Free, not forgotten
For some, it may be basic physical freedom -- from the four walls of a prison cell or the political oppression of a dictatorial regime. News stories of hostages, a military invasion, and a brutal prison riot testify to the continuing need to cherish and preserve freedom of movement where it does exist.
For many people today, another important element of feeling free is feeling healthy. The mortal body can sometimes be as brutal a prison as the New Mexico penitentiary during the destructive riot there earlier this month. Indeed, sickness can seem to be an even more hopeless state. While most would agree that willful destruction and hatred are not impelled by God, there is not yet general agreement that disease is just as alien to the divine will.
God does not impose servitude -- whatever its form. And God has not forgotten us or left us to fend for ourselves. Man is free, not forgotten, and we can start to prove this immediately. How? By developing a more accurate view of God, of ourselves, of our thoughts and bodies.
Let's start with God.
The Bible declares: "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." n1 Where God is, is freedom. Since God, Spirit, is everywhere, we can experience the freedom He bestows -- wherever we are.
n1 II Corinthians 3:17;
We need, of course, to know that we can turn to God as our source of freedom. Ignorance of Him would leave us imprisoned. "Men and women of all climes and races are still in bondage to material sense, ignorant how to obtain their freedom," n2 writes Mary Baker Eddy, an American woman whose deep desire to help humanity obtain freedom was an important factor in her discovery and founding of Christian Science.
n2 Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,m p. 225;
She refers to this Science as she continues: "The voice of God in behalf of the African slave was still echoing in our land, when the voice of the herald of this new crusade sounded the keynote of universal freedom, asking a fuller acknowledgment of the rights of man as a Son of God, demanding that the fetters of sin, sickness, and death be stricken from the human mind and that its freedom be won, not through human warfare, not with bayonet and blood, but through Christ's divine Science." n3
n3 ibid.,m p. 226;
Any science clears away some form of ignorance. Christian Science frees us from our ignorance of God by declaring that the total presence of God, Spirit, makes matter powerless and nonexistent. God is good, and He allows no other power to govern His creation, including man.
God certainly is not helpless in the face of our problems. Neither is He unwilling or unable to heal those who seek freedom from sickness. But we need to infuse our prayers with the confidence that it is God's nature to make us Godlike and perfect -- spiritual and eternal.
Such prayer will inspire our spiritual growth and our recognition that it's not a physical body, but God, that governs our feelings and actions. We are His children -- actually spiritual, not material -- subject to His control. That being the case, our feeling and action must be healthy -- free of anything unlike God, free of sickness or limitation.
Once, when Christ Jesus went to the synagogue in Nazareth, he said he fulfilled the prophecy that he had just read from Isaiah: "The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me; . . . he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound." n4
n4 Isaiah 61:1 (See also Luke 4:18).
Are we listening to what he said? Are we accepting it? Are we proving that the liberty he proclaimed is ours? DAILY BIBLE VERSE All the ends of the world shall remember and turn unto the Lord: and all the kindreds of the nations shall worship before thee. Psalm 22:27