The only power of enforcement
Often when something wrong happens in our lives we feel a sense of injustice. We innately sense that the wrong goes against the higher power and authority of God, good. We mentally rebel against the threat and its intended path.
Why? Because within each of one of us is the presence of the Christ, the spiritual idea of God, good, and it's this Christ that wells up within thought and awakens us to acknowledge our God-given perfection. It's a spiritual rebellion, if you will, and it rouses us to follow St. James' instructions: "Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you" (4:7).
Submitting ourselves to God doesn't mean to submit to evil, disease, or death. It's not a confirmation of evil from God that states, "This is God's will" or "This is your time" or "I'm being called 'home'" type of submission.
No. It's a submission to divine Love, God, whose law governs every aspect of our being and whose intentions for His creation are solely good. Mrs. Eddy, the Leader of Christian Science, writes, "When the first symptoms of disease appear, dispute the testimony of the material senses with divine Science. Let your higher sense of justice destroy the false process of mortal opinions which you name law, and then you will not be confined to a sick-room nor laid upon a bed of suffering in payment of the last farthing, the last penalty demanded by error"
(Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,
390:12).
Submitting to spiritual sense, to divine Love, is to yield all fear to the very presence of God, good -- to let it go and give it up, -- and to replace it with the spiritual understanding that God's law is acting on our behalf.
How? By facing the fear prayerfully and denouncing it. It's very unreality and baselessness requires it to loosen its hold in our thought where we can then replace it with what it real and true, -- a spiritual understanding of our perfect identity. Continuing the quote above, Mrs. Eddy writes, ”Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him.' Suffer no claim of sin or of sickness to grow upon the thought. Dismiss it with an abiding conviction that it is illegitimate, because you know that God is no more the author of sickness than He is of sin. You have no law of His to support the necessity either of sin or sickness, but you have divine authority for denying that necessity and healing the sick" (ibid).
We have divine authority for denying sin, disease, and death because this authority is God-given to each one of us. No evil can remain in our thought once it is dismissed as illegitimate, as not God-given so not God-supported. Why? Because evil has no law behind it. It has no power of enforcement. Only God has the power of enforcement, and He enforces the only law He knows, -- His own, the law of divine Love.
So, when we appear to be facing sin, disease, death, or any other evil we can confidentially turn on them and simply toss them in the trash can, -- dismiss them, -- as worse than useless. Simultaneously we'll be turning toward divine Love, God, and His law of perfection for us.
