“Pray always, lest you enter into temptation, and lose your reward. Be faithful unto the end, and lo, I am with you. These words are not of man nor of men, but of me, even Jesus Christ, your Redeemer, by the will of the Father. Amen.”
Book of Doctrine and Covenants, 30:4c-d, Community of Christ, 2004 Edition
Take a deep breath before reading on.
Here is what happened when I read the above scripture verses. Certain words stood out. I’ve made them bold here:
“These words are not of man nor of men, but of me, even Jesus Christ…”
You know what? Let’s go with only the words. Try reading this arrangement:
not of man
nor of men
but of me
There! Now it appears as pure poetry, which is the way I heard it in my mind. Read it aloud to yourself, if you are in a place where you can. Feel the rhythm.
quick-quick Slow
quick-quick Slow
quick-quick Slow
Feel the metrical structure. The triplet quality should be apparent by now. Two unaccented syllables followed by an accented one. Here it is rendered in symbols:
_ _ /
_ _ /
_ _ /
Perhaps you want to cut in now. Say: Jake, what are you getting at? What do you want us to take away from this post?
If you must, disregard the poetic context and go full-on church history and doctrine. Read it in the LDS edition if you like: D&C 31:13. I don’t see this exact phrase showing up elsewhere in the standard works. Perhaps that makes it important. Also, I have not forgotten to give you the background. I just don’t care about it. The background is only important if that is where you, the reader, choose to go next.
Welcome to poetry. One day I was reading left to right. A series of words caught my eye, like a pretty lady strolling down the street. Looking once wasn’t enough. I had to look again.
not of man
nor of men
but of me
Today I’m sharing words which enchanted me. Now you get to read into those words whatever you want. Take a deep breath. Scroll back up and reread them.
What do the words mean for you? What do the words do to you? And if you step one foot beyond the words themselves, where do you find yourself?
Image Credit: NASA.
(Shared for enjoyment. For the background on the featured image, read a short post on space station gardening).
Wheat & Tares 
Hmm, well, when I read the lines, I get a different rhythm. If we’re talking about accentual verse, these feel more like amphimacers than anapests because I would scan these lines as:
/ _ / rather than _ _ /. Granted, the amphimacer is often used as a metrical substitution for an anapest, but I still get the feel of an initial accent there. And if they’re more like amphimacers than anapests, I think there’s an intentional emphasis on the “not”,”nor” and “but”, which would emphasize the kind of negational intent of the first two lines and the affirmation of the third line, so from a metrical, i.e. accentual standpoint, that would sort of make sense. From the standpoint of quantitative verse, I’d say you were spot on. The anapest in Roman poetry (Latin language) is two short vowel sounds and a long. We don’t really have a long “a” sound in the first line or a long “e” sound in the second, but I think the vowel length differs enough. Although it does get weird because Roman poetry allows for a lot of substitutions; e.g. an anapest and a spondee would be considered to be of equal “length” and therefore it would be permitted to substitute one for the other. And elisions make it even more complicated. Catullus’s poem 5 is just one example. So with all of that being said, I think the rhythm and the pacing of the words is meant to reinforce Christ’s authority and the clear hierarchy of truth and divinity; Christianity in general, and therefore by inclusion LDS churches, is invested in the separation of the “worldly” from the divine and these phrases intend to do that, not only through semantic meaning, but also through prosody. The phrases, when stacked on top of each other the way you’ve done here, emphasize the power and authority not only of Christ’s words but of his position in the divine hierarchy. He is emphasizing that he is speaking these words, not some random human being or random group of human beings. The prosodic elements therefore function to reinforce the denotative meaning of the words themselves. My .02.
Really enjoyed your response, Brother Sky. Reading the words in the prose context of D&C, I agree with your scanning. As I thought it over during the writing of this post, I think I arrived at the anapest reading only after I took the words out of the D&C and arranged them into three lines. Then I experimented with them as a standalone chant, and in the repetition of it I arrived at the anapest approach: _ _ /. Even then it’s not so much about the vowel sounds for me as it is the pace of delivery, the quick-quick Slow. Not the best scan from a natural speech perspective, but for me really enjoyable as a stylized chant rhythm. But yes, in the context of the D&C section, it’s more like you say, both for the accents and the doctrinal messaging.