Abiding Safely in Christ
By Jürgen Kurt Stark
From the April 2016 issue of The Christian Science Journal
First appeared as a Web Original on December 3, 2015
The security we all yearn for is found only in the teachings of Christ. When Christ Jesus said, “If ye abide in me” (John 15:7), he gave us the prerequisite for his every promise of good, including “There shall not an hair of your head perish” (Luke 21:18). How similar this is to the Psalmist’s vital qualification, “He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High” (Psalms 91:1), which precedes all his assurances of protection found in this well-loved psalm. Both statements indicate that our mental abiding place is more important for our security than our physical location. However surprising this might sound, it is one of the strong teachings of the Bible that is borne out in so many escapes from evil circumstances told in its pages.
The questions to ask ourselves—as the Bible might put them to us—are: Do we dwell in the valley of materialism, or are we attaining daily more of the mountaintop of spirituality? Do we pray to hold to, or abide in, the consciousness of Christ, God’s true idea as expressed in the life of Jesus, or allow ourselves to stay in the materialistic consciousness of Adam, representative of a false concept of God’s man? As people who wish to help our world, we cannot be unmindful of these differing mental conditions upon which the promise of our safety (or the lack thereof) is based.
Our great Exemplar, Christ Jesus, practiced spirituality throughout his life, and as a consequence we don’t find any record in the Bible that he was afraid. He never believed in any evil thing, but he called things evil. He identified evil actions and the people who did them, but he never swerved from the spiritual fact of one God, one perfect creation, and one power, the power of the Godhead as taught in the Old Testament. He didn’t abide in fear. He didn’t accept disease or death as realities, as part of God’s creation. And because he did not make room for such events in his consciousness, he did not succumb to them in his life or in his body.
We have the Bible’s account of Jesus walking safely through a menacing mob intent on throwing him off a cliff. It’s apparent that nothing could convince him that his life was in danger or threatened with extinction. He slept peacefully in a ship on a stormy lake, while his disciples were frightened by the waves and feared for their lives. Nothing could terrorize Jesus, for as the writer of Hebrews says, he was “without sin” (Hebrews 4:15), without material-mindedness. He did not believe in a power apart from God. By contrast, it is our believing in evil’s reality that makes us believe it can endanger us and subject us to its conditions.
Jesus had no worldly weapons to defend himself. His defense was in the goodness he lived, his reflection of God. His every thought abode in Christ, in the imperishable Truth he embodied. Throughout his career he taught that the kingdom of heaven, the realm of reality, is within man and forever intact. He knew his safety was in his demonstrated spirituality, in the living of the Christly qualities of purity and innocence, and not in reliance on physical weaponry. Jesus proved the security innate in one who gives evil-mindedness, alias the carnal or mortal mind, nothing to prey upon, for there was no materialism in Jesus. He said, “The prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in me” (John 14:30).
