© 2002 Larry Mullins
© 2002 The Christian Fellowship of Students of The Urantia Book
A significant amount of interest in starting a home Living the Teachings Group has been generated among Urantia Book readers recently. Below is an excerpt from one of our “Living the Teachings” booklets.
Some of us began to believe sometime ago that ordinary study groups do not cultivate the inner life. Reading groups seem to be developed around “head knowledge.” We began to wonder if this was enough and had the feeling of dissatisfaction with our regular study groups. Something was missing.
We could talk about the teachings of the Master in study groups, and most of us knew the Urantia Papers fairly well. But study groups did not seem to change the lives of those who attended. We came to believe that very few of us were living the teachings of the Master on a significant level.
Intellectually, we thought we knew about the religious life of Jesus and how he lived it. But even this knowledge-that which is “of the greatest value” to humankind-in and of itself was not enough. We knew about this religious life, but we did not, in a sense, “own” it.
We came to believe that we needed more than the knowledge and philosophy about the Master’s religious life. We decided we wanted to experience that religious life ourselves, and try to actually live it. We needed to live the religion of Jesus.
The group we now call Living the Teachings set about to learn and define the religious life of Jesus, and to discover how he lived it. We then sought to apply these ideas to our own lives.
We discovered this process to be a mutual adventure, yet one that is profoundly personal and ongoing. More and more we discovered ourselves gravitating toward a religious belief. But not a religious belief like any we had known before. It was more a personal religious belief that addressed the inner life of each individual. We began to discover what the Papers call “the religion of personal experience…”