Article February 7, 1994 Issue

The door to spiritual progress

No one need be resigned to limitation. The way to genuine freedom and dominion is here.

Joe Eller

In the New Testament Gospel of John, Christ Jesus refers to himself in several vivid ways. He speaks of himself as "the way," for example, and "the resurrection, and the life." Also, he says he is "the true vine," as well as "the good shepherd." One of the most meaningful to me is "the door."

Jesus' teachings and example are really the door to our salvation and require of us the yielding of thought and action to the divine standard of purity and love, to worship of the one God, Spirit; to letting that "mind be in [us], which was also in Christ Jesus" (Phil. 2:5). The conventional viewpoint, of course, is that once a person's thought is set, there is little possibility of really changing it; that there are slight prospects even for God to reach and regenerate human thinking. It's believed by some that God is separated by a wide gulf from His own children, and that the coldness and hardness of mortal thought—the mindset of the flesh, you might say—make it virtually impossible for someone to be meaningfully touched and changed by His love.

And yet we want to be changed—we want to leave behind the fears and limitations of mortality and experience more joy, love, wholeness, and indestructible life, which Christian Science shows are inherent in man's true identity as the sinless, spiritual reflection of God. Jesus says: "I am the door of the sheep. ... I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture" (John 10:7, 9). Can't this be taken as reassurance that the pure, spiritual love so evidently expressed in Christ Jesus is the rightful and undeniable guiding influence for all of human thinking?

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