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religious obligations, social duty, and economic necessity.
The personal faith of Jesus 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.
As a man of the realm, Jesus brought to God 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 in terms of the Father's will.
The God-consciousness of Jesus
The secret of Jesus' unparalleled religious life was his consciousness of the presence of God and he attained it by intelligent prayer and sincere worship--unbroken communion with God--and not by leadings, visions, or extraordinary religious practices.
Jesus trusted God much as the child trusts a parent. He had a profound confidence in the universe--just such a trust as a child has in its parents.
Jesus does not require his disciples to believe in him but rather to believe with him in the reality of the love of God and, in full confidence, to accept the security of the assurance of membership in the family of the heavenly Father. He desires that all his followers should share fully his transcendent faith. He challenged his followers to believe as he believed. This is the full significance of his one supreme command, "Follow me."
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.
What has real value?
Of all human knowledge that which is of the greatest value is to know the religious life of Jesus and how he lived it.
Jesus was a wholly consecrated mortal, unreservedly dedicated to doing his Father's will. 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.
In his devotion to the cause of the kingdom, Jesus burned all bridges behind him; he sacrificed all hindrances to the doing of the Father's will.
Jesus 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 taught men to place a high value on themselves in time and in eternity, and he was willing to spend himself in unremitting service to humankind. And it was this infinite worth of the finite that made the golden rule a vital factor in his religion. What mortal beings could fail to be uplifted by the extraordinary faith Jesus had in them?
On spiritual value
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.
The Indwelling Spirit of God
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 indwelling Spirit of God.
Three separate evidences of this Spirit indwelling of the human mind are:
Humanitarian fellowship--love. Only the spirit-indwelt intellect is unselfishly altruistic and unconditionally loving.
Interpretation of the universe--wisdom. Only the spirit-indwelt mind can comprehend that the universe is friendly to the individual.
Spiritual evaluation of life--worship. Only the spirit-indwelt mortal can realize the divine presence and seek to attain a fuller experience with this foretaste of divinity.
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