Daily Watch for the week of December 8th, — December 15th, 2024
285 — When Mrs. Eddy found students trying to put food aside, instead of a material sense of food, she said, “Don’t say there is no intelligence in food. The earth brings forth food for man’s use and we must reflect the divine intelligence that enables us to use that food; adhere to the statement that divine intelligence directs man and governed by it, man eats, sleeps, walks and talks harmoniously. Depict the real Christ; the man-made is not the image.”
The world of mortal belief malpractices on food just as it does on nerves. This malpractice is the talking serpent that must be handled. Jesus encouraged the eating of food, showing that at our present stage of experience, it is not food that we must eliminate, but the belief that it is material, that it can affect man adversely either through quality or quantity, or that it can be the medium for mortal mind. If God is not absent from the blessings He bestows, then we must never consider that His goodness and love are absent from the food He supplies to His children.
When Jesus met with his disciples at supper, the eating of food became a channel for a spiritual uplift. When food is seen as a channel for inspiration and blessing, man’s spiritual nature is fed, at the same time his temporary material needs are taken care of.
Food and nerves are never the cause or the source of man’s discords. It is the serpent, or mortal belief, that claims to use matter as a medium through which to enslave mortals. When this mortal belief is extracted from food, it might be likened to dehydrated vegetables, out of which all water has been taken. One might say that this is what the prodigal son did. When he had taken all life, truth, substance and intelligence out of matter, nothing but husks remained, that which no longer had any weight to hold his thought on a mortal level. Then he rose spontaneously into the consciousness of Mind as the only true substance; the husks became the channel for Mind’s blessing and were no longer seen as matter.
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from Watches, Prayers, and Arguments, as given by Mary Baker Eddy, page 49
“Hear, O Israel, for the Lord, our God, is one God.”
You are not to come in your own name to pray.
You are not to control any mind.
You are to come only in the divine strength, and know that God will rule and does, and that hypnotism and evil minds cannot, and do not, control men or governments.
All power is God, good.
This is my only formula to Christian Scientists for prayer, and God will give you faith that will remove mountains.