T. 19. IV. B. 1 – 3. Jesus: “We’ve said that peace must first surmount the obstacle of your desire to get rid of it. Where the attraction of guilt holds sway, peace is not wanted and you will not have it. Yet there is a second obstacle as well that peace must flow across, and closely related to the first.
That obstacle is the belief that the body, in itself, is valuable for what it offers you! For here is the attraction of guilt made manifest, and continually experienced in the form of the body. This is ‘the value’ that you think the peace of God would rob you of. This is what you believe that the Atonement would dispossess, thus ‘leaving you homeless!’ And so it is this for which you would deny a home to peace, relinquishing the last inkling of attack!
This is the ‘sacrifice’ you feel to be too great to make, too much to ask of you! But is it a ‘sacrifice’ you resist, or a release to freedom? What has the body really given you that justifies your strange belief that in the body somehow lies salvation? Do you not see that what. You are clinging to is but the belief in death?
Here we recognize why you misperceive the Atonement as murder! Here is the source of the idea that love is to be feared! Yet at the level of mind, and far beyond the body, the Holy Spirit’s messengers are sent, their messages calling the mind to join in holy communion and be at peace. Such is the message that I have given them for you! It is only the messengers of fear that see the body, for they choose to look for what can suffer. Is it a sacrifice to be removed from what can suffer?
The Holy Spirit does not demand you sacrifice the hope of the body’s pleasure. It has no hope of any real pleasure! But neither can the body itself bring you fear of pain. Pain is the only ‘sacrifice’ the Holy Spirit asks, and this He would remove for you!”