeding upon in your mind now, God has created it in such a manner. The Creator has made you in such a manner that what you feed upon mentally is what you are going to incarnate… in your body, in your business, in your affairs, in your school, in your health…

In every way. I want you to make up your mind, yes, it is my Father’s will. For me personally, peculiar and all as I might be… This Father, if I believe this, He will lead me by the desires of my nature, by circumstances and events and people on the outside being drawn to me, and me being drawn to others. He will lead me towards the fulfillment of all my dreams.

Far beyond my dreams. Because His dreams and His desires for me are… far exceed my wildest hopes for myself. When I think back on my own life, ye wish. How much… how much… Anybody here… I mean anybody that is… that is at the young age of us…

What would you have settled for as a life income? In 1937. Supposing in those years, somebody had come up to you and said, “Look, I’m a millionaire or a billionaire many times over. Now, I’ll give you a job, but you tell me… for the rest of your life now…”

“What do you want as an annual wage?” What would you have picked? Doesn’t it… doesn’t it freeze you to even think of it? Ugh! They had all those ads in the papers then, in the magazines then that said… what was it? “Retire on $125 a month.” Shoot!

I’d hate like the old cinder thing… Anybody had offered me that then… at my age, I would have kissed them, I think. I want a horrible… And this just goes to show you, God’s dreams of abundance far exceed whatever… Don’t put a limit on what you think you want or can do, and just say, “More and more and more!” Gracious God, Heavenly Father… Oh, and I forgot here… while your eyes are shut now… one of the people at this camp here, who is very loved, I love, just a wonderful person, she’s going to have an… going to the doctor this day sometime or other. And I want you to just…

Everybody in this room, take Ruthie in your arms now, in the arms of your heart, in the arms of your mind, in the arms of your emotions, in the arms of your joy and abundance, and… just lovers… right this minute.

I want you to see a great… someone who is extremely happy, and project that happiness towards the time when she comes back here, joyous and happy. That the Shepherd of life will fit all of the possibilities of greatness, health, goodness, joy, right to all of the peculiarities that she is, and temperament in every other way. Doesn’t make any difference. This is how we’ll be. Health, strength, joy, abundance.

Thanksgiving, gratitude, just overflowing. Now Father, this is what we want, and we thank You for it. Heavenly Father, Lord Jesus and Holy Spirit, Spirit of God, Shepherd of life. Now let’s all say, “Thank You, Lord.” Amen.