Looking to be a better healer? Then you’ll want to keep an eye out for articles like this one, appearing periodically in the Sentinel, The Christian Science Journal, and The Herald of Christian Science. Their aim: to correct some of the misconceptions about Christian Science that would keep us from having the results we so desire.

Maybe you have thought something like this before: “God has a plan for me—the right school, job, house, or spouse.” We probably all have from time to time. But if we’re thinking more of God aligning with our desires and less of aligning our thoughts with God’s will, this confuses and limits our understanding of what God is, and can impede our spiritual growth.

Recently, I was thinking about the story of Moses trying to figure out how to lead the Hebrew people out of Egypt to the Promised Land. Moses isn’t convinced the people will follow him, but he believes they would follow God—the one true God. So Moses asks God what he should say to the people to prove that God is indeed the true God, the God of their fathers. “And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you” (Exodus 3:14).

Prayer brings our thought into alignment with the established spiritual facts.

It’s kind of an unusual name, but it includes the profound acknowledgment that we cannot define the infinite within the finite. Considering what was on the line in that moment, it’s pretty amazing. Moses seems to have been looking for the words to unite his people and inspire them to action—to accept a plan of liberation, both physical and mental, that was going to take courage, strength, faith, trust, and more resolve than they probably ever imagined that they had. It was also going to take a cultivation of spiritual thinking—an effort that would certainly try the Hebrew people, while also transforming them. 

The part that is so amazing to me is that Moses’ discernment of God as the great I AM keeps the Exodus to freedom on a spiritual foundation. Moses is helping his people, and generations to come, understand that God, divine Spirit, cannot be circumscribed. He is not a finite, personal God overseeing a human situation, but divine Principle, Love, revealing the harmony, abundance, and order that exist as divine law. And we can and should bring our thoughts into alignment with Him.

That deep spiritual lesson was still going to take some growing into for the children of Israel. But their journey brought many lessons illustrating that good is eternal and spiritual, not fluctuating or material. 

Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer of Christian Science and the founder of this magazine, writes: “A personal God is based on finite premises, where thought begins wrongly to apprehend the infinite, even the quality or the quantity of eternal good. This limited sense of God as good limits human thought and action in their goodness, and assigns them mortal fetters in the outset” (The People’s Idea of God, p. 3).

If Moses had perpetuated the concept of a personal God, the people might not have outgrown the finite premises they were wrestling with and from which they ultimately gained their freedom. 

This finite premise of a personal God is really just an outgrowth of the limitations of trying to understand God—Spirit—and good within the confines of matter. Sometimes that finite premise takes the form of the belief that God has a personal plan for, or hand in, our temporal affairs—such as in finding what we would outline as the perfect house or spouse. 

We can feel comforted and supported by the fact that God is our Father-Mother, taking perfect care of us and meeting our human needs. And we can grow in our spiritual understanding to see that, instead of requests for more good to happen in our lives, our prayers should be a sincere desire for more receptivity to the omnipotence of good and its forever-presence in our lives. Prayer can’t bring God closer to us, because we are forever one with God, but it does enable us to feel closer to God. Prayer brings our thought into alignment with established spiritual facts. 

A humble, receptive heart is key to being led in the right direction, and it is natural and innate to all of us.

I’ve found it helpful to think of it like this: In Christian Science, physical healing isn’t about fixing an ill or damaged body but about gaining a deeper sense of God’s allness. The body will adjust to a normal state of health because of the shift in thought from a material to a spiritual basis. Similarly, the right house, relationship, and so on come about because we perceive through prayerful listening something more of the harmony of being—the good that is continuous and perfect. We may experience the effect of that understanding in a larger way that makes us feel that the new house or relationship perfectly meets our need—but this is human consciousness yielding to the light of divine Spirit, not God being conscious of the perfect situation for us and moving things around to suit us. 

Christ Jesus lived that spiritual understanding of God, which lifted so many around him to a fuller sense of unlimited good, liberating and transforming their thoughts and lives for the better. He taught and practiced a spiritual understanding of God that couldn’t be defined by matter or doctrine.

In Second Corinthians, the Apostle Paul says, “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (10:5, New International Version). I love that imagery of bringing our thought and understanding into obedience to Christ. 

For me, bringing every thought into obedience to Christ is about following Jesus’ example by not allowing a mortal and material concept of God to steal into my perception of, and sense of connection with, the unlimited and infinite God, good. But it’s not all on us to discipline thought. There is a divine influence—Christ—at work, reaching receptive hearts and spiritualizing perceptions of this infinite good. It’s the same divine influence that was moving Moses’ thought and bringing it into obedience with what is right and true. 

A humble, receptive heart is key to being led in the right direction, and it is natural and innate to all of us. But to think that God is acting within us as human beings, altering things materially, is to misunderstand God and His law, which are entirely spiritual. 

Does God make a damaged knee into a healed knee? No. Spirit and its ideas are never material, never lacking—never anything less than perfect God and His perfect expression. The healing reflects the degree to which this fact dawns in thought and transforms our perception from matter and its limitations to Spirit and its illimitable ideas. 

Asking God to make bad matter into better matter, or a bad scenario into a better one, perpetuates a mistaken belief that we are material now and working to become spiritual. It perpetuates a belief that we are separated from God, good, and that our prayers, our good behavior, and our faith are the means by which God will decide if He will help us. 

It’s not hard to see how this belief could stand in the way of our spiritual growth. In fact, Mrs. Eddy writes in her primary work, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, “The mere habit of pleading with the divine Mind, as one pleads with a human being, perpetuates the belief in God as humanly circumscribed,—an error which impedes spiritual growth” (p. 2).

Believing that it’s God knowing and adjusting our situation—rather than us coming to better know God—that puts us somewhere and guides our personal affairs may feel like an easier way to accept God’s presence and the good in our lives. It may also be a way to feel security and faith in something beyond our own decisions, our chosen courses of action, and a belief in fate. But as we gain a clearer sense of what God, Spirit, is and what divine intelligence does, we’ll come to enjoy a more substantial sense of comfort, security, and freedom in the understanding of God as truly unconfined.

As was the case with Moses, the true idea of God—Christ—is speaking to you in a way that will move you forward and help you to know divine Love and be about the business of Love. What transpires in your life as a result of your prayer and your receptivity to good is governed by God, the perfect Principle of all goodness. 

These days, when I’m feeling grateful for how something has worked out, my deepest gratitude is for glimpsing something more of the infinite order and allness of God.

As our understanding of God and His activity becomes less material, our receptivity to and desire to worship the Father in Spirit will give us opportunities to expand our sense of the infinite and experience more freedom.