Part 1 Undoing the Way We See Things Now
Lesson 101 God’s Will for Me is Perfect Happiness.
- Today we will continue with the theme of happiness. This is a key idea in understanding what salvation means. You still believe it asks for suffering as penance for your “sins.” This is not so. Yet you must think it so while you believe that sin is real, and that God’s Son can sin.
- If sin is real, then punishment is just and cannot be escaped. Salvation thus cannot be purchased but through suffering. If sin is real, then happiness must be illusion, for they cannot both be true. The sinful warrant only death and pain, and it is this they ask for. For they know it waits for them, and it will seek them out and find them somewhere, sometime, in some form that evens the account they owe to God. They would escape Him in their fear. And yet He will pursue, and they cannot escape.
- If sin is real, salvation must be pain. Pain is the cost of sin, and suffering can never be escaped, if sin is real. Salvation must be feared, for it will kill, but slowly, taking everything away before it grants the welcome boon of death to victims who are little more than bones before salvation is appeased. Its wrath is boundless, merciless, but wholly just.
- Who would seek out such savage punishment? Who would not flee salvation, and attempt in every way he can to drown the Voice Which offers it to him? Why would he try to listen and accept Its offering? If sin is real, its offering is death, and meted out in cruel form to match the vicious wishes in which sin is born. If sin is real, salvation has become your bitter enemy, the curse of God upon you, who have crucified His Son.
- You need the practice periods today. The exercises teach sin is not real, and all that you believe must come from sin will never happen, for it has no calls. Except atonement with an open mind, which cherishes no lingering belief that you have made a devil of God’s son. There is no sin. We practice with this thought as often as we can today, because it is the basis for today’s idea.
- God’s will for you is perfect happiness because there is no sin, and suffering is causeless. Joy is just, and pain is but the sign you have misunderstood yourself. Fear not the Will of God. But turn to it in confidence that it will set you free from all the consequences sin has wrought in feverish imagination. Say: God’s Will for me is perfect happiness. There is no sin; it has no consequence. So should you start your practice periods, and then attempt again to find the joy these thoughts will introduce into your mind.
- Give these five minutes gladly, to remove the heavy load you lay upon yourself with the insane belief that sin is real. Today escape from madness. You are set on freedom’s road, and now today’s idea brings wings to speed on, and hope to go still faster to the waiting goal of peace. There is no sin. Remember this today and tell yourself as often as you can: God’s will for me is perfect happiness. This is the truth, because there is no sin.[1]
Notes and Personal Application: Jesus tells us today that God wants nothing for us than happiness. In God’s Kingdom, sin does not exist. In God’s Kingdom, there is no savage punishment awaiting for those who would fall into a simulated, insane world where creation would or could turn its back upon the Creator. God did not create us to be whipping boards; we were created in love and by love and for love. God’s Will for us is to be happy.
Jesus says that it is the sinful who warrant death and pain. We ask for death and pain because we owe God for all the things that we have done wrong. In our shame and guilt and sorrow we would flee from an angry God who chases us down. We know we cannot escape, but we run and hide anyway. Salvation spells pain, suffering, sacrifice, loss. It is costly. Someone must pay, and so the sweet, innocent, pure blood of the woolly little lamb is offered in our place.
Jesus says we made it all up. We have made for ourselves a salvation based upon a double whammy of shame and guilt. We make up rules for a flesh body to follow and to give them oomph and power, we say they are God’s Laws. We are unable to live up to them, and we call our failings “sin.” We convince ourselves that sin must be punished, and we live in fear of God and the punishment that we know is coming our way. And then God in His great beneficence deigns to come up with a plan to save us from our sins. Someone innocent, pure, holy, and totally undeserving must take the fall for what we deserved. We would call this “plan of salvation” emotional blackmail, because it is not based upon love, it is based on a lie, followed up by fear, obligation, and guilt.
Instead Jesus is asking us to step away from all we have been taught and listen to what our hearts and minds are telling us. God’s plan of salvation is to save us from the lie that all this insanity is built upon in the first place. We have made a mistake, we have fallen into a simulated, unreal illusion of reality where flesh and blood define the Son of God – where petty trifles give rise to separations within separation. Jesus did not come to pay the price of such nonsense; He came to save us from the idea of sin driven into our consciousness when we tumbled into ego’s simulated world and forgot who we are in God.
The parable that best illustrates this is the Prodigal Son. Take note: The Father did not plan a dungeon of tortures for his wastrel son’s return. He forgave the fact that his son had been deceived by that which is not love. The orgies, substance abuse, false friends, and other riotous acts meant nothing to the Father. He was not keeping an account of the ways in which his son had betrayed him and squandered all his hard-earned money. The Father knew his son would come home because He was in His Son. Sooner or later, His Son would come home.
Nowhere in this parable do we find the Father preparing a dungeon of tortures to punish his wayward son upon his return. Nor we do see the Father beating the living daylights out of his faithful son as a propitiation for his rage and fury over the sins of the prodigal.
We see a Father who waited patiently for his son’s return to sanity. Thanksgiving was celebrated early the day the chastened wit stumbled up the lane and threw himself at his Father’s mercy. “I was wrong,” he said. “There is no place like your Kingdom. Let me earn my keep.” If you are not familiar with the parable, read Luke’s account of the story in Luke 11:15-32.[2]
Christ tells us everything we need to know about God with this story. God is not concerned about our sins; His concern is that we wake up and remember who we are and what we are in Him. God’s Will for us is happiness, our perfect happiness. His joy and our joy are intertwined and will not be complete until we are united. He has prepared no consequences for our sins, because none of it is real. He did not demand the blood of Christ to appease His rage over our mistakes in the hellish realm – He sent His Son to show us that the most gruesome death our egos could come up with to end the Son of God, could not vanquish Him, could not squash His love for us, could not steal His joy or end our happiness, or drive Him from our hearts and minds. He is there to stay!
This Easter Saturday we can liberate ourselves of any residue of fear we have of our loving Father and His plan for our salvation. We remember His love. We remind ourselves that nothing we could ever do or fail to do could cause Him to rage and roar. The story of sin, sacrifice, and appeasement – we see as the ploy of the ego to hurt and manipulate us into thinking that it is our maker, and we are its servants. Jesus came to set us free from this temptation. Jesus tells us that God’s Will for us is perfect happiness. This is the truth because there is no sin.
Let us accept the truth and be free!
[1] A Course in Miracles. Workbook for Students. Lesson 101 God’s Will for me…Foundation of Inner Peace, Second Edition (1992). pp 182-183.
[2] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+15%3A11-32&version=NIV
the friar patch 