One of the most precious gifts that God gives each one of us is spiritual sense, our inherent ability to understand God and to discern the reality of good. We can always exercise this God-derived insight to rightly assess the quality of our thoughts and actions, to distinguish between what’s right and what needs correcting and uplifting, so that we better conform to God-modeled thinking and behavior. This can stop evil’s scenarios in our lives, whether minor or major.
Of course, we need to cultivate this great gift of spiritual sense in day-to-day experience by opening our thought to its God-given presence, claiming this true sense as our own, and being faithful to its guidance. Doing so improves our ability to track our own thought. This is not a matter of constantly indicting ourselves—a vital point. But it is a matter of watching our thinking from a spiritual standpoint through understanding the nature of God and therefore the true nature of man, His spiritual expression. Comparing our thoughts to the perfect model of God’s thoughts, we realize when we might be headed in a direction that is not in line with God’s perfect government or character, which is always typified by love, harmony, strength, purity, and peace.
In the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy writes, “Know thyself, and God will supply the wisdom and the occasion for a victory over evil” (p. 571). And in another place the textbook says: “Anatomy, when conceived of spiritually, is mental self-knowledge, and consists in the dissection of thoughts to discover their quality, quantity, and origin. Are thoughts divine or human? That is the important question. This branch of study is indispensable to the excision of error” (p. 462).
