Hoping for healing – or expecting it?

Hope is a wonderful quality, but the expectation of good is better. A couple may hope to have children. This could be attended with doubts as to whether their hope will come to fruition. A couple expecting a child, however, has great confidence this will be fulfilled.

When there’s a health problem, the universal, overriding hope is for the restoration of health. Sometimes, though, whether because of the persistence of a health issue, the aggressiveness of symptoms, or a frightening diagnosis, the expectation of healing may be uncertain or nonexistent.

Christ Jesus, whose method of healing recorded in the Bible is the model for Christian Science healing, showed by his example that we can expect healing in any situation. Matthew 14:36 states that all who came to Jesus for healing “were made perfectly whole.” People often termed these healings miraculous, yet the consistency of Jesus’ healings shows that his ministry was based on law – the law of God, or the Science of Christ, divine Truth. Mary Baker Eddy discovered this law through spiritual inspiration, and named it Christian Science.

She laid out the rules for demonstrating this Science in “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures.” Many people confidently expect and experience healing through even a modest understanding of Christian Science – not as a miraculous event, but as a reliable outcome of understandingly and faithfully following Jesus’ teachings.

The Bible account of a lame man at the Temple gate called Beautiful is instructive (see Acts 3:1-8). He would daily ask for money from those going into the temple. One day, as the Apostles Peter and John went into the temple, he asked them for money, “expecting to receive something of them” (verse 5, emphasis added). And he did, but instead of getting a monetary handout, he was healed. Being able to enter the temple that day “walking and leaping” must have been so empowering. Peter offered him what they had – their understanding of the divine Principle, God, on which Jesus’ ministry and theirs was based.

When we turn to God for healing, – for example, requesting metaphysical treatment from a Christian Science practitioner, as Christian Scientists often do – it’s important to hope that our prayers will be answered. But it’s much more important to expect healing.

The assurance and confident expectation that our needs will be met is due to the fact that God is Spirit, and that as His children, created in Spirit’s likeness, we are spiritual and perfect right now. This is the truth of being that Jesus taught and proved and that an understanding of God’s nature, as revealed in Christian Science, makes evident in our daily lives.

Expectation isn’t dependent on how proficient we think a practitioner is (or we are), or on how many good works we’ve done, but on the unfailing, universal law and love of God. No one is left out. God’s law works equally for all. When we turn trustingly and understandingly to this law, we bring it into our experience. If we realize to some degree what it means that God is Love itself, we’ll turn confidently to God for help, not in blind faith but in absolute faith – in the spiritual understanding that Christian Science teaches. Then we find that God is with us. The Bible calls this Emmanuel (see Matthew 1:23) – the ever-present healing influence of Christ.

God does abundantly beyond what we ask or think. This Bible promise, echoed in Science and Health, assures us that divine Love meets every human need. Whether the need is for physical or mental healing or the resolution of some other problem, God’s law is sufficient for every situation.

However, it’s important that we place our expectation in Him and not outline what the outcome of our expectation will look like. We are admonished not to “limit in any direction of thought the omnipresence and omnipotence of God” (Science and Health, p. 445). We can know that our expectation of healing will manifest and will be good. A preconceived notion of what the resolution of a problem will look like may make us overlook signs of progress.

God made us perfect permanently by conceiving us as spiritual ideas rather than as imperfect, material beings. This is the truth of being, and, though spiritual, it can be proved humanly in God’s way. Science and Health states, “Hold perpetually this thought, – that it is the spiritual idea, the Holy Ghost and Christ, which enables you to demonstrate, with scientific certainty, the rule of healing, based upon its divine Principle, Love, underlying, overlying, and encompassing all true being” (p. 496).

Can we expect God to heal? Yes, we can.

Adapted from an editorial published in the Aug. 14, 2023, issue of the Christian Science Sentinel.