The Lord preserveth all them that love him.
Would you like to experience more of the protecting power of God? Then love God more!
Loving God is an act of preservation. It neutralizes evil in human consciousness, separates us from its bad effect and brings thought into conscious harmony and health.
If we’re afraid, we’re not in complete love with God. We’re bowing down to an argument of evil waged against God.
If we worry, we’re not in total love with God. We doubt the omnipresence of good.
If we feel ill, a false belief of mortal mind is striving to dominate thought and sap our love and attention to God.
What is the antidote for neutralizing evil? Love God. Love God more, and evil will have no room in consciousness to cause grief.
This is an interesting topic. Love God more! If we want more of his protective power, and overcome health problems and daily challenges, just love God more. But what is more? How to love more? And when is our love of God enough? It sounds so simple and straightforward to apply.
You have mentioned this topic before with “deeper trust versus surface trust”. With deeper trust you declared “peace be still” just as Jesus did to calm the sea of Galilee in a storm. And in that case your plane flew and we were all inspired.
Beyond affirming divine truth and denying mortal mind, what does loving God more look like? Beyond seeing everything spiritually as being perfect, how do we have more love or enough love that it is expressed in daily life?
If we are struggling with a problem, love God. If it doesn’t go away, love God more. And if it doesn’t go away, we are not loving God enough. These are all interesting mental dynamics gymnastics that we put ourselves through. I believe I understand what it means to love God. I have just never learned how to love God more.
That was a slap on my face ! in a very positive and constructive way, of course 😉
Thanks for this powerful reminder, Evan !
Thank you, Evan, for this beautiful challenge to love God more. One way I’m going to approach loving God more today is to be a more consistent reflection of Love…. to React less with criticism and frustration and Act more with Love’s qualities of compassion, patience, and a corrective loving mental truth….whether interacting with the news, family or the paint store clerk.
To anon,
It won’t be mental gymnastics when you’re really living the love! That’s were honesty comes in. You can’t just say the words and put on “the look.” the love has to be real, and it means devotion of thought, consecration of consciousness to Truth. It’s evident in a thinking overflowing with spiritual reality, feeling as close to God as a circle is to round. This happens as human thought turns from worshiping matter, fearing disease and working in sin, to worshiping Spirit, embracing health, losing all fear and dropping sin. This happens step by step, but it happens as one continues to honestly dedicate themselves to this path.
You will be at the point of loving God “the most,” when all sense of matter, sin, disease and death have vanished. That’s called heaven!
I am trying to put this into action. I started doing the Bible Lesson in June. Not only am I making a sincere effort to understand but to put in practice what I read. For instance, this weeks lesson “GOD.” in SECT: (2) Nebuchadnezzar throwing the 3 men into the fire and the fire had no power. I applied that story to the fires going on in the western part of the US. And guess what, the very day, I prayed, the firemen began to get a handle on the fires. How happy I felt when I heard that on the news. We do have a mighty form of prayer as taught in C/S.
put God 1st, always in thought & deed. thank you for the wonderful reminder to remember it!
Thanks to anon for your questions which were also mine. And thanks to Evan for a helpful reply. Both greatly appreciated!
Evan,
I appreciate your comments on how to love God more by “really living the love” by turning away from worshiping matter and working in sin. If our ultimate goal is to eliminate all sense of matter. I think we can agree then that brushing our teeth with Crest because it has fluoride, and applying iodine to cuts and scratches, and accepting medical treatment for injuries and falls could all be considered forms of worshiping matter. We are not moving toward Heaven if we are still tending to any sense in matter.
So let’s allow honesty to come in. Any use of matter as a means to aid the body in healing runs counter to spiritual healing as taught by MBE. Mrs. Eddy even suggested suffering for the cause. This would be one means of loving God more by denying medical treatment and denying the symptoms while spiritually affirming the truth.
Worshiping matter comes in 1000 different faces and should be denied at every turn. Being healed by spiritual means does not include the use of physical means and should not be used at the same time. Practitioners view their use as contrary to the treatment. In fact, nutrition, physical therapy, and any form of alternative medicine are seen has various forms of animal magnetism.
So I believe we can conclude that we are not loving God more when we use any of these means to obtain relief of symptoms and complaints. I see “living the love” as a tall order to daily living. To “love God more” feels inspiring but it may place us at risk. And this concerns me if this is the measure of how much or less I love God.
To above,
Loving God more never puts one at risk, but takes one out of danger. The opposite of love is fear. Fear is what leads to trouble, not love. So, the more one truly understands God and learns how to avail self of divine care is putting themselves in the best position possible.
We progress spiritually in degrees. To make blanket statements as to what one “should do or not do” is usually not as important as learning the lessons of humility, grace and poise in the service of our Master.
What you don’t do materially is not the important factor compared to what you do do spiritually. What you do spiritually leads you down the path of progress, and naturally grows one out of false reliance.
Thank you for the above response Evan!
I really love the part about how what you do spiritually is mor important than what you don’t do materially!!!
Such a helpful way to put the emphasis where it belongs.
This is soooo good.
To Evan,
It sounds like there is much that we are in agreement. I agree that loving God more should never put one at risk. So it concerns me about recent Wisconsin parents who were convicted in the death of their child for refusing medical care and relying solely on prayer. I am sure they loved their child and felt they were loving God more by relying on God’s power to heal their child. It may feel comfortable to view everything through our spiritual eyes but as Paul states we are looking through a glass darkly.
And I so agree with you that making blanket statements really doesn’t work. This is my very concerned when we talk about the physical world in such absolutes. As you explained earlier that heaven and perfect health is achieved thru no sense of matter. Science and Health describes it as the complete and total annihilation of material sense. That sort of kicks a hole in a day at the ocean with your family or dining at your favorite Thai restaurant with your wife. To denounce the physical senses as contrary to God leaves us all in a dilemma for daily living. When we tried to apply these blanket statements, they don’t seem to fit.
For myself, a day at the ocean filling all the senses of sight, sound, smells, and touch can leave me with a sense of gratitude and awe rather than viewing this as all mortal thought and mortal error. I think artist paint using matter to express the joy they see and feel. And musicians play using brass and strings to express beauty and harmony hear. And health caregivers use material means to offer loving compassion because they care. To discount matter as having no value in our lives because we are spiritual beings leaves us without the benefit that matter can offer. The scientific statement of being uses many blanket statements which can be misleading and even leave one’s physical health at risk. While remaining in the mental world of spirituality is comforting, we are still required to interact with matter without trying to annihilate it from our lives.
To above,
I love reading your comments and observations because they are bringing out some of the major misunderstandings some people have about CS. Thanks for being open and honest and sharing with us.
You mention that Science and Health teaches the annihilation of material sense. I’ve studied CS for decades, and I’ve never picked that up. It’s not my concept of CS. My understanding is that as one grows in understanding God, Spirit, and how the world was created spiritually, the material sense grows dim and distant, until eventually it disappears. Nothing is annihilated at all, except for a false sense of what existed spiritually in the first place.
You mention valuing the joys of an ocean view or a beautiful song played. I understand. But someday, as your spiritual sense continues to grow and mature, you’ll begin to see that all the joy and delight you’ve been experiencing, has come from God. You thought it was coming from something material, but that was just a temporary medium. It originated in God, the creator of all good, beauty, intelligence, and so on.
I do not look around in what many call a material world and say, “This is not real.” Only people who don’t understand CS would say something like that. Jesus said we live in the Kingdom of Heaven now. I look around, see beauty, order, harmony, intelligence, and say, “Thank you God for such a beautiful, intelligent universe to live in! And I give the credit to God, Spirit, not to matter.
Matter is a temporary limited view of what exists in Spirit.
Matter is not something to annihilate. It’s a limited view to look beyond. Through spiritual sense one sees that beauty, health, life originate in God, not in a mindless atom. Anyway, this is a big topic, but a healthy one to discuss.
You are correct, that absolute statements of Truth must be demonstrated in degrees. A student of Truth needs to recognize that and therefore very humbly and meekly walk down the path of Truth demonstrating what they are capable of demonstrating at the time, and not forcing a demonstration through blind human will or ignorant misled intentions. Point well taken!