It wouldn't make sense for God—who is omnipotent—to be powerless in certain instances. It just wouldn't add up for God, divine Love, to create man in His perfect likeness and then leave him as if he were a mortal put in some cosmic obstacle course to test his wits and endurance. These concepts of God are entirely mistaken. God isn't apart from us looking down, wondering if and when we might "get with it" and figure out how His creation works!
Christian Science shows us man's oneness with his Maker as the very expression of divine Mind. When we turn to God in the specific healing prayer we call Christian Science treatment, this reality becomes clearer to us. We are flooded with the sense of God's allness and love, as the truth of being comes to us from divine Mind. This powerful truth isn't just human opinion; it is divine fact, and it operates as law—the unchangeable law of God, forever governing every one of us, made in His spiritual image. Nothing could stop this truth, any more than God could be stopped from being God.
While a Christian Scientist may use the phrases "giving treatment" and "having treatment," when providing or receiving specific prayerful help on request, the help is really coming directly from God, not from or through a human mind "trying" to give it. The so-called human mind can neither promote nor block the truth of being. When we turn to God, the only Mind, to know what is true, we realize that what Mind knows is all there really is to know or be known. Healing is the effect.
What is decisive is our unselfed love and the degree of our willingness to understand and respond to the divine will. The Lord's Prayer includes the affirmation "Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven." Matt. 6:10. Mrs. Eddy emphasizes this spiritual fact with the scientific interpretation "Enable us to know,—as in heaven, so on earth,—God is omnipotent, supreme." Science and Health, p. 17. God does enable us to know that His will for His creation is entirely good and unopposable. Quite obviously, Love's purpose could never be for us to be sick or to be in pain. For healing to go forward and remain permanent, however, any notion that something actually could thwart or hold back Love's goodness must be discredited and thrown out.
Christian Science treatment is an expression of truth impelled by divine Mind. It is simply impossible for this truth to be deflected, stopped, or somehow made of none effect.
Knowing our true relationship to God melts any fear about being unable to overcome evil threats. When we know how infinitely loved we are by our Father-Mother, we aren't afraid we're not "good enough" to heal or be healed or that we aren't able to respond to God's will. Since in our real identity we are created in divine Love's likeness, we could never be unworthy of God's love or incapable of receiving it. If we're believing otherwise, the remedy is to draw closer to God in prayer and stay close. Then we stop believing we can't be what God already created us to be. We begin to feel with more solid conviction that, in truth, we've always been God's flawless and receptive child. We see that the aggressive suggestions arguing for failure, inadequacy, and weakness are lies—and that these lies aren't us, aren't our real identity or our real thoughts at all.
This healing, reforming prayer has momentum provided by the very law of God, whose spiritual creation is the perpetual unfolding of good. This good is eternal, and it simply can't be held back. Lies that say "no progress," "relapse," or "going backward" don't have a chance when prayerful treatment embodies the specific counter fact—the spiritual fact that God's truth isn't stoppable or reversible. Christian Science treatment is an expression of truth impelled by divine Mind, and therefore it is simply impossible for this truth to be deflected, ignored, perverted, stopped, or somehow made of none effect. The scientific truth of being is not mere human demanding or assertion. It is God's omnipotent, irresistible will in operation. The prophet Isaiah represents God as saying. "My word ... that goeth forth out of my mouth ... shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it." Isa. 55:11.
The closer we live within God's Word, His law, the more confidence and joy we have in divine Truth's self-asserting and self-revealing power. Evil or matter loses its claim to hold or to frighten us. We don't believe that some personal will separate from God could ever actually succeed in resisting Truth, working against it, or neutralizing its power. However, when we mistakenly imbue the so-called mortal, or material, mind with such clever and awesome power and build it up, we're very likely to feel pressed and worn out. But we can stop making another god, stop believing that this imaginary power rules our lives, and stop feeling mesmerically engaged with it.
All Christian Science practice is based on the First Commandment, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." Ex. 20:3. As we faithfully worship the one divine Mind and affirm its allness, doubts about the outcome of prayer diminish, and the suggestion of being stuck or trapped fades. We feel our natural, God-given energy and joy continually renewed. "Mind is the source of all movement, and there is no inertia to retard or check its perpetual and harmonious action," Science and Health, p. 283. explains Mrs. Eddy.
She discovered that what was behind Jesus' unparalleled healing was the quickening power of the eternal Christ, which he so perfectly expressed. Every attempt to stop Christ Jesus and to end his ministry failed because nothing could ever prevail against Christ, God's spiritual idea. Mrs. Eddy's discovery, Christian Science, is divine revelation that came to her from God through the Christ. It was so clear to her that nothing could stop the forever appearing of Christ, the coming of the promised Comforter, that she stated of Science, "This coming, as was promised by the Master, is for its establishment as a permanent dispensation among men. ..." Ibid., p. 150. She knew that the permanency of Science is guaranteed by virtue of its divine origin.
In our practice of scientific Christianity today, we need to be alert to treat and destroy any lie challenging the permanence of the Science of Christ or the permanency of healings brought about through Christ. The continuing progress of the practice of Christ-healing rests upon our understanding that the irresistible, irreversible Christ can no more be stopped than the sun can be put out or its light dimmed.
As we grasp this, healing—and the Christian Science movement— move forward.
