Sunday, May 3rd, 2020 Roundtable

May this little sanctum be preserved sacred to the memory of this pure purpose, and subserve it. Let the Bible and the Christian Science textbook preach the gospel which heals the sick and enlightens the people’s sense of Christian Science. This ministry, reaching the physical, moral, and spiritual needs of humanity, will, in the name of Almighty God, speak the truth that to-day, as in olden time, is found able to heal both sin and disease.

— from Miscellany, by Mary Baker Eddy, page 147

131 — WATCH lest you pray to infinite Love and wisdom to remove from your path those experiences which you need in order to increase your understanding and growth. A child may beg its father to let it leave school and have a holiday, or even to get a job. But the father knows that the child needs the discipline and the education.

Whatever we need to teach us to hold our scientific thought against false testimony and mental suggestion, God will provide. Never pray to have removed from your experience that which has come to help you, for the moment you learn the lessons such experiences have come to teach, they will disappear.

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Golden Text — “He that covereth his sins shall not prosper: but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy.” — Proverbs 28 : 13

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Bible Study Link — Consider Your Ways Chapter on Haggai from April 11th, 2020

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Mr. Young once said, “We often get into a rut and go right on ‘rutting’!” This might be said of many students and of some practitioners. They get into certain ruts or grooves and go around and around in this fixed routine of thought, with the grooves growing deeper and deeper, until they bury themselves mentally. They have chained themselves to a fixed habit of thought and they have failed to see actual man and the spiritual universe at hand.

— from Addresses by Martha Wilcox<, page 164

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Forum post from April Lesson on Unreality — If ye continue in my word … then… by Parthens

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The human heart, like a feather bed, needs often to be stirred, 128 sometimes roughly, and given a variety of turns, else it grows hard and uncomfortable whereon to repose.

— from Miscellaneous Writings by Mary Baker Eddy, page 127

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Everlasting punishment is hiding your sins.

— Plainfield Roundtable

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Ease in matter is not freedom, it is running away from challanges.

— Plainfield Roundtable

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Get problems out into the light of day to be healed.

— Plainfield Roundtable

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Forum post — Lead me in thy truth, and teach me:.. by Karen from CA

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Mother explained this Scripture, “Ye ask and receive not, because ye ask amiss to consume it on your lusts.” We ask from a selfish motive, and she illustrated it in this way: “If we have a pain, we ask to have it destroyed. Why? Because it makes us suffer. Is this the way? No! We should ask to have it removed, because it dishonors the Way that God has revealed, and this dishonors God. We ask to have the pleasures of sense destroyed. Why? Be- cause they make us miserable. Is this the way? No! We should ask to have them destroyed, because they dishonor the Way and thus dishonor God. Then our prayer will be answered, because we ask from an unselfish motive and with an honest purpose to honor and love the Way that is God’s idea. This is the great lesson that He has given to us, that if we would ‘love Him with all our heart and our neighbor as ourself’ — thus keeping the whole law — we must have the spiritual sense of the Way and love and honor His Way or idea — the real individual that voices good — with the spiritual sense of this individual and not a material one, and do this by prayerful watching to see, that in forsaking the material sense, we love more instead of less, and are ever reflecting this spiritual sense of Love, which is all tenderness and compassion and loving kindness, and which is the Way, the divine idea of Love.” Mother explained the difference between a material sense of love and a spiritual sense. A material sense of love dishonors the one it professes to love, through lust, as in marriage the man dishonors the woman he claims to love by taking away her virginity, thereby exposing the falsity of such a sense by showing it is not love, but lust, i.e. hate.

Mother said, this is the “Lamb slain from the foundation of the world,” that is, the spiritual sense of Love that is slain from the foundation of a material sense of sexuality.

— from Watches, Prayers, and Arguments by Mary Baker Eddy, page 161-162

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For all of good the past hath had
Remains to make our own time glad,
Our common, daily life divine,
And every land a Palestine.

— Hymn 238 from the Christian Science Hymnal

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When you are being tempted take to have a flash forward to see if that is where you want to end up.

— Plainfield Roundtable

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(To the chief Musician, A Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet came unto him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.) Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions.

— Psalms 51: 1 from the King James Bible

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We cannot choose for ourselves, but must work out our salvation in the way Jesus taught. In meekness and might, he was found preaching the gospel to the poor. Pride and fear are unfit to bear the standard of Truth, and God will never place it in such hands.

— from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, page 30

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Idle hands are the devil’s tools.

— Plainfield Roundtable

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The advancing stages of Christian Science are gained through growth, not accretion; idleness is the foe of progress. And scientific growth manifests no weakness, no emasculation, no illusive vision, no dreamy absentness, no insubordination to the laws that be, no loss nor lack of what constitutes true manhood. Growth is governed by intelligence; by the active, all-wise, law-creating, law-disciplining, law-abiding Principle, God. The real Christian Scientist is constantly accentuating harmony in word and deed, mentally and orally, perpetually repeating this diapason of heaven: “Good is my God, and my God is good. Love is my God, and my God is Love.”

— from Unity of Good, by Mary Baker Eddy, page 206

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Divine Love corrects and governs man. Men may pardon, but this divine Principle alone reforms the sinner.

— Citation 13 in this week’s Lesson from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, page 6 : 3-5

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Final Readings