Exercises for gospel teachers
These exercises build on the manual designed to accompany the tape, “Depths in Jesus’ Gospel,” but you are of course welcome to adapt them to other settings. Wisely choose the exercises you find helpful, given the time you can devote to this study at present. You will observe that the tape breaks up the presentation into three parts.
Some of the exercises can be done alone; others are designed to be done in a group.
The following instruction goes for every exercise: Remember—and if you are a group leader, make this clear to the group: Self-revelation is voluntary. When the invitation comes to share what you have thought and written, you do not have to reveal to others anything that makes you uncomfortable or that you feel is not wise to share.
Before beginning, you may want to take a minute or two of silent receptivity and prayer.
I. Hearing the words of Jesus
Read the following quotation from Jesus.
You cannot teach the deep things of the spirit to those who have been born only of the flesh. First see that men are born of the spirit before you seek to instruct the advanced ways of the spirit. Do not undertake to show men the beauties of the temple until you have first taken them into the temple. Introduce men to God and as the sons of God before you discourse on the doctrines of the fatherhood of God and the sonship of men. Do not strive with men always be patient. It is not your kingdom; you are only ambassadors. Simply go forth proclaiming: This is the kingdom of heaven: God is your father and you are his sons, and this good news if you wholeheartedly believe it is your eternal salvation.
The Urantia Book, pp. 1592-93
II. Responding to Jesus’ gospel
Close your eyes and imagine being in Galilee listening to Jesus. Imagine being in the crowd. Take a couple minutes to visualize the scene and to bring to mind the many dimensions of the situation.
Then imagine what it would be like to see and hear Jesus say, “This is the kingdom of heaven: God is your father and you are his sons, and this good news if you wholeheartedly believe it is your eternal salvation.”
Questions for silent reflection
Question 1. What quality of faith is expressed in the way you, in imagination, see and hear Jesus saying that to you?
Question 2. Do you believe him wholeheartedly? Take time to let your wholeheartedness grow as you respond to the Master’s gospel.
II. Interpreting and honoring Jesus’ instruction for teachers
Questions for discussion
Question 1. Why did Jesus instruct his gospel messengers to see that their hearers were in the temple before giving them advanced teaching? Think of all the reasons you can. Is there any reason this instruction does not apply in your case? In sharing truth, will you obey the Master’s principle?
Discussion 1. Take time to reflect and write, then share with a partner, then share with the larger group (depending on time and the size of the group) on the following questions.
Question 2. What implications does your answer to question 1 have for the issue about sharing The Urantia Book?
The leader can determine whether there should be separate rounds for these questions or whether they shall be treated together.
III. Realizing the phases of our relationship with the Father
1. Begin by asking the Son to reveal the Father to you as you do this exercise. Address your prayer to Jesus or to the Eternal Son.
2. Read the seven functions of fatherly love on page 1604:
Jesus stated that a true family is founded on the following seven facts:
1. The fact of existence. The relationships of nature and the phenomena of mortal likenesses are bound up in the family: Children inherit certain parental traits. The children take origin in the parents; personality existence depends on the act of the parent. The relationship of father and child is inherent in all nature and pervades all living existences.
2. Security and pleasure. True fathers take great pleasure in providing for the needs of their children. Many fathers are not content with supplying the mere wants of their children but enjoy making provision for their pleasures also.
3. Education and training. Wise fathers carefully plan for the education and adequate training of their sons and daughters. When young they are prepared for the greater responsibilities of later life.
4. Discipline and restraint. Farseeing fathers also make provision for the necessary discipline, guidance, correction, and sometimes restraint of their young and immature offspring.
5. Companionship and loyalty. The affectionate father holds intimate and loving intercourse with his children. Always is his ear open to their petitions; he is ever ready to share their hardships and assist them over their difficulties. The father is supremely interested in the progressive welfare of his progeny.
6. Love and mercy. A compassionate father is freely forgiving; fathers do not hold vengeful memories against their children. Fathers are not like judges, enemies, or creditors. Real families are built upon tolerance, patience, and forgiveness.
7. Provision for the future. Temporal fathers like to leave an inheritance for their sons. The family continues from one generation to another. Death only ends one generation to mark the beginning of another. Death terminates an individual life but not necessarily the family.
3. For each function, take a few minutes to reflect and write ways in which you can begin to see God performing this function in your life. If you come up blank on one or more of these, that’s just fine at this point. Take twenty minutes of quiet reading, contemplation, and writing for this stage of the exercise.
4. Share your answers with others in your group. Begin sharing in pairs, then share with the larger group.
IV. Preparing to Share our Father’s Love
1. Then take another few minutes for each function, asking yourself how you might perform this function with others you know. Again, take about twenty minutes and share as above.
2. Close with some minutes of silence, thanking the Son for his revelation of the Father and thanking our Father for his many-faceted love . . . and let yourself be led into worship.
V. A Brief Topical Study
Read and discuss the following selections.
“Sonship is the only experience that makes fatherhood certain.” (1126.1)
Faith sonship
Always the burden of his message was: the fact of the heavenly Father’s love and the truth of his mercy, coupled with the good news that man is a faith-son of this same God of love. (1460.6)
“All who enter the kingdom of heaven shall become the sons of God . . . .” (1537.3)
Universal sonship
After Jesus and Matthew had finished talking, Simon Zelotes asked, “But Master, are all men the sons of God?” And Jesus answered: “Yes, Simon, all men are the sons of God, and that is the good news you are going to proclaim.” (1585.5)
God as a fact
John asked Jesus, "Master, what is the kingdom of heaven?" And Jesus answered: "The kingdom of heaven consists in these three essentials: first, recognition of the fact of the sovereignty of God; second, belief in the truth of sonship with God; and third, faith in the effectiveness of the supreme human desire to do the will of God--to be like God. And this is the good news of the gospel: that by faith every mortal may have all these essentials of salvation." (1585.7)
The sovereignty of God is unlimited; it is the fundamental fact of all creation. (52.5)
From the truth-level experience of divine love to the fact of brotherhood
Read four paragraphs from “The Part and the Whole,” 138.3-6, noting how the glorious love of God for each person (a “truth-level” experience) brings into being, without any preferential “respect of persons,” the universal brotherhood, a relationship of the whole—a “fact of relationship.”
The Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man present the paradox of the part and the whole on the level of personality. God loves each individual as an individual child in the heavenly family. Yet God thus loves every individual; he is no respecter of persons, and the universality of his love brings into being a relationship of the whole, the universal brotherhood.
The love of the Father absolutely individualizes each personality as a unique child of the Universal Father, a child without duplicate in infinity, a will creature irreplaceable in all eternity. The Father's love glorifies each child of God, illuminating each member of the celestial family, sharply silhouetting the unique nature of each personal being against the impersonal levels that lie outside the fraternal circuit of the Father of all. The love of God strikingly portrays the transcendent value of each will creature, unmistakably reveals the high value which the Universal Father has placed upon each and every one of his children from the highest creator personality of Paradise status to the lowest personality of will dignity among the savage tribes of men in the dawn of the human species on some evolutionary world of time and space.
This very love of God for the individual brings into being the divine family of all individuals, the universal brotherhood of the freewill children of the Paradise Father. And this brotherhood, being universal, is a relationship of the whole. Brotherhood, when universal, discloses not the each relationship, but the all relationship. Brotherhood is a reality of the total and therefore discloses qualities of the whole in contradistinction to qualities of the part.
Brotherhood constitutes a fact of relationship between every personality in universal existence. No person can escape the benefits or the penalties that may come as a result of relationship to other persons. The part profits or suffers in measure with the whole. The good effort of each man benefits all men; the error or evil of each man augments the tribulation of all men. As moves the part, so moves the whole. As the progress of the whole, so the progress of the part. The relative velocities of part and whole determine whether the part is retarded by the inertia of the whole or is carried forward by the momentum of the cosmic brotherhood.
Brotherhood on the level of truth—Jesus to Ganid
No man is a stranger to one who knows God. In the experience of finding the Father in heaven you discover that all men are your brothers, and does it seem strange that one should enjoy the exhilaration of meeting a newly discovered brother? To become acquainted with one's brothers and sisters, to know their problems and to learn to love them, is the supreme experience of living. (1431.1)
VI. Some questions about the gospel
1. How does Jesus say that can you fuse with your Adjuster in this life?
"Verily, verily, I say to you who believe the gospel that, if a man will keep this word of truth alive in his heart, he shall never taste death.” (1797.2)
2. How does the gospel lead us into new realms of truth, beauty, and goodness? Consider the following.
To material, evolutionary, finite creatures, a life predicated on the living of the Father's will leads directly to the attainment of spirit supremacy in the personality arena and brings such creatures one step nearer the comprehension of the Father-Infinite. Such a Father life is one predicated on truth, sensitive to beauty, and dominated by goodness. Such a God-knowing person is inwardly illuminated by worship and outwardly devoted to the wholehearted service of the universal brotherhood of all personalities, a service ministry which is filled with mercy and motivated by love, while all these life qualities are unified in the evolving personality on ever-ascending levels of cosmic wisdom, self-realization, God-finding, and Father worship. (1175.1)
3. What is the import of the fact that the gospel is expressed in terms of joy and liberty?
"When Jesus began to preach, there remained the exhortation to repentance, but such a message was always followed by the gospel, the good tidings of the joy and liberty of the new kingdom." (1509.2)
4. Why does the gospel include “faith in the supreme human desire to do the will of God—to be like God” (1586.0).
5. What role does gospel truth play in character growth?
Jesus taught the appeal to the emotions as the technique of arresting and focusing the intellectual attention. He designated the mind thus aroused and quickened as the gateway to the soul, where there resides that spiritual nature of man which must recognize truth and respond to the spiritual appeal of the gospel in order to afford the permanent results of true character transformations. (1705.4)
The following exercises prepare you to relate gospel truth to current human spiritual difficulties. These exercises can be done more rapidly or developed over weeks, so make your choice and adjust your expectations accordingly.
VII. Orienting our ministry
Jesus lived on earth and taught a gospel which redeemed man from the superstition that he was a child of the devil and elevated him to the dignity of a faith son of God. Jesus’ message as he preached it and lived it in his day was an effective solvent for man’s spiritual difficulties in that day of its statement. And now that he has personally left the world he sends in his Spirit of Truth, who is designed to live in man and for each generation to restate the Jesus message so that every new group of mortals to appear upon the face of the earth shall have a new and up-to-date version of the gospel, just such personal enlightenment and group guidance as will prove to be an effective solvent for man’s ever new and varied spiritual difficulties. (2060.6)
Consider the following truths expressed in diverse expressions of Jesus’ gospel. Add to the list other key spiritual truths and concepts in the light of your own study and realization. Your experience of the dynamism of truth will be heightened if you put your favorite quotation expressing your list of gospel themes on left side of a large sheet of paper and put your list of spiritual needs (developed in the following exercise) on the right side . . . and then watch the way the truth on the left ministers to the needs on the right.
Gospel themes
Knowing God as your father
Worshiping God as our father
Feeling the infinite love of God
Knowing God’s indwelling spirit presence
Having God as a friend
Approaching God through supreme truth, beauty, and goodness
Recognizing the fact of the sovereignty of God
Realizing that you can experience sonship with God every day
The supreme joy of the faith realization of sonship with God
The supreme desire to do the will of God
Divine sonship
The brotherhood of man
The brotherhood of the faithful
Service-discovery and ministry-revelation
The kingdom of heaven—the higher brotherhood of beings
Jesus as revealing the Father and the way of living by his life and teachings
Spiritual liberty
Eternal life
Ever-ascending citizenship in the eternal universe
VIII. Recognizing Current Spiritual Difficulties
Wise gospel proclaiming (or proclaiming by the way we live, proclaiming in thought, word, and deed) ministers eternal spiritual truth to the spiritual difficulties of the current generation. As those difficulties change, so the presentation of the gospel adjusts. Consider the group of people with whom you come into contact. Include people you have special concern for, those you see regularly, and strangers you come across here and there. To be sure, individual spiritual difficulties may differ from one person to the next. Nevertheless, we are also, in some measure, the children of our age, and the culture we share presents us with some common spiritual difficulties. At least I think it is worth exploring this thought.
What spiritual difficulties did the people of Jesus' day face? They knew God as the one Creator of the universe and the Lord of history, who cared for them as a people, but they needed an enhanced realization of God's personal relationship with the individual. They saw themselves as special, and they needed an expanded awareness of their kinship with all people.
What is a spiritual difficulty?
A difficulty that the indwelling spirit is having in helping the subject progress
A difficulty that a person or group are wrestling with in their spiritual progress
Note: these difficulties may be more conscious or less conscious. Take time to write out your own best answers to these questions.
1. What spiritual difficulties is the present generation dealing with?
2. What social, economic, and political difficulties do we face? What aspects of spiritual difficulties are implicit in those?
3. Think of the obvious biological, social, economic, and political troubles of our world. What spiritual difficulties are involved in them?
4. Think of one or more persons for whom you especially pray to share your joy in divine truth. What spiritual difficulties are they facing?
5. Take a sheet of paper and write the concepts of Jesus' gospel as you understand it on one side. Then write the spiritual needs you see on the other side. Take time to imagine truth reaching out to needs. Think about a favorite example of how Jesus responded to someone's needs. Think about how truth may best be expressed today in order to meet those needs. What way of putting today's gospel might best reach the one(s) for whom you are especially praying?
7. How can you live that gospel with the one(s) you have in mind?