30/10/2024
Lesson 101
God’s Will for me is perfect happiness.
1. Today we will continue with the theme of happiness. ²This is a key idea in understanding what salvation means. ³You still believe it asks for suffering as penance for your “sins.” ⁴This is not so. ⁵Yet you must think it so while you believe that sin is real, and that God’s Son can sin.
2. If sin is real, then punishment is just and cannot be escaped. ²Salvation thus cannot be purchased but through suffering. ³If sin is real, then happiness must be illusion, for they cannot both be true. ⁴The sinful warrant only death and pain, and it is this they ask for. ⁵For 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. ⁶They would escape Him in their fear. ⁷And yet He will pursue, and they can not escape.
3. If sin is real, salvation must be pain. ²Pain is the cost of sin, and suffering can never be escaped, if sin is real. ³Salvation 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. ⁴Its wrath is boundless, merciless, but wholly just.
4. Who would seek out such savage punishment? ²Who would not flee salvation, and attempt in every way he can to drown the Voice which offers it to him? ³Why would he try to listen and accept Its offering? ⁴If sin is real, its offering is death, and meted out in cruel form to match the vicious wishes in which sin is born. ⁵If sin is real, salvation has become your bitter enemy, the curse of God upon you who have crucified His Son.
5. You need the practice periods today. ²The exercises teach sin is not real, and all that you believe must come from sin will never happen, for it has no cause. ³Accept Atonement with an open mind, which cherishes no lingering belief that you have made a devil of God’s Son. ⁴There is no sin. ⁵We practice with this thought as often as we can today, because it is the basis for today’s idea.
6. God’s Will for you is perfect happiness because there is no sin, and suffering is causeless. ²Joy is just, and pain is but the sign you have misunderstood yourself. ³Fear not the Will of God. ⁴But turn to it in confidence that it will set you free from all the consequences sin has wrought in feverish imagination. ⁵Say:
⁶God’s Will for me is perfect happiness.
⁷There is no sin; it has no consequence.
⁸So should you start your practice periods, and then attempt again to find the joy these thoughts will introduce into your mind.
7. Give these five minutes gladly, to remove the heavy load you lay upon yourself with the insane belief that sin is real. ²Today escape from madness. ³You are set on freedom’s road, and now today’s idea brings wings to speed you on, and hope to go still faster to the waiting goal of peace. ⁴There is no sin. ⁵Remember this today, and tell yourself as often as you can:
⁶God’s Will for me is perfect happiness.
⁷This is the truth, because there is no sin. (https://acim.org/acim/en/s/505 #1:1-7:7 | W-101.1:1–7:7)
