Know what you are

For many years certain circumstances would trigger in me a response of self-condemnation, followed by feelings of great unworthiness. It was a miserable cycle. And then one day, within that predictable scenario a gentle correcting message came to me: “This is not you.”

Recognizing this as a Christly message from God, divine Love, I found this to be an instant wake-up call to stop entertaining unloving thoughts about myself and instead remember what I am as God’s creation. I felt washed clean. Since then I’ve not been tricked into that destructive thought pattern. Such freedom and peace!

There’s an account in the Bible that deeply resonates with me about how important it is to know our true identity as God’s children. After a shipwreck during his voyage to Rome as a prisoner, the Apostle Paul and others find safety on an island (see Acts 28:1-6). The island natives treat them kindly, making a warm fire to welcome them. But as Paul is adding a bundle of sticks to the fire, a poisonous snake is driven out by the heat and fastens itself on his hand. Seeing this, the natives assume he is a murderer who is now being rightfully punished. Paul’s response is to immediately shake off the viper into the fire, without any hurt to himself.

We might see Paul’s act of shaking the serpent off into the fire as symbolizing his rejection of the poisonous accusation that he is a sinful mortal with an ugly past. Earlier in Paul’s life, although it’s not clear whether he himself was a murderer, he’d given consent to the persecution and murder of Christians and stood by watching while murder was committed. But Paul experienced a change of thought and character after he came to a new understanding of Christ Jesus as the promised Messiah (see Acts 9:1-20). He summed up this change, assuring others that “if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” (II Corinthians 5:17). He understood that his life was “hid with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3).

Paul’s experience illustrates that the Christ presence makes God known to us in a new way. Mary Baker Eddy describes “Christ” in “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” as “the divine manifestation of God, which comes to the flesh to destroy incarnate error” (p. 583). The Christ is always speaking to human consciousness, showing us what we each are, made in the image and likeness of God. That spiritual perception enables us to drop any destructive view of ourselves and others as material personalities with a material history. We’re made new.

For some time prior to that life-changing message I received – “This is not you” – I’d been praying each day with a heartfelt desire to be made new, to be washed clean of everything that wasn’t representing my reflection of God’s goodness. The human personality includes dualistic characteristics: good and productive ideas and opposite concepts and traits. From this point of view, the world is seen as material, having its own power to create and to govern, and a matter-created man as having a good and bad mind of his own. Such a conclusion suggests something other than God, Spirit, who is infinitely good, as the creator of man and the universe.

Christian Science declares that it is impossible for there to be a creator other than God, or for man (any individual) to be anything other than God’s spiritual creation. The first chapter of the Bible affirms that God is good and made man in His image, after His likeness. This man isn’t a world-shaped material personality but a Godlike spiritual individuality.

To accept the truth requires us to sacrifice a sense of ourselves as finite, material identities. But with this sacrifice, we gain a clear, accurate, spiritual view of what we actually are, which brings a genuine sense of self-worth and true joy to our human experience.

God, because of His great love for us, intends for us to know Him, and enables each of us to know ourselves and others as we have been created by Him. And so He is constantly leading us through Christ to a fuller view of the divine reality of what we truly are.

Adapted from an article published in the Jan. 13, 2020, issue of the Christian Science Sentinel.