The biggest factor in spiritual healing is to resist the temptation to turn to God to bring about a healing. Instead we must acknowledge that God, Spirit, alone is the cause, the law, and the substance of all form, and that regardless of any appearance to the contrary, we will stand on this truth: “Judge not according to the appearance.” Appearances may testify to a sin or a disease; appearances may testify to something or other not of God, but if we judge by appearances, we are going to be a slave to appearances. To be free means to acknowledge that all that God made is good, and anything that does not conform to that standard is not God-ordained and has no law of God to enforce it.
To discipline ourselves not to turn to God expecting God to do something for us, is itself an indication of the difficulty of embracing the spiritual life, because the very idea of expecting God to do something for us suggests the idea that God is not doing it for us now. That is a denial of the truth that God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. It is a denial of omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience. To believe for a minute that God can do something for us after we have given a treatment or been given a treatment is a denial of God. The treatment should consist of the understanding of omnipresence, even before we pray.
“Before they call, I will answer.” Before they call! If we believe that God is going to operate after we have prayed, we have misunderstood the nature of God and have cut ourselves off from God. God is not going to act in the future. In God there is no time: no past, no present, and no future. There is only now. Now is the only time God is, and all that God is, God is now. All that God is ever going to be, God is being now; all that God ever was, God is now. All that God was in Galilee two thousand years ago, God is here and now this minute. All that God did in the Holy Land two thousand years ago through Jesus Christ, God is doing at this very moment, in this room, through us. Just as “God is no respecter of persons,” God is no respecter of time. God did not pick two thousand years ago as the time to do healing work and leave all the people before that and all the people who have lived since then out in the cold. There is no such God.
Everything is an activity of consciousness and, therefore, we consciously, sometimes even unconsciously, cut ourselves off from God by accepting the opinions of the world. But we can stop that nonsense any time we choose and realize:
‘What God was, God is, and what God is, God ever will be. God is omnipresence; God is omnipotence; and God is omniscience. God is, and that is enough. God is here and now where I am. “The place whereon thou standest is holy ground.” Here where I am is holy ground, for I and the Father are one. There is no separation between God and man! God shows Himself forth as man. God shows forth His whole glory as man, and that man is here and now, the man I am.’
We open our consciousness to this truth and, as we embrace it, we embrace the whole of the Godhead. If we do not open ourselves to the truth, we are closing our consciousness to God, but that does not prevent somebody else’s embracing it. “A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee,” if we open our consciousness to the truth of omnipresence.
J. S. Goldsmith: The Art of Spiritual Living. Chapter Six; Demands of The Spiritual Life; Resist The Temptation to Turn to God; Kindle location: page 102-104