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
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 coordinated 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 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.
Excerpt made possible by the
Urantia Book
Thy Sovereign Son
Michael of Nebadon
Michael of Nebadon
