To everyone, Jesus gave this loving instruction: “Be ye therefore perfect” (Matthew 5:48). Then he followed up with some specifics: “even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.”
So, this perfection Jesus is referring to isn’t a material perfection. It is a perfection that’s reflected from the Father, God, whom the Bible also calls Spirit and Love. Without including even a molecule of matter, God stands forth as pure goodness and intelligent Love. Divine Spirit’s state of perfection is continuous, invulnerable, and unchangeable.
It’s encouraging to consider how each one of us, without exception, is designed to show forth God’s nature, including God’s continuous perfection. We all are made spiritually perfect, because we solely and fully express God’s essence, Spirit’s substance. To believe in the legitimacy of a presence or a situation that isn’t of God is to believe falsely.
That sounds quite audacious, I know, but it was proven tangibly to me when I damaged a knuckle on my hand.
The praying I usually do for myself in such cases took a new and productive turn. I was thinking about how Christian Science teaches that injuries (along with all that would appear to threaten us) are not fundamentally material conditions, but false beliefs – lies about our true nature, which is entirely spiritual and flawless. The purity of Spirit and its creation is unalterable.
Similar to how the principles of mathematics are always intact and show in numerical equations, Spirit’s state of perfection is always intact and showing in us, its expression. Any other notion or perspective about reality would necessarily have to be a false belief.
Here is the interesting twist: As I prayed, if I thought of the false belief that God’s child could be harmed as relating to a material hand, I found no relief. However, as I considered the injury to be a false belief about my entirely spiritual identity – identity that is perfect, even as divine Spirit, Love, is perfect – well, my whole perspective changed. How could anything ever change infinite Spirit – or us, made in the likeness of Spirit?
In that moment, I found full relief and complete healing.
The founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, explains in her book “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” “The substance, Life, intelligence, Truth, and Love, which constitute Deity, are reflected by His creation; and when we subordinate the false testimony of the corporeal senses to the facts of Science, we shall see this true likeness and reflection everywhere” (p. 516).
In everything we do, we can strive to bring this Christly, healing perspective into action. Referring to Christ Jesus, Science and Health says, “He understood man, whose Life is God, to be immortal, and knew that man has not two lives, one to be destroyed and the other to be made indestructible” (p. 369). It’s so heartening to release the notion of ourselves as material and vulnerably on our own, and to embrace the fact that our life is upheld by Spirit and that we are made to express God’s wonderful perfection.
Holding to our existence as Spirit’s conception is something each of us can do within our own thoughts. We can allow ourselves to feel God’s presence and nature. Through prayer, we can behold how our true existence is spiritual and indestructible, and expresses God’s intelligence and love.
And then we experience the joy of growing securely Godward and proving, by healing on a spiritual basis, that God’s truth is practical and powerful.
