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There are more than twenty verses in the New Testament telling of the God-Spirit-Within--knowledge commonly held among early Christians but which since became lost. Examples are:
"God is love. He that dwells in love dwells in God and God in him." (1 John 4:16)
"Guard those noble things given to you by the Spirit of God that dwells within." (2 Timothy 1:14)
"Surely you know that you are God's temple, and that God's Spirit dwells within you." 1 Cor. 3:16)
"We are sure that we live in union with God and that he lives in union with us because he has given us his Spirit." (1 John 4:13)
"But you live not in the flesh but in the spirit if it so be that God dwells in you." (Romans 8:16)
Memes and Genes
For hundreds of years ahead our major task will be to bring the primary teachings of the Papers to a world population that, at best, is only marginally literate.
Genes are the basic units of heredity. About 30,000 of them cooperate to specify that you are an individual member of the human species. Genes are passed on by parents to the individuals of the next generation. They control the evolution of the species.
For a society, memes are the equivalent of genes. Together they regulate cultural aspects of the society and tend to be passed on, generation by generation. They specify the evolution of that society.
"Jesus died for my sins," is a powerful meme that has had a controlling influence on the behavior of Christian societies for nigh on 2000 years. Because of what it implies about the nature of God, it must now be updated or Christianity will founder and die.
Short, sharp memes have the potential to redirect Christianity along new pathways--those that we can discover in the Urantia Papers--that will ensure the revival and survival of Jesus' Fourth Epochal Revelation. The two most powerful can be stated in many ways. They are:
God is good.
God dwells within each of us.
Short sharp memes like these have the power to do what the Urantia Papers alone cannot do--get through to the average human individual.
However a meme has little or no power unless it is served up repeatedly. It needs to be moved from short term to long term memory and then served up in new ways until it becomes an instrument of evolutionary change.
There is one more effective instrument of evolutionary change than a meme. That is a human life lived in complete accord with Jesus' original revelation--his life.
Developing a personal relationship with the God-Spirit-Within is primary for living a life in the imitation of Jesus. Having achieved such a personal relationship, "you are led by the Spirit and are no longer under the law" (Galatians 5:18). The God-Within becomes our sole authority for all that relates to our life of loving God and loving our neighbor as Jesus loved us.
Four hundred years ago, the Society of Friends, the Quakers, founded a Christian sect based upon the concept that the Spirit of God indwells us. Their firm belief was that the direct apprehension of God by the individual, without creeds, clergy, or other ecclesiastical forms, would lead to the purification of all Christendom. Now, four hundred years later, though still with us, this belief of the Quakers has made almost no inroads upon mainstream Christianity.
The error of the Quakers may have been disproportionate attention being given to secular affairs at the expense of spiritual progress--perhaps because of an inadequate understanding of what "spirituality" really implies. Consequently, the lives of individuals were less than inspirational for other Christians.
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