CHRIST JESUS' recognition (John 14:10), "The words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself: but the Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works," enabled him later on, in the face of his coming crucifixion, to pray (Luke 22:42), "Not my will, but thine, be done." Knowing that he could completely trust his Father to carry him through the crucifixion itself, the Master was able to surrender all human desire to be spared this experience.

Since we all have to awaken eventually from the Adam-dream of life in matter to man's status as God's image as reflection, we have to learn what Jesus knew, namely that we really can do nothing of ourselves. Our power and intelligence are derived from the Father, or the divine Mind, God, all-knowing, all-acting, all-powerful, infinite good.

Mary Baker Eddy opens the Preface to her book "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" with these words (p. vii): "To those leaning on the sustaining infinite, to-day is big with blessings." Jesus always leaned "on the sustaining infinite." The night before his crucifixion, he leaned completely on the sustaining power of God, confident that His omnipotence conquers all phases of evil.

After Jesus had asked his disciples three times to watch with him—to help him—and three times had found them sleeping, he turned away from dependence on personal friends for aid. He reached the conviction that God, divine Principle, or infinite Love, is greater than a mere human sense of love and that divine Love was protecting him as well as those who were sleeping.

Even though some or all of our human needs are gratified, we do not find full and permanent satisfaction until we surrender our willful desires for what we think we need and the way in which we want it to come and let God direct each forward step of our experience, assured that His will includes all good for each of His children.

A young student of Christian Science had dreamed all her life of the kind of a home she wanted and thought that she needed. She did not wish for great material wealth, but for adequate supply to maintain a home which could be shared and enjoyed by all kinds of people. Somehow this did not seem to be realized, although she used every human means at her command to bring about what seemed a worthy desire for a certain kind of home. In fact, through the years of business depression and the struggle to make both ends meet, some friends dropped away, a home was lost, jobs were taken from her, until finally she reached what seemed a wilderness.

Then she began to turn more humbly to God to find out what His will for her could be. She began to stop willful planning and scheming how to make friends, or how to get work, or how to improve her home in a wholly human way. She began to pray wholeheartedly to God to direct her life.

She found that this new procedure did not mean letting things go from bad to worse or letting them take their own course. It meant constant praying with the conviction that God's will is to bless all His children with abundance of good, continuous opportunity, and successful accomplishment. Affirming God's goodness, as Christian Science teaches, brought peace of mind, and everything in her experience began to improve. Home took on a better appearance. Work came to her which brought more and more opportunity to share the good she was gaining. New friends appeared, and old friendships were restored.

One day she awoke to realize that her little dream of what she had longed for was being fulfilled in a much bigger and more far reaching way than her human outline had envisoned. She began to see that because God's will for His children is joy she could surrender her feeble attempts to find joy through merely material circumstances, or people, or things. Humbly she thanked God for revealing to her the blessings and spiritual riches which come when we honestly say, "Not my will, but thine be done."

Adversity, frustration, illness, loneliness, are not God's will for man. They arise in human experience when we believe that we are separated from good and that we are struggling alone against some insurmountable evil force. Human effort undertaken without the direction of God seems to make the force more formidable. But when we stop pushing to make things come to pass and claim our unity with the will or law of perfect God, we shall see as did Zechariah that all obstacles to our enjoyment of the kingdom of God are overcome "not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord of hosts" (4:6).