Article December 19, 1953 Issue

"BELOVED, NOW"

ISABEL ABBOTT JUERGENS

One of the happiest features of Christian Science is that it teaches us to live in the present, and only in the present.

Mary Baker Eddy considered the first three verses of I John, third chapter, so fundamental that she included them in the order of the Sunday service in all Churches of Christ, Scientist. Hear the ringing declaration of our eternal status: "Beloved, now are we the sons of God." The blessedness of our inheritance, then, is not merely on the way; it is actually here now. Nothing has to change to bring it to pass. It is divinely established fact.

The next words explain to us how we may awake to this inheritance, how we may realize its radiant presence, how we may assure its continuance as bountiful with "every good gift and every perfect gift" (James 1:17). "It doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is." If the statement that we are now heirs of all good seems visionary and obscure, the remedy is to stop staring at the human picture and "see him as he is." We must learn more of God and His Christ. What God is we reflect because of our oneness with Him. As we understand God's perfection, presence, and power we become informed about our true selfhood, as His expression. This ever-widening sense of the infinitude of being necessitates the disappearing of a narrow, earth-bound concept of Life, our Life, all the Life there is. This spiritualization of attitude, far from being vague, is highly practical and effective and is evidenced in present improvement of morale, health, capacity, condition.

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