Article July 17, 1954 Issue

FREEDOM THROUGH TRUE IDENTIFICATION

PAUL J. LICHTENFELS

Christ Jesus is identified in Christian Science as the one who fully presented the spiritual idea of God. In Wycliffe's translation of John 17:1 we find these words of Jesus': "Father, the hour cometh, clarify thy son: that thy son clarify thee." The King James Version reads, "Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee." The spiritual light which Jesus demonstrated revealed his Godlike nature and witnessed to his Father-Mother God as the source of all power.

There is scarcely a person who does not desire in some way to express power. But too often people are imprisoned in the darkness of material-mindedness and misguided thinking, which misunderstands true selfhood and employs a perverted sense of power. It is only the identification of oneself as the perfect man of God and the demonstration of it that frees one from mental imprisonment in sin and disease. Christian Science brings the spiritual light that enables one to make this identification with real being and express freedom and spiritual power.

Mary Baker Eddy writes in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (pp. 300, 301), "God is revealed only in that which reflects Life, Truth, Love,—yea, which manifests God's attributes and power, even as the human likeness thrown upon the mirror, repeats the color, form, and action of the person in front of the mirror." It is man who reflects Life, Truth, and Love; it is man who manifests God's attributes and power, but this man is not the human being whose likeness is thrown upon the mirror. The material self is really a counterfeit of man, who is God's image and likeness and is purely a spiritually mental being. This true man exemplifies all the attributes of God.

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