Part II:2 WHAT IS SALVATION?
- Salvation is a promise, made by God, that you would find your way to Him at last. It cannot but be kept. It guarantees that time will have an end, and all the thoughts that have been born in time will end as well. God’s Word is given every mind which thinks that it has separate thoughts and will replace these thoughts of conflict with the thought of peace.
- The thought of peace was given to God’s Son the instant that his mind had thought of war. There was no need for such a thought before, for peace was given without opposite, and merely was. But when the mind is split there is a need of healing. So the thought that has the power to heal the split became a part of every fragment of the mind that still was one but failed to recognize its oneness. Now it did not know itself, and thought its own identity was lost.
- Salvation is undoing in the sense that it does nothing, failing to support the world of dreams and malice. Thus it lets illusions go. By not supporting them, it merely lets them quietly go down to dust. And what they hid is now revealed; an altar to the holy Name of God whereon His Word is written, with the gifts of your forgiveness laid before it, and the memory of God not far behind.
- Let us come daily to this holy place and spend a while together. Here we share our final dream. It is a dream in which there is no sorrow, for it holds a hint of all the glory given us by God. The grass is pushing through the soil, the trees are budding now, and birds have come to live within their branches. Earth is being born again in new perspective. Night has gone, and we have come together in the light.
- From here we give Salvation to the world, for it is here Salvation was received. The song of our rejoicing is the call to all the world that freedom is returned, that time is almost over, and God’s Son has but an instant more to wait until his Father is remembered, dreams are done, eternity has shined away the world, and only heaven now exists at all.
Lesson 231
Father, I Will But to Remember You.
- What can I seek for, Father, but Your Love? Perhaps I think I seek for something else; a something I have called by many names. Yet is Your Love the only thing I seek, or ever sought. For there is nothing else that I could ever really want to find. Let me remember You. What else could I desire but the truth about myself?
- This is your will, my brother. And you share this will with me, and with the One as well Who is our Father. To remember Him is Heaven. This we seek. And only this is what it will be given us to find.[1]
Meditation for Part II:(Section) 2 and Lesson 231
Salvation is simply undoing the separation, giving no energy to the things in darkness and focusing our minds and hearts upon the truth of God. Salvation is God’s promise to each and every one of us. None of us will be lost in time, in space, alone and vulnerable and cast out of His Kingdom forever. None of us are destined to burn for our mistakes, but rather salvation blots out all thoughts that ever strayed from God. Thoughts of disease, decay, and death will be no more when we no longer find them useful, when we recognize the lie, when we see that we have been deceived by our own arrogance and selfish desire for specialness.
When our minds are healed, they will no longer be twisted by opposites. We will no longer seek peace and war; we will no longer seek love and hate; we will no longer seek joy and sorrow. My happiness does not ride upon your unhappiness. Your worth does not depend upon my worthlessness. We are one in God and with God and all for one and one for all.
No longer do we have any concerns about who we are and where we came from. We will not be concerned about what makes us different, but only what makes us one. We will have no favorites at the expense of having those we dislike; there will be no popularity contests, unmet attention needs, and vying for distinction for we will recognize the gifts and talents of each person as being vital, irreplaceable, and of equal worth.
Jesus encourages us to quiet our minds and still our beings to meditate upon these concepts. Every day we are to set aside all the time it takes for us to give no thought to the ways of the world, but rather fill our minds with this vision of Christ – a dream of no sorrow, a reflection of the glory of God, a place of the earth being born anew in love and joy and peace. We can behold nature that is peaceful, helpful, abundant, and kind. No longer does Creation prey upon one another in lust, hunger, vengeance, or destruction. Creation is kind, interdependent, loving, helpful, and productive – the grass, the trees, the birds – we are one with Creation and the Creator.
These thoughts give Salvation to the world, it is in our peaceful, loving minds where Salvation is received. This is our freedom from all thoughts of hate, fear, and reprisal. This is a cause to rejoice that the time of death and darkness is coming to a close, and we have only a little while to wait until we remember our God fully, we awaken to the truth, we return happily and with wholehearted commitment back into the eternal Kingdom of God
As we meditate upon Lesson 231, we remind ourselves that our will is to remember God, our Father, Lord, and King. We thought we wanted a lot of other things, but now we know, that it is only our Father’s Love we want, our Father’s Love we will have and share. No matter what we called it, bottom line, it is God’s Love we sought, for in God’s Love we have everything we were looking for, everything we ever wanted, everything we ever dreamed. It is in God’s Love we find our truth, our identity, our Everything.
Jesus tells us today that to remember God is Heaven. It is what we seek – even when we thought we were seeking other things to take His place; God is what we seek, and it is only God that we find at the end of all our seeking. He is at the end of all our mistakes, our mistrials, our wanderings. No matter how many wrong trees we bark up trying to find peace and satisfaction and bliss, God will not be replaced, forgotten, or lost. We are His and He is ours.
Let these words today be your comfort and your guide. If you are given to feeling ashamed of the roads you traveled to find God, lift up your head and be thankful that those roads you traveled taught you everything you need to know to deliver you from the snares of time. If you are given to being preachy and lecturing others on their sins and shortcomings, please note that there is not a one of us on this earth who is in a position to judge, condemn, or make rules for who gets in and who stays out. If you tend to sermonize and weaponize salvation, understand that when we attack our brothers, we have attacked ourselves and have removed our minds from the Kingdom of Heaven.
Today we get quiet, we get very still, we come to our Father with our altars cleared of thoughts of this world and ask Him to give us the vision of Christ. We see the real Creation in our minds. We let our hearts rejoice in the beauty of pure and holy nature where lion and lamb lay together in peace, where we are not preying upon nature, but loving it, tending to it, giving and receiving simultaneously in a virtuous cycle of expanding love, joy, and peace. Dare to envision what can only be given by God. Do not think for a moment that we can force this upon the world through politics, through shame, through pointing fingers and blaming one species over another, one race against another, one religion against another, one country against another. We are all in this together. We have all strayed from the glory of God and each one of us are called to bring our holy minds back to the place where they belong. This is the way to Salvation, this is the Second Coming of Christ as each of us joins with our Savior, standing with Him and becoming one.
[1] A Course in Miracles. Workbook for Students. Part II:2 and Lesson 231, Foundation for Inner Peace, Second Edition (1992).
Audio credit: The Friar Patch @ http://www.eckiefriar.com
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