Finding where God is seen and felt - What's church got to do with it? Emra Farkas, Speaker

couple of weeks ago I was in Portland and I was driving across town and I saw at the end of a block this beautiful newly painted white wooden 19th century church with a great big steeple and as I got closer I saw there was a marquee out front and the Marquee said this is not a church and I wondered did they have to put that out there because people had come wanting to worship and they had to turn them away and tell them no this is a Performing Arts Center but it got me thinking that the impulse that had originally built that church that has inspired this church hasn't gone anywhere it's exactly the same it has been the same through all time and my my own understanding of that impulse deepened some years ago when I had an experience that made me aware that there's a different way to think this was an experience that just disrupted everything I thought I knew about how everything works because of it I was healed overnight night of numerous physical problems and it was Christian Science that made sense of this experience that made sense of this this healing paradigm shift for me by showing me that Jesus teaching that God is love always present unconditional all Powerful Love is something we can prove in our own experience it is practical so as you might imagine my first response to this experience was just Joy I was thrilled to be well after years of illness but I also found myself filled with hope not just for myself but but because of the implications if just recognizing the presence of this love could have such a powerful effect on me well then it could for anybody now Albert Einstein said a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels and the kind of thinking we'll be talking about today does just that it gives us a Dependable way way to find Love's presence and its practical goodness so as you've heard and seen the title of this lecture is finding where God is seen and felt and that comes from my experience and then there's a subtitle what's Church got to do with it and I hope to show you that those two things very much go together in fact they're actually inseparable because whenever and wherever you start from the premise of Love's presence you are going to find Love's healing and transforming power and then whenever and wherever you live in accord with this love you live in response to it you actually become part of the church that Jesus and the early Christians talked about not a bricks and more location that could be turned into a Performing Arts Center but a response to God's goodness that includes us all so it's those two things it's the recognition of Love's presence and our response to it that will scientifically move us toward those higher levels so when I was a child God's goodness was very real to me there's a line from a poem by William woodsworth that explains the naturalness of this he wrote trailing Clouds Of Glory we come from God who is our home all heaven lies about us in our infancy and of course Jesus was known for saying that little children with their natural love of good their trust in good are closer to God than adults who come with their opinions and their biases and their fears and I think this tells us something essential about who we really are what our relationship to good to God actually is now some of you know in many language is those two words God and good are identical God is good and it's our own love of good it's our desire for it our expectation of it in our lives which is natural and this is what opens the way for love to reach us even in difficult conditions so as you heard I was raised in Christian Science and the things my mother told me the things I learned in Sunday school all just confirmed that childlike sense of the reality of good so I was taught that God is divine and supreme and infinite which to me just meant that God is completely good this goodness is the most powerful thing there is and it's everywhere all the time and then in Sunday school I learned names for God that helped me to see the entireness of this goodness so I was taught that God is principle the foundation the structure of everything that God is mind and soul and spirit all terms for God you find in the Bible that God God is truth reality itself that God is life itself and that God is as Jesus taught love so putting these things together putting together for example that mind is divine helped me to see that what God knows is entirely good that mind is supreme told me that what God knows is the final word that mind is infinite assured me that there was no place I could be where this Divine intelligence would not be present and so I learned to pray not by asking God to take away my problems but by thinking specifically about what God is and what God is doing right there in real time where I was and if that goodness seemed distant well then I could know it was just that it was a seeming because in fact life's goodness Love's presence mind's intelligence were all right there where I was and when I would realize that whatever that seeming was would dissolve so when I was very small I used to get earaches whenever I went swimming and one night in the middle of one of these the thought came to me that God fills all space that was a revelation because it implied that that meant God also filled the space where my ears were and with that thought the pain just stopped and the earaches never came back a few years later I was in a car with my mom we were on our way to a doctor to have me checked into a hospital to get my tonsils out now I'd been having chronic sore throats that had been keeping me out of school and a lot of my little friends that had their tonsils out and my dad who was not a Christian Scientist thought you know maybe this is something we ought to be looking into we were about a block from the doctor's office and my mother turned to me and she said you know what God knows about you is all there is to know and I think up to that moment I hadn't been praying really so much as just hoping the whole thing would go away but in that moment it was like a light bulb went on over my head and I knew what she was saying was the truth so we got to the doctor's office and he examined me and he said these tonsils are perfect there's no reason to have them removed go home so we went home a few years later one evening I felt a really desperate need to pray and I thought I'd start with the Lord's Prayer but I never got past the first two words our father because what they made me realize was that not only did they mean that I was the loved and cared for child of God that I'd been taught I was but this group of girls at my school who had threatened to beat me up the next day who had been bullying me for weeks that they were also God's children well that was a revelation the fear that I'd been feeling just drained away when I got to school the next day day there was no bullying there was no beating up it was as if none of it had ever happened so praying this way when I did it it felt natural it felt normal it felt joyful I don't know if I could have unpacked the metaphysical logic that because there's there's just one Primal cause God there therefore can't be an effect from any other cause I don't know if I fully grasped the theology that it was the very nature of God that assured my safety and well-being I just knew that when I made room in my thought for a God who is love it felt like coming home and healing followed but as I got into my later teens I I stopped doing that God was getting crowded out of my thought by what I read in the morning newspaper what I saw on the Evening News what we talked about in school what I talked with my friends about those things were all very challenging to a faith in a God who is supreme goodness so I had a friend who came over after school one day and we were talking we got to talking about religion and he said he felt like his church was just all empty ritual was meaningless and I somewhat unkindly piled on at this point with something about how not all the members of my church walked their talk and I don't know why at the age of 16 I thought church membership assured human Perfection but but we must have thought that religion was something worth saving because we started to brainstorm what what would an ideal Church look like and we got so serious that we actually got a pad and a pen and we started writing a list of rules for our ideal church because if you're a church you have to have rules and it was going along okay until one of us said it should be a rule that everyone believed that God is all powerful and we realized that neither of us did as my friend said what kind of God would allow the war and the disease and the poverty and the corruption the misery that we see in the world around us what kind of God would that be and I didn't have an answer for him in that moment so that was the end of our ideal Church there is a passage at the beginning of this book science and health with key to the scriptures which is written by the discoverer and founder of Christian Science Mary Baker Eddie and this is a book that it explains the the biblical foundation for healing and spiritual regeneration it explains how and why Jesus teachings are practical and provable and if I had given this some serious thought at the time it might have saved me years of trouble but the passage says the time for thinkers has come truth independent of doctrines and time honored systems knocks at the portal of humanity contentment with the past and the cold conventionality of materialism are crumbling away ignorance of God is no longer the stepping stone to Faith well at at that point Faith was not on my radar and I think I could certainly say that I was I was theologically ignorant but I did consider myself a thinker and it would have done me good in that moment to remember that there is such a thing as Divine truth that could have turned there for inspiration and found understanding instead of just intellectually tinkering with those time honored systems but the problem was at that point I had accepted the cold conventionality of materialism as reality itself without even realizing I'd done it I was like the fish who is swimming along and another fish called out hey how's the water and I would have said what's water I was just going with the flow of materialism without thinking about it so when I got to college I stopped going to church I dismissed religion as something I had outgrown but what I could not dismiss were those healings and there were many more of them than the few I shared with you if God had not been the cause of those experiences well I wanted to know what was but nothing that I was hearing in the psychology classes that I was taking in the philosophy classes that I was taking gave me answers to that question that rang true with my own experience so as time went on and life got more complicated as it does I started asking more questions life's big questions what is really going on here who am I what am I here for and to find answers for these questions I started to look into different religions different spiritual practices but again all that I found in sacred texts in years in the meditation Hall in years of doing chanting and breathing these things all just created more questions so I headed into my 30s with a whole array of unanswered questions and a host of medical problems that were defying Medical Solutions I've been diagn noosed with endometriosis which I was told was so pervasive that I would never have children I had migraines I had a standing appointment with a chiropractor because my back was always going out and I had this chronic pain that seemed to move around the body and so at one point I asked a doctor what is the source of this pain where is it coming from and he said oh this pain has no Source this is this is phantom pain so I looked into alternative medicine and I tried acupuncture and Chinese herbs and Homeopathy I tried so many different things and none of them brought relief and there came a year where ID had a surgery that hadn't helped and then at the end of that year I contracted what one doctor sort of excitedly told me was a rare strain of malaria and there was no treatment so he sent a sample off to the CDC and sent me home and now on top of everything else I have a fever that never breaks and it's going into its fourth week and I feel like my life is over because all I can do on any given day I can I can sit up in bed and read a little bit on a really good day I might make it out to the couch in the living living room I can remember sitting there one afternoon just weeping because of what my life had become so one night I got to thinking about some of the books that I'd been trying to read and they were about quantum physics because I was still searching and the books had talked about this idea that the universe is Observer created a physicist named Max plank had said I regard Consciousness as fundamental I regard matter as derivative from Consciousness and I looked at the wall across from my bed and thought so that would mean all the assumptions that I've had about how solid everything seems might not be entirely accurate and this got me started doing a kind of mental inventory of all the things I assumed I knew everything I thought I knew about how everything works I decided if I hadn't proved it in my own experience I would just let that assumption drop away and this this process was like peeling an onion and assumptions and opinions and secondhand beliefs are all just dropping away and I wondered if there'd be anything left but as it turned out when everything else was gone there was was something left and it was something I knew was true something I knew was true in every fiber of my being and what it was was love and this wasn't like thinking about incidents of love that I'd experienced or or thinking about love as an abstract idea this this was like looking out from love seeing it poured out permeating everything and and including me and I felt this wonderful wash of relief and I fell asleep well when I woke up in the morning I knew right away that everything was different for one thing the fever was gone and I didn't know it yet but all of those physical problems were gone I just I knew I felt full of energy and joy I felt I felt like a little kid at the beginning of summer vacation who just can't wait to get up get out there and be part of life and I thought what was I thinking the night before what is this and I realized that the feeling was actually very familiar the feeling was exactly how I'd felt as a child when I'd been healed in Christian Science so I started trying to recreate what was going on in in my thought I remembered before bed I had been reading a book on the early centuries of Christianity and I hadn't thought about Christianity in years but a friend had given me this book and here were historical accounts of the men and women who had responded to the Christian message now whatever I had thought about whether or not you could prove that there was a historical Jesus it was very clear that something huge had happened at this moment in time that changed hundreds of lives it transformed the lives of these people and then they went out and transformed the lives of others I remembered looking at the wall and thinking okay it's matter and matter is composed of atoms and atoms are mostly empty space and the empty space is filled with Consciousness so surely the question has got to be what is this Consciousness that that can form and transform reality and the answer came to me in words I've been taught in Sunday school from science and health from something that's called the scientific statement of being and it says there is no life truth intelligence nor substance in matter all is infinite mind and its infinite manifestation for God is all in all and I have to confess that the very next thought I had was oh no oh no I leapt out of bed and I ran into the living room and I found my childhood copy of science and health and got it down from the top of a bookshelf and dusted it off and started reading and oh yes here were the answers to the questions I've been asking for 15 years what is really going on here well there's a Divine principle to the universe and it is love and I had just felt that who am I I'm Inseparable from that love and I just seen that what am I here for well I must be here to express it and then came another surprising thought which was I want to go to church and I didn't know exactly what that that was about but 3 days later it was Sunday and I went to church and I sat in the back and I waited to see what would happen three lines into the first hymn there are tears rolling down my cheeks because here again is this amazing sense of love and the hymn that morning was from a poem by Mary Baker Eddie and the first lines are oh gentle presence peace and joy and power oh life Divine that owns each waiting hour everything I heard at the service that morning just confirmed and explained and magnified that sense of love so when I went out the doors at the end of the service I knew what I had to do I had to hang on to this sense of things I did not want to let it go ever again I had to find a way to live consistently with it and from it and I wanted to share it because it was just way too good to keep to myself now it turns out my experience was not actually very exceptional because whenever anybody catches even a glimpse of Love's presence the reality of that they have exactly the same response they feel Joy and gratitude they want to hang on to it and they want to share it and you see that in the experiences of those first Christians people encountered first through Jesus then through his followers this amazing paradigm shift that St Paul called the mind of Christ and Christ what is Christ Christ is divine truth God's love coming to us showing us the good that's there to be seen clearing out our fears healing us if you want to see what Christ looks like in Human Experience look at the Life of Christ Jesus everything he said everything he did expressed Christ and now here is St Paul urging his fellow Christians to have that mind the mind that was in Christ Jesus implying first of all that they can I mean think of that we can have the understanding that lay behind jesus' teachings and his healing works that we can do those healing works as he promised his followers that they could through this understanding and people responded there was a young woman in Iconium turkey named Thea and when Paul came to preach there she sat in her window and listened 3 days he preached three days she listened and then she walked out her door leaving behind the life that her family thought she was supposed to lead and she became a follower of Paul and later actually a partner in his ministry and she's just one of the many men and women who heard this Christ message and were transformed by it who dropped everything and they they went around the Mediterranean Basin sharing that message healing people that's documented before a brick was ever laid in a church building there was this movement of personal transformation of of people responding to the Christ it was like like a stone dropped in a pond that was love and the ripples went out that was church you know that word that we read as Church in our English Bibles only shows up twice in all the gospels just twice and in the original Greek that word is elesia and at the time elesia simply meant people who are called could be for anything but the really definitive place where we find it is in the gospel of Matthew where Jesus asks his disciples to tell him who they think he is and the disciple Simon answers and he says you are the Christ you are the son of the Living God and Jesus agrees and he says you are Peter from the Greek word Petros meaning Rock and he says on this rock I will build my theya so jesus' Church the men and women his words and works had called had as their Foundation the recognition of Christ God's truth and love coming to us showing us that we're Inseparable from God's goodness now Paul wrote a lot about Ecclesia he called Church the body of Christ meaning that we are all indispensable invaluable members parts of this greater ho that expresses God's truth and love and he told the new Christians at Corinth he told them you are the temple you are the Temple of the Living God and these are people who live in a town that is world famous for its temples devoted to the Greek pantheon but he tells them you are the temple you're the place where God's qualities shine through so Corinthians you better think that way you better act that way and then in the letters of Peter we find this he said ye have tasted that the Lord is gracious he's talking to people who have had this experience ye as Lively stones are built up a spiritual house acceptable to God and you find that same spiritual sense of church in science and health where Mary Baker Eddie describes church as the structure of Truth and Love whatever rests upon and proceeds from Divine principle and it's very helpful to know that in the dictionary that she used as she wrote that book The 1828 Websters the first meaning of structure is not a physical thing it says structure the act of building so this church is not a human creation this church is a Divine expression it is the effect of the Living God and we become part of it whenever we start from think from live from the mind of Christ that recognizes Truth and Love Supremacy so I get now why my little experience of Love's presence should have prompted a desire for church the recognition of love as a Divine Law of being includes this call of the Christian Ecclesia to rejoice in this wonderful spiritual sense of life to strive to live consistently with it and from it and to share it and how we do that is at the heart of the the discovery of Christian Science so when Mary Baker Eddie made her discovery that there are Divine laws of Truth and Love that support our ability to think from and live from the mind of Christ to experience the healing the transformation that comes with that realization she thought her message was going to be welcomed with open arms by the public and the Christian churches but in 1866 and into the rest of that Century the powers that were were almost entirely male so the doctors of divinity had a hard time with the idea that a woman from rural New England could be a legitimate Theologian the men of science and medicine didn't think she could have anything to contribute on those topics when science and health was first published the men of letters wrote scathing reviews I want to share you with you something that gives you a different perspective on how her work was seen because after one of these literary critics had heaped scorn on her writing Bronson Alcott the father of Louisa May Alcott who wrote Little Women came to her door and knocked and and she answered and and he told her she had done something wonderful something important he said he was going to write her a little note and that she should feel free to publish it which she did and what he wrote her is this the profound truths which you announce sustained by facts of The Immortal Life give to your work the Seal of inspiration reaffirm in modern phrase the Christian revelations in times like these so sunk in sensualism I hail with joy your voice speaking an assured word for God and immortality and my joy is heightened that these words are of woman's [Music] divining so when I read biographies of Mary Baker Eddie or I go online to the Mary Baker Eddie Library read about her life there and I heartily recommend going there and clicking on Deep dive you can read about the adversity that she had to contend with but of course what you find there are her accomplishments know that this is a woman who built a church in Boston founded a Christian denomination published books and periodicals on Christian healing founded a newspaper the Christian Science monitor to rate raise the standard of Journalism but what strikes me most as I read about here is how uniquely fitted she was to make the discovery and then to share the message so she grows up in a New Hampshire farming Community her family in her words are of Puritan stock and whatever cliches May come to thought when you hear that word Puritan consider that these were people who earnestly believed that fulfilling one's duty to God was the entire purpose of existence so that's the atmosphere she grows up in and she has a great love of God great faith and this is seen in occasions even as a child when she's able to help and heal others by lifting her thought to God so when one of the little farm animals is sick the family brought it to Mary and she held it and it became well when her older brother George accidentally gashed his leg with an axe her father brought Mary to him and the wound healed so quickly it startled their family doctor but as a child and then later as an adult she struggled with chronic illness and she later said the conventional prayers of her family and of her church had failed to help and so she knew there was more she needed to understand about what is the prayer that heals so she spent decades searching for the answer to this question searching for the truth and she writes about that in her Memoir called retrospection and introspection she said during 20 years prior prior to my Discovery I had been trying to trace all physical effects to a mental cause and in the latter part of 1866 I gained the scientific certainty that all causation was mind and every effect a mental phenomenon so her studies led her to study allopathic West medicine with a licensed physician she became a licensed homeopathic physician she experimented with different cures and Health Systems of her day and what all of this showed her was that our experience is clearly connected to if not entirely governed by thought I mean today a doctor will urge you to be optimistic he'll tell you relax he'll say be hopeful knowing that thought matters given her experiences with proofs of God's care she knew that the good she was seeking the answers she was seeking were inseparable from God so all through this period she keeps up a dedicated study of her Bible knowing that having a deeper understanding of the nature of God is going to relate directly to the answer she's looking for and for me it's it's these two qualities it's her her persistence the way adversity did not stop her in her search for a truth that would help and heal not just herself but others everyone and it's her steadfast faith that these are the things that are the most helpful to my own practice of Christian Science especially her faith because as someone I mean let's face it I had a really good look at God's love as a child and then I totally lost sight of spirit and so I have since come to Value not leaving God out of your calculations which is something she never did so this brings us to 1866 she's in a seemingly hopeless condition her friends her pastor her doctor are expecting her to pass on at any moment and she turns to her Bible and it opens to one of Jesus healings and she sees there suddenly the timelessness of Christ after she saw that the truth and love that Jesus taught was God was as real for her as present as powerful in that moment as it had been nearly 19 centuries before just the realization of that brought immediate healing and then something happened that I think is every bit as important to the Discovery as that initial Revelation and what happened is she met with resistance and the resistance took the form of her doctor who had come to check on her and when she greeted him at the door fully dressed and in apparent good health and rejoicing in her good health his reaction was to tell her you can't possibly be well the extent the severity of the internal injuries that you've suffered in a recent fall make this sort of rebound sound impossible and he questions her because he had diagnosed her as having had a concussion and perhaps he thought she was not in her right mind so he asked her did you take the medicine I gave you and she opens the drawer and shows him no I haven't touched it and then he explains to her why she can't be well and as he's doing this she begins to feel faint and seeing this he gets her settled in a chair and then because there isn't anything he can do for her medically he leaves wishes her well she goes back to her Bible and it opens again to one of Jesus healings and she sees there she finds that living palpitating presence of Christ that is always here and the relapse ends so it's these two things it's our recognition of Love's presence as it always is and the fact that the human mind has got to yield to the Divine mind that our assumptions and opinions those condemnations have to be cleared away to make room for the mind of Christ and you see those same two factors at work in the lives of those first Christians because of course they faced appalling resistance they faced persecution and imprisonment and execution and their response to these existential threats was to pray and I think we can safely assume that their prayer was not to petition God go to make for them some path of flowers their prayer had to be grounded in what Jesus taught them about the presence of love and the power of love that there would be no room that they would ever find themselves in no place where this love wasn't the biggest thing where it wasn't in fact the only thing they needed to consider and so when Paul is preaching one night long into the night and he actually was sort of famously not a charismatic speaker so he's going on and this young man named udus is sitting three stories up in a loft and he nods off and he falls to what everyone assumes is his death and Paul doesn't mourn he doesn't wonder why this has happened he doesn't blame udus he doesn't blame himself he doesn't blame God he goes to where udcus is and he prays and udus gets up and everyone rejoices I don't think it's a mistake that the book in the Bible where you read about these first Decades of Christianity that book isn't called The Book of the terrible times and the horrible things we suffered it's called The Acts of the Apostles and it's a book full of grace and healing and Revelation when Mary Baker Eddie wrote about her experiences with adversity she called them God's gracious preparation and she wasn't being sarcastic and she didn't mean that God in tends or sends adversity for some mysterious purpose she meant that when we like those early Christians turn with Hope and Faith in the reality of Good's presence God's presence we are going to find that it's there and it will change our experience we're going to find that adversity is not a proof of God's absence adversity well it's just a chance for us to find Love's presence and we're not going to do this by putting on a brave face through willpower through the so-called power of positive thinking the human mind is not a factor in this we will make our own proofs of Love's care when our god-given love of good and Des desire for it welcomes the Christ that's the methodology that's the howto of Christian Science that's how we do it I have a friend who like to say that those words Christian and science are like a match in a stick of dynamite and you keep them apart and nothing happens but you put them together you put together what Jesus knew about the nature of God with the fact that it is based in Divine Law good for all time and something big happens and I'm not talking about a destructive explosion I'm talking about a powerful disruption of fear of Sorrow of anger where that merely materal material coldly conventional sense of things gets blown away and we see ourselves in the light of spirit we're whole and intact and blessed and blessing that's the paradigm shift that is needed that brings that healing and transformation so how do we do that how do we change our base and live from that different standpoint well this is going to get into what church has got to do with it because when Mary Baker Eddie first began to share her Discovery to teach Christian healing she realized right away this isn't an academic subject this isn't some intellectual download the minds of and hearts of the students have to be prepared to receive the message to want to live from that new basis and so let me go back to that description of church it says the church is that institution which affords proof of its utility and is found elev ating the race rousing the dormant understanding from Material beliefs to the apprehension of spiritual ideas and the demonstration of Divine Science thereby casting out Devils or error and Healing The Sick and again it helps to know that if you looked up that word institution in the 1828 Di AR it's another one of those almost verbs it says institution the act of establishing so she saw that church understood and participated in as God's expression it would prove the practicality of jesus' teachings it would show that this is natural for us to think this way to live this way it would in her words reinstate primitive Christianity and lost element of healing and so as her eclesia grew she created a church manual with bylaws and a form of government designed to turn its members to God for everything not just in the running of the church but in how we meet every challenge we might be confronted with in our daily life the mind of Christ is to have precedents so this church is an act of building it's an act of establishing it's the ongoing upleveling of our understanding of life through the inspiration we gain from each other through the revelations we have as we come in contact with Divine truth through our practice of those truths now you go into a Christian Science Church on a Wednesday evening and you will hear people talk about what it's like to live from this different basis what happens when they do and you'll hear about healing because healing is a side effect of the mind of Christ so in my own Branch Church in recent months I've heard of healings of paralysis of a cancerous growth falling off a man's face of a member whose foot was run over by a car on a Wednesday morning and Wednesday evening there she was in church completely free and fine the healing of a kicky horse the the recovery of a lost dog the healing of Discord in the workplace and all of these things just point to how natural it is for us to live this way and hardly a Wednesday goes by that I don't find myself thinking you know what this is what's normal for us all this is what's normal so I said at the beginning of our time that my experience had given me hope not just for myself but that Humanity can survive and move toward those higher levels that Albert Einstein talked about he made that quote in 1946 so it's just shortly after two bombs in been dropped in Japan two atomic bombs but I think those words are as relevant for us now as they were then in fact I think they're even more pressing for us because if you look at what was in the news in 1946 it was exactly the same sort of stuff that had upset me in 1976 exactly the same sort of thing you would have encountered if you opened the paper this morning his words are more ing because we live in a time of 247 news when it's like standing in front of a fire hose of reasons to be mad and sad and scared the Pew Center does a study called the global state of emotions poll and it shows that every year people are more anxious more depressed and more angry I saw a bumper sticker recently it said if you're not outraged you're just not paying attention well we know it's good to pay pay attention but I think we have to ask ourselves what assumptions are we bringing to the things that we are so laser focused on because what my experience taught me what I find in the writings of Mary Baker Eddie and the teachings of Christ Jesus is that this dark Grim picture of the world and of us is not the whole picture in fact because it leaves God entirely out it's not the true picture at all because there is a way to find Love's presence and therefore it's practical goodness so I think on some level we all know this not just that we hope that it's true but that we know that this is what we're really here for this is what we're here for and you see people struggling to find this good in their life in some way shape or form now you probably if you read the news you've heard a lot in the last three to five years about the decline of church how people are fleeing organized religion in fact just last week there were another two pieces that came came out it it's like a topic the media just can't let alone but what I find most interesting about the articles are the comments you go to the comment section if there is one and you see people saying well yeah I don't go to church anymore but I pray or I think of myself as spiritual even though I don't associate with a denomination and what you keep seeing over and over again is people talking about what they miss they miss the fellowship they miss the inspiration and they talk about different ways they're trying to recreate that in their lives but as one person who tagged on to that particular thread said yes but if you if you're going through something really trying in your life scary and hard as nice as the people in your soul cycle group or your knitting Circle are they're probably not equipped to give you the spiritual counsel and comfort that you so desperately need in that moment there was one writer who talked about different strategies churches were using to bring people back in you know that they were updating their liturgy or they're just getting rid of the Liturgy and making it like a community center put in a Jumbotron screen and you update the music and you get a band or you hold your service in a coffee shop and the writer said that these strategies were failing because they failed to meet a very real human yearning for an experience of Living spirit you can't strategize your way to an experience of Living spirit but if you take away nothing else from today take away this that that experience is aail ailable it's natural it's something that belongs to all of us so I want to leave you with three brief illustrations of what life can look like lived from this different basis and the first has to do with what church can look like so when I returned to church I became a member and our church decided to rewrite their bylaws and so we had a meeting and we sat in a circle and we quickly discovered that there were as many opinions about what new bylaws should be as there were people sitting in the room and that night that night was not our best hour personalities clashed and harsh words were spoken people left unhappy but as unhappy as we were at the end of that evening I knew that we were going to go home and pray and I knew that ultimately ultimately our prayer was not going to be please God make them all agree with me it would be a prayer of listening so there were three months before the next meeting and there was no consensus appearing but when we all came back together as I said I knew we'd been praying I'd been praying to think of church as God's expression to think of us as members of the body of Christ an expression of God's truth and love that there was no other influence there was nothing else more powerful than that truth about us and so we came back and votes were held on each motion and every vote was unanimous and we all sat there looking at each other and at the end we talked and what people said well they said two things they talked about the palpable sense of love that was in that room and they talked about the fact that they had come determined to listen and as they heard they voted even when it opposed their cherished opinions and then suddenly there we all were of one Accord in one place as it says in the book of Acts and I share that not just because of the implications for church work but because whenever you're dealing with a situation in community where you've got people with different opinions that seem to clash where there doesn't seem to be any way forward because you can't agree on anything you can know that we actually are all members of the body of Christ that there is more going on than meets the eye and that more is the action of divine love and seeing this makes a difference so the second illustration has to do with what happens when we are all of One Accord in one place couple of summers ago we had very bad wildfires in New Mexico usually I can look out my window I can see most of the way to Albuquerque on these days I could see about 30 ft and that Wednesday at church our first reader who puts together the readings from the Bible and science and health had put together readings about God's protection in times of danger and then people stood up and talked about their experiences with that and there were many of them so we went out the door at the end we felt really different than we had when we'd come in earlier we'd come in coughing and anxious and we left with an assurance of God's presence and protection and over the next few days the fires were put out which was something which was not expected but the next Wednesday a man came who had been there the week before who was not a member but he said he had a a cabin that had been in his family for over a century it was up in the posos right in the heart of where the fires were worse and he said that until that meeting the week before he'd been listening to the radio reports you could you could hear a report every hour that would tell you what had burned and he said when he went home that night he decided he was going to turn off the radio and instead of listening to those reports he was going to think about what God was doing right where the destruction seemed to be just as the people in church had done and he said after the fires have put out a friend of his got up there in a four-wheel drive and he called him up and he said man it's a miracle your your cabin is untouched you could see where the fire came down a Hillside and it jumped a creek and then it just turned and went away and there was like a circle around the cabin all burned and the cabin was fine and he said he knew it was not a miracle he knew it was a proof of what he had heard that night in church and what he had then cherished in his own thought and I share that because again if you're confronted in your community with insurmountable obstacles forces beyond your control you can know that what is really there is Love's presence what is really there is the power of divine Divine mind and divine truth and seeing this makes a difference sharing it makes a difference so the last illustration has to do with what it is like to live as a living Stone when I went to church in Wisconsin our church had a member who would get up every Wednesday she would talk with great enthusiasm about what she was learning from the weekly Bible Lesson and like every other Christian denomination we go to church on Sunday we hear a sermon read on different topics but we get to see them earlier so we get to actually start studying them ahead of time it enriches the experience and what Barb would do in her words she would read this lesson on Monday and then she'd take it out for a test drive and then she'd do that all Tuesday and Wednesday she'd come to church and share with us how it was going so this particular Wednesday she stood up and said she'd been taking out her trash in the morning and and her neighbor had come over and said would you pray for my husband he's in the hospital he has stage four cancer they don't think he's going to live through the week and Barb saides of course and she went back to her house and thought how should I pray and she decided she would reread that Bible Lesson sermon for that week she said she read it three times before she had that sense of assurance and peace the sense that this was the truth not just for her in her living room but for her neighbor for her neighbor's husband in the hospital it was the truth for everybody involved and we all felt it just in her description of her prayer we felt it so that when we left at the end of the service we felt that same assurance that all was well so the next week she came back and stood up and she said I was taking out my trash and I thought oh I've heard this she said well my neighbor's husband was taking out his trash and she went over to him and told him how glad she was to see him and he said well I've never been so glad to take out the trash in my life life the Thursday previous the day after Barb had started praying the doctors for no apparent reason had decided to run more tests and the tests came back and they showed that the cancer was completely gone so some very happy doctors sent this very happy man and his wife home and I share this because the Divine truth that you encounter in your living room on your walk with your dog on your drive across town when you see the truth it makes a difference when you change your basis you change the world and then you live as the place where God is seen and felt so thank you all so much for spending this afternoon with us I'll stick around if anyone has any questions question s [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Prayer that Heals

Views: 2,845

Keywords: Christian Science, Prayer That Heals, Healing Prayer, God is Love, spirituality, marybakereddy, christianity, Christian Science Lectures, Testimonies of Healing, Inspirational, Spiritual, Personal growth, Personal development, Overcoming, Prayer that heals, Bible, Christian, Self development, God, christian, Emra Farkas

Id: oOHSofiPjbY

Length: 68min 54sec (4134 seconds)

Published: Sat May 25 2024