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[Tune-out the noise to hear & feel the peace God’s allness – to “touch the fringes of eternity”! (Hymn 64)]
Metaphysical Application Ideas for the Christian Science Bible Lesson on

“God the Only Cause and Creator”
for Sunday, December 6, 2015

by Kerry Jenkins, CS, House Springs, MO
(314) 406-0041 kerry.helen.jenkins@gmail.com

There is no room for a division of labor in this week's Bible lesson subject. God is it ["I am the Lord; there is none else" B1, RR and Hymn 444]. He is the One, the Only Cause and the Only Creator. This might not seem like a really big deal, but it is. When we take that statement to its logical conclusion, knowing that God is also only good, only loving and the only power, we find that there is no place left for evil. So, like I said, this is a really big deal. We humans can get pretty hung-up on evil, look at the latest round of terrorist attacks, disease, death, and all the other manifestations of evil out there. How can we make such a claim as this? I'm not going to be able to explain to everyone's satisfaction why evil is not the power that it seems to be. A deep understanding of this fact comes through demonstration, through spiritual healing. It is also ongoing; we can never just settle in and find that we have no more questions about God's government and God's creation. But I hope you will have a greater confidence that this demonstration is not withheld from a single idea. We can all come to a sense of peace, as described by Mrs. Eddy in citation S30 "Through divine Science, Spirit, God, unites understanding to eternal harmony. The calm and exalted thought or spiritual apprehension is at peace." We can all subordinate the testimony of material sense to the authority and government of divine Mind through persistent practice. As we deepen our understanding of God as the only source of all creation, the only cause, we leap past so much that would cause us to doubt and fear. We can begin, through this understanding, to experience the powerful harmony of the kingdom of God within. We move forward knowing that God has naturally established man in righteousness. The rest is noise.

Golden Text and Responsive Reading:
God causes goodness and righteousness, just as naturally as a garden grows plants that are planted there. You will see several references to this inherent righteousness and to the salvation that comes to us as we recognize that righteousness as the true, powerful, only state of God's reflected creation. To see this for ourselves we must look to God, not to material sense, our own, or another's material sense, including the media. "…Ask me of things to come concerning my sons.." "Look unto me and be ye saved…" (italics and underlining added).

Section 1: Why would we worship God if He causes or creates evil?
Mrs. Eddy asks this question this way: "What can be the standard of good, of Spirit, of Life, or of Truth, if they produce their opposites, such as evil, matter, error, and death?" S4. The Bible passages from this section confirm that God doesn't create or cause evil. Not only that, but as the divine source of all reality, He is "excellent" in "lovingkindness" B2. We tend to trust those who genuinely love us. In this Bible passage we can expand this sense of trust, through spiritual sense, to include a consciousness of the unchanging love of God for us as His creation. The time-honored analogy of light and darkness from citation B4 illustrates the fact that light, love, goodness, naturally must displace darkness, hate, evil… Darkness cannot overpower light, it just disappears in light. When we apply that idea to questions of hatred, evil, disease—allow that power to seep into our consciousness—we can feel the light of Love cause hatred to disappear just as naturally, lies to be dissolved by Truth, death and disease to be routed by Life (S3). Material sense sometimes doesn't easily give up its feelings of hatred or fear or sickness. This is why we have to make an "end run" around these senses. We must, as quoted from the Responsive Reading look to God, and ask God, and not our own or other's understanding of things. We had an excellent healing of an apparent concussion with one of our kids some years ago when I really turned away from what the senses were screaming at me. Huck, then about 8, had a spectacular bike accident that smashed in the front of his bike helmet. At the time I didn't notice the helmet and instead saw the significant scrapes as being the "problem". It wasn't until he was experiencing headache and nausea the next morning that I realized that he'd hit his head so hard. I admit, I floundered for a bit, trying to get past my concerns over his well-being. But a friend at church pointed out that passage from Isaiah in the Responsive Reading: "Ask me of things to come concerning my sons, and concerning the work of my hands command ye me." She read it with that particular emphasis, and it didn't hurt that it included "sons" in the quote. She had even had a wonderful healing of the exact same issue with one of her boys the day before! All that fear and unease disappeared. I knew what God was saying about Huck! Sure enough, he came out of Sunday School healed, no residual effects at all. If we find that our material sense of injustice or hatred, etc. are not yielding as readily as we'd like, we can ask ourselves whether we are genuinely asking God for His view, or tightly holding onto our own. It is our nature to be good, to want to feel love; the material senses cannot impose a false control over our consciousness.

Section 2: Man can't create, he can only reflect.
This is not a bad thing! When there is only one source for creation and it's all good, then everything that reflects it is wonderful. While we can't claim as our own this creativity and intelligence, love and selflessness…, we do get to appreciate the infinite availability of these qualities to us as His ideas. I had one of those spherical, tear-drop-shaped crystals when I was a kid and I hung it in a window in my room. I loved the way it would send rainbows all around the room when the afternoon sun shone through it. It didn't matter that the light didn't originate from the crystal—in fact how limiting would that be? I'd be the only one who'd get to appreciate those little colorful spatters of light! It only mattered that the crystal would capture and disperse the light in those wonderful spinning rainbows when I twisted the fishing line that it hung from. Thinking of that crystal as a source is the perfect analogy for the idea that material "creation" is "vanity" (B7). As we "…gain more correct views of God and man…" (S12), we start to understand that the truth about God's creation, and God as the only source, actually broadens the array and richness of existence, rather than narrowing it.

Section 3: Divine Mind subdues mortal mind through the touch of the Christ.
Jesus knew that God was supreme, the source of man's inherent harmony. The woman in citation B13, [P.S.#1 and CC Download 3] touched the "fringes" of this knowledge and grasped a little of its power, enough to heal a hemorrhage of twelve years standing. She truly was asking God through His greatest representative. Her deep desire was answered with the healing Christ, God's love made clear to her consciousness. Mortal mind called for help and she was healed. This illustrates the fact that the problem was in mortal mind, not in matter. Her plea was answered through consciousness and revealed in her wholeness. And in citation B12 {and the first online Download] we find even Jesus, the master Christian, refusing to claim personal credit for his holy works. He always knew that God was the source of healing. By making this fact clear, he proved the infinite and eternal availability of this power to all, rather than confined to him personally, or to his era.

Section 4: Start by accepting as fact that God does not "afflict".
Sometimes we get too complicated when confronted with sickness. Our job is to see and act on our inherent, God-given righteousness. Go to God, make Him your "refuge" as the 91st Psalm tells us (B17). Don't go to any other source for information, comfort, or understanding. All other so-called sources are rooted in mortal mind, and mortal mind then "maps out the way" (S20). We don't need to provide a roadmap for error to follow. We can instead "exclude" error of every variety and we can "Rise in the strength of Spirit to resist all that is unlike good" (S24 and S25). If Jesus illustrated God's goodness and love for man through healing the woman in the last section, Mrs. Eddy gives us instruction on how to demonstrate his healing power in this section. And sometimes we just have to accept the fact that God never, ever would bring down evil on His children—this despite material sense testimony. Material sense testimony can be persistent—as it was for that woman with the issue of blood. But it still is powerless in the face of the truth/fact that God never caused or created disease. Be persistent in truth, it brings about harmony.

Section 5: Spiritually understanding God as the only cause and creator brings peace.
The constant suggestions that evil has power and a source are ongoing. But the peace that comes from knowing that these suggestions are only that, suggestions not reality, is achievable now. We don't have to move through life swinging constantly between hope and despair. The humble acknowledgement from citation B19 that we can bow down and kneel before our Maker, as His sheep, cared for, watched over, and loved beyond compare, is a great way to start this journey. If we accept God as the source of all good, and as the only (all-good) power there is, then every other suggestion can be seen for the lie that it is. Our peace comes not from physical well-being; it comes from spiritually understanding that this well-being is upheld by God's law. "Spiritual causation is the one question to be considered," says Mrs. Eddy, "for more that all others, spiritual causation relates to human progress." Then she tells us that "The age seems ready to approach this subject, to ponder somewhat the supremacy of Spirit, and at least to touch the hem of Truth's garment."(S29) The woman in Section 3 was ready nearly 2,000 years ago; we can be ready today to approach this grand revelation about God, Love, and also touch that Christly hem of healing.


[P.S.#1 In his Commentary on Luke 8:41-48 (B13) Cobbey Crisler sets the stage for how the woman who had been hemorrhaging for 12 years was healed by touching the hem or wings of Jesus’ garment. “The woman… is at the absolute desperate end of a rope. Here we find the receptivity. Blessed are those are in this state. Happy are those because the state of mind can be changed.
“This radical change of thought was in the presence of the Christ-correction that Jesus was exercising in the mental realm. It’s going to be sufficient and the woman feels that it will help her. She’s lost all her money on physicians. [No health insurance…] Mark even tells us that she’s worse because of that choice. [Mark 5:26] All she does is touch the border of his garment. The issue of blood, the continuous hemorrhaging that had occurred for twelve years had kept her out of the temple, kept her out of worship and made her as unclean as the lepers…
“In Luke 8, Verse 48 he calls that lady, “Daughter.” Who’s daughter? Certainly, not his. In fact, he lifts that word “daughter” entirely out of any sense of blood relationship. That was the woman’s problem. He lifts even her identity out of blood.
“Daughter, be of good comfort” (Verse 48). Look at how he’s addressing the thought of that woman. Not only the precious relationship to God, but the comfort. She hasn’t experienced that in twelve years. She’d lost all her money. She was about to be thrown on the society. There was nowhere to go when you were thrown on society. That may have happened to the woman who had been a sinner. Prostitution was the only open career for many women when they were simply thrown out and discarded from normal humanity…
Jesus refuses to allow that woman to walk away from the scene thinking that physical contact with his robe had anything to do with the healing. He says, again, “Your faith hath made you whole.” The word “whole” and the word “heal” in Anglo-Saxon have the identical root. It implies that disease is something less than wholeness, that it is a fragmentation of our being. Healing is the condition of being made whole.” Luke the Researcher, B. Cobbey Crisler, pages 163 and 164 copied in full in online Download

A background note is that in Numbers 15:38-40, God tells Moses to have Hebrew men attach fringes to the wings of their prayer shawl garments —like the one pictured in Download 1—to remind them to abide by God’s commandments and to ‘be holy unto your God’ (Numbers 15:40). The woman healed of her great, 12-year issue was rewarded for exercising her faith that Christ Jesus was fulfilling this prophesy in Malachi: “But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings; (Mal. 4:2). Many others in Jesus day were also rewarded for exercising their faith in Jesus being the fulfillment of the scriptural promise of the healing power connected to the keeping of God’s law… Mark 6:56 records of Christ Jesus’ healing that whithersoever he entered, into villages, or cities, or country, they laid the sick in the streets, and besought him that they might touch if it were but the border of his garment: and as many as touched him were made whole.” (or “perfectly whole” in the account in Matthew 14:36) Here’s to perfect wholeness for you in your faithfully following of the science of the Christ and its expounding and fulfilling of God’s laws and Decalogue.]


[P.S. #2: For #GivingTuesday tomorrow, please be on the lookout for our once-a-year direct fundraising email. It includes a link to CedarS online Giving Tree, with gifts starting at $1. If you want to get a head start on giving, feel free to click here and select your present. All gifts are tax deductible and add up to big blessings in the lives of Sunday School students.]


[IT WOULD BE A HUGE ANSWER TO PRAYER to have more monthly gifts online which you can set up easily at http://www.cedarscamps.org/giving/.

To get discuss privately how to transfer securities or other assets to help support and perpetuate CedarS work, you can reach a member of the Founding family nearly anytime by calling the Huffs at 636-394-6162
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THANKS TO YOU PRECIOUS DONORS FOR YOUR ONGOING, GENEROUS and NEEDED SUPPORT OF CedarS IMPORTANT WORK!]


[CedarS weekly Metaphysical Newsletter is provided at no charge to the 1,200 campers and staff blessed each summer at CedarS, as well as to CedarS alumni, families and friends who have requested it. However, current and planned gifts are a big help and are greatly appreciated in defraying the costs of running this service and of providing needed camperships, programs and operations support.

[The Met application ideas above are provided primarily to help CedarS campers and staff (as well as friends) see and daily demonstrate the great value of studying and applying the Christian Science Bible lessons throughout the year, not just at camp! YOU CAN ALSO SIGN UP for weekly emails from past CedarS staff of possible ways to share Bible Lesson applications with older, as well as younger, Sunday School classes by clicking the "Subscribe Now" button (lower left) at http://www.cedarscamps.org/metaphysical/ ]

[For additional "Director's Notes" on the history, development & 4 translations of CedarS weekly Bible Lesson "Mets" go to Notes in our online version of it.]

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