Pain can be silenced
People are looking for a way to be free of pain. They may echo Jeremiah’s lament, “Why is my pain perpetual, and my wound incurable, which refuseth to be healed?” (Jeremiah 15:18). But other Bible passages offer convincing hope that pain can be overcome.
For example, the book of Exodus records God as saying that He heals us (15:26). This is not wishful thinking but a recognition of the presence of God’s harmony – and it is based in spiritual law.
Describing our permanent oneness with God, infinite good, the Bible tells us, “In him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28). This spiritual law governs everyone, for we are all created by God to represent His beauty, goodness, and peace. The truth of spiritual creation places man (the true, spiritual identity of everyone) forever in the realm of God.
As His creation, man is always perfect, manifesting perfect health and harmonious being under the law of God. Nothing needs to be or can be added to this expression of God. And when we understand and trust our omnipotent God, we need not fear or experience pain.
Last year I was working at my desk when a sharp pain shot through the length of my body. I grabbed the desk to keep from falling to the floor. Immediately, these words came to thought: “Man is God’s own child” (Margaret Glenn Matters, “Christian Science Hymnal,” No. 232). I felt that I was metaphorically sitting in God’s lap, surrounded by His love, and I saw myself as His perfect child. That made me smile, and the pain permanently ceased.
Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, affirms that we have God-given power over pain when she writes, “Take possession of your body, and govern its feeling and action. Rise in the strength of Spirit to resist all that is unlike good. God has made man capable of this, and nothing can vitiate the ability and power divinely bestowed on man” (“Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” p. 393).
How is this possible? It has to do with knowing that we live in Spirit, God, not matter. Because this is so, matter has no power to control us. We are subject to the power of Love, God, alone. This understanding was the basis of Jesus’ healing works.
A material condition only seems real to the physical senses, and cannot be real to spiritual sense. So, what appears to be pain is a false belief based in the material senses, which have no actual voice to communicate to us the supposed reality of matter in any form.
As in the case of my healing, when our belief that reality is based in matter or material conditions ceases, pain ceases. God is proven to be the all-powerful, ever-present creator, the one Mind. To silence pain, then, we must forsake belief in a material existence that includes physical sensation and is governed by material laws.
The First Commandment, about having no other gods but God (Exodus 20:3), encourages us to recognize only what God creates and knows – His spiritual, perfect, joyous creation, governed by spiritual laws mandated by God, good.
Again, this rests on the oneness of God. Science and Health states, “Spiritually to understand that there is but one creator, God, unfolds all creation, confirms the Scriptures, brings the sweet assurance of no parting, no pain, and of man deathless and perfect and eternal” (p. 69). Health is the consciousness of this real, spiritual creation rather than belief in the mortal picture of life in matter.
The only true voice in our consciousness is that of God, Truth, telling us that we are His children – His painless, harmonious, and loved spiritual ideas. As we listen exclusively to that voice of Truth in prayer, discord is silenced. Some healings take persistence, but they do come. Pain is not forever; Love is.
As God’s children, we are so blessed with love from our Father-Mother God. Divine Love gives us freedom to experience our perfect, painless, and peaceful existence as God’s spiritual likeness.
Adapted from an article published in the June 27, 2022, issue of the Christian Science Sentinel.
