Personal
from Herbert W. Armstrong

Don’t sell yourself short! The possibilities that lie ahead for you are transcendently greater than you have ever come to know!

When I was an adolescent of sixteen, as I have said and written many times, AMBITION was aroused in me. It was on my first summer vacation job away from home. I had never thought very seriously before of making something of myself in the world.

I had devoted my time, as most boys do, to “having fun.” I had played baseball, football, and spun tops. At age twelve I became interested in wrestling. Those were the days when wrestling was wrestling – not a deceptive comedy show like professional wrestling later became. Those were the days when Frank Gotch was world champion – a real champion – the days of “Farmer Burns,” Zsbysco, and other superstrong men. The older brother of a neighbor boy I played with had set up a real wrestling mat, and we boys were learning all about half nelsons, arm locks, and toeholds.

Then at sixteen I had a summer vacation job in another town. My employer complimented me on my work, and this caused me to try hard. He began telling me I had abilities to make a real success of my life – I could really accomplish big things, if I applied myself.

Ambition is the DESIRE to accomplish, PLUS the will to apply oneself energetically with determination. I didn’t then know what I would do – in what field I would become such a success – but I began to believe in myself, and began to apply myself to studies at the public library, entirely aside from the high school studies.

At age eighteen I put myself through a course of self-analysis, by means of a book I found in the public library, Choosing a Vocation. It helped me avoid “fitting the square peg in the round hole.” It set forth the requirements for success in the professions, businesses, occupations. This self-survey, coupled with a survey of occupations, led me into the advertising profession.

I applied myself vigorously. As I grew into the twenties, I became quite successful. With an office in Chicago’s Loop from age 23 to 30, I was finally earning an income which, on today’s dollar value, would amount to $150,000 per year.

Then, at age 34, I was challenged most seriously, and was led into an intensive, almost night-and-day, in-depth study of evolution and the Bible. My marriage depended upon it, and I did not believe in divorce.

This in-depth research OPENED MY EYES to an entirely NEW HORIZON!

Up until then I had been imbued 1) with self-confidence, and 2) with an horizon limited to mental or physical secular fields.

In other words, I interpreted “human potential” in terms of the physical and the material, as I suppose most everybody does today.

Commonly, people will think of human potential as the possibility of making such a success in life as a Thomas A. Edison, an Einstein, a Paderewski, an Arthur Rubinstein – or, historically, a Napoleon, or an Alexander the Great.

But now a WHOLE NEW HORIZON loomed transcendently before my mind’s eye – something immeasurably greater and more wonderful than any physical, material, or mechanical accomplishment.

And now, too, an entirely NEW kind of CONFIDENCE began to grip me. I began to exchange SELF-confidence for the confidence that is FAITH in the living Jesus Christ. Self-confidence began to disappear. FAITH, which is RELIANCE on God, began to grow.

And a potentiality that is possible for humans now loomed up stupendously greater than anything I had conceived of before.

I had begun to see, in the Bible, something TREMENDOUS that seems hidden from human eyes in this world. I began to realize that the gospel message which GOD sent by Jesus Christ involves a vast comprehension of God’s great PURPOSE! I began to discover the missing dimension in knowledge – knowledge undiscovered by science, untaught in higher education, glossed over entirely by religion.

Actually, I began to realize that the biblical revelation, and the message Jesus proclaimed, is in fact such STUPENDOUS knowledge that what is being disseminated as higher education is dwarfed into insignificance!

But that monumental message, which was Christ’s gospel – His glorious GOOD news – was soon suppressed, in the very first century!

It is concerned with the Creator’s all-encompassing, overwhelming, overall purpose, involving not only man, but the entire vast and limitless UNIVERSE, to be made over by man, when man comes into his projected GLORY!

This is no imaginary, illusory play on words – it is real!

It means that the great majestic GOD is, literally, reproducing Himself in MAN; that mortal MAN has the transcendent potential of being born into the very GOD FAMILY as an immortal SPIRIT being in superlative GLORY and with creative power, under God and under Christ, to literally make over and renew the face of planets throughout the vastness of endless SPACE!

It is true that hardly one in a thousand humans ever realizes, even partly, his purely human potential as a human. The average human never utilizes even five percent of his mental powers. On the purely human level, man has the potential – if an American – of becoming President of the United States. Or of becoming a Thomas A. Edison, or an Einstein.

But that potential is as nothing compared to the spiritual and transcendent potential of being born into the very GOD FAMILY – and inheriting the very capabilities of GOD!

Actually most of these exciting, inspiring, mind-expanding TRUTHS are never even remotely considered in the religious teachings of this world!

Some time in the spring of 1979, my new book, The Incredible Human Potential, will appear in bookstores all over the English-speaking world. It’s a story too comprehensive to even begin to condense in this “Personal” in The Plain Truth.

Actually I feel with deep conviction that I myself really did not author this book–that the living Jesus Christ is its real author. I was merely like a stenographer writing it down. And with that understanding, I feel I may say that this is the most important – the most tremendously revealing – book since the Bible! Although it will be sold in bookstores, interested readers may reserve a copy now, by mail.

Meanwhile, I might announce now that by next spring also will appear in bookstores everywhere another new book, Seven Proofs of the True Church. This, too, will be a surprising, eye-opening work. Can you believe that of all the religions in the world, including Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Shintoism, Hinduism, the Moslem and the Christian religions, not one (save the one original true Church of God, pictured in the twelfth chapter of Revelation as persecuted, small, hated by Satan) knows WHO and WHAT God is? Could you believe that only this one true Church knows WHAT and WHY man is; why humanity was put on the earth; where we are going; and what is the way? Or that only this one knows the real purpose and meaning of Old Testament Israel – WHY God called them, even though He gave spiritual salvation only to their prophets? Further, do you realize that no other church or religion knows WHAT was the gospel Jesus proclaimed and taught – a gospel suppressed near the middle of the first century, and not proclaimed to the world until our present generation? This book will prove astounding to the reader.

Other books to be found in the bookstores beginning next spring authored by Herbert W. Armstrong are The United States and Britain in Prophecy, Tomorrow – What It Will Be Like, and a new, updated and enlarged book, The Seven Laws of Success.

And still others, God willing, I hope shall be published by our own Everest House, and be available also in bookstores by the fall of 1979.

If God will give me the strength and time, I hope to complete The Autobiography. Half of this was published in one 540-page volume in 1957, with other editions in 1958, 1959, and 1975. I hope to have the entire two volumes complete, available in bookstores everywhere, by the fall of 1979.