Lesson #103 from A Course in Miracles states, “God, being love, is also happiness.” While we’ve all heard the phrase “God is love,” the course provides an extension of that idea which is that God, who is love, is also happiness.
The bottom line of this lesson is that it is contrasting love and happiness with fear. What it's really trying to communicate to us is that most human beings have a fearful understanding of God. So this lesson is trying to make a contribution towards driving us more deeply and in a committed way to embracing God as love and therefore source of happiness without fear.
From the beginning of the lesson in the first two paragraphs, it says, “Happiness is an attribute of love. It cannot be apart from it, nor can it be experienced where love is not. Love has no limits being everywhere, and therefore joy is everywhere as well. Yet can the mind deny that this is so, believing there are gaps in love where sin can enter, bringing pain instead of joy.”
Then, in paragraph two, it says, “Fear is associated, then, with love.” In other words, the two become contaminated with each other by this strange process in which we as human beings begin to entertain thoughts about the fact that love can be sullied, corrupted, or made less than love by our taking in fear into our minds.
The mind will take the illusion that fearful things are real and then use them to contaminate the mind. Finally, in a later section it says, “These images with no reality and truth, then bear witness, add falsely to the fear of God forgetting being loved, God must be joy. This basic error, we will try again to bring the truth today and to teach ourselves that God being loved is also happiness.” So in the way that we've become used to about the course, it's very sort of technical, almost legal in the argument it tends to make.
God is love.
We have a tendency to contaminate our understanding of God with fear
We then believe in fearful things and lose our happiness because we're really not holding to the image of God, the true image or the Truthful image of God is love.
But why do you think that people would develop a fear of God in the first place?
We have had a tendency to separate from God. There’s the Biblical story of the Prodigal Child as an example. The story is told of a wealthy parent of an empire at the historical time. Their younger of the two adult children says they want all of their inheritance but the parent begs, “Stay here with me - you have everything you need! Why would you leave here?” But the child says no, they’ve got to go and enjoy their fortune. So very reluctantly, the parent gives the child the inheritance. The child departs and then falls on really hard times, squandering the inheritance until nothing is left. They are out of food in a famine stricken land only fit for pigs. Then at some point he rediscovers a connection to home and says, “Maybe if I go home, I'll have a place to sleep and some food to eat.” He was only hoping for basic needs to be met again, but instead he was welcomed with unconditional love. It didn’t matter that he had left and squandered his inheritance, the parent was simply glad that their beloved son was back and he was given back all of the keys to the Kingdom again. So this idea, illustrates our tendency to separate from a loving home and go off on a potentially unwise adventure alone, and this is also the reason why we have a fearful image of God, because in a way, it was an attack on God to leave in the first place. We fear punishment, forgetting that God’s love is the ultimate forgiveness and a space completely free of condemnation as was discussed in a previous article.
A secondary reason why one might stray from God is that we actually want to be God rather than be aligned with God. So this is the main secret that most every human being has, which is that they want to kick God off the throne and replace God with ourselves and our achievements and pride. Despite all of this, God has nothing to do with fear. God is a source of pure joy and happiness. No threats, no punishment, no wrath, nothing.
The exercise provided in this lesson is to repeat, “God being loved is also happiness. To fear God is to be afraid of joy.” The lesson says to allow this one correction to be placed within your mind each waking hour today. Often in the course, it says to focus on something through your waking hours in the day, every hour, and remind yourself of what the lesson is. So here, the thing we keep reminding ourselves of is that God being loved is also happiness. And to fear God is to be afraid of joy.
Then it says in terms of the exercise, “then welcome all the happiness it brings as truth replaces fear and joy becomes what you expect to take the place of pain. God being loved, it will be given you bolster this expectation frequently throughout the day and quiet all your fears with this assurance. Kind and Holy. True God being loved is also happiness. And it is happiness I seek today. I cannot fail because I seek the truth.”
The main point of application for me in my own coaching work around this is that the more grounded I can be every day, every week, every year in God's love for me and for everybody else, the more effective I can be in helping others. Because then in the work that I do, I'm not really primarily warning people, threatening people, sort of redirecting people because they're doing something wrong, judging people, it's really just sort of being an extension of God's love and just expressing a kind of love. No matter whether or not you “failed” in some way, it doesn't really matter. Ultimately, God loves you, and I'm an ambassador for that message.
At a deeper level, applying everything we talked about earlier, Jesus didn't suffer to pay for your crimes and misdemeanors; God loves you unconditionally directly without Jesus having suffered on the cross. So without saying all those things specifically to people or preaching at them, just having the consciousness of all of this gets imparted, somewhat telepathically to clients and helps them kind of return to a place where they feel more loved and because they feel more love, feel more joy and happiness, and therefore, in a sense, are more effective.
When leaders display their leadership in this manner in their organizations, their teams, their frontline workers, they are examples of the “Lighthouse Brand” that we speak of all the time. They know love, they experience it and they translate it throughout their organization, and it reaches their clients and their customers.
Remember that we are partners with God and God is our rocket fuel. He simply wants to help us and assist us to be as fulfilled and as happy as possible, and that it's gotten sort of convoluted with all kinds of other very scary, very scarcity oriented limitations. And while God will help us solve all problems that confront us, the reason is because of God's love for us. It's like a parent with a child. Any good parent would draw attention to a problem their child is facing so that they can help you any way they can to solve your problem. Be challenged to remember that God’s love is the ultimate source of happiness, and no fear, so that you can tap into that unlimited wellspring of happiness that God has for you.
