THE worship of Deity has always been accompanied with the desire to please God, however crude and imperfect the concepts of Him. Christ Jesus taught and demonstrated the full and perfect understanding of God as Life and as divine Love. That understanding, through Christian Science, enables us to-day to love God supremely and to love our neighbor as ourselves, thereby fulfilling the whole law.
Jesus is the outstanding example of how to please God. All that he said and did was for the praise and glory of his Father. Always did he pray to Him for inspiration, strength, and guidance. To the extent that we, too, as Paul writes, "are led by the Spirit of God," are we "the sons of God." Necessarily, this involves the greatest of all sacrifices, without which we cannot enter the kingdom of heaven, namely, the relinquishment of belief in a material selfhood apart from God.
Our Father-Mother God loves all His children impartially, and each one of them is conscious of and reflects divine Love. The divine Mind, Love, cannot possibly be displeased with its own ideas. Hence, the true desire to please God is impelled by gratitude and love, rather than by fear of His displeasure. Mrs. Eddy writes in our textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 140), "The Christian Science God is universal, eternal, divine Love." That spiritual fact, understood, destroys the false belief of God as manlike, liable to become wrathful and to inflict punishment.
