Wondering about spiritual healing?

Is spiritual healing just hoping God will make everything all right? How do I know if I am worthy of being healed? Would the disease have disappeared anyway?

Christ Jesus healed without material means. He relied completely on God's power, confident of its effectiveness. His consistent results ruled out mere coincidence.

But do we have the ability or right to heal as Jesus did? His words remind us, "He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also." n1 Believing on Christ Jesus means recognizing the perfect man -- the spiritual man created by God -- that the Master exemplified. It also means learning to understand God as Jesus did.

n1 John 14:12;

The Bible tells us that God is Spirit, not flesh, not matter. Therefore man made in His likeness is spiritual, not material. Spiritual healing results from gaining this true view of God and man. As Mary Baker Eddy n2 explains: "Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man the Saviour saw God's own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick." n3

n2 Mrs. Eddy is the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science;

n3 Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,m pp. 476-477;

Is this kind of healing practical? Can it be relied on?

One evening the area under one of my eyes became puffy and swollen. At first I hoped that it might just go away. But then I thought, "Why let this imperfect picture of man stay even one more minute in my consciousness?" The Bible commands us in Matthew, "Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him." n4

n4 Matthew 5:25;

I began to pray right then. I held to the true view of man, my spiritual selfhood, expressive of God. I insisted on the fact that man is inseparable from God, from all that is good. I expected this prayer to bring me freedom.

A sentence from First Corinthians occurred to me: "Charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up." n5 Did I have an inflated sense of myself? I recalled a recent conversation in which I had indulged what seemed like justified criticism. Actually it had just been unnecessary complaining. I hadn't shown much charity.

And I realized that, in general, instead of seeing God's perfect man, I was thinking of people in varying degrees of good and bad. Healing cannot be won on this basis.

n5 I Corinthians 13:4.

Now I affirmed the natural, unchanging spiritually of myself and of all mankind. In other words, I began loving my neighbor as myself. I had let go of that puffed-up, critical, misshapen concept of myself and my neighbor.

After about an hour of prayer I was confident of healing. By bedtime the swelling had gone down considerably, and by the next evening it had disappeared completely.

Then my joy seemed dashed. Might the swelling have disappeared anyway?

For a time, my confidence was shaken. The I saw what had happened. It was consciousness, not matter, that had needed to be changed. And the critical, self-righteous, puffed-up thinking would not have just gone away on its own. It needed to be rooted out and replaced with a spiritual concept of man. When this was done, true healing could take place; the physical change was simply the natural and inevitable result of spiritualized thought.

The ability to heal spiritually is available to everyone. Any person can change his thinking to include better, purer, more Godlike qualities.

So is this a reliable method of healing? Thousands of people around the world are consistently solving difficulties through spiritually scientific prayer. Healing in Christian Science is relying on the certainty of God's power , a power that is always dependable. DAILY BIBLE VERSE Ah Lord God! behold, thou hast made the heaven and the earth by thy great power and stretched out arm, and there is nothing too hard for three. Jeremiah 32:17