Article May 11, 2020 ISSUE

I don’t need God … or do I?

Brian Webster

A young friend informed me that she didn’t need church. Despite her belief in God’s existence, she mentioned that life seemed good enough as it was, and that church was an unnecessary inconvenience. In fact, she challenged me to convince her why someone like her would have any reason to attend church or Sunday School, let alone learn about God and their relationship to Him.

The question stumped me. I wanted to share with her what an understanding of God as taught in Christian Science has given me—confidence and hope during personal trials, healing and comfort when suffering, guidance and direction when lost, peace in times of conflict and stress, answers when I needed solutions. But it seemed it would be hard to convince anyone to make the effort to understand God better if they thought they had all they needed, and harder still if gaining spiritual understanding involved surrendering any material pleasures or beliefs that made them happy. 

This describes the position of many people today. They concede that God exists, but feel they have little use for God until a problem arises that they can’t solve themselves. Yet I’ve come to learn that despite a person’s present satisfaction or dissatisfaction with their life, a knowledge of God is fundamental to our existence. To know God is to know what we truly are—our actual identity. So, not to know God is not to know ourselves—which would be like launching our boat on the sea of world thought without a rudder or sail. We’d be unable to set our own course, left to drift along with every dreadful belief that blows in our direction.

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