“I gazed in the mirror this morning and was stunned by how absolutely flawless I look” … said no one ever!
Well, maybe a tiny selection of people have said such a thing, yet for the rest of us, self-image isn’t always the most uplifting topic. A professional dancer once told me that even though she spends so much time each day in front of a mirror rehearsing, she cannot really tell what she looks like. While many people see beauty in her, her self-image is so blurred by the world’s body-image expectations for performers that, try as she might, she just can’t see herself objectively.
Beyond the images in stark glass mirrors, is there a better way to comprehend who we really are? In this week’s “Christian Science Quarterly” Bible Lesson on “Ancient and Modern Necromancy, alias Mesmerism and Hypnotism, Denounced,” there is some good counsel from the Bible’s book of Proverbs: “Be not wise in thine own eyes” (Proverbs 3:7).
Yes, that’s reasonable. Through our own eyes, self-image can definitely get skewed by our emotions, and then it’s tough to discern wisely who and what we actually are. Further on in this Bible lesson comes this helpful counsel from the New Testament: “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God” (Romans 13:1).
The only power, who is God, always beholds His creations with utter accuracy. Does that mean that God focuses on flaws in His creations? Hardly! God, understood in Christian Science as Truth and Life, sees only His own image in each of us.
Without using any physical constituents, God forms us spiritually for the simple purpose of expressing His perfect and good nature. This is such heartening news. In no way are we, God’s spiritual creations, images of mortals or mortality; we exist only as God’s self-expression. We reflect Him 100% of the time.
Instead of going to a mirror to discover ourselves, we can go in prayer to God, divine Truth. Divine Truth isn’t going to lie to us about who we are. With absolute accuracy, God will give us clear information, despite all of the substandard things that the world may mistakenly believe about us.
Jesus depended so completely on the activity of the Christ in his thoughts and experiences that he is known as Christ Jesus. About the Christ, there is a selection in this Bible lesson from the book “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science: “Christ is the true idea voicing good, the divine message from God to men speaking to the human consciousness. The Christ is incorporeal, spiritual, – yea, the divine image and likeness, dispelling the illusions of the senses; the Way, the Truth, and the Life, healing the sick and casting out evils, destroying sin, disease, and death” (p. 332).
Why is God constantly “voicing good” about us? Because divine Truth itself is purely good and is constantly expressing its own goodness within each of us! In reality, there is no other presence but God. So, there is nothing else from which we can receive identity. Not only is this an encouraging arrangement; knowing about it effectively dispels those hypnotic, degrading, material “illusions of the senses” staring back from a mirror.
In prayer, we find that we have the right to “be not wise in thine own eyes,” and confidently look away from that mortal image in a mirror. Why look away? Because something much more interesting has our attention: God’s image. It is our real self-image. “Science and Health” explains: “When man is spoken of as made in God’s image, it is not sinful and sickly mortal man who is referred to, but the ideal man, reflecting God’s likeness” (p. 346).
With God’s Christly wisdom and peace, is it possible to become consistent in identifying ourselves as this ideal man who exists as God’s image alone? Yes, it definitely is. Realizing the truth about ourselves equips us to expose, denounce, and prove the powerlessness of counterfeit mortal images. They don’t apply to us as God’s creations, so we don’t need to resent them anymore. Instead, we rejoice because “we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord” (II Corinthians 3:18).
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