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Spirit of Truth sent to us by Jesus-Michael. But almost two thousand years have gone by and our planet is still in dire trouble. And so we have been provided with a back-up in the form of The Urantia Book that, in turn, has given us a new and fuller account of the life of Jesus. Why?
"Of all human knowledge, that which is of greatest value is to know the religious life of Jesus anti how he lived it. " (2090)
It is a fact that a phrase such as "doing the will of God" has little real meaning to most Urantians. Neither does the idea of being indwelt by the spirit of the Father. Christians have known from the New Testament that John told us that the spirits of the Father and the Son would come to us and abide with us (Jn 14:23), and Paul taught a similar message (Gal. 4: 6; Rom. 8: 14-16). But to most followers of Jesus, God is still "out there somewhere." The fact of God within them has no real, effective meaning.
Jesus came to Urantia to live as we live and to experience as we experience. He was to live this human-style life in "unbroken communion with the Paradise Father." To do so, Jesus fixed in his mind what he, as a human like us, conceived to be the nature of God--then he lived that nature.
"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."' (2087)
The life and teachings of Jesus, as revealed to us in the book, is the vital knowledge that provides the means of really knowing the mind of Jesus--thereby enabling the Spirit of Truth to make us more conscious of Jesus, which, in turn, enhances superconscious awareness of the activity of our Thought Adjuster in guiding our spiritual growth. Knowing the mind of Jesus provides us with another real advantage. In any real life situation in which we find ourselves, we can consult our memory banks and ask, "What would Jesus do?"--and seek the answer from both our stored memories and with the guidance of the spirit forces available to us. In this way, the bestowal life of Jesus has provided we backward, animalistic Urantians with a transforming power by which we can overcome the greatest handicap to our spiritual growth--our innate, inherited genetic inability to communicate adequately with our Thought Adjuster.
Possibly one of the most significant of Jesus' actions during the bestowal was the change he made to the second most important of the Hebrew commandments. The first of these was to love your God with all your heart and soul; the second to love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus changed the latter to "love one another as I have loved you." That change elevated a concept that could be interpreted in purely material terms and in many different ways to one which must be interpreted purely at the spiritual level.
What did Jesus mean by his injunction to love one another as he, representing God, loved us? The book tells us, "Love, unselfishness, must undergo a constant and living re-adaptive interpretation of relationships in accordance with the leadings of the Spirit of Truth. Love must thereby grasp the ever-changing and enlarging concepts of the highest cosmic good of the individual who is loved." (1950)
This instruction equates love and unselfishness. And it informs us that it is the Spirit of Truth that does the leading. Last but not least, we are informed that to love another is to want for them, not what appears to be right and propitious for the moment, but that which aligns with their highest cosmic good! Only God can know that! No wonder that Emmanuel's charge to Jesus included, "you need be concerned with but one thing, the unbroken communion between you and your Paradise Father." How then are we earthlings, handicapped by our inherent inability to communicate effectively with our Thought Adjusters, going to cope with loving our neighbor as Jesus loved us? We will not all have the same answer to this question. One possibility is to take note of what happened with the apostles. Four years in company with Jesus and with their own individual Thought Adjusters brought them less spiritual progress than a four week stint with the Spirit o Truth! How do we live in unbroken communion with the Spirit of Truth? The book tells us that the Spirit does not make us conscious of himself. Rather, the Spirit makes us conscious of the presence of Jesus. For most of us, being conscious of the presence of a God of whom we have little personal, intimate knowledge is not easy. In The Urantia Book we find the means to know Jesus intimately, as well as the information that, of all human knowledge, that which is greatest is to know the religious life of Jesus and how he lived it.
For me, the greatest gift associated with the receipt of The Urantia Book has been the substitution of prayerful communication with a "God out there" for a personal experience of "Jesus with me," a friend, always by my side, always there, always ready to provide what it takes to advance my spiritual progress, but at the same time always urging me to stand on my own feet and to make my own decisions. If only I could remember that he is always there!
I've known Urantia book readers who want to by-pass this phase of living with Jesus, who want only to deal with "the man at the top." Maybe they have missed that part in the book that informs us that, for all intents and purposes, a Creator Son is God to his universe. (66) With Jesus birthday coming up, what gift can we offer him? The words that come to mind are from a popular American folk hymn:
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