Yielding to God or resisting Him?
When we pray to God and don't seem to get answers, maybe we aren't listening the right way.
"Dear God, tell me what I need to know!" How often we pray this way when some pressing problem seems to resist our efforts to solve it. It is a good prayer, providing, of course, that it is sincere. The genuine desire to know God's will, to conform our sense of things to His, to follow His commands, is a selfless prayer that never goes unanswered.
"But," we may say, "I don't get any answer." It might be more accurate to say, "But I don't hear any answer," for the lack of an answer doesn't lie in God's not giving it so much as in our not hearing what He is telling us. The divine message is always here, as close as breath, at the threshold of consciousness, waiting to be heard.
And why would we not hear? If the answer meant the solution to our problem, it would seem that the only intelligent thing to do is to listen and obey. But the human mind tends toward selective hearing. While it readily hears what it wants to hear, or what conforms to its wishes, wants, and preferences, it frequently resists hearing what it isn't so keen to know.
When the answer to our prayer is a demand for spiritual progress, for giving up a sinful practice, relinquishing long-held prejudice, or exchanging some material concept for a more spiritual view, we sometimes fail to hear because that isn't what we were listening for. If the answer to our prayer for enlightenment were always framed in terms we approved of, we would always hear it!
Perhaps, then, the solution lies in having the spiritual grace to always approve of God's message, even when it challenges our personal preferences.
Christ Jesus was the perfect example of this grace. In all that he did, God's will was his standard. He well knew that his security and his success depended on consistent obedience to God. He said with confidence, "The Father hath not left me alone; for I do always those things that please him." John 8:29 . Even when the crucifixion loomed, and his personal desire would have been to avoid it, his prayer was "Thy will be done." Matt. 26:42 . The results of this yielding fully confirmed its wisdom.
When an answer to our prayer doesn't become obvious to us, a helpful approach is to ask ourselves what it is that we are truly seeking. If we search our motives and find that our main objective is to be relieved of the problem, to have circumstances altered, to have other people be changed in some way or removed from our path, we may have found the reason for our not hearing the answer.
Real healing is not just change of circumstance, though circumstances may change. It is not correction of others' wrongdoing, though correction may well occur. Healing through prayer in Christian Science comes as our thoughts yield to God's truth, to the facts of His holy creation, which the Bible describes as "very good" (Gen. 1:31 ). For spiritual healing to occur, thought must yield first to the divine demand that God, Spirit, be recognized as supreme over all—as the only creator, the alone cause, the Judge, Lawgiver, and King of all that exists.
Healing for our body, our business, our relationships, has its roots in the desire to conform our thoughts to the divine standard, in which man is wholly spiritual, the image of God. Our job is to relinquish the insistent perception of evil as equal in power and authority to God and to honor Him as the sole determining force in the life of all creation. The genuine wanting to see a situation in the light of God's perfect expression, to see what He has created instead of what the deceptive material senses are representing, is prayer that always receives its answer. Focused on God's goodness and allness—on the beauty, harmony, and perfection of His kingdom and the holiness of His spiritual likeness, man—rather than on the problem that suggests His absence or incompetence as creator and controller, we are open to the answer to our prayer.
Sometimes we believe that we aren't hearing an answer because we have already heard it and ignored it or written it off as irrelevant. Human thought sometimes resists the correction of its errors and so seems not to hear the divine message that is offering correction and healing.
I can speak from experience on this point. At one time I had been getting a mental prodding—very gentle, but there, nevertheless—to uplift my sense of friendship to a more spiritual level, to turn from intense personal regard for a select few to a higher, Christian love. While I had noticed this faint mental prodding, I had pretty well ignored it, for personal attachments were one of my indulgences.
Then one day I found myself caught in a dispute between two of my favorite friends and threatened with the loss of one or both friendships. This was a situation so disconcerting to me that it forced me to pray desperately for a solution. When the anguish of my predicament was at its peak, I reached out to God for an answer. The need for a more spiritual and less personal sense of friendship presented itself again to my thought, more firmly this time than before. I saw the demand, but hesitant to yield up my personal attachments, I responded mentally, "Oh, Father, ask me anything else, but don't ask me that!"
Immediately the hypocrisy of my position was exposed. I saw that if I wanted God's answer to the problem, I should be willing to accept it on His terms. A sentence from the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health by Mrs. Eddy, came strongly to mind: "Prayer means that we desire to walk and will walk in the light so far as we receive it, even though with bleeding footsteps, and that waiting patiently on the Lord, we will leave our real desires to be rewarded by Him." Science and Health, p. 10 .
In a moment of utter chastisement I saw that I could not insist on a pleasurable personal sense of friendship without virtually denying that God was my real source of joy and satisfaction, as I had learned through my study of Christian Science. I yielded to the demand of Spirit: "I will do it Your way, Father, no matter how hard it may seem to human sense." With this yielding, the anguish, confusion, and distress that had been with me for days vanished instantly, and I was left in complete peace. What's more, the conflict between the two friends was never mentioned again by either of them, and no further division occurred. I am still friends with them, but the sense of friendship is on a different level now, released from the hold of person-worship and elevated to more genuine spiritual affection.
Instead of losing something good—which had seemed to me would be the likely outcome of this yielding and had caused the resistance to it—I found that a steadier, more consistent, and more untroubled sense of friendship resulted. This opened the way for further progressive steps in the happifying of my human relationships.
We can never lose any good by yielding to God's demands. When the answer to our prayer for healing involves giving up some cherished human belief or leaving our material standpoint for a more spiritual one, a subtle fear that we will lose something we hold dear often causes us to resist. But we need not be afraid. No demand of divine Love ever deprives us of any real joy or happiness, for Love requires our yielding in order that we may be blessed more completely.
Yielding brings healing. Why should we resist it?
