Divine power -- never out of date

WE read in the Gospel of Matthew that Jesus healed ``all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among the people.''1 Even the severest ills were healed through the master Christian's unparalleled understanding of God's supreme power and ever-presence. Were these profoundly convincing proofs of the divine power short-lived phenomena, confined to a brief period in history? Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, writes, ``It is not well to imagine that Jesus demonstrated the divine power to heal only for a select number or for a limited period of time, since to all mankind and in every hour, divine Love supplies all good.''2

Divine Love, the one Almighty God, is totally good, as we can learn from the Bible, and God maintains the well-being of man, His eternal spiritual likeness. To acknowledge this truth and discern something of its reality in prayer bring the power of divine law to bear on our lives in healing and in greater order in every detail of our experience. This law has not become obsolete, nor has its power lessened. The spiritual facts Jesus proved for all time are law now, available to us at this moment, every moment.

It is a spiritual fact that God, total good, has created man as the expression of total good, and that man can never be separated from his divine source and experience the opposite of good. How can this spiritual fact be applied to a discordant situation?

Here's a small example. Inadvertently I plunged my hand deep into a tub of boiling water. Immediately my fingers became inflamed and very painful. This would seem normal according to material law, which claims to govern such mishaps. But at the time this happened I had been thinking about spiritual law and a statement from the Christian Science textbook by Mrs. Eddy: ``The divine Mind is the Soul of man, and gives man dominion over all things. Man was not created from a material basis, nor bidden to obey material laws which Spirit never made; his province is in spiritual statutes, in the higher law of Mind.''3

Then the challenging thought came to me, ``Which law are you subject to -- the material or the spiritual?'' My fingers were rapidly returning to their normal condition; the swelling and redness diminished until they were no longer evident, and I continued the job I was doing in perfect comfort.

What had happened? I had rejected the material law, which decrees that pain must follow an injury, and had placed myself under the protection of the supreme spiritual law, which holds man forever intact as the expression of God, inseparable from Him.

Spiritual power that is proved effective in the minor problems can also be relied on to meet the weightier challenges, because the source of this power, the very substance of it, is God.

What comfort and assurance come to us as we open our thinking unreservedly to the fact that God is wholly good and that the power of His Christ, of the universal divine healing influence, is undiminished and timeless. As we realize with absolute certainty that there is never a moment in our experience when Christ is not at hand, we know that nothing can prevent the touch of the Christ from reaching us, no matter what depth of human suffering or despair we may be facing.

We must be willing to yield to divine power and begin to relinquish old habits of thought, which would cloud our growing awareness of God's presence -- detrimental elements such as anger, jealousy, destructive criticism, or old, worn-out beliefs in the necessity or inevitability of suffering. Doing so awakens us to the presence of God and to His tender love for us. We can do this, knowing that the timeless spiritual facts of God and His perfect creation, which underlay the Biblical marvels, are here and active now, as was proved in my experience. A hymn, referring to Jesus' healing of a woman who touched the hem of his garment, puts it this way: ``The power that filled the garment's hem/Is evermore the same.''4

Truly, divine power can never be out of date.

1Matthew 4:23. 2Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 494. 3Ibid., p. 307. 4Christian Science Hymnal, No. 96.

You can find more articles like this one in the Christian Science Sentinel, a weekly magazine. DAILY BIBLE VERSE: I am with thee to save thee and to deliver thee, saith the Lord. Jeremiah 15:20