© 2000 Al Gates Lockett
© 2000 Urantia Association International (IUA)
| Living the Will of Our Father | Journal — September 2000 — Index | Relation of Adjusters to Universe Creatures |
Universal Father, at the center of all eternity and all creation, we are thankful for your will.
I would like to thank all of those responsible for this wonderful occasion and all of you who traveled such great distances to be here. What a great time to be living the will of the Father. When I imagine the enormous spiritual energy with all of the Thought Adjusters presently in this location and the guardian seraphim and legions of angels gathered about this location, at this event, I am thrilled to be here. What a powerful moment to be living the will of the Father. What a great time to focus and re-focus on the very reason we all exist!
It was over 28 years ago when The Urantia Book was given to me, and in that time I have learned what it means to live the will of the Father. It was during that exciting time that I consciously began to actively participate in the perfection of my life and destiny. It is a part of that destiny that I appear before you today to share my experience of living the will of the Father.
Prior to discovering The Urantia Book, I was subject to many confusing interpretations of what the will of God was. Growing up there were different occasions in which I got a chance to see God’s will at work. For example, one time at a funeral I heard someone remark, “It was God’s will.” Or there would be an awful tragedy, and that too was God’s will. If something occurred and there was no coherent reason for it, it became the will of God. Even in my prayers as a child I was taught to say, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Always these cryptic elucidations of the will of God. How many religious causes or zealots have justified their actions by claiming it was God’s will? As a result, God’s will takes on a pretty ominous and complicated form. The anthropomorphic picture is God sitting there on a massive throne, with a long white beard (thanks to Michelangelo), going about the business of doling out blessings, answering prayers, and affecting his will upon mankind at his whim. God’s will becomes a very complicated issue and living it even more so.
So it is a very ambitious undertaking to have an event titled “Living the Will of the Father,” where we get together to explore God’s will as it is revealed in our lives, as we have become sensitive to living with it as a primary influence.
The source of my topic today is from Paper 107, “Origin and Nature of Thought Adjusters,” and Paper 108, “The Mission and Ministry of Thought Adjusters.” I will not get into the details of Papers 107 and 108, but instead, the essence of what it means to our lives as it pertains to living the will of the Faher.
If I were to ask all of you to define or identify God’s will in your lives or ask how do you effectively live the Father’s will, I would likely have as many different responses as there are participants here today. That is because living the will of the Father is as personal and individual an experience as one’s religious belief. That being said, however, today I am going to discuss exactly what God’s will is and the common attributes we all share when it comes to living it.
My topic today under the thematic umbrella of “Living the Will of the Father” is “Walking the Talk,” and I would like to focus on three areas:
- The call to perfection.
- No pain—no gain.
- What does it mean to you and me?
Although the Universal Father is personally resident on Paradise, at the very center of the universes, he is also actually present on the worlds of space in the minds of his countless children of time, for be indwells them as the Mystery Monitors. [UB 107:0.1]
The Adjusters are the actuality of the Father’s love incarnate in the souls of men; they are the veritable promise of itan’s eternal career imprisoned within the mortal mind; they are the essence of man’s perfected finaliter personality, which be can foretaste in time as be progressively masters the divine technique of achieving the living of the Father’s will. [UB 107:0.2]
¶ The Call to Perfection
I have just read three sentences from the introduction to Paper 107. The introduction to Paper 107 is the longest introduction of all the papers given to us by the revelators, equaled only by Paper 1, “The Universal Father.” To say that the revelators have given it considerable importance is an understatement. There you have succinctly in three sentences some of the most important information relative to our lives given to us in The Urantia Book.
Let’s reflect on the first sentence: Although the Universal Father is personally resident on Paradise, at the very center of the universes, he is also actually present on the worlds of space in the minds of his countless children of time, for he indwells them as the Mystery Monitors. I don’t know about you, but this set my mind reeling with days and nights of deep contemplation, that the Creator of everything-infinite, eternal and more than my material mind could ever comprehend-is resident within me.
Here are two other statements in The Urantia Book: There are no created beings that would not delight to be bosts to the Mystery Monitors, but no orders of beings are thus indwelt excepting evolutionary will creatures of finaliter destiny [UB 107:7.7].
The Adjusters are the actuality of the Father’s love incarnate in the souls of men; they are the veritable promise of man’s eternal career imprisoned within the mortal mind; they are the essence of man’s perfected finaliter personality, which be can foretaste in time as be progressively masters the divine technique of achieving the living of the Father’s will [UB 107:0.2].
They are the essence of the perfect you and me as we progressively master the divine technique of achieving the living of the Father’s will.
So achieving “living the will of the Father” is the result of a divine technique that we must master.
The last sentence, God, having commanded man to be perfect, even as be is perfect, has descended as the Adjuster to become man’s experiential partner in the achievement of the supernal destiny which has been thus ordained [UB 107:0.3], spells out just what the will of God is to each of us and the fact that it is ordained and that God as the Adjuster, is our experiential partner in achieving that destiny.
Not only has it been ordained, it is the primary purpose or reason for existing. You want to know the reason for life. You don’t have to go to Tibet or to the Dalai Lama—it’s living the will of the Father by following the directive to be perfect.
How do we know if we are living the will of the Father? And what does it mean to be perfect? Surely that remains an impossibility. As far as I know there has been only one perfect example of a human life on this planet and that was of course the man Joshua ben Joseph, more commonly known as Jesus. The example he demonstrated is manifest in the decisions he made. Every decision was given over to total submission to the will of God. We can hardly hope to approximate that level of perfection. So to take you back to my first question: How do we know if we are living the will of the Father?
Living the will of God is living the will of the Adjuster. It is attuning your will or submitting your will to that of the Thought Adjuster.
Every mortal who is consciously or unconsciously following the leading of his indwelling Adjuster is living in accordance with the will of God.
So the only way we live in accordance with God’s will is by following the leading of the Adjuster. That is aligning our will with that of God’s. Living life religiously. Jesus’ earthly life was devoted to one great purpose—doing the Father’s will, living the human life religiously and by faith.
Let’s go back to the passage: … progressively masters the divine technique of achieving the living of the Father’s will [UB 107:0.2].
Living the will of the Father is a divine technique to be mastered. There is a work component or requirement associated with living the will of the Father.
And although there are different aspects of each of our lives that we need to work on, there are some constants. I’ll just name a few. I am sure there are more, but here goes:
What are the requirements to living the will of the Father?
- We are required to experience disappointment.
- We are required to experience difficulty.
- We are required to suffer.
- We are required to love.
- We are required to understand.
- We are required to have patience.
- We are required to be tolerant.
- We are required to forgive even as we are forgiven.
- We are required to serve one another.
And I think Jesus put it in the context of the 11th commandment to love God with all our heart and soul and to love our neighbor as ourselves. But most of all, we are required to have faith.
The faith of Jesus was trusting, like that of a child, but it was wholly free from presumption. He made robust and manly decisions, courageously faced manifold disappointments, resolutely surmounted extraordinary difficulties, and unflinchingly confronted the stern requirements of duty. It required a strong will and an unfailing confidence to believe what Jesus betieved and as be believed. [UB 196:0.14]
There is one component to living the will of the Father, and that is “living life fearlessly.”
Do you know to live life boldly and fearlessly is a difficult yet worthy goal? I read that the angels don’t understand our emotion of fear.
¶ No Pain—No Gain
Paper 108 talks about the mission of the Thought Adjusters:
The mission of the Thought Adjusters to the human races is to represent, to be, the Universal Father to the mortal creatures of time and space; that is the fundamental work of the divine gifts. Their mission is also that of elevating the mortal minds and of translating the immortal souls of men up to the divine heights and spiritual levels of Paradise perfection. [UB 108:0.1]
Again the key element is perfection, but they go on to say:
The Mystery Monitors are not thought helpers; they are thought adjusters. They labor with the material mind for the purpose of constructing, by adjustment and spiritualization, a new mind for the new worlds and the new name of your future career. [UB 108:5.5]
Their mission chiefly concerns the future life, not this life. They are called heavenly helpers, not earthly helpers:
- Their work is dynamic, growing as we grow, making the adjustments.
- The outcome of their work concerns our future life, not our present life.
They are not interested in making our lives easy; rather, are they more concerned in making our lives reasonably difficult and rugged, so that the right decisions will be stimulated and multiplied.
Going back to those requirements: Whatever you require to master the technique of achieving living the will of the Father, you will get in your life. If you require patience, then you had better believe that you will be in situations that will try your patience. And try your patience again, and try your patience again, until you make the right decision or master the situation 100 percent of the time-and that may not happen here or on the early mansion worlds, but it will happen.
The presence of a great Thought Adjuster does not bestow ease of living and freedom from strenuous thinking, but such a divine gift should confer a sublime peace of mind and a superb tranquillity of spirit. [1192.0]
I had a football coach, back in my high school days that used to work us till we dropped, and he used to say: “It’s hard, but it’s fair.”
And every now and then we pause to question some of the trials we go through. Most of us at times have prayed, “Lord, give me strength to overcome.” But there should be comfort in knowing that what you are experiencing is for the mastery of living the will of the Father to perfection and that there is a place of sublime peace that you can go to knowing that God is with you as your experiential partner.
The old folks would often say, “God don’t put any more on you than you can handle.”
No pain—no gain.
Your transient and ever-changing emotions of joy and sorrow are in the main purely human and material reactions to your internal psychic climate and to your external material enviromment. Do not, therefore, look to the Adjuster for selfish consolation and mortal comfort. It is the business of the Adjuster to prepare you for the eternal adventure, to assure your survival. It is not the mission of the Mystery Monitor to smooth your ruffed feelings or to minister to your injured pride; it is the preparation of your soul for the long ascending career that engages the attention and occupies the time of the Adjuster. [UB 108:5.6]
No pain—no gain.
¶ What Does It Mean to You and Me?
First, the Adjusters are the will of God.
- The Adjusters are the actuality of the Father’s love incamate in the souls of men.
- They are the veritable promise of man’s eternal career.
- The unqualified assurance that man can find the Universal Father.
- It is the Adjuster who creates within man that unquenchable yearning and incessant longing to be like God.
- The Adjuster is the living presence, which actually links the mortal son with his Paradise Father and draws him nearer and nearer to the Father.
- Living the will of God is living the will of the Adjuster. It is attuning your will or submitting your will to that of the Thought Adjuster.
- The whole idea that we are inclined towards this religiosity or religiousness, this drive towards perfection and spiritual consciousness, is the indwelling and divine Adjuster working in conjunction with the Spirit of Truth.
- One of the things I have leamed is that living God’s will is personal to the individual. And that it bears the fruit of love and service to one’s fellows.
The Thought Adjusters would like to change your feelings of fear to convictions of love and confidence. [UB 108:5.8]
When it comes to the sharp and well-defined conflicts between the higher and lower tendencies of the races, between what really is right or wrong (not merely what you may call right and wrong), you can depend upon it that the Adjuster will always participate in some definite and active manner in such experiences. [UB 108:5.9]
I would like to close with a statement from the book that was of the greatest comfort to me. It spoke to my heart and to all of my perceived inadequacies. Hopefully in the context and theme of this momentous event, it will continue to provide hope in our persistent attempts at living the will of the Father.
Having started out on the way of life everlasting, having accepted the assignment and received your orders to advance, do not fear the dangers of human forgeffulness and mortal inconstancy, do not be troubled with doubts of failure or by perplexing confusion, do not falter and question your status and standing, for in every dark bour, at every crossroad in the forward struggle, the Spirit of Truth will always speak, saying, “This is the way.” [UB 34:7.8]
| Living the Will of Our Father | Journal — September 2000 — Index | Relation of Adjusters to Universe Creatures |