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Jesus Christ Heals
Chapter 4
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[Jesus Christ Heals]
[Charles Fillmore's Works] [Unity on the Web Home Page]
Chapter IV
Producing Results
IT IS A striking fact that even back in the time of Moses
the health of the people was considered of great importance
and was always mentioned in connection with their spiritual
welfare. If they were obedient to the law, they kept in
health; if disobedient, they fell sick. The same law that
brought about these results has always been operative and
is active in our midst today. Faith in God as the health of
His people and obedience to the law of Being bring health.
Distrust and disobedience produce ill-health.
It has been proved again and again that there is a definite
relation between the thoughts of man and the conditions in
his body. Scientists of the world are experimenting with
mental processes and are discovering that the old Scripture
writers knew whereof they spoke when they taught that sin
produces sickness and righteousness health. It is known
that infants have been poisoned by the milk from the
breasts of angry mothers. Persons under the stress of fear
suffer a loss of appetite. Many other illustrations of the
effect of discordant mental states come to those who study
mind and its manifestations. Job understood the relation
between a mental concept and its result. He said: "The
thing which I fear cometh upon me."
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In the past century there has been a general awakening
among people to the realization of the relation between
righteousness and health, and men everywhere are seeking
the knowledge of God and His healing power. God becomes to
them their "all-sufficiency in everything." This
all-sufficiency manifests itself to them according to their
needs. To one it is health, to another it is freedom from
bondage to some habit, to a third person it is illumination.
Jesus was the great teacher and example of obedience to the
law of constructive thinking. All His commandments and
sayings tend toward the enhancement of life and health and
harmony. The reforms that man in mortal consciousness tries
to make are all based on destructive ideas set to work in
the external. The reform of Jesus is an inner
transformation: "I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill."
He came not to tear down but to build up. If we follow Him
we shall give our strength and substance and thought force
to constructive activity.
In order to understand the Scriptures and especially the
portion of them that gives the life and experiences of
Jesus it is necessary to study the action of the mind. The
movement of every mind in bringing forth the simplest
thought is a key to the great creative process of universal
Mind. In every act is involved mind, idea, and
manifestation. The mind is neither seen nor felt; the idea
is not seen, but it is felt; and the manifestation appears.
The history of mankind in the majority of its aspects shows
a steady growth or ascent from a lower
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to a higher estate. In the forms of nature external to man
the same law of development is seen. Jesus' statement that
"the earth beareth fruit of herself; first the blade, then
the ear, then the full grain in the ear" is a recognition
of the truth that evolution in the earth is universal.
The progress of man through the aid of uplifting influences
has been especially marked in the education of the mind. In
the field of mathematics alone almost unbelievable increase
in the understanding of abstract truth has been gained over
a period that began with the crude though systematic work
of the Egyptians, about 2500 B.C., and extended to include
the seventeenth-century research of Leibnitz, who developed
the branch of higher mathematics known as the infinitesimal
calculus.
Steady progress has been the rule also in that phase of
life which deals with a man's relations to his fellow men.
The various activities of social service have led to
improved working conditions, better homes, and more helpful
environments for those whose condition of life has called
for the help of their brothers. Sociology has thus resulted
in many movements for the uplift of mankind.
In the field of religion the upward march has been
especially remarkable. There is a wide range of religious
experience between the blindly groping faith that caused
men to pass their children through the fire as sacrifices
to their deities and the divine consciousness of Jesus
Christ, who submitted His body to the purifying fire of the
Spirit and came
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forth alive with a life that never dies.
The healing of the body of man must follow the law of
evolution, in common with the education of his mind and the
adjustment of his social relations. Jesus did His healing
spiritually. When He was told of the "great fever" of
Simon's mother-in-law, He administered no drug to reduce
her temperature. Instead He "stood over her, and rebuked
the fever; and it left her." Jesus knew the law that
"without any dispute the less is blessed by the better." He
knew that the blessing of health comes through the exercise
of faith on the part of the man who seeks it, that faith
opens the mind to the influx of power from on high, and
that the power of the Highest heals all diseases both of
soul and of body.
When faith is sufficiently strong to dissolve all adverse
conditions and to open the mind fully to the power of God,
healing is instantaneous. In the natural course of events
the patient who survives a fever goes through a long, slow
convalescence; hence perhaps the name "patient." Jesus had
no "patients" although He healed many who were "sick with
divers diseases." Simon's mother-in-law rose up immediately
and went about her work when Jesus denied the power of the
fever to hold her.
After a busy day of teaching in the synagogue in the course
of which Jesus restored to his right mind a man who "had a
spirit of an unclean demon," He ended the evening by
healing, without exception, "every one of them" that were
brought to Him. He had spent no time in the study of
pathology prior to
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this work. Shortly before that time He had spent forty days
in the wilderness in communion with God and in setting His
own purposes in order by the light of the divine
understanding that He had gained there. After each season
of healing and intensive teaching He again withdrew into a
desert place or to a mountain, either alone or in company
with His apostles, and there obtained a new influx of power
from the Father. So the healing work went on. There is no
record of incurables.
Further there is no record that Jesus took any precautions
to avoid infection when He was engaged in healing the sick.
He was without fear of evil because He acknowledged only
the power of the Highest, which is good. He put His hand on
the leper to prove to him that He was fearless and
confident. He spoke six short, decisive words, "I will; be
thou made clean"; and we are told that "straightway his
leprosy was cleansed" although the Scripture shows that he
was in the last stage of the disease ("full of leprosy").
There were no long explanations, no instructions given.
Jesus simply turned His super-will upon the leper, and the
power of the Highest flowed through Him instantly to do its
perfect work. Then only did an instruction follow. The
leper was told to offer the usual praise and sacrifice to
God and to ascribe his healing to the Highest rather than
to the power of personality.
Jesus always connected sin and sickness as cause and
effect. When the man sick of the palsy was let down through
the roof of a house that he might be
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brought before Jesus for healing, there were those present
who expected the healing to be done in some mysterious way;
and when Jesus spoke of forgiving the man's sins in order
to heal him they said: "Who is this that speaketh
blasphemies? Who can forgive sins, but God alone?" These
men lived in a material world and saw everything from a
material viewpoint. They did not understand that the man's
sins caused his palsy. As a proof of man's power to forgive
sin and thus heal the effects of sin Jesus said when the
man was brought for healing:
"But that ye may know that the Son of man hath authority on
earth to forgive sins (he said unto him that was palsied),
I say unto thee, Arise, and take up thy couch, and go unto
thy house. And immediately he rose up before them, and took
up that whereon he lay, and departed to his house,
glorifying God."
Jesus taught plainly that the mind was the place of origin
of every act. He said that if there was lust in the heart,
it was sin even though no overt act were committed. All
thinking people in this day accept without question the
fact that the body is moved by the mind; and those who have
made a study of mental processes have found that all the
conditions of the body are brought about by the mind; also
that there is a law of right thought and that a departure
from that law is sin or "missing one's aim," which is the
original Hebrew conception of sin.
Forgiveness really means the giving up of something. When
you forgive yourself, you cease doing
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the thing that you ought not to do. Jesus was correct in
assuming that man has power to forgive sin. Sin is a
falling short of the divine law, and repentance and
forgiveness are the only means that man has of getting out
of sin and its effect and coming into harmony with the law.
But who can tell what the law is? Only those who study man
as a spiritual and mental being. Study of manifestation
alone is futile; it leads nowhere. We must get at it from
the cause side. All sin is first in the mind; and the
forgiveness is a change of mind or repentance. Some mental
attitude, some train of mental energy, must be transformed.
We forgive sin in ourselves every time we resolve to think
and act according to the divine law. The mind must change
from a material to a spiritual base. The law is already
fixed; there is nothing in it to be changed, because God is
the lawgiver and does not change. The change must all be on
the part of man and within him. The moment man changes his
thoughts of sickness to thoughts of health the divine law
rushes in and begins the healing work.
The law is Truth, and the Truth is that all is good. There
is no power and no reality in sin. If sin were real and
enduring, like goodness and Truth, it could not be forgiven
but would hold its victim forever. When we enter into the
understanding of the real and the unreal, a great light
dawns upon us and we see what Jesus meant when He said,
"The Son of man hath authority on earth to forgive sins."
The Son of man is that in us which discerns the difference
between Truth and error. When we get this
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understanding, we are in a position to free our soul from
sin and our body from disease, which is the effect of sin.
Sin is the result of desire manifesting itself in erroneous
ways and may be compared to the errors of the child working
a problem in mathematics. When the error is discovered and
there is a willingness to correct it, under the law of
forgiveness man erases it as easily as the child rubs out
the false figures in his exercise. Thus in spiritual
understanding, the I AM of man forgives or "gives" Truth
"for" error; the mind is set in order and the body healed.
The moment man realizes this he puts himself in harmony
with the Truth of Being, and the law wipes out all his
transgressions.
In denying the reality of sin send out your freeing thought
to others as well as to yourself. Do not hold anyone in
bondage to the thought of sin. If you do, it will pile up
and increase in power according to the laws of mental
action.
No one can understand how forgiveness sets free the
sin-bound soul and the sick body unless he studies mind and
has some understanding of its laws. There is a universal
thought substance in which thought builds whatever man
wills.
The right images become active through the power of
thought. Man has unlimited power through thought, and he
can give his power to things or withhold it. If he thinks
about the power of sin, he builds up and gives force to
that belief until it engulfs him in its whirlpool of
thought substance. He forgets his spiritual origin and sees
only the human.
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He thinks of himself as a sinner "born in sin and conceived
in iniquity" rather than as the image and likeness of God.
Man also sees the law of sowing and reaping, and he fears
his sins and their results. Then fear of the divine law is
added to his burdens. The way out of this maze of
ignorance, sin, and sickness is through man's understanding
of his real being, and then the forgiving or the giving up
of all thoughts of the reality of sin and its effects in
the body.
But we must recognize the unity of the race in Christ and
include all people in our forgiving. A good freeing
statement is:
"I do not believe in the power of sin in myself or in
others."
If anyone tries to free himself while holding others in the
thought of sin, he will not demonstrate his freedom. No man
can rise except as he lifts the race with him in his
thought: "and I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will
draw all men unto myself." As by one man sin came into the
world so by one man it is taken away. As all were included
in the sin of one so all are included in the righteousness
of one, and every man stands sinless before God in Christ.
Recognition of this will make men free, and the greater the
number of men that recognize and declare the Truth the
sooner will all men know that they are free from sin in
Christ.
You must build upon faith in the reality of the spiritual.
The next step is to put your selfishness away. There cannot
be two in this kingdom. It is the
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kingdom of God, and man must give up. The John the Baptist
must recognize the Son of God that is in you and that this
Son must be always active in you in love, life, and power.
The kingdom is for the larger man. The personal man must be
eliminated.
The next step is love, universal love: not the love of
earthly possessions but the love of spiritual things. We
must give up the flesh man and all his possessions and at
the same time lay hold of the spiritual man. Then we have
everything although apparently we may have nothing. This is
a difficult proposition to those who think in terms of
material ideas. You must be able to get away from all
thought of material things. "Love . . . seeketh not its
own"; "is not puffed up." Love is not selfish. We cannot
have selfishness and love at the same time. We cannot have
this universal brotherhood unless we love everybody. We
must love all because we are all one. There must be in our
consciousness a recognition of the universal right of all
to all the possessions of the world.
Then there must be this inner growth that is a fuller
consciousness of the new life which comes with the entering
into this kingdom of Christ.
The fact is that there is a foundation for this world-wide
movement in behalf of purer men and better things for all.
There is something back of it all, and the old conditions,
diseases, and limitations must pass away; and the time is
now ripe for entering into this kingdom, this attainment of
the spiritual side of life, this growing of a new body; and
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every one of us can enter in if we only will to do so.
True, in all actual transformation of mind and body a
dissolving, breaking-up process necessarily takes place,
because thought force and substance have been built into
the errors that appear. In each individual these errors
have the power that man has given to them by his thought
concerning them. These thought structures must be broken up
and eliminated from consciousness. The simplest, most
direct, and most effective method is to withdraw from them
the life and substance that have been going to feed them,
and to let them shrivel away into their own nothingness.
This withdrawal is best accomplished by denial of the power
and reality of evil and affirmation of the allness of
Spirit. Nothing is destroyed, because "nothing" can't be
destroyed. The change that takes place is merely a
transference of power from an error belief to faith in the
Truth, through the recognition that God is good and is all
that in reality exists.
The doctrine of the Trinity is often a stumbling block,
because we find it difficult to understand how three
persons can be one. Three persons cannot be one, and
theology will always be a mystery until theologians become
metaphysicians. It is necessary to understand the Trinity
in order to be healed in soul and body.
God is the name of the all-encompassing Mind. Christ is the
name of the all-loving Mind. Holy Spirit is the all-active
manifestation. These three are one fundamental Mind in its
three creative aspects.
We have to be healed physically, mentally, and
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spiritually. Often people think they are sick physically
when they are just sick in soul. It is easy to understand
how the idea of perfect health may exist in the great
Father-Mind; also how that idea may become active in the
individual and manifest in his life. This simple comparison
clears up the mystery of the Trinity. Here are the
Scripture symbols compared with modern metaphysical terms:
God--Christ--man.
Mind--idea--manifestation.
Father--Son--Holy Spirit.
Thinker--thought--action.
Spirit--soul--body.
I AM--I AM conscious--I appear.
We want the actual overcoming power of Christ. To get this
we must appreciate life and enter into it thankfully and
heartily. "I came that they may have life, and may have it
abundantly." This abundant life is always present. When we
recognize it and open our consciousness to it, it comes
flowing into mind and body with its mighty quickening,
healing power, and they are renewed and transformed.
The following affirmations are for the purpose of
establishing the whole man in the consciousness of unity
and health. They are given as they came into mind without
any attempt at classification:
My body does not starve for my love and appreciation of it.
I recognize it, honor it, and love it as the body temple of
the living God.
I have now the only body I ever had. Though I were
reincarnated a thousand times, yet is my body
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the same. It is I. Its appearance depends on my beliefs and
thoughts and changes accordingly, but it is always the same
body, even as my soul and spirit are always the same. My
body is as much a part of my individuality as my soul. It
is eternal, like any other part of my I. It is I, even as
my soul is I.
I cannot disown my body and say that I borrowed it from my
parents. This is not the truth. I may have taken up some of
my parents' error beliefs and built them into my body; but
my body came from no one but God. It came from Him with my
spirit and soul and has ever coexisted with them. These
three are one, inseparable. It is the belief in man that
his body is separate from him and is something that he
merely owns that makes the appearance of separation. I do
not own my body: I am body. I do not own my soul: I am
soul. I do not own my spirit: I am spirit. And these three
are one.
The redemption of the body depends on my having the right
idea of body. It must be the divine idea, and there must be
no other. The eye must be single.
My body (or I manifested as body) is not filled with error,
sin, discord. Beholding myself free from these keeps me
manifesting thus. The law of growth is in beholding. While
I behold the body as anything else but its divine idea I
hold it there. It can never change before the belief of it
changes.
I am. I am in every cell of my body. I am every cell of my
body. I do not disown my body. I do not withdraw my I, but
I take possession--full possession--of every part in the
name of the Lord.
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I now fully identify myself with my body even as with my
soul and spirit, thus making the at-one-ment.
Since my body is I, if there appears resistance in it, that
resistance is my own; it comes only from me. It comes from
my failure properly to identify myself with my body. The
way to get control is to take it. This I do, not by will
power, by personal force, or by anything that recognizes my
body as separate from me, but by my consciousness of
oneness with it. This unifies all of me and stops all
resistance.
My body is life, purity, wholeness, sinlessness. In my
flesh I see God. What I see, what I behold, becomes
manifest.
"Beloved, believe not every spirit, but prove the spirits,
whether they are of God; because many false prophets are
gone out into the world. Hereby know ye the Spirit of God:
every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in
the flesh is of God: and every spirit that confesseth not
Jesus is not of God."
I confess that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh, even in
my flesh.
"Not for that we would be unclothed, but that we would be
clothed upon, that what is mortal may be swallowed up of
life."
The idea of the body as an earthly house is now dissolved,
and I am now clothed upon with the heavenly house, even the
divine idea of man complete. In this idea I am one with the
immortal, incorruptible flesh of Jesus Christ, and I have
eternal life. I do confess that Jesus Christ is come in the
flesh.
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