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APPLICATION GEMS TO TRANSFORM YOUR WHOLE BEING FROM THE INSIDE OUT!
Let God Expressed Meekly/Mightily in you sparkle brightly with new insights from Cobbey Crisler & others as inspired by The Christian Science Quarterly Bible Lesson on
“SOUL AND BODY”
for November 20, 2022
(Cobbey’s insights are shared with the blessing of Janet Crisler janetcrisler7@gmail.com)
compile after CedarS Annual Board Meeting ended 11-19-22 at 10pm by Warren Huff, CedarS Executive Director Emeritus, warren@cedarscamps.org
“GET READY FOR “A COMPLETE CHANGE for the BETTER!” ACTIONIZE ROMANS 12:2 (Responsive Reading)
[FYI:] “In one of Mary Baker Eddy’s Bibles, she wrote beside Romans 12:
“Romans 12 is Christian Science.” (MBE Accession #B00017.C)
Romans 12:2
“. . . be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.”
Conformed is syschematizo in Greek which means “to conform one’s self, one’s mind and character, to another’s pattern, to fashion one’s self according to (www.blueletterbible.org, Strong’s Lexicon 2964).
Transformed is metamorphoo in Greek which means “to change into another form, to transfigure, i.e. resplendent with a divine brightness, to the same image of consummate excellence that shines in Christ, reproduce the same image” (www.blueletterbible.org, Strong’s Lexicon 3339).
“Acceptable – That which will be pleasing to God. or which he will approve. There is scarcely a more difficult text in the Bible than this, or one that is more full of meaning. It involves the main duty of religion to be separated from the world; and expresses the way in which that duty may be performed, and in which we may live so as to ascertain and do the will of God” (Barnes Commentary from www.biblehub.com).
JB Phillips’ translation – “Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its own mold.”
James Moffatt’s translation – “Instead of being molded to this world, have your mind renewed, and so be transformed in nature, able to make out what the will of God is, namely what is good and acceptable to Him and perfect.”
SILENCE DIVISIVENESS! HEAR HOW TO THINK WITHOUT STRIFE!
START & STAY with the WHOLENESS of GOD’S ONENESS & ALLNESS!
Apply citations B1/Deut. 6:4 1 & S7/9:17 to yourself & the whole world.
As Thanksgiving week arrives AND We “love into view” our “best holiday season yet,” it’s very helpful that our Christian Science Quarterly Bible Lesson contains what Jesus was trained to pray to begin and end each day. (All Jews are still supposed to pray a key prayer at the start, as well as at the end of each day). They call this prayer the “Shema” – the Hebrew word for “Hear”— because Deuteronomy 6:4/citation B1 starts with that word.
4 Hear, O Israel: “The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 5 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” (citation B1/Deut. 6:4, 5) [The Shema prayer continues… ] 6 These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. 7 Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 8 Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. 9 Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.” Deuteronomy 6:4-9, (NIV), verses 6-9 follow citation B1.
Please note how constantly throughout each day Jews are supposed to prayerfully affirm the supremacy of God’s oneness and of His commandments that He gave to rule over all!
In her ground-breaking opening chapter of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy, picks up on and interprets the centrality of the Shema’s demands on all of us and what we think most about–morning, noon and night by asking the question: “Dost thou “love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind”? This command includes much, even the surrender of all merely material sensation, affection, and worship. This is the El Dorado of Christianity. It involves the Science of Life, and recognizes only the divine control of Spirit, in which Soul is our master, and material sense and human will have no place.” (page 0:17)
It’s significant that this key “Shema” prayer of oneness with God dovetails with CedarS 2022 theme of “Unity” – which was subsequently announced as the theme of this year’s Annual Meeting of the Mother Church. The value of unity/oneness is a powerful, healing keynote to focus on throughout each day. Our united prayers and actions will be especially helpful in the coming weeks and months as the world emerges from the pandemic and hopefully from an escalation of the terrorism and atrocities of wars in Ukraine, the Middle East or wherever these “errors are screaming on their way out.”
As Christie Hanzlik, CS, pointed out in a paragraph of a CedarS Met for a previous Christian Science Quarterly Bible Lesson: “It is tempting to see a world consisting of millions of human opinions, warring media reports, racial strife, class warfare, tribalism, gender inequity, political personalities, family disagreements and even conflicts within ourselves. The singular answer to this seeming divisiveness is the oneness of Truth, the oneness of good, the oneness of God. God is indivisible. And therefore we, as the outcome of God, are also indivisible.”
Verse 3 of Christian Science Hymn 157 calls for us to make daily progress in demonstrating unity: “Day by day the understanding / Of our oneness shall increase.” This prayer request to God for oneness comes from no other than Jesus in the final hours before he allows himself to be captured for crucifixion, when he prayed for his disciples and us that we may feel at one with God and with one another! (John 17:11, 21, 22)
Christian Science Hymn 157
“Jesus’ prayer for all his brethren: / Father, that they may be one, / Echoes down through all the ages, / Nor prayed he for these alone / But for all, that through all time / God’s will be done.
“One the Mind and Life of all things, / For we live in God alone; / One the Love whose ever-presence / Blesses all and injures none. / Safe within this Love we find all / being one.
“Day by day the understanding / Of our oneness shall increase, / Till among all men and nations / Warfare shall forever cease, / So God’s children all shall dwell / in joy and peace.”
(Christian Science Hymnal, No. 157:1–3)
REFUSE TO ACCEPT THE FLESH AS THE CONTAINER OF YOUR INDIVIDUALITY!
Freedom from the flesh according to Paul from Romans 8:5, 6, 8, 9/cit. B9 (+v. 19-21):
“For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit.” (plus, verse 6 bonus— “For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.” (cit. B9/Romans 8:6, KJV)
[Warren] The Contemporary English Version (CEV) translates this citation as “People who are ruled by their desires think only of themselves. Everyone who is ruled by the Holy Spirit thinks about spiritual things. If our minds are ruled by our desires, we will die. But if our minds are ruled by the Spirit, we will have life and peace.”
[Warren] The Living Bible (TLB) renders these verses: “Those who let themselves be controlled by their lower natures live only to please themselves, but those who follow after the Holy Spirit find themselves doing those things that please God. 6 Following after the Holy Spirit leads to life and peace, but following after the old nature leads to death.”
Cobbey Crisler writes about how Paul continues to develop this theme in Romans 8:9/cit. B9.
[Cobbey:] on Romans 8:9 “How many auditoriums would empty in ridicule if Paul stood before them today and announced, “You are not in the flesh”? That’s an invitation to laughter, isn’t it? “You are not in the flesh,” Paul said. Flesh is not the container, then, of our individuality. We [are encouraged to think that] we are [our bodies]. We’re proud of that “fact”. We have turned the glory into shame by thinking out from the basis of flesh. We suffer from the incurred problems of an evolution that traces itself back through dust-like levels, so that heredity becomes a problem in health. We take pride in those “designer-genes” that form our genetic code.
In the Bible it’s a case of choosing between Genesis or genetics. Genesis (1:1, 25) has us in the beginning created by God with dominion and in God’s image. So, flesh cannot be part of that image. Where are we seeing ourselves? “Adam, where art thou?” (Genesis 3:9)
Where are we instead of in the flesh according to Romans 8, Verse 9? We’re “in the spirit” That’s home, then. Do we really feel at home in the Spirit? To be inspired is to have Spirit within, literally, in Latin. Do we enjoy living in an inspired state? Everything moves aside. Everything is subordinated to that inspiration. “we’re in the Spirit, if the Spirit of God dwells in us.” …
(bonus verses from Romans 8)
In Verse 19 would you agree with Paul that “the earnest expectation of the whole human race is waiting for this manifestation of the sons of God”? That it could be manifested, this sense of glory?
“Verse 21 mentions “the creature itself.” Look what is going to happen to the human body as the result of the evangelization of our mentality. As our mentality becomes more and more like God, the human body, “the creature itself, also shall be delivered.” There’s freedom, freedom from “every ill that flesh is heir to,” as Shakespeare says. “Delivered from the slavery,” literally in Greek, “the bondage of corruption,” “the slavery of decay into,” literally, “the freedom of the children of God.” The divine mode of being, as one dictionary says glory is, “into the freedom of the glory of the divine mode of being, of the divine nature, of the radiant thought of the children of God.”
If (only) all our thoughts could be at the level of such radiance. We’ve seen light come out from a human expression. We’ve met people who radiate a sense of insight… That’s in the fleshly. That’s simply an outward manifestation of what’s going on within. More should be going on within. And we’re spending most of our time trying to dress the without.”
“Glory: Divine Nature in The Bible,” by B. Cobbey Crisler**
STOP BEING “A TENANT IN A TOMB BY BEING AT HOME IN THE BODY!” Be at home in the ‘new man’ to “make all things new!” Cobbey on II Cor. 5:1-8, 16-17 (cit. B10 & as quoted in cit. S8, 13:29-6)
[Cobbey on II Cor. 5, verse 1:] “Where we are now is a tabernacle, which if “dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens…” (We look out of heavenly consciousness—every window has a heavenly view. We worship where we live — Our bodies are our ultimate idols, if we are living there.
“Verse 4. For we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened:” Jesus said take my yoke upon you for my yoke is easy and my burden light.”…
“Verse 6. It’s not what we see but what we know that matters: “Therefore we are always confident, knowing that, whilst we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord.” THIS IS ONE OF THE MOST RADICAL STATEMENTS IN THE WHOLE BIBLE THAT IS VIRTUALLY SKATED OVER.
“It is foolhardy to adapt ourselves to live in corporeality. You are a tenant in a tomb if at home in the body. Why be so satisfied with data coming to us from the 5 channels of the corporeal senses? Jesus said “Take no thought for your body.”
“Verse 8. “We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and present with the Lord.”
“Socrates said “The dead body will not be me. Don’t let him talk about burying Socrates. Say only that you are burying the body.”
“Ishmael (In Moby Dick said “My body is but the lees of my better being.”
“Verse 16. “Wherefore henceforth know we no man after the flesh:”
The ultimate objective is to know no man (or woman) after the flesh, according to fleshly information. Our divine nature or anyone’s true, divine nature is not conveyed or confined by anything fleshly from “the old man.” As Jesus beheld, we are to behold the “new man” and in so doing make not just some things but ALL things new. [W: “new man” in SH 300:9]
“As Verse 17 says, “Therefore, if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” (II Cor. 5:17)
Transcribed from marginal notes in Warren’s Bible from a talk by Cobbey Crisler**
ELIMINATE ANXIETY! STOP WORRYING;
SEEK GOD 1ST & ALL GOOD COMES NATURALLY!
Cobbey Crisler’s on part of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount & Matt. 6:27-33 (cit. B15)
[Cobbey:] Matthew 6: There are several verses which begin ‘Take no thought’ or that utilize that concept.
“Let’s determine just what thought-taking is. Does it mean to be thoughtless? Thought-taking is the way Jesus is using this in context. It’s anxiety, it’s care, it’s concern. Alright, let’s ask ourselves how we do in this test.
‘Take no thought for your life, what you are going to eat, drink, or wear.’ How much time do we give in any day to those three objectives, eating, drinking, wearing? Then Jesus said, ‘Do you know what? It’s not the menu that counts so much as your life which is bigger than what you’re eating, and your body, or identity, much bigger than what you wear.’…
…(Verse 28). …why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow.’ They’re disappearing from the Holy Land rapidly with all this building, but you can still see some of them…. all red anemones behind the snow-covered 10,000-foot peak of Mount Hermon is absolutely magnificent. There’s no difficulty at all when you’re visiting the Holy Land in the Spring to “love your anemone.” They’re simply magnificent.
(Verse 29). You can understand really why it says, ‘That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.’
(Verses 30 and 31). So, ‘if God so clothed the grass of the field, why should we be so concerned and anxious about what we wear?
Matthew 6: (Verse 32). Again, Jesus repeats, ‘Take no thought…’ Don’t be so concerned and anxious about what we eat, drink or wear…
(Verse 33). And then Jesus gives the priority equation, ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.” In other words, is what we eat, drink or wear of no significance? They are natural and normal on earth. He’s not wiping them all out as if it were a branch of some ascetic cult. But rather, ‘Seek God first and all these things will be added.’ Added. The heavenly law of mathematics is priority first and all those that we normally take thought of would come into our experience naturally. Instead of wasting so much good mental time, taking thought, worrying, and being anxious, we spend that same time seeking the kingdom of God, and all those things come naturally as a result of that.”
“Book of Matthew, Auditing the Master: A Tax Collector’s Report,” by B. Cobbey Crisler**
IN SECTION 5 (Acts 14:8-10, cit. B21) PAUL GIVES “CONVINCING PROOFS … TO THE WORLD” OF THE VALIDITY OF HIS STATEMENT to the Romans that “ye are not in the flesh, but the Spirit…” (cit. B9/Romans 8:9) THAT CORRELATES WITH “THE SCIENTIFIC STATEMENT OF BEING” (see Retrospection & Introspection, p. 93: 17 & SH 32, 208)
Mary Baker Eddy on Paul’s words in Athens (Acts 17:28):
“St. Paul said to the Athenians, “For in Him we live and move and have our being.” This statement is in substance identical with my own: “There is no life, truth, substance, nor intelligence in matter.” It is quite clear that this great verity has not yet been fully demonstrated, but it is nevertheless true. If Christian Science reiterates Paul’s teaching, we, as Christian Scientists, should give to the world convincing proof of the validity of this scientific statement of being. Having perceived, in advance of others, this scientific fact, we owe to ourselves and to the world a struggle for its demonstration.”
“Retrospection and Introspection,” by Mary Baker Eddy, page 93: 17
ACCEPT HEALING AS PROPHECY FULFILLED: LOVE AT YOUR LYSTRA THE FULFILLMENT OF A LAME MAN LEAPING! Cobbey on cit. B21/Acts 14:8-10+, Paul & the Isa. 35:6 prophesy fulfilled
[Cobbey Crisler:] “Acts, Chapter 14 begins with [the prequel of] “the unbelieving Jews” in Acts 14, verse 2, “stirring up the Gentiles.” … And we find now that this is close on the heels of all the success the church makes – a step forward and then a counter step trying to resist and destroy what has been achieved. … So, the “stirring up occurs.” Acts 14, verse 4, shows you a “division in the city, an actual assault is made” in Acts 14, verse 5, “to stone them.”
And they leave the city going to Lystra and Derbe, and to the surrounding region to preach the gospel.” (Acts 14:6, 7) …
“In the midst of all this persecution and conflict, “there is a man at Lystra, a cripple, and born that way. He never had walked.” (Acts 14:8, cit. B21)
Acts 14:9 The same heard Paul speak: who stedfastly beholding him, and perceiving that he had faith to be healed,
“Now you remember what we said when Jesus looked at someone? “And Peter beheld someone.” … Here it says, “Paul, steadfastly beholding him.” The author means much more that staring at him, doesn’t he? “Steadfastly beholding him, perceiving” – you see it’s an inner sight – “perceiving he had faith to be healed.” (Acts 14:9, cit. B21)
“Now, if he hadn’t [perceived that he had faith], the implication is what? They were many that needed healing there, but receptivity – the patient has to be part of it apparently. Just as Jesus did not physically lift people to their feet so much as he said, “Pick up your bed and walk…stretch forth your hand” and so forth here.
“Paul, perceiving that he had faith to be healed “Said with a loud voice, Stand upright on thy feet. And he leaped and walked. (Acts 14:10, cit. B21)
“You notice that the first thing this man does also is what? He leaps before he walks. He never had walked, and “the first thing he did was leap.” …
And Isaiah, if you will recall the prophecy, it indicated “the lame man shall leap as an hart.” (Isa 35:6) … It is a fulfillment of prophecy. Therefore, it’s God’s idea, you see, not man’s healing.”
[“Chapter 14 ends with the exciting sequel of Paul being worshipped and then being stoned and raised by prayer and returning to where he was stoned….] … That shows you the extremes of human nature. You’re a god one moment, and they stone you the next. And that’s exactly what happened to Jesus if you recall the triumphant entry into Jerusalem – and one week later the crucifixion. So, avoid triumphal entries if you can at all help it.
“So, “Paul is stoned.” (Acts 14:19) … Now, remember later in a list of the things that he gives that he’s been through; he says he was stoned once, and this is the only record that we have of it. “They drag him out insensible, looking as if he is dead.” (Acts 14:19, NOT in cit. B21)
“The disciples, instead of running, stand around about him.” (Acts 14:20 NOT in cit. B21) “Howbeit, as the disciples stood round about him, he rose up, and came into the city: and the next day he departed with Barnabas to Derbe.”
“Now, I don’t know whether anybody in this room would have had the courage Paul did. Even if we rose up from the dead, would you have run back into the city? Didn’t you get the idea that you weren’t wanted?
“He comes back into the city. He would not be thrown out. He then leaves with Barnabas the next day,” normally, “to Derbe to preach there.” (Acts 14:20 NOT in cit. B21)
Acts 14:21 And when they had preached the gospel to that city, and had taught many, they returned again to Lystra, and to Iconium, and Antioch (NOT in cit. B20)
“And Acts 14, verse 22, the last three lines, he indicates that “we must through great tribulation enter into the kingdom of God.” (NOT in cit. B21)
“But he’s establishing churches as he goes. And think of the influence of his example in stamping the example to follow Christ in that early church. So, as he creates churches as he goes along, he comes back through. He retraces his steps and returns to Antioch in Syria, not the Antioch of Pisidia. He’s back home again
Acts 14:26 And thence sailed to Antioch, from whence they had been recommended to the grace of God for the work which they fulfilled.
“If you want to know how the church responded to the results of this first mission; they hold a special corporate meeting and “rehearsed” in Acts 14, verse 27, “all that God had done with them, and how he had opened the door of faith unto the Gentiles.” Look at that news, “the door of faith has been opened to the Gentiles.” (not in cit. B14) …
“That says something about the corporate body, especially if the New Testament remark “that the church is the body of Christ is correct. You can’t divide that body. If you try, you’re trying to break the body of Christ in that sense. This was tried on the cross.
“And collectively man is at one under one God if the Biblical theme is accurate. And that must include the Gentiles; it must even include those we may count among our enemies. And Paul’s approach here is a pioneering one.”
“AFTER THE MASTER, WHAT?” by B. Cobbey Crisler**
