The Sunday Mail
Christian Science Paradzai Kudyakwenzara —
SOME individuals in our society are addicted to substances (tobacco, harmful drugs and certain medical prescriptions) that do not improve their health, their financial situation, their family life or their communities.
I was one of these people. In search of satisfaction and happiness, I started smoking and drinking at the tender age of 16 and continued for many years thereafter. I became a heavy drinker and a chain smoker; and I got involved in drugs.
In drunken stupors, I found pleasure in committing sinful acts that I am now ashamed even to mention. I comforted myself by misinterpreting certain Scriptures that suggest man is born a helpless sinner and inherits the Adamic nature, and I also at times believed that I was not included in God’s Love.
But in the last 17 years, I have been learning a different way to see myself and understand my true spiritual nature. This new view is based on the fact that God created man in His image and likeness, as the Bible tells you in the first chapter of Genesis.
Wisdom
And with that creation, He set the standard of infinite good. Life was created by Him and nothing exists that He did not make, (John 1:1). For His own glory, God made man ‘male and female’ innocent and blameless in every way.
God sees in the divine mirror his own good creation. All that he created is excellent and we are complete offspring of His wisdom, intelligence, holiness, power, majesty, beauty, grace and abundant life.
Christ Jesus showed man his real estate when he affirmed, “I and my Father are one…” Not in quantity but in quality. “What I see my Father do I do … What I hear my Father say, I hear and judge righteously.”
Thus, Christ Jesus clearly demonstrated that divine love (God) protects man in trials. Temptations had no effect upon Him, Pharisees’ envy did not disturb Him and He slept soundly amid stormy seas.
The patriarchs in the Old Testament, the disciples of the New Testament and still today many followers of truth, who trust God in trials, experience that God’s loving kindness never fails.
Jesus truly showed us the man of God’s creating: that we are the actual evidence of divine life’s glorious nature, the evidence of God’s majesty; we enjoy eternal sufficiency and we are always embraced in divine Love.
As I studied the Scriptures and learned more of this new view of man, I began to cultivate my “spiritual sense” instead of the carnal senses. Christian healer Mary Baker Eddy defines spiritual sense as “… a conscious, constant capacity to understand God”. ( Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures , by Mary Baker Eddy)
The more I learned about and understood my spiritual sense and this view of God, the more I was able to find freedom from the beliefs of man as evil and the behaviours that came with those beliefs.
I realised that the Ten Commandments underlie the model of true happiness and that personified evil – called devil – had no constitution nor mandate by which it could control me.
Ten Commandments
I simply was not compelled to steal, or commit adultery, or hate my neighbor. I learned to destroy all manner of evil behaviour by keeping the commandments of Christ Jesus, in whose standard of good I now measure my life.
As I emulate Christ Jesus in a life of holiness and take steps to meet any appearance of evil with an overpowering action of the reality of good, I experience joy and the peace of God that garrisons my thoughts.
Jesus Christ illustrates the perfection of God, and man is the expressed image of infinite good. I realise that it is my divine right to destroy the works of the flesh, which are sin, sickness, disease, poverty and evil of any sort.
Dear reader God created you capable of doing good. You, too, are that perfect man now.
Paradzai Kudyakwenzara is with the Christian Science Committee on Publications for Zimbabwe. Feedback: [email protected]
