Lesson 156: “I walk with God in perfect holiness.”  

The Course wants us to include ourselves in our salvation.  Our salvation is ensured by God because we are perfectly holy.

God says we are innocent completely now and always because God gives us the gift of being whole, complete, and healed all the time.

This means that we are in need of nothing else because we have God.  In the world, it appears we need physical things and our bodies do need some looking after in order to maintain our lives.  But the Course reminds us that God gives us whatever we need in a fundamental way.

Even though we eat and need food to survive, we just want to appreciate that is how things look in form but what is really feeding us is God’s Love.

This Love sustains our being because it is energy that is perfect and exactly adequate to take care of our needs in the most basic ways.

We receive God’s Love first and then this shifts our energy to one of abundance because we are no longer experiencing the belief we have been lacking in God’s energy of Love.  Then when we focus on this abundance, this shifts our energy and feeling so we start to exude this perfect energy.  This then allows us to manifest in the world whatever else we need to take care of our bodies in the experience of being physical.

When we are reminded that we are whole and good and perfect, we need no excess in the world because we are balanced internally. 

We don’t need to try to get anything from the world but an amount of physical substance that simply meets our needs.  

That means we won’t try to meet this neediness in the world with some filler there because with God’s Love it will be already changed energetically into something that is a healthy or at least a healthier desire.  That means we don’t have to overeat when we don’t want to or we don’t have to flirt more than is good for us or gamble to hide our needy feelings.  The reason we can do this is because we are with God at every moment.  This means all we have to do is tune into the reminder that God is currently with us.

That means we don’t have to look anywhere else to attempt to meet this needs in ways that simply don’t work.

The world’s supplies are always limited.  God is not.

The Course says we want to be sure we make no idols in the world.  We are essentially looking to the world to fill the neediness that only God can truly fill.

This not only doesn’t work, it doesn’t feel good to give these parts of the world where our addictions lie more time and attention than we give God. 

We are entrenched in this relationship with them that makes no sense.

We get to be perfectly holy.  That is quite a description.  It leaves no room for error.  We can’t be partially perfectly holy.  We are the real deal.  And we all are, no matter who we are or what our life experience has been. Holy means that God sanctifies us. Holy means that we are ‘dedicated to God’.  That means that we are good enough exactly as we are now to be in God’s inner circle.  The Course says our job is to learn this.  Practice is certainly called for.  We just need a zillion reminders  because the more we think it, the more those cells in our bodies are taking up the message.  That is why we may have heard this countless times in the Course, but are asked to listen again to simply bring it deeper into our consciousness.  That is the part we play.

The Lesson here says that we walk with God.  That means it is our job to take up the task of being willing to do the work this mind training requires.  We do it because we want to be happy and at peace.

This is a fabulous end condition but the middle of the training is also a place to cherish because we are participating in such an amazing transition of our minds into a breeding ground for only what is exceptional.

We are reminded to love the process too.

That is also practice, just being willing to meet God every day in prayer about how to be light and joyful in this path.