Article December 12, 2016 Issue

Glorify God—a reliable basis for healing

John Biggs

As a follower of Christ Jesus, who glorified God in all that he taught and proved of God’s healing power, I love to let the glorification of God be my hallmark, motivation, and lens for prayer. This helps me remember that God’s work is complete and that it’s entirely good—the spiritual reality of existence right now. Therefore, I am not trying, through prayer, to change something or make God change some material circumstance. Rather, I’m striving to see more clearly the truth of perfect God and His perfect expression through opening my thought to the power of Christ, God’s healing message. Through the Christ-power my thought is renewed—to a degree transformed—and this change of thought is expressed outwardly in healing.

When we experience healing through prayer in Christian Science, whether of the body, a relationship, or some other circumstance, in a sense the only thing that has actually changed is our thought; the healing is a result of this change. Our thought has been freed from the false belief that some phase of evil is solid reality, liberated through a spiritual perception of what is actually happening—uninterrupted good. There is never any change in the woman and man of God’s creating—our true identity. Through the saving power of Christ, Truth, prayer helps reveal that God’s creation has always been whole and perfect. Healing is the revealing of what was always spiritually true.

In St. Paul’s letter to the Romans he speaks of “the invisible things of him [God] from the creation of the world” (1:20). If we are willing to base our thought on glorifying and loving God, and start our prayers with what’s true “from the creation of the world”—the timeless, eternal reality that God made entirely good—we will see outward evidence of God’s power and the whole, intact nature of His creation. Mary Baker Eddy, whose book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures illumines the Scriptures and shows their immediacy and practicality, writes in that book, “God is the creator of man, and, the divine Principle of man remaining perfect, the divine idea or reflection, man, remains perfect” (p. 470).