Article December 3, 1949 Issue

OUR HEALING MISSION

ISRAEL PICKENS

An impressive moment in the Sunday service of the Church of Christ, Scientist, comes when "the scientific statement of being," from "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy (p. 468), and the correlative Scripture according to I John 3: 1-3 are read. Mrs. Eddy's words, "Spirit is God, and man is His image and likeness. Therefore man is not material; he is spiritual," are of utmost import, for they identify man as he actually is. The receptive listener thus becomes more conscious of his true identity as God's image and is reassured that "now are we the sons of God." The divine fact of man's sonship with God is a fundamental teaching of the Science of being, and its realization is requisite to spiritual healing.

That which characterized the life and teaching of the master Christian, Christ Jesus, perhaps more than anything else was his insistence upon his sonship with God. Even at the age of twelve, as he stood in the presence of a group of learned men, he was conscious of his sonship with the Father. When members of his human household anxiously sought his whereabouts, he asked (Luke 2:49), "How is it that ye sought me? wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?"

Near the close of his ministry he declared, "I and my Father are one." His consciousness of his spiritual identity had sustained, maintained, protected him under all hostile and untoward circumstances. He knew his sonship with God to be a divine heritage, as is ours today, and it is significant that he not only claimed his unity with God, but proved it each step of the way.

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