As A Course in Miracles explains, “You believe it is possible to be host to ego or hostage to God.” Indeed, religion has falsely taught us that salvation requires tremendous sacrifices that would rob us of fun and richness of experience in life. While religiosity can make life dull, spiritual awakening brings aliveness.

The story of Christ dying on the cross is not a story of sacrifice; rather, a story about fearlessly overcoming death as spirit-identity. No sacrifice is required to align with God because God is the force of life, itself. It is what we are, beyond the flesh. When you recognize your divine identity, you choose to let the false ego identity go because you simply recognize it as the source of problems. Is ending your problems in this life and beyond a sacrifice?

People misunderstand God as something external, far away, a sort of man in the sky whom we are supposed to fear. This idea of God is so ridiculous that most people, choosing to become agnostic or atheist, assume the world’s false identity of ego instead. The tragic error of ego is undone when we recognize God as the energy and force of life, itself, experienced by humans internally as the energy, feeling, and thought system of Love.

Of course, Love (capitalized because it is divine) is another badly misunderstood concept, for the simple reason that we are taught that it, too, requires sacrifice.   

“Sacrifice is so essential to your thought system that salvation apart from sacrifice means nothing to you. Your confusion of sacrifice and love is so profound that you cannot conceive of love without sacrifice. And it is this you must look upon; sacrifice is attack, not love.”
-A Course in Miracles

To Love fully, to spiritually awaken and to align with the divine thought system of Love, requires no sacrifice at all. Those who would make you sacrifice for love or for salvation are manipulating and exploiting you for very selfish reasons. To embrace this message is to free yourself, to end your suffering, to awaken to truth, reality, and joy. No sacrifice. No fear. Just love.