Article June 22, 1918 Issue

Working Together with God

JOHN B. WILLIS

Christ Jesus was transcendently unique in the assertion of an exalted individualism,—his sinlessness, his perfect exemplariness, his authority, his power, and his right to the unquestioning obedience and devotion of men. Yet he no less emphatically affirmed that he was in subjection, wholly dependent on his Father and obedient to Him. He declared that of himself he could do nothing. His every healing word and work was to be attributed to Him of whom he said, "There is none good but one, that is, God." Thus, in a sense, his self-elimination was quite as marked as his self-assertion, and this is made perfectly intelligible in Christian Science through the apprehension of the nature and plane of the Messianic life and ministry, the discrimination it establishes between the selfhood of sense and the selfhood of Spirit.

Writing to Timothy, St. Paul declared that "God was manifest in the flesh." Concerning the importance of an understanding of this manifestation St. John says, "Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: and every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God." The purpose of the appearing of the Messiah is affirmed by St. Paul to be that he might reconcile us unto God. Writing to the Romans he says that "what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh" that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us." Not his embodiment in the flesh, but the embodiment of righteousness, of Truth and Love in him, made him the Savior of all mankind.

Further, it is of the highest interest to note that in his letter to the Galatians the great apostle identifies his own ministry with that of Christ Jesus in these remarkable words: "I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God." Paul does not say that he honored Christ, or had become his advocate and representative; he said vastly more, namely, that the life, the vitality, and power of Christ was his. "Christ liveth in me," were his words, and Christ could not live anywhere without manifesting the inherent nature of Truth, its healing and saving power, its Messianic effectiveness.

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God and His Idea
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