© 1985 Jeff Wattles
© 1985 The Urantia Book Fellowship (formerly Urantia Brotherhood)
Religion helps people deal with the spiritual difficulties of their times. Primitive people needed to be liberated from bondage to tradition, to recognize one supreme God of nature and the spiritual world, to be delivered from fear and to gain the assurance that faith alone is required in order to receive the gift of eternal life. That original gospel of faith and trust in the one God is always relevant, and Jesus came expanding the truth. The people of his day needed especially to experience the personal character of God’s relationship with the individual. Jesus revealed the personality of the Father, and taught that we are the faith sons and daughters of God. He demonstrated the joy and liberty of sonship with God and the spontaneous fruits of living truth in wholehearted worship of God and loving service of humankind. Today we urgently need to realize that God’s relation with the individual entails a profound spiritual consequence; the brotherhood of all humankind.
By the supreme decisions of living faith, we can assist in the dawn of a new age. New insights will harmonize scientific facts, philosophic meanings, and spiritual truth; appreciation of the beauties of nature and art will thrive; and morality — the practice of the golden rule will become the personal philosophy of growing men and women. The great teachers of the coming age will be able to set forth their enlightening and comforting message without succumbing to the temptation to adulterate their spiritual proclamation with efforts to give timely advice on social, economic, or political matters. A rebirth of genuine religion, a spiritual renaissance, is destined to transform wastelands of secularism into gardens of a plant blossoming in faith.
— Jeffrey Wattles
Concord, California