Article May 15, 1937 Issue

Praying Aright

LAURA LEE LINDSEY

Mankind's greatest need is to know how to pray aright. Prayer is communion with God. To commune with Him, knowing that He hears and answers us, we must have an understanding of His nature. We can understand God through the ideas which express Him. Man is God's highest idea, the complete expression of Himself. As we become acquainted with our true selves as God's spiritual ideas, it becomes clear to us that our paramount needs are spiritual needs and can be met only by spiritual impartations from God to the consciousness which seeks Him. We then begin to know that these ideas will unfold, in our human experience, whatever is needful.

Jesus prayed, and taught others to pray, for spiritual understanding. He said that we should seek first the kingdom of God, and that all the needed things would be added unto us. This points to infallible Truth. We often fail by timidly applying it, but Truth never fails us when we obediently and lovingly comply with its demands. On one occasion Jesus said to his disciples, "Hitherto have ye asked nothing in my name: ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full." When we pray to God for material things, we are literally asking nothing of Him, for in the light of divine Science matter is nothing, mere illusion. God answers our spiritual desire in spiritual ways. These spiritual ways bring enlightenment, and thereby unfold a sufficiency for all our human needs.

Mary Baker Eddy, author of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," devotes the first chapter of this marvelous book to the subject of prayer. In it she expresses so spiritual a concept of communion with God that many persons, reading the chapter for the first time, have been healed of troubles, such as sickness, sin, sorrow, discouragement, lack of supply and opportunity, hatred—all manner of inharmonies. Those who read it with an unbiased desire to learn to pray aright, find themselves so uplifted in thought that they read and reread it. Every reading of this chapter reveals new treasures of spiritual good available through inspired prayer.

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Christlike Simplicity
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