Sunday, December 19th, 2021 Roundtable
Turning Back the Dial
This week’s Lesson Sermon Subject: Is the Universe, Including Man, Evolved by Atomic Force?
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Morning Prayers
(12/27/03) My beloved Students: May this dear Christmas season be to you a risen Christ, a morn, the break of day. There is nothing jubilant attached to the birth of a mortal – that suffers and pays the penalty of his parents’ misconception of man and of God’s creation. But there is a joy unutterable in knowing that Christ had no birth, no death, and that we may find in Christ, in the true sense of being, life apart from birth, sorrow, sin and death. O may your eyes not be holden, but may you discern spiritually what is our Redeemer. … May you watch and pray that you keep the Commandments, and live the Sermon in the Mount this coming year.
(1887) Let the good you can do and the stimulation of action keep your mind from dwelling on the past, for the present demands your care, and you must go forth to meet the future calm and strong.
— from Divinity Course and General Collectanea, (the “Blue Book”), by Mary Baker Eddy, page 128, 139
Discussion points
153 — WATCH lest you accept the common notion that the small power represented by David’s little stone, overthrew a great power, called Goliath. David, as the visible representative and manifestation of the omnipotence of divine Mind, was the invincible giant, equipped with infinite power that overthrew Goliath, whose power lay wholly in deception through size.
Thus, when we come to a problem that seems gigantic, we should not ask God for more power; we should handle animal magnetism, that our eyes may be opened to see things in their proper relationship and size. Then we will recognize ourselves as representatives of God equipped with omnipotence, going forth to meet a foe no more to be feared than a sparrow.
Christian Science does not equip man with greater and greater power, so that he may go forth to meet the gigantic forces of evil; but it takes from his eyes the magnifying glasses of sense testimony, which cause error to loom up as real, swollen in size and power.
…the belief of matter birth puts mortal mind’s “glasses” of material vision on mortals, so that the pigmy of human powerlessness and nothingness is swollen to appear as a Goliath of power and vengeance. When spiritual understanding takes away this distortion, and enables man to have a clear vision, he beholds the utter nothingness of nothing, and the great fact of God’s allness. In this way the Goliath of mortal mind is vanquished.
— from 500 Watching Points by Gilbert Carpenter
GOLDEN TEXT: Psalm 103 : 19
“The Lord hath prepared his throne in the heavens; and his kingdom ruleth over all.”
“One Cause And Effect”, from Miscellaneous Writings by Mary Baker Eddy, page 21
Forum posts — Is the Universe, Including Man, Evolved by Atomic Force? — December 19th, 2021
It is helpful to work daily with “I am ageless, diseaseless, and deathless, because God has made me so!
— Roundtable
The call of Christian Science to individual consciousness is the prophet’s admonition to Hezekiah of old: “Set thine house in order.” One who has touched the hem of Christ’s healing garment in Christian Science has caught his first real glimpse of the divine plan in creation, and he begins at once to readjust his confused mental household. It requires no extended argument to convince him that, like Joshua, he has been clothed with filthy garments,—with thoughts of sin, disease, sorrow, and disappointment; and the law of Love demands that all these and kindred thoughts be surrendered. It may at first appear to be a herculean task confronting him, but remembering that the Lord will fight his battles for him, he presses on until the necessary “change of raiment” is made and he senses the mental or Horeb height from which he is to present his body, “holy and acceptable unto God.
“The Divine Order” from Christian Science Journal, February 1908, by Clarence W. Chadwick
If Christian Science is the same as Jesus taught, why is it not more simple, so that all can readily understand it?
The teachings of Jesus were simple; and yet he found it difficult to make the rulers understand, because of their great lack of spirituality. Christian Science is simple, and readily understood by the children; only the thought educated away from it finds it abstract or difficult to perceive. Its seeming abstraction is the mystery of godliness; and godliness is simple to the godly; but to the unspiritual, the ungodly, it is dark and difficult. The carnal mind cannot discern spiritual things.
— from Miscellaneous Writings by Mary Baker Eddy, page 53-54
“Mary” from Addresses by Martha Wilcox, page 291
The belief that scares you is your own hand uplifted against yourself. Put it down. The Truth that is good is your life, and doing good you sustain it, but fearing evil you lose it.
— from Collectanea, the “Blue Book,” by Mary Baker Eddy, page 111
Final Readings
What we seem to know, we don’t know; what we seem to see, we don’t see what we seem to be, we can’t be. We see what we call days, months and years, and count our days accordingly. We limit our own selves and others as to the number of years that we or they can live, or that can be added after a severe illness. We cut our own selves short and think, forsooth, ’tis all that God has given! When the shadow has sunk low in the dial, when we are sick and ready to die, we come to Christ in Divine Science. We seek aid in the Spirit of Good; but, all unconsciously to ourselves, we place a limit for our recovery — beyond which we cannot seem to reach. We see Eternal Life, and know ’tis there, and know ’tis ours; but we cannot seem to claim it as our own, and so come into full possession of it now, with all the rights and titles of perfect ownership, with all restrictions and encumbrances now, henceforth and evermore removed. …
Could the prophet, in behalf of the king, have overreached his own limit, the fifteen years’ extension might have lengthened into eternal life. When we, for ourselves or in behalf of another, throw ourselves upon eternal Life, we can have added to our years, our health, our strength, our happiness, all that we at the time can conceive as possible to us.
God, the Infinite and Eternal, never set a boundary line beyond which we could not reach. The infinite and eternal Spirit has said to all mortality, “Thus far and no farther, and here shall thy proud waves be stayed”; yet, to His own in Spirit and in Truth, God never said, “I have eternal Life, but you can never reach it.” On the contrary, to those that love God, the Christ has ever said, “Nothing shall be impossible unto you,” and “Ye shall ask what ye will in my name, and it shall be given you of my Father.”
— “Human Limitations” from Christian Science Journal, September 1892 by F. J. Fluno