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The question, within reason, is how does the parent-child relationship provide us with the emotional level of assurance, and how does one retain that relationship after he has become an adult?
One thing, by studying Jesus’ life experience in book IV, is that yes Jesus had good parents. This contributed to Jesus’ emotional state as he matured, but he was also allowed the freedom to learn their ways and to question the rightness of his household culture. But within that family environment, there was a spirit that called him to have “just one more talk with (his) father in heaven”, an inner relationship between Jesus and God, that now is understood in quality to be the same as the relationship between any parent and child.
Because Jesus retained that experience on an emotional level, he was able to teach the means of prosperity and of mental fortitude that allowed him to remain unswayed through beatings and trials at the hands of his accusers. On an emotional level, then, he must have possessed the degree of self-restraint necessary to endure those later experiences.
One aspect that is difficult to grasp from a temporal or emotional perspective, is how the oversight of a parentlike Deity would preexist, exist, and continue to exist for each temporal instance during the individual lifetime. It raises the prospect that if a man can face the reality of circumstance bravely and with a similar deference, he can retain on a mental level of personality if not an emotional level, the goodness of all prior experience.
When we are confronted with the concept of faith assurances, we often fall into neglect. We forget that God may or must depend on each individual experience. Without human assurance, self-confidence to speak the truth freely, then God is confronted with the dilemma of how his will may be done on Urantia as it is on Paradise. The human assurance cannot be done without the required experience of to rear, or to foster, since in those experiences you will find the fostering of your own emotions, necessary to have rendered assurance unto others. And by offering that, you allow the Almighty Supreme to metaphorically reciprocate through healthy and evolving emotions.
182:3.5 (1968.6) During the years that Jesus lived among his followers, they did, indeed, have much proof of his divine nature, but just now are they about to witness new evidences of his humanity. Just before the greatest of all the revelations of his divinity, his resurrection, must now come the greatest proofs of his mortal nature, his humiliation and crucifixion.
182:3.6 (1969.1) Each time he prayed in the garden, his humanity laid a firmer faith-hold upon his divinity; his human will more completely became one with the divine will of his Father. Among other words spoken to him by the mighty angel was the message that the Father desired his Son to finish his earth bestowal by passing through the creature experience of death just as all mortal creatures must experience material dissolution in passing from the existence of time into the progression of eternity.
182:3.7 (1969.2) Earlier in the evening it had not seemed so difficult to drink the cup, but as the human Jesus bade farewell to his apostles and sent them to their rest, the trial grew more appalling. Jesus experienced that natural ebb and flow of feeling which is common to all human experience, and just now he was weary from work, exhausted from the long hours of strenuous labor and painful anxiety concerning the safety of his apostles. While no mortal can presume to understand the thoughts and feelings of the incarnate Son of God at such a time as this, we know that he endured great anguish and suffered untold sorrow, for the perspiration rolled off his face in great drops. He was at last convinced that the Father intended to allow natural events to take their course; he was fully determined to employ none of his sovereign power as the supreme head of a universe to save himself.
182:3.8 (1969.3) The assembled hosts of a vast creation are now hovered over this scene under the transient joint command of Gabriel and the Personalized Adjuster of Jesus. The division commanders of these armies of heaven have repeatedly been warned not to interfere with these transactions on earth unless Jesus himself should order them to intervene.
182:3.9 (1969.4) The experience of parting with the apostles was a great strain on the human heart of Jesus; this sorrow of love bore down on him and made it more difficult to face such a death as he well knew awaited him. He realized how weak and how ignorant his apostles were, and he dreaded to leave them. He well knew that the time of his departure had come, but his human heart longed to find out whether there might not possibly be some legitimate avenue of escape from this terrible plight of suffering and sorrow. And when it had thus sought escape, and failed, it was willing to drink the cup. The divine mind of Michael knew he had done his best for the twelve apostles; but the human heart of Jesus wished that more might have been done for them before they should be left alone in the world. Jesus’ heart was being crushed; he truly loved his brethren. He was isolated from his family in the flesh; one of his chosen associates was betraying him. His father Joseph’s people had rejected him and thereby sealed their doom as a people with a special mission on earth. His soul was tortured by baffled love and rejected mercy. It was just one of those awful human moments when everything seems to bear down with crushing cruelty and terrible agony.
182:3.10 (1969.5) Jesus’ humanity was not insensible to this situation of private loneliness, public shame, and the appearance of the failure of his cause. All these sentiments bore down on him with indescribable heaviness. In this great sorrow his mind went back to the days of his childhood in Nazareth and to his early work in Galilee. At the time of this great trial there came up in his mind many of those pleasant scenes of his earthly ministry. And it was from these old memories of Nazareth, Capernaum, Mount Hermon, and of the sunrise and sunset on the shimmering Sea of Galilee, that he soothed himself as he made his human heart strong and ready to encounter the traitor who should so soon betray him.
182:3.11 (1970.1) Before Judas and the soldiers arrived, the Master had fully regained his customary poise; the spirit had triumphed over the flesh; faith had asserted itself over all human tendencies to fear or entertain doubt. The supreme test of the full realization of the human nature had been met and acceptably passed. Once more the Son of Man was prepared to face his enemies with equanimity and in the full assurance of his invincibility as a mortal man unreservedly dedicated to the doing of his Father’s will.
. . . how does the parent-child relationship provide us with the emotional level of assurance. . . .
Even if you had lousy parents, surely you were acquainted with parents of your friends who were loving and fair-minded parents with their children.
1:1.6 [Part I]On a planet of sex creatures, in a world where the impulses of parental emotion are inherent in the hearts of its intelligent beings, the term Father becomes a very expressive and appropriate name for the eternal God. He is best known, most universally acknowledged, on your planet, Urantia, by the name God. The name he is given is of little importance; the significant thing is that you should know him and aspire to be like him. Your prophets of old truly called him “the everlasting God” and referred to him as the one who “inhabits eternity.”I don’t think humans are going to be reliable in terms of assurance for you. Humans are uneven. They run hot and cold. Here today, gone tomorrow. With you today, but tomorrow? Or maybe you’re the one on the verge of leaving tomorrow. Fickle. Restless. Bored. More monotony – more of the same. Can’t settle down. Can’t get a grip. Over-thinking everything. Questions, uncertainty, insecurity. Until you find God in your own and personal experience.111:5.1 [Part III]The doing of the will of God is nothing more or less than an exhibition of creature willingness to share the inner life with God — with the very God who has made such a creature life of inner meaning-value possible. Sharing is Godlike — divine. God shares all with the Eternal Son and the Infinite Spirit, while they, in turn, share all things with the divine Sons and spirit Daughters of the universes.The good news is that you yourself of your own freewill choose whether or not you want God in your life. The best news of all? There is no escaping him, as Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit.13:4.5 [Part I]The determiner of the differential of spiritual presence exists in your own hearts and minds and consists in the manner of your own choosing, in the decisions of your minds, and in the determination of your own wills. This differential is inherent in the freewill reactions of intelligent personal beings, beings whom the Universal Father has ordained shall exercise this liberty of choosing. And the Deities are ever true to the ebb and flow of their spirits in meeting and satisfying the conditions and demands of this differential of creature choice, now bestowing more of their presence in response to a sincere desire for the same and again withdrawing themselves from the scene as their creatures decide adversely in the exercise of their divinely bestowed freedom of choice. And thus does the spirit of divinity become humbly obedient to the choosing of the creatures of the realms.Faith assurance is not human at all in source but is Divine. It is the Spirit response to human faith. Human faith is but the human response to the Divine Connection within. We are encircuited by multiple Deity connections and the Deity Gravity Circuits.
Human assurance is from and by Devine sources.
Personal religious experience, when true, delivers an assurance of our being, our personal relationship with God, our safety and survival, our purpose, and our destiny. This experience begins in-mind with the ministry of the Holy Spirit by the Adjutants delivering faith assurance and with the subsequent ministry of the God Fragment/Thought Adjuster by personal revelation delivering truth assurance and with the additional ministry (on our world since Pentecost) of the Spirit of Truth by the confirmation of both faith assurance and truth assurance. In addition to personal revelation, we are advised that we are periodically blessed by epochal revelation (or revelation to the world and all people upon the world, the UB being the 5th such to our world)….the purpose of which is to add facts and truths to eliminate the errors and reduce the confusions of evolutionary religion and science and the limitations of personal revelation.
All of these sources and forms of ministry to mortals deliver “assurance” in some form or another. It is our personal assurance that spiritualizes and spiritizes us and changes our personal motives, intentions, priorities, decisions, perspective, and delivers a philosophy for living that delivers the fruit of the Spirit led life. It is assurance that allows us to learn to feast on uncertainty and to remain faithful and joyful and trusting in the face of chaos and calamity, and to embrace the adventure of that to come which we cannot predict nor control! Assurance is a most important concept for the UB student to understand and learn to embrace.
The mind poisons of doubt, anxiety, fear, anger, mistrust, and paranoia erode such assurance and prevent the fruits of the Spirit which come by the assurance of our safe keeping and safe passage in God’s friendly universe!! That and those who are antagonistic to assurance – especially that assurance/faith/trust within others – are the enemies of truth, beauty, and goodness and embrace evil and spread evil to others….they offer the bitter fruit of the dead branch and the blind and deaf perspective of those who personally lack assurance…or, perhaps, they suffer from spiritual pride and feel superior in their assurance to others and believe it is their place to criticize, instruct, and otherwise demean the religious experience and growth and assurance of others. In either case, we should be wary of those who distrust God or God’s power, purpose, plan, and process or who feel it their duty to tell others what to do and when and to measure others by their own self perceived superiority….puffed up tadpoles!
God loves us each and blesses us each with personality, mind, free will, and endows each with the ministry of the Spirits – and all of these combine to give us the assurance of God and God’s love and our relationship to God and to one another.
Assurance is related to so many concepts and teaching in the Urantia Book.
101:0.3
Religion, the conviction-faith of the personality, can always triumph over the superficially contradictory logic of despair born in the unbelieving material mind. There really is a true and genuine inner voice, that “true light which lights every man who comes into the world.” And this spirit leading is distinct from the ethical prompting of human conscience. The feeling of religious assurance is more than an emotional feeling. The assurance of religion transcends the reason of the mind, even the logic of philosophy. Religion is faith, trust, and assurance.101:1.6
Faith unites moral insight with conscientious discriminations of values, and the pre-existent evolutionary sense of duty completes the ancestry of true religion. The experience of religion eventually results in the certain consciousness of God and in the undoubted assurance of the survival of the believing personality.101:2.4 (1106.3) There are two basic reasons for believing in a God who fosters human survival:
101:2.5 (1106.4) 1. Human experience, personal assurance, the somehow registered hope and trust initiated by the
indwelling Thought Adjuster.101:2.6 (1106.5) 2. The revelation of truth, whether by direct personal ministry of the Spirit of Truth, by the world bestowal of divine Sons, or through the revelations of the written word.
101:2.14
Your deepest nature — the divine Adjuster — creates within you a hunger and thirst for righteousness, a certain craving for divine perfection. Religion is the faith act of the recognition of this inner urge to divine attainment; and thus is brought about that soul trust and assurance of which you become conscious as the way of salvation, the technique of the survival of personality and all those values which you have come to look upon as being true and good.Me here: I think assurance is the bread and water of life – that which satisfies the hunger, thirst, and yearning delivered by the Adjutants and the Thought Adjuster. We yearn for such assurance. We need God. And God responds to our yearn, our hunger, and our thirst. And when we embrace God’s response of assurance, then are we attaching our branch to the living vine to be nurtured by love and guided into truth…and this is The Real Nature of Religion…the experience of growth and personal progress in the Spirit. Religion is “the conviction faith of the personality”!
Bradly
The TA’s and Adjutants and Spirit of Truth are instruments of personalized spiritualization and their efforts and that of the angels is educational for our personal growth. Assurance is something that is given to those who seek and listen and knock and pray and worship….not something derived by study, practice, and skill I do not think. Everyone benefits from the assurance of the Spirit, it is primal and essential and requires no belief or accuracy in beliefs to feel and benefit from. It is a natural nourishment that benefits the faith child in many ways. We gain assurance in quantity and quality based on our progress in the Spirit as we grow.
19:5.12 And from all this, you mortals, just now taking your first step on the eternal journey, can well see that you must advance a long way before you will progress by “sight” and “material” assurance. You will long use faith and be dependent on revelation if you hope to progress quickly and safely.
Me here: There is a spectrum of reality-awareness that begins in us as young children. It begins with urges and impulses that are natural and inherent as delivered by the Holy Spirit and her Adjutants. We have the awareness of “otherness” or the feeling of God’s presence and existance. This begins the faith of our evolutionary experience and the faith assurance and confirmation of relationship – personal recognition of our dual nature!
Then comes the yearn, hunger, and thirst of the TA – a more constant feedback loop where urges and impulses are augmented and now comes actual personal/self revelation – the voice of the pilot which delivers truth to mind. This is amplified by the Son’s Spirit of Truth which confirms truth and adds the Son’s Spirit Gravity – a true universe force of response and attraction to the quantity AND the quality of our reality-response. Now faith assurance combines with truth assurance in the believer and faith child.
But as we acquire experiential wisdom over time and as we see and know the morontial life to come – now there is evidence and scientific proofs of our inner experience and faith is rewarded by empirical evidence. Only mortals experience this material death and then resurrection – the victory of faith is rewarded!! Then comes fusion!! And we are a whole new being with new levels of confidence in universe realities. Does the TA depend upon faith? No…not like we understand faith. The TA’s have a confidence that is absolute and experiential. As will we. We will progress by “sight” and “material” assurance!
In this material life and the one to come, assurance is complimented by and rewarded with the fruits of the spirit – the only proof of the source and result of faith!
34:6.9 In every mortal there exists a dual nature: the inheritance of animal tendencies and the high urge of spirit endowment. During the short life you live on Urantia, these two diverse and opposing urges can seldom be fully reconciled; they can hardly be harmonized and unified; but throughout your lifetime the combined Spirit ever ministers to assist you in subjecting the flesh more and more to the leading of the Spirit. Even though you must live your material life through, even though you cannot escape the body and its necessities, nonetheless, in purpose and ideals you are empowered increasingly to subject the animal nature to the mastery of the Spirit. There truly exists within you a conspiracy of spiritual forces, a confederation of divine powers, whose exclusive purpose is to effect your final deliverance from material bondage and finite handicaps.
34:6.10 The purpose of all this ministration is, “That you may be strengthened with power through His spirit in the inner man.” And all this represents but the preliminary steps to the final attainment of the perfection of faith and service, that experience wherein you shall be “filled with all the fullness of God,” “for all those who are led by the spirit of God are the sons of God.” *
34:6.11 The Spirit never drives, only leads. If you are a willing learner, if you want to attain spirit levels and reach divine heights, if you sincerely desire to reach the eternal goal, then the divine Spirit will gently and lovingly lead you along the pathway of sonship and spiritual progress. Every step you take must be one of willingness, intelligent and cheerful co-operation. The domination of the Spirit is never tainted with coercion nor compromised by compulsion.
34:6.12 And when such a life of spirit guidance is freely and intelligently accepted, there gradually develops within the human mind a positive consciousness of divine contact and assurance of spirit communion; sooner or later “the Spirit bears witness with your spirit (the Adjuster) that you are a child of God.” Already has your own Thought Adjuster told you of your kinship to God so that the record testifies that the Spirit bears witness “with your spirit,” not to your spirit.
34:6.13 The consciousness of the spirit domination of a human life is presently attended by an increasing exhibition of the characteristics of the Spirit in the life reactions of such a spirit-led mortal, “for the fruits of the spirit are love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and temperance.” Such spirit-guided and divinely illuminated mortals, while they yet tread the lowly paths of toil and in human faithfulness perform the duties of their earthly assignments, have already begun to discern the lights of eternal life as they glimmer on the faraway shores of another world; already have they begun to comprehend the reality of that inspiring and comforting truth, “The kingdom of God is not meat and drink but righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.” And throughout every trial and in the presence of every hardship, spirit-born souls are sustained by that hope which transcends all fear because the love of God is shed abroad in all hearts by the presence of the divine Spirit.
Me here: Assurance is important to all creatures – high and low – and operates on many levels of reality. From the mortal perspective on a primitive world, it can be very difficult to “see” and “know” that everything will work out for the better and that Divine Providence and God’s will prevails. But that is the very assurance even mortals might attain with sufficient faith and the vision that comes from the believer’s perspective. Even in the throes of mortal suffering and the consequences of evil and sin, still can the believer have assurance of our own and our world’s destiny!
48:4.7 [Part II]
3. Prophetic joy. It will perhaps be difficult for mortals to envisage this phase of humor, but we do get a peculiar satisfaction out of the assurance “that all things work together for good” — for spirits and morontians as well as for mortals. This aspect of celestial humor grows out of our faith in the loving overcare of our superiors and in the divine stability of our Supreme Directors.54:6.4 [Part II]
But one thing should be made clear: If you are made to suffer the evil consequences of the sin of some member of your family, some fellow citizen or fellow mortal, even rebellion in the system or elsewhere — no matter what you may have to endure because of the wrongdoing of your associates, fellows, or superiors — you may rest secure in the eternal assurance that such tribulations are transient afflictions. None of these fraternal consequences of misbehavior in the group can ever jeopardize your eternal prospects or in the least degree deprive you of your divine right of Paradise ascension and God attainment.
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