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Marks of Religious Living
True religion is living love, a life of service that adds new meanings to all life.
The sincere religionist has an inner awareness of contact with something transcendent of the material, the God-Spirit-Within, and becomes motivated to attain high moral and spiritual goals. This intense striving is characterized by increasing patience, forbearance, fortitude, and tolerance.
The Acme of Religious Living.
It is altogether possible for every mortal being to develop a strong and unified personality similar to the perfected lines of Jesus' personality.
One basic aspect of Jesus personality was his emphasis of love and mercy in place of fear and sacrifice. Another was his unfailing trust in God. Jesus' trust was both sublime and absolute, reminiscent of a child's trust in its parents. Hence he was immune to disappointment and untouched by apparent failure. His faith was thus perfect but never presumptuous and it never faltered. Of Jesus, it is said:
He loved men and women as his brothers and sisters.
He went about doing good.
He loved the sinner but hated the sin.
He never grew weary of saying:
It is more blessed to give than to receive.
Freely you have received, freely give.
Everyone who seeks shall find.
If it were not so, I would have told you.
Jesus' personality included:
Symmetry in its exquisite balanced unification.
Unfailing kindness.
True sincerity.
Absence of hypocrisy, affectation, pretense, sham.
He lived the truth.
He was the truth.
Always approachable, always reasonable.
Free of all freakish and erratic tendencies.
Exquisite discrimination and sense of propriety.
Surcharged with divine enthusiasm but never fanatical.
Imaginative but practical.
Frankly faced the realities of life.
Never dull or prosaic.
Prudent but never cowardly.
Sympathetic but not sentimental.
Pious but not sanctimonious.
Unbound by tradition or conventionality.
Gentle and unassuming--yet the perfected man of the universe.
Superbly original but respectful of truth of predecessors.
Never in a hurry.
Brave but never audacious.
A pattern of reverence.
Great because he was good.
Jesus was the perfectly unified human personality. The traits of his personality plus his faith and sublime trust in God combined to permit him to live his life as a revelation of the nature of the heavenly Father--that aspect of the transcendent God that is comprehensible to the minds of mere mortals like us.
Jesus' life is therefore a pattern life for all those of any religion who truly seek God, to be like God, and who seek to do God's will--to live, "De imitatione Christi," in the likeness of Jesus.
[Jesus made no claim to be God or the Son of God. When accused of doing so he countered, "You are all sons of God." He also told his accusers he did not ask them to believe in him but rather to believe in the one who sent him.]
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