© 1977 Patsy and Tucky Hayes
© 1977 The Urantia Book Fellowship (formerly Urantia Brotherhood)
Genetic families and study group families are both the workshops of Our Father. They provide adjustment of the self to other selves. They allow for cultivation of our Father’s love through which Thought Adjusters, the Spirit of Truth, and our other spiritual benefactors may help us achieve the uplifting of humanity.
The home provides the first opportunity for fostering fraternal devotion among members. Study group 5 whose members loyally seek to live loving service also find themselves experiencing similar loving relationships. In talking with his apostles concerning love and the family, Jesus said: “The people of another age will better understand the gospel of the kingdom when it is presented in terms expressive of the family relationship-when man understands religion as the teaching of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, sonship with God.” (UB 142:7.4) We are the people of another age.
Mature study groups, like “true” families, promote brotherly love and the fulfillment of the “golden rule” by actively fostering the brotherhood of man revelation on earth. This is a valuable achievement. But Jesus admonishes his followers to love men as he loves us-to love with a fatherly as well as a brotherly affection. If we are to represent Jesus to our family of man, he expects us to display the supreme reactions of fatherly affection-assured faith and perfect love.
Our degree of understanding of universe reality is in direct proportion to our faith efforts to know and understand our relation to our Father. Jesus provided for us the truth fact that the family pattern is the best way to illustrate man’s relation to God.
In well developed study groups we find among faithful members the same expressions of the characteristics of “true” family love which Jesus pointed out to his apostles. Some of these facts are: provisions for companionship and loyalty, love and mercy, pleasure and security, education and training, and provision for the future. These characteristics are developed in study groups through the high levels of interaction and communication between diverse personalities who pool their resources to advance in their inner spiritual lives.
Through the smallness and personal intimacy of our study group “families,” we individuals can freely study together the truths of The URANTIA Book and learn much about how to apply those truths personally by lovingly socializing and sharing them with humanity. The family home and the study group atmosphere provide us a practicing arena in which to develop the “startling affection” and “amazing devotion” to the loving service of mankind which Jesus demonstrated and taught his followers to manifest.
Jesus expects spirit-born mortals to be as one. As his Spirit of Truth is in us, so are we one in him. As our Thought Adjuster is in God, so are we one in our Father. Let us commit ourselves to be as one in our families of the home, the study group, the human planetary family; and as one with our Universal families of time and space.
—Patsy and Tucky Hayes