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Jesus Christ heals, by Charles Fillmore, [1939], at sacred-texts.com
JEHOVAH GOD restores me to health and wholeness. Words are quickened by those who speak them and they pick up and carry the ideas of the speaker, weak or strong, ignorant or wise, good or ill. Thus words descriptive of deity have been personalized in the thought stuff of the race and those who invoke them in prayer and meditation are given a spiritual impetus far beyond what they would receive from common words. It is a fact that the name Jehovah came to be held in such reverence by the rabbis that they never spoke the word aloud. Jesus said that His words were so charged with spirit and life that they would endure longer even than heaven and earth.
Next to Spirit the word of Spirit is the most powerful thing in existence. The author of the Book of Hebrews says "that the worlds have been framed by the word of God." We read in Genesis that "God said" and it came to pass. And God said, "Let us make man in our own image, after our likeness." Thus we see that man is the incarnate word of God, and it logically follows that our words bring forth whatever we put into them. Study the 1st chapter of John. Jesus said that a man will be held accountable for his lightest word.
Spiritually classified, the Jehovah of the Old Testament is identical with the Christ in the New. One who heals by the power of the word should become familiar with the inner meaning of all words and use those that appeal to him as possessing the greatest healing potency. Jesus promised that He would unite with the Holy Spirit in helping those who called upon Him. Unity healers have found that this promise is fulfilled when they concentrate in prayer and positive affirmation on the presence of the Holy Spirit and Jesus Christ. A new and strong contact is felt with spiritual life, as if it were a mighty battery, when the name Jehovah God or Jehovah-rapha ("the Lord that healeth thee") is spoken silently and audibly; then the ethers quicken with the name and shower spiritual life on both patient and healer. The word Jehovah or Yahweh is charged with spiritual power far above and beyond any other word in human language.
I am raised to perfection in mind and body by the healing power of Jesus Christ.
Quite a few Truth students ask why we emphasize Jesus Christ so strongly in our writings and statements of Truth. Spiritual psychology proves that the name of a great character carries his mind potency and that wherever his name is repeated silently or audibly his attributes become manifest. Jesus knew this and commanded His disciples to go forth in His name. The marvelous works they did prove that they exercised power far beyond anything warranted by their education or previous ability, power
springing directly from Spirit.
Every thinker who studies the life and teachings of Jesus readily admits that He attained an understanding of spiritual things far beyond that of any other man that ever lived. His mind touched heights far beyond those of other advanced searchers for Truth. As we unfold spiritually we see more and more that Jesus understood the finer shades of metaphysical reasoning and related His mind and body to both ideas and their manifestation.
Jesus demonstrated that He understood the healing power stored up in the body, which He said is released through faith. "Thy faith hath made thee whole." Jesus identified Himself and His name with the sacred name of the Hebrew dispensation, Jehovah, and added another link to that long chain of names and events that brought forth the perfect man ideated by God-Mind, Jesus Christ.
As a directive head is essential in any army, militant or spiritual, so in every forward movement of the human family there must be a leader. The leader is chosen because of his ability as a demonstrator of the principles adopted by the group he represents. The religious principles taught and demonstrated by Jesus were not originated by Him, nor did He claim them as a "discovery." He said that Moses wrote of Him, and He often quoted Moses, but with an interpretation quite different from that of the popular religious leaders. He told them that they studied the Scriptures expecting through them to attain eternal life when the only way to attain that life was through
Him, and they would not come to Him. Right here Jesus emphasized the spiritual man, the I AM in man, as the only way by which man can enter the kingdom of God.
Jesus was undoubtedly the greatest of all exponents of the impersonal I AM, which is revealed to man when he opens up the supermind within his own soul. Jesus Christ's real name is Jehovah, I AM. The personal man Jesus is merely the veil or mask worn by the spiritual man Christ or Jehovah. We are all, in our personality, wearing the mask that conceals the real, the spiritual, I AM. Jesus shattered that mask and revealed the spiritual man. He also taught the way by which we may all do what He did and thus fulfill the destiny implanted in us by the parent Mind.
There are many distractions to keep us from finding the one door into the inner kingdom and many voices calling to us that they will show us the easy way, but Jesus Christ is the only one that appeals to those who are grounded in principle.
Any declaration man may make in which the name Jesus Christ is used reverently will contact the spiritual ether in which the Christ I AM lives and will open the mind and body to the inflow of spiritual healing rays. These healing rays are very much superior to the ultraviolet rays that come from the sun or our best medical appliances, because they minister to the mind as well as the body.
Thy vitalizing energy floods my whole being, and I am healed.
The most inclusive name for Being is Jehovah God. Jehovah represents the individual I AM and God (Elohim) the universal Principle. When man thinks or says "I am" he is potentially giving freedom to the seed ideas that contains in its spiritual capacity all of Being. The natural man in his narrowed mental comprehension barely touches the seed ideas that expand in the Christ man to infinite power. The more we dwell upon and expand our I AM the greater looms its originating capacity before us. When Jesus proclaimed, "Before Abraham was born, I am," He realized that the I AM preceded all manifestation, however great, and was capable of infinite expression.
The proposition that the seemingly insignificant individual I AM contains infinite creative capacity appears absurd to the thoughtless, but we have numerous examples of extraordinary capacity for expansion in the little seeds that bring forth gigantic trees. The Scriptures plainly teach that men may become gods. Adam was expelled from the Garden of Eden because Jehovah realized that he might appropriate eternal life and live forever in his ignorance.
When man realizes that "death and life are in the power of the tongue" and begins to use his "I am" statements wisely, he has the key that unlocks the secret chambers of existence in heaven and earth.
The Christ substance (body) and the Christ life (blood) are accessible at all times and in all places to the one who awakens his soul to spiritual omnipresence. The table of the Lord is spread everywhere
for those who believe on Him as Spirit and in their Spirit affirmation eat of His body and blood. The appropriation by His followers of His life and substance is the very foundation of salvation through Jesus Christ. The mere acceptance intellectually of the teaching that we are saved by the blood of the Lord Jesus and the partaking of the bread and wine in a perfunctory manner will save neither mind nor body. The only thing that will do it is the understanding that Jesus raised His body life and substance out of the race consciousness into Spirit consciousness and that with our minds poised in that consciousness we can lay hold of the Spirit elements that will save us to the uttermost.
Nearly everyone needs both mind and body healing, and those who give faithful attention to the law as it operates in man are rewarded by demonstrations of healing. Jesus healed "all manner of disease," the same Jesus has broadcast that healing Spirit to the uttermost ends of the earth, and today all who will may be made whole.
The Christ life quickens and heals me.
Although millions have testified that they have felt the quickening life of Christ, other millions doubt if such a thing as the Christ life exists.
The unseen forces have always been an enigma to the masses, and even those who are expecting the unseen to spring forth suddenly into some marvelous manifestation do not recognize it when it comes to pass. It is said that when Marconi demonstrated to a group of scientists in Paris the power of radio waves,
they doubted his claims and sought in various ways to discover the concealed wires, which they were sure were being used. So every unseen force man uses has had to prove its existence by some visible manifestation that can be mechanically demonstrated. But are there unseen forces that cannot be mechanically demonstrated? The answer is that all unseen forces can be mechanically demonstrated and that they are being demonstrated every day the world over, but scientists have not yet recognized as mechanical all the devices through which man brings unseen forces into manifestation; for example, his own brain and the radio. These with many other unseen forces come under the head of mechanism.
Brain cells are the only material things that will transmit mind, and man has never yet been able to invent so fine a piece of mechanism outside his own organism. But brains are mechanical, and man does build and use them in expressing his intelligence.
The fact is that each of us builds a brain especially designed and fitted for our individual use and for no one else's. All attempts to turn our brains over to others in hypnosis or mediumship will prove abortive in the end.
In radio terms your brain cells correspond to the tubes in a combined broadcasting and receiving set, and you have tuned them to certain wave lengths and turned on the power. If you have not been informed of your innate ability to turn on or off the mind waves, you are functioning in the established race programs of personality: what your ancestors
have thought, what other people think, and what little thought you can conjure up yourself. Unless your mind has been quickened by the light of spiritual understanding, you are living in a little three-dimensional world whose beginning and end is sin or a falling short of the divine ideal.
"If a man keep my word, he shall never see death."
"I am the resurrection, and the life."
Jesus stressed the power of words, especially His words. In the parable of the sower He said, "When anyone heareth the word of the kingdom." Here He referred to the Logos, the creative Word, which framed the worlds, according to John. The creative Word or Logos is also identified as Holy Spirit, which is carrying forward the ideas of God as they unfold in the manifest universe.
As the Word of God, the Logos, is creating in the universe (body of God) so man's word is creating in his universe (man's body). That is why Jesus said that we should be judged by our words. We are creating a little universe in which the cells of the body correspond to the planets of the solar system. "And I say unto you, that every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment."
The "day of judgment" to us is any day that we get the fruit in body and affairs of some thought or word that we have expressed.
The creative power of man's word is in proportion to his understanding of God-Mind and his unity
with its law. The creative power of most men does not get beyond their own body consciousnesss, because they know very little about Spirit and their relation to its laws. The better we realize our spiritual relationship to creative Mind and conform our thoughts and words to its laws the greater is the power of our words. Jesus "tuned in" to Divine Mind until that Mind reinforced His mind and raised it to superhuman capacity. It was in one of His moments of mental exaltation that He declared, "The words that I have spoken unto you are spirit, and are life."
We have thought that we were to be saved by Jesus' making personal petitions and sacrifices for us, but now we see that we are to be saved by using the creative principles that He developed in Himself, and that He is ever ready to co-operate with us in developing in ourselves by observing the law as He observed it. "I in them, and thou in me, that they may be perfected into one."
Thus we see that when Jesus said, "If a man keep my word, he shall never see death," He meant that we should realize the life-giving properties of the creative words of God as He had realized them, that we should have no consciousness of death.
I have new life in Christ and I am healed.
To attain this realization of the word of life we must create currents of life in our bodies as Jesus did in His. Of all man's possessions the most valuable is life. "For what shall a man be profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and forfeit his life? or what shall a man give in exchange for his life?"
When Jesus uttered these words He was explaining to His disciples that He was about to pass through a transformation in which He would give up His physical life, though He would continue His manifestation in a spiritual life. They did not understand Him, and Peter "began to rebuke him." Jesus told them they did not understand the things of God "but the things of men." Up to this day the passing over of the natural life into the spiritual life is not fully understood by Christians. It is almost universally interpreted as something that takes place after the death of the body, while in fact it is a transformation of the issues of life while the body is intact. Paul said, "I die daily." So Jesus could not have appeared after His crucifixion in the same body if He had not daily given up the physical life and daily put on the Christ life. It is a step-by-step or cell-by-cell transformation.
What did Jesus mean when He said, "If a man keep my word, he shall never see death"? Did He mean death of the soul? There is nothing in His teaching to warrant such a conclusion. He meant that we shall escape physical death if we identify ourselves with the creative Word in Him, the Logos.
Then to understand the new life in Christ we must give attention to that mystical Word or Logos, because in it are wrapped the principles that, planted in our minds, will spring into new life in mind and body.
Eternal life and strength are here, and I am made whole through Jesus Christ.
Among the seven sacred names given to Jehovah by the Hebrew priesthood is "Jehovah-shammah," meaning "Jehovah is there." Jehovah is the name of the ever-living I AM. When the mystic desired to commune with the omnipresent life he did not speak the name aloud but silently intoned, "Jehovah-shammah!" This pervasion of his I AM with the ever-living I AM harmonized the spiritual man with his source, and the individual was merged with the universal.
A certain mystery has always accompanied the use of the sacred name, and the priesthood gained their ascendancy over the people by performing marvelous works through the silent and audible intoning of words charged with thoughts of spiritual power.
However a priest must undergo discipline to acquire mastery of the elemental forces that function in mind and body. A cursory reading of Exodus conveys the idea that for forty years Moses was a shepherd, tending the flocks of his father-in-law Jethro, priest of Midian. But his mastery of nature, as evidenced by his works in Egypt, plainly shows that he understood the control of matter by mind better than did the magicians of Egypt, although he was versed in their magic.
The followers of Jesus did marvelous works in His name, but that name was also used by those who were not His immediate disciples, and they succeeded in casting out demons so well that John complained about it. Jesus said, "Forbid him not: for he that is not against you is for you." So we find that a person's
name identifies him with his character. If that character is mighty in spirituality and power, he who invokes it in his prayers is automatically raised into a like sphere of power and what he says comes to pass. "And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son."
Salvation through Jesus Christ is not accomplished by looking forward to freedom but by realizing that we are now free through His freeing power, which we are using to cut the bonds with which our thoughts have bound us. Then we have only to establish ourselves in real life and strength by understanding that these attributes of Being are omnipresent and that our affirmations of that presence, will cause us to become conscious that we do now and here live, move, and have our being in eternal life and strength.
In the name and by the power and authority of Jesus Christ I am made every whit whole.
Man gives a name--that is, "character"--to every idea that comes into consciousness, and whatever he conceives a thing to be, that it becomes to him. So it is written in Genesis: "Whatsoever the man called every living creature, that was the name thereof."
Jesus taught and demonstrated that man is master of a kingdom far beyond the consciousness of the natural man, but accessible to those who open their mind to its laws and observe those laws in thought and act.
The official declarations of a representative of a country are recognized by all as worthy of credence.
Jesus represented the kingdom of the heavens, and we, His agents, take possession of that kingdom in His name and declare that we are vested with authority to bring spiritual forces to bear that will restore man to his primal perfection.
In the 3d chapter of Acts is recorded the healing by Peter of a man lame from his birth; and Peter says, "In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk. . . . and immediately his feet and ankle-bones received strength. And leaping up, he stood, and began to walk; and he entered with them into the temple, walking, and leaping, and praising God."
When the people were greatly astonished at this marvelous healing and gathered around Peter and John, Peter explained, "Ye men of Israel, why marvel ye at this man? or why fasten ye your eyes on us, as though by our own power or godliness we had made him to walk? . . . And by faith in his name hath his name made this man strong."
Shakespeare says, "Good name in man and woman . . . is the immediate jewel of their souls." But even Shakespeare, with his psychological insight, never realized how good a name would be or to what heights of power it could lift one who applies the laws of Spirit in its use.
Those who have searched diligently to know God and His Son Jesus and have prayed for the light of Spirit find that they possess a certain confidence and faith in the very name Jesus Christ and that to the one who speaks it the name draws creative forces far beyond mental comprehension.
Hence we should have confidence in the promises of Jesus that those who in faith use His name shall do the marvelous wonders that He did and even greater works of a spiritual character.
Read in the 16th chapter of Mark what are the signs of a real follower of Christ and see if you are measuring up to them: "And these signs shall accompany them that believe: in my name shall they cast out demons; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall in no wise hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover."
By the grace of God through Christ Jesus I am made whole.
Jesus knew what He had accomplished in breaking the mortal mesmerism of the race, and He boldly proclaimed His ability to help all those who join Him in seeking to effect a direct union with creative Mind.
As Jesus healed in Galilee so He is healing in the same spiritual realm of radiant health today. "To him that overcometh, to him will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the Paradise of God." "I am the way, and the truth, and the life."