Spiritual sense and peace

IN a world swirling with conflicting viewpoints and beliefs, and where to many people misfortune seems more the rule than the exception, we may find it difficult to feel genuine peace. Yet a feeling of peace is natural and obtainable, because peace is a quality of God and as such is included in His offspring, man. We shouldn't, of course, strive for a mere self-serving peace but for the God-derived calm that enables us to respond to His direction. The question is, How can we do this in the face of individual and worldwide challenges?

No one would deny that circumstances sometimes appear complex, insurmountable. But in a very profound sense they're not insurmountable, because the power of the one supreme God supersedes the supposed force of circumstances and human viewpoints.

This is unequivocal truth, proved throughout the Bible to be truth, and we can make it practical in our lives as we open our thought to this reality and faithfully trust it; as we allow ourselves to be guided by spiritual sense. The Bible represents God as saying, ``There is no God else beside me; a just God and a Saviour; there is none beside me.''1 And we read in Psalms, ``I will hear what God the Lord will speak: for he will speak peace unto his people, and to his saints.''2

Spiritual sense is our natural capacity to discern God and His goodness. It doesn't tell us of some distant, unobtainable, ideal world but of the present reality of God and man. Spiritual sense assures us that we live safely in the presence of divine Love. It enables us to glimpse the fact that God is indeed All and omnipresent and that we're not the susceptible mortals we appear to be but His blessed spiritual offspring. Our eyes are then opened somewhat to the harmony of God's spiritual creation, and this higher sense of things is reflected in our experience -- in the silencing of confusion and the harmonizing of circumstances.

Christ Jesus pointed to the demand for spiritual sense, for an understanding that transcends superficial, materialistic views of life, when he said to his disciples, ``Having eyes, see ye not? and having ears, hear ye not?''3

It's important that we be alert to put out the elements of sensuous, worldly thinking that would prevent us from seeing spiritually and thus finding peace. Sin and sensuality can never bring lasting peace, because they're rooted in a materialistic sense of life, in the false sense that makes God seem distant and man a vulnerable creature of the flesh, subject to forces beyond his control.

Nothing can compare to the purification of thought that enables us to hear what God is telling us about our innocence and safety in His care. And nothing can compare to seeing proof of that fact through our faithfulness to spiritual sense. Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, writes, ``What is termed material sense can report only a mortal temporary sense of things, whereas spiritual sense can bear witness only to Truth.'' She says further, ``Spiritual sense, contradicting the material senses, involves intuition, hope, faith, understanding, fruition, reality.''4

Staying faithful to what we know to be spiritually true of God and man, despite appearances to the contrary, enables us to feel genuine peace and to help others in that direction as well.

Isaiah 45:21. 2Psalms 85:8. 3Mark 8:18. 4Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 298.

You can find more articles like this one in the Christian Science Sentinel, a weekly magazine. DAILY BIBLE VERSE: We have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God....But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. I Corinthians 2:12,14