Ch. 9. II. 8 – 12. Jesus: “Believe in your brothers because I believe in you, and you will learn that my belief in you is justified. Believe in me by believing in them, for the sake of what God gave them! They will answer you truly if you learn to ask only truth of them!
Do not ask for your brothers’ blessings without first blessing them, for only in this way can you learn how blessed you are. By holding to this way, you are but seeking the truth in you. This is not going beyond yourself, but toward your Self. Hear only God’s Answer in His Sons, and you are answered!
To ‘refuse to believe in’ is to side against, or to attack! To ‘believe in’ is to accept, to trust, and to side with. To believe in another does not mean to be foolishly credulous, taking every word literally, but to accept and appreciate the truth that is in your brother!
What you do not believe in, you do not appreciate, and you cannot be grateful for what you do not value. There is, then, a price you necessarily pay for any judgment you lay upon your brother, because that judgment is the illusion of setting of a price on what is priceless. And as you set it, you will pay it!
If paying is thought of in the sense of giving ‘to get,’ you will set the price low but demand a high return from your brother. You will have forgotten, however, that to price is to value, so that your return is in proportion only to your judgment of worth. If the ‘paying’ is associated with giving, however, paying cannot be perceived as loss, and the reciprocal relationship of giving and receiving will be recognized. The ‘price’ you willingly pay will then be set high, because of the greater value of the return. The price for the ‘getting’ way of thinking is to lose sight of value, making it inevitable that you will devalue what you receive. Valuing it little, you will not appreciate what you receive, and so it will not be perceived as what you want and you will not be satisfied!
Never forget, then, that you set the value on what you receive, and price it by what you give. To believe that it is possible to get much for little in your relationship is to believe that you can bargain with God! God’s laws are always fair and perfectly consistent. By giving you do receive. But to receive is to accept, not to ‘get.’
It is impossible not to have, but it is possible to ‘not know’ you have! The recognition of having is the willingness for giving, and only by this willingness can you recognize what you have. What you give is therefore the value you place on what you have, being the exact measure of the value you place upon it. And this, in turn, is the measure of how much you want it!
You can ask of the Holy Spirit, then, only by giving to Him, and you can give to Him only where you are willing to recognize Him. If you recognize Him in everyone, consider how much you will be asking of Him, and how much you will receive! He will deny you nothing because you have denied Him nothing, and so you can share everything.
This is the way, and the only way to have His answer, because His answer is all you can ask for and want. Say, then, to everyone: Because I will to know myself, I see you as God’s Son and as my brother.”