Lesson 168: “Your grace is given me.  I claim it now.”

This lesson says, “We acknowledge our mistakes, but He to Whom all error is unknown is yet the One Who answers our mistakes by giving us the means to lay them down, and rise to Him in gratitude and love.” 

The Course is teaching us how to have a harmonious emotional relationship with ourselves. 

The first task in order is that we need to just be honest with ourselves and acknowledge when we have behaved in a way that we see from the place of evaluation that we do not want to continue doing that certain thing.

Or, we may want to do something to make up for something we feel like we did- not acting appropriately enough in the range of how we would like to do things and behave in the world.

Sometimes getting honest is cool, distant trick. 

It can feel like it is far beyond the reach of what we can do.

Fortunately, the Course reminds us we always have access to the Holy Spirit, that part of God available to intercede and show us how to shape our behavior in the situation.  We can trust the Holy Spirit to give us all the know how we need to do whatever is necessary.

The Course says that to God all error is unknown because God is perfect.

That means we can trust that God will do only certain things, and we can always know, that God is always totally blameless and sinless and never has done anything that can be considered an error because that would be false behavior.

The Course says that God is only true love an nothing else, and therefore, we can trust that God will only do what is helpful and appropriate.

God will never fail in anyway because that would be contrary to God’s perfection.

We just need to appreciate that  God is only good. 

And yet, we can also know that the Holy Spirit is the one Who will be able to connect with what is happening in our lives, and is always available to help us get the direction we need when we want to make decisions about how to proceed. 

God never makes mistakes because God is perfect and yet the Holy Spirit is always available  to see what we are doing and help out when we need it.

God is totally blameless we have established, and He has no need to be involved in the worldly activities in which we find ourselves.

God has no need to try to help us out of our cycle of thinking we have made mistakes and need to atone for them.  

God has no interest in that because God knows that we have never done anything that is deemed bad or causes us to lose our whole self-worth- the full cup of love within.

God does not want to try to fix the world because the world us unreal and can’t be fixed anyway. 

We learn that our job as a miracle worker in the world is to just accept our Godly nature of our lovability. 

We don’t have to fix the world, but we want to fix our minds.  We don’t want to suffer the guilt that always comes when we believe we did something wrong.

God is not interested in our mistakes, but rather, takes them and shows us how to set them down permanently so they no longer bother us. 

God says we are given the incredible gift of forgiveness and God’s grace of accepting that we are fine as we are and never did anything to change this truth about us. 

This means God gives us the permission to lay down all that guilt.

We must let God be the power- the catalyst- in our minds where suddenly we realize we are totally healed because there was never a problem in the first place. 

This is why God’s grace is what gives us the freedom to surrender all that guilt we think we have.