When people get even an inkling of the larger dimension of Christianity—Christianity that isn't narrowed and weighed down by materialism—religion tends to come alive for them. A routine, dutiful sense begins to dissolve in the process of finding new insight. What Jesus said can seem literally fulfilled: "The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life."John 6:63.
In an article in a church newsletter, an Episcopal bishop talks about his sudden recognition that Christian healing is to be taken as thoroughly real. Having heard a series of lectures by a noted Methodist healer, Agnes Sanford, he describes his awakening: "It was for me and some others a rather traumatic moment when she concluded by suggesting rather gently but pointedly that if we were not going to believe the promises of God, as given to us by Jesus Christ in the New Testament, maybe we were really in the wrong line of work! ... I knew that I had to try to approach my ministry in a new way, ... try to pray with a measure of boldness that I never before possessed. I needed to dare to believe that the God who created all things could do all things ..., daring to believe that God's will is ever for the health and wholeness of His children ...." Maurice M. Benitez, "The Bishop's Column," The Texas Episcopal Churchman, February 1990.
Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered and founded Christian Science, once described it as developing an enlarged sense of Christianity. She comments in one of her Bible lessons: "The next step for ecclesiasticism to take, is to admit that all Christians are properly called Scientists who follow the commands of our Lord and His Christ, Truth; and that no one is following his full command without this enlarged sense of the spirit and power of Christianity. 'He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do,' is a radical and unmistakable declaration of the right and power of Christianity to heal; for this is Christlike, and includes the understanding of man's capabilities and spiritual power."Miscellaneous Writings, p. 193.
