Sunday July 11th, 2021 Roundtable
Millennium: The Reign of Christ
This week’s Lesson Sermon Subject: Sacrament
Click here to play the audio as you read:
Morning Prayers
Set your affections on things above; love one another; commune at the table of our Lord in one spirit; worship in spirit and in truth; and if daily adoring, imploring, and living the divine Life, Truth, Love, thou shalt partake of the bread that cometh down from heaven, drink of the cup of salvation, and be baptized in Spirit.
— from Christian Science versus Pantheism, by Mary Baker Eddy, page 14
Discussion points
40 — WATCH lest you believe that spiritual progress consists in anything but a spiritualization of thought, of which your acts are the honest expression, that your outward life may attest the sincerity of your effort to think right. False theology declares that, regardless of man’s thoughts, his acts are the important thing. Science says that unless man’s thoughts are changed, no change in his outward life or acts weighs aught in the spiritual scale. Since thought is cause, and acts are effect, it is spiritualization that marks spiritual growth.
— from 500 Watching Points by Gilbert Carpenter
GOLDEN TEXT: I Peter 5 : 2
“Feed the flock of God which is among you, taking the oversight thereof, not by constraint, but willingly.”
Read or listen to “Sermon on the Mount” From the King James Bible
Millenium: A thousand years; a word used to denote the thousand years mentioned in Revelations 20, during which period Satan shall be bound and restrained from seducing men to sin, and Christ shall reign on earth with his saints; the thousand years mentioned in Revelation during which holiness is to prevail and Christ is to reign on earth; a period of great happiness or human perfection; a period of 1000 years
— from 1828 Webster’s Dictionary
This period is the period of the dragon and the dragon is not met and overcome in the realm of argument, but purely in the realm of realization, consecration and the understanding that evil today, produces its chaos, of every kind, by the illusionary mesmerism that, man is God. Discern this clearly and dwell forever in the consciousness that ‘the source of all good’ is God, never man, and there abide.
— from Christian Science, Its Clear, Correct Teaching, by Herbert Eustace, page 993
If half the attention given to hygiene were given to the study of Christian Science and to the spiritualization of thought, this alone would usher in the milleninium.
— from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, page 382
Article — “Love” by Mary Baker Eddy, page 249
The effect of this Science is to stir the human mind to a change of base, on which it may yield to the harmony of the divine Mind.
— from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, page 162
Must mankind wait for the ultimate of the millennium — until every man and woman comes into the knowledge of Christ and all are taught of God and see their apparent identity as one man and one woman — for God to be represented by His idea or image and likeness?
God is one, and His idea, image, or likeness, man, is one. But God is infinite and so includes all in one. Man is the generic term for men and women. Man, as the idea or image and likeness of the infinite God, is a compound, complex idea or likeness of the infinite one, or one infinite, whose image is the reflection of all that is real and eternal in infinite identity. Gender means a kind. Hence mankind — in other words, a kind of man who is identified by sex — is the material, so-called man born of the flesh, and is not the spiritual man, created by God, Spirit, who made all that was made. The millennium is a state and stage of mental advancement, going on since ever time was. Its impetus, accelerated by the advent of Christian Science, is marked, and will increase till all men shall know Him (divine Love) from the least to the greatest, and one God and the brotherhood of man shall be known and acknowledged through-out the earth.
— from Miscellany, by Mary Baker Eddy, page 239-240
…do not be offended by anyone, for they do not know you as you really are; if they did they would love you. … Click below to read more
Article — “There Is No Death”A letter sent to Herbert Eustace from one of his students
… My sense the Sermon on the Mount, read each Sunday 18 without comment and obeyed throughout the week, would be enough for Christian practice. The Word of God is a powerful preacher, and it is not too spiritual to be practical, nor too transcendental to be heard and understood.
— from Message for 1901 by Mary Baker Eddy, page 11
This word also refers to the pruning (hence, “taming”) of a plant (tree, hedge, vine) previously allowed to grow in unrestrained wildness, without proper care or management. The great English poet, Robert Southey, put it this way:
“Behold this vine, I found it a wild tree Whose wanton strength had [swollen] into Irregular twigs … Wasting the sap and strength That should have given forth fruit. But when I pruned the tree, Then it grew temperate in its vain expense Of useless leaves, and knotted, as thou seest, Into these full, clear, clusters, to repay The hand whose foresight wounded it. This pruning process is what the original Greek of James 1:21 is all about. Pruning means subtracting something. Grafting means adding something. James balances pruning with grafting in the second half of the scripture, encouraging me to embrace not only loss of something old (pruning) but gain of something new (grafting).
— Forum post by Parthens