Sunday, May 4th, 2025 Roundtable
The Key to Forgiveness
This week’s Lesson Sermon Subject: Everlasting Punishment
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Morning Prayer
Be wholly absorbed in the work of gaining daily more understanding of God. Then personal ambition, envy, desire to be in this or that place cannot use you. Personal ambition has no place in a Christian’s thought or life. He is wholly occupied in the loving, humble purpose to do good, to be good, and to prove that good is all that can govern thought, action, condition, or being.
I have only to trust in God, for Love is destroying disease. I can’t do it. Truth and Love are at work and error and hate can’t stand before them. They are destroying sin, disease and death. I know this and my faith in it cannot fail and I cannot fear.
from Collectanea, by Mary Baker Eddy, page 59
Daily Watch
107 — WATCH lest you permit a human estimate or attitude to blind you to the true and divine significance of your human experiences. This is an important point, since it is your attitude towards anything that determines how it will affect your progress.
If we whine, complain, or wonder why God is picking on us, when we get into hot or cold water, then we will get little spiritual growth. Once a man was thrown into a pit. Instead of becoming angry, when people threw stones at him, he used the stones to build steps, on which he climbed up to freedom.
Jesus says in Matt. 10:22, “He that shall endure to the end shall be saved.” Does a wise student bemoan the fact that he cannot seem to maintain human harmony all the time? Does he look upon a problem as a badge of shame, as if it exposed his lack to other students who are demonstrating more human harmony? It would surely spell an end to spiritual growth, if one could maintain harmony in matter.
What would be the value of a consciousness of God, and an understanding of Christian Science, that had not been toughened and strengthened so that it could endure to the end? When one has the right attitude toward human persecution and affliction, he will never be ashamed of his problems, nor will he personalize the channels through which such experiences come to him. He will perceive that it is Love’s plan and Truth’s way of training him to endure.
The gist of the Master’s statement is that, if one desires to establish himself in the character of the Christ, which means holding steadfastly to the realization of one’s spiritual identity until the claim of material selfhood is silenced, he must suffer the effects of persecution and affliction, in order to develop his receptive and retentive qualities, which will enable him to receive and maintain the eternal good.
Mortal man must be shaken out of his complacence. Otherwise he will never make an effort sufficient to throw off mortality, or to accomplish anything constructive along spiritual lines.
Unless one is progressing as he should under harmony, he should welcome whatever tends to keep him at the peak of spiritual endeavor, even if human sense rebels, and cries out to be let alone.
Discussion points
11. 248
Let unselfishness, goodness, mercy, justice, health, holiness, love — the kingdom of heaven — reign within us, and sin, disease, and death will diminish until they finally disappear.
Golden Text: Proverbs 28 : 13
“He that covereth his sins shall not prosper: but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy.”
On Confessing One’s Sins by Ella W. Hoag
If a man is jealous, envious, or revengeful, he will seek occasion to balloon an atom of another man’s indiscretion, inflate it, and send it into the atmosphere of mortal mind — for other green eyes to gaze on: he will always find somebody in his way, and try to push him aside; will see somebody’s faults to magnify under the lens that he never turns on himself.
What have been your Leader’s precepts and example! Were they to save the sinner, and to spare his exposure so long as a hope remained of thereby benefiting him?
Has her life exemplified long-suffering, meekness, charity, purity? …
Do we yet understand how much better it is to be wronged, than to commit wrong? What do we find in the Bible, and in the Christian Science textbook, on this subject? Does not the latter instruct you that looking continually for a fault in somebody else, talking about it, thinking it over, and how to meet it, — “rolling sin as a sweet morsel under your tongue,” — has the same power to make you a sinner that acting thus regarding disease has to make a man sick? Note the Scripture on this subject: “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.”
from Miscellaneous Writings, by Mary Baker Eddy, pages 129 to 130
Christian Science Bible Lessons by F. E. Mason
1. Psalm 32 : 1, 2, 5 (to 2nd .), 6 (to :), 9-11
1 Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.
2 Blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no guile.
5 I acknowledged my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid. I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the Lord; and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin.
6 For this shall every one that is godly pray unto thee in a time when thou mayest be found:
9 Be ye not as the horse, or as the mule, which have no understanding: whose mouth must be held in with bit and bridle, lest they come near unto thee.
10 Many sorrows shall be to the wicked: but he that trusteth in the Lord, mercy shall compass him about.
11 Be glad in the Lord, and rejoice, ye righteous: and shout for joy, all ye that are upright in heart.
LOOSE HIM AND LET HIM GO by Nancy Beauchamp
Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals.
from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy, pages 476 to 477
It were better to be exposed to every plague on earth than to endure the cumulative effects of a guilty conscience. The abiding consciousness of wrongdoing tends to destroy the ability to do right.
from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy, page 405
That God is light.—Here is the essence of Christian theology, the truth about the Deity as opposed to all the imperfect conceptions of Him which had embittered the minds of the wise. To the heathen, Deity had meant angry, malevolent beings, worshipped best by the secrecy of outrageous vice; to the Greeks and Romans, forces of nature transformed into superhuman men and women, powerful and impure; to the philosophers, an abstraction either moral or physical; to the Gnostics it was a remote idea, equal and contending forces of good and evil, recognisable only through less and less perfect deputies. All this John, summing up what the Old Testament and our Lord had said about the Almighty Father, sweeps away in one simple declaration of truth. Light was God’s garment in Psalm 104:2; to Ezekiel (Ezekiel 1:2), the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord was brightness; to Habakkuk (1 John 3:3), His brightness was as the light; Christ had called the sons of God children of the light (John 12:36), and announced Himself as the Light of the World (John 8:12); in the Hebrews (Hebrews 1:3), Christ was the refracted ray of the Father’s glory, “the express image of His person;” to James, the Almighty was the Father of all lights (James 1:17); to Paul, He dwells “in the light that no man can approach unto” (1Timothy 6:16); to St. Peter, the Christian state is an admission “into His marvellous light” (1 Peter 2:9). These ideas John comprehends: God is Light. Light physical, because (1) it was He who called everything first out of darkness, and (2) from whom proceeds all health and perfection; light intellectual, because (1) He is the source of all wisdom and knowledge, and (2) in His mind exist the ideals after which all things strive; light moral, because (1) His perfection shows that the difference between good and evil is not merely a question of degree, but fundamental and final, and (2) the life of Christ had exhibited that contrast sharply: once for all. Thus, on this declaration depends the whole doctrine of sin: sin is not merely imperfection; it is enmity to God. There can be no shades of progression, uniting good and evil: in Him is no darkness at all. Good and evil may be mixed in an individual: in themselves they are contrary.
from Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers
Evening Prayer, from Watches, Prayers, and Arguments by Mary Baker Eddy
I need not ask of You, dear Lord, how long
Sin will remain; nor need I ask how strong
It is. I only have to realize
I need not yield unto its abject lies.
Evil cannot dwell with me one hour
Except at my request; it has no power
Apart from that which I concede to it;
It makes no gain save that which I admit.
O for the seeing eye that pierces through
The mists of sense and sees the real and true,
That sees in God alone that which can please;
And then with all unlike Him disagrees.
Daily Angels by Max Dunaway, page 60
Let error kill itself. It comes to you for life and you give it the only life it has — in belief.
from Divinity Course and General Collectanea, (the “Blue Book”), by Mary Baker Eddy, page 215
Handling Malicious Animal Magnetism — A Collection of Articles on Overcoming Evil
Animal magnetism, I acknowledge your claims, but I denounce your power.
from Collectanea, by Mary Baker Eddy, page 151
Christian Science is susceptible of being made the repository for all the sins of the other two religions in marked face and form, whereby the most aggravated and exaggerated and liberated powers of evil have full sway.
Each religion defined by what the words include is right; but fatally wrong and wronged in its interpretation by the world, the flesh and the devil – the three-in-one of error, opposed to the trinity of Life, Truth and Love.
The woman has cast into these three measures of iniquity, the leaven that is fermenting them. Therefore, they, inherent in mortal mind, take vengeance on their destroyer. Alas for the masquerade of their friendship, of their gratitude, of their honesty, of their virtue, and especially of their humanity towards this woman. Does one human heart love her? No! It is all a farce. The carnal mind hates her, and deserts her, lies about her, steals from her, mocks her, betrays her, nails her to the cross and spits on her, saying ‘Come down from the cross’. Then parts her seamless robe that has not one ridge of the three religions as interpreted by this trio of error – and casts lots for it. Rending it into rags it picks up the shorn glory and decks itself therewith in harlequin jacket. Not one of these three religions – misused – is the Rock on which Christ, Truth, builds the church against which the gates of hell cannot prevail. And the last one is named the final one; therefore, it holds the most relentless war against the woman.
from Essays and Other Footprints, (the “Red Book”), by Mary Baker Eddy, pages 54 to 55
Catholicism is brotherly love, while Roman Catholicism is the Pope’s intention.
from Divinity Course and General Collectanea, (the “Blue Book”), by Mary Baker Eddy, page 75
Who is telling mankind of the foe in ambush? Is the informer one who sees the foe? If so, listen and be wise. Escape from evil, and designate those as unfaithful stewards who have seen the danger and yet have given no warning.
from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy, page 571