Thank you, Jeremiah
If Jeremiah (the biblical prophet) were here today, I’d email him for sure to thank him for sharing with us a precious prayer: “Heal me, O Lord, and I shall be healed; save me, and I shall be saved: for thou art my praise” (Jeremiah 17:14). I attribute a quick healing I had to important lessons this prayer taught me when I, too, turned to God for healing (see “Trusting God’s faithfulness,” Christian Science Sentinel, September 13, 2010).
God can indeed heal. God is almighty and ever present, and His love is constant, invariable, irresistible. God is the source and supplier of all good. So it’s natural to turn to Him for health as surely as it is to turn to Him for happiness, comfort, and strength – in fact, for everything.
The words of Jeremiah’s prayer might sound like a petition. And petitioning might seem like begging. But if we ponder Jeremiah’s prayer deeply, we see that it isn’t begging at all but is instead a prayer of expectancy and conviction. There is nothing in it about how dire or difficult Jeremiah’s need is, why it happened, or what God must do for him. With his whole heart, Jeremiah is turning to his God in purest love and trusting Him to be God, Spirit – ever present, all-powerful, and all good.
Finally, in the prayer’s last five words, “for thou art my praise,” I see that the prophet’s entire thought is on God – on His hereness, nowness, allness, onlyness, and goodness. Jeremiah must have clearly glimpsed that Spirit, God, is the only creator, cause, and condition of existence. Therefore, all that is created has to be and is just as spiritual and perfect as Spirit, despite what the physical senses claim. And it’s man’s spiritual sense – our “conscious, constant capacity to understand God” (Mary Baker Eddy, “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” p. 209) – that shows us this.
Simply praising God is enormous. It is spiritualized consciousness, filled completely with the thought of God. It is dwelling in “the secret place of the most High” as David described it in the beloved 91st Psalm (verse 1). When I turn to that psalm, it describes for me the safety and security that God’s thoughts – or angels – provide for His children (all of us). Jeremiah refers to them as “thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end” (Jeremiah 29:11).
The last three verses of the psalm sum it all up. In one of them God says, “Because he hath set his love upon me, therefore will I deliver him: I will set him on high, because he hath known my name” (Psalms 91:14). I see those “becauses” as perfect descriptions of what Jeremiah did. He went only to God, knew His nature, and trusted His love.
As we let all this sink in, our consciousness becomes alive with what we know of God as revealed in the Bible and Science and Health, the Christian Science textbook. Then, like Jeremiah, we won’t depart from this certainty of our God’s greatness – all-present, all-powerful, and so precious – until we realize that there’s nothing needing to be healed. At such moments, God’s supremacy and sufficiency feel certain to us. We feel embraced by divine Truth and experience healing.
So what lessons does Jeremiah’s prayer teach? What I have learned from it is that we need to go directly and entirely to God and keep our thought on Him instead of beginning with a problem and then throwing truths at it like darts at a dartboard. And that means turning to Him wholeheartedly – with our whole being, our whole heart, and every single thought.
In “Pulpit and Press,” Mrs. Eddy, the discoverer of Christian Science, writes, “You have simply to preserve a scientific, positive sense of unity with your divine source, and daily demonstrate this” (p. 4). That, I believe, is precisely what Jeremiah did, and what his prayer can inspire us to do, too, time and again.
Thank you, Jeremiah!
Adapted from an article published on sentinel.christianscience.com, June 22, 2023.
