Spiritual Advice and Guidance Blog: Urantia Book

Q: Why are we born? What is the purpose of living? Why am I living?

A: Thank you for your note to Truthbook.com, a website dedicated to the teachings of The Urantia Book. I will answer your questions with Urantia Book quotes, and I hope you will click on each link to expand these important ideas

We are born to come to know and love God as our spirit Father.

(1:0.2) The myriads of planetary systems were all made to be eventually inhabited by many different types of intelligent creatures, beings who could know God, receive the divine affection, and love him in return. The universe of universes is the work of God and the dwelling place of his diverse creatures. "God created the heavens and formed the earth; he established the universe and created this world not in vain; he formed it to be inhabited."

(1:1.2) The Universal Father never imposes any form of arbitrary recognition, formal worship, or slavish service upon the intelligent will creatures of the universes. The evolutionary inhabitants of the worlds of time and space must of themselves - in their own hearts - recognize, love, and voluntarily worship him. The Creator refuses to coerce or compel the submission of the spiritual free wills of his material creatures. The affectionate dedication of the human will to the doing of the Father's will is manâ€™s choicest gift to God; in fact, such a consecration of creature will constitutes man's only possible gift of true value to the Paradise Father. In God, man lives, moves, and has his being; there is nothing which man can give to God except this choosing to abide by the Father's will, and such decisions, effected by the intelligent will creatures of the universes, constitute the reality of that true worship which is so satisfying to the love-dominated nature of the Creator Father.

Our purpose in life is to share and co-create our lives with God.

(108:0.2) Nothing in the entire universe can substitute for the fact of experience on nonexistential levels. The infinite God is, as always, replete and complete, infinitely inclusive of all things except evil and creature experience. God cannot do wrong; he is infallible. God cannot experientially know what he has never personally experienced; God's preknowledge is existential. Therefore does the spirit of the Father descend from Paradise to participate with finite mortals in every bona fide experience of the ascending career; it is only by such a method that the existential God could become in truth and in fact man's experiential Father. The infinity of the eternal God encompasses the potential for finite experience, which indeed becomes actual in the ministry of the Adjuster fragments that actually share the life vicissitude experiences of human beings.

(2:2.6) God is eternally and infinitely perfect; he cannot personally know imperfection as his own experience, but he does share the consciousness of all the experience of imperfectness of all the struggling creatures of the evolutionary universes of all the Paradise Creator Sons. The personal and liberating touch of the God of perfection overshadows the hearts and encircuits the natures of all those mortal creatures who have ascended to the universe level of moral discernment. In this manner, as well as through the contacts of the divine presence, the Universal Father actually participates in the experience with immaturity and imperfection in the evolving career of every moral being of the entire universe.

We are born to develop God-consciousness.

(0:12.12) ...we know that there dwells within the human mind a fragment of God, and that there sojourns with the human soul the Spirit of Truth; and we further know that these spirit forces conspire to enable material man to grasp the reality of spiritual values and to comprehend the philosophy of universe meanings. But even more certainly we know that these spirits of the Divine Presence are able to assist man in the spiritual appropriation of all truth contributory to the enhancement of the ever-progressing reality of personal religious experience â€” God-consciousness.

(5:5.11) God-consciousness, as it is experienced by an evolving mortal of the realms, must consist of three varying factors, three differential levels of reality realization. There is first the mind consciousness â€” the comprehension of the idea of God. Then follows the soul consciousness â€” the realization of the ideal of God. Last, dawns the spirit consciousness â€” the realization of the spirit reality of God. By the unification of these factors of the divine realization, no matter how incomplete, the mortal personality at all times overspreads all conscious levels with a realization of the personality of God.

You are living to grow an immortal soul of survival value, and then, live forever.

(1:3.7) In the inner experience of man, mind is joined to matter. Such material-linked minds cannot survive mortal death. The technique of survival is embraced in those adjustments of the human will and those transformations in the mortal mind whereby such a God-conscious intellect gradually becomes spirit taught and eventually spirit led. This evolution of the human mind from matter association to spirit union results in the transmutation of the potentially spirit phases of the mortal mind into the morontia realities of the immortal soul. Mortal mind subservient to matter is destined to become increasingly material and consequently to suffer eventual personality extinction; mind yielded to spirit is destined to become increasingly spiritual and ultimately to achieve oneness with the surviving and guiding divine spirit and in this way to attain survival and eternity of personality existence.

(5:5.13) Eternal survival of personality is wholly dependent on the choosing of the mortal mind, whose decisions determine the survival potential of the immortal soul. When the mind believes God and the soul knows God, and when, with the fostering Adjuster, they all desire God, then is survival assured.

Finally, you are a completely unique individual in the family of God. No one else can do what you have to do here on the earth. You are the only one who can reflect back to the world your unique part of the personality of God.

(12:7.9) 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.

Thank you for this most important question. I hope my reply has been helpful

Labels: God, God-Consciousness, individuality, purpose of life, sharing, soul, The Urantia Book

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Friday, October 17, 2008

Why Do Children Die?

Q: Why do children die? Is it for the sins of the parents, or is their mission on earth completed?

A: It is always a sadness when a child dies. It touches our hearts so deeply that we feel there must be an explanation, and we ask "Why?" It is such a difficult thing to understand that we feel there has to be a good reason, known only to God. It is hard to realize that an innocent child is denied the chance to live a long life, when so many not-so-innocent folks live to a ripe old age.

The Urantia Book teaches us that affliction - any kind of affliction - is never a judgment from God. On a planet such as ours, many things happen which seem heartless and cruel, but this does not mean that we are being punished by God, or that our children are bearing divine retribution for our sins.

The phenomenon of death is occurring all over the planet at every moment. People are born and people die all the time. Death is not a curse, but an inevitability. None of us is guaranteed a long life on this earth, but we are all guaranteed to die in one way or another. In our attempts to fathom some reason in a child's death, we may grasp at the explanation that it was due to some sin that the parents committed - a sin against God, and so God claimed the life of this innocent in retribution...but this is just not the case. The sins of the fathers are not visited on subsequent generations in the form of a death curse. Death simply comes due to disease and the accidents of time - sometimes through violence or war - but the fact of death is simply a part of life, and will ever be so. Death is an equal-opportunity event, whether early or late. This is not to say that it is easy to accept the untimely passing of a child. No matter how they meet death, it is an especially sorrowful thing to bear the loss of a young person, and I can understand why it seems to need an explanation. But the fact is that our lives here are transient, and none of us will avoid death.

The Urantia Book reveals and enlarges the concept of a loving, fatherly God. Our Heavenly Father loves all of his children as individual members of the universal family, and his love encompasses even the smallest and the weakest of lives. With God, no life is ever lost. Even if a child should unfortunately lose its life before it is able to choose an eternity with God, it is saved, and kept safe. The child is raised in one of the many stopping-places in the Father's universe and is ultimately given a chance to enjoy an eternal existence just as is the oldest, most experienced survivor of this earth life. So, even if their earth life may be cut short, they still have the potential of an eternal life in the Father's care.

God is not an angry, vengeful tyrant who demands harsh payments for our transgressions. The Heavenly Father is incapable of wrath and anger. He is so great and good that he has no need for such base emotional reactions. In our attempts to make sense of the seemingly insensible, we have to be careful not to place upon God our most disagreeable human traits.

As for a "life-mission," I cannot presume to say that there is a pre-determined purpose for anyone's life. Our lives are shaped by our free-will decisions. I suppose that many of us feel that we do have a life-mission, but this is usually arrived at after some life experience and is predicated on one's interests and desires and goals for the future.

Labels: affliction, children, death, God, purpose of life, The Urantia Book

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Monday, April 21, 2008

Interview With Rick Warren

You will enjoy the new insights that Rick Warren has, with his wife now having cancer and him having "wealth" from the book sales. This is a facinating short interview with Rick Warren, "Purpose Driven Life " author and pastor of Saddleback Church in California

In the interview by Paul Bradshaw with Rick Warren, Rick said:

People ask me, What is the purpose of life? And I respond: In a nutshell, life is preparation for eternity. We were not made to last forever, and God wants us to be with Him in Heaven.

One day my heart is going to stop, and that will be the end of my body-- but not the end of me.

I may live 60 to 100 years on earth, but I am going to spend trillions of years in eternity. This is the warm-up act - the dress rehearsal. God wants us to practice on earth what we will do forever in eternity.

We were made by God and for God, and until you figure that out, life isn't going to make sense.

Life is a series of problems: Either you are in one now, you're just coming out of one, or you're getting ready to go into another one.

The reason for this is that God is more interested in your character than your comfort.

God is more interested in making your life holy than He is in making your life happy.

We can be reasonably happy here on earth, but that's not the goal of life. The goal is to grow in character, in Christ likeness.

This past year has been the greatest year of my life but also the toughest, with my wife, Kay, getting cancer.

I used to think that life was hills and valleys - you go through a dark time, then you go to the mountaintop, back and forth. I don't believe that anymore.

Rather than life being hills and valleys, I believe that it's kind of like two rails on a railroad track, and at all times you have something good and something bad in your life.

No matter how good things are in your life, there is always something bad that needs to be worked on.

And no matter how bad things are in your life, there is always something good you can thank God for.

You can focus on your purposes, or you can focus on your problems.

If you focus on your problems, you're going into self-centeredness, "which is my problem, my issues, my pain." But one of the easiest ways to get rid of pain is to get your focus off yourself and onto God and others. We discovered quickly that in spite of the prayers of hundreds of thousands of people, God was not going to heal Kay or make it easy for her.

It has been very difficult for her, and yet God has strengthened her character, given her a ministry of helping other people, given her a testimony, drawn her closer to Him and to people.

You have to learn to deal with both the good and the bad of life.

Actually, sometimes learning to deal with the good is harder. For instance, this past year, all of a sudden, when the book sold 15 million copies, it made me instantly very wealthy.

It also brought a lot of notoriety that I had never had to deal with before I don't think God gives you money or notoriety for your own ego or for you to live a life of ease.

So I began to ask God what He wanted me to do with this money, notoriety and influence. He gave me two different passages that helped me decide what to do, II Corinthians 9 and Psalm 72

First, in spite of all the money coming in, we would not change our lifestyle one bit. We made no major purchases. Second, about midway through last year, I stopped taking a salary from the church.

Third, we set up foundations to fund an initiative we call The Peace Plan to plant churches, equip leaders, assist the poor, care for the sick, and educate the next generation.

Fourth, I added up all that the church had paid me in the 24 years since I started the church, and I gave it all back. It was liberating to be able to serve God for free.

We need to ask ourselves: Am I going to live for possessions? Popularity?

Am I going to be driven by pressures? Guilt? Bitterness? Materialism? Or am I going to be driven by God's purposes (for my life)?

When I get up in the morning, I sit on the side of my bed and say, God, if I don't get anything else done today, I want to know You more and love You better. God didn't put me on earth just to fulfill a to-do list. He's more interested in what I am than what I do. That's why we're called human beings, not human doings.

Happy moments, PRAISE GOD.
Difficult moments, SEEK GOD.
Quiet moments, WORSHIP GOD.
Painful moments, TRUST GOD.
Every moment, THANK GOD.

Labels: God, Paul Bradshaw, purpose of life, Rick Warren, spirituality

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