Trust in Me and Believe in Yourself

“Isn’t this emphasis on the power of positive thinking wrong?”

No, it is still valid as far as it goes.  You will develop more and have a greater impact for good if you trust in Me and believe in yourself—not in your ego, your will, but in your spirit and your destiny.

“Destiny?”

Yes, there is a goal for you (for a person)—an individual path of evolution—that I want to help you along.  Believing that you can progress and trust in Me to help you is very helpful in achieving that goal.

Read Chapter 114

A Proper Appreciation of Yourself Opens Your Heart.

An ego rush always broke my connection with God.  So I tried to keep a cold watch on this ego of mine.

When I was still in Washington, D.C., a matter came up about which I needed the assistance of an eminent intellectual with whom I had a limited acquaintance.  He was completely forthcoming, and I felt flattered by his response.

“Lord, how should I take this?  Is it wrong for me to feel flattered?”

No, it is not.  This is joy, the joy of being yourself, which is proper to (appropriate for) human beings.  I want you to be happy, to feel the fullness of your own being, its bounty.  I blessed you with certain gifts.  Of course, you recognize them as gifts, as benefits, as talents.  That is okay.  It is not the same as ego.

Ego is destructive, separatist, defiant of My will, self-satisfied and self-lustful.  A proper appreciation of yourself opens your heart, binds you to Me, to those you love.

 

“Pray and I will tell you”

I started making a list of great spiritual leaders to pray about.  I thought the question would be, for example, What was God communicating to Martin Luther?  But, when I asked, I got a different answer.

Suppose you brought a guy in – say, Luther – and cut him up (dissected him, looked at the elements that make him up).  What would you find?

“Not just the single solitary individual, I suppose, but someone immersed in a tradition, institutions, and a culture.”

I act over the centuries in reference to individuals, but also movements, cultures, and the like.

“But only individuals receive communications.”

Just listen for the moment.  I interact with mankind, with the universe, in many different ways.  Do not assume that the only interaction is the same form of the interaction I have with you.  With some it is conversational, but with others it is by inspiration, by My spirit moving through them, infusing institutions and life-forms, cultures, cultural forms, art, music, dance, symbolism, ideational systems, thought forms …

So, looking at each cultural form, I should be able to figure out how it reflects You?”

The starting point is not the cultural forms and asking “What kind of God or transcendent order does that imply or suggest?” but start with Me and ask “What am I doing with that culture, individual, art, art form, or whatever.  What is it to Me?”  Pray and I will tell you.

The Right Way to Ask

“Walsch reports You as saying, ‘God will grant whatever is asked, without fail.’  Whatever is asked!”

The trick is in “ask.”  Not everything you “want” has been “asked” in the right way, with fulsomeness of soul.

“But then the statement is completely misleading.  It depends on a verbal sleight of hand.”

Not so.  Some might be confused by it, but it is a way of focusing attention on the right way to ask, to believe and feel fully, and to motivate this change in people.  But it is not a lie, not even a Noble Lie.  It is the direct truth.  When you come into the fullness of Being, of partnership with God, everything you truly seek will be granted.  That may seem like a bait and switch, but that is not the way you will see it when you get there.  You will see that this is indeed what you really wanted all along.

 

Think of Joan at the Stake

I was told not just to read books but to look at “religious lives.”  Receiving an honorary degree from a small Catholic liberal arts college, I spoke about Joan of Arc.  She had the most well-documented life of anyone in history up to her time.  We still have the records from her two trials.  She had been convicted of heresy and burned at the stake at the age of nineteen as a result of a trial rigged by her English captors.  Some years after her death, a new trial was held, which exonerated her.  Both trials took evidence from people who had known her since childhood.  In the twentieth century, she was canonized.

“Lord, what can I learn from Joan of Arc?”

Think of Joan on the stake.  What are her feelings?

This is what came to me:  “Glory to God, blessed savior and lord, redeemer, I love God and am happy to sacrifice all for Him; a feeling of joy and triumph over this world, a rapture and sense of rising to heaven, to join God, to be received and welcomed by a chorus of angels; a peace, calm, inner togetherness, centeredness, kindness to mankind, to their suffering, to their burden of sin, smiling also in triumph.  They ‘know not what they do’ to their own souls!  They do not know they are the losers.  They are the ‘fools’ who do not know what’s really going on.  Radiant love sweeping out over the world, embracing the world, as soul-like awareness of the pain of the body and its frailty and vulnerability and impermanence, a deep understanding of the nature of reality, an immersion in the really real, a closing of the old eyes and opening of the new ones, a succumbing, a resignation, a withdrawal.”

 

I Want You to Tell My story.

I want you to tell My story.

I thought the Bible told His story.  “Lord, hasn’t Your story already been told?”

Yes, but it is time for it to be told anew, and not in the same way.  We are entering an unusual time in the history of the world.  The old religions are coming apart.  Yet there is a renewal of religious spirit.  Many of the great religions rested on a relatively clear reception of messages from Me.  The new spirituality does not.  It is aimless, made-up, impressionistic, psychologized, sometimes flaky and even dangerous and demonic.  Not all “spiritual” forces are from God.  Some are evil or distorted.  A purity of message must be regained.