Source: https://www.bertha-dudde.org/en/proclamation/1382

1382 The will of man is valued, not the deed.... soul work....

April 12, 1940: Book 23

The urge of the heart is decisive for people's actions and every deed will therefore characterize the person's inherent disposition. However, it is important that a person is able to carry out what he intends to do.... Often, however, he is somehow prevented from doing so. His will then always remains the measure of his disposition, not what he carries out, if the latter does not correspond to his will. A person can therefore perform a good deed by force under some kind of influence, but it cannot be credited to him because it was not born of his inner feeling and because he would never have done it without this compulsion.... just as, conversely, the will to do a good deed that cannot be performed is credited as a good deed. And so here again the lord judges in strictest justice, He regocnizes people's hearts, He knows every emotion, every thought, and nothing can remain hidden from His eye.... If you humans now devote yourselves to the belief that all good thoughts are valued as accomplished deeds, this will ennoble your thinking, you will begin to always give an account of your innermost feelings, of all words and thoughts.... you will even look at every good deed with a critical eye and always ask yourself whether it has fully corresponded to your thinking. And this is work on the soul, constant self-observation, constant striving upwards and acquiring an extremely strongly developed sense of truth.... all of this is conscious work on the soul. Man must first educate himself to love by constantly endeavouring to help his fellow man.... he must have a certain spiritual superiority over everything that could trick him into accomplishing something that does not correspond to his innermost heart's urge.... he must therefore, if bad influence wants to push him towards the apparent fulfilment of his life's career, oppose it with all his will and listen to the inner voice that prescribes his right way of life. He must therefore be prompted by his will to serve God to do every good deed, he must make it his concern that will and deed always coincide, that the deed never deviates from the will, but that will and deed always move in the same direction and his inner being is now always and constantly moulded until the will has become completely one with the divine will and the deed is valuable before God....

Amen

Translated by Doris Boekers