Daily Watch for the week of June 2nd, – June 9th, 2024
From 500 Watching Points by Gilbert Carpenter
179 — WATCH lest you yield to the error mentioned in Joel 3:5, and carry into the temple God’s goodly pleasant things. Even though our pleasant things represent the harmony resulting from demonstration, they must not be carried into the church, since the church represents spiritual effort and activity, where the watchword is from Joel 3:9, “Prepare war.” The goodly things represent the fruitage of demonstration, whereas the church represents a warfare with material sense that must continue, until the warfare is ended. Thus the thought of completion should not enter into the church, since it stands for spiritual growth.
The danger from results is that they may bring self-satisfaction, which is death to progress. No child beyond the kindergarten stage is allowed to play in the schoolroom. That is the place for study. Thus our church is the place for demonstration.
If one really wants continuous progress, he would never desire nor seek to have any error removed without demonstration. Otherwise he is not making a suitable preparation for meeting the next problem. To have a right spiritual objective means to understand that progress is overcoming rightly each error that confronts one in his path, thus giving proof of faithfulness.
To sidestep an error means to step out of the struggle for the time being. Once a student of Mrs. Eddy’s declared that in his early days in Science when he had a difficulty, he went so far as to pray that it would not go away except through demonstration. To him demonstration was such a sacred and vital thing, that he did not want to miss a single opportunity to use it.
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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.