© 1992 Ann Bendall
© 1992 ANZURA, Australia & New Zealand Urantia Association
Ann Bendall, Nambour, Queensland
I see so many of my beloved brothers and sisters running around trying to find someone to lead them, someone to follow.
Why do any of us need a lesser person than Jesus to follow? Perhaps it is because Jesus refuses, in love, to do as we ask — to tell us exactly what we should be doing. Are we not supposed to be doing the will of God? So why can’t we get our orders directly? Is it that a false idea has infiltrated into our minds on what the will of God really means? In answer to a question Jesus said:
“The will of God is the way of God, partnership with the choice of God in the face of any potential alternative. To do the will of God, therefore, is the progressive experience of becoming more and more like God, and God is the source and destiny of all that is good and beautiful and true.” (UB 130:2.7)
In seeking to know and to do the will of God, it is not so much what we do but how we do it that is important. God is not going to make our decisions for us. We make spiritual progress only through making our own decisions. Making them in accordance with the will of God simply means making God-like decisions, then carrying them out in a God-like manner. Our role model to do this is to be discovered in the life and teachings of Jesus. The URANTIA Book tells us:
“Material evolution has provided you a life machine, your body; the Father himself has endowed you with the purest spirit reality known in the universe, your Thought Adjuster. But into your hands, subject to your own decisions, has been given mind, and it is by mind that you live or die. It is within this mind and with this mind that you make those moral decisions which enable you to achieve Adjuster likeness, and that is Godlikeness.” (UB 111:1.4)
But we persist in wanting direct orders — to be told what to do. How can Jesus tell us the future! He knows full well that the future is God’s. He knows full well that God will arm us, with all that is required to cope with and overcome any adversity which might come our way.
Why should we be so distrustful? We don’t mean to be but we are, and, in our anxiety we run to a loving brother or sister until we find one who is so eager for our love and approval that they disturb their own minds in order to fill our need. Then we sit at the feet of our gurus and delude ourselves. We ask them to make our decisions, to tell us our future and they oblige. The book tells us that Jesus sat at no man’s feet (UB 126:2.3).
In following our new found leader, we write our own future in the process, forcing our patient Thought Adjuster to throw away the preferred plan, in deference to our will. What do we think our Thought Adjuster is doing all day but trying to spiritualize us!
What a blessing to have The URANTIA Book. I had looked for a model in life. Someone to emulate. Someone to look up to. Someone whom I could copy, knowing that his/her way of thinking, feeling, and doing things, were the ways, thoughts and feelings which I could strive to adopt, as the best way of living for me.
Because I lost Jesus in the Bible, I needed the URANTIA Book, and then my hero, my leader, my model blossomed into reality as an achievable ideal. Here was my perfect model for ‘God-likeness’. But as I looked at his life, the description of the growth of his moral, emotional and mental maturity, I realized that it takes lots of work. Jesus had culminated his growth in perfection at a chronological age, a few years before I had even started mine. So I recognized that there was a long haul ahead of me to reach the level of maturity that he attained on Urantia. Perhaps I will look like my model did in his mid-thirties by the time I wave goodbye to him as I leave for Edentia. But he will still be my model in those longahead days, for he will have shown me a Jesus-Michael model to follow on my pathway to Paradise.
As a human, it is sad that we find models to copy in life, such as our parents in early life, only to have our dreams shattered with the reality that our human models are just normal imperfect humans. What a blessing to discover a model in the human Jesus, who one day will be able to reveal himself to me as a semi-spiritual model, followed by a spiritual model and so on, dependent upon my ability to see and appreciate. I need no other model. Why settle for second best?
The future is God’s. He has the idea for the story of my life. I wish God’s will to be my will and I know that the will of God is the way of God, a process of being, not doing. I want my will and my mind to be so attuned to my Thought Adjuster’s that the two are indistinguishable and so, with copious support, and assistance from my beloved Adjuster, I try to make my decisions as I believe Jesus would have made them, knowing that, in doing so, they are most likely to be in harmony with God’s desires for me.