© 2020 David Glass
© 2020 The Urantia Book Fellowship
| Adoration of the Mother | Volume 20, Number 1, 2020 (Summer) — Index | Uversa — the Future Headquarters of God the Supreme |
All of these truths shall be valid for any day that is TODAY exploring the divine love of God!
This is the day the Lord has made;
Let us rejoice and be glad in it.
Serve the Lord with gladness;
Come before his presence with singing.
Know that the Lord is God;
It is he that has made us
And not we ourselves.
Enter into his gates with thanksgiving,
And into his courts with praise.
Be thankful unto him
And bless his name;
For the Lord is good,
His mercy is everlasting,
And his truth endures to all generations.
There is inherent joy in freewill existence. [UB 28:5.16]
We get a peculiar satisfaction out of the assurance “that all things work together for good”—for spirits and celestials as well as for mortals. This confidence grows out of our faith in the loving overcare of our universe superiors and in the divine stability of the supreme directors. [UB 48:4.7]
Said Jesus: “Future generations shall know the radiance of our joy, the buoyancy of our goodwill, and the inspiration of our good humor. We proclaim a message of good news which is infectious in its transforming power. Our religion is throbbing with new life and new meanings. Those who accept this teaching are filled with joy and in their hearts are constrained to rejoice evermore. Increasing happiness is always the experience of all who are certain about God.” [UB 159:3.10]
The Joys of Existence. The principal activities of this group of superuniverse seconaphim are directed toward promoting reactions of joy among the various orders of the angelic hosts and the lower will creatures. . . . In a more general manner, . . . they function as joy clearinghouses, seeking to up step the pleasure reactions of the realms while trying to improve the humor taste, to develop a superhumor among mortals and angels. They endeavor to demonstrate that there is inherent joy in freewill existence , independent of all extraneous influences. [UB 28:5.16]
Wrote Ganid: This new religion of ours is very full of joy, and it generates an enduring happiness. The loving service of the children of God enlarges our capacity to receive and experience the joys of heaven. [UB 131:10.5-6]
Consider the life of joyous faith that Jesus attained and lived and whereby he was able to reveal the loving nature of the heavenly Father:
Jesus experienced the tranquility of supreme and unquestioning trust in God and felt the tremendous thrill of living, by faith, in the very presence of the heavenly Father. He calmly stood in the divine presence free from fear and fully conscious of spiritual invincibility.
In the Master’s life, we discover a new and higher type of religion based on personal relations with the Universal Father and validated by the supreme authority of genuine personal experience. In the human life of Jesus faith was personal, living, original, spontaneous, and purely spiritual.
The secret of his unparalleled religious life was this consciousness of the presence of God and he attained it by intelligent prayer and sincere worship—unbroken communion with God. Said Jesus: “It is not so important that you should know about the fact of God as that you should increasingly grow in the ability to feel the presence of God .”
The Master desires that all his followers should fully share his transcendent faith. Jesus brought to God, as a man of the realm, the greatest of all offerings: the consecration and dedication of his own will to the majestic service of doing the divine will. Jesus desires his disciples to believe with him in the reality of the love of God and in full confidence accept the security of the assurance of sonship with the heavenly Father. [UB 196:0] & [UB 155:6.12]
The Father desires all his creatures to be in personal communion with him. There is an infinite grandeur and an inexpressible generosity connected with the majesty of his love which causes him to yearn for the association of every created being who can comprehend, love, or approach him.
Settle in your philosophy now and forever: to each of you, God is approachable, the Father is attainable, the way is open; the forces of divine love and the ways and means of divine administration are all interlocked in an effort to facilitate the advancement of every worthy intelligence of every universe to the Paradise presence of the Universal Father.
Although the approach to the Paradise presence of the Father must await your attainment of the highest finite levels of spirit progression, you should rejoice in the recognition of the ever-present possibility of immediate communion with the bestowal spirit of the Father so intimately associated with your inner soul and your spiritualizing self. Said Jesus: “Every honest attempt of the material mind to communicate with its indwelling spirit meets with certain success.” [UB 5:1.2-3,8] & [UB 133:4.10]
The greatest evidence of the goodness of God and the supreme reason for loving him is the indwelling gift of the Father—the Adjuster who so patiently awaits the hour when you both shall be eternally made one. That fragment of the pure Deity of the Universal Father which indwells mortal man is a part of the infinity of the First Great Source and Center, the Father of Fathers.
The great God makes direct contact with mortal man and gives a part of his infinite and eternal and incomprehensible self to dwell within him. God has embarked upon the eternal adventure with man. If you yield to the leadings of the spiritual forces in you and around you, you cannot fail to attain the high destiny established by a loving God as the universe goal of his ascendant creatures from the evolutionary world of space. [UB 2:1.11] & [UB 5:1.12] & [UB 2:5.5]
The love of the Father appears in the mortal personality by the ministry of the indwelling Adjuster. All true love is from God, and man receives the divine affection as he himself bestows this love upon his fellows. Man can never take the love of God and imprison it within his heart. The Father’s love can become real to mortal man only by passing through that man’s personality as he in turn bestows this love upon his fellows. Such a God-knowing son reveals this love to his universe brethren, and this fraternal affection is the essence of the love of the Supreme.
The great circuit of love is from the Father, through sons to brothers, and hence to the Supreme. The search for God is the unstinted bestowal of love attended by amazing discoveries of new and greater love bestowed. Men all too often forget that God is the greatest experience in human existence. Other experiences are limited in their nature and content, but the experience of God has no limits save those of the creature’s comprehension capacity, and this very experience is in itself capacity enlarging. When men search for God, they are searching for everything. When they find God, they have found everything. [UB 117:6.9-10]
At times I am almost pained to be compelled to portray the divine affection of the heavenly Father for his universe children by the employment of the human word symbol love. How unfortunate that I cannot make use of some supernal and exclusive term which would convey to the mind of man the true nature and exquisitely beautiful significance of the divine affection of the Paradise Father! [UB 2:5.11]
Mortal man cannot possibly know the infinitude of the heavenly Father. But this same finite human being can actually feel —literally experience—the full and undiminished impact of such and infinite Father’s LOVE. Finite appreciation of infinite qualities far transcends the logically limited capacities of the creature because of the fact that mortal man is made in the image of God—there lives within him a fragment of infinity. Therefore, man’s nearest and dearest approach to God is by and through love, for God is love. [UB 3:4.6-7]
To finite man truth, beauty, and goodness embrace the full revelation of divinity reality. As this love-comprehension of Deity finds spiritual expression in the lives of God-knowing mortals, there are yielded the fruits of the divine spirit: intellectual peace, social progress, moral satisfaction, spiritual joy, and cosmic wisdom. The advanced mortals on a world in the seventh stage of light and life have learned that love is the greatest thing in the universe, and they know that God is love. Love is the desire to do good to others. [UB 56:10.20-21] (my emphasis)
The divine personality is defined as consisting in spirit and manifesting himself to the universe as love. Therefore, in all his personal relations with the creature personalities of the universes, the First Source and Center is always and consistently a loving father. God’s only personal attitude towards the affairs of the universe is always a reaction of divine affection. The infinite love of God is not secondary to anything in the divine nature. He is eternally motivated by the perfect idealism of divine love, and that nature finds its strongest expression and in loving and being loved. [UB 188:4.8] & [UB 4:4.6]
Said Jesus: Love is the greatest of all spirit realities. I declare to you that my Father in Paradise does rule a universe of universes by the compelling power of his love. Love is the supreme relationship. God the Father divinely loves his children, all of them. [UB 134:4.1]
God loves every individual; he is no respecter of persons; yet God thus loves each individual as an individual child in the heavenly family. The love of the Father absolutely individualizes each personality of the Universal Father. The Father’s love glorifies each child of God, illuminating each member of the celestial family. The love of God strikingly portrays the transcendent value of each will creature, unmistakably reveals the high value which the Universal Father has placed upon each and every one of his children. [UB 12:7.8-9] (my emphasis)
There is in the mind of God a plan which embraces every creature of all his vast domains and this plan is an eternal purpose of boundless opportunity, unlimited progress, and endless life. [UB 32:5.7]
We all love the Universal Father and all other beings, divine or human, because we discern that these personalities truly love us. The experience of love is very much a direct response to the experience of being loved. [UB 2:5.8]
As you ponder the loving nature of God, there is only one reasonable, natural personality reaction thereto: You will increasingly love your Maker; you will yield to God an affection analogous to that given by a child to an earthly parent; for as a father, a real father, a true father, loves his children so the Universal Father loves and forever seeks the welfare of his created sons and daughters. [UB 2:5.9]
The affectionate dedication of the human will to the doing of the Father’s will is man’s choicest gift to God; in fact, such a consecration of a creature will constitute man’s only possible gift of true value to the Paradise Father. There is nothing which man can give to God except this choosing to abide by the Father’s will, and such decisions, affected by the intelligent will creatures of the universe, constitute the reality of that true worship which is so satisfying to the love-dominated nature of the Creator Father. [UB 1:1.2]
God first loves man and confers upon him the potential of immortality—eternal reality. And as man loves God, so does man become eternal in actuality. And here is a mystery: The more closely man approaches God through love, the greater the reality—actuality—of that man. When man consecrates his will to the doing of the Father’s will, when man gives God all that he has, then does God make that man more than he is. [UB 117:4.14]
Sooner or later all universe personalities begin to realize that the final quest of eternity is the endless exploration of infinity, the neverending voyage of discovery into the absoluteness of the First Source and Center. We arrive at the understanding that living the will of God is the eternal passport to the endless possibility of infinity itself. To material evolutionary, finite creatures, a life predicated on the living of the Father’s will leads directly to the attainment of spiritual supremacy in the personality arena and brings such creatures one step nearer the comprehension of the Father-Infinite.
Such a Father life is one predicated on truth, sensitive to beauty, and dominated by goodness. Such a God-knowing person is inwardly illuminated by worship and outwardly devoted to the wholehearted service of the universal brotherhood of all personalities, a service ministry which is filled with mercy and motivated by love. [UB 106:9.11-12] Said Jesus: “If you would but believe that my Father loves you with an infinite love, then you are in the kingdom of God.” [UB 137:8.17]
The Father’s love follows us now and throughout the endless circle of the eternal ages. [UB 2:5.9]
¶ References
- Article obtained from The Fellowship site
| Adoration of the Mother | Volume 20, Number 1, 2020 (Summer) — Index | Uversa — the Future Headquarters of God the Supreme |