Do Not Allow Your Feelings To Lead You

 

Do Not Allow People To Distract You

 

The Infinte Spirit

The Infinite Spirit

8:0.1 (90.1)BACK in eternity, when the Universal Father’s “first” infinite and absolute thought finds in the Eternal Son such a perfect and adequate word for its divine expression, there ensues the supreme desire of both the Thought-God and the Word-God for a universal and infinite agent of mutual expression and combined action.

8:0.2 (90.2)In the dawn of eternity both the Father and the Son become infinitely cognizant of their mutual interdependence, their eternal and absolute oneness; and therefore do they enter into an infinite and everlasting covenant of divine partnership. This never-ending compact is made for the execution of their united concepts throughout all of the circle of eternity; and ever since this eternity event the Father and the Son continue in this divine union.

8:0.3 (90.3)We are now face to face with the eternity origin of the Infinite Spirit, the Third Person of Deity. The very instant that God the Father and God the Son conjointly conceive an identical and infinite action—the execution of an absolute thought-plan—that very moment, the Infinite Spirit springs full-fledgedly into existence.

8:0.4 (90.4)In thus reciting the order of the origin of the Deities, I do so merely to enable you to think of their relationship. In reality they are all three existent from eternity; they are existential. They are without beginning or ending of days; they are co-ordinate, supreme, ultimate, absolute, and infinite. They are and always have been and ever shall be. And they are three distinctly individualized but eternally associated persons, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit.

The Lessons of The Cross

 

Lessons of the cross

188:5.1 (2017.9)The cross of Jesus reflects the fullness of the supreme devotion of the true shepherd to even the unworthy members of his flock. It places all relationships between God and man forever on a family basis. God is the Father, man is his son. Love, the love of a father for his son, becomes the central truth in the universe-relationships between Creator and creature-not the justice of a king, who seeks satisfaction in the suffering and punishment of his sinning subject.

188:5.2 (2018.1)The cross shows forever that Jesus' attitude toward sinners was neither condemning nor condoning, but rather eternally and lovingly saving. Jesus is truly a Savior, in the sense that people are won to goodness and to righteous survival through his life and death. Jesus loves people so much that his love awakens the response of love in people's hearts. Love is truly contagious and eternally creative. Jesus' death on the cross illustrates a love strong and divine enough to forgive sin and absorb all evil doing. Jesus revealed to this world a higher quality of justice than righteousness - the purely technical right and wrong. Divine love not only forgives wrong deeds, it absorbs them and actually nullifies them. Forgiveness out of love far exceeds forgiveness out of mercy. Mercy sets aside the guilt of wrongdoing: love, however, nullifies sin, and all the weakness that results from it, forever. Jesus brought a new way of life to Urantia. He taught us not to resist evil, but through him to seek a goodness that actually destroys evil. Jesus' forgiveness is not condonation: it is salvation from condemnation. Salvation does not pass over wrongful acts: it restores them. True love does not compromise with hate, nor does it condone it, but it destroys it. The love of Jesus is never satisfied with mere forgiveness. The Master's love involves rehabilitation, eternal survival. It is perfectly correct to speak of salvation as salvation, if by this you mean this eternal rehabilitation.

188:5.3 (2018.2)Jesus, by the power of his personal love for men, was able to break the grip of sin and evil. He thereby set people free so that they could choose better ways of life. Jesus portrayed redemption from the past, which in itself promised victory for the future. Forgiveness thus provided salvation. Once the beauty of divine love has found full access to the human heart, it destroys forever the temptation of sin and the power of evil.

188:5.4 (2018.3)Jesus' suffering was not limited to crucifixion. In fact, Jesus of Nazareth spent more than twenty-five years on the cross of a real, intense, mortal existence. The true value of the cross lies in the fact that it was the highest and final expression of his love, the completion of the revelation of his mercy.

188:5.5 (2018.4)On millions of inhabited worlds, tens of trillions of evolving creatures who might have been tempted to give up the moral struggle and abandon the good fight of faith have looked again to Jesus on the cross and then continued the arduous journey, inspired by the sight of God laying down his incarnate life in dedication to selfless service to man.

188:5.6 (2018.5)The triumph of death on the cross is summed up entirely in the spirit of Jesus' attitude toward those who besieged him. He made the cross an eternal symbol of the triumph of love over hate and the victory of truth over evil when he prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. That devoted love was contagious throughout this vast universe: the disciples were kindled by their Master with it. The very first teacher of His gospel who was called to leave his life in this service said, when they stoned him, 'Do not impute this sin to them.'

188:5.7 (2018.6)The cross makes an supreme appeal to the best in man because it reveals a man who was willing to give his life for the service of his fellow men. No one can have greater love than this: that he is willing to give his life for his friends - and Jesus had such a love, that he was willing to give his life for his enemies, a love greater than had ever before been known on earth.

188:5.8 (2019.1)On other worlds, as well as on Urantia, this sublime sight of the death of the man Jesus on the cross of Calvary touched the emotions of mortals, while it aroused the highest devotion of angels.

188:5.9 (2019.2)The cross is the high symbol of holy service, of dedicating one's life to the welfare and salvation of one's fellow man. The cross is not the symbol of the sacrifice of the innocent Son of God in the place of guilty sinners in order to appease the wrath of an offended God, but it does indeed exalt itself forever, on earth as well as everywhere else in this awesome universe, as a sacred symbol of the good giving themselves to the bad, saving them precisely by this devoted love. Indeed, the cross exalts itself as the sign of the highest form of selfless service, the supreme devotion of a righteous life given entirely for the service of sincere service, even in death, the death of the cross. And the mere sight of this great symbol of the self-giving life of Jesus truly inspires us all to do the same.

188:5.10 (2019.3)When thinking men and women look at Jesus as he sacrifices his life on the cross, they will hardly afford to complain even about life's gravest adversities, much less about trivial irritations and their many, purely imaginary grievances. His life was so glorious and His death so triumphant that we are all lured into a willingness to share both. There is a true appeal in the entire self-sacrifice of Michael, from the days of his youth to this overwhelming spectacle of his death on the cross.

188:5.11 (2019.4)Take care, then, that when you consider the cross as a revelation of God, you do not look at it with the eyes of primitive man or from the point of view of the later barbarian, both of whom viewed God as a ruthless Sovereign who renders strict justice and inflexibly enforces his laws. Rather, you should take care to see in the cross the final manifestation of Jesus' love and devotion to the life mission by which he bestowed himself on the mortal races of his vast universe. See in the death of the Son of Man the climax of the unfolding of the Father's divine love for his sons upon the worlds of mortals. Thus the cross depicts the dedication of willing love and the gift of voluntary salvation to those willing to receive these gifts and dedication. There was nothing in the cross that the Father demanded - only what Jesus willingly gave and refused to avoid.

188:5.12 (2019.5)If man cannot appreciate Jesus in other ways and understand the meaning of his self-gifting on earth, at least he can understand the communion expressed in his suffering as a mortal. No one can ever fear that the nature and extent of his afflictions in this world are unknown to the Creator.

188:5.13 (2019.6)We know that the death on the cross took place not to reconcile man to God, but to encourage man to become aware of the eternal love of the Father and the endless compassion of His Son, and to make these universal truths known to a whole universe.

A Thought for Consideration from The Urantia Book

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Lao-Tse and Confucius

 

Lao-Tse and Confucius

94:6.1 (1033.4)About six hundred years before the arrival of Michael, it seemed to Melchizedek, long since departed from the flesh, that the purity of his teaching on earth was being unduly jeopardized by general absorption into the older Urantia beliefs. It appeared for a time that his mission as a forerunner of Michael might be in danger of failing. And in the sixth century before Christ, through an unusual co-ordination of spiritual agencies, not all of which are understood even by the planetary supervisors, Urantia witnessed a most unusual presentation of manifold religious truth. Through the agency of several human teachers the Salem gospel was restated and revitalized, and as it was then presented, much has persisted to the times of this writing.

94:6.2 (1033.5)This unique century of spiritual progress was characterized by great religious, moral, and philosophic teachers all over the civilized world. In China, the two outstanding teachers were Lao-tse and Confucius.

94:6.3 (1033.6)Lao-tse built directly upon the concepts of the Salem traditions when he declared Tao to be the One First Cause of all creation. Lao was a man of great spiritual vision. He taught that man’s eternal destiny was “everlasting union with Tao, Supreme God and Universal King.” His comprehension of ultimate causation was most discerning, for he wrote: “Unity arises out of the Absolute Tao, and from Unity there appears cosmic Duality, and from such Duality, Trinity springs forth into existence, and Trinity is the primal source of all reality.” “All reality is ever in balance between the potentials and the actuals of the cosmos, and these are eternally harmonized by the spirit of divinity.”

94:6.4 (1033.7)Lao-tse also made one of the earliest presentations of the doctrine of returning good for evil: “Goodness begets goodness, but to the one who is truly good, evil also begets goodness.”

94:6.5 (1033.8)He taught the return of the creature to the Creator and pictured life as the emergence of a personality from the cosmic potentials, while death was like the returning home of this creature personality. His concept of true faith was unusual, and he too likened it to the “attitude of a little child.”

94:6.6 (1034.1)His understanding of the eternal purpose of God was clear, for he said: “The Absolute Deity does not strive but is always victorious; he does not coerce mankind but always stands ready to respond to their true desires; the will of God is eternal in patience and eternal in the inevitability of its expression.” And of the true religionist he said, in expressing the truth that it is more blessed to give than to receive: “The good man seeks not to retain truth for himself but rather attempts to bestow these riches upon his fellows, for that is the realization of truth. The will of the Absolute God always benefits, never destroys; the purpose of the true believer is always to act but never to coerce.”

94:6.7 (1034.2)Lao’s teaching of nonresistance and the distinction which he made between action and coercion became later perverted into the beliefs of “seeing, doing, and thinking nothing.” But Lao never taught such error, albeit his presentation of nonresistance has been a factor in the further development of the pacific predilections of the Chinese peoples.

94:6.8 (1034.3)But the popular Taoism of twentieth-century Urantia has very little in common with the lofty sentiments and the cosmic concepts of the old philosopher who taught the truth as he perceived it, which was: That faith in the Absolute God is the source of that divine energy which will remake the world, and by which man ascends to spiritual union with Tao, the Eternal Deity and Creator Absolute of the universes.

94:6.9 (1034.4)Confucius (Kung Fu-tze) was a younger contemporary of Lao in sixth-century China. Confucius based his doctrines upon the better moral traditions of the long history of the yellow race, and he was also somewhat influenced by the lingering traditions of the Salem missionaries. His chief work consisted in the compilation of the wise sayings of ancient philosophers. He was a rejected teacher during his lifetime, but his writings and teachings have ever since exerted a great influence in China and Japan. Confucius set a new pace for the shamans in that he put morality in the place of magic. But he built too well; he made a new fetish out of order and established a respect for ancestral conduct that is still venerated by the Chinese at the time of this writing.

94:6.10 (1034.5)The Confucian preachment of morality was predicated on the theory that the earthly way is the distorted shadow of the heavenly way; that the true pattern of temporal civilization is the mirror reflection of the eternal order of heaven. The potential God concept in Confucianism was almost completely subordinated to the emphasis placed upon the Way of Heaven, the pattern of the cosmos.

94:6.11 (1034.6)The teachings of Lao have been lost to all but a few in the Orient, but the writings of Confucius have ever since constituted the basis of the moral fabric of the culture of almost a third of Urantians. These Confucian precepts, while perpetuating the best of the past, were somewhat inimical to the very Chinese spirit of investigation that had produced those achievements which were so venerated. The influence of these doctrines was unsuccessfully combated both by the imperial efforts of Ch’in Shih Huang Ti and by the teachings of Mo Ti, who proclaimed a brotherhood founded not on ethical duty but on the love of God. He sought to rekindle the ancient quest for new truth, but his teachings failed before the vigorous opposition of the disciples of Confucius.

94:6.12 (1034.7)Like many other spiritual and moral teachers, both Confucius and Lao-tse were eventually deified by their followers in those spiritually dark ages of China which intervened between the decline and perversion of the Taoist faith and the coming of the Buddhist missionaries from India. During these spiritually decadent centuries the religion of the yellow race degenerated into a pitiful theology wherein swarmed devils, dragons, and evil spirits, all betokening the returning fears of the unenlightened mortal mind. And China, once at the head of human society because of an advanced religion, then fell behind because of temporary failure to progress in the true path of the development of that God-consciousness which is indispensable to the true progress, not only of the individual mortal, but also of the intricate and complex civilizations which characterize the advance of culture and society on an evolutionary planet of time and space.