Review & Lesson 171

ACIM Lesson 171: God is but love and therefore so am I.

Streamed LIVE, Sunday October 6, 2024.
Watch here or join us on Zoom

Renewing Our Commitment

As we embark on this review, we approach it with a renewed sense of dedication. We’re not just going through the motions; we’re investing more time and effort, recognising that we’re preparing ourselves for a profound shift in understanding.

Addressing Uncertainty

Are you feeling unsure about your spiritual journey? It’s natural to have doubts, but Master Jesus reminds us of the importance of moving beyond superficial engagement. We must remain vigilant, guarding against the mind’s tendency to wander.

Lessons Revisited

This review brings us back to two fundamental lessons:

  1. Lesson 151: All things are echoes of the voice of God
  2. Lesson 152: The power of decision is my own

These teachings invite us to reconsider our perception of the world and our role in shaping our experiences.

A Prayer for Guidance

Let us reflect on this beautiful prayer:

Steady our feet, our Father. Let our doubts be quiet and our holy minds be still, and speak to us. We have no words to give to You. We would but listen to Your Word, and make it ours. Lead our practicing as does a father lead a little child along a way he does not understand. Yet does he follow, sure that he is safe because his father leads the way for him.

This prayer acknowledges our vulnerability and our trust in divine guidance. Like children, we may not fully understand the path, but we move forward with faith.

Lesson 171: God Is But Love, and Therefore So Am I

Today’s lesson reminds us of our true nature. As we delve into the idea that “God is but love, and therefore so am I,” we’re invited to recognise the divine essence within ourselves and others.

Gratitude and Love

As we continue our spiritual journey, let us carry forward a sense of love, praise, and gratitude for God. Each step, each lesson, brings us closer to understanding our true selves.

Next Steps for Embracing Love

  1. Meditate on ACIM Lesson 171: “God is but love, and therefore, so am I.”
  2. Seek support: Join like-minded individuals who are also on this journey of self-discovery and growth.
  3. Scroll down & read ACIM Lesson 171 in preparation for the session. You may also want to read ACIM Lesson 151 All things are echoes for the voice of God and lesson 152, The power of decision is my own.
  4. Join us on Zoom and interact live with the session.

See you there!
Dehyana

Lesson 171
God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

1. (151) All things are echoes of the Voice for God.

²God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

2. (152) The power of decision is my own.

²God is but Love, and therefore so am I.

Lesson 151
All things are echoes of the Voice for God.

1. No one can judge on partial evidence. ²That is not judgment. ³It is merely an opinion based on ignorance and doubt. ⁴Its seeming certainty is but a cloak for the uncertainty it would conceal. ⁵It needs irrational defense because it is irrational. ⁶And its defense seems strong, convincing, and without a doubt because of all the doubting underneath.

2. You do not seem to doubt the world you see. ²You do not really question what is shown you through the body’s eyes. ³Nor do you ask why you believe it, even though you learned a long while since your senses do deceive. ⁴That you believe them to the last detail which they report is even stranger, when you pause to recollect how frequently they have been faulty witnesses indeed! ⁵Why would you trust them so implicitly? ⁶Why but because of underlying doubt, which you would hide with show of certainty?

3. How can you judge? ²Your judgment rests upon the witness that your senses offer you. ³Yet witness never falser was than this. ⁴But how else do you judge the world you see? ⁵You place pathetic faith in what your eyes and ears report. ⁶You think your fingers touch reality, and close upon the truth. ⁷This is awareness that you understand, and think more real than what is witnessed to by the eternal Voice for God Himself.

4. Can this be judgment? ²You have often been urged to refrain from judging, not because it is a right to be withheld from you. ³You cannot judge. ⁴You merely can believe the ego’s judgments, all of which are false. ⁵It guides your senses carefully, to prove how weak you are; how helpless and afraid, how apprehensive of just punishment, how black with sin, how wretched in your guilt.

5. This thing it speaks of, and would yet defend, it tells you is yourself. ²And you believe that this is so with stubborn certainty. ³Yet underneath remains the hidden doubt that what it shows you as reality with such conviction it does not believe. ⁴It is itself alone that it condemns. ⁵It is within itself it sees the guilt. ⁶It is its own despair it sees in you.

6. Hear not its voice. ²The witnesses it sends to prove to you its evil is your own are false, and speak with certainty of what they do not know. ³Your faith in them is blind because you would not share the doubts their lord can not completely vanquish. ⁴You believe to doubt his vassals is to doubt yourself.

7. Yet you must learn to doubt their evidence will clear the way to recognize yourself, and let the Voice for God alone be Judge of what is worthy of your own belief. ²He will not tell you that your brother should be judged by what your eyes behold in him, nor what his body’s mouth says to your ears, nor what your fingers’ touch reports of him. ³He passes by such idle witnesses, which merely bear false witness to God’s Son. ⁴He recognizes only what God loves, and in the holy light of what He sees do all the ego’s dreams of what you are vanish before the splendor He beholds.

8. Let Him be Judge of what you are, for He has certainty in which there is no doubt, because it rests on Certainty so great that doubt is meaningless before Its face. ²Christ cannot doubt Himself. ³The Voice for God can only honor Him, rejoicing in His perfect, everlasting sinlessness. ⁴Whom He has judged can only laugh at guilt, unwilling now to play with toys of sin; unheeding of the body’s witnesses before the rapture of Christ’s holy face.

9. And thus He judges you. ²Accept His Word for what you are, for He bears witness to your beautiful creation, and the Mind Whose Thought created your reality. ³What can the body mean to Him Who knows the glory of the Father and the Son? ⁴What whispers of the ego can He hear? ⁵What could convince Him that your sins are real? ⁶Let Him be Judge as well of everything that seems to happen to you in this world. ⁷His lessons will enable you to bridge the gap between illusions and the truth.

10. He will remove all faith that you have placed in pain, disaster, suffering and loss. ²He gives you vision which can look beyond these grim appearances, and can behold the gentle face of Christ in all of them. ³You will no longer doubt that only good can come to you who are beloved of God, for He will judge all happenings, and teach the single lesson that they all contain.

11. He will select the elements in them which represent the truth, and disregard those aspects which reflect but idle dreams. ²And He will reinterpret all you see, and all occurrences, each circumstance, and every happening that seems to touch on you in any way from His one frame of reference, wholly unified and sure. ³And you will see the love beyond the hate, the constancy in change, the pure in sin, and only Heaven’s blessing on the world.

12. Such is your resurrection, for your life is not a part of anything you see. ²It stands beyond the body and the world, past every witness for unholiness, within the Holy, holy as Itself. ³In everyone and everything His Voice would speak to you of nothing but your Self and your Creator, Who is one with Him. ⁴So will you see the holy face of Christ in everything, and hear in everything no sound except the echo of God’s Voice.

13. We practice wordlessly today, except at the beginning of the time we spend with God. ²We introduce these times with but a single, slow repeating of the thought with which the day begins. ³And then we watch our thoughts, appealing silently to Him Who sees the elements of truth in them. ⁴Let Him evaluate each thought that comes to mind, remove the elements of dreams, and give them back again as clean ideas that do not contradict the Will of God.

14. Give Him your thoughts, and He will give them back as miracles which joyously proclaim the wholeness and the happiness God wills His Son, as proof of His eternal Love. ²And as each thought is thus transformed, it takes on healing power from the Mind which saw the truth in it, and failed to be deceived by what was falsely added. ³All the threads of fantasy are gone. ⁴And what remains is unified into a perfect Thought that offers its perfection everywhere.

15. Spend fifteen minutes thus when you awake, and gladly give another fifteen more before you go to sleep. ²Your ministry begins as all your thoughts are purified. ³So are you taught to teach the Son of God the holy lesson of his sanctity. ⁴No one can fail to listen, when you hear the Voice for God give honor to God’s Son. ⁵And everyone will share the thoughts with you which He has retranslated in your mind.

16. Such is your Eastertide. ²And so you lay the gift of snow-white lilies on the world, replacing witnesses to sin and death. ³Through your transfiguration is the world redeemed, and joyfully released from guilt. ⁴Now do we lift our resurrected minds in gladness and in gratitude to Him Who has restored our sanity to us.

17. And we will hourly remember Him Who is salvation and deliverance. ²As we give thanks, the world unites with us and happily accepts our holy thoughts, which Heaven has corrected and made pure. ³Now has our ministry begun at last, to carry round the world the joyous news that truth has no illusions, and the peace of God, through us, belongs to everyone.

Lesson 152
The power of decision is my own.

1. No one can suffer loss unless it be his own decision. ²No one suffers pain except his choice elects this state for him. ³No one can grieve nor fear nor think him sick unless these are the outcomes that he wants. ⁴And no one dies without his own consent. ⁵Nothing occurs but represents your wish, and nothing is omitted that you choose. ⁶Here is your world, complete in all details. ⁷Here is its whole reality for you. ⁸And it is only here salvation is.

2. You may believe that this position is extreme, and too inclusive to be true. ²Yet can truth have exceptions? ³If you have the gift of everything, can loss be real? ⁴Can pain be part of peace, or grief of joy? ⁵Can fear and sickness enter in a mind where love and perfect holiness abide? ⁶Truth must be all-inclusive, if it be the truth at all. ⁷Accept no opposites and no exceptions, for to do so is to contradict the truth entirely.

3. Salvation is the recognition that the truth is true, and nothing else is true. ²This you have heard before, but may not yet accept both parts of it. ³Without the first, the second has no meaning. ⁴But without the second, is the first no longer true. ⁵Truth cannot have an opposite. ⁶This can not be too often said and thought about. ⁷For if what is not true is true as well as what is true, then part of truth is false. ⁸And truth has lost its meaning. ⁹Nothing but the truth is true, and what is false is false.

4. This is the simplest of distinctions, yet the most obscure. ²But not because it is a difficult distinction to perceive. ³It is concealed behind a vast array of choices that do not appear to be entirely your own. ⁴And thus the truth appears to have some aspects that belie consistency, but do not seem to be but contradictions introduced by you.

5. As God created you, you must remain unchangeable, with transitory states by definition false. ²And that includes all shifts in feeling, alterations in conditions of the body and the mind; in all awareness and in all response. ³This is the all-inclusiveness which sets the truth apart from falsehood, and the false kept separate from the truth, as what it is.

6. Is it not strange that you believe to think you made the world you see is arrogance? ²God made it not. ³Of this you can be sure. ⁴What can He know of the ephemeral, the sinful and the guilty, the afraid, the suffering and lonely, and the mind that lives within a body that must die? ⁵You but accuse Him of insanity, to think He made a world where such things seem to have reality. ⁶He is not mad. ⁷Yet only madness makes a world like this.

7. To think that God made chaos, contradicts His Will, invented opposites to truth, and suffers death to triumph over life; all this is arrogance. ²Humility would see at once these things are not of Him. ³And can you see what God created not? ⁴To think you can is merely to believe you can perceive what God willed not to be. ⁵And what could be more arrogant than this?

8. Let us today be truly humble, and accept what we have made as what it is. ²The power of decision is our own. ³Decide but to accept your rightful place as co-creator of the universe, and all you think you made will disappear. ⁴What rises to awareness then will be all that there ever was, eternally as it is now. ⁵And it will take the place of self-deceptions made but to usurp the altar to the Father and the Son.

9. Today we practice true humility, abandoning the false pretense by which the ego seeks to prove it arrogant. ²Only the ego can be arrogant. ³But truth is humble in acknowledging its mightiness, its changelessness and its eternal wholeness, all-encompassing, God’s perfect gift to His beloved Son. ⁴We lay aside the arrogance which says that we are sinners, guilty and afraid, ashamed of what we are; and lift our hearts in true humility instead to Him Who has created us immaculate, like to Himself in power and in love.

10. The power of decision is our own. ²And we accept of Him that which we are, and humbly recognize the Son of God. ³To recognize God’s Son implies as well that all self-concepts have been laid aside, and recognized as false. ⁴Their arrogance has been perceived. ⁵And in humility the radiance of God’s Son, his gentleness, his perfect sinlessness, his Father’s Love, his right to Heaven and release from hell, are joyously accepted as our own.

11. Now do we join in glad acknowledgment that lies are false, and only truth is true. ²We think of truth alone as we arise, and spend five minutes practicing its ways, encouraging our frightened minds with this:

³The power of decision is my own. ⁴This day I will accept myself as what my Father’s Will created me to be.

⁵Then will we wait in silence, giving up all self-deceptions, as we humbly ask our Self that He reveal Himself to us. ⁶And He Who never left will come again to our awareness, grateful to restore His home to God, as it was meant to be.

12. In patience wait for Him throughout the day, and hourly invite Him with the words with which the day began, concluding it with this same invitation to your Self. ²God’s Voice will answer, for He speaks for you and for your Father. ³He will substitute the peace of God for all your frantic thoughts, the truth of God for self-deceptions, and God’s Son for your illusions of yourself. (https://acim.org/acim/en/s/558#1:1-12:3 | W-152.1:1–12:3)

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