A major purpose of Christian Science is to enable any individual to pray to God in the way that Christ Jesus did and taught us to do, and to bring out the results he promised—healing sickness and destroying sin and its effects.
Prayer is most often thought of as a private communication between an individual and God: a humble recognition of His power and presence, a desire to be lifted out of limiting human circumstances, and a commitment to better understand and obey His law. While such communion is one purpose of prayer, Christ Jesus' teachings show us that prayer is much larger in scope. Prayer is not just the action of communing with God; it's also the way we live. It isn't possible to cultivate two separate mentalities—one to use in communing with God and the other to use for everything else. To commune with God effectively, an undivided Christlike mentality must be cultivated, and it must gradually assume control of all our behavior.
We see this Christlike thought in the Lord's Prayer. In Matthew this prayer comes almost at the center of the Sermon on the Mount, and thus is surrounded by Jesus' great teaching on the requirements for Christian living. Just so a Christian healer's spiritual communion with God must be surrounded by a Christian life. All of Jesus' teaching, including the Lord's Prayer, can be summed up in the command covering both our mental communion and our lives: "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." Matt. 5:48.
