FROM THE BIBLE:
PSALMS
WEDNESDAY EVENING READINGS JANUARY 11, 2012 “RESTORATION”
103:1 Bless the Lord, O my soul: and all that is within me, bless his holy name. 3 Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases; 4 Who redeemeth thy life from destruction; who crowneth thee with lovingkindness and tender mercies;
51:10 Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me. 11 Cast me not away from thy presence; and take not thy holy spirit from me. 12 Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation; and uphold me with thy free spirit.
FROM II KINGS IN THE NEW ENGLISH BIBLE:
4:8 It happened once that Elisha went over to Shunem. There was a great lady there who pressed him to accept her hospitality, and so, whenever he came that way, he stopped to take food there. 9 One day she said to her husband, ‘I know that this man who comes here regularly is a holy man of God.
10 Why not build up the wall to make him a little roof-chamber, and put in it a bed, a table, a seat, and a lamp, and let him stay there whenever he comes to us?’ 11 Once when he arrived and went to this roof-chamber and lay down to rest, 12 he said to Gehazi, his servant…
14 ‘…what can be done for her?’ Gehazi said, ‘There is only this; she has no child and her husband is old.’ 15 ‘Call her back,’ Elisha said. When she was called, she appeared in the doorway,
16 and he said, ‘In due season, this time next year, you shall have a son in your arms. 17 Next year in due season, the woman conceived and bore a son, as Elisha had foretold.
18 When the child was old enough, he went out one day to the reapers where his father was. 19 All of a sudden he cried out to his father, ‘O my head, my head!’ His father told a servant to carry him to his mother.
20 He brought him to his mother; the boy sat on her lap till midday, and then he died. 21 She went up and laid him on the bed of the man of God, shut the door and went out.
25 … she set out and came to the man of God on Mount Carmel. The man of God spied her in the distance and said to Gehazi, his servant, ‘That is the Shunammite woman coming, 26 Run and meet her, and ask, “Is all well with you? Is all well with your husband? Is all well with the boy?” She answered, ‘All is well.”
27 When she reached the man of God on the hill, she clutched his feet. Gehazi came forward to push her away, but the man of God said, ‘Let her alone; she is in great distress, and the Lord has concealed it from me and not told me.’ 32 When Elisha entered the house, there was the boy dead, on the bed where he had been laid.
33 He went into the room, shut the door on the two of them and prayed to the Lord. 34 Then, getting on to the bed, he lay upon the child, put his mouth to the child’s mouth, his eyes to his eyes and his hands to his hands; and, as he pressed upon him, the child’s body grew warm.
35 …and the boy opened his eyes. 36 The prophet summoned Gehazi and said, ‘Call this Shunammite woman.’ She answered his call and the prophet said, ‘Take your child.’ 37 She came in and fell prostrate before him. Then she took up her son and went out. 8:1 Elisha said to the woman whose son he had restored to life, ‘Go away at once with your household and find lodging where you can, for the Lord has decreed a seven years’ famine and it has already come upon the land.’ 2 The woman acted at once on the word of the man of God and went away with her household and she stayed in the Philistine country for seven years. 3 When she came back at the end of the seven years, she sought an audience of the king to appeal for the return of her house and land. 4 Now the king was questioning Gehazi, the servant of the man of God, about all the great things Elisha had done; 5 and, as he was describing to the king how he had brought the dead to life, the selfsame woman began appealing to the king for her house and her land. ‘My lord king,’ said Gehazi, ‘this is the very woman, and this is her son whom Elisha brought to life.’ 6 The king asked the woman about it, and she told him. Then he entrusted the case to a eunuch and ordered him to restore all her property to her, withal the revenues from her land from the time she left the country till that day.
FROM JOEL IN THE KING JAMES VERSION:
2:13 … turn unto the Lord your God: for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, … 23 … rejoice in the Lord your God: for he hath given you the former rain moderately, and he will cause to come down for you the rain, the former rain, and the latter rain in the first month.
24 And the floors shall be full of wheat, and the fats shall overflow with wine and oil.
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25 And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, … 26 And ye shall eat in plenty, and be satisfied, and praise the name of the Lord your God, that hath dealt wondrously with you: 27 And ye shall know that I am in the midst of Israel, and that I am the Lord your God, and none else:
EPHESIANS
4:17 This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind, 18 Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart: 20 But ye have not so learned Christ;
21 If so be that ye have heard him, and have been taught by him, as the truth is in Jesus: 22 That ye put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts;
23 And be renewed in the spirit of your mind; 24 And that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.
II CORINTHIANS
4:8 We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; 9 Persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed; 16 … though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.
17 For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; 18 While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.
SCIENCE & HEALTH WITH KEY TO THE SCRIPTURES BY MARY BAKER EDDY.
S&H 139:4-8, 15-27,
From beginning to end, the Scriptures are full of accounts of the triumph of Spirit, Mind, over matter. Moses proved the power of Mind by what men called miracles; so did Joshua, Elijah, and Elisha. The decisions by vote of Church Councils as to what should and should not be considered Holy Writ; the manifest mistakes in the ancient versions; the thirty thousand different readings in the Old Testament, and the three hundred thousand in the New, — these facts show how a mortal and material sense stole into the divine record, with its own hue darkening to some extent the inspired
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pages. But mistakes could neither wholly obscure the divine Science of the Scriptures seen from Genesis to Revelation, mar the demonstration of Jesus, nor annul the healing by the prophets, who foresaw that “the stone which the builders rejected” would become “the head of the corner.”
S&H 140:23-27
The Jewish tribal Jehovah was a man-projected God, liable to wrath, repentance, and human changeableness. The Christian Science God is universal, eternal, divine Love, which changeth not and causeth no evil, disease, nor death.
S&H 141:1-3
This indicates the distance between the theological and ritualistic religion of the ages and the truth preached by Jesus.
S&H 347:14
Christ, as the spiritual or true idea of God, comes now as of old, preaching the gospel to the poor, healing the sick, and casting out evils. Is it error which is restoring an essential element of Christianity,– namely, apostolic, divine healing? No; it is the Science of Christianity which is restoring it, and is the light shining in darkness, which the darkness comprehends not.
S&H 348:26
I have never supposed the world would immediately witness the full fruitage of Christian Science, or that sin, disease, and death would not be believed for an indefinite time; but this I do aver, that, as a result of teaching Christian Science, ethics and temperance have received an impulse, health has been restored, and longevity increased. If such are the present fruits, what will the harvest be, when this Science is more generally understood?
S&H 470:32
The relations of God and man, divine Principle and idea, are indestructible in Science; and Science knows no lapse from nor return to harmony, but holds the divine order or spiritual law, in which God and all that He creates are perfect and eternal, to have remained unchanged in its eternal history.
S&H 390:4-9
We cannot deny that Life is self-sustained, and we should never deny the everlasting harmony of Soul, simply because, to the mortal senses, there is seeming discord. It is our ignorance of God, the divine Principle, which produces apparent discord, and the right understanding of Him restores harmony.
S&H 96:12
This material world is even now becoming the arena for conflicting forces. On one side there will be discord and dismay; on the other side there will be Science and peace. The breaking up of material beliefs may seem to be famine and pestilence, want and woe, sin, sickness, and death, which assume new phases
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until their nothingness appears. These disturbances will continue until the end of error, when all discord will be swallowed up in spiritual Truth.
S&H 291:13
Heaven is not a locality, but a divine state of Mind in which all the manifestations of Mind are harmonious and immortal, because sin is not there and man is found having no righteousness of his own, but in possession of “the mind of the Lord,” as the Scripture says.
S&H 76:6-10
When being is understood, Life will be recognized as neither material nor finite, but as infinite, — as God, universal good; and the belief that life, or mind, was ever in a finite form, or good in evil, will be destroyed.
S&H 98:15
Beyond the frail premises of human beliefs, above the loosening grasp of creeds, the demonstration of Christian Mind-healing stands a revealed and practical Science. It is imperious throughout all ages as Christ’s revelation of Truth, of Life, and of Love, which remains inviolate for every man to understand and to practise.
S&H 423:13 it … it restores the harmony of man.
PUBLICATIONS QUOTE:
The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany by Mary Baker Eddy 152:12
“The restoration of pure Christianity rests solely on spiritual understanding, spiritual worship, spiritual power. Ask thyself, Do I enter by the door and worship only Spirit and spiritually, or do I climb up some other way? Do I understand God as Love, the divine Principle of all that really is, the infinite good, than which there is none else and in whom is all? Unless this be so, the blind is leading the blind, and both will stumble into doubt and darkness, even as the ages have shown. To-day, if ye would hear His voice, listen to His Word and serve no other gods. Then the divine Principle of good, that we call God, will be found an ever-present help in all things, and Christian Science will be understood.”
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