Article April 4, 1983 Issue

Prayer that moves mountains

JONATHAN W. YOST

Think how raptly the disciples of Christ Jesus must have listened as their Master taught them how to pray! His prayers "moved mountains": comforted the sorrowing, reformed the sinning, healed the sick, even raised a man four days dead. Jesus specifically rejected mere ritual, in these words: "When ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do."^{Matt. 6:7.}

Christian Science echoes Jesus' concern that his followers not mistake "vain repetitions" for genuine prayer. In a chapter contrasting faith cure and Christian Science in her book Retrospection and Introspection, Mary Baker Eddy writes, "Belief is virtually blindness, when it admits Truth without understanding it."^{Ret., p. 54.}

As Jesus taught and Christian Science reiterates, prayer, instead of changing God's plan, changes us—bringing our thought closer to God's will. This perspective on prayer is consistent with the fundamental point in Science that God is wholly good and could never withhold good from His beloved children.

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