Obedience to God’s Law

Thank you tonight for those wonderful readings on God’s law, and ending in Science and Health where Mrs. Eddy says, “Obedience to Truth gives man power and strength.”

Growing up in Science most of my life, I tried very hard to be obedient to God — or what, at the time, I thought was obedience to God. I thought I was pretty obedient; I tried to be kind and loving, and live up to the commandments. But as a young adult, I had many unmet problems — physical, emotional, mental, often sick, very sick really, and didn’t know where I was failing, or what more I needed to do.

I am grateful that I was led to this church and a practitioner here. One thing I learned — and it did take me a while — I hadn’t been totally obedient to God, because I would quite often entertain thoughts of negativity and fear. That was my mode of thinking. Even though I prayed and tried to be a good person, I was fearful and negative. I guess I didn’t realize how disobedient that was. I realized I was acting like a Satan-worshipper! I say that because I needed to shock myself out of that disobedience. I had to realize that every time I was negative and fearful, I was believing that there was a power other than God. So, what would that be? I was believing in evil. I was believing in Satan. Really, that’s what it gets down to, and yet I was calling myself a Christian Scientist.

So, there was this definite duality that I had to face and come to terms with. It took a while because the Christians say “toehold, foothold, stronghold,” and this negativity and fear seemed to have a strong hold on me because I had done it so long. So, I had to begin to “stand porter at the door of thought,” as Mrs. Eddy says in Science and Health and as the Bible says, to bring every thought into captivity to the Christ, — to watch my thinking and when those fearful thoughts came, to realize that this wasn’t just some little indiscretion. I was disobeying God; I was believing that there was some other power. By listening to it and by following its awful demands, I — in belief — was giving it power and life.

Mrs. Eddy says that “error comes to you for life and you give it all the life it has.” And then I had to learn to be a “terror to error,” as Mrs. Eddy also says. Because these thoughts were very aggressive, I had to fight back and know they weren’t true, and that I did believe in one God, one good God. I was going to obey the First Commandment and have no other gods and not believe that there could ever be a power apart from God. As I stood up stoutly for the first time in my entire life, those insidious suggestions began to stop, to be destroyed, because they were not true.

As I did that, and as I did that consistently, all the other problems stopped, too. I was no longer sick all the time, I was no longer a worry-wart or mental wreck, constantly being concerned about this, that, or the next thing. I had a strength from God that I never knew existed. This Science heals. It works. It will change your life forever if you apply it with all your heart and soul and mind.

I am so grateful for this Truth, I’m grateful for a practitioner who knew how to demonstrate it, who gave me the guts to demonstrate it, and to know that we have a good God who loves us, and when we get on our knees to Him, there’s nothing that can’t be healed, changed, rectified. It’s all in His loving care.