WORSHIPING GOD

THOMAS B. HUDSON

What we worship, bow down to, or accept as real determines the status of our daily experience. Christian Science helps us to worship God aright and therefore to enjoy a happier, healthier, and holier experience, This Science is first of all a religion, and in its inculcation of the constant worship of God, Science eliminates belief in evil.

Mary Baker Eddy deplored the lack of understanding of true worship and said (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 40), "It is sad that the phrase divine service has come so generally to mean public worship instead of daily deeds."

It is evident from this statement that our daily thinking and doing indicate either a worship of God or a worship of something else. Therefore if it is our practice to pay reverence to Spirit, infinite good, we are worshiping God as we should and rendering divine service.

Humanly speaking, we may serve good or evil, Spirit or matter, as we please. But actually man, in the image and likeness of God, can worship only God, the Mind that makes him. So good must be recognized as the only Mind, if we would worship aright. All true worship is based on the remarkable statement that Jesus made to the Samaritan woman (John 4:24), "God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth."

Paying reverence to God as Spirit is accomplished by spiritual understanding, which is gained through spiritual sense. When we permit our thought to serve and honor God daily, we recognize that personality, material sense, fear, discouragement, loneliness, doubt, and so forth, are not gods to be worshiped, believed in, or submitted to.

When Jesus healed the man who was blind from birth, he was complying with his own demand to worship God "in spirit and in truth." The man who was healed saw this plainly, for he stated (John 9:31), "Now we know that God heareth not sinners: but if any man be a worshipper of God, and doeth his will, him he heareth."

A woman who was serving as Second Reader in a Church of Christ, Scientist, developed a throat difficulty which was so severe that she could hardly talk. Feeling no improvement after a few days, she asked the Christian Science practitioner who was working prayerfully for her if she should ask for a substitute for the following Sunday. This was on Friday.

The woman was reminded that God cares for those whom He appoints. This broke the mesmeric fear, and she found increasing faith through resting in good. Now she was truly worshiping God. As a result she was in her place, perfectly well, on Sunday.

It would be impossible to discuss worship without some consideration of church. Of great impor tance are Mrs. Eddy's words in "The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany" (p. 162), "Our proper reason for church edifices is, that in them Christians may worship God,—not that Christians may worship church edifices!" We can no more revere a church edifice than we can revere a material body.

We come to a church edifice for one purpose: to join in a collective reverence to the one God. In a message to a branch church, Mrs. Eddy describes the result of this united effort (ibid., p. 189): "You worship no distant deity, nor talk of unknown love. The silent prayers of our churches, resounding through the dim corridors of time, go forth in waves of sound, a diapason of heart-beats, vibrating from one pulpit to another and from one heart to another, till truth and love, commingling in one righteous prayer, shall encircle and cement the human race."

So, whether in church, at home, or at work, we must serve only that which is pure, holy, healthy, and Godlike, if we would worship God. Prayer without ceasing is knowing ourselves as living in the kingdom of God, the consciousness of Love's activity. Then we are worshiping "in spirit and in truth."

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