 We continue today with Chapter 25, The Rock of Salvation. Yet if the Holy Spirit can commute each sentence that you laid upon yourself into a blessing, then it cannot be a sin. Sin is the only thing in all the world that cannot change. It is immutable, and on its changelessness the world depends. The magic of the world can seem to hide the pain of sin from sinners and deceive with glitter and with guile, yet each one knows the cost of sin is death, and so it is. For sin is a request for death and a wish to make this world's foundation sure as love dependable as heaven and as strong as God himself. The world is safe from love to everyone who thinks sin is possible, nor will it change. Yet is it possible what God created should not share the attributes of His creation when it opposes it in every way? It cannot be the, quote, sinner's wish for death. It is just as strong as is God's will for life, nor can the basis of the world He did not make be firm and sure as heaven. How could it be that hell and heaven are the same? And is it possible that what He did not will cannot be changed? What is immutable besides His will, and what can share its attributes except itself? What wish can rise against His will and be immutable? If you could realize nothing is changeless but the will of God, this course would not be difficult for you. For it is this that you do not believe, yet there is nothing else you could believe if you but looked at what it really is. Let us go back to what we said before and think of it more carefully. It must be so that either God is mad or is this world a place of madness. Not one thought of His makes any sense at all within this world. And nothing that this world believes as true has any meaning in his mind at all. What makes no sense and has no meaning is insanity. And what is madness cannot be the truth. If one belief so deeply valued here were true, then every thought God ever had is an illusion. And if but one thought of His is true, then all beliefs the world gives any meaning to are false and make no sense at all. This is the choice you make. Do not attempt to see it differently nor twist it into something it is not. For only this decision can you make. The rest is up to God and not to you. To justify one value that the world upholds is to deny your Father's sanity and yours. For God and His beloved Son do not think differently. And it is the agreement of their thoughts that makes the Son a co-creator with the mind whose thought created Him. So if He chooses to believe one thought opposed to truth, He has decided He is not His Father's Son. Because the Son is mad and sanity must lie apart from both the Father and the Son. This you believe. Think not that this belief depends upon the form it takes. Who thinks the world is sane in any way is justified in anything it thinks or is maintained by any form of reason believes this to be true. Sin is not real because the Father and the Son are not insane. This world is meaningless because it rests on sin. Who could create the changeless if it does not rest on truth? The Holy Spirit has the power to change the whole foundation of the world you see to something else. A basis not insane on which a sane perception can be based, another world perceived, and one in which nothing is contradicted that would lead the Son of God to sanity and joy. Nothing attests to death and cruelty, to separation and to differences, for here is everything perceived as one and no one loses that each one may gain. Test everything that you believe against this one requirement and understand that everything that meets this one demand is worthy of your faith, but nothing else. What is not love is sin and either one perceives the other as insane and meaningless. Love is the basis for a world perceived as wholly mad to sinners who believe theirs is the way to sanity. But sin is equally insane within the sight of love whose gentle eyes would look beyond the madness and rest peacefully on truth. Each sees a world immutable as each defines the changeless and eternal truth of what you are. And each reflects a view of what the Father and the Son must be to make that viewpoint meaningful and sane. Your special function is the special form in which the fact that God is not insane appears the most sensible and meaningful to you. The content is the same. The form is suited to your special needs and to the special time and place in which you think you find yourself and where you can be free of place and time and all that you believe must limit you. The Son of God cannot be bound by time nor place nor anything God did not will. Yet if His will is seen as madness, then the form of sanity which makes it most acceptable to those who are insane requires special choice. Nor can this choice be made by the insane whose problem is their choices are not free and made with reason in the light of sense. It would be madness to entrust salvation to the insane because he is not mad. Has God appointed one as sane as he to raise a saner world to meet the sight of everyone who chose insanity as his salvation? To this one is given the choice of form most suitable to him, one which will not attack the world he sees, but enter into it in quietness and show him he is mad. This one but points to an alternative, another way of looking at what he has seen before and recognizes as the world in which he lives and thought he understood before. Now must he question this because the form of the alternative is one which he cannot deny nor overlook nor fail completely to perceive at all. To each his special function is designed to be perceived as possible and more and more desired as it proves to him that it is an alternative he really wants. From this position does his sinfulness and all the sin he sees within the world offer him less and less until he comes to understand it cost him his sanity and stands between him and whatever hope he has of being sane. Nor is he left without escape from madness for he has a special part in everyone's escape. He can no more be left outside without a special function in the hope of peace than could the father overlook his son and pass him by in careless thoughtlessness. What is dependable except God's love? And where does sanity abide except in him? The one who speaks for him can show you this in the alternative he chose especially for you. It is God's will that you remember this and so emerge from deepest mourning into perfect joy. Except the function that has been assigned to you in God's own plan to show his son that hell and heaven are different, not the same. And that in heaven they are all the same without the differences which would have made a hell of heaven and a heaven of hell had such insanity been possible. The whole belief that someone loses but reflects the underlying tenet God must be insane. For in this world it seems that one must gain because another lost. If this were true then God is mad indeed. But what is this belief except a form of the more basic tenet? Quote, sin is real and rules the world. For every little game must someone lose and pay exact amount in blood and suffering. For otherwise wise would evil triumph and destruction be the total cost of any game at all. You who believe that God is mad look carefully at this and understand that it must be either God or this must be insane. But hardly both. Salvation is rebirth of the idea no one can lose for anyone to gain. And everyone must gain if anyone would be a gainer. Here is sanity restored and on this single rock of truth can faith in God's eternal sameness rest in perfect confidence and perfect peace. Reason is satisfied for all insane beliefs can be corrected here. And sin must be impossible if this is true. This is the rock on which salvation rests. The vantage point from which the Holy Spirit gives meaning and direction to the plan in which your special function is a part. For here your special function is made whole because it shares the function of the whole. Remember all temptation is but this. A mad belief that God's insanity would make you sane and give you what you want. That either God or you must lose to madness because your aims cannot be reconciled. Death demands life but life is not maintained at any cost. No one can suffer for the will of God to be fulfilled. Salvation is his will because you share it. Not for you alone but for the self that is the son of God. He cannot lose for if he could the loss would be his father's and in him no loss is possible. And this is sane because it is the truth. And from the workbook Lesson 197 It can be but my gratitude I earn. Here is the second step we take to free your mind from the belief an outside force pitted against your own. You make attempts at kindness and forgiveness. Yet you turn them to attack again unless you find external gratitude and lavish thanks. Your gifts must be received with honor, lest they be withdrawn. And so you think God's gifts are loans at best, at worst deceptions which would cheat you of defenses to ensure that when he strikes he will not fail to kill. How easily are God and guilt confused by those who know not what their thoughts can do. Deny your strength and weakness must become salvation to you. See yourself as bound and bars become your home. Nor will you leave the prison house or claim your strength until guilt and salvation are not seen as one. And freedom and salvation are perceived as joined with strength beside them to be sought and claimed and found and fully recognized. The world must thank you when you offer it release from your illusions. Yet your thanks belong to you as well, for its release can only mirror yours. Your gratitude is all your gifts require that they be a lasting offering of a thankful heart, released from hell forever. Is it this you would undo by taking back your gifts because they were not honored? It is you who honor them and give them fitting thanks or it is you who have received the gifts. It does not matter if another thinks your gifts unworthy. In his mind there is a part that joins with yours in thanking you. It does not matter if your gifts seem lost and ineffectual. They are received where they are given. In your gratitude are they accepted universally and thankfully acknowledged by the heart of God himself. And would you take them back when he has gratefully accepted them? God blesses every gift you give to him and every gift is given him because it can be given only to yourself. And what belongs to God must be his own. Yet you will never realize his gifts are sure, eternal, changeless, limitless, forever giving out, extending love and adding to your never ending joy while you forgive but to attack again. Withdraw the gifts you give and you will think that what is given you has been withdrawn. But learn to let forgiveness take away the sins you think you see outside yourself and you can never think the gifts of God are lent but for a little while before he snatches them away again in death. For death will have no meaning for you then and with the end of this belief is fear forever over. Thank yourself for this for he is grateful only unto God and he gives thanks for you unto himself. To everyone who lives will Christ yet come for everyone must live and move in him. His being in his Father is secure because their will is one. Their gratitude to all they have created has no end for gratitude remains a part of love. Thanks be to you the Holy Son of God for as you were created you contain all things within yourself and you are still as God created you nor can you dim the light of your perfection. In your heart the heart of God is laid he holds you dear because you are himself. All gratitude belongs to you because of what you are. Give thanks as you receive it. Be you free of all in gratitude to anyone who makes yourself complete. And from this self is no one left outside. Give thanks for all the countless channels which extend this self. All that you do is given unto him. All that you think can only be his thoughts sharing with him the holy thoughts of God. Earn now the gratitude you have denied yourself when you forgot the function God has given you. But never think that he has ever ceased to offer thanks to you. Amen.