Article September 24, 1966 Issue

The Bible Speaks to You

RADIO PROGRAM NO. 233

Announcer: What can young people and their parents do to help make the coming school year less frantic and more rewarding? Last week in emphasizing the value of an understanding of God in approaching academic challenges, we indicated an important first step is to ask two questions: What is my motive in wanting to succeed? and Where am I looking for my ability? Today we're taking up the second question, on ability.
Speaker: The whole object of the Bible is to relate the power of God to human lives and human experience. And a little later I'd like Lo give you an illustration of how what we've been talking about here can have a practical effect in the lives of students.
Questioner: I think most students have good intentions of doing the right things when they go away to college. But there should be more to it than that.
Speaker: In facing up to a new school year, it isn't enough to have good intentions or even to have right motives. We also need to know where to look for the ability to carry out these intentions. And these abilities have as reliable and as spiritual a basis as the motives.
There's a promise in the Bible that I think is very valuable for a student. It's in the book of Philippians where it says (4:19), "My God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus."

We need to ask ourselves, What are God's riches? The Bible brings out, and we learn in Christian Science, that God's riches include all that it is His nature to impart, including unlimited intelligence, ability, perception, purity, love, and all those qualities which have their source in God and which really belong to man as the image and likeness of God.
Questioner: When a student goes away to school, everything is new to him and there are a lot of things that he worries about: new teachers, how he is going to do in his studies, and if he is going to be accepted socially. How can he lessen these fears?
 Speaker: What do you think underlies these fears? Isn't it a certain concept of oneself?
Questioner: Well, being insecure.
Speaker: But what lies behind the insecurity? Why does an individual feel insecure?
Questioner: I don't know. Can you answer that?
Speaker: I wonder if one aspect of it, anyway, isn't the feeling that one is a limited mortal with limited abilities, limited attractiveness, or limited individuality. In other words, I wonder if these fears don't represent a limited view of oneself in one way or another. And I wonder if underlying this limited view isn't the basic mistake of viewing oneself as material in origin rather than as the spiritual likeness or representative of God.

If we believe that we're off all by ourselves, that the only intelligence and ability we have come from a human brain and that in a new situation every adjustment has to come from our own resources, isn't this viewpoint the enemy that leads to a feeling of inferiority and leads us to question whether we can make it during the new school year?

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