July 2012

ESCAPE SELF-CONDEMNATION
     I want to talk to you a little bit about what happens all along the way in regard to hostile assaults on you. The devil doesn’t want to lose anyone to God. He spends his entire time to making sure that the masses don’t escape and the masses don’t escape. That should be abundantly clear to you that they’re not going to make it. And you will be a target for a long, long while, but first I want to reassure you, if you will simply put your choice on the side of learning from a mistake, from yielding to temptation, if you will simply say, “I'm hardly a perfect human being, I recognize that, but I'm going to do something different. I'm going to realize that no matter how awful a thought I thought — and I'm sure glad people couldn’t read my mind when I thought that sex thought, e.g. — no matter how bad it is, I realize that in my spiritual infancy, in my ignorance, I had no strength or wisdom to do anything but fall down before it. I'm weak, that’s all.” Oh, do you know, do you realize that God has been waiting for you to say that? “I'm weak.”
     All right, don’t you dare spend one second in berating yourself, hating yourself, calling yourself dumb or stupid, because you’ve fallen for the trick of the devil to give you an identity of being a bad person, and now you’ve been deceived again. No, you do something else the next time you make a mistake. First of all, you’re going to know you made it because you feel awful, uncomfortable, maybe a bit ashamed that you were so weak and yielded to the temptation. If you insist on calling yourself a wicked sinner, if you insist on calling yourself evil, God can’t save you. God demands that you get rid of your self-hatred because that is another identity and it is at enmity with God. From now on, you’re simply going to realize that you cannot ever, ever be good, strong, or wise of yourself. Listen to me, you do not have a separate individual self inside of you that can be wise or that needs to be wise. You, I, can’t be intelligent. Get rid of the idea that you are a container of wisdom, of strength, of power, etc. You are not. Make your determination that, no matter what you do, you’re never ever going to stop in the identity that “I'm too far gone.” If you say you’re too far gone, you’ll make that true and you will be too far gone; and that’s the excuse that wicked sinners have for continuing to worship their own egotism.

RELAX AND START OVER
     Oh, why don’t we relax right now? You’ve just struck a blow, to use a military term, against the general called Satan. He didn’t want you to do that. He wanted you to stay tense and nervous and all wrapped up in your sick little self. Congratulations! You did something right even if you did it under orders of the Spiritual Captain which is Truth. Someday you will have direct contact with the Captain, with Truth, and while you’re down at the shop, or having dinner, or even while you’re conversing with someone, all of a sudden, because you’re listening and receptive to the Captain’s invitation to relax and start life over right now, you’ll be able to do it from yourself without being told.