LESSON 321
November 17
"Father, my freedom is in You alone."
PRACTICE SUMMARY
(See Part II Practice Summary, and also Part II Introduction)
COMMENTARY
This lesson, like many in this last part of the Workbook, is written from the perspective of a person who is entering the last stages of the journey home. Here is the song of one whose uncertainty has ended, whose decision for the Kingdom of God is strong and clear. In the words of "Development of Trust" in the Manual for Teachers: "The teacher of God is now at the point in his progress at which he sees in it his whole way out. 'Give up what you do not want, and keep what you do.' How simple is the obvious! And how easy to do!" (M-4(A).6:5-7). These are the words of someone who has realized that the peace of God is all that he wants.
"I did not understand what made me free, nor what my freedom was" (1:1). Our freedom is in God alone. At the start we believed the opposite. Being free seems to mean being independent. How could freedom be found in acceptance of God's Will? Isn't that enslavement? Only as we realize that our will is God's Will, that our will and His are one and the same, can we realize that to do the Will of God is perfect freedom because it is what we truly want, and what we were created for. "Father, it is my will that I return" (1:9).
Not knowing what freedom was we have looked for it where it could not be found: in the exercise of our independent will in this world. Until we hear the Voice for God directing us, and respond, we cannot find freedom. "Now I would guide myself no more" (1:3). Our freedom is found in accepting a new Guide. It is found in resigning as our own teacher (T-12.V.8:3) and accepting another Teacher. It is found in letting go of our independent goals and accepting the one goal we all share together.
Freedom is the liberty to be all that I am. Freedom is the liberty to express my nature without any hindrance. My nature is love; my nature is the holiness of God Himself. My only freedom is in being that which I am because God created me. To attempt to be something else is to enslave myself, to constrict my soul into a shape not its own. Freedom is to teach and offer only love, because that is what I am.
Let me, then, today, gladly surrender my opinions about what I am, and accept what God tells me I am. Let me readily relinquish the false and illusory freedom I have thought to pursue, and accept the only freedom that is real, in glad capitulation to my own nature. There is no surrender but to my Self. There is no sacrifice but of illusion. When I have reached the point of being willing to hear only the Voice for God, I will be able to say:
"The way to You is opening and clear to me at last" (1:7).
Copyright © 1996, The Circle of Atonement, Sedona,
Arizona, USA.
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