Paper 196 Overview: The Faith of Jesus

Jesus had complete faith in God throughout his life on earth. His faith was personal and spiritual, not based on tradition or just ideas. Jesus showed humans a new way to have faith in God through his own life example.

Jesus believed in God as both holy and loving, and he taught that every person is a child of God. His faith was living and active, not just a way to escape the troubles of life. He faced life's challenges with faith and courage.

Jesus trusted God like a child trusts a parent, but his faith was strong and mature. He asked his followers not just to believe in him, but to believe with him in the reality of God's love. His example showed that religious faith is about personally finding and doing God's will.

Jesus had a complete and wholehearted faith in God. Even when life was difficult, he never doubted that God was watching over him. His faith came from the divine presence within him, his indwelling Thought Adjuster.

Jesus saw God as holy, just, and great, but also as true, beautiful, and good. He thought of God as "the will of the Father in heaven." Jesus was not the first to call God a Father, but he made this idea special by teaching that every person is a child of God.

Jesus did not hold onto faith just to get through hard times. His faith was not just a comfort when things were bad. He lived with complete trust in God even when facing difficulties in life. He experienced the joy of living by faith in the presence of the heavenly Father.

Jesus' greatest gift to human experience was not just new ideas about God, but showing a new type of living faith in God. On no other world in the universe did God become so real to someone as he did in Jesus' human experience.

Jesus completely gave himself to doing his Father's will and serving others. This was more than just a human decision—it was a full commitment to sharing love. Jesus went to heaven as both man and God. He belongs to all people, and all people belong to him. It is sad that religion itself has sometimes taken the human Jesus away from people who are struggling. Jesus was a religious man who, by faith, knew and did God's will. He was the most truly religious person who ever lived on earth.

The time is right for the human Jesus to rise from his burial place in religious traditions. Jesus of Nazareth should not be sacrificed even for the wonderful idea of the glorified Christ. What a great service it would be if the Son of Man could be brought back from the tomb of traditional religious teaching and presented as the living Jesus to the church that bears his name and to all other religions. The Christian fellowship should not be afraid to follow the Master in showing his real life of religious devotion to doing his Father's will and unselfish service to others.

To "follow Jesus" means to personally share his religious faith and enter into the spirit of the Master's life of unselfish service. One of the most important things in human life is to find out what Jesus believed, to discover his ideals, and to try to achieve his high purpose in life. Ordinary people heard Jesus gladly, and they will respond again to the sharing of his sincere human life of religious commitment if these truths are shared with the world. People heard him gladly because he was one of them, a simple layman. The world's greatest religious teacher was a layman.

Someday, there may be a change in the Christian church that will go deep enough to get back to the pure religious teachings of Jesus, who started and completed our faith. People can preach a religion about Jesus, but they must live the religion of Jesus. In the excitement of Pentecost, Peter accidentally started a new religion, the religion of the risen and glorified Christ. The Apostle Paul later changed this new gospel into Christianity, a religion that included his own religious views and his personal experience with Jesus on the Damascus road.

Almost all of the New Testament is about Paul's religious experience and personal religious beliefs, not about the meaningful and inspiring religious life of Jesus. The few exceptions to this are parts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the Book of Hebrews, and the letter of James. Even Peter, in his writing, only once returned to the personal religious life of his Master. The New Testament is an excellent Christian document, but it does not contain much about Jesus' actual teachings.

Jesus' life on earth shows an amazing religious growth from early ideas of awe and respect for God up through years of personal spiritual communion until he finally reached the advanced state of knowing he was one with the Father. In one short life, Jesus went through the religious growth that most people begin on earth and usually finish only after a long journey in the spirit training schools of the higher levels before Paradise. Jesus went from being fully human to knowing he was divine and worked with the Universal Father in managing a universe.

Personal, spiritual religious experience helps solve most human problems. It does not remove troubles, but it helps us deal with them better. True religion unifies the personality to handle all of life's challenges. Religious faith—the positive leading of God's spirit living in the human mind—helps people bridge the gap between seeing God as the First Cause and knowing God as the heavenly Father of Jesus' gospel, the personal God of human salvation.

There are three elements in all reality: fact, idea, and relation. Religious consciousness identifies these as science, philosophy, and truth. Philosophy sees them as reason, wisdom, and faith—physical reality, intellectual reality, and spiritual reality. We can also designate these realities as thing, meaning, and value.

Understanding more of reality is like getting closer to God. Finding God and knowing you are connected to reality means experiencing completion—becoming whole. Experiencing all of reality is fully realizing God, the final goal of knowing God.

The full summary of human life is knowing that people are educated by fact, made better by wisdom, and justified by religious faith. Physical certainty comes from the logic of science. Moral certainty comes from the wisdom of philosophy. Spiritual certainty comes from the truth of real religious experience.

The human mind can reach high levels of spiritual insight and related areas of divine values because it is not completely material. There is a spirit center in the human mind—the Adjuster of the divine presence. There are three separate proofs of this spirit living in the human mind: Humanitarian fellowship (love), interpretation of the universe (wisdom), and spiritual evaluation of life (worship).

The human mind does not create real values. Human experience does not produce universe insight. For insight, recognizing moral values, and understanding spiritual meanings, all the human mind can do is discover, recognize, interpret, and choose.

When all is said and done, the Father idea is the highest human concept of God.