From the pandemic to political division to climate disasters, today’s news begs the question “Where is God when bad things happen?” And if God is here, why doesn’t it seem to make a difference?
This podcast series investigates different aspects of this large question. Each of the speakers shares a different view of God that can help you find your own peace and experience the kind of stability we all want these days.
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Here are the links to the four sessions in this series:
This recording is of readings on the topic: Grace – God’s Unconditional LoveMeeting the Human Need
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… prove me now herewith, saith the Lord of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it.
(The Bible – Malachi 3:10)
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Every Wednesday at 6.15pm a Testimony Meeting is held at the Christian Science church in Canberra (corner of Macquarie and Bligh Streets, Barton). At these meetings short readings on a particular topic are followed by time for members of the congregation to share how they have been helped and healed through prayer.
Everyone is welcome. If you are in Canberra on any Wednesday, please join us.
What would Christianity of the kind that Jesus, the original Christian, lived be like if it were practiced today? Original Christianity simply loved; it loved gently, powerfully, universally. It met the human need right where that need was without judgement or limitation. It acted with the deepest, genuine humility – Jesus said, ‘Of my own self I can do nothing.’ It was not political. It had no robes, rituals or riches.
It loved with a divine love so transforming that it healed, or solved the human need, no matter what that need was – poverty, sorrow, sickness. It gave us an understanding of God that was not humanistic. ‘God is Love’ (The Bible – 1 John 3:23) lifts our sense from a limited, masculine, judgemental, far-off, traditional concept, to one that envelops us in a feeling of infinite closeness and care. To truly practise Christian worship we must live love for Love is the law of life that will bring, ‘on earth peace, good will to men.’ This is the type of worship that is at the core of Christian Science practice.
Real love reduces fear and that is the love that is most needed right now. It is needed for the current economic and public health crisis as well as global concerns about racial injustice.
The Bible quote “God is love” appears near the front of almost every Christian Science church, including in The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, the headquarters for the denomination.
To the degree that we love God with all our heart, soul, and mind — to that degree will our hearts and hands be moved by Christ to meet the needs of our brothers and sisters.
Our church is committed to spiritual healing, which endeavours to see the image of God in everyone. “Great charity and humility is necessary in this work of healing,” wrote church founder Mary Baker Eddy. “The loving patience of Jesus we must strive to emulate.” Healing can’t be approached dogmatically, Christian Scientists emphasise. Christian Scientists are always free to make their own health choices. Healing is about giving gratitude to God, who is love, and learning to acknowledge more of this saving presence.
The Christian Science church in Canberra has at its heart a great love for its community and shares an understanding of God that has brought healing and happiness to the lives of many. Anyone in need of some love and prayer, is welcome to come and visit.
(This article was contributed by Beth Packer, a Christian Science practitioner of healing and an international speaker on Christian Science and spiritual healing.)
Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy
This book is the textbook of Christian Science. It explains God intelligently, not as anthropomorphic, but as Mind and as Love. By aligning our thought with this divine Mind, peace and wellbeing are experienced. Mary Baker Eddy explains:
Not muscles, nerves, nor bones, but mortal mind makes the whole body “sick, and the whole heart faint;” whereas divine Mind heals.
When this is understood, we shall never affirm concerning the body what we do not wish to have manifested. We shall not call the body weak, if we would have it strong; for the belief in feebleness must obtain in the human mind before it can be made manifest on the body, and the destruction of the belief will be the removal of its effects. (p219: 11-20)
You embrace your body in your thought, and you should delineate upon it thoughts of health, not of sickness. You should banish all thoughts of disease and sin and of other beliefs included in matter. (p208: 29-1)
Stand porter at the door of thought. Admitting only such conclusions as you wish realized in bodily results, you will control yourself harmoniously. When the condition is present which you say induces disease, whether it be air, exercise, heredity, contagion, or accident, then perform your office as porter and shut out these unhealthy thoughts and fears. (p392: 24-30)
Click here to purchase this book or to read it free on-line. It is also available for purchase or loan at the Christian Science Reading Room and bookshop located on the corner of Macquarie and Bligh Streets, Barton, ACT.
… your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. (The Bible – I Corinthians 2: 5)
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The prayer that reforms the sinner and heals the sick is an absolute faith that all things are possible to God, — a spiritual understanding of Him, an unselfed love. (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy p1: 1-4)
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Every Wednesday at 6.15pm a Testimony Meeting is held at the Christian Science church in Canberra (corner of Macquarie and Bligh Streets, Barton). At these meetings short readings on a particular topic are followed by time for members of the congregation to share how they have been helped and healed through prayer.
Everyone is welcome. If you are in Canberra on any Wednesday, please join us.
This is a recording of the Wednesday readings on the topic: The Faith That Heals.
When she had nowhere else to turn, Stormy turned to God in prayer – a God she did not know very well, whose existence she had often doubted and who now was the focus of her anger.
She studied the Bible and the textbook of Christian Science, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, and learned that God was Love; God did not send sickness. As her understanding of God grew her health improved. She learned that there were divine laws that sustained and maintained man. As she learned to apply these laws she was restored to perfect health.
Stormy is now a full-time Christian Science healer and teacher. She has travelled the world sharing what she has learned about spiritual healing.
The Christian Science Church – a part of the Canberra community. Members share testimonies and talk about their lives as Christian Scientists.
This article, Healing Like an Awakening, is by Christine who is a member of the Christian Science Church in Canberra. She shares how a deeper understanding of God as Principle helped to bring about the healing of a restricting physical condition.
Mary Baker Eddy, the discoverer of Christian Science has an interesting definition of this Science: “To live so as to keep human consciousness in constant relation with the divine, the spiritual, and the eternal, is to individualize infinite power; and this is Christian Science.”
My study and practice of this Science of Being has resulted in a deep sense of peace, joy and gratitude. I am learning how thought is vital to my everyday experience and keeping my consciousness in relation to the divine, is the key to an awareness of what is real.
Many times I experienced that what was first so real, so frightening, so painful was changed totally by a change of perception, a change of thought, the realization that we are not alien to the divine Principle, or law, but are truly one with the divine Life.
I would like to explain this further with a physical healing that happened some years ago. I grew up with the practice of Christian Science Mind-healing and so it was very natural for me to turn to it in every need. So when I became ill with symptoms that were never diagnosed (listlessness, sleeplessness and no appetite) I turned to God for a greater sense of wholeness and perfection. I worked with a Christian Science healer but my condition did not change until I became quite frail.
My husband gave me an ultimatum one day and asked me to see a medical practitioner. I could see that this was a reasonable request but it also somehow awakened me to expect healing and a change in my thought that I had been working on every day – a kind of transformation. That night when I could not sleep, I got up and walked around our kitchen and thought of 7 synonyms or names for God that Mary Baker Eddy explains in her book Science & Health. These are: Mind, Soul, Spirit, Principle, Life, Truth, Love.
I often ponder them when I want to get a clearer idea of what God means to me and I did this aloud at this time of great need. For example, I thought of how my life was an expression of the one big Life, Life that could never get limited, disharmonious. There is Truth that always frees us from limitations and how Love is the one cause of all being. When I came to the concept of a divine Principle, or law, something suddenly cleared in my thinking. I realized that I was connected to the law of Life, the law of being – everyone was. I bathed in that thought and it became like a light and also something of substance I could lean on, something that had indeed great power.
During this prayerful time I became very calm and eventually I returned to bed and for the first time in weeks, slept peacefully. In the morning I was well, ate a big breakfast and although I had been quite weak, there was no need for recuperation. I quickly gained my normal weight and started living an energetic life once more. In fact just two days after the night time turn around, I saddled my horse and went for a long ride through the countryside with such a sense of unbounded freedom. The healing suddenly felt so natural, as if all that had happened was that I had woken up and realized that all was well.
Title for these reading was taken from hymn 462 in the Christian Science Hymnal:
When my days are much too busy to find where prayer fits in, / There’s a timeless prayer I can always pray: / Simply praising Him. / Praise the creator. Let all within me sing! / For that’s what I am made to do, and stillness it will bring.
Every Wednesday at 6.15 pm a Testimony Meeting is held at the Christian Science Church in Canberra. Each meeting begins with readings selected from the two books designated as the Pastor of Christian Science: The Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. A new topic for the readings is selected each week.
At the conclusion of the short readings the congregation is invited to share thoughts on this topic and relate how they have used the principles of Christian Science to solve life’s problems and bring physical healing.
If you are in Canberra on any Wednesday please join us. Everyone is welcome.
This recording represents the readings on the topic:Let All Within Me Sing.
On Thursday 19 November a Thanksgiving Service was held by the members of the Christian Science Church in Canberra. Many in the congregation gave thanks for the good in their lives:
Very recently I was listening to a Christian Science lecture in which the speaker outlined a wonderful example of problem solving through prayer, and then went on to share her awe at the overwhelming abundance of the divine solution.
This brought vividly to my mind the first time I experienced this divine ‘extra’ in an answer to my prayer. I was staying alone in an absent friend’s home when over several days I found myself feeling sicker and sicker and weaker and worrying about how I was to get home.
Finally, I looked in a Christian Science Journal for the name and number of a local Christian Science practitioner to help me through prayer. She so readily and lovingly took me under her spiritual wing. I don’t remember now whether the healing took 2 or 3 days but completely healed I certainly was, for which I felt much gratitude, but not surprise, because new as I was to Christian Science, I’d already learned enough to know God’s readiness and love and power were always there. The dazzling remembrance that sprang to my mind when His abundant good was illustrated in the lecture was my trip home a day later. When I presented myself at the airport the clerk said – completely out of the blue – that my seat had been up graded to first class!
Something which had, and has, never happened to me before or since.
A God … abundant in loving kindness and truth (Exodus 34: 6).
![article.271029.large[1]](https://christiansciencecanberra.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/article-271029-large1.jpg)
In this hour-long lecture,
This article, Healing Like an Awakening, is by Christine who is a member of the Christian Science Church in Canberra. She shares how a deeper understanding of God as Principle helped to bring about the healing of a restricting physical condition.
Christian Science Canberra 