Walking with God

FLORENCE IRENE GUBBINS

When confronted by the apparent bigness of a problem Christian Science students are at times bewildered by the thought of what is required of them. They feel that perhaps their understanding is not equal to making the demonstration. It is well to clarify the point at issue and see just what is required at such times. The Bible says, "What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" To walk with God is a wholly mental and spiritual experience, as all will allow. And does it not mean to walk with God in our thoughts, and not walk away from Him by identifying ourselves with erroneous thinking and by accepting erroneous mental suggestions? Does it not mean to remind ourselves, as St. Paul says, that God worketh in us "both to will and to do of his good pleasure"? So, at a moment when sense testimony is arguing for the reality of evil, let us remind ourselves that our part is simply to be faithful to God in our thinking, moment by moment. If error suggests pain, what does Truth require of us at that moment, but the acknowledgment of the fact that divine Love is infinite? And, further, it demands the denial of the belief of suffering, based on the fact that God is true, and that material sense, a liar, is seeking to deceive us into accepting its claims as real.

Should error suggest that in our wrestling with its false claims we have reached the limits of our endurance, then to be faithful to God at such a moment is to know that, in the words of our Leader, "Spiritual energies can neither wear out nor can so-called material law trespass upon God-given powers and resources" (Science and Health, p. 387). For every lying argument of error there is a truth we can put in its place. We are not required to fight tomorrow's battles, but the demand is that we should be true to God just for the moment in which we are living. As the Bible says, "Our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen;" in other words, while we turn our face from the testimony of error to the opposite direction, to the facts of spiritual being. These facts, steadfastly adhered to through good and evil report, will "assert themselves over their opposite," as our Leader says on page 55 of "Miscellaneous Writings." Is it not far simpler to leave the working out of the problem to God, divine Truth, concerning ourselves only with "bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ," than it is to feel responsibility for the results of our true thinking?

God revealed Himself to Moses at the burning bush as "I AM," and in the the midst of the fiery experience in which we may seem to be, God is still saying, "I AM," is still proclaiming His allness and omnipresence; and we as His reflection can only echo His beauty, His glory, His infinite perfection. Therefore, we must silence the suggestions of error, in obedience to the words of the Psalmist. "Be still, and know that I am God." Having silenced the arguments of error that "I AM" may reign supreme in our consciousness, we shall behold the glory of God, and the place where we stood with our belief in error as real, we shall find to be holy ground; the memory of the anguish and the pain will be wiped out forever, and in its place there will be a more steadfast consciousness of the nothingness of evil, and the reality and power of good.

In the book of Revelation, we read of the final destruction of error. There the great red dragon, which deceived the whole world, is referred to as being "cast unto the earth;" ; " in other words, reduced to nothingness. So our chief work in dealing with false belief is to refuse to be deceived. "Be not deceived," St. Paul says. In proportion as we refuse to be deceived by error arguing as physical pain, as family discord, or even as death itself, we shall find ourselves in the kingdom of heaven, for all error is but a deception or a delusion. There is nothing wrong with God or His creation. There is no solid mass of error to be laboriously demolished. Truth, as our Leader has written in Science and Health (p. 403), "sweeps away the gossamer web of mortal illusion."

Though error seems dark and threatening at times, and at times our world of human experience may appear to be falling about our ears, we shall awake sooner or later to know that evil has no more reality than a nightmare, no more substantiality than a dream. Let us, then, in the midst of the dream experience, remind ourselves of the glorious facts that are mighty to end the dream. Then we shall be able to look up to God as a child who wakened from a dream in which it seemed to have wandered far away, looks up into its mother's face, and say as the Psalmist said, "When I awake, I am still with thee." We shall find that in reality there has been no wandering away, no experience apart from God, but that the true experience is just reflecting the everlasting "I AM," that "which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty."

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