Finding Unity and Abundance Through Prayer with Nate Frederick

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Spiritual Solutions for Today's Challenges, an eight week
series airing on Sunday evenings in October and November at
eight o'clock. The co sponsors of tonight's program are First
Church of Christ Scientist in Montclair, New Jersey, an Eighth
Church of Christ Scientist in New York City. Our guest
is Nate Frederick, who shares his faith in jails, rehab centers, churches,

(00:26):
and inter faith events as a member of the Christian
Science Board of Lectureship, and you're about to hear his
speaking on finding Unity and Abundance through Prayer.

Speaker 2 (00:36):
Hello everyone, I'm Nate Frederick, a member of the Christian
Science Board of Lectureship, and I love to talk about
how prayer can better and beautify our lives. I sometimes
say that I've seen everything from broken hearts to broken
bones healed through Christian Science prayer, and there's certainly nothing
special about me. What I want to share today is

(00:57):
how anyone can practice this science of Christianity, the science
of love, and find healing in their own lives, in
their own families, and in our community and in our world.
Today's talk is called Finding Unity and Abundance through prayer.
So why am I giving a talk today called Finding

(01:20):
Unity and Abundance through Prayer. Well, I think a lot
of people are focused on division these days. It seems
to be rampant on the news, and people talk about lack,
how they don't have money to get their groceries or
to get what they feel like they deserve in life.

(01:40):
And often people feel like the solution to these problems
needs to be some kind of material thing, money or medicine,
or some kind of technology, or even governmental change. But
today we're going to talk about a means of change
that I think is the most wonderful and influential and

(02:04):
helpful activity we could ever take part in, and that
is prayer. I think a lot of people when they
think of prayer, they think of it in very namby
pamby wimpy ways. Often when there's a difficulty in culture,
people will say, well, I'll send my thoughts in prayers,
But often it's not with an expectation of radical and

(02:26):
wonderful and complete resolution. But today we're going to see
how prayer can bring resolution to our lives, can bring
healing and renewal to our lives, can bring the best
in life. Christ Jesus, by many accounts, is and was

(02:47):
the most influential person who ever lived. And this is
true not just for religious people, but even secular historians
often say this. And Jesus, what was his profession? He
wasn't a politician. In fact, he saw that as a
temptation when he was in the wilderness, to become a
part of politics and to govern over people. But instead

(03:11):
of becoming a politician or becoming some kind of material
inventor or manipulating matter in one way or another, what
he did to help people was pray. He was a
professional prayer, you could say, And if you read the Bible,
there's just one story after the next. How this most

(03:32):
humble of all people, Jesus, How he helped people through prayer,
who are struggling with chronic and hereditary disease, who are
struggling with the most difficult things in life. And often
a single encounter with Jesus would make people experience the
best in life, and it would often end their suffering. Well,

(03:55):
Jesus isn't with us anymore, but I believe the Christ
love or Christ power is with us. Jesus was born
Jesus of Nazareth. But people saw the good and the
love and the truth that shone through his life, and
they saw this as the Messianic power, the saving power

(04:16):
of God's love, and he was given that title Christ
Christ Jesus. Well, even though Jesus isn't with us today,
we're going to talk about how to gain that same
mind or mindset that he had. There's a beautiful letter
in the Bible, in the Book of Philippians that says
that we can have the same mind or mindset that

(04:38):
was also in Christ Jesus. And this is what Christian
science helps us do. What Jesus was teaching wasn't based
upon a Christian gift or a Christian doctrine or a
mere Christian faith. But Jesus when he said you will
know the truth, and the truth will set you free,
he was talking about a kind of divine knowledge or

(05:00):
a divine science, a knowledge that can be proved in
the laboratory of our own lives. And that's what I
want to talk about. If you're just tuning in today,
I'm Nate Frederick, and you're listening to a lecture called
Finding Unity and Abundance through Prayer. And this lecture is
a Christian science lecture. What does it mean to be

(05:22):
a Christian? It means to live a life of love,
following on the footsteps of Jesus. What does science mean?
It means finding knowledge that can be proved, and so
Christian science is learning to prove that what Jesus lived
and taught is something that is universally true. When he
said you will know the truth, and the truth will

(05:43):
set you free, he was talking about a universal divine
knowledge that really does consistently bring us freedom when understood.
So I want to talk to you a little bit
about how this works. I mentioned how a lot of
people are struggling with division or divisiveness these days, of
different forms of dualism, feeling like there's a left and

(06:07):
right side to things, that there is a light and darkness,
there is a Us first them, and people have always
struggled with this, and yet the Bible, from beginning to end,
really explores this concept of monotheism. In other words, the
appearance of life as dualistic from the Bible's point of

(06:28):
view is ultimately untrue because there's only one cause or
source or God, and God is just one thing. And
in the Bible it's revealed that God is love itself,
and this love is shown for what it is in
the life and teachings of Jesus. So when I was young,

(06:49):
my mom was kind of church shopping, so I got
to go to a lot of different Christian churches and
I gained a lot from each one, and yet I
kind of felt like I was just believing in things,
but I didn't really understand them. And it wasn't until
college that I started to study something called perennial philosophy,

(07:09):
and I was studying religion looking for the truth and
the ethics and the healing experiences that seemed to pop
up again and again that I came across the teachings
of Christian science and they really became a home to me.
As I started to practice them, I started to get
deeply in tune with this one love, which I understood

(07:30):
to be the principle of all things that God loved.
We could begin to reason out and see life from
the standpoint of love, and as I did, that wonderful
thing started to happen to me. I had to stop
playing sports when I was a kid because I had
a shoulder injury and it was always nagging me in
the background. And as I started to study Christian Science.

(07:52):
All those years later, that pain went away, and my dad,
who was an alcoholic my whole life, we were always
getting in fights, and I started to view him through
the eyes of love, and all of a sudden, his
desire for what was wrong, in this case, the alcohol,
the addiction to what he knew wasn't right for him,
dropped away. And at that point he became my biggest supporter.

(08:13):
And I was also doing personal care work for a
woman who was chronically ill, and long story short, I
eventually shared with her teachings of Christian Science, and in
a few months she was a bed of her bed
and taking dance classes and art classes, and her whole
life was really turned around. And so I really started
to learn that there is something very profound about these

(08:34):
Christian science teachings, and so I started to go to
a Wednesday night Christian Science testimony meeting on a regular
basis each Wednesday, every time I could make it. And
one time there was some readings that were given about
the Kingdom of Heaven, the Kingdom of Heaven, and interestingly,
when you read the Bible, you might think that Jesus

(08:57):
would say something like when you die, if you're a
good person, you go to heaven. That's what a lot
of people think Christianity is. It's about being a good
person here and if you do it right, then when
you die, you go to this place called heaven. If
you mess up and you don't do it right, you
go to hell. But Jesus talks a lot about heaven,

(09:17):
but he says it's something within us. He says it's
something here and near. And what's so wonderful is that
Jesus asked us to pray as in Heaven so on earth.
In other words, as in the ideal of things, the
perfection of things. How we really know things when we

(09:39):
understand what God is. Let that be right now, the
truth in my own experience here in this moment on earth,
so to speak. Well, as I was in this Christian
Science testimonial meeting and thinking about the Kingdom of Heaven,
the readings were doing something very interesting for me. They

(10:01):
were teaching me a lot about God's nature, about what
divine love actually is, and they were showing me a
vision of life that was holy, non dualistic. That there
was no us verse them, there was no left verse right,
there was no God over there, and us over here.

(10:22):
It was just this oneness. Jesus said, I and my
father are one, just one thing. And what's so interesting
is that think about this analogy because it really gets
what I was experiencing there. And picture if you're looking
up at the sun from the Earth. You see the

(10:44):
sun rise, and you see it coming up to high noon,
shining real bright, and eventually you see it start to
decay or get less bright, and eventually the sun sets.
And we use all these words like sunrise and sunset.
We even can check out what time it's setting in
this country or whatever. But the truth is, the sun

(11:05):
is not rising, the sun is not setting. The sun
is just shining all the time. And the truth is
if you were to stand on the sun and look out,
not only would you see what is correct, you would
see the Earth orbiting the sun, not the other way around,
but you would see that the sun is shining all
the time and not subject to these different phases that

(11:30):
we call like night and day. The sun is shining
and it's out right now, and it's not out at night. Well,
of course, the sun is always out. It's always shining.
And you get this truth from the sun's point of view.
In our solar system. When you look at things from
the Earth's point of view, everything appears to be kind

(11:51):
of upside down. The Sun seems to be orbiting the Earth,
and the Sun only seems to be shining sometimes, and
you get that sense of dualism at night and a day.
But if you're looking out from the sun, you just
see the sun shining all the time. If someone from
the Earth came to the Sun and said and started
to complain, gosh, it's always such a bummer when it

(12:14):
gets cold and the sun goes down and it's not
shining anymore and it's dark, there's no light from the sun. Well,
if someone grew up on the Sun, they wouldn't know
what this Earth person was talking about. They would say,
what are you talking about? The Sun is always shining,
and what is this darkness that you speak of? I
know it not. And what was happening to me in

(12:36):
this Christian Science testimony meeting is that I was beginning
to see that love and its apparent dualistic opposite hate
are not two different equal things. Love is just something
that's always present, and yet our belief that love is
not in a place could result in something called hate

(12:58):
but hate has no substance, are caused to it because
the one is love is God. Just in the same
way that like darkness is not the opposite of light.
It's the apparent inability to see light in a certain circumstance.
Like if we were to look at the night sky
and it would appear all dark to us, but then

(13:18):
you look at the moon. How is the moon lighting up?
The Moon's lighting up because there's light in the sky
right where we don't see it. You trace the line
between the sun and the moon. It's dark all along
that way to our eyes because we're not sensitive enough
to see that light. But that light is there. That's
why the moon is lighting up. And sometimes we might

(13:41):
think we live in a dark world, but we need
to show up and reflect the love that is everywhere.
Love is the one source, the one caused love is God.
It feels so right to love because love is literally right.
What Christian science teaches is that it's a science because
it shows us the correct relationship between God and us.

(14:03):
One way that Christian science talks about God is just life. Life.
What do you think the opposite of life is? Might
think it's death. Well before I even was a Christian scientist.
I used to do documentaries and I recorded a lot
of people who had near death or life after life experiences.
And what they would often tell me is something like

(14:24):
they got into an accident or their heart stopped on
the operating table, and the next thing that they remembered
they were walking to a light. And often they would
say something like they encountered such love, such infinite, wonderful love.
Sometimes they would encounter some spiritual beings. They had all
sorts of wonderful experiences, but for one reason or another,

(14:45):
they often felt called back to this experience. They would
often turn around and they would see their body on
an operating table or on the floor somewhere something like that,
and they often felt like they need to go back.
Their job wasn't done here, and they would walk towards
their body and the next thing that they would remember
was that they would wake up in the hospital room

(15:05):
or wherever they were. And whenever they told me stories
like that, well, one you saw that what appeared to
be death was not death to them. Their life was continuous,
and they were also walking in what appeared to be
a body, but they said their body was over there dead,
And so I would ask them about this, and I

(15:26):
started to recognize. As I started to really dive into
this phenomenon more deeply, and especially after I started to
study Christian science, I started to realize that body is
something within mind. Just like when you dream at night,
there seems to be a sense of body, like you're
walking around, you're seeing things, and it feels all physical

(15:47):
when you're in a dream, but when you wake up
you realize it's entirely mental. And Christian science teaches that
life actually is entirely mental. Because another way to think
about God is mind. God is that infinite intelligence that
creates all things. But it's it's mind, it's intelligence itself.

(16:08):
It's not something trapped or confined within form or matter,
everything within experience. When we try to draw a line
around something like a body or a you know, a
home or something, we say, you know, there's there's goodness
or intelligence or life in there, but that's just us

(16:28):
drawing that outline, that limited outline. But mind is always
the creator. You realize this when you dream, or in
any form of creation, you create a story or a novel.
You could do anything you want, And yet you're talking
about bodies talking to each other, it's a it's a
mental projection. So back to this concept of duality, and

(16:50):
again that's that's a duality. We're just talking about there,
like mind and the body. But turns out that's it's
everything that's an expression of mind. Well, as I was
in that Christian science testimony meeting and I was recognizing
that there's just one thing going on, God, I started
to think, and I was hearing too, about God's nature
and the service. God is love. I've talked about God

(17:13):
is mind, as I've talked about. God is life, as
I've talked about. But God is also spirit. So every
we're all spiritual. That's our true essence. We're all good
as God's beautiful spiritual creations. God is soul is another
way that Christian Science talks about God. So we're all

(17:34):
soulful and beautiful. It feels right to talk about and
think about ourselves as beautiful and good because that is right.
You know, if you were to describe the worst day
of your life, you would describe a day where everything
was going wrong, where you saw in biblical language, sin, disease,
and death. And yet, and yet people don't often realize

(17:57):
what they're saying when they say that's wrong. I think
it's wrong, like mathematics are wrong when you have the
wrong digits, when you put something like two times four
equals six instead of eight. Well, you could see that
on a chalkboard. But it's not true because it doesn't
really have a cause or a god. It doesn't have
a principle. There's no principle of mathematics that supports that

(18:22):
false equation. And in fact, there's only one principle of mathematics.
And if you tried to use that equation to build
a roof and the roof fell down on you, you wouldn't say, oh,
the anti principle is after me. No, you would say
it was our ignorance of the principle that caused that.
And what Christian science teaches is that all difficulty, or
what we appear to see as evil or limitation, comes

(18:45):
ultimately from an ignorance of God. There's a wonderful book
referred to as the Textbook of Christian Science, Science and
Health with key to the Scriptures, And if you like
to get a copy, you can wait to the end
of this program and hear some more about that. It's
written by this woman named Mary Baker Eddy who really
saw that Christian healing is something that is scientific. It's

(19:09):
based upon a universal understanding of God that anyone can
understand for themselves and proof for themselves. And she writes
in this book that it is our ignorance of God
the divine principle which produces a parent discord, and the
right understanding of Him restores harmony. So what happened was,

(19:29):
after I walked out of that Christian science testimony meeting,
I felt like I was on cloud nine. I just
felt so good inside and out. For the first time,
I felt like I was free of this false belief
you could say in dualism that there really is these
separate powers warring against each other. I saw that all
is love, and where there is love, there can't be

(19:50):
any hate at all. Just like if you were to
shine a flashlight, all would be light to that flashlight.
The flashlight doesn't know any darkness because wherever it looks,
it sees it's light illuminating things. And Jesus love illuminated everything,
and he didn't see hate or difficulty. He saw possibility
in eternal love expressing itself and evolving for good. And

(20:15):
as I walked around the corner, after that Christian Science
testimony meeting, I saw two men in a big fistfight.
One had just clocked the other on the face and
he was bleeding. And it was a scene of division, divisiveness, hate, conflict,
whatever you want to call it. And when I saw it,
the most interesting thing happened. I have to say. I

(20:36):
looked at it and I thought to myself, that can't be.
That cannot be. Although I saw it with my eyes,
it was like seeing something that I knew was not
only wrong, but was wrong in a way that it
just didn't have a real cause or principle or God
behind it. Just like looking at two times four equals

(20:57):
six instead of eight. You can see, but you know
it's not true, and it's not something to be remembered
or thought about. It's something to be corrected. And often
before Jesus brought healing to someone, he said he was
moved with compassion, in other words, with a love beyond himself.
And this really is the activity of what you could

(21:17):
call the Christ, that power of love that animated Jesus.
Well during that Christian Science service, I was inspired by
this christ truth, and now I found myself animated by it.
I found myself running up to these two guys, and
I grabbed one of them and I flipped him around.
And I don't know how I did this, because he
was a lot bigger and stronger than me in the
middle of a big fight. But I walked him away

(21:40):
from that fight, and immediately these simple words started to
come out of my mouth, like you are loved. Everything
is going to be okay. You don't want to hurt anyone.
And then I did what Christians do. I listened and loved,
and I sought to see him as what the Bible
first defined each and every one of us as the

(22:02):
image and likeness of God of love. And so I
was doing a lot more listening than speaking, a lot
more knowing than asserting myself with any opinion. And what
happened was so cool. That same love that I was
touched with at that service, you could see it was

(22:23):
the most contagious thing in the world, and it really
started to touch him as well. And in the presence
of that love, he just seemed to have to unload
the kind of mental weight, the mental guck, the unneeded
concepts that needed to go from his life. And the
way that that played out was that it actually started

(22:45):
to come out of his mouth, all of these like, well,
I've been abused, I can't feel love. I just feel
like people don't really love me because I'm not good
and I don't deserve it. And all this stuff was
coming out of him. You know, my parents were no good?
Well how could I be good? And as this stuff
was coming out of him, it was coming out of

(23:07):
his mouth, but I was thinking it's going out, but
it's not coming back in because he's going to see
himself as the image and likeness of God, you know, Jesus.
He said, call knowing man on earth your father. And
he wasn't anti family. He said that because he was
sharing a metaphysical principle. The Bible doesn't say with the
image and likeness of other people. It says with the

(23:28):
image and likeness of God. Well, anyhow, that night that
man was really touched by the Christ as I was.
And after all that bad stuff came out of his mouth,
it really felt like there was a relief, like there
was a He sighed and he looked at me and
he said, I love you. And I had never met
this man. He didn't know anything about me, And of

(23:51):
course he wasn't loving personal Nate. He didn't know anything
about me. What he was loving was the same thing
that I was in love with that I picked up
with that Christian science service, the truth that life really
is the expression of God of love. And the more
we understand about that and apply that more right things

(24:13):
will happen. Just like as you learn more about math
and you apply math throughout the world, you know, things
start to work right and more interesting possibilities come to
the surface. Well, what happened was this man all of
a sudden grabbed my arm now and he walked me
back to where that fight started, and he embraced that
man who had punched him in the face not too

(24:34):
long ago, and he said, I forgive you, I forgive myself.
And eventually the three of us sat down together, and
the man who apparently started the fight looked at this
change that came over this person and looked at me,
and he was kind of like, what just happened here?
And now the three of us were talking and basically

(24:57):
the same thing happened to the other guy started to
talk about how he wished he could feel this way more,
and eventually, before we parted, he said that he loved
us as well, and it was just such a beautiful,
a beautiful unifying experience. This lecture, if you're just tuning
in right now, is called finding Unity and Abundance through prayer,

(25:21):
and this moment was really a moment of just beautiful
and pure unity, and we were experiencing the abundance of
God's love. Not only did I feel it, but this
one man on the street felt it and it transformed him.
And then he spread that love to that other man
who he had been in a fight with, and now

(25:42):
he was feeling that love. And every once in a
while I've run into these guys on the street after that,
and they always seem to be in a good mood
and they're moving forward in life. If you like to
learn more about these ideas that I'm sharing, you can
go online to Christianscience dot com to find any church
or reading room in your area, and a whole lot more.

(26:02):
You can also hear helpful, encouraging programs by phone. Just
dial three three two two FI five six, seven eight
nine to hear Bible lessons, the Christian Science Sentinel Watch
radio program, or a Spanish program, El Heraldo. These weekly
programs offer practical, healing, spiritual ideas dial three three two two,

(26:23):
fy five six, seven, eight nine. Well, Christian science prayer,
it really does apply to anything we might be dealing
with in life. It makes us more humble, it makes
us less duped and tricked by just imagery on the surface,

(26:46):
and it makes us more thoughtful, and it makes us
understand more about what actually inspires and motivates good thoughts
and actions. There's a beautiful, ubiquitous image for prayer that
people have all around the world. If you asked a
child to draw someone praying, what would they draw? They

(27:08):
would draw someone down on their knees, their eyes closed,
their hands folded. And this image, it really does impart
a great deal about what prayer is all about. To
be down on our knees. I believe that represents humility.
Jesus said, I can, of my own self do nothing,
And yet he was the person who did more to

(27:29):
affect culture and history than anyone I believe whoever lived.
And yet he did that because he understood that right
ideas and the love that brings unification and goodness, it
comes from a source beyond the human mind or psyche,
and prayer really is listening to that source. If we

(27:50):
all just get quiet. We can recognize there is a
governing principle that is just making life happen right now.
We don't self gener life moment to moment. It's just here.
In fact, we don't generate thought. As you listen, thoughts
just appear and they're either from God and they're good

(28:11):
and they're beautiful, or they seem to be echoes from
the world. It's like the telephone game when you get
a message after a bunch of people have been messing
with it and it's totally different than what it seemed
to be at the beginning, and a lot of what
we hear from culture and the ideas that people have
in life, it seems to be like it's gone through

(28:32):
that telephone game. And what happens is that every great
scientific revolution, it always starts from some bold discover or
someone who just really tried to see things outside of
the box in a childlike way. Him thinking about Einstein
at the moment, and he was so childlike and outside

(28:54):
the box he was able to see things in a
new way. But every great scientific revelation starts with someone
seeing beyond what the physical senses present to us. Because
the material senses often don't only show us a limited
version of life, but they often show us an inversion
of what is true. Like people used to think the

(29:15):
world is flat, and it's not just a little bit curved,
it's actually a spheroid. People used to think that the
sun moved around the earth. It's just the opposite. The
Earth rotates around the Sun. I think today people think
that life is made and governed by matter and material processes.
But actually I believe that life comes from spirit. It's

(29:37):
ultimately spiritual. It's ultimately of mind of God, the One Mind.
And I'd like to illustrate more about how understanding God
can bring harmony into our lives. There's another beautiful quote
from this book. I mentioned Science and Health with Key

(29:57):
to the Scriptures, written by Mary Baker Ready, and if
you like to get a copy of this book, there'll
be more information about it at the end of this program.
In that book, it says, our false views of life
hide eternal harmony and produce the ills of which we complain.
And another part of that prayer symbol is not only

(30:18):
being down on one's knees with that humility, but also
closing one's eyes. And I think the closing one's eyes
represents that life from a material, limited point of view
often presents to us things that are wrong, like we
see that flat earth or the sun going around the Earth,

(30:38):
and it's just the opposite. And to get that truth
of what's really going on, often we need to shut
out a limited or material sense of things and go within.
Jesus said, the Kingdom of Heaven is within us. And lastly,
in that prayer symbol, you have hands coming together. And
it seems like all day long we have two hands,

(30:58):
two arms, as separate as can be, and yet in
prayer there's a coming together. There's that sense of unity,
of oneness, and often a pleading to understand it more.
And when Jesus said I and my Father are one,
I think he was not just saying it for himself,
but for all of us. We're one with God, like
a effect is with its cause. If God is the

(31:22):
cause of all, the one creator, then each of us
are the needed effect of God. And I think each
of us are needed, like every whole number in the
number system is needed. To the principle of mathematics, if
you just got rid of one thousand, seven hundred and
thirty four, it doesn't sound like that number is that needed.

(31:43):
You've probably never thought about it, probably never wrote that
number down in your life. And yet if you just
got rid of it, if reality couldn't use that number,
if it could never be cognized, thought written, then we'd
be in big trouble because I bet every computer in
the world, at least most of them, would say error.
Our stock market would crash, all sorts of things would unfortold,

(32:06):
unseen things would happen, and we'd be in big trouble
if that number went missing. Well, I think each and
every one of us so much more valuable and beautiful
and needed to creation than just a mere number. I
believe God is the principle of life, and we are
the highest expressions of life that we know about, and
we all should be so valued in love, and we

(32:27):
should feel that inside and out, not only for ourselves,
but for each and every person we encounter. Well, I
want to share with you a concatenation of healings, a
series of healings that a friend of mine had through
the practice of Christian science. That's going to illustrate more
about this topic finding unity and abundance through prayer. Well,

(32:51):
I had a friend of mine and I still have
this friend. And some years ago we were both looking
for apartments in a small town and we both, after
an art research, landed on an apartment that shared a
back deck. And we didn't even know we were living
in the same part of this town, and when we

(33:12):
fully realized the situation, it was just so lovely. And
we were both going through very difficult breakups at the
time people we both thought we would marry. And I remember,
in a rather uninspired or unenlightened moment, I was lamenting
with him about his difficulties and I just was saying
something like, oh, you should try to win back your

(33:36):
girlfriend or your ex girlfriend, and you two are so
wonderful together, and maybe just tell her how you feel
again and talk it out and maybe you can work
it out. And he said to me, you know what
I really think I should do, Nate, I should read
that book that you gave me, Science and Health with
Key to the Scriptures, written by Mary Baker Ready, And
he said, I think the answers are in there. And

(33:58):
I said to him, yeah, go with your inspiration, not mine.
And he did start to read that book, and what
started to happen to him, I thought was very beautiful.
You could see that there was a switch in his thought.
Instead of trying to get love from one person, he
started to give love wherever he was. The Bible talks

(34:18):
a lot about how giving is more important than getting.
And if you think about the analogy of being a
light beam, Jesus talked about himself as the light of
the world, but he also talked about if you follow
his teachings, that you too can be the light of
the world. He said that to his disciples, and I

(34:38):
believe that he was saying it for anyone who followed
his teachings or follows his teachings. And if you picture
a light beam emanating out from the sun, the sun
needs that light beam to express itself out of its
very own being. It expresses itself through each of those
light rays. And the light ray gets everything that it

(34:58):
is from it source, the Sun, and there's a reciprocal
needing each other. There isn't there. The sun needs the ray,
the ray needs the sun. They're at one. But the
Sun is greater than the ray, just like Jesus talked
about God being greater than him, but him being at
one with God. So my friend was starting to learn

(35:21):
that just like that ray of light, a ray of
light is not designed to just to go get light
from others. It's designed to shine and to light up
whatever it lands on. If you picture a light beam
landing on the earth, whatever it lands on, a tree,
a person in a car, or a flower, it's designed
to light up and reveal the beauty of whatever it hits.

(35:43):
It's to show its color and all of its luminosity.
And so he was starting to see that he, as
the expression of God, was really designed to express love
wherever he was, and this giving and there was such
a joy in it. And the thing about abundance that

(36:06):
this lecture is about is that since love is God,
it comes from an infinite source. God is infinite. That
the more you love, the more you experience love around you.
It's the same thing with intelligence, because God is infinite intelligence.
The more you express intelligence, you don't run out of it.
The more you express it, the more you express it,
the more intelligent you appeared to be, and the more

(36:27):
intelligence you are aware of. And so as he started
to love in every situation in his life, he started
to discover a whole life of love, an abundant life
of love, and he didn't feel so isolated from just
not getting the love from the one person that he
hoped to and he was able to go through that

(36:47):
breakup with a measure of grace and it led on
to more good things in his life. Now, fast forward
a couple years, he got into a difficult car accident,
and without going fully into it, he applied christ and
science instead of getting rushed off to the hospital. And
there seemed to be some internal injuries, and yet after
a few days of prayer, he never had to go

(37:09):
to the hospital actually, and he was able to go
back to work. And it was such a quick and
wonderful recovery that people saw it and they were like, wow,
Christian science is efficacious. It really does work, and it
really impacted him. Now, a couple of years later he
called me, and this was out of the blue. We

(37:30):
had been out of touch for a while, and he said,
can we pray about teeth? Is that fair game? And
I said, of course, you can pray about anything. As
you get a better understanding of it from God's point
of view, you'll experience more harmony, more health. And so
he was excited about that. And so he was kind
of in between jobs at this point in his life,
and he didn't have a lot of money and he

(37:52):
didn't want to pay for this procedure out of the pocket.
He basically said he'd been going to a dentist off
and on for a long time, and they kept telling
him that he had this dead tooth that need to
be removed and if he didn't remove it, it was going
to cause more problems in his mouth. And it eventually
kind of came to the moment where they're really pushing
this that he had to get this removed, and so

(38:15):
that was when he called for prayer. Now we were exploring,
essentially some of these concepts that I've been talking about
about how to get through and past this concept of dualism.
In the Book of Luke, it essentially says that God
is the God of life, to whom there was no
death at all. And to God's point of view, God

(38:37):
just knows its own being and expresses its own being,
just like the sun expresses its own being, and like
rays of light, and it is no darkness at all.
And if you look at the sun, you might think,
like what's powering the sun? Like where are the batteries?
And to God, God is self sustaining life is self sustaining.

(38:58):
Nothing creates life. In every philosophy or way of viewing life,
you have to get down to a first principle, something
that can't be explained in terms of anything else. And
when Christian science explores what God is, it's just the
foundation of life. It's the foundation of life. And Jesus

(39:21):
he really wanted us to get that right understanding or
foundation understanding. That really speaks to me of a foundation understanding.
If you haven't read your Bible in a while, a
wonderful place to start is Matthew five six and seven.
Often scholars call it the Sermon in the Mount. I
like to call it Jesus's Greatest Hits. And Jesus essentially says,

(39:46):
after teaching all about how to align our thought with
God for about ten pages, at the end of it,
he says, if you build your life on these teachings,
it's like building on the rock, and it's like standing
on something that's a firm foundation. And then when the
difficulties the storms of life come, he essentially says, your
house or your mentality in other words, will not be

(40:06):
knocked down, and your good will not be knocked down.
So we were thinking about things like this, and we
were becoming more and more conscious that my friend, as
the expression of life, there couldn't be any death in him.
In this book Science and Health with que the Scriptures,

(40:27):
written by Mary Baker Ready, it says that substance is
eternal and incapable of decay. And he was dealing with
what seemed to be decay there, right, And yet he
was starting to realize, as this expression of God, he
couldn't decay anymore than the sun could set. The sun

(40:48):
doesn't really set. That's an illusion, right, And to think
about our substance as decaying, that's an illusion as well.
And he was recognizing that he was not only infinitely
good as the expression of God, but he was in
a sense made new every moment. In the Book of Revelation,
it says, behold, I God make all things new. If

(41:10):
you put your hand up to a light beam and
then take it down, it's shining bright just the moment later,
because that light beam is always made new every moment,
right out from its source. And we recognized that my
friend was not defined by any material images. Doesn't say
in the Bible that where the image and likeness of
matter or an X ray. No matter what that tooth

(41:33):
looked like in the past, that wasn't really him. Any
image of something that's decaying or imperfect, that's not the
expression or the cause of him. Just like if you
saw some numbers put in some strange order, if they
didn't express the principle of mathematics, they didn't really have

(41:54):
a cause, or they don't really have a cause. And
we were recognizing what my friends cause action is as God,
divine love that knows no hate, principle that knows no
chaos or things out of place, divine soul that knows
no ugliness or breakage or things out of sorts. God

(42:16):
is life in whom there is no death at all.
And as we are praying to really overcome this false
sense of dualism and unite with God in our heart,
our mind, our soul, to really feel this oneness that
we are the very living expression of God and nothing else,
and there's just one thing going on. As we are

(42:38):
praying along those lines, we were recognizing what you call
divine law, that these ideas are not just inspirational kind
of poetic ways of thinking about things, but they're actually
the true relationship. Every science is based upon relationships, how
one thing relates to another. You study chemistry, for example,

(42:58):
it's how one chemical relates to another chemical in a
way that is always the same. But Christian science explores
the two biggest relationships that we have, our relationship to
God and our relationship with others. Jesus basically boiled down
all the apparent laws in the Judaic scriptures, and he
basically said, if you boil it down, it's all about

(43:21):
loving God and loving each other, loving our neighbor as ourself.
In other words, so we were recognizing in prayer that
my friend existed as the very outcome the effect of
this great cause that is love, and that is understanding
ourselves in right relationship. As we thought and prayed along

(43:43):
those lines, we just started to feel this wonderful, deep
sense of peace and assurance that all would be well.
And eventually he went back to the dentist and they
looked into his mouth, and all of a sudden things
were different. They said that tooth looked perfectly healthy, and
they had never seen anything like it in all their
years of dentistry, and it was just so cool. And

(44:07):
yet it wasn't a miracle that happened there. It was
not supernatural. It was super natural, the most natural thing
in the world. We were just exploring in kind of
a simple, childlike pure way, what we are as the
effect of God. And as we really understood that in prayer,

(44:28):
we are able to experience that on the outside, what
we see on the outside of life is always the
expression of some kind of mentality. That's why prayer, when
it shifts our thoughts and aligns them with the mind
that is God, with the love that is God, things
change because what we see before us is always an
expression of mentality. Just like when you're in a dream,

(44:50):
you think you're in a world of physical laws that
kind of are governing you, but when you step outside
of it, you realize the whole thing was governed by
one mind. And in a dream we see things that
are wrong because it's not the expression of a perfect mind, right,
it's the expression of what you call immortal mind. But

(45:10):
God is the infinite mind that is Love, in which
everything is unified and good and needed, just like every
number in the number system is needed to the mathematics,
the principle of mathematics. God needs each and every one
of us. And when we realize that we're needed, and
we start to apply these laws that we learn in

(45:32):
Christian science of our relationship to God, we can find
not only that we're forever unified with God, but that
we're naturally unified with others through love through God. And
it feels so right to love each other because it's
literally right. And as we do this in life, we

(45:52):
find that no matter what situation we're in, we can
experience the abundance of God's love because as we listen
to God to love for what we need to know,
God will keep giving us good ideas. When I pray,
it's like I like to think that it's like putting
my hands out to Niagara Falls and the water just
keeps on flowing. When we ask God in simple prayers,

(46:15):
things like what do I need to do to help?
How can I know your love? How can I serve
in a way that will bless people today? How can
I express your nature? When we pray in simple and
humble ways like this, God will keep answering these humble
prayers in ways that will help. And I found that

(46:37):
not only the Bible is so helpful to study to
recognize how we can pray more deeply and effectively but
this book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,
written by Mary Baker Ready, really does help so much.
The whole first chapter is all about prayer. If you
like to get a copy, you could wait to the
end of this program and there'll be more information about
that and again your list to finding unity and abundance

(47:02):
through prayer. I'm Nate Frederick, a member of the Christian
Science Board of Lectureship, and this program is brought to
you by the eighth Church of Christ Scientist in New York,
New York and the First Church of Christ Scientist in Montclair,
New Jersey. And this talk is part of Spiritual Solutions
for Today's Challenges, which runs every Sunday at eight pm
until November twenty fourth. And if you'd like to learn

(47:23):
more about these ideas that I'm sharing, you can go
online to Christianscience dot com to find any church or
reading room in your area and a whole lot more.
You can also hear helpful, encouraging programs by phone. You
can dial three three two two FI, five six seven
eight nine to hear Bible lessons, the Christian Science Sentinel
Watch radio program, or a Spanish program, El Horado. These

(47:48):
weekly programs offer practical healing spiritual ideas just dial three
three two two FI five six seven eight nine. So
I just want to close here just telling you a
little bit about the founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Ready.
She was someone who recognized in a very deep and

(48:08):
profound way that what she had discovered as Christian Science
was so much more important than anyone's personal expression of
love or truth. There's a wonderful biography about her called
Christian Healer. It caalogs over three hundred healing experiences that
she had through prayer, and there's an index at the
back where you can flip through and you can just

(48:30):
read about any kind of difficulty you could imagine, and
you can find an experience how she helped heal someone
through prayer alone, through this Christian Science prayer alone. What's
so interesting is that this book is called Christian Healer,
but she didn't refer to herself as Christian Healer, Mary
Baker Ready. She referred to herself again and again as

(48:50):
the discoverer of Christian Science. Because she recognized that Christianity
is not based upon a gift, a dogma, a doctrine,
a myth, anything like that, but it's based upon a
universal knowledge or science that anyone can study and learn.
And in this book Christian Healer, if you read it,

(49:10):
there's so many wonderful accounts of how when people met
Mary baker Ready, they not only were inspired to see
life in the most loving and good way, but it
brought out the best in them. They didn't get addicted
to her personality, but they went out and they healed
more and they loved more. I just came across a

(49:32):
wonderful story in this book where someone's arm was disabled
with a neurological condition and they met Mary Bakerdy and
they were healed. And they said they weren't even healed
until they showed up at one of these Wednesday night
evening services and gave a testimony about it. And what's
so interesting is after this happened, this person is quoted

(49:55):
here saying I have never been able to I've never
been able since I saw Mary Bakerdy's beloved countenance to
hold hatred or malice toward a human being, though before
I rather prided myself in forgiving but not forgetting well.
In one Corinthians thirteen, it basically says in the NIV

(50:17):
version that love or God keeps no record of wrongs,
just like the principle of mathematics keeps no record of
wrong math. And God knows the good in each of us,
and it feels so right to know that good in
each of us because it is literally right. We are

(50:37):
composed of good because God is good. And the more
we realize that in life, the more we're going to
see unity and abundance not only in our individual lives,
but in our families, our community, in the world. When
we pray about world issues, we know world issues can
be healed too, because just like you know to time,

(51:00):
four equals eight, well two million times four a million
equals eight million. The scale does not matter. The scale
does not matter. It's about the truth. And when we
know something that's true, that can bless not only ourselves
and others, but the whole world. And I want to
say to everyone listening today that God loves you, Divine

(51:26):
love loves you, and this love is a principle of good.
And the more you learn about God, the more you're
going to see good and right things unfold in your life.
As I quoted before from the Christian science textbook Science
and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary bak Grady.

(51:46):
It says it is our ignorance of God that produces
a parent discord, and the right understanding of Him restores harmony.
Thank you so much for listening to this lecture, finding
you and abundance through prayer. I'm Nate Frederick, a member
of the Christian Science Board of Lectureship and again this program.

(52:08):
It's brought to you by Eighth Church of Christ Scientist
in New York, New York and the First Church of
Christ Scientist in Montclair, New Jersey. My talk is part
of a series called Spiritual Solutions for Today's Challenges, which
runs every Sunday until eight pm until November twenty fourth.
Thanks for tuning in.

Speaker 1 (52:26):
You can hear this program and others in the series
as podcasts. Go to war seven ten dot com slash
Spiritual Solutions. That's woor seven ten dot com slash Spiritual
Solutions to hear this and other programs in the Spiritual
Solutions for Today's Challenges series. Eighth Church of Christ Scientist

(52:47):
on seventy seventh Street between Lexington and Park Avenues, Manhattan,
and First Church of Christ Scientist on Hillside Avenue, Montclair,
New Jersey brought this program to you. These friendly churches
will welcome visitors to their services on Wednesdays and Sundays.
For details, go to CSNYC dot com. That's CSNYC dot com.

(53:10):
Live lectures will be presented in New York City and
in Summit, New Jersey. Nicki o'hagen will speak at Tenth
Church on McDougall Street in Manhattan on Tuesday, November nineteenth
at seven pm, topic the Science of God and its
Power to heal us. Julian Nis Tetro will speak at
the Christian Science Church on Springfield Avenue in Summit, New

(53:33):
Jersey on Saturday, November twenty third, at two pm, topic
Learning to Love Your Enemies. Niss Tetro will also present
Learning to Love Your Enemies in this radio series. Hear
it next Sunday at eight pm Here on seven ten wr.

Speaker 3 (54:59):
SEP Lord, I would delight and on my caipad to
thevery dramably my best, my friend. The nor material streams

(55:29):
are dried, thy fall miss the same. May I with
this be satisfied and glory thyed? Oh God, we'reere. It

(55:52):
may be found. It's so stuff finding me. I must
have all things.

Speaker 2 (55:58):
And bad.

Speaker 3 (56:01):
Well, God has got to me that that a strong

(56:30):
faith to long within to credit what my save you said,
whose word can now

Speaker 2 (56:43):
Fit