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Urantia Book Paper 196 The Faith Of Jesus
SPIRITWEB ORG, PROMOTING SPIRITUAL CONSCIOUSNESS ON THE INTERNET.
Subjects Archive The Urantia Book Urantia Book PART IV: The Life and Teachings
of Jesus : The Bestowal Of Michael On Urantia The Times Of Michael's Bestowal
Birth And Infancy Of Jesus The Early Childhood Of Jesus The Later Childhood Of
Jesus Jesus At Jerusalem The Two Crucial Years The Adolescent Years Jesus'
Early Manhood The Later Adult Life Of Jesus On The Way To Rome The World's
Religions The Sojourn At Rome The Return From Rome The Transition Years John
The Baptist Baptism And The Forty Days Tarrying Time In Galilee Training The
Kingdom's Messengers The Twelve Apostles The Ordination Of The Twelve Beginning
The Public Work The Passover At Jerusalem Going Through Samaria At Gilboa And
In The Decapolis Four Eventful Days At Capernaum First Preaching Tour Of
Galilee The Interlude Visit To Jerusalem Training Evangelists At Bethsaida The
Second Preaching Tour The Third Preaching Tour Tarrying And Teaching By The
Seaside Events Leading Up To The Capernaum Crisis The Crisis At Capernaum Last
Days At Capernaum Fleeing Through Northern Galilee The Sojourn At Tyre And
Sidon At Caesarea-philippi The Mount Of Transfiguration The Decapolis Tour
Rodan Of Alexandria Further Discussions With Rodan At The Feast Of Tabernacles
Ordination Of The Seventy At Magadan At The Feast Of Dedication The Perean
Mission Begins Last Visit To Northern Perea The Visit To Philadelphia The
Resurrection Of Lazarus Last Teaching At Pella The Kingdom Of Heaven On The Way
To Jerusalem Going Into Jerusalem Monday In Jerusalem ... The Faith Of Jesus
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Paper 196 The Faith Of Jesus
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Introduction
JESUS enjoyed a sublime and wholehearted faith in God. He experienced the
ordinary ups and downs of mortal existence, but he never religiously doubted
the certainty of God's watchcare and guidance. His faith was the outgrowth of
the insight born of the activity of the divine presence, his indwelling
Adjuster. His faith was neither traditional nor merely intellectual; it was
wholly personal and purely spiritual.
The human Jesus saw God as being holy, just, and great, as well as being true,
beautiful, and good. All these attributes of divinity he focused in his mind as
the "will of the Father in heaven." Jesus' God was at one and the same time
"The Holy One of Israel" and "The living and loving Father in heaven." The
concept of God as a Father was not original with Jesus, but he exalted and
elevated the idea into a sublime experience by achieving a new revelation of
God and by proclaiming that every mortal creature is a child of this Father of
love, a son of God.
Jesus did not cling to faith in God as would a struggling soul at war with the
universe and at death grips with a hostile and sinful world; he did not resort
to faith merely as a consolation in the midst of difficulties or as a comfort
in threatened despair; faith was not just an illusory compensation for the
unpleasant realities and the sorrows of living. In the very face of all the
natural difficulties and the temporal contradictions of mortal existence, he
experienced the tranquillity of supreme and unquestioned trust in God and felt
the tremendous thrill of living, by faith, in the very presence of the heavenly
Father. And this triumphant faith was a living experience of actual spirit
attainment. Jesus' great contribution to the values of human experience was not
that he revealed so many new ideas about the Father in heaven, but rather that
he so magnificently and humanly demonstrated a new and higher type of living
faith in God. Never on all the worlds of this universe, in the life of any one
mortal, did God ever become such a living reality as in the human experience of
Jesus of Nazareth.
In the Master's life on Urantia, this and all other worlds of the local
creation discover a new and higher type of religion, religion based on personal
spiritual relations with the Universal Father and wholly validated by the
supreme authority of genuine personal experience. This living faith of Jesus
was more than an intellectual reflection, and it was not a mystic meditation.
Theology may fix, formulate, define, and dogmatize faith, but in the human life
of Jesus faith was personal, living, original, spontaneous, and purely
spiritual. This faith was not reverence for tradition nor a mere intellectual
belief which he held as a sacred creed, but rather a sublime experience and a
profound conviction which securely held him. His faith was so real and
all-encompassing that it
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absolutely swept away any spiritual doubts and effectively destroyed every
conflicting desire. Nothing was able to tear him away from the spiritual
anchorage of this fervent, sublime, and undaunted faith. Even in the face of
apparent defeat or in the throes of disappointment and threatening despair, he
calmly stood in the divine presence free from fear and fully conscious of
spiritual invincibility. Jesus enjoyed the invigorating assurance of the
possession of unflinching faith, and in each of life's trying situations he
unfailingly exhibited an unquestioning loyalty to the Father's will. And this
superb faith was undaunted even by the cruel and crushing threat of an
ignominious death.
In a religious genius, strong spiritual faith so many times leads directly to
disastrous fanaticism, to exaggeration of the religious ego, but it was not so
with Jesus. He was not unfavorably affected in his practical life by his
extraordinary faith and spirit attainment because this spiritual exaltation was
a wholly unconscious and spontaneous soul expression of his personal experience
with God.
The all-consuming and indomitable spiritual faith of Jesus never became
fanatical, for it never attempted to run away with his well-balanced
intellectual judgments concerning the proportional values of practical and
commonplace social, economic, and moral life situations. The Son of Man was a
splendidly unified human personality; he was a perfectly endowed divine being;
he was also magnificently co-ordinated as a combined human and divine being
functioning on earth as a single personality. Always did the Master co-ordinate
the faith of the soul with the wisdom-appraisals of seasoned experience.
Personal faith, spiritual hope, and moral devotion were always correlated in a
matchless religious unity of harmonious association with the keen realization
of the reality and sacredness of all human loyalties--personal honor, family
love, religious obligation, social duty, and economic necessity.
The faith of Jesus visualized all spirit values as being found in the kingdom
of God; therefore he said, "Seek first the kingdom of heaven." Jesus saw in the
advanced and ideal fellowship of the kingdom the achievement and fulfillment of
the "will of God." The very heart of the prayer which he taught his disciples
was, "Your kingdom come; your will be done." Having thus conceived of the
kingdom as comprising the will of God, he devoted himself to the cause of its
realization with amazing self-forgetfulness and unbounded enthusiasm. But in
all his intense mission and throughout his extraordinary life there never
appeared the fury of the fanatic nor the superficial frothiness of the
religious egotist.
The Master's entire life was consistently conditioned by this living faith,
this sublime religious experience. This spiritual attitude wholly dominated his
thinking and feeling, his believing and praying, his teaching and preaching.
This personal faith of a son in the certainty and security of the guidance and
protection of the heavenly Father imparted to his unique life a profound
endowment of spiritual reality. And yet, despite this very deep consciousness
of close relationship with divinity, this Galilean, God's Galilean, when
addressed as Good Teacher, instantly replied, "Why do you call me good?" When
we stand confronted by such splendid self-forgetfulness, we begin to understand
how the Universal Father found it possible so fully to manifest himself to him
and reveal himself through him to the mortals of the realms.
Jesus brought to God, as a man of the realm, the greatest of all offerings: the
consecration and dedication of his own will to the majestic service of doing
the divine will. Jesus always and consistently interpreted religion wholly in
terms of the Father's will. When you study the career of the Master, as
concerns prayer
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or any other feature of the religious life, look not so much for what he taught
as for what he did. Jesus never prayed as a religious duty. To him prayer was a
sincere expression of spiritual attitude, a declaration of soul loyalty, a
recital of personal devotion, an expression of thanksgiving, an avoidance of
emotional tension, a prevention of conflict, an exaltation of intellection, an
ennoblement of desire, a vindication of moral decision, an enrichment of
thought, an invigoration of higher inclinations, a consecration of impulse, a
clarification of viewpoint, a declaration of faith, a transcendental surrender
of will, a sublime assertion of confidence, a revelation of courage, the
proclamation of discovery, a confession of supreme devotion, the validation of
consecration, a technique for the adjustment of difficulties, and the mighty
mobilization of the combined soul powers to withstand all human tendencies
toward selfishness, evil, and sin. He lived just such a life of prayerful
consecration to the doing of his Father's will and ended his life triumphantly
with just such a prayer. The secret of his unparalleled religious life was this
consciousness of the presence of God; and he attained it by intelligent prayer
and sincere worship--unbroken communion with God--and not by leadings, voices,
visions, or extraordinary religious practices.
In the earthly life of Jesus, religion was a living experience, a direct and
personal movement from spiritual reverence to practical righteousness. The
faith of Jesus bore the transcendent fruits of the divine spirit. His faith was
not immature and credulous like that of a child, but in many ways it did
resemble the unsuspecting trust of the child mind. Jesus trusted God much as
the child trusts a parent. He had a profound confidence in the universe--just
such a trust as the child has in its parental environment. Jesus' wholehearted
faith in the fundamental goodness of the universe very much resembled the
child's trust in the security of its earthly surroundings. He depended on the
heavenly Father as a child leans upon its earthly parent, and his fervent faith
never for one moment doubted the certainty of the heavenly Father's overcare.
He was not disturbed seriously by fears, doubts, and skepticism. Unbelief did
not inhibit the free and original expression of his life. He combined the
stalwart and intelligent courage of a full-grown man with the sincere and
trusting optimism of a believing child. His faith grew to such heights of trust
that it was devoid of fear.
The faith of Jesus attained the purity of a child's trust. His faith was so
absolute and undoubting that it responded to the charm of the contact of fellow
beings and to the wonders of the universe. His sense of dependence on the
divine was so complete and so confident that it yielded the joy and the
assurance of absolute personal security. There was no hesitating pretense in
his religious experience. In this giant intellect of the full-grown man the
faith of the child reigned supreme in all matters relating to the religious
consciousness. It is not strange that he once said, "Except you become as a
little child, you shall not enter the kingdom." Notwithstanding that Jesus'
faith was childlike, it was in no sense childish.
Jesus does not require his disciples to believe in him but rather to believe
with him, believe in the reality of the love of God and in full confidence
accept the security of the assurance of sonship with the heavenly Father. The
Master desires that all his followers should fully share his transcendent
faith. Jesus most touchingly challenged his followers, not only to believe what
he believed, but also to believe as he believed. This is the full significance
of his one supreme requirement, "Follow me."
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Jesus' earthly life was devoted to one great purpose--doing the Father's will,
living the human life religiously and by faith. The faith of Jesus was
trusting, like that of a child, but it was wholly free from presumption. He
made robust and manly decisions, courageously faced manifold disappointments,
resolutely surmounted extraordinary difficulties, and unflinchingly confronted
the stern requirements of duty. It required a strong will and an unfailing
confidence to believe what Jesus believed and as he believed.
1. JESUS--THE MAN
Jesus' devotion to the Father's will and the service of man was even more than
mortal decision and human determination; it was a wholehearted consecration of
himself to such an unreserved bestowal of love. No matter how great the fact of
the sovereignty of Michael, you must not take the human Jesus away from men.
The Master has ascended on high as a man, as well as God; he belongs to men;
men belong to him. How unfortunate that religion itself should be so
misinterpreted as to take the human Jesus away from struggling mortals! Let not
the discussions of the humanity or the divinity of the Christ obscure the
saving truth that Jesus of Nazareth was a religious man who, by faith, achieved
the knowing and the doing of the will of God; he was the most truly religious
man who has ever lived on Urantia.
The time is ripe to witness the figurative resurrection of the human Jesus from
his burial tomb amidst the theological traditions and the religious dogmas of
nineteen centuries. Jesus of Nazareth must not be longer sacrificed to even the
splendid concept of the glorified Christ. What a transcendent service if,
through this revelation, the Son of Man should be recovered from the tomb of
traditional theology and be presented as the living Jesus to the church that
bears his name, and to all other religions! Surely the Christian fellowship of
believers will not hesitate to make such adjustments of faith and of practices
of living as will enable it to "follow after" the Master in the demonstration
of his real life of religious devotion to the doing of his Father's will and of
consecration to the unselfish service of man. Do professed Christians fear the
exposure of a self-sufficient and unconsecrated fellowship of social
respectability and selfish economic maladjustment? Does institutional
Christianity fear the possible jeopardy, or even the overthrow, of traditional
ecclesiastical authority if the Jesus of Galilee is reinstated in the minds and
souls of mortal men as the ideal of personal religious living? Indeed, the
social readjustments, the economic transformations, the moral rejuvenations,
and the religious revisions of Christian civilization would be drastic and
revolutionary if the living religion of Jesus should suddenly supplant the
theologic religion about Jesus.
To "follow Jesus" means to personally share his religious faith and to enter
into the spirit of the Master's life of unselfish service for man. One of the
most important things in human living is to find out what Jesus believed, to
discover his ideals, and to strive for the achievement of his exalted life
purpose. Of all human knowledge, that which is of greatest value is to know the
religious life of Jesus and how he lived it.
The common people heard Jesus gladly, and they will again respond to the
presentation of his sincere human life of consecrated religious motivation if
such truths shall again be proclaimed to the world. The people heard him gladly
be-
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cause he was one of them, an unpretentious layman; the world's greatest
religious teacher was indeed a layman.
It should not be the aim of kingdom believers literally to imitate the outward
life of Jesus in the flesh but rather to share his faith; to trust God as he
trusted God and to believe in men as he believed in men. Jesus never argued
about either the fatherhood of God or the brotherhood of men; he was a living
illustration of the one and a profound demonstration of the other.
Just as men must progress from the consciousness of the human to the
realization of the divine, so did Jesus ascend from the nature of man to the
consciousness of the nature of God. And the Master made this great ascent from
the human to the divine by the conjoint achievement of the faith of his mortal
intellect and the acts of his indwelling Adjuster. The fact-realization of the
attainment of totality of divinity (all the while fully conscious of the
reality of humanity) was attended by seven stages of faith consciousness of
progressive divinization. These stages of progressive self-realization were
marked off by the following extraordinary events in the Master's bestowal
experience:
1. The arrival of the Thought Adjuster.
2. The messenger of Immanuel who appeared to him at Jerusalem when he was about
twelve years old.
3. The manifestations attendant upon his baptism.
4. The experiences on the Mount of Transfiguration.
5. The morontia resurrection.
6. The spirit ascension.
7. The final embrace of the Paradise Father, conferring unlimited sovereignty
of his universe.
2. THE RELIGION OF JESUS
Some day a reformation in the Christian church may strike deep enough to get
back to the unadulterated religious teachings of Jesus, the author and finisher
of our faith. You may preach a religion about Jesus, but, perforce, you must
live the religion of Jesus. In the enthusiasm of Pentecost, Peter
unintentionally inaugurated a new religion, the religion of the risen and
glorified Christ. The Apostle Paul later on transformed this new gospel into
Christianity, a religion embodying his own theologic views and portraying his
own personal experience with the Jesus of the Damascus road. The gospel of the
kingdom is founded on the personal religious experience of the Jesus of
Galilee; Christianity is founded almost exclusively on the personal religious
experience of the Apostle Paul. Almost the whole of the New Testament is
devoted, not to the portrayal of the significant and inspiring religious life
of Jesus, but to a discussion of Paul's religious experience and to a portrayal
of his personal religious convictions. The only notable exceptions to this
statement, aside from certain parts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are the Book of
Hebrews and the Epistle of James. Even Peter, in his writing, only once
reverted to the personal religious life of his Master. The New Testament is a
superb Christian document, but it is only meagerly Jesusonian.
Jesus' life in the flesh portrays a transcendent religious growth from the
early ideas of primitive awe and human reverence up through years of personal
spirit-
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ual communion until he finally arrived at that advanced and exalted status of
the consciousness of his oneness with the Father. And thus, in one short life,
did Jesus traverse that experience of religious spiritual progression which man
begins on earth and ordinarily achieves only at the conclusion of his long
sojourn in the spirit training schools of the successive levels of the
pre-Paradise career. Jesus progressed from a purely human consciousness of the
faith certainties of personal religious experience to the sublime spiritual
heights of the positive realization of his divine nature and to the
consciousness of his close association with the Universal Father in the
management of a universe. He progressed from the humble status of mortal
dependence which prompted him spontaneously to say to the one who called him
Good Teacher, "Why do you call me good? None is good but God," to that sublime
consciousness of achieved divinity which led him to exclaim, "Which one of you
convicts me of sin?" And this progressing ascent from the human to the divine
was an exclusively mortal achievement. And when he had thus attained divinity,
he was still the same human Jesus, the Son of Man as well as the Son of God.
Mark, Matthew, and Luke retain something of the picture of the human Jesus as
he engaged in the superb struggle to ascertain the divine will and to do that
will. John presents a picture of the triumphant Jesus as he walked on earth in
the full consciousness of divinity. The great mistake that has been made by
those who have studied the Master's life is that some have conceived of him as
entirely human, while others have thought of him as only divine. Throughout his
entire experience he was truly both human and divine, even as he yet is.
But the greatest mistake was made in that, while the human Jesus was recognized
as having a religion, the divine Jesus (Christ) almost overnight became a
religion. Paul's Christianity made sure of the adoration of the divine Christ,
but it almost wholly lost sight of the struggling and valiant human Jesus of
Galilee, who, by the valor of his personal religious faith and the heroism of
his indwelling Adjuster, ascended from the lowly levels of humanity to become
one with divinity, thus becoming the new and living way whereby all mortals may
so ascend from humanity to divinity. Mortals in all stages of spirituality and
on all worlds may find in the personal life of Jesus that which will strengthen
and inspire them as they progress from the lowest spirit levels up to the
highest divine values, from the beginning to the end of all personal religious
experience.
At the time of the writing of the New Testament, the authors not only most
profoundly believed in the divinity of the risen Christ, but they also
devotedly and sincerely believed in his immediate return to earth to consummate
the heavenly kingdom. This strong faith in the Lord's immediate return had much
to do with the tendency to omit from the record those references which
portrayed the purely human experiences and attributes of the Master. The whole
Christian movement tended away from the human picture of Jesus of Nazareth
toward the exaltation of the risen Christ, the glorified and soon-returning
Lord Jesus Christ.
Jesus founded the religion of personal experience in doing the will of God and
serving the human brotherhood; Paul founded a religion in which the glorified
Jesus became the object of worship and the brotherhood consisted of fellow
believers in the divine Christ. In the bestowal of Jesus these two concepts
were potential in his divine-human life, and it is indeed a pity that his
followers failed to create a unified religion which might have given proper
recognition to both
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the human and the divine natures of the Master as they were inseparably bound
up in his earth life and so gloriously set forth in the original gospel of the
kingdom.
You would be neither shocked nor disturbed by some of Jesus' strong
pronouncements if you would only remember that he was the world's most
wholehearted and devoted religionist. He was a wholly consecrated mortal,
unreservedly dedicated to doing his Father's will. Many of his apparently hard
sayings were more of a personal confession of faith and a pledge of devotion
than commands to his followers. And it was this very singleness of purpose and
unselfish devotion that enabled him to effect such extraordinary progress in
the conquest of the human mind in one short life. Many of his declarations
should be considered as a confession of what he demanded of himself rather than
what he required of all his followers. In his devotion to the cause of the
kingdom, Jesus burned all bridges behind him; he sacrificed all hindrances to
the doing of his Father's will.
Jesus blessed the poor because they were usually sincere and pious; he
condemned the rich because they were usually wanton and irreligious. He would
equally condemn the irreligious pauper and commend the consecrated and
worshipful man of wealth.
Jesus led men to feel at home in the world; he delivered them from the slavery
of taboo and taught them that the world was not fundamentally evil. He did not
long to escape from his earthly life; he mastered a technique of acceptably
doing the Father's will while in the flesh. He attained an idealistic religious
life in the very midst of a realistic world. Jesus did not share Paul's
pessimistic view of humankind. The Master looked upon men as the sons of God
and foresaw a magnificent and eternal future for those who chose survival. He
was not a moral skeptic; he viewed man positively, not negatively. He saw most
men as weak rather than wicked, more distraught than depraved. But no matter
what their status, they were all God's children and his brethren.
He taught men to place a high value upon themselves in time and in eternity.
Because of this high estimate which Jesus placed upon men, he was willing to
spend himself in the unremitting service of humankind. And it was this infinite
worth of the finite that made the golden rule a vital factor in his religion.
What mortal can fail to be uplifted by the extraordinary faith Jesus has in
him?
Jesus offered no rules for social advancement; his was a religious mission, and
religion is an exclusively individual experience. The ultimate goal of
society's most advanced achievement can never hope to transcend Jesus'
brotherhood of men based on the recognition of the fatherhood of God. The ideal
of all social attainment can be realized only in the coming of this divine
kingdom.
3. THE SUPREMACY OF RELIGION
Personal, spiritual religious experience is an efficient solvent for most
mortal difficulties; it is an effective sorter, evaluator, and adjuster of all
human problems. Religion does not remove or destroy human troubles, but it does
dissolve, absorb, illuminate, and transcend them. True religion unifies the
personality for effective adjustment to all mortal requirements. Religious
faith--the positive leading of the indwelling divine presence--unfailingly
enables the God-knowing man to bridge that gulf existing between the
intellectual logic which recognizes the Universal First Cause as It and those
positive affirmations of the soul which
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aver this First Cause is heavenly Father of Jesus' gospel, the personal God of
human salvation.
There are just three elements in universal reality: fact, idea, and relation.
The religious consciousness identifies these realities as science, philosophy,
and truth. Philosophy would be inclined to view these activities as reason,
wisdom, and faith--physical reality, intellectual reality, and spiritual
reality. We are in the habit of designating these realities as thing, meaning,
and value.
The progressive comprehension of reality is the equivalent of approaching God.
The finding of God, the consciousness of identity with reality, is the
equivalent of the experiencing of self-completion--self-entirety,
self-totality. The experiencing of total reality is the full realization of
God, the finality of the God-knowing experience.
The full summation of human life is the knowledge that man is educated by fact,
ennobled by wisdom, and saved--justified--by religious faith.
Physical certainty consists in the logic of science; moral certainty, in the
wisdom of philosophy; spiritual certainty, in the truth of genuine religious
experience.
The mind of man can attain high levels of spiritual insight and corresponding
spheres of divinity of values because it is not wholly material. There is a
spirit nucleus in the mind of man--the Adjuster of the divine presence. There
are three separate evidences of this spirit indwelling of the human mind:
1. Humanitarian fellowship--love. The purely animal mind may be gregarious for
self-protection, but only the spirit-indwelt intellect is unselfishly
altruistic and unconditionally loving.
2. Interpretation of the universe--wisdom. Only the spirit-indwelt mind can
comprehend that the universe is friendly to the individual.
3. Spiritual evaluation of life--worship. Only the spirit-indwelt man can
realize the divine presence and seek to attain a fuller experience in and with
this foretaste of divinity.
The human mind does not create real values; human experience does not yield
universe insight. Concerning insight, the recognition of moral values and the
discernment of spiritual meanings, all that the human mind can do is to
discover, recognize, interpret, and choose.
The moral values of the universe become intellectual possessions by the
exercise of the three basic judgments, or choices, of the mortal mind:
1. Self-judgment--moral choice.
2. Social-judgment--ethical choice.
3. God-judgment--religious choice.
Thus it appears that all human progress is effected by a technique of conjoint
revelational evolution.
Unless a divine lover lived in man, he could not unselfishly and spiritually
love. Unless an interpreter lived in the mind, man could not truly realize the
unity of the universe. Unless an evaluator dwelt with man, he could not
possibly appraise moral values and recognize spiritual meanings. And this lover
hails from the very source of infinite love; this interpreter is a part of
Universal Unity; this evaluator is the child of the Center and Source of all
absolute values of divine and eternal reality.
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Moral evaluation with a religious meaning--spiritual insight--connotes the
individual's choice between good and evil, truth and error, material and
spiritual, human and divine, time and eternity. Human survival is in great
measure dependent on consecrating the human will to the choosing of those
values selected by this spirit-value sorter--the indwelling interpreter and
unifier. Personal religious experience consists in two phases: discovery in the
human mind and revelation by the indwelling divine spirit. Through
oversophistication or as a result of the irreligious conduct of professed
religionists, a man, or even a generation of men, may elect to suspend their
efforts to discover the God who indwells them; they may fail to progress in and
attain the divine revelation. But such attitudes of spiritual nonprogression
cannot long persist because of the presence and influence of the indwelling
Thought Adjusters.
This profound experience of the reality of the divine indwelling forever
transcends the crude materialistic technique of the physical sciences. You
cannot put spiritual joy under a microscope; you cannot weigh love in a
balance; you cannot measure moral values; neither can you estimate the quality
of spiritual worship.
The Hebrews had a religion of moral sublimity; the Greeks evolved a religion of
beauty; Paul and his conferees founded a religion of faith, hope, and charity.
Jesus revealed and exemplified a religion of love: security in the Father's
love, with joy and satisfaction consequent upon sharing this love in the
service of the human brotherhood.
Every time man makes a reflective moral choice, he immediately experiences a
new divine invasion of his soul. Moral choosing constitutes religion as the
motive of inner response to outer conditions. But such a real religion is not a
purely subjective experience. It signifies the whole of the subjectivity of the
individual engaged in a meaningful and intelligent response to total
objectivity--the universe and its Maker.
The exquisite and transcendent experience of loving and being loved is not just
a psychic illusion because it is so purely subjective. The one truly divine and
objective reality that is associated with mortal beings, the Thought Adjuster,
functions to human observation apparently as an exclusively subjective
phenomenon. Man's contact with the highest objective reality, God, is only
through the purely subjective experience of knowing him, of worshiping him, of
realizing sonship with him.
True religious worship is not a futile monologue of self-deception. Worship is
a personal communion with that which is divinely real, with that which is the
very source of reality. Man aspires by worship to be better and thereby
eventually attains the best.
The idealization and attempted service of truth, beauty,
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and goodness is not a substitute for genuine religious experience--spiritual
reality. Psychology and idealism are not the equivalent of religious reality.
The projections of the human intellect may indeed originate false gods--gods in
man's image--but the true God-consciousness does not have such an origin. The
God-consciousness is resident in the indwelling spirit. Many of the religious
systems of man come from the formulations of the human intellect, but the
God-consciousness is not necessarily a part of these grotesque systems of
religious slavery.
God is not the mere invention of man's idealism; he is the very source of all
such superanimal insights and values. God is not a hypothesis formulated to
unify the human concepts of truth, beauty, and goodness; he is the personality
of love from whom all of these universe manifestations are derived. The truth,
beauty, and goodness of man's world are unified by the increasing spirituality
of the experience of mortals ascending toward Paradise realities. The unity of
truth, beauty, and goodness can only be realized in the spiritual experience of
the God-knowing personality.
Morality is the essential pre-existent soil of personal God-consciousness, the
personal realization of the Adjuster's inner presence, but such morality is not
the source of religious experience and the resultant spiritual insight. The
moral nature is superanimal but subspiritual. Morality is equivalent to the
recognition of duty, the realization of the existence of right and wrong. The
moral zone intervenes between the animal and the human types of mind as
morontia functions between the material and the spiritual spheres of
personality attainment.
The evolutionary mind is able to discover law, morals, and ethics; but the
bestowed spirit, the indwelling Adjuster, reveals to the evolving human mind
the lawgiver, the Father-source of all that is true, beautiful, and good; and
such an illuminated man has a religion and is spiritually equipped to begin the
long and adventurous search for God.
Morality is not necessarily spiritual; it may be wholly and purely human,
albeit real religion enhances all moral values, makes them more meaningful.
Morality without religion fails to reveal ultimate goodness, and it also fails
to provide for the survival of even its own moral values. Religion provides for
the enhancement, glorification, and assured survival of everything morality
recognizes and approves.
Religion stands above science, art, philosophy, ethics, and morals, but not
independent of them. They are all indissolubly interrelated in human
experience, personal and social. Religion is man's supreme experience in the
mortal nature, but finite language makes it forever impossible for theology
ever adequately to depict real religious experience.
Religious insight possesses the power of turning defeat into higher desires and
new determinations. Love is the highest motivation which man may utilize in his
universe ascent. But love, divested of truth, beauty, and goodness, is only a
sentiment, a philosophic distortion, a psychic illusion, a spiritual deception.
Love must always be redefined on successive levels of morontia and spirit
progression.
Art results from man's attempt to escape from the lack of beauty in his
material environment; it is a gesture toward the morontia level. Science is
man's effort to solve the apparent riddles of the material universe. Philosophy
is man's attempt at the unification of human experience. Religion is man's
supreme gesture, his magnificent reach for final reality, his determination to
find God and to be like him.
In the realm of religious experience, spiritual possibility is potential
reality. Man's forward spiritual urge is not a psychic illusion. All of man's
universe romancing may not be fact, but much, very much, is truth.
Some men's lives are too great and noble to descend to the low level of being
merely successful. The animal must adapt itself to the environment, but the
religious man transcends his environment and in this way escapes the
limitations of the present material world through this insight of divine love.
This concept of love generates in the soul of man that superanimal effort to
find truth, beauty, and goodness; and when he does find them, he is glorified
in their embrace; he is consumed with the desire to live them, to do
righteousness.
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Be not discouraged; human evolution is still in progress, and the revelation of
God to the world, in and through Jesus, shall not fail.
The great challenge to modern man is to achieve better communication with the
divine Monitor that dwells within the human mind. Man's greatest adventure in
the flesh consists in the well-balanced and sane effort to advance the borders
of self-consciousness out through the dim realms of embryonic
soul-consciousness in a wholehearted effort to reach the borderland of
spirit-consciousness--contact with the divine presence. Such an experience
constitutes God-consciousness, an experience mightily confirmative of the
pre-existent truth of the religious experience of knowing God. Such
spirit-consciousness is the equivalent of the knowledge of the actuality of
sonship with God. Otherwise, the assurance of sonship is the experience of
faith.
And God-consciousness is equivalent to the integration of the self with the
universe, and on its highest levels of spiritual reality. Only the spirit
content of any value is imperishable. Even that which is true, beautiful, and
good may not perish in human experience. If man does not choose to survive,
then does the surviving Adjuster conserve those realities born of love and
nurtured in service. And all these things are a part of the Universal Father.
The Father is living love, and this life of the Father is in his Sons. And the
spirit of the Father is in his Sons' sons--mortal men. When all is said and
done, the Father idea is still the highest human concept of God.
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Subjects Archive The Urantia Book Urantia Book PART IV: The Life and Teachings
of Jesus : The Bestowal Of Michael On Urantia The Times Of Michael's Bestowal
Birth And Infancy Of Jesus The Early Childhood Of Jesus The Later Childhood Of
Jesus Jesus At Jerusalem The Two Crucial Years The Adolescent Years Jesus'
Early Manhood The Later Adult Life Of Jesus On The Way To Rome The World's
Religions The Sojourn At Rome The Return From Rome The Transition Years John
The Baptist Baptism And The Forty Days Tarrying Time In Galilee Training The
Kingdom's Messengers The Twelve Apostles The Ordination Of The Twelve Beginning
The Public Work The Passover At Jerusalem Going Through Samaria At Gilboa And
In The Decapolis Four Eventful Days At Capernaum First Preaching Tour Of
Galilee The Interlude Visit To Jerusalem Training Evangelists At Bethsaida The
Second Preaching Tour The Third Preaching Tour Tarrying And Teaching By The
Seaside Events Leading Up To The Capernaum Crisis The Crisis At Capernaum Last
Days At Capernaum Fleeing Through Northern Galilee The Sojourn At Tyre And
Sidon At Caesarea-philippi The Mount Of Transfiguration The Decapolis Tour
Rodan Of Alexandria Further Discussions With Rodan At The Feast Of Tabernacles
Ordination Of The Seventy At Magadan At The Feast Of Dedication The Perean
Mission Begins Last Visit To Northern Perea The Visit To Philadelphia The
Resurrection Of Lazarus Last Teaching At Pella The Kingdom Of Heaven On The Way
To Jerusalem Going Into Jerusalem Monday In Jerusalem Tuesday Morning In The
Temple The Last Temple Discourse Tuesday Evening On Mount Olivet Wednesday, The
Rest Day Last Day At The Camp The Last Supper The Farewell Discourse Final
Admonitions And Warnings In Gethsemane The Betrayal And Arrest Of Jesus Before
The Sanhedrin Court The Trial Before Pilate Just Before The Crucifixion The
Crucifixion The Time Of The Tomb The Resurrection Morontia Appearances Of Jesus
Appearances To The Apostles And Other Leaders Appearances In Galilee Final
Appearances And Ascension Bestowal Of The Spirit Of Truth After Pentecost The
Faith Of Jesus
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