Paper 196 Overview: The Faith of Jesus

Jesus exhibited a complete and unwavering faith in God throughout his mortal life on earth. His faith was neither traditional nor merely intellectual, but rather personal and spiritual, arising from his inner experience with the divine presence within him, his indwelling Thought Adjuster. Unlike many religious adherents who turn to faith for consolation during hardship, Jesus maintained his supreme trust in God as a living experience of spiritual attainment, demonstrating tranquility even when confronted with life's contradictions and challenges.

Jesus conceptualized God as both "The Holy One of Israel" and "The living and loving Father in heaven," elevating the concept of God as Father to a sublime experience through his revelation that every mortal creature is a child of divine love. His greatest contribution to human experience was not revealing new ideas about God, but rather demonstrating a higher type of living faith that made God a living reality in his human life. This faith was original, spontaneous, and purely spiritual—a profound conviction that provided spiritual anchorage even in the face of apparent defeat and threatening despair.

The faith of Jesus was characterized by its all-consuming yet balanced nature, coordinating spiritual devotion with intellectual judgment and never becoming fanatical despite its intensity. He visualized all spiritual values as found in the kingdom of God, making the achievement of God's will the central focus of his life and prayer. Jesus connected to God not as a duty but as a sincere expression of spiritual attitude and soul loyalty, resulting in an unbroken communion with the divine that produced the transcendent fruits of the divine spirit in his life.

Jesus possessed a sublime and wholehearted faith in God that remained steadfast through all the challenges of mortal existence. He never religiously doubted God's watchcare and guidance, as his faith emerged from the insight produced by the activity of his indwelling Adjuster, the divine presence within him. His faith was neither traditionally inherited nor merely intellectual in nature—it developed as something deeply personal and purely spiritual through his ongoing communion with God.

The human Jesus perceived God as being simultaneously holy, just, and great, as well as true, beautiful, and good, focusing these divine attributes in his mind as "the will of the Father in heaven." While the concept of God as Father wasn't original to Jesus, he transformed and elevated this idea into a sublime experience by achieving a new revelation of God's nature and by proclaiming that every mortal creature exists as a child of this loving Father. Through his life and teaching, Jesus established a profoundly personal relationship between humans and the divine, emphasizing that each person is a genuine son or daughter of God.

Unlike many who cling to faith as a struggling soul at war with the universe, Jesus did not use faith merely as consolation amid difficulties or as comfort against despair. His faith was not an illusory compensation for life's unpleasant realities and sorrows, but rather a living engagement with divine reality. Even when confronting natural difficulties and temporal contradictions, Jesus experienced tranquility through his supreme trust in God and felt the tremendous thrill of living by faith in the very presence of the heavenly Father, a triumphant faith representing actual spiritual attainment.

Jesus' most significant contribution to human values wasn't presenting new ideas about God, but rather demonstrating magnificently and in human terms a new and higher form of living faith in God. In no other place throughout the universe did God become such a living reality as in the human experience of Jesus of Nazareth. His faith transcended intellectual reflection or mystic meditation. It was a genuine personal spiritual relationship with the Universal Father, fully validated by the supreme authority of authentic personal experience, making his life the definitive example of how to live by faith.

Jesus' devotion to doing his Father's will and serving humanity represented more than just mortal decision and human determination. It constituted a wholehearted consecration of himself to an unreserved bestowal of love. Regardless of the magnificent truth of Michael's sovereignty, it remains essential not to separate the human Jesus from everyday people and their struggles. Jesus ascended to heaven both as a man and as God; he belongs to humanity, and humanity belongs to him. It is unfortunate that religion itself has sometimes contributed to distancing the human Jesus from struggling mortals. The historical Jesus of Nazareth was a genuinely religious man who, through faith, achieved both knowing and implementing God's will, establishing himself as the most truly religious individual who has ever lived on our planet.

The time is appropriate for witnessing a figurative resurrection of the human Jesus from his burial tomb amid theological traditions and religious dogmas accumulated over nineteen centuries. Jesus of Nazareth must no longer be sacrificed even to the splendid concept of the glorified Christ that has come to dominate religious thinking. What a transcendent service it would be if, through this revelation, the Son of Man could be recovered from the tomb of traditional theology and presented as the living Jesus to the church bearing his name and to all other religions. The Christian fellowship should not hesitate to make necessary adjustments in faith and practices to follow the Master in his authentic demonstration of religious devotion to doing the Father's will and serving humanity unselfishly, even if this means confronting institutional Christianity's self-sufficient and unconsecrated character.

To "follow Jesus" means personally sharing his religious faith and entering into the spirit of the Master's life of unselfish service for others. One of the most valuable forms of human knowledge is understanding what Jesus believed, discovering his ideals, and striving to achieve his exalted life purpose. Ordinary people heard Jesus gladly, and they would again respond to presentations of his sincere human life of consecrated religious motivation if such truths were proclaimed anew to the world. People responded to Jesus because he was one of them—an unpretentious layman—which is notable since the world's greatest religious teacher was not a professional religious leader but an ordinary person. The goal for believers should not be to literally imitate Jesus' outward life but to share his faith, trust God as he did, and believe in people as he demonstrated through his life.

Someday a reformation within the Christian church may penetrate deeply enough to rediscover the unadulterated religious teachings of Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. It is possible to preach a religion about Jesus, but the essential challenge is to live the religion of Jesus in daily life. During the enthusiasm of Pentecost, Peter unintentionally inaugurated a new religion focused on the risen and glorified Christ, which Paul later transformed into Christianity—a religion incorporating his own theological perspectives and personal experience with Jesus on the Damascus road. This shift moved Christianity away from Jesus' original gospel of the kingdom.

The New Testament is devoted predominantly not to portraying Jesus' significant and inspiring religious life, but to discussing Paul's religious experience and presenting his personal religious convictions. With the exception of certain portions of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, plus the Book of Hebrews and the Epistle of James, the New Testament provides limited insight into Jesus' actual teachings. Even Peter, in his writings, rarely referenced the personal religious life of his Master. While the New Testament stands as a superb Christian document, it contains relatively little material directly reflecting Jesus' original message and methods, having become more focused on beliefs about Jesus rather than the faith of Jesus.

Jesus' earthly life demonstrated a transcendent religious development from primitive awe and human reverence through years of personal spiritual communion until he ultimately achieved awareness of his oneness with the Father. In a single lifetime, Jesus experienced the spiritual progression that humans typically begin on earth but usually complete only after extensive training in the spirit schools of higher realms. He advanced from a purely human consciousness of faith certainties based on personal religious experience to the sublime spiritual heights of positively realizing his divine nature and his close partnership with the Universal Father in managing the universe. This remarkable progress from human to divine was accomplished entirely through mortal achievement, showing that divine realization is possible through the power of faith.

Personal spiritual religious experience effectively resolves most human difficulties by serving as an efficient solvent that sorts, evaluates, and adjusts all mortal problems. While religion doesn't eliminate human troubles, it dissolves, absorbs, illuminates, and transcends them, unifying the personality for effective adjustment to all of life's demands. Religious faith, the positive guidance of the indwelling divine presence, enables the God-knowing individual to bridge the gulf between intellectual logic recognizing the Universal First Cause as It and the soul's positive affirmations that this First Cause is He, the personal heavenly Father revealed in Jesus' gospel and experienced in human salvation.

The universe contains three fundamental elements of reality: fact, idea, and relation, which religious consciousness identifies as science, philosophy, and truth respectively. Philosophy would view these activities as reason, wisdom, and faith—corresponding to physical, intellectual, and spiritual reality. We typically designate these realities as thing, meaning, and value in our attempts to comprehend the structure of existence. Understanding their interrelationship helps us integrate our worldview and experience.

Progressive comprehension of reality constitutes an approach toward God, as finding God and experiencing identity with reality delivers the experience of self-completion and wholeness. Experiencing total reality represents the full realization of God, marking the culmination of the journey of knowing God through personal spiritual discovery. This integration of knowledge, wisdom, and faith provides the foundation for a balanced life that honors all dimensions of human experience while recognizing the spiritual as supreme.

Human life reaches its fullest expression when a person is educated by fact, ennobled by wisdom, and saved—justified—by religious faith. Physical certainty emerges from the logic of science, moral certainty from philosophical wisdom, and spiritual certainty from the truth of genuine religious experience. These three paths to certainty complement each other, providing a comprehensive approach to understanding reality and our place within it.

The human mind can achieve high levels of spiritual insight and corresponding awareness of divine values because it is not entirely material in nature. A spirit nucleus, the divine Adjuster presence, exists within each human mind, manifesting in three distinct ways: humanitarian fellowship expressed as unselfish love; interpretation of the universe as wisdom that recognizes the cosmos as friendly to individuals; and spiritual evaluation of life as worship that acknowledges divine presence and seeks deeper experience of divinity. These three evidences demonstrate that humans transcend purely material existence.

The human mind doesn't create real values, nor does human experience independently yield universe insight. Regarding insight, recognition of moral values, and discernment of spiritual meanings, the human mind is limited to discovering, recognizing, interpreting, and choosing among values already present in reality. Moral values become intellectual possessions through three basic judgments of the mortal mind: self-judgment (moral choice), social-judgment (ethical choice), and God-judgment (religious choice). This process of moral evaluation with religious meaning represents spiritual insight—the individual's choice between good and evil, truth and error, material and spiritual, human and divine, time and eternity.

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