How reassuring it is to know that we’re not required to understand all about God, Spirit, and His creation in one fell swoop. We progress in spiritual understanding at the pace that’s just right for us because this is how God’s law of progress operates. One important thing that impels spiritual growth is the desire to understand God and His creation better—a desire that God blesses.

We have the example of Christ Jesus to help us in our spiritual journey onward and upward. Jesus proved the truth of God’s nature and ours in the way he lived and in what he taught his followers. We also have his promised Comforter—the Holy Spirit or divine Science—that leads us gently, step by step, into a better understanding of the truth Jesus practiced. 

The Savior came to show that we’re not working our way out of an imperfect material condition and striving to work up to perfection and our Godlike nature. Instead, like God, we’re perfect and spiritual now, a status that Jesus described as the kingdom of God being within us (see Luke 17:21). However, we are working to emerge from the false belief that we’re material, sinful, sick, and mortal to the understanding and demonstration of our salvation.

Christian Science defines salvation as “Life, Truth, and Love understood and demonstrated as supreme over all; sin, sickness, and death destroyed” (Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 593). The capitalized words Life, Truth, and Love refer to God. Our work, therefore, is to gently and gradually emerge into a better understanding of God and demonstrate this understanding practically, bearing witness to how Christ—God’s divine manifestation or true idea—destroys the ills of the flesh.

We read that even Jesus, our Exemplar, though endowed with the Christ without measure (see John 3:34) had to grow in the understanding of his Christly nature before he began his healing ministry. The Bible says that as he grew in stature from boyhood to manhood, he “waxed strong” in spirituality, wisdom, and grace (see Luke 2:40). We also are endowed with the Christ, just as Jesus was, because “unto every one of us is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ” (Ephesians 4:7). 

While we’re not asked to do more than we can, Christian Science teaches that we’re all capable of more than we are doing. 

As we desire to understand God better day by day, whether things are going well or not, we’re prioritizing our efforts to prove the kingdom of heaven that is already within us—to prove and express our perfect, spiritual nature. And Christ, always present in human consciousness, enables us to progress gently but firmly and inexorably, as we emerge by degrees into the demonstration of our inherent perfection. So, while we’re not asked to do more than we can, Christian Science teaches that we’re all capable of more than we are doing. 

Mrs. Eddy, who discovered Christian Science—God’s law of Truth that Jesus taught and practiced—also emerged gently into a fuller understanding of her discovery. She writes: “The revelation of Truth in the understanding came to me gradually and apparently through divine power” (Science and Health, p. 109), later adding, “As former beliefs were gradually expelled from her thought, the teaching became clearer, until finally the shadow of old errors was no longer cast upon divine Science” (p. 460). 

The understanding of the truth of being—the inseparable unity of God and His spiritual idea, man—is something we can all prove, and we must be willing to start and progress, whether rapidly or slowly. God is working with us, and we are assured that we will “all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ” (Ephesians 4:13).

When we go to sleep at night, we don’t doubt that a new day will dawn. It comes without any effort. We hear no creaking sound, smell no fragrant whiff to announce its coming, but it always dawns, gently, gradually, and invariably, until we see the full brightness of the day. So we, too, gently emerge in our understanding of the infinitude of perfect Spirit, and consequently see and prove with transformative healing results the nothingness of matter—the unreality of any supposed opposite of Spirit. 

We can be grateful to know that we will emerge, and gently, too, from the belief that life is either material or a combination of matter and Spirit. As we desire to understand the truth of being, steadily but surely we win the victory over error, whatever its name or nature, and we win through the grace of Christ. Referring to this, in her Message to The Mother Church for 1901, Mrs. Eddy says, “This is working out our own salvation, for God worketh with us, until there shall be nothing left to perish or to be punished, and we emerge gently into Life everlasting” (p. 10).

Moji George, Member of the Christian Science Board of Directors