 We continue today with Chapter 21, Faith, Belief, and Vision. All special relationships have sin as their goal, for they are bargains with reality toward which the seeming union is adjusted. Forget not this. To bargain is to set a limit, and any brother with whom you have a limited relationship you hate. You may attempt to keep the bargain in the name of, quote, fairness, sometimes demanding payment of yourself, perhaps more often of the other. Thus, in the, quote, fairness, you attempt to ease the guilt that comes from the accepted purpose of the relationship. And that is why the Holy Spirit must change his purpose to make it useful to him and harmless to you. If you accept this change, you have accepted the idea of making room for truth. The source of sin is gone. You may imagine that you still experience its effects, but it is not your purpose, and you no longer want it. No one allows a purpose to be replaced while he desires it, for nothing is so cherished and protected as is a goal the mind accepts. This it will follow, grimly or happily, but always with faith and with the persistence that faith inevitably brings. The power of faith is never recognized if it is placed in sin, but it is always recognized if it is placed in love. Why is it strange to you that faith can move mountains? This is indeed a little feat for such a power, for faith can keep the Son of God in chains as long as he believes he is in chains. And when he is released from them, it will be simply because he no longer believes in them, withdrawing faith that they hold him and placing it in his freedom instead. It is impossible to place equal faith in opposite directions. What faith you give to sin you take away from holiness, and what you offer holiness has been removed from sin. Faith and belief and vision are the means by which the goal of holiness is reached. Through them the Holy Spirit leads you to the real world and away from all illusions where your faith was laid. This is his direction, the only one he ever sees. And when you wander, he reminds you there is but one. His faith and his belief and vision are all for you. And when you have accepted them completely instead of yours, you will have need of them no longer. For faith and vision and belief are meaningful only before the state of certainty is reached. In heaven they are unknown. Yet heaven is reached through them. It is impossible that the Son of God lack faith, but he can choose where he would have it be. Faithlessness is not a lack of faith, but faith in nothing. Faith given to illusions does not lack power, for by it does the Son of God believe that he is powerless. Thus is he faithless to himself, but strong in faith in his illusions about himself. For faith, perception and belief you made has means for losing certainty and finding sin. This mad direction was your choice, and by your faith and what you chose, you made what you desired. The Holy Spirit has a use for all the means for sin by which you sought to find it. But as he uses them, they lead away from sin, because his purpose lies in the opposite direction. He sees the means you use, but not the purpose for which you made them. He would not take them from you, for he sees their value as a means for what he wills for you. You made perception that you might choose among your brothers and seek for sin with them. The Holy Spirit sees perception as a means to teach you that the vision of a holy relationship is all you want to see. Then, will you give your faith to holiness, desiring and believing in it because of your desire? Faith and belief become attached to vision as all the means that once served sin are redirected now toward holiness. For what you think is sin is limitation, in whom you try to limit to the body, you hate because you fear. In your refusal to forgive him, you would condemn him to the body, because the means for sin are dear to you. And so the body has your faith in your belief. But holiness would set your brother free, removing hatred by removing fear, not as a symptom, but as its source. Those who would free their brothers from the body can have no fear. They have renounced the means for sin by choosing to let all limitations be removed. As they desire to look upon their brothers in holiness, the power of belief and faith goes far beyond the body, supporting vision, not obstructing it. But first they chose to recognize how much their faith had limited their understanding of the world, desiring to place its power elsewhere should another point of view be given them. The miracles that follow this decision are also born of faith, for all who choose to look away from sin are given vision and are led to holiness. Those who believe in sin must think the Holy Spirit asks for sacrifice, for this is how they think their purpose is accomplished. Brother, the Holy Spirit knows that sacrifice brings nothing. He makes no bargains, and if you seek to limit him, you will hate him because you are afraid. The gift that he has given you is more than anything that stands this side of heaven. The instant for its recognition is at hand. Join your awareness to what has been already joined. The faith you give your brother can accomplish this, for he who loves the world is seeing it for you without one spot of sin upon it and in the innocence that makes the sight of it as beautiful as heaven. Your faith in sacrifice has given it great power in your sight, except you do not realize you cannot see because of it. For sacrifice must be exacted of a body and by another body. The mind could neither ask it nor receive it for itself, and no more could the body. The intention is in the mind which tries to use the body to carry out the means for sin in which the mind believes. Thus is the joining of mind and body inescapable belief of those who value sin. And so is sacrifice invariably a means for limitation and thus for hate. Think you the Holy Spirit is concerned with this? He gives not what it is his purpose to lead you from. You think he would deprive you for your good, but quote good and quote deprivation are opposites and cannot meaningfully join in any way. It is like saying that the moon and sun are one because they come with night and day, and so they must be joined. Its sight of one is what the sign the other has disappeared from sight. Nor is it possible that what gives light be one with what depends on darkness to be seen. Neither demands the sacrifice of the other, yet on the absence of the other does each depend. The body was made to be a sacrifice to sin and in the darkness so it is still seen. Yet in the light of vision it is looked upon quite differently. You can have faith in it to serve the Holy Spirit School and give it power to serve as means to help the blind to see. But in their seeing they look past it as do you. The faith and the belief you gave it belongs beyond. You gave perception and belief and faith from mind to body. Let them now be given back to what produced them and can use them still to save itself from what it made. And from the workbook, lesson 168, your grace is given me. I claim it now. God speaks to us. Shall we not speak to him? He is not distant. He makes no attempt to hide from us. We try to hide from him and suffer from deception. He remains entirely accessible. He loves his son. There is no certainty but this. Yet this suffices. He will love his son forever. When his mind remains asleep he loves him still. And when his mind awakes he loves him with a never-changing love. If you but knew the meaning of his love, hope and despair would be impossible. For hope would be forever satisfied, despair of any kind unthinkable. His grace, his answer, is to all despair, for in it lies remembrance of his love. Would he not gladly give the means by which his will is recognized? His grace is yours by your acknowledgment and memory of him awakens in the mind that asks the means of him whereby its sleep is done. Today we ask of God the gift he has most carefully preserved within our hearts, waiting to be acknowledged. This the gift by which God leans to us enlists us up, taking salvation's final step himself. All steps but this we learn, instructed by his voice. But finally he comes himself and takes us in his arms and sweeps away the cobwebs of our sleep. His gift of grace is more than just answer. It restores all memories the sleeping mind for God, all certainty of what love's meaning is. God loves his son. Request him now to give the means by which this world will disappear and vision first will come with knowledge but an instant later. For in grace you see a light that covers all the world in love and watch fear disappear from every face as hearts rise up and claim the light as theirs. What now remains that heaven be delayed an instant longer. What is still undone when your forgiveness rest It is a new and holy day today for we receive what has been given us. Our faith lies in the giver, not our own acceptance. We acknowledge our mistakes but he to whom all error is unknown is yet the one who answers our mistakes by giving us the means to lay them down and rise to him in gratitude and in love. And he descends to meet us as we come to him for what he has prepared for us he gives and we receive. Such is his will because he loves his son. To him we pray today returning but the word he gave to us through his own voice, his word, his love. Your grace is given me. I claim it now. Father, I come to you and you will come to me who ask I am the son you love. Amen.