Testimony of Healing April 22, 2002 Issue

Prayer removes facial growths

John Vance

Four decades ago I was healed through prayer of the effects of heat stroke. I had feared I wouldn't survive. The most valuable thing about that healing—and this point has become clearer to me since my account of that healing was published in the October 20, 1986, Sentinel—was the spiritual progress that accompanied it. I realized that there had to be a moral purification in me in order for the healing to be permanent, a need indicated by Jesus when, after healing a sick man, he told him, "Sin no more, lest a worse thing come unto thee" (John 5:14).

To me, it is this demand to "go up higher" that separates Christian Science healing from "mind over matter" philosophies. Mary Baker Eddy wrote in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: "To-day the healing power of Truth is widely demonstrated as an immanent, eternal Science, instead of a phenomenal exhibition. Its appearing is the coming anew of the gospel of 'on earth peace, good-will toward men.' This coming, as was promised by the Master, is for its establishment as a permanent dispensation among men; but the mission of Christian Science now, as in the time of its earlier demonstration, is not primarily one of physical healing. Now, as then, signs and wonders are wrought in the metaphysical healing of physical disease; but these signs are only to demonstrate its divine origin,—to attest the reality of the higher mission of the Christ-power to take away the sins of the world" (p. 150). At the time I suffered the heat stroke, I was on such a low moral plane that some improvement was not at all difficult, and wonderful blessings followed as a result.