II. SECTION 10. What is the Last Judgment?
Lesson 317 I follow in the way appointed me.
- I have a special place to fill; a role for me alone. Salvation waits until I take this part as what I choose to do. Until I make this choice, I am the slave of time and human destiny. But when I willingly and gladly go the way my Father’s plan appointed me to go, then will I recognize salvation is already here, already given all my brothers, and already mine was well.
- Father, Your way is what I choose today. Where it would lead me go, I choose to go; what it would have me do I choose to do. Your way is certain and the end secure. The memory of You awaits me there. And all my sorrows end in Your embrace, which You have promised to Your Son, who thought mistakenly that he had wandered from the sure protection of Your loving Arms. [1]
Our lesson on the last judgment today emphasizes how important making the choice for salvation. Until we recognize our position here in a state of nothingness, we are enslaved to time and to the fate of all humans. When we are blinded to our Father’s love, we fail to see Creation as it was created to be. We keep repeating human history – we keep bringing more children into the world, we keep hoping that there will be a cure for all our diseases, for evil, for aging, and death. We keep competing with one another, going to war, seeing our brothers as separate from us instead of seeing them as one with us. As long as we continue to search for our salvation in the physical realm, time quickly passes, our lives are over, and the world keeps repeating its same cycles.
This morning when I awoke, it was 4:11 a.m. Too early, I grumbled to myself as I reluctantly got out of bed and fumbled in the dark for my glasses and computer. Trudging downstairs, one could never mistake from outward appearances alone my resistance to being called out of bed so early in the morning! If I did not know the difference between my holy Self and the flesh self, I could easily mistake my sighs and bleary eyes as indications of my unwilling participation in God’s plan of salvation. Until I had a few sips of coffee, the joy and gratitude that are always there, were obscured by gravity, grogginess, and grudge.
Salvation comes with our Last Judgment about the ego world. This is the only decision that each of us must make. Nobody else can make this decision for us. We must all come to that place of salvation, when we gladly and willingly say no more to the enchantment, enslavement, and entrapment of human destiny. When we say no more to separation, we make the last judgment necessary in the separated state. Now we see past this world and all its ins and outs, ups and downs, and multitude of opposing choices. We have made the last one judgment that sets us free, that takes the blinders off our eyes, that wakes us from a stupor of madness. We recognize ego world for what it is, and we have declared it a zero. We have learned the lessons of what is not forever, what is not love, what we do not want, and what we do not need. We are no longer content to be a slave of time, fate, unloving relationships, limited resources, and meaningless activity. Salvation teaches us to be free of all that bound us to decay and death. We are free of our corpses, so to speak.
The special part each of us play in this grand scheme is the last special, individual thing we must do in separation. We must bring our individual separateness back to the fold and become one. We must do this happily, willingly, and with a full understanding of what we are putting down in order to return to God. Our Father does not drag us back to His Kingdom by the scruff of our necks, dragging our feet, and hanging on to our lust and lies and perversions. There is no one in God’s Kingdom who is held captive there, who longs to come back to a world like the one we made here, because we do not get to go until we make the last individual judgment we will ever make – we declare the world nothing in order to accept Everything.
In your devotional practice today, come to God as a child who has no preconceived notions of who and what God is. Do not tell God who and what He is; ask Him to show you. When God reveals Himself to you as Love, do not be afraid. When God reveals to you how precious and holy you are, how devoted He is to you, how undemanding and merciful, do not be afraid.
This is a very important message that I give you today, and so I urge you who are reading or listening to this post – be careful which God you pray to for if you pray to the false conception of God you may have in your mind, that false conception of God is a lie of the ego. It will mislead you, disappoint you, and wreak havoc upon your tender faith. When we pray to the false ideas of God, we will be led to attack our brothers, despise those who are different from us, and be drawn into ridiculous at best and vicious at worst ideas about sacrifices necessary to appease his anger, wrath, and spite. Know this: God is love and you will know His Love when you come to know Him.
Join with me in prayer:
Dear Father, We choose to walk in Your path. We choose to go where Love leads. We happily and willingly do our special part in Your plan of salvation today – we make a last judgment upon the separated world and we judge it as nothing. We made a mistake. We left Your Kingdom and thought we would make our own. We chose bodies and egos, Father, but they served only to bring us back to You. We are Your Sons. Lead us on the certain path which ends in Your eternal Kingdom. In the name of Jesus, with Whom we are one. Amen.
[1] A Course In Miracles. Workbook for Students. Lesson 317. Foundation for Inner Peace, Second Edition (1992). p. 459.
Audio credit: the friar patch @ www.eckiefriar.com
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