II. The Voice for God 7-12
7. The Voice of the Holy Spirit does not command because it is incapable of arrogance. It does not demand, because it does not seek control. It does not overcome, because it does not attack. It merely reminds. It is compelling only because of what it reminds you of. It brings to your mind the other way, remaining quiet even in the midst of the turmoil you may make. The Voice for God is always quiet because it speaks of peace. Peace is stronger than war because it heals. War is division, not increase. No one gains from strife. What profited it a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? If you listen to the wrong voice you have lost sight of your soul. You cannot lose it, but you can not know it. It is therefore “lost” to you until you choose right.
8. The Holy Spirit is your Guide in choosing. He is in the part of your mind that always speaks for the right choice because He speaks for God. He is your remaining communication with God, which you can interrupt but cannot destroy. The Holy Spirit is the way in which God’s Will is done on earth as it is in Heaven. Both Heaven and earth are in you because the call of both is in your mind. The Voice for God comes from your own altars to Him. These altars are not things, they are devotions. Yet you have other devotions now. Your divided devotion has given you the two voices, and you must choose at which altar you want to serve. The call you answer now is an evaluation because it is a decision. The decision is very simple. It is made on the basis of which call is worth more to you.
9. My mind will always be like yours, because we were created as equals. It was only my decision which gave me all power in Heaven and earth. My only gift to you is to help you make the same decision. This decision is the choice to share it because the decision itself is the decision to share. It is made by giving and is therefore the one choice that resembles true creation. I am your model for decision. By deciding for God I showed you that this decision can be made, and that you can make it.
10. I have assured you that the Mind that decided for me is also in you, and that you can let it change you just as it changed me. This Mind is unequivocal because it hears only one Voice and answers in only one way. You are the light of the world with me. Rest does not come from sleeping but from waking. The Holy Spirit is the call to awaken and be glad. The world is very tired because it is the idea of weariness. Our task is the joyous one of waking it to the Call for God. Everyone will answer the Call of the Holy Spirit, or the Sonship cannot be as one. What better vocation could there be for any part of the Kingdom than to restore it to the perfect integration that can make it whole? Hear only this through the Holy Spirit within you and teach your brothers to listen as I am teaching you.
11. When you are tempted by the wrong voice, call on me to remind you how to heal by sharing my decision and making it stronger. As we share this goal, we increase its power to attract the whole Sonship, and to bring it back into the oneness in which it was created. Remember that “yoke” means “join together,” and “burden” means “message.” Let us restate “my yoke is easy and my burden light” in this way: “Let us join together, for my message is Light.”
12. I have enjoined you to behave as I behaved, but we must respond to the same Mind to do this. This Mind is the Holy Spirit, Whose will is for God always. He teaches you how to keep me as the model for your thought, and to behave like me as a result. The power of our joint motivation is beyond belief, but not beyond accomplishment. What we can accomplish together has no limits, because the Call for God is the call to the unlimited. Child of God, my message is for you, to hear and give away as you answer the Holy Spirit within you. [1]
Today as we come to our devotional practice, contemplate the quiet, knowing Voice for God reminding us of the Other Way in which we can simply put our egos aside and walk with calm assurance even through the hottest messes we make in our relationships and circumstances in our lives. We will always know the Voice for God because it is quiet and peaceful, not loud and brash! As we become more familiar with Holy Spirit, we begin to understand what has been apparent all along – nobody gains from strife. No matter if you won a billion dollar lottery or if you strove until you were the richest guy that ever walked the face of the earth – what possible good could it do unless you were inspired of Joy, unless your soul was happy, unless you knew God?
We must stop seeking outside of ourselves for Holy Spirit, for Holy Spirit is our inner Guide Who was given us since the separation and never taken away from us. We can choose not to listen to our Inner Guide, we can listen to the mindless ego chatter, we can try to drown out the Voice for God with loud music, unholy relationships, and vicious thoughts, but the Voice for God can never be destroyed. Holy Spirit is the means by which God’s Will is done on earth as it is in Heaven. In paragraph two Jesus explains to us that calls for both Heaven and earth have divided the devotion of our minds. We devote ourselves to the call which proves itself to have more value. The world beckons and calls to us from the time we are born. It seems to hold much value and promise. From the outside looking in there are those who lead lives which seem full of beautiful images of people, cars, houses, travel, and acclaim. Little do we know that devotion to the material world leads to certain despair, emptiness, loneliness, and weariness. No matter how many people warn us, we all have to find out for ourselves in one way or the other! Sooner or later we all pay heed to the Call for God – Jesus urges us, however, to choose sooner rather than later. As impossible as it is for the ego to understand His love and concern for us, Jesus and all Whom He represents finds no joy in our suffering or in the disappointments and hardships that we make for ourselves in the world of striving and stress, despair and death.
In paragraph nine, Jesus tells us that there is nothing special about His mind. His mind and our minds were created as equal. The only thing that sets Jesus apart from us is that His divided devotion became one united devotion to God. Jesus was a man of flesh and blood just like you and me. He had an ego. He did things that are not recorded by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The reason that his family and the people of his own household found it hard to believe in him was because unlike the way Jesus is portrayed in the myths that arose around him, he was not born with a halo over his head. He was a mix of good and bad. He told the truth when it suited him and otherwise he fibbed. He was generous and greedy. He said kind things and he said mean things. He obeyed and he disobeyed his parents. He reacted to the egotistical as an ego and not a Son of God. He was chaste at times and other times he followed his lust. There were times he drank too much and ate too much. There were times he was industrious and other times he was lazy. He cursed, he swore, he had a potty mouth. He ran with a rough crowd. None of us have anything on Jesus when it comes to sin and shame. There was nothing about his blood that was magical or his flesh that was exceptional in any way. You may say that I am being sacrilegious by sharing this about Jesus but ask Him for yourself in your thoughts and prayers. Instead of idolizing Jesus and making of Him some extraordinary Being Whom none of us can truly relate to, go beyond what others have made of Him and get to know the real Jesus.
Jesus is our Savior because He decided for God. He put aside His ego and devoted Himself entirely to God and all power in Heaven and in earth was given Him. In devoting Himself to God, He devoted Himself to all of Creation – to you and to me and to everybody and everything that has ever been born on the face of the earth. When we decide for Christ, we join with Him, we have one altar instead of two, we stand for oneness and unity with God.
The Mind that decided for Jesus is also in you and in me, and we can let it change us just as it changed Him. This Mind hears only the Voice for God and responds with single, radiant devotion that awakens us from our weary restless dreams with the Call for Joy. We join in that call until everyone awakens, and the Sonship is one. This is my calling, and it is your calling – we stand with Christ and teach the gospel of wholeness, of integration, of restoration. Jesus tells us to hear only this through the Voice for God within us, to teach our brothers to listen to the Holy Spirit as He teaches us.
We are all tempted by egotistical drives and impulses. We all think that we are the center of the universe at times. We think we have a special “in” with God. We are tempted to think God will smite our enemies for us or shower us with blessings to prove we really are His little darlings. We forget who and what we are and respond from anger, spite, or peevishness. Call on me, Jesus tells us, and be healed by making and sharing my decision. As we choose with Christ, we teach others to do the same. Our choice for oneness is a choice for healing, for joining together instead of tearing apart, for bringing Light instead of more darkness to every relationship, to every circumstance, to every event.
When we make the decision for total commitment to God, our Mind becomes whole and holy. The higher mind where Holy Spirit resides expands and cancels out the lower mind of the ego. This is not a one-and-done kind of magic! We learn to be like Jesus. This is a process, and it looks and feels rough and bumpy at times. The power that comes from joining with Christ is beyond belief because belief is an ego function. It has little meaning; believing in something has no power, you can spend your whole life believing in something, but it will not make it true. Accomplishment however has no limits, and the Voice for God is the call to the freedom and liberty of borderless, boundless, limitless achievement. This can only be ours by joining with Christ, by dedicating our minds to the Voice for God and communicating His message of Love and Devotion.
Because this is not the message of the ego, do not expect to be embraced by the more traditional systems of belief anymore than Jesus was embraced by the belief systems of His days on earth. The true gospel of Christ is mutinous to the mind of ego. Shock and dismay at the ego’s attempts to twist and pervert it, mythologize and theologize what it simply cannot understand are not acceptable responses. Harmless and helpful, we are called to heal and restore, not rant and rave and cast aspersions! This has been a hard lesson for me and one in which I am still learning and for which I trust in your forgiveness. When we accept the call for God in our lives, we set ourselves apart from all that would make another call upon us. To engage in the world simply holds so little real interest to us that others may find us boring and insular. When we follow the Voice for God, the work we do in the Spirit is largely without physical acclaim or appreciation. While the intangible Gifts of the Spirit are difficult if not impossible to prove in a material world, they are truly the only Gifts worth receiving and giving!
[1]A Course in Miracles. Chapter 5 Healing and Wholeness II The voice for God 7-12. Foundation for Inner Peace, Second Edition (1992).
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