Lately I have been gaining more appreciation for the concept of assurance and its meaning and value in context of Religion In Human Experience (Paper 100), The Real Nature of Religion (P-101), The Foundations of Religious Faith (P-102), and The Reality of Religious Experience (P-103).
Be aware, anything I post that is not actual text quotes is merely my personal opinion based on my own understanding and is subject to error, lack of clarity, inadequate expression, etc. I am most hopeful for the opinions of others related to the teachings and anticipate expanding my own perceptions and perspective thereby!
Personal religious experience, when true, delivers an assurance of our being, our personal relationship with God, our safety and survival, our purpose, and our destiny. This experience begins in-mind with the ministry of the Holy Spirit by the Adjutants delivering faith assurance and with the subsequent ministry of the God Fragment/Thought Adjuster by personal revelation delivering truth assurance and with the additional ministry (on our world since Pentecost) of the Spirit of Truth by the confirmation of both faith assurance and truth assurance. In addition to personal revelation, we are advised that we are periodically blessed by epochal revelation (or revelation to the world and all people upon the world, the UB being the 5th such to our world)....the purpose of which is to add facts and truths to eliminate the errors and reduce the confusions of evolutionary religion and science and the limitations of personal revelation.
All of these sources and forms of ministry to mortals deliver "assurance" in some form or another. It is our personal assurance that spiritualizes and spiritizes us and changes our personal motives, intentions, priorities, decisions, perspective, and delivers a philosophy for living that delivers the fruit of the Spirit led life. It is assurance that allows us to learn to feast on uncertainty and to remain faithful and joyful and trusting in the face of chaos and calamity, and to embrace the adventure of that to come which we cannot predict nor control! Assurance is a most important concept for the UB student to understand and learn to embrace.
The mind poisons of doubt, anxiety, fear, anger, mistrust, and paranoia erode such assurance and prevent the fruits of the Spirit which come by the assurance of our safe keeping and safe passage in God's friendly universe!! That and those who are antagonistic to assurance - especially that assurance/faith/trust within others - are the enemies of truth, beauty, and goodness and embrace evil and spread evil to others....they offer the bitter fruit of the dead branch and the blind and deaf perspective of those who personally lack assurance...or, perhaps, they suffer from spiritual pride and feel superior in their assurance to others and believe it is their place to criticize, instruct, and otherwise demean the religious experience and growth and assurance of others. In either case, we should be wary of those who distrust God or God's power, purpose, plan, and process or who feel it their duty to tell others what to do and when and to measure others by their own self perceived superiority....puffed up tadpoles!
God loves us each and blesses us each with personality, mind, free will, and endows each with the ministry of the Spirits - and all of these combine to give us the assurance of God and God's love and our relationship to God and to one another.
Assurance is related to so many concepts and teaching in the Urantia Book. Here's a link to the keyword search results:
https://urantia-association.org/search/ ... t%5B%5D=-1 101:0.3
Religion, the conviction-faith of the personality, can always triumph over the superficially contradictory logic of despair born in the unbelieving material mind.
There really is a true and genuine inner voice, that "true light which lights every man who comes into the world." And this spirit leading is distinct from the ethical prompting of human conscience. The feeling of religious assurance is more than an emotional feeling.
The assurance of religion transcends the reason of the mind, even the logic of philosophy. Religion is faith, trust, and assurance.
101:1.6
Faith unites moral insight with conscientious discriminations of values, and the pre-existent evolutionary sense of duty completes the ancestry of true religion.
The experience of religion eventually results in the certain consciousness of God and in the undoubted assurance of the survival of the believing personality.
101:2.4 (1106.3) There are two basic reasons for believing in a God who fosters human survival:
101:2.5 (1106.4) 1. Human experience, personal assurance,
the somehow registered hope and trust initiated by the
indwelling Thought Adjuster.
101:2.6 (1106.5) 2. The revelation of truth, whether by direct personal ministry of the Spirit of Truth, by the world bestowal of divine Sons, or through the revelations of the written word.
101:2.14
Your deepest nature — the divine Adjuster —
creates within you a hunger and thirst for righteousness, a certain craving for divine perfection. Religion is the faith act of the recognition of this inner urge to divine attainment; and
thus is brought about that soul trust and assurance of which you become conscious as the way of salvation, the technique of the survival of personality and all those values which you have come to look upon as being true and good.
Me here: I think assurance is the bread and water of life - that which satisfies the hunger, thirst, and yearning delivered by the Adjutants and the Thought Adjuster. We yearn for such assurance. We need God. And God responds to our yearn, our hunger, and our thirst. And when we embrace God's response of assurance, then are we attaching our branch to the living vine to be nurtured by love and guided into truth...and this is The Real Nature of Religion...the experience of growth and personal progress in the Spirit. Religion is "the conviction faith of the personality"!
Bradly
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