Now let us think of this in relationship to God.  God is spirit.  Therefore, he is not corporeal, but he is personal.  We see this in Hebrews 11:6, where it says, And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.  That which distinguishes the Judeo-Christian God is the concept of God as personal yet infinite.  And as a personal God, he thinks, he acts, and he feels.  And in the area of creation, God thought, God spoke, and it was: a real eternal world.  This is wonderful beyond words.  Christian Science is wrong when it makes everything only a thought-world.  Eastern thinking is wrong, which very often would reduce everything eventually to a dream of God.  The external world is not an extension of God’s essence.  The universe is not God; it has a real objective existence.  There is a real external existence outside of God, because he made it outside of himself.  It is not a part of himself.  He spoke and it was, externally and really.  Let us notice the Bible’s statement concerning creation And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together, Colossians 1:17.  The external world which he made is now not a rival center in the universe.  By him all things hold together, and yet the Bible itself insists that because God made it, it is a real, objective, external world.   

Christian Science and Eastern thinking and philosophical idealism are counterfeits rather than total lies.  These philosophies are totally wrong in their system and in their direction, but they are not stupid.  The reason they trap man is not that they say nothing, but that they are perversions, they are counterfeits of the truth.  Although we do not produce an extension of our essence, there is a revelation of ourselves, just as God did not create by an extension of his essence, but what he has created is a revelation of himself.  Concerning man there is a body, and there is a real, external world.  But the thoughts are first, and they are central.  This is where true spirituality in the Christian life rests: in the realm of my thought-life. 

Thoughts developed or used directly from the work of Schaeffer, Francis. True Spirituality . Tyndale House Publishers, Inc