ARCIM

Daily Lesson 154 ~
June 3

I am among the Messengers of the Divine.

Let us today have neither arrogance nor false humility. We have gone beyond such foolishness. We cannot judge ourselves, nor need we do so. These are merely attempts to hold decision off, and to delay commitment to our function. It is not our part to judge our Worth, nor can we know of ourselves what role is best for us. We cannot perceive in its entirety what we can do within a larger Plan. Our part is cast in the Realm of Heaven, not in the nightmare of hell. And what we think is weakness can be Strength, while what we believe to be our strength is often unrecognized weakness.

Whatever your appointed role in the Plan may be, it was selected by the Voice of the Divine, Whose Function is to speak for you as well as for the Divine. Seeing your strengths exactly as they are, and equally aware of where they can be best applied, for what, to whom and when, It chooses and accepts your part for you. Your part does not work without your own consent. Spirit is not deceived about what you are, and your spirit listens only to the Divine’s Voice in you.

It is through your true Strength’s ability to hear one Voice that is Its Own that you become aware at last there is one Voice in you. And that one Voice appoints your function, and relays it to you, giving you the Strength to understand it, do what it entails, and to succeed in everything you do that is related to it. The Divine has joined Its Children in this, and thus Its Children become Its Messengers of Unity with It. It is this Joining of Creator and Creation, through the Voice of the Divine, that sets apart awakening from the world. It is this Voice that speaks of Laws that the world does not hear or accord with. It is this Voice that promises awakening from all illusion and error, from every belief in separation, with guilt abolished in the mind that the Divine created sinless. Now this mind becomes aware again of Who created it, and of its lasting Union with its holy Self. So is its Self the one Reality in which its will and that of the Divine are joined.

A messenger does not decide the message they deliver. Nor do they question the right of the one who creates the message to send it, nor ask why the maker of the message has chosen the recipients who will receive the message that the messenger brings. It is enough that the messenger accept the message and deliver it to the ones for whom it is intended, thus fulfilling their role in its delivery. If the messenger insists on determining what the message or its purpose should be, or where it should be delivered, they are failing to perform their proper part as bringer of the message.

There is one major difference in the role of the Messengers that Heaven appoints and sends that distinguishes them from those the world appoints and sends, which is that the Messages they deliver are intended first for the Messengers. And it is only as they can accept these Messages for themselves that they become able to bring them further, and to give them everywhere that they were also meant to be. Like earthly messengers, they did not write the Messages they bear, but they become their first receivers in the truest sense, receiving them in order to prepare themselves to give them.

Earthly messengers fulfill their role by delivering all their messages. The Messengers of the Divine perform their part by their acceptance of Its Messages for themselves, and then show they understand the Messages by giving them away. They choose no roles that are not given them by the Divine’s Authority. And so they gain by every Message that they give away.

Would you receive the Messages of the Divine? For thus do you become Its Messenger. You are appointed now! And yet you still wait to give the Heavenly Messages you have received, and so you do not recognize them, and do not know that they are yours. No one can receive and understand they have received until they give. For in the giving is their own understanding and acceptance of what they received.

You who are now the Messenger of the Divine, receive Its Messages! For that is part of your appointed role. Spirit has succeeded in offering you what you need to be the Divine’s Messenger, and this has been accepted by you. However, another part of your appointed Task is yet to be accomplished. Spirit, Who has received for you the Messages of the Divine, would have them be received by you as well. For thus do you identify with the Divine, and receive your own.

It is this joining that we undertake to recognize today. We will not seek to keep our minds apart from the Voice Who speaks to us and for us, for it is simply our true voice we hear as we attend It. Spirit alone can speak to us and for us, joining in One Voice the receiving and the giving of the Divine’s Word, the receiving and the doing of Its Will.

We practice giving the Voice of the Divine what It would have, that we may recognize Its Gifts to us. It needs our voice that It may speak through us. It needs our hands to receive Its Messages and carry them to those It appoints. It needs our feet to bring us where It wills, that those who wait in misery may be at last freed. And It needs our will united with Its Own and our Creator’s, that we may be the true receivers of the Gifts It gives.

Let us learn only this lesson for today: we will only recognize what we receive when we give it. You have heard this said in this Course many times and in many ways, and yet belief may still be lacking. But this is sure: until true belief is given it, you will receive a thousand miracles and then a thousand more, but will not know that the Divine Itself has left no Gift beyond what you already have, nor has denied the tiniest of Blessings to Its Children. What can this mean to you until you have identified with the reality of your sisters and brothers and with your own?

Our lesson for today is stated thus:

 

“I am among the Messengers of the Divine, and I am grateful that I have the means by which to recognize that I am free.”

 

The world recedes as we light up our minds, and realize these holy Words are true. They are the Message sent to us today from our Creator. Now we demonstrate how they have changed our minds about ourselves, and what our true function here is. For as we prove that we accept no will we do not and cannot share, the many Gifts from our Creator will spring to our sight and leap into our hands, and we will recognize what we have received.

 

Corresponding Text Section

 

Chapter 13: From Guilt to the Promise of Heaven

 

4. Demanding Specialness

Those who have preferred specialness to Sanity could not have sought for specialness when in their right mind. Everyone was at peace until some asked for special favor to set them apart from their sisters and brothers, which the Divine could not give. For the request was outside of the Nature of the Divine, and could not have been asked of the Creator, Who truly and equally loves Its Children. Therefore, in the minds of those who made it, this request seemed to make of the Divine an unloving creator, demanding of It what only an unloving creator could give. And in this request the Peace of the Divine’s Children who wanted specialness was shattered, for they no longer understood their Creator. They feared the unloving image of a creator they had made, but still more did they fear their true Creator, having attacked their glorious Equality with It.

In the Truth of Peace the Divine Children need nothing, and ask for nothing because they have Everything. In the lie of conflict they demand everything, but find nothing. For how could the Gentleness of Love respond to their demands, except by remaining in Peace in the Creator? If the Divine Children did not wish to remain in Peace in the Realm of Heaven, then they could not remain at all. For a darkened mind cannot live in the Light, and it must seek a place of darkness, where it can believe that it is where it is not. The Divine did not allow this to happen. But those who desired specialness demanded that it happen, and therefore in a dream believed that it was so.

To single out is to make alone, and thus make lonely. The Divine did not do this to you. Could It set you apart, knowing that your Peace resides in Its Oneness? It denied you only your request for pain, for suffering is not of Its Creation. Having given you the perfect Creation, It could not take It from you. It could only answer your insane request with a sane Answer, which would abide with you in your insanity until you emerged from it. And this the Divine did. Everyone who hears and receives Its Answer will give up insanity. For Its Answer is the Reference Point beyond delusions, from which you can observe them clearly and perceive them as insane. Just seek this Place and you will find It, for Love is in you, and will lead you there.

And now the reason why fear of awakening and of this Course might exist should be apparent. Because this is a course about the Children of the Divine, it is a course on Love. You have been told that your function in this world is healing, and that your Function in Heaven is creating. The ego teaches that your function on Earth is destruction, and that you have no function at all in Heaven. It would thus destroy and bury you here, leaving you no inheritance except the dust out of which it thinks you were made. When the ego is reasonably satisfied with you, as its reasoning goes, it offers you oblivion. When it becomes overtly savage, it offers you a nightmare of hell.

Yet neither oblivion nor hell is as unacceptable to the separated ones in the insanity of their split mind as Heaven. For the ego’s definition of heaven is oblivion and hell, and so to those who associate with the ego, the Realm of Heaven is the greatest threat they think they could experience. For oblivion and hell are ideas that they made up, and they are bent on demonstrating the actuality of these ideas, in order to establish their own existence as separated ones. If the actuality of these insane ideas is questioned, they believe that their existence is. For they believe that fear and conflict established their existence, and that their, and your, destruction is the final proof that they were right.

Under these circumstances, would it not be more desirable to have been wrong, even apart from the fact that you were wrong? For while it could perhaps be argued that death suggests there once was life, no one would claim that it proves there is life now. Only Life proves that there is Life. And even a life that is past, which death might indicate, could only have been futile if it had to come to death, and needed death to prove that it once was.

The separated ones have been as selective in their questioning as in their perception. The Reality of Heaven is questioned, but the realness of death is taken for granted. An open mind is more honest than this. You can heal and be healed as you question death’s realness. And even though you have temporarily forgotten Heaven, and therefore currently know It not, might not Heaven still be more desirable than death?