How encouraging it is when a friend sees the potential for good in us and tells us so! Such loving appreciation gives hope. It makes us feel worthy and needed. It helps us try to measure up. But such commendation can be even more valuable if it is based on a spiritual sense of our abilities as gifts from a caring God, Spirit, who is all good. The teachings of Christ Jesus, explained in Christian Science, show the way to make these spiritual gifts or qualities our own and so find more and more of the good God has provided.
In proportion as we, through trusting, persistent prayer to God, seek to know His divine view, we will begin to find out that all is spiritual—what Mind, God, is knowing. Christian Science explains that as Mind's likeness, man, our true identity, is forever Godlike. Realizing this is the first step in finding the goodness known by the one Mind to be our only real substance. Mrs. Eddy writes: "Wholly apart from this mortal dream, this illusion and delusion of sense, Christian Science comes to reveal man as God's image, His idea, coexistent with Him—God giving all and man having all that God gives." The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 5.
It is obvious, however, that to get above the illusion of the sense-dream to the spiritual sense and substance of being, we need to go beyond just saying words. We need to understand and obey. We want to understand what it takes to discern and follow Mind's vision of creation. Here we find specific directives in the life of Christ Jesus. His works and words were the outcome of the fact that he saw all existence as God sees it, heard His words, and did what God commanded; he was God's representative. He said, "The Father loveth the Son, and sheweth him all things that himself doeth," and also "I can of mine own self do nothing: as I hear, I judge." John 5:20, 30.
