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Ascended Master Jesus through Kim Michaels.

I have talked about the necessity to take a critical look at the history of the Christian religion in order to see how it has been influenced by the consciousness of anti-christ. This is a big job. This is an extensive task that would require people to look at many different aspects of history. Nevertheless, I wish to give you one example of how this must be done. Consider one of the great schisms that has divided the Christian religion in the West between the Roman Catholic Church and the various Protestant denominations. This is the debate about whether you are saved through grace alone, or through grace and works.

When you look at the historical setting for this, you will see that the Catholic Church, up through the Middle Ages, had added many things to Christianity that clearly were not in accordance with my teachings. The most blatant of these was, of course, the letters of absolvency where you could buy the absolution of your sins. Nevertheless, there were many other things added, including a very subtle mindset of exclusivity that only Catholics would go to heaven because they followed the rules of an outer religion. This is also part of works, not only that you do good works for others in the form of charity, but that you perform good works in supporting the Church in all ways, including being obedient to church hierarchy.

It should be possible for those who have read this book to see that you do not score points with Christ by blindly following the blind leaders – the fallen beings, the false teachers – who have taken over the Catholic Church. This is not good works in the eyes of Christ. Nor is it, of course, true that you can buy your way to absolution from your sins. Nor is it, for that matter, true that an external church authority can absolve you of your sins in the first place.

I am not thereby denouncing the institution of confession. It can be helpful in a psychological sense for some people. If they can go and speak out what they have done and accept forgiveness for it, they can be helped to move on with their lives. For many people, going to confession has just become a ritual, and they go and confess some sin and then accept that they are absolved from the sin, but they do not change the consciousness that caused them to sin.

It is only the change in consciousness that I am looking for. It is only a change in consciousness that will bring you into the kingdom of God that is within you. It is only the shift from the duality consciousness, the divided consciousness, into the unified consciousness of Christ, the consciousness of oneness, that will bring you to heaven, so to speak. Heaven is a state of consciousness and that is why the kingdom of God is within you.

The fundamentalist mockery of Jesus’ mission

The Catholic concept of good works was indeed very flawed. It is appropriate that Luther and other Protestant church leaders took a critical look at this. The problem was that in taking a critical look at the concept of works, they did what the duality consciousness so often makes people do. They jumped from one extreme to the other.

They reasoned that because the Catholic Church had a flawed interpretation of the concepts of works, they needed to jump to the other extreme and say that works do not contribute to your salvation for you are saved exclusively through the grace of Jesus Christ. This is what then led to the development of fundamentalist churches who say that the only thing you need to do in order to be saved is to confess Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior.

What a complete mockery of my true mission to demonstrate the gradual path to a higher state of consciousness. What a complete and blatant disrespect for even the words of the scriptures that these fundamentalist preachers claim should be taken literally. They have made a mockery out of the scriptures by interpreting them in a way that they claim to be literal but which is anything but literal. Of course, from a logical viewpoint there can never be a literal interpretation. As soon as you are interpreting, you are not literal.

This ties in with what I have said about the consciousness of anti-christ. You see everything from a distance and therefore everything becomes a concept and every concept has an opposite and can be debated endlessly. You are now lost in the quagmire of interpretation. Do you see how this ties in with thesis versus anti-thesis, creating synthesis? The thesis was the Catholic version of works. The anti-thesis was Luther’s interpretation that only grace saves you. The synthesis was the Christian fundamentalist claim that only by declaring Jesus as your Lord and Savior, will you be saved and that this is all that is needed.

Well, where is the path in Christian fundamentalist churches? It is lost, it is gone, and therefore those churches are dead to me. I can only say to them: “Get thee behind me, Satan.” They have nothing whatsoever to do with my true mission.

Do I sound harsh? I do indeed intend to sound harsh for what else can cut through the veil of lies that has surrounded the people in these fundamentalist churches? They sit there every Sunday feeling holier than thou, feeling convinced that one day I will appear in the sky and give undeniable proof to all of humankind that these people in their little church somewhere were the only ones who knew the true teachings of Christ. What blatant spiritual pride and arrogance is this! How can it have anything to do with the reality of Christ? It is only and exclusively a fabrication of the mind of anti-christ and the blind leaders who have attempted to lead people astray for eons on this planet.

You need both works and grace

What is the deeper reality of works versus grace? It is that there is no works versus grace. It is not a matter of one or the other, both are necessary. You do need to perform works. Why do you need to perform works? For two reasons. One is that you need to shift your consciousness and this requires work. You need to be willing to look at the beam in your own eye, the elements of anti-christ in your own eye. You also need to transform the negative energies that have accumulated in your personal energy field, not only in this lifetime but in past lives. You also need to recognize that there is a certain reality to what Eastern religions call karma and what Christianity calls sin. In the past, you sent out an energy impulse, and this impulse will at some point be reflected back to you by the cosmic mirror of the material universe.

In the past, you have sent out these energy impulses at the level of the conscious mind and the physical body. They cycle through what I have called the four levels of the material universe, and when they come all the way back to the material

realm, they manifest as various events in your life. There has been a debate, not only in Christian circles but in all religious circles, about why bad things happen to good people. Why is it that some children are born with diseases or physical handicaps or psychological handicaps? If you look only at the official Christian interpretation that reincarnation is a fallacy, then you cannot explain this.

Here is a person who has lived a good life, has gone to church every Sunday, has confessed every sin, has striven to live a life according to the outer teachings of his or her church and suddenly he or she is in a car accident and is handicapped for life. If you do not incorporate reincarnation, you cannot explain this. You can only say that this must be a good and benevolent God who wanted this to happen to that person. It must be a good and benevolent God who wanted this child to be born with a crippling disease.

Or you can come up with even more convoluted interpretations that the child must somehow have sinned, but if it was born with a disease when would it have sinned? Ah, some preachers will say, it must have sinned in the womb. Well, how exactly does a child sin in the womb? This they cannot explain for there is no logical explanation. The logical explanation is that a child sinned in a past life and is now reaping the karmic consequences of its own past choices. It was not God who wanted to punish the child, but God has given all lifestreams free will and has set up the material universe to reflect back to them, in the future, the choices they have made in the past and the energy impulses they have sent out.

Why is there a delay factor? Because it gives you the opportunity to rise above the consciousness that caused you to sin in a past life. When you do rise above the consciousness that caused you to sin, then you do not need to reap the physical consequences of your past actions.

NOTE: The rest of this dictation is available in the book What Would Jesus Say about Christianity?