Withdrawal symptoms

Often when we learn to rely on something that we are ultimately awakened to see is an evil, and try to turn away from it, we encounter a law that has become entrenched in human belief. This law says, in effect: ''Withdraw from me, and I will make your life a hell. You will either yield and come back to your worship of me, or spend the rest of your days anxiously trying to stay out of my traps.'' Whether the evil we're trying to loose ourselves from is hard or soft drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, or promiscuity, the message of this so-called law is the same: evil is power, and its attraction cannot be broken without the penalty of continuous suffering.

Can this supposed law - that withdrawal from evil causes suffering or relapse - be broken? The answer is yes! But it can only be permanently broken by understanding and turning to divine law.

In answer to the question ''How would you define Christian Science?'' its Discoverer and Founder, Mary Baker Eddy, writes, ''As the law of God, the law of good, interpreting and demonstrating the divine Principle and rule of universal harmony.''n1 This Science doesn't provide any way to escape the suffering brought on by continued sin. But it does show us how to terminate the claim that evil can make us suffer even after we cease sinning.

n1 Rudimental Divine Science, p. 1.

So long as we sin we will suffer, simply because we have separated ourselves, in belief, from the protective government of infinite, omnipresent Love, God, by looking to evil as an apparent source of happiness. If we believe we're outside the jurisdiction of divine Love's law, and therefore separate from its moral demands, then we're believing that we're in a place where divine law is nonexistent or ineffective - a place where evil has power. Only in such a place - which is strictly a mental misconception - can the false laws claiming to govern mankind's attraction to and withdrawal from evil, seem to operate.

To destroy the claim of evil's withdrawal symptoms, or the temptation to return to habitual sin, we need to take ourselves out of the mental ''place'' where these things can seem real. In reality, there is no realm apart from the allness of divine Love, no place where evil can exist or have power. God, infinite good, is the only presence, power, and lawmaker there is; and man, made in His likeness, is complete and satisfied, needing nothing that sin claims to provide.

Wasn't Christ Jesus pointing out mankind's need to awaken to God's government when he said, ''Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven''? n2 From that standpoint - the standpoint of ''the law of good, interpreting and demonstrating the divine Principle and rule of universal harmony'' - he destroyed every claim that evil has power. From that standpoint we can destroy the claims of withdrawal symptoms.

n2 Matthew 5:44, 45.

In truth, man has never withdrawn, and can never withdraw, from the all-embracing government of divine Principle, Love. Only in mistaken belief does any power, substance, or law exist that can entice one away from his need to discover man's true identity as the spiritual child of God, or that can punish him for progressively waking up to God's ever-presence. The punishment of sin is fully in accord with the action of divine law, and can't be escaped. But once we have been awakened to the demands of divine law and cease to sin, we can with Christlike authority claim absolute exemption from any ''law'' of the carnal mind that suffering - or a return of the temptation - must be experienced.

When we are aligned with Love's government, separated from the sin that claimed to govern us, all that can be manifested in our consciousness and body is an ever-growing demonstration of good's inexhaustible infinity and its unopposed power. DAILY BIBLE VERSE There is therefor now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus. who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death Romans 8:1, 2