© 2024 James Woodward
© 2024 International Urantia Association (IUA)
Going out on a limb of faith requires faith.
Faith is a holy paradox: It’s a grab-hold thing on spirit levels and a let-go thing on material levels. With the affirmation of faith, we acknowledge a spirit reality and the divine beings who inhabit that reality—without seeing it, or them. With living faith, we invest implicit trust that those realities and beings are friendly to us, even love us. With the exercise of faith, we snuggle up to those realities and beings like we do our beloved family and our nurturing natural environment. With the perfection of faith, we fully share the will of God, living the Perfect Plan. For mortals that’s a plan in progress.
“Perfecting is of God. To wish for perfection is of man.”
— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
If you were told there was a perfect plan, one designed uniquely for you and your maximum benefit, would you be willing to upgrade from your imperfect plan? Lest our cultural baggage about being perfect or imperfect color the question, it’s helpful to frame our general life plan as incomplete. We need more input to develop a complete life plan, more spirit input. Our faith in divinity truly brings it into existence for us; amazingly, it frees God within us.
Faith acts to release the superhuman activities of the divine spark, the immortal germ, that lives within the mind of man, and which is the potential of eternal survival. UB 132:3.6
Our faith and our thoughts are like Supreme Tools we use to realize God in our personal experience, to release God within and make the Father real to us—and thus begin our journey into eternity. Going out on a limb of faith is to faith / think God into our everyday lives, even though we disobediently resist.
The success of your Adjuster in the enterprise of piloting you through the mortal life and bringing about your survival depends not so much on the theories of your beliefs as upon your decisions, determinations, and steadfast faith. All these movements of personality growth become powerful influences aiding in your advancement because they help you to co-operate with the Adjuster; they assist you in ceasing to resist. UB 110:3.2
There is a simple self-test to evaluate one’s current mind / spirit status: “Am I overflowing with love?” Yes, it’s a lofty benchmark and most would say it’s difficult or impossible to achieve. Nevertheless, all of us have experienced an overflow of love. It might have been for your mom and dad after a Christmas present you longed for; perhaps the romantic swoon of a courtship with a loved one; maybe holding your newborn. True worship is an overflow of love going up wonderfully woven with an overflow of love coming down. The overflow is possible for us; it’s the way we become more God-like.
The Perfect Plan of God enlivens natural possibilities with unlimited and never-ending power; our faith in supernatural possibilities is what transforms us. Here is truth: we faith God into our personal experience; we have a choice to faith / think divinity into existence, for ourselves. This is not a wishful theory; it’s how the revelators define it for us: “Is faith—the supreme assertion of human thought—desirable?” UB 3:5.9
I’m thinking of co-operating with my divine fragment; thinking I will cease to resist. I’m thinking I am in the presence of God. I’m thinking my faith increases my faith and adjusts my mind into a supreme assertion of faith in my birthright as a beloved child of our heavenly Father.