When Love Says, “You Are Mine”: Meeting Christ Jesus Beyond Religion
You know that feeling when you’re trying really hard to be “spiritual,” but secretly you’re just exhausted and a bit over it. The performing, the fixing, the “am I good enough yet?” loop. This week’s Christ Jesus Bible Lesson basically walks in, looks at all that spiritual hustle, and says, “Put it down. You’re already loved. Start from there.”
The Golden Text has this insanely tender line: “Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” That’s the starting point. Not “once you clean up your life,” not “after you understand Christian metaphysics perfectly.” Just: beloved. Already. The whole Lesson shows Christ Jesus as the living proof that our core identity is spiritual, God-sourced, and deeply okay. And that’s not just holy-sounding poetry. It’s a very practical way to live.
We’re told God didn’t send the Son to condemn the world, “but in order that the world might be saved through him.” That is such a direct hit on shame culture. Shame says, “You’re the problem.” Christ says, “You’re loved. Error’s the problem. Let’s deal with that.” Galatians adds that God sends “the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father.” That’s intimacy, not hierarchy. That’s family language. Spiritual sonship or daughterhood isn’t a far-off religious status. It’s the actual tone of our relationship with divine Love.
Science and Health calls Christ “the true idea voicing good, the divine message from God to men speaking to the human consciousness.” So Christ isn’t limited to one religious brand. It’s that deep, intuitive goodness that won’t shut up in you. The “still, small voice” that doesn’t condemn you but keeps nudging you toward more honesty, more compassion, more freedom. That’s Christ active, right where you are, whether you’re in church, in traffic, or on the couch with Netflix and snacks.
From fixing bodies to awakening thought
The Lesson really pushes us out of matter-based thinking. Great crowds bring the lame, blind, and sick to Jesus, and “he cured them,” and the people glorify God. On the surface, this looks like physical repair work. But the Christian Science commentary breaks it open. It says Jesus’ so-called miracles were actually “natural demonstrations of the divine power,” revealing how spiritual law operates. Christ, the “spirit of God, of Truth, Life, and Love,” heals mentally.
In other words, healing isn’t magic. It’s what happens when thought aligns with what’s really true about Life. Matter-based thinking says: “I am a fragile body trying to manage a chaotic world.” Spirit-based thinking says: “I am the expression of divine Life, already connected to what sustains and governs me.” That’s not denial. That’s a total reframe. And yes, it can feel awkward, even offensive at first.
There’s that moment in John 6 where Jesus talks about being the “living bread” and says whoever eats this bread will live forever. People hear this and basically go, “What is this teaching? Who can handle this?” and many walk away. Jesus doesn’t soften it to make everyone comfy. He clarifies: “It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.” He’s calling them out of a material interpretation into spiritual understanding.
Science and Health leans right into that discomfort. It says the “shock” we often feel at Truth comes from “the great distance between the individual and Truth.” Of course it feels jarring to move from “I am a suffering mortal” to “My actual Life is God, here and now.” But that discomfort isn’t punishment. It’s labor pain. Something real is being born in consciousness.
The woman at the well: no shame, just clarity
One of the most emotionally honest stories in this Lesson is the Samaritan woman at the well. She comes to do something mundane, just get water, and meets this guy who casually offers “living water.” He tells her the water he gives becomes “a spring of water gushing up to eternal life” in her. She’s skeptical. Practical. “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep.” Totally fair point.
Then things get uncomfortably specific. Jesus points out her relationship history, and it’s messy. That could have been a shame explosion moment. But notice what happens. She doesn’t spiral. She doesn’t collapse. She says, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet.” Then she runs back to town saying, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?”
The Christ-idea, Science and Health says, has always come “with some measure of power and grace to all prepared to receive Christ, Truth.” The Samaritan woman is a perfect example. She doesn’t get a sanitized “church girl” story first. She meets Christ right in her complicated life. And the result isn’t humiliation. It’s liberation. She leaves her water jar. She leaves the old routine and becomes this bold broadcaster of good news.
That’s such a good model for us. Christ never partners with shame. It exposes what isn’t aligned with Love, but only so we can drop it and discover identity rooted in God, not in our past.
Casting out demons… in 2026
Let’s talk about the demon bit, because that’s where some people mentally check out. In Luke 4, a man in the synagogue with “the spirit of an unclean demon” cries out, recognizing Jesus as “the Holy One of God.” Jesus rebukes the demon. It throws the man down, then leaves “without having done him any harm.” People are stunned. “What kind of utterance is this!”
From a Spirit-based lens, we don’t have to literalize the demon as some independent evil force. Christian Science reads these as personifications of fear, hatred, disease, self-destructive tendencies. It notes that our Master cast out devils, and “it should be said of his followers also, that they cast fear and all evil out of themselves and others and heal the sick.” Strong claim. Also wildly practical.
You’ve seen this in real life. When someone stops believing the story, “I am broken, I am alone, I’ll always be like this,” and instead grounds in a sense of being loved, of having purpose, of being upheld by something bigger than their trauma. The “devil” loses its stage. It can kick up a fuss as it goes, but it can’t actually harm who they really are.
And yes, the text is honest that “some people yield slowly to the touch of Truth.” There’s struggle. There’s resistance. Sometimes waking up to Christ’s demand feels like “drowning men” making “vigorous efforts to save themselves.” But those efforts are “crowned with success” by “Christ’s precious love.” That’s not spiritual self-help. That’s grace plus willingness.
From admiring Jesus to actually living this
The Lesson ends in a place that’s both beautiful and a bit confrontational. John 17 has Jesus praying that we may all be one, as he and the Father are one. That we may know we are loved “even as” he is loved. That’s radical equality of love. Not Jesus in one category and the rest of humanity as permanent spiritual interns. Oneness.
Science and Health responds by saying Christian Science is determined “not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and him glorified.” That’s not about personality worship. It’s about seeing and affirming the Christ-nature as what’s true of everyone. And it won’t let us stay in spectator mode. It says emotional love for Jesus is not enough. “We must go and do likewise,” or we’re not really using the blessings he gave us.
So what does “do likewise” look like in normal life?
Seeing yourself and others as beloved before you see the problem.
Refusing to partner with shame, even when your past is loud.
Letting discomfort with Truth be a sign of growth, not danger.
Treating spiritual healing as normal law, not rare exception.
Letting your “cup of cold water” be a word, a text, a kindness that says, “You’re not alone. There’s more to you than this moment.”
The Lesson describes “millions of unprejudiced minds… weary wanderers, athirst in the desert,” just waiting “for rest and drink.” That’s our world. That might be you this week. Your tiniest Christ-inspired act is not nothing. It’s participation in that living stream.
So maybe this week, instead of trying to be a “better Christian” or a “more spiritual person,” you experiment with something simpler. Start from “beloved.” Start from “God is with us.” Watch how that one shift quietly rewrites how you talk to yourself, how you respond to others, and how you face whatever is on your plate.
And I’ll toss this back to you:
Where in your life right now would it be most disruptive, and most healing, to actually believe “You are mine. You are beloved. I am with you”?
