T. 31. I. 1 – 4. Jesus: “How simple is salvation! All it says is what was never true is not true now, and never will be. The impossible has not occurred, and can have no effects. And that is all!
Can this be hard to learn by anyone who wants it to be true? Only unwillingness to learn it could make such an easy lesson difficult. How hard is it to see that what is false cannot be true, and what is true cannot be false? You can no longer say that you perceive no difference between the false and true. You have been told exactly how to tell one from the other, and just what to do if you feel yourself confused. Why, then, do you persist in not learning such simple things?
There is of course a reason! But confuse it not with ‘difficulty’ in the simple things salvation asks you learn. It teaches but the very obvious. It merely goes from one apparent lesson to the next, in easy steps that lead you gently from one to another, and with no strain at all. This cannot be confusing, yet you seem to be confused! For somehow you believe that what is totally confused is easier to learn and understand. What you have taught yourself has been such a giant learning feat that it is, indeed, incredible! But you have accomplished it simply because you wanted to, and did not pause in your persistence to judge it ‘hard to learn’ or too complex to grasp.
No one who understands what you have learned, how carefully you learned it, and the pains to which you went to practice and repeat the lessons endlessly, in every form you could conceive of them, could ever doubt the power of your learning skill!
There is of course a reason! But confuse it not with ‘difficulty’ in the simple things salvation asks you learn. It teaches but the very obvious. It merely goes from one apparent lesson to the next, in easy steps that lead you gently from one to another, and with no strain at all. This cannot be confusing, yet you seem to be confused! For somehow you believe that what is totally confused is easier to learn and understand. What you have taught yourself has been such a giant learning feat that it is, indeed, incredible! But you have accomplished it simply because you wanted to, and did not pause in your persistence to judge it ‘hard to learn’ or too complex to grasp.
No one who understands what you have learned, how carefully you learned it, and the pains to which you went to practice and repeat the lessons endlessly, in every form you could conceive of them, could ever doubt the power of your learning skill!
There is no greater power in the world than your own mind. The world was made by it, and even now depends on nothing else. The lessons you have taught yourself have been so over-learned and fixed in place, that they rise like heavy curtains to obscure the simple and the obvious.
Say not that you cannot learn the simple and the obvious! For your power to learn has been strong enough to teach you that your will is not your own, your thoughts do not belong to you, and even that you are someone you are not. Who could maintain that lessons such as these are easy?
Yet you have learned far more than this. You have continued, taking every step, however difficult, without complaint, until a world was built that you thought suited you. And every lesson that makes up the world arises from the first accomplishment of learning; an enormity so great the Holy Spirit’s Voice seems small and still before its magnitude.
The world began with one strange lesson, the thought that separation could be your reality. It was powerful enough to render God forgotten and His Son an alien to himself, in seeming exile from the home where God Himself established him.
You who then taught yourself the Son of God is guilty, say not you cannot now learn the simple things salvation asks of you!”