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More on the gospel of the kingdom
Stated in its simplest form the gospel of the kingdom is the recognition that the God-spirit dwells within us to lead us to want be like him.
The actual life of Jesus of Nazareth provides mankind with its highest understanding of the true nature of God.
[There is no perfect statement of that life and teachings (not even in the Urantia Book), if only because all things touched by human hand become corrupted. But through faith in the leading of the God-spirit within, all sincere men are enabled to recognize the perfect patterns--whether they be through Jesus or from some other source.]
There must come a revival of the actual teachings of Jesus; such a statement as will undo the work of his early followers that created a sociophilosophical system around the fact of Jesus sojourn on earth.
The new kingdom must be created around the gospel of the kingdom that blends man's highest moral ideas and spiritual ideals into his sublime hope for eternal life.
The present Christian church is the larval stage of the thwarted kingdom that will carry the church through the material age and over into a more spiritual dispensation.
Jesus way--It's not what you can get but what you can give.
If your God loves only Christians, or Mohammedans, or Buddhists, or Taoists or whatever, then there must be a greater God who loves all of his earthly children. The God of Jesus of Nazareth is that God.
The early evolutionary mind gives origin to a feeling of social duty and moral obligation derived chiefly from emotional fear. The more positive urge of social service and the idealism of altruism are derived from the direct impulse of the divine spirit entering the human mind.
Primitive man regards as neighbor only those very close to him. Jesus enlarged the neighbor scope to embrace the whole of humanity, even that we should love our enemies. There is something inside every normal human being that tells them that this teaching is moral--right.
All men recognize the morality of the universal human urge to be unselfish and altruistic. The religionist correctly ascribes it to the leadings of the indwelling God-spirit.
Individual happiness is achieved only when the ego desire of self and the altruistic urge of the higher self--the indwelling spirit of God--are coordinated and reconciled by the unified will of the integrating and supervising personality.
The pursuit of the ideal--the striving to be Godlike--is a continuous effort before death and after. The life after death is no different in the essentials than the mortal existence. Everything we do in this life which is good contributes directly to the enhancement of the future life.
Real religion does not foster moral indolence and spiritual laziness by encouraging the vain hope of having all the virtues of a noble character bestowed upon one as a result of passing through the portals of natural death.
True religion does not belittle man's efforts to progress during the mortal lease on life. Every mortal gain is a direct contribution to the enrichment of the first stages of the immortal survival experience.
Mankind is ennobled and mightily energized on learning that the higher urges of the soul emanate from the spiritual forces that indwell the mortal mind.
In the spiritual domain, mankind does have free will. Mortal man is neither a helpless slave of the inflexible sovereignty of God nor the victim of the hopeless fatality of a mechanistic cosmic determinism. Man is most truly the architect of his own eternal destiny.
It lifts man out of and beyond himself when he once fully realizes that there lives and strives within him something which is eternal and divine. And so it is that a living faith in the superhuman origin of our ideals validates our belief that we are sons and daughters of God and makes real our altruistic convictions, the feelings of the brotherhood of man.
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