Article December 7, 1981 Issue

When tempted

DANIEL E. LEES

When individuals engage in wrongdoing, or sin, they tend to blame themselves. This produces the hurtful emotion of guilt. Wrong thinking, speaking, and acting should indeed be regretted, repented of, and forsaken. But proper regret includes no personal condemnation.

One of the foundation stones in scientific Christianity is the truth that the individual, as in reality the spiritual offspring of God, good, is never destroyed, but that sin—thoughts and acts opposed to good, omnipotent God—is expiated only as destroyed. This view of sin is so important that it finds expression in one of the religious tenets given by Mrs. Eddy, the Founder of Christian Science, and subscribed to by all Christian Scientists: "We acknowledge God's forgiveness of sin in the destruction of sin and the spiritual understanding that casts out evil as unreal. But the belief in sin is punished so long as the belief lasts."^{Science and Health, p. 497.}

In order to occur, sin must have an act of committal, and that's where temptation comes in. To withstand temptation one needs to understand that the modes of sin, which seem to be proliferating, are less important than the basic impulse to sin. Although it often takes repeated effort to overcome a sin, if we're turning to God for forgiveness (healing) of the same sin over and over again with no apparent progress, something may be wrong in our approach. Could it be that we have understood the nothingness of the specific evil through realizing the allness of divine Mind but have left unhandled the mortal belief of temptation itself?

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