ACIM Daily Lesson 343 I am not asked to make a sacrifice to find the mercy and the peace of God. 1. The end of suffering can not be loss.
I am not asked to make a sacrifice
to find the mercy and the peace of God.
Photo by John Gardiner of Whangarei, New Zealand
Lesson 343
I am not asked to make a sacrifice to find the mercy and the peace of God.
1. The end of suffering can not be loss. ²The gift of everything can be but gain. ³You only give. ⁴You never take away. ⁵And You created me to be like You, so sacrifice becomes impossible for me as well as You. ⁶I, too, must give. ⁷And so all things are given unto me forever and forever. ⁸As I was created I remain. ⁹Your Son can make no sacrifice, for he must be complete, having the function of completing You. ¹⁰I am complete because I am Your Son. ¹¹I cannot lose, for I can only give, and everything is mine eternally.
2. The mercy and the peace of God are free. ²Salvation has no cost. ³It is a gift that must be freely given and received. ⁴And it is this that we would learn today.
The idea that God asks sacrifice of us is so ingrained that Jesus must strongly and frequently reinforce that this is not true. He tells us often, as he does here, that God does not want our sacrifice. We do not lose by turning to God, we only gain thereby because God does not take; He only gives. He gives us love, joy, and peace eternally. Because we were created like God, this must be true for us as well. All that we receive we give. All that we give, we receive,
As we practice what the Course teaches, we learn that giving is receiving.
All that we give, we receive, and so as we learn to give all to all, we learn that we receive all. As Jesus says in this beautiful prayer, ⁷And so all things are given unto me forever and forever. This is what God means for us as we accept His gift. It is the understanding of what it means to be an extension of God. We are like Him and complete Him.
I have learned that as I give forgiveness, I receive forgiveness. The more love I give, the more love I feel. The more peaceful my life becomes, the more peace others feel in my presence. It has also taught me to accept that there is no loss in giving as God gives. The more I give the gifts of God that I have received, the more I experience these gifts.
The only thing God asks of us is that we accept what we are as His creation.
What I give up is no sacrifice at all. As I remember my true Self, I am losing interest in pain, suffering, and death. This could hardly be considered a sacrifice. We only give up the belief in what is not real. This made me think of something that happened in the past. I thought I had lost a friend due to a misunderstanding.
There didn’t seem to be a way to heal the rift, and I could have felt unfairly treated. Instead, I asked for another way to see this, and I was led to simply love everyone involved. I had to “sacrifice” righteous indignation but was this really a sacrifice? Righteous indignation certainly didn’t bring me any happiness or peace. I chose to love and to keep loving, and soon the whole incident shifted without my interference. I gave love to receive love. So, I continue to monitor my beliefs and their effects and to forgive all that does not bring me closer to God. I freely accept the gift of salvation.
This is a world of suffering, so how is it that giving it up could be a sacrifice?
It’s strange that we have to be convinced that letting go of the idea of an endless cycle of birth and death with all its pain and suffering is not a sacrifice. Stranger still that we are afraid of giving up the fiction of a separate and special self. Lifetime after lifetime, we choose a different self to express in our made-up world, and never are we satisfied. What a relief it will be to finally know our Self.
Because in our search for specialness, we have chosen to perceive ourselves as less than we are, we seek endlessly for fulfillment, always trying to get more of everything, never feeling whole. Like everything in the world, this is upside-down thinking. To know our Self, we must give, not take, because our nature is to give. Giving is how we receive. This makes no sense to the separated mind that sees giving as loss. This is why we resist salvation so strongly.
In reality, I have never lost anything.
I am whole and complete even as I pretend to be something else. I have come to believe that giving up the world may not be a sacrifice at all. Sometimes I know it is not, and other times I think it is not, but with lingering uncertainty. I recognize that uncertainty for the insanity it is, and I become willing to know the truth.
I must be willing if I want salvation because it can only be received if I am willing to receive it and if I am willing to give it. At times, I notice that judgment still lingers in my mind. Each time I become aware of a judgmental thought, I remember that I am not interested in this anymore. I give up the judgmental thought, and I give love instead. That is, I allow the truth about the other to come into my mind. As I do this, I receive that same truth for myself, and thus we are both blessed as I give and receive freely.
Regina’s Tips
Regina talked about how we go through many shifts as we awaken. I’m sure that we have all experienced that. Sometimes a shift will be so dramatic that we think we are there, fully awakened, only to discover there is more. It’s good to know this so that we are not fooled. It’s good that people who have gone on before us have taken the time to write about it so that we know what to expect.
I am very grateful to them. Regina says this: The miracle moves us, one shift at a time, from the sense of self relative to something else, including relative to God, to the edge of unselfconscious or no sense of self. At this edge, which we gradually acclimate to one shift at a time, we are ready for the final movement beyond any sense of self or other.
She also talks about forgiveness, and I think that while the stages of awakening are important, I think that forgiveness is essential for most of us right now. Here is what she says.
As our special theme says, “Now is forgiveness seen as justified.”
I’d like to look at that last sentence for a moment before we move to today’s workbook lesson. It says that when we are at that edge, which is sometimes referred to as the edge of a cliff—also referred to as the edge of the bridge in previous tips—“forgiveness is seen as justified.” If we need to get all the way to that edge before we see forgiveness as justified, then prior to that final perception, we will sometimes (or often) think forgiveness is not justified. We will think we have a right to feel affected, offended, afraid, hurt, angry, controlled, etcetera. However, if we believe we are fully right about our right to be affected, we refuse the miracle.
That is the purpose of faith. Before we arrive at the edge of perception and see clearly that all forgiveness is justified, we need to have faith that forgiveness is justified. Even if we cannot understand how it is justified, we need the faith to forgive anyway. This faith, followed by a conscious choice, is how we open up to the miracles that usher us gently to the threshold of truth.
My Thoughts
I sometimes have a brief moment in which I feel affected by someone’s words or actions. But that passes quickly because I am fully accepting of forgiveness. Forgiveness is always justified. Why it is justified doesn’t matter to me, I just know it is. I suppose that if I had to give a reason, it would be that none of this is real and that everyone is living a specific script for a specific reason.
Judging their script isn’t possible because I don’t know why it is what it is, and I’m not interested in judging it. I don’t walk out of a movie angry with a character who acted a certain way. This experience I am having now is absolutely no different than a movie I watch on the screen. It just makes no sense to judge a movie even if I imagine myself in it.
In the same way, I don’t know why someone else chose the script they are experiencing; I don’t know why I chose the script for this lifetime for myself. Thus, it makes no sense to judge myself for my part in it. That is quite a relief. Regina goes on to talk about the lesson and to remind us that the ego is not going to let go of the idea of sacrifice easily. It wants to blame others and to see itself unfairly treated. She encourages us to use the Loving All Method or the Rest, Accept, Trust method to allow the miracle to bring us closer to the truth.
I used to think it was a sacrifice to let someone off the hook.
It took so long to heal the relationship with my ex-husband because it seemed to mean I had to sacrifice in order to forgive his very “obvious to me” sins. From my point of view, he did a lot of things that resulted in pain for others, and he never apologized or even accepted responsibility for them. Why did he deserve forgiveness? Why should his victims suffer and he not suffer?
I did choose to forgive, though. It was at first, as Regina said. I got to the edge of perception where I thought he didn’t deserve forgiveness. I stood at that cliff believing that my unforgiveness was justified. From there, I had to take a leap of faith. I had to believe in Jesus and what he was telling me. Then I had to make a conscious choice to forgive despite not understanding why forgiveness was justified. That choice to forgive anyway opened me to the miracle that took me the rest of the way. It also took him with it.
This is the process that has brought me to the place I am now. I had to use it many times before I could simply forgive without hesitating at the cliff, reminding myself that this was not a sacrifice. It took many more times before there was no hesitation to forgive. I seldom ever hesitate anymore. It was myself that was the hardest for me to forgive since I judged myself far more harshly than I did others. But even that is fading away. I still have to be vigilant, but help is always there when I need it. And consistently choosing love over fear has given me confidence in the result.
Contemplation 2025
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