Matthew 19: Consciousness of Strength and Weakness

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Quick Insights

The chapter stages map inner negotiations about commitment, separation, and the price of possession.
Questions about divorce and law reveal the mind trying to justify a split from wholeness while the imagination remembers original unity.
The encounter with the young man shows how attachment to outer goods blocks entry into a higher state of being, and the impossible becomes possible when identity shifts.
Promises of reward for those who forsake comforts point to a psychic reordering where imagination reallocates value from transient things to eternal states.

What is the Main Point of Matthew 19?

At its heart this chapter describes the soul learning to prefer inner unity over divided justification: a movement from legalistic separation back toward an assumed wholeness where imagination and feeling create a new reality. The drama shows how beliefs about marriage, property, duty, and privilege are really self-constructed states that either bind or free consciousness. Liberation is offered not as an external decree but as a reorientation of attention and desire toward the internal source that unites what was split.

What is the Spiritual Meaning of Matthew 19?

The courtroom-like exchanges about divorce are an inner dialogue between reason and origin. Reason cites rules and exceptions to preserve a comfortable split, while the remembering imagination invokes the first creative act that made two become one. This returns attention to the fact that relationships are lived realities made by how we imagine and feel one another; separation is legal justification of a felt disunion, and reconciliation is the work of restoring feeling to match an imagined unity. When children are welcomed, the text points to a receptive state of consciousness rather than a literal scene. Childlikeness means a trustful posture of imagination that receives without bargaining, a state that exemplifies how the kingdom appears. Conversely, the rich young man dramatizes the ego that has identified with possessions and habits; his sorrow at the hint to let go reveals the cost of identity change. The image of the camel and the needle names the experiential gap between a great attached identity and the narrow gate of true transformation, while the injunction that with the divine all is possible points to the power of aligned imaginative seeing to collapse impossibility. The promise to those who forsake houses and kin describes a psychological economy: when attachment is consciously released, the imagination can redistribute value and create compensatory realities of connection and meaning. The reversal that many first shall be last and the last first signals an interior reordering of valuation, where humility and dependence on inner source reorder status. This chapter thus maps a transformation from outer conformity and ownership to inner sovereignty of feeling and imaginative assumption.

Key Symbols Decoded

Crossing into Judea and the presence of the crowds are symbolic of thresholds and collective conditioning; moving beyond familiar territory is the psyche stepping into unfamiliar inner work, and the multitudes are the aggregated patterns that congregate around a dominant way of seeing. The Pharisees represent the part of mind that argues with conscience, inventing legal exceptions to avoid change, while the commandment talk represents the scaffolding of moral imagination that can either imprison or orient a person toward an integrated life. The child is the emblem of receptive imagination and unprotected openness, the young rich man the emblem of ego invested in possessions and self-image, and the needle through which the camel must pass is the narrow discipline of assumption and felt change that allows the immense to be reconfigured into the intimate. Treasure in heaven names redirected attention and imaginative capital that, when invested inwardly, yields a different experiential economy.

Practical Application

Practice begins as inner conversation. When a contentious thought arises that would justify separation or preserve ownership, pause and imagine the original wholeness you once knew or intuit; hold that scene with sensory detail until feeling shifts. If you find yourself identifying with what you own or with a role, picture releasing it as if placing it in another's hands and notice the subtle change in posture and breath; repeat this until the imagination proves more compelling than the habit. Use small experiments of assumption as daily practice: adopt the feeling of being already reconciled in a relationship where you have been divided, or imagine the freedom of having given away a clinging belief and sense how your inner landscape enlarges. Cultivate childlike receptivity by imagining a moment of pure welcome and let that feeling dictate choices for an hour. Over time these imaginative acts realign attention so that the inner ‘kingdom’ is lived rather than merely hoped for.

The Inner Test: Choosing the Kingdom Over Comfort

Read as a psychological drama, Matthew 19 unfolds not as a sequence of external events but as a movement of consciousness through conflicting states of mind. The places, questions and characters are inner rooms, panels of attention, emotional postures and imaginative stances. The chapter sketches the passage from limited, fragmentary selfhood toward an integrated, creative consciousness — and it stages the resistance that arises when the inner economy of identity is asked to change.

The opening scene — leaving Galilee and coming into the coasts of Judaea beyond Jordan with great multitudes following — signals an inward migration. Movement from one region to another describes a shift of focus: Galilee, a place of relative innocence and familiar patterns, to Judaea beyond Jordan, the territory of testing. The multitudes that follow are the manifold contents of consciousness — memories, convictions, hopes — clustering around a central aspiration that is walking toward a deeper self-understanding.

The Pharisees who approach with legal questions represent the legalistic, outer-minded faculty that interprets every inner difficulty as a problem of external rule. Their question about divorce is an attempt to confine relationship problems to the world of law and precedent rather than to see them as psychological phenomena. Asking, 'Is it lawful to put away a wife for any cause?' is a disguised way of asking, How may I relieve the discomfort of inner contradiction without changing my inner state? The reply — returning to the beginning, citing the unity of the two as one flesh — refuses the Pharisee's external solution. At the level of imagery and feeling, 'one flesh' names a state of consciousness in which perceived separateness has been resolved: two attitudes, two roles, two selves identify and cleave. When inner division remains, the outer world fractures; when inner union is assumed, outer discord cannot persist.

Moses's concession — 'because of the hardness of your hearts' — is psychology speaking: rules and permits are accommodations to hardened patterns. Law is a bandage for those who will not change the wound. In this telling, the allowance for divorce is not the ideal but a practical response to entrenched patterns of thought and feeling. It shows how human systems codify compromise when imagination and self-change are refused.

When Jesus says that whoever puts away and marries commits adultery, the language points to the movement of attention. Adultery here is not only a moral crime but the repeated betrayal of an inner commitment by yielding to transitory impulses. It describes how the mind, by constantly shifting its affections and assumptions, becomes adulterous to its own higher center. Stability of inner belief is the ground on which outer constancy stands.

The teaching about eunuchs then appears as an acknowledgement of the different capacities of consciousness. Some are born with a temperament less entangled in the sensual or possessive; some are conditioned into restraint; some choose detachment for the sake of a higher kingdom. These three kinds map to temperament, circumstance and willful renunciation. The kingdom of heaven is not uniformly received because people differ in readiness; some have to dissolve attachments deliberately in order to allow a larger life to emerge.

When children are brought and the disciples rebuke them, the scene dramatizes the mind's refusal to receive simple receptivity. Children are the archetype of the receptive state: uncorrupted attention, trust, lack of calculating self-interest. To bless children is to bless the attitude of open imagination. The kingdom belongs to those who can accept without defensiveness, who can feel and trust before they analyze. Laying on of hands is an image for the directed blessing of attention: a transfer of presence from a higher centering to a receptive mood.

The encounter with the rich young man is the chapter's pivotal interior challenge. He is 'young' — a state of mind full of accumulated beliefs about who one is and what matters — and 'rich' — laden with possessions that symbolize a self-concept invested in external goods, social status, memory, reputation. His question, 'What good thing shall I do?' disguises the real problem: he wants to secure eternal life by adding actions to a self-narrative that remains unchanged. The commandments named are elementary moral postures; he replies that he has kept them, signaling that he has followed the rules of the outer mind. Yet the injunction to 'go, sell that thou hast, give to the poor, and come and follow' points inward: to follow is to relocate identity from outer holdings to a living center.

Selling and giving are psychological metaphors for letting go of the accumulated identity that stands between the person and their realized Self. The sorrowful departure of the young man shows how attachment to a self-image prevents transformation. The 'treasure in heaven' that follows renunciation is the paradox of consciousness: what is released externally is regained internally in a richer form. The allegory asks: will you cling to the outer tokens of security or will you reassign your loyalty to the inner life that exalts rather than conserves small certainties?

The hyperbolic image of a camel passing through the eye of a needle dramatizes magnitude versus aperture: great constructs of identity cannot be forced through the narrow gate of single-pointed attention and inner surrender. 'With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible' acknowledges that the transformation requires a change in the scale of identity — from the small self to the I AM. Psychologically, 'God' names the creative imagination, the organizing presence within us that re-forms circumstance. When consciousness identifies with that presence, impossibilities become possible.

Peter's question about reward — 'Behold, we have forsaken all, and followed thee; what shall we have?' — articulates the anxious bargaining of the ego, which fears loss even as it follows. The answer, that those who forsake will receive a hundredfold and inherit life everlasting, is an inversion of worldly accounting: true gain comes through relinquishment of limiting identities. The promise is not an external reward machine but the reorientation of experiential reality: the inner man who has yielded to a larger self now perceives abundance that was hidden before.

The closing paradox, 'many that are first shall be last,' makes explicit the overarching theme: outer precedence based on accumulation, reputation, or defensive cleverness collapses when inner values are supreme. The kingdom's economy reverses everyday logic because it is the economy of consciousness, where priority is given to presence, imagination and unity rather than to separation and acquisition.

Across the chapter the creative power operating within human consciousness is made visible. Imagination is not idle fantasy; it is the formative faculty that clothes inner states in outer events. The posture of mind you occupy — clinging, legalistic, receptive, generous, closed — attracts circumstances that mirror that posture. Where the Pharisees attempt to adjudicate through rule, the transformative center insists on identity shift. Where the disciples seek pragmatic solutions, the teaching keeps returning to internal adoption of a new center.

Practically, the chapter invites an interior practice: to observe the parts of oneself that test, negotiate and cling; to recognize the authority of laws and customs as accommodations to hardened hearts; to cultivate the childlike openness that receives the kingdom; to face the attachments that prevent full assumption of a larger self and to let them go so that imagination can realign experience. The acts of 'selling' and 'giving' are internal verbs: selling the idea that possessions constitute who you are, giving away the need for others to confirm you, and following the voice that calls you to a unifying presence.

Ultimately Matthew 19 teaches that relationships, laws and social forms are reflections of inner states. Imagination, charged by feeling and discipline, is the active cause of outer events. To change results, change the assumption. To heal fractured marriages of attention, return to the one-flesh state of identity. To enter the kingdom, become like the child who trusts. To pass through the eye, allow the self to be reshaped by the creative God within. This chapter is a map for psychological transformation: it names the resistances, proposes the surrender, and promises that the inner act of becoming will be vindicated outwardly by a world remodeled to match the new imagination.

Common Questions About Matthew 19

How does Neville Goddard interpret the 'kingdom of heaven' in Matthew 19?

Neville Goddard reads the 'kingdom of heaven' in Matthew 19 not as a distant realm but as the living state of consciousness within each person, the simplicity and receptivity Jesus praises when he welcomes children (Matthew 19:14). The kingdom is entered by assuming the inner feeling of already being that which you desire; imagination is the gateway. Practically, close your eyes, imagine the quiet assurance and wonder of a child accepted by God, dwell in that feeling until it becomes natural, and act from it; habit will externalize that state into relationships and circumstances. The biblical command to suffer little children points to cultivating that receptive state as the primary spiritual practice.

How can I use Neville's 'state of the wish fulfilled' with the story of the rich young man?

Neville taught that you enter the imagined end and live from it; with the rich young man story that means identifying the wish behind his question—eternal life and perfection—and assuming the state of already having it, even while possessions remain. Close your eyes, construct a brief scene in which you hand your wealth to the poor and follow, feel the relief and joy in the body, and remain in that feeling until it hardens into conviction; practice this before sleep and during idle moments so imagination governs your consciousness. The outer world will then rearrange to match the inner reality illustrated in Matthew 19:21–22.

What lesson does Matthew 19 give about riches and how can I apply Neville's teachings to it?

Matthew 19 warns that riches can entangle a man’s sense of self and make the inner door to the kingdom narrow, illustrated by the rich young man’s sorrow and the camel and needle image (Matthew 19:21–24). The practical teaching is not condemnation of wealth but exposure of identity; wealth becomes a problem when you assume you are defined by possessions. Use your imagination to change that assumption: rehearsing the scene of joyful detachment, feeling gratitude as if free from burden, and living momentarily from the state of generosity transforms inner identity and invites outer change. Persist in the feeling of being already at ease with giving and following, and circumstances will conform.

What does Matthew 19 teach about marriage and manifesting a spouse according to Neville's methods?

Matthew 19 teaches that marriage reflects an inner union—two becoming one flesh—and that what God joins is a state, not merely external arrangement (Matthew 19:5–6). To manifest a spouse, first assume the inner reality of being married: live daily from the feeling of shared life, rehearse mental scenes of ordinary married moments, and cultivate gratitude as though the union exists now. Refine your identity to match that which a spouse would meet; clear contradictions and be the loving partner you imagine. Persist without impatience; imagination sustained in feeling will attract the corresponding outer partner and circumstances, because consciousness always precedes manifestation.

How do I apply Neville's revision or meditation techniques to internalize 'let the little children come to me'?

Neville's revision and meditation translate that command into practice by teaching you to cultivate the childlike state Jesus praises (Matthew 19:14) through nightly revision and brief daytime scenes. At night review the day and change any scene that closed your heart—replace it with one in which you welcome a childlike openness or are welcomed by Christ; feel the acceptance, wonder, and trust as though real. During the day take short silent moments to revive that feeling, imagining hands laid on you and your spontaneous, uncomplicated faith; persist until receptivity becomes your baseline. The inner habit of being open and dependent will transform how you move and what you attract.