John 10:18 Meaning No One Takes It Away From Me

Nothing real can be stolen from a mind, and this is the freedom the ego most fears to hear. What seems to be taken by force, the body, the life, the peace, is only ever released or held by the mind that owns it. To say no one takes it is to withdraw the last belief that the world has power to victimize, for a mind cannot be robbed of what it alone lays down and alone takes up again.

This is not defiance but remembered strength. The mind that acts from its Source discovers it was never at the mercy of anything outside it; the power it thought had been wrested away was resting in its own hands the whole time.

Father: the Source of the mind's authority, the will it shares and from which its power is drawn.

No outside hand fastens a person to any condition. A man lays down one state and takes up another entirely from within, whatever the world seems to be doing to him. The circumstances press, but they cannot seize the inner feeling unless the feeling is surrendered. Consent is the only door, and it opens only from the inside.

Here is the concrete of it. A man beaten down by failure has not had his freedom stolen; he has laid down the sense of being adequate and picked up the sense of being small. The same power that set that state down can set it aside and lift the other. To know this is to hold the reins nobody else can reach. The self that assumes is the only authority over what a life becomes.