Over the past couple of weeks I was drawn to one of my books.  As happens all the time, I’ve read it and re-read it, over and over.  Like the information was some sort of pinball that had to rattle around inside my mind for a while before I knew what to make of it.
 

Make of it…what am I going to give physical birth to this time?  Talk about Creative.  Somebody ‘upstairs’ must have me confused with a rabbit.  

I don’t even ask what’s about to come out of me at this point.  I’ve learned better.  Asking only increases any anxieties I may have or feel.  So I don’t ask.  I make like a leaf floating down the river, trusting the current will take me wherever I need to go.
 

I begin by quoting from the Urantia:

“Christainity has indeed done a great service for this world but what is now most needed is Jesus.  The world needs to see Jesus living again on earth in the experience of spirit-born mortals who effectively reveal the Master to all men.  Christianity must go forward from where we find ourselves.  Modern culture must become spiritually baptized with a new revelation of Jesus’ life and illuminated with a new understanding of his gospel.  And when Jesus becomes thus lifted up, he will draw all men to himself.  Religion is only an exalted humanism until it is made divine by the discovery of the reality of Spirit in personal experience.  

‘The Kingdom of God is within you’ was probably the greatest pronouncement Jesus ever made, next to the declaration that his Father is a living and loving Spirit.

It is not the first mile of compulsion, duty, or convention that will transform man and his world, but rather the second mile of free service and liberty loving devotion that betokens the Jesusonian reaching forth to grasp his brother in love.  Christianity even now goes the first mile, but mankind languishes and stumbles along in moral darkness because there are so few genuine second milers – so few professed followers of Jesus who really live and love as he taught his disciples to live and love and serve.

The call to the adventure of building a new and transformed human society by means of the spiritual rebirth of Jesus’ brotherhood of the kingdom should thrill all who believe in him as men have not been stirred since the days when they walked about on earth as his companions in the flesh.

No social system or political regime which denies the reality of Spirit can contribute in any constructive and lasting manner to the advancement of human civilization.  But Christianity, as it is subdivided and secularized today, presents the greatest single obstacle to its further advancement.

Ecclesiasticism is at once and forever incompatible with that living faith, growing Spirit, and firsthand experience of Jesus in the brotherhood of man, in the spiritual association of the kingdom of heaven. The praiseworthy desire to preserve traditions of past achievement often leads to the defense of outgrown systems of worship. The well meant desire to foster ancient thought systems effectively prevents the sponsoring of new and adequate means and methods designed to satisfy the spiritual longings of the expanding and advancing minds of modern men.  Likewise, the Christian churches of the twentieth century stand as great, but wholly unconscious, obstacles to the immediate advancement of the real gospel. – the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.

Many earnest persons who would gladly yield loyalty to the Christ of the gospel find it very difficult enthusiastically to support a church which exhibits so little of the Spirit of his life and teachings, and which they have erroneously taught he founded.  Jesus did not found the so-called Christian church.

Christianity is seriously confronted with the doom embodied in one of its own slogans: ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’   The living Jesus is the only hope of a possible Unification of Christianity.  The true church – the Jesus brotherhood – is invisible, spiritual, and is characterized by Unity, not necessarily uniformity.  Uniformity is the earmark of the physical world of mechanistic nature.  Spiritual Unity is the fruit of faith union.  The visible church should refuse longer to handicap the progress of the invisible and spiritual brotherhood of the kingdom of God.  This brotherhood is destined to become a living organism in contrast to an institutionalized social organization. 

There is no excuse for the involvement of the church in commerce and politics; such unholy alliances are a flagrant betrayal of the Master.  And the genuine lovers of truth will be slow to forget that this power institutionalized church has often dared to smother newborn faith and persecute truth bearers who chanced to appear in unorthodox raiment.

It is all too true that such a church would not have survived unless there had been men in the world who preferred such a style of worship.  Many spiritually indolent souls crave an ancient and authoritative religion of ritual and sacred traditions.  But in the brotherhood of Jesus, there is no place for sectarian rivalry, group bitterness, nor assertions of moral superiority and spiritual infallibility.

Most throughout the world do not understand that there is a religion of Jesus separate, and somewhat apart, from Christianity, which has more and more become a religion about Jesus.

If Christianity could only grasp more of Jesus’ teachings, it could do so much more in helping modern man to solve his new and increasingly complex problems.

Christianity suffers under a great handicap because it has become identified in the minds of all the world as part of the social system, the industrial life, and the moral standards of Western civilization; and thus has Christianity unwittingly seemed to sponsor a society which staggers under the guilt of tolerating science without idealism, politics without principles, wealth without work, pleasure without restraint, knowledge without character, power without conscience, and industry without morality. 

The hope of modern Christianity is that it should cease to sponsor the social systems and industrial policies of Western civilization while it humbly bows itself before the cross it so valiantly extols, there to learn anew. From Jesus of Nazareth the greatest truths mortal man can ever hear – the living gospel of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.”