When we draw near to God, we are aware of the freshness and purity which are forever present in the spiritual nature of existence. The God who is Love is the God who restores all good and in whom no good thing is lacking. Before we found Christian Science we did not know how to claim our birthright as a child of God, how to know the purity and power which are ours by reflection. But now through an understanding of the Christ we have found the way to do so.
There is nothing lacking in the Christ, or Truth. When we are aware of its influence, we feel the love, vitality, and bodily vigor of spiritual well-being. There is no limit to our endurance when we work through the Christ. Paul said (Phil. 4:13), "I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me." Christ is not an abstraction. It includes all divine attributes, such as wisdom, power, strength, love, health, holiness, which exist independently of matter. The Christ is the truth concerning our heavenly nature. We are complete in Christ. The man of God's creating lacks nothing. An understanding of man's inseparability from the Christ reveals the divine nature and the spiritual universe of God's making. The mortal mind picture is one of mortality, including birth, growth, sin, sickness, and disintegration. We seem to express this imperfect image until the Christ is fully understood, and in proportion as this understanding comes we are able to prove that man bears the image of the heavenly.
Humanly speaking, we must live up to the highest we know and continually gain more of the Christlike nature. Mary Baker Eddy writes in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 547): "The true theory of the universe, including man, is not in material history but in spiritual development. Inspired thought relinquishes a material, sensual, and mortal theory of the universe, and adopts the spiritual and immortal."
