The hour in which we accept the Christ wholeheartedly marks a decision which establishes us as followers of Christ Jesus in faith and in deed. That hour may come to us when, in the throes of a struggle with temptation or personal desire, we are able to rise above self-will to the spiritual altitude where it is possible for us to say, as the Master did in the garden of Gethsemane (Matt. 26:39), "Not as I will, but as thou wilt."
In taking his stand for the will of God, Christ Jesus was at the same time reaffirming his complete acceptance of his true selfhood as the Christ, or Son of God. And the Christ, we should remind ourselves frequently, is likewise our own true, eternal selfhood as God's reflection. Christ Jesus let the will of God take its exalted course in him in order that he might carry through God's plan for his own salvation and for the salvation of the world. Jesus' complete surrender to the will of God enabled him to achieve the resurrection and the ascension and thus prove that life is wholly spiritual and indestructible.
Mary Baker Eddy says in her definition of "will" in the Glossary of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 597), "Will, as a quality of so-called mortal mind, is a wrong-doer; hence it should not be confounded with the term as applied to Mind or to one of God's qualities." Erring human will always impels a wrong decision and makes the wrongdoer a tool of aggressive evil suggestion.
Jesus' attitude in the garden of Gethsemane is the consummate example of an unswerving loyalty to the will of God. For us to take our stand for the will of God, despite the pressure upon us to remain in the bondage of mortality, is a decision that we all must make if we are to achieve spiritual salvation and heavenly harmony. The demands of God, Soul, inevitably lead us step by step to the spiritual power that eradicates the claims of sense.
Scholastic theology tends to be confusing with respect to the will of God. It teaches that God's will is oftentimes the way of suffering, of hard sacrifices, of impossible tasks. But only mortal mind is the believer of its own false beliefs, and only suppositional animal magnetism can propel us into the mesmeric state that accepts these false beliefs as true. The will of God is the will of good. In the triumph of spiritual sense, corporeal sense is left without a witness, and right where the mortal and material seeming was, there is true individuality in the likeness of God with no taint of anything unlike God. Every healing, however small, that a yielding to the divine will has made possible is the evidence from on high that God's perfect child is progressively appearing to human consciousness.
Among the many divinely inspired pronouncements shared with us by Mrs. Eddy, few perhaps portray so revealingly God's standards as does her unfolding of what happened at the crucifixion. She writes in "Unity of Good" (p. 58): "Jesus walked with bleeding feet the thorny earth-road, treading 'the winepress alone.' His persecutors said mockingly, 'Save thyself, and come down from the cross.' This was the very thing he was doing, coming down from the cross, saving himself after the manner that he had taught, by the law of Spirit's supremacy; and this was done through what is humanly called agony."
His coming down from the cross was far removed from the taking down of the physical body of Jesus. In the true descent from the cross, Jesus was handling the claim that evil could destroy the Christ he exemplified. He was proving that the Christ is indestructible and is Lord forever. When the will of God is revealed, as Jesus revealed it through his understanding of his divine nature as the Christ, the will of men is undone.
Do we feel on occasion that we are being held fast to a cross of some kind? Is there something in our personal lives that will not give up its claim to fetter us and keep us in bondage? Then let us remember that our Leader points out (Science and Health, p. 574), "The very circumstance, which your suffering sense deems wrathful and afflictive, Love can make an angel entertained unawares." We can hardly hope to find ourselves within the kingdom of God without first being willing to give up the kingdom of this world, the belief and dream of material intelligence, claiming a mind and a will separate from God.
But there is an hour of decision in which we must submit understandingly and lovingly to God's divine mandate and directive. This hour of decision is not a matter of time but of thought. Expediency has nothing to do with it; sincerity is required. Not out of fear but out of love we yield up our sense of human will for Soul's calling. In the final analysis Soul inspires a true spiritual stand, and Love beckons us on and forward.
In reality we can do nothing of ourselves, but we can only "do always those things that please him" (John 8:29), as Christ Jesus himself once summed it up.
