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Putting an end to sex trafficking

A Christian Science perspective: How the saving power of prayer can help stop enslavement through sex trafficking.

  • By Judy Cole

Sex trafficking enslaves millions worldwide – usually children and women – and is the fastest growing criminal enterprise worldwide. While numerous noble humanitarian efforts have resulted in increased awareness, more arrests, and the freeing of many people, still more work is needed, and my heart yearns to help.

I learned long ago about the saving power of prayer that Isaiah prophesied, adequate to meet every need: “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;... to comfort all that mourn” (Isaiah 61:1, 2). This saving power is Christ, Truth, which Christ Jesus embodied and utilized.

Studying Jesus’ healings as recorded in the Bible indicates to me that he rejected the surface view of life as a false, unjust parody of man’s true nature as God’s image and likeness. He perceived the perfect, spiritual identity of God’s sons and daughters. This view healed sin and sickness, freeing humanity from every bondage of the flesh. Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered Christian Science, explained it in this way: “Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals. In this perfect man the Saviour saw God’s own likeness, and this correct view of man healed the sick” (“Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” pp. 476-477).

God does not restrain evil only on occasion; God and evil do not coexist. Because God is All-in-all, evil has no place. God makes man and woman whole and upright, free from evil, lack, or limitation. The harmonious facts of spiritual being are present facts. Understanding this destroys fear, ignorance, and sin and reveals God’s perfect will for His children to live in harmony.

Mrs. Eddy wrote: “Slavery is not the legitimate state of man. God made man free. Paul said, ‘I was free born.’ All men should be free. ‘Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.’ Love and Truth make free, but evil and error lead into captivity.

“Christian Science raises the standard of liberty and cries: ‘Follow me! Escape from the bondage of sickness, sin, and death!’ Jesus marked out the way” (Science and Health, p. 227).

Jesus overcame every bondage of sin, as well as disease and death, proving Life to be the law of man’s being. Although his friend Lazarus had been buried four days, Jesus recognized the supremacy of this transforming Spirit and commanded that the stone be removed from the tomb and that Lazarus come out and be loosed from the grave wrappings. And so it was (see John 11:1-44).

My prayers assert the divine right of everyone against the hopelessness of helplessness. I offer honest protests of truth against the hideousness of slave trafficking and its suggested inevitability. I pray that no lawlessness can resist God’s government, the omnipotent power of God’s pure love for all His creation. Because sensualism is a counterfeit of God’s creation, I pray that both the traffickers and buyers motivated by greed and lust can be stopped, and even reformed, by the same transforming Spirit that Jesus proved.

Seeing God’s children as spiritual representatives of Life, Truth, and Love gives me hope that the deep wounds of abuse can be healed and that broken lives can be made whole, “[F]or with God all things are possible” (Mark 10:27).

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