Article August 6, 1966 Issue

Our Individual Responsibility

PHILIP S. METCALF

Man's purpose, his function and reason for existing, is to express God. Christian Science explains this. It also explains and demonstrates that the source of all real ability, volition, and action is God. But, one may ask, if God's power is the only power, if God's will is the only will, what can one do for himself? What is the individual's responsibility?

When Jesus said, "I can of mine own self do nothing," John 5:30; he was not saying that he could do nothing, for he also said, "The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise." v. 19; Was he not, therefore, stating what Paul later declared, "I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me"? Phil. 4:13; Thus Paul referred to the Christ, not to the personal, human Jesus, but to the incorporeal idea, which evidences the power and presence of God so perfectly manifested by Jesus and available today to each one of us.

Jesus knew well that man's purpose for existing is to express God, and he was every about the Father's business, the business of expressing the divine nature and qualities. We also must be about the Father's business. This is an individual responsibility. In "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, in speaking of Jesus' life, writes, "He did life's work aright not only in justice to himself, but in mercy to mortals,—to show them how to do theirs, but not to do it for them nor to relieve them of a single responsibility." Science and Health, p. 18;

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