Tell the Truth

Archive for April, 2009

18  Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old.
19  Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it?  I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert. Isaiah 43:18-19

Can God do a thing and we not know it?

Can we know the Truth and the Truth not make us free? No, we shall know spiritual freedom.

Can we have eternal Life but experience mortal death? No, we shall know the Life that never dies.

Can we life, move and have our being in God and yet, experience separation? No, we shall know God’s omnipresence.

Divine Love is our shepherd, we shall not want. Can we not know the provision and goodness of divine Love for us? No, we shall know it.

And God will make a way for us to know it, though we are walking through the wilderness, or are athirst in the desert.

And all flesh shall see the salvation of God.  Luke 3:6

Be as mindful of the Truth about yourself as you would have a practitioner be.

 Man 41:19
       Daily Prayer. SECT. 4. It shall be the duty
   of every member of this Church to pray each
21 day: “Thy kingdom come;” let the reign of
   divine Truth, Life, and Love be established in
   me, and rule out of me all sin; and may Thy
24 Word enrich the affections of all mankind, and
   govern them!

Don’t let your Christian Science practice be just reading the weekly Bible lesson or attending church–take it with you. LET Truth, Life and Love be established in you. Work for it!

Prepare ye the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Isaiah 40:3 (KJV)

Do the necessary human steps to necessary to prepare the coming of the kingdom (pray, watch, work).

 1:6
 6 Prayer, watching, and working, combined with self-im-
   molation, are God’s gracious means for accomplishing
   whatever has been successfully done for the Christian-
 9 ization and health of mankind.

Allow Truth to abide in your thinking. Bring Truth into your every inner conversation, adjusting your thinking about every event and activity of your life. View the world through the lens of Science. Guard your thought, and confront error each time you meet it.

 392:24 Stand
24                             Stand porter at the door of thought.
   Admitting only such conclusions as you wish realized in
   bodily results, you will control yourself har- 
27 moniously. When the condition is present 
   which you say induces disease, whether it be air, exercise,
   heredity, contagion, or accident, then perform your office
30 as porter and shut out these unhealthy thoughts and fears.
   Exclude from mortal mind the offending errors; then the
   body cannot suffer from them. The issues of pain or
 1 pleasure must come through mind, and like a watchman
   forsaking his post, we admit the intruding belief, forget-
 3 ting that through divine help we can forbid this entrance.

Remember, error can only exist in mortal mind–push it out of consciousness, not by ignoring it, but by replacing it with Truth. If you only ignore it, it will return. Ignoring a problem works to desentisize you to evil. Christian Science confronts evil wherever it meets it. Don’t ignore, watch!

24 When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest; and finding none, he saith, I will return unto my house whence I came out. 25 And when he cometh, he findeth it swept and garnished. 26 Then goeth he, and taketh to him seven other spirits more wicked than himself; and they enter in, and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first.  Luke 11:24-26 (KJV)

What can you do with that problem that won’t seem to go away? Enter God’s presence. As you face each difficulty, watch WITH God. Ask Him, “Father, what should I do?” and then listen. Allow God to lead you. Divine Mind knows the Truth that will correct any error, and divine Love will show it to you.

18 I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you. 19 Yet a little while, and the world seeth me no more; but ye see me: because I live, ye shall live also.  20 At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you.  John 14:18-20 (KJV)

Consciously abiding in God’s presence is something that YOU decide to do. It’s an action YOU have to take. God is already there. Will you choose to walk with Him?

 Hymn 148:2
Wherever He may guide me,
No want shall turn me back;
My Shepherd is beside me,
And nothing can I lack.
His wisdom ever waketh,
His sight is never dim;
He knows the way He taketh,
And I will walk with Him.

The three daily duties that Mrs. Eddy gives us in the Manual of the Mother Church are a guide to living as a Christian Scientist. Together, they are a seamless garment that wraps us in the protection of divine Love.

Through them, we live in that divine consciousness of harmony that Jesus called the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven. In that secret place of the most high, where divine understanding and harmony reign supreme, divine Truth, Life and Love are established in us and by their presence rule out of us all sin—all of our ungodly, self-destructive thinking and behavior.

We actively endeavor to establish divine Truth, Life and Love within us, not just by asking, but by listening to God and watching—standing porter at the door of thought. Are we asking God for how to live out His will and listening for the answer, or are we making our choices based on mere personal animosity and attachment? Are we earnestly endeavoring to live under God’s government, divine Love, or are we, in effect, praying that our own will be done?

When personal will is motivating us, we find ourselves out of Truth, Life and Love: we find ourselves out of integrity and lying to others; nurturing discordant thought and harboring fear of already present or potential problems; and acting selfishly toward our neighbor and even our loved ones, seeking our personal pleasure and good at their expense.

The temptation to walk apart from God and His kingdom seems ever-present throughout the day, and we must persistently be on our guard against the aggressive mental suggestion that we go our own way. We must ever be a watcher at the gate or we easily become distracted from our spiritual responsibilities—as a Christian, a Scientist and as a healer in the world.

Mrs. Eddy specifically warns us against trying to establish ourselves through humanly manipulating others—through judging or condemning them, holding our court over the kitchen table; through a personal pride that would boast of a knowledge of what’s “best” for others; through manipulating by offering our unasked for personal opinion, or by pressuring others to “do what’s right”, and which just by coincidence is what is best for us as well. It is God’s Word that will enrich the affections of all mankind, not human personal opinion or will, and as we know, personal will can be expressed behind the mask of spirituality.

She also asks us to be loving by rebuking sin in others in “true brotherliness, charitableness, and forgiveness”. Self-destructive behavior always brings suffering, and it is a true friend who helps us to see our mistakes. When on the receiving end of the correction, it is true wisdom to then listen to God in prayer for how “to be delivered from all evil”. But Mrs. Eddy also warns us against being influenced by the personal sense of others instead of listening to God, divine Principle for what is ours to do.

That listening to God and endeavoring to live under the rule of divine law is the purpose and aim of the daily duties, and the three duties taken together are a seamless garment which direct our spiritual steps into greater a understanding and more perfect demonstration of Christian Science.

Will you keep your watch? To keep your watch doesn’t only mean to be awake at that hour and be working mentally. It means to do the work and succeed in breaking the mesmerism for the two hours assigned. If you don’t succeed, you haven’t kept your watch.  From Watches, Prayers, Arguments ascribed to Mary Baker Eddy

Watching means not letting evil—sin, sickness and death, have its way in our consciousness; and here, Mrs. Eddy says that if we’re not successful, we haven’t done our work.

In this regard, studying our Bible lesson doesn’t mean just sitting down regularly and reading it. It means breaking through “earth’s stupid rest” to find inspiration and enlightenment.

And prayer for healing means more than repeating well-worn Truths as though we were saying our rosary.

We must be successful, or our work isn’t done.

Break forth into joy, sing together, ye waste places of Jerusalem: for the LORD hath comforted his people, he hath redeemed Jerusalem.   Isaiah 52:9 (KJV)

I’ve always love this joyous passage from Isaiah. I was reading in the New Century Bible this morning and there it is rendered as:

Jerusalem, your buildings are destroyed now, but shout and rejoice together, because the Lord has comforted his people. He has saved Jerusalem.  Isaiah 52:9 (NCV)

Anyone who has ever felt they were “laid waste” by their health problems or a difficult financial situation may have a hard time with this passage. How do we “shout and rejoice together” when our “buildings are destroyed”? We think when we see our lives restored–then we can shout and rejoice. But, certainly, not now!

The Bible exhorts us to bring every thought captive to Christ. How do we bring our discouraged thoughts captive to Christ?

Our discouragement and our discouraging problems have the same cause–mortal mind, the belief that we have a mind and an existence apart from God, our “very present help in trouble.”  Psalms 46:1 (KJV) Our discouragement doesn’t come from our problems, it’s just another part of the package. As Mrs. Eddy ways, the sin and the sinner are one. (RET 64:1)

The coming into our oneness with God, our escaping from the sense of separateness, is called the atonement. In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, the Christian Science textbook, Mrs. Eddy tells us,

19:6
 6                                                       Jesus aided in recon-
   ciling man to God by giving man a truer sense of Love,
   the divine Principle of Jesus’ teachings, and this truer
 9 sense of Love redeems man from the law of matter,
   sin, and death by the law of Spirit, — the law of divine
   Love.

How does a truer sense of Love redeem man from the law of matter? Isn’t that redemption to be found in the understanding that God, who is Love, never made man a sinner? Never made man to be vulnerable to sickness or disease? Never gave us a material life that ends in death? And that this understanding allows us to know that sin, sickness and disease are not our lot in life? That they are illegitimate because not from God?

390:20
              Suffer no claim of sin or of sickness to grow upon
21 the thought. Dismiss it with an abiding conviction that
   it is illegitimate, because you know that God is no more
   the author of sickness than He is of sin. You have no
24 law of His to support the necessity either of sin or sick-
   ness, but you have divine authority for denying that neces-
   sity and healing the sick.

Jesus rejected error for us when we couldn’t yet see it. He showed us what oneness with God looks like. How it operates. How it changes our thinking–our behavior. He showed us the power of that oneness through demonstration as well as words. In that, there is cause plenty for us to “Break forth into joy”!

Christian Science brings to man the truth that we have not been condemned to the immoral sentence of a false material judge with it’s arbitrary and devastating sentence of sin, disease and death.

We have one creator–one God and “father of us all”.  Romans 4:16 (KJV)  And we can no more be separated from God than a ray of light can be separate from the sun, “For in him we live, and move, and have our being.”  Acts 17:28 (KJV)

Mis 277:23-24
       No evidence before the material senses can close my
24 eyes to the scientific proof that God, good, is supreme.

No physical irritation can close my eyes to the scientific proof that God, good, is supreme.
 
No claim of disease can close my eyes…
 
No inflamation can close my eyes…
 
No animal magnetism can close my eyes…
 
No aggressive mental suggestion can close my eyes…
 
No material history or claim of heredity can close my eyes…
 
No fear, doubt, confusion, or worry can close my eyes…
 
No claim of personality can close my eyes…
 
No claim of mortality can close my eyes…
 
No claim of sinfulness, sickness or death can close my eyes…

No insecurity or self-doubt can close my eyes…

I woke up this morning and sat down to do my metaphysical work as I do each morning and had a tough time of it. I felt as though my spiritual consciousness had flown out of the window. Nothing in the lesson seemed to connect with me.

Jesus was tempted as well…

“Then the devil taketh him up into the holy city, and setteth him on a pinnacle of the temple, And saith unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone.”  Matt 4:5,6

He saw the temptation to “cast ourselves down” for what it was–an aggressive mental suggestion, and his answer was “no”.

“Jesus said unto him, … Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” Matt 4:7

Our connection with God is invulnerable. It cannot be dampened, nor can it be taken from us. Our spiritual joy is forever.

“joy cannot be turned into sorrow, for sorrow is not the master of joy;” 304:11-12 joy (to

In Watches, Prayers and Arguments, Mrs. Eddy talks about the watches she had asked her students to do. They were to hold a high state of consciousness about an issue over a period of several hours. In WPA, she makes the point that it’s not a matter of merely putting in our time. It’s a matter of getting to a consciousness of Truth and staying in it.

We shouldn’t be satisfied with just spending our scheduled time in reading the lesson, or Science and Health, or whatever task we have before us. Putting in the time is not enough. We have to rouse ourselves to realization and stay there.

“But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you.”  Rom 8:11

That Spirit is the Mind of Christ that is in us–working in us to transform our lives. We shouldn’t settle for anything less.

Let us watch, work, and pray that this salt lose not its saltness, and that this light be not hid, but radiate and glow into noontide glory.  367:21

When we “lose our saltness”, it’s a sign we have more work to do!

God who is perfect and without limit has never experienced nor conceived of imperfection and limitation. His creations don’t express those mortal qualities either. In Miscellaneous Writings, Mrs. Eddy says, “a perfect man would not desire to make himself imperfect” (MIS 363:15). If you were the creator, would you create your loved ones with imperfections and limitations? With a sinful nature? With a diseased or disabled body? With a mental disorder?

Jesus asks, “If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone? or if he ask a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent?  Or if he shall ask an egg, will he offer him a scorpion?” Luke 9:11-12

And Hymn 51 tells us:

God could not make imperfect man
His model infinite;
Unhallowed thought He could not plan,
Love’s work and Love must fit.

Love’s work and Love must fit.  Love must work in accord with It’s nature. When we are in love, aren’t our thoughts our loved one full of love? Full of tender care and kindness? If you were God and setting the conditions for your loved ones, would you give them an existence full of imperfection and discord? Full of sickness and woe?

How can God, who is Love Itself do any less than even a mortal man would do?  “If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?” Luke 9:13

We just can’t be something God didn’t make us to be. As Popeye says, “I yam what I yam,” and what we are is God’s image and likeness—the image of perfection. We can’t be anything less.

“God is not chargeable with imperfection.” (MIS 363:16)  Let us not accuse Him of creating it.

Divine Love is filling every avenue, flowing through every channel and removing every obstacle. From Watches, Prayers, Arguments by Mary Baker Eddy.