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PROVIDING UrantiaNITE SPIRITUAL LEADERSHIP
Robert Crickett, Dandenong, Australia.
The provision of spiritual leadership within The Urantia Book context is currently challenging a number of people around the world. As it should. The context is Epochal.
The spiritual dimension of the Epochal issues straight from the heart of our Michael. This universe is wholly his, for the Father. Jesus told us all to go into all the world and spread the gospel. Our Midwayer brethren have done just that, and to their eternal praise, how magnificently. The spiritual leadership of the new Christian, the Urantianite, is being quickened. Great faith is being fashioned, pruned, recast again and again and again. Such is the influence of the Epochal upon the call to perfection. Enormously significant global concepts are begging to be reshaped. Gigawatts of enlightenment are pleading to be switched on. Without the Lucifer rebellion, the world again can walk in universal union. Preparations are being made for this rebirth. The Epochal itself is giving birth to new kinds of faith-skills in a number of individuals around the world, those who are being challenged to provide not just a Urantianite witness, but new spiritual leadership.
When human minds struggle to grasp the purely spiritual dimension of this Epochal revelation, the first glimmer of light filters through when a door is opened as the result of a necessary surrender to the vision and skill of the intimate indweller. That opening is a death, an unknowing, and a resurrection--as real and as much for the Christian as for the Urantianite. The Epochal context does not change the fact that it is an indwelt mortal who is seeking to be moved by the one Christ. To personally own the truth of The Urantia Book revelation, is to own Sonship with colossal forces. Death and resurrection repeat themselves tirelessly in some endless predestined procession of transformations bearing great resemblance to Genesis 1:2. The door creaks open, seemingly grudgingly.
The great struggle to grapple with Urantia Book spirituality begins in earnest surprisingly, not when one encounters the wonderful ministry gifts of the Infinite Spirit, nor when one experiences fragments of the Supreme. It is when one draws so close to the intimate indweller that one is forced to acknowledge his most wonderful Son, Jesus, and to acknowledge him in a freshly Urantianite manner. That is when sincerity takes on a whole new light. That is when The Urantia Book changes from being a blessing to a challenge.
When Jesus' call to follow him, is taken sincerely; upon the realisation of direct sonship with the actual Michael of Nebadon and when one is truly known by that perfect friend; when one has been introduced to the Paradise Father by his Creator Son; when one is known to the Mother Spirit and ministers her grace and bounty; when the Father himself breaks down all barriers and reveals his most precious word and face right there before you and in you; when the love for your fellow mortal is truly the witness of Jesus' fatherly devotion to a brother or sister; when the divinity of your convictions root you in a soil of the goal of fusion and you stand erect and unshakeable like Van's ancient tree eager to bear the fruit of life; when your mortal heart has been wounded so terribly deeply by divine love and your superb strength and togetherness have been exhausted until you resemble a petal now so impeccably sensitive to the least passing current of that divine breath upon your inner most being which ever caresses the silence with its "This is the way"; when all mortal hope is gone and all fear is overturned by the presence of a sovereignty not even your own; when the intimate indweller has true access and you have ceased your valiant struggles and flickers of doubt; when you are happy and joyful to agree that the intimate indweller is your partner and not your Lord, your father and not your God, your perfection and not your sin's embarrassment, your realness and not your thoughts and feelings, your future and not your past, your life and not only some nirvanic state of being, your destiny and not your 'guide'; when this has settled upon you, doing with you as it will, you will gaze about and ponder, to Church or not to Church, to evangelise Urantia or not to evangelise Urantia, to dissolve within Christianity and remain in the world but not of it, or to retreat and be neither in it nor of it--such being the enormity of the work you see so personally set before you, and such being the weight of the honest view of your own imperfection and inadequacy!
There are times when all you see is the confusion wrought in your life by this Epochal revelation. Nobody understands you. Nobody speaks your soul's language. You have no one to pray with, worship with, celebrate with. This marvellous book about which you used to long to tell everyone, has turned from being a veritable shangri-la to the desert of some third century hermit fathers. You cannot discard the book, but you have reservations about sharing it as openly as you once did. There is no hell, no reincarnation. People are inherently OK. Why should you be the one to impose such a ghastly burden upon them. You cannot help them celebrate the very victory the revelation espouses. There is no church, no fellowship, no 'kingdom', no phone number to contact. And you don't know how to make it all happen. You don't know how The Urantia Book fits in with the human experience of other religions. You plague yourself with imperfection. Was Paul's experience on the Damascus Road, the same as Guatama Buddha's Enlightenment? And if it was, what do they have to do with Jesus' baptismal Adjuster fusion? And ... what about my own? Surely I can provide no leadership in this world. As much as I would love to be another Van, or Melchizedek, or Peter, or Nathaniel. Pity the poor soul who follows after my blind steps.
In this manner, the Epochal casts and recasts the great faith and perseverance which is forming Urantianite spiritual leadership. The desert fathers, the Carthusians of the modern day, coined the expression of being burned in the spiritual desert by Christ. This refers to
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