Lesson 118
For morning and evening review:
1. (105) God’s peace and joy are mine.
²Today I will accept God’s peace and joy, in glad exchange for all the substitutes that I have made for happiness and peace.
A mistake I can make when I think about exchanging all the substitutes that I have made for happiness and peace is believing I must make myself stop doing certain things or thinking certain things in order to have God’s peace and joy. This is the idea that I must be worthy of the peace and joy or that I have to get myself in alignment with peace and joy and then I will have it. But that is not what today’s lesson says. It says that I will accept God’s peace and joy. It doesn’t say that I will accept His peace and joy once I am doing things right.
Peace and joy are in me already, I just have to accept them. Yesterday, I had a reaction to a thought in my mind and I went down the rabbit hole for a while as I followed that thought and this attracted more thoughts along the same line. I began to believe that I needed to change my life significantly if I wanted God’s peace and joy. But really, all I needed to do was to allow the Holy Spirit to heal my mind. I needed to substitute my own beliefs of what would bring me happiness and peace for His, and He even gave me the beliefs that would pull me out of my ego confusion.
If we insist on a strong spiritual path, the ego figures that if it can’t beat us, he will join us. So, when we become aware of negative self-defeating thoughts and notice that they are affecting our peace, we want to release those thoughts to the Holy Spirit for correction. But from the perspective of the ego thought system, this means we must make ourselves stop thinking these thoughts or change what we are doing so those thoughts will stop meaning we are not ok.
This would be asking the ego to heal us and this is not a function of the ego and so will not work. The ego thought system was made to give us a way to experience specialness through separation and this is all it can do. Thinking of it in terms of a computer program, it is designed to make images of something that does not exist and to keep our attention with those images. There is nothing in the program as it is designed that will tell us the images don’t exist and that we can stop looking at them when we are ready to do so. There is nothing in that program that will tell us that we are looking only at images. Fortunately, we have a built in Voice in our mind that calls to us, and when we tire of the ego images we start to notice that Voice. We listen because the Voice is compelling. This Voice will heal our mind if we don’t try to heal ourselves through the ego thought system.
2. (106) Let me be still and listen to the truth.
²Let my own feeble voice be still, and let me hear the mighty Voice for Truth Itself assure me that I am God’s perfect Son.
When Jesus speaks of our own feeble voice, he is talking about the ego voice that we have been identified with to the point we believe it is our own voice. It is not. It is just a program running in our mind, an endless loop of problems with solutions that are guaranteed not to work so that we must keep making more images with more useless solutions. We keep doing this because we believe in the ego and believe that we are this ego. And as Jesus tells us, what we believe is true for us.
This is why we need a Solution that works. This Solution is outside our belief system and knows that we are actually the Son of God. It is not fooled into the false identity as we are. This Voice for God knows we believe in the ego but knows this is not true. Therefore, the Voice can call us out of our illusions and into the truth. Let us today be still and listen to the truth. Let us listen to the Holy Spirit remind of our true Identity.
3. On the hour:
²God’s peace and joy are mine.
³On the half hour:
⁴Let me be still and listen to the truth.