The Bible often refers to gatekeepers and porters, sentinels who kept watch over the areas surrounding them. For instance, when the Israelites rebuilt the walls of Jerusalem, Nehemiah tells us that the city itself was large, but the people who inhabited it were few. So everyone had to be “in his watch,” at his designated post, vigilant and on guard against the enemy (see Nehemiah 7:3, 4). And when Christ Jesus was about to be crucified, he spoke of mental watching when he reprimanded, then cautioned Peter (who had fallen asleep along with two other disciples while praying): “Keep alert and pray. Otherwise temptation will overpower you” (Matthew 26:41, The Living Bible).
In a sense, we need to be contemporary gatekeepers, watchers of our own thinking. Alertness, vigilance, and awareness are words related to being watchful, which is certainly the opposite of idleness, passivity, or apathy. Maintaining spiritual alertness involves undergirding our thinking with spiritual facts based on the truth of being. We’re required to reason spiritually and boldly claim man’s identity—our own!—as God’s reflection and as never separate from Him, divine Mind.
Foundational to the teachings of Christian Science is that God is divine Love and that man is created by this loving Father-Mother God—always embraced, protected, and maintained by Him, divine Principle. This was proved by Christ Jesus and is affirmed in multiple Bible passages, such as the following: “For in him we live, and move, and have our being; … For we are also his offspring” (Acts 17:28). Because our very being dwells in this divine Principle, man and woman, as spiritual ideas created in the image and likeness of God, are never outside of God’s care. We are always safe, always secure in the arms of divine Love. God knows us only as His cared-for spiritual children, not defined by a particular religion, race, color, ethnicity, nationality, or other human designation.
