The Jesus I Know

As a Religious Scientist I sometimes miss Jesus. Oh, I know that the Master Teacher is always there, ready to come into my heart and mind whenever I am open to the experience. But I miss hearing more about the real Jesus - the magnificent man who transcended his humanity in a way that no other person that we know of has done. You see, those of us in Science of Mind (Religious Science), while once openly metaphysical Christians, have now in our churches and teaching banished Jesus to the sidelines in search of inclusiveness and as a reaction to Fundamentalism.

Fundamentalism has mounted a marvelous and totally successful marketing campaign aimed at forcing their antiquated and wrong headed view of The Christ on the entire Christian community. They have done this by means of their doctrine of the Five Fundamentals and told all other Christians that if you do not accept each of these doctrinal principles as literal truth then you may not call yourself a Christian.

The effrontery of these self appointed arbiters of faith to tell me and countless millions of other Christians that if we do not accept the medieval and pagan myths of Fundamentalism; if we do not agree to park our minds at the church door - why then we are no true Christians! In fact, they trumpet to the world that all who do not bow the knee to their error filled view of Christ are members of a heresy or worse - a cult! I doubt that the Master would feel much at home in a Fundamentalist Church - particularly in America!

Here is the Jesus I know and love. He is Yeshua Ben Joseph the Jewish, Essene lad we have chosen to call Jesus, although he would never have been called that in life. Joshua, as I prefer to call him was a man - 100% human. He was not half god/half man in the Greek demi-god tradition as our Fundamentalist brethren maintain. He was born of a man and a woman, not begotten by God, and that is what makes Jesus such an enduringly special and powerful force in human history! Were he a God, nothing he did or said would be exceptional in any way! The miracle is that a HUMAN did it!

God creates but never begets! We are all the sons and daughters of the most High God and the Indwelling God; which are one and the same. Are you aware that no one in Jesus' own time had ever heard of the myth of his virgin birth? That idea appeared first in the 9th century CE (the 800's) and was totally unknown in his own time. Paul, who wrote 56% of the New Testament and was the earliest contributor to the New Testament, made NO mention of any birth out of the ordinary for the Master. If it were common knowledge, why Paul's total silence about a Divine Paternity in all his writing?

The Jesus I know was friends with all the wrong people. He broke bread with tax collectors (the most hated and social unacceptable men in Israel or Judea). He ministered to lepers who were thought so contagious and dangerous that they were stoned to death if they appeared in town. He consorted with prostitutes and saved an adulteress from stoning. His best friend in the world was Mary Magdalene, a rich widow of questionable reputation. He refused the table and company of the Priests and Pharisees as he believed them to be oppressors of the people and morally bankrupt. He befriended and healed the children of Roman officers - hated as occupiers by all Jews of the time. He refused to call himself the Messiah when the people wanted him to lead a revolt against the hated Romans. He refused to judge any other man or woman, warning that those who judge will surely be harshly judged themselves. Only the Creator who gave life could judge it and take it away.

Jesus befriended Samaritans, the half Jewish and half Greek people who lived just north of Judea and were despised by the orthodox Jews as unclean and infidels. Sounds like the ranting of intolerant ministers today, doesn't it? Jesus traveled with an entourage of wealthy women - a truly scandalous thing to do in that era. He forgave all who sought forgiveness, he judged no one, he loved all as his brothers and sisters regardless of religion, race or previous sin. Those who believed that his Word had power, he healed without thought of who they were or expectation of payment or reward. He taught all who came to hear the Truth - no one was barred from his presence or his table. He refused to prove his Christ hood before the Pharisees; Truth needs no proof and the Master understood this well.

He transcended his humanity time and time again; when he could have escaped and lived a peaceful life as a teacher, he refused to abandon his destiny which was to be the anointed messenger of Truth to a world that thirsted for his Word. When he fell hopelessly in love and was so tempted to live the normal life of a Jewish husband and father - he swallowed his longing and grief and renewed his ministry and his healing. This is the Jesus I know and love!

I know the Jesus who loved without hesitation or qualification. The Jesus who asked each of us to transcend our petty humanity and reach for the greatness that each of us has within. The Jesus who taught us that death was another kind of birth into a new state and a new realm. Because of Jesus we could now face death without fear. I know the Jesus who by his example taught us that love is the most powerful force in the Universe. The Jesus who taught us how to pray affirmatively and powerfully, expecting and knowing that our prayers are answered before they are spoken. I know and love the Jesus that came to bring us the abundant life.

This magnificent man showed us the way to live, the way to love, the way to die when the time comes. If he were a demi-god as the literalistic Fundamentalists would have us believe, all that he did would have been simply normal behavior for a God. To do what he did as a fully human man was the miracle and the lesson. When we make the Master into a little tin god, we diminish his greatness and miss the entire point of his ministry on Earth. Christ means the anointed one - the man touched by God and given a destiny to bring the Light of Love and Law to all mankind. Jesus was indeed the Christ.

So can we all be. As the Master said on many occasions and in many ways: All that I have done, may you do also - if you believe.

He did not mean for us to believe in him! He meant for us to believe and to trust in God the Father, whose good pleasure it is to bring you the Kingdom of Heaven right here and right now - if you will receive it! If you are estranged or do not know this Christ Jesus, open your heart, your mind and your spirit and let the unconditional love he personifies flood through every cell of your being. Let the peace that passes all understanding heal your body, your mind and your spirit. Come home to the Jesus I know!

More on my Jesus next week!

AND SO IT IS!

Breaking The Mould

I have often said on this blog that using the Law is simple but it is seldom easy. That is so true for so many of us - including me! If you read last week's message you know that the Law is another way of describing God's operating system - how the Universe works and how we co-create our own personal reality. If you remember, we discussed the idea that we create our reality, our life experience, exactly the same way that God creates and constantly re-creates everything that exists.

In the beginning was the Word is true in God's world and in ours. Everything in our lives begins with our Word. Not only the word we speak, although that has tremendous power, but the Word we think which has all the creative power of the Universe behind it. I capitalize word because speaking the Word is an act of creation. The most important thing we can do is to think and speak. All the power of God lies in our ability to think and to speak our thoughts into being.

What you think about consistently, what you speak about often, what your bedrock beliefs are about life, people, love, sex, money, family - every aspect of life - out pictures in your life perfectly. Your life is a perfect mirror of what you believe, think and speak.

If you don't like what you see in the mirror of your life, the fault lies not outside in your environment, your family or your spouse. It lies with YOU. You are the only one thinking your thoughts and speaking your words. Your thoughts and words spoken with feeling and consistency harden into attitudes that determine your choices and actions which create your life. No one else has the power to create your life experience but you! Shakespeare was entirely right - you really are the master of your fate and the captain of your soul.

If you are like me, your teachers, your family and society taught you that you were a product of your environment - that you were born a blank slate just waiting to be written upon. According to this theory of life, you are not to blame for how your life has turned out, you are but a victim of environment, social class, economic inequality and other outside factors. I am here to tell you that this is utter hogwash! How did this upside down view of the world come into being?

The "behaviorist" model of human development was developed by Dr. B.F. Skinner who did his research on rats in a maze. Behaviorism became the "Holy Grail" of scientific thought in the 40's, 50's and on up to the 80's. It was wrong then and it is still wrong. Humans are not rats. We are not highly evolved lower animals. We are unique on this planet and are endowed by our creator with the power of creation by the speaking of our Word. We do not have to blindly respond to stimuli in a programmed way, as Skinner believed. We have the Holy Spirit within and we have will - we have the Law and the knowlege of how to use it!

It is NOT society's fault if you did not attend college and you are now working for $11 an hour. It is not society's fault if you did not make healthy choices and you now weigh 300 lbs and are morbidly obese. You thought the thoughts that led to these choices. You spoke the words that caused you to accept less than your best in any area of your life. You settled, you compromised, you became less than you knew you could be. Blame serves no purpose but taking responsibility empowers you to change what needs changing in your life.

In our hearts we know this is the truth but it is so much more comforting to be able to blame something or someone! We are not bad because we made these choices - they are what they are. However it is our responsibility and we must live with the results of these choices, at least until we learn to make different choices.

God will not save us from our bad decisions. We are in command of our lives - we have a license from our Creator to use the power that is our birthright. God gives us all that we need to live in abundance, in bliss and in joy. If we do not live as wish, then we must look at ourselves - not God.

We must be willing to kill the old way of thinking, speaking and living and be prepared to think a new thought, speak a new Word and make new healthier, wiser choices. We must clean up our self talk and speak and think only of things of "good report". Focus on what you want - stop preparing for the worst. To prepare for the worst is speaking your Word for exactly what you do not want. Feed the flowers and starve the weeds in your mind. Break that hardened old mould in your mind and you will be transformed by the renewal of your mind.

May God give you the strength to begin your life transformation today!

AND SO IT IS!

God's Operating System

When I was a child I had a very difficult time understanding how God could allow all the bad things that happened to the Earth and her people. Why were thousands killed in an earthquake in Tokyo and hundreds dead of Hurricane Donna in the Gulf Coast? Doesn't God control all things, including the weather? Doesn't God care about what happens to his children? Why doesn't he protect us and keep us from harm?


When I would ask a minister or my mother's Rabbi friend, I would get a version of the "God works in mysterious ways" answer. This did not satisfy me and I did not believe in a God who worked that way. I thought: "Why have a God at all, if He is not going to take care of us?"


Now this bothered me because I remembered being healed of cerebral palsy through the power of Spiritual Mind Treatment (affirmative prayer) by my dear Mother who would not accept a crippled life in an institution for her baby boy. If she could do that, using God's power of prayer, then God must exist! Something just did not add up for me.


There must be a truth that I had not yet learned. Indeed, there was! My entire concept of God and how God operated was 180 degrees wrong! God is NOT a parent - God is a Creator and in this fact lies the entire error of our thinking. We are not God's children, we are God's Creations. You may ask, what is the difference? Well, If I am a writer and I create a novel I care not one bit who reads it or whether they are good or evil. I just care that they read my book. It is my creation and I care about it but I do not become involved in its distribution, sale or what happens to it after the sale. God creates us but allows us the gift of free choice - to create the life we can believe in and accept. Whether we know how the Law works, we create our lives according to God's Law - there is no other way to create anything. The trick is to learn to use the Law to consciously create our life the way we want it to be. We can stop being a passenger in the back seat of our lives and learn to drive the car! Do not think that we are alone and without help!

Now this does not mean that God is dead to us and is unavailable for help and direction. God is always available, never closes and is always ready to assist us in any way possible. How God does this is the key question. God does not meddle, or micro manage our lives. God uses the operating system of the entire Universe to empower us, to direct us and to support us. This operating system is the Law. God operates by scientific principle. God operates the same way each time, is predictable, and even handed. This fact is the greatest gift God could possibly give us.

God is not a human and is therefore not subject to human frailties such as favoritism, caprice or bad temper. God is a Spirit, the creative intelligence of the Universe; the author of the big bang, the designer of evolution, the engineer who designed the entire cosmos and everything in it.

God invented science, man just discovered it! God invented electricity - the universal power source of all creation, man just discovered it! God is the architect of the Universe and of everything that is in it. As a scientist, God has instituted immutable laws on both the physical and spiritual planes of existence. They always operate, they are totally dependable, they are totally impersonal - they work the same for the saint and the sinner.

We all know some of the laws of the physical world such as gravity; the law that states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, the laws of thermodynamics and many others. These laws must be unchangeable and they must work every time for every one or else the entire planet would fly to pieces and all life would cease to exist. We can depend on gravity to hold us down upon this planet spinning dizzily through the heavens at 18,000 miles per hour.

So too we can depend on the spiritual laws that God has ordained for us to use in creating and managing our personal reality. Here are just a few: The law of cause and effect. For every thing that appears in our life (an effect), there is a cause. That effect can only be changed or eliminated at the level of the cause; fooling around with the effect cures nothing. This is the basic law of the Universe!

We see this effect fiddling every day in our culture. Doctors often fiddle with symptoms or the effects of illness but rarely cure the dis-ease. Why? Because they never address the cause of the disease. They look only at the physical world for the cause and the cause is always mental and spiritual. The mind and spirit must become sick before the body can exhibit the sickness. One day, physicians will treat the mind and spirit first while containing the symptoms with medicine or surgery. At that point, we will have true healing. What about cancer - a disease that touches so many lives today.

Cancer is made more probable by certain lifestyle choices like smoking but it is caused by long term sadness, grief, anger or bitterness. We poison ourselves with our anger and hurt and then look for a physical cause. Cancer is the body turning upon itself. It does this at the mind's bidding - of itself it can do nothing. The spirit and mind must be transformed and healed before the body can be totally healed. All healing must take place at cause - never at effect. We rearrange the "deck chairs on the Titanic" when we work with the effects. The cause was the hole in the hull and any remedy that did not address the cause was doomed to fail in the life of the Titanic and in our lives.

My life's work is to empower people by teaching them how to consciously and deliberately use the Law to create the life they want and deserve. Why not drive the car and get out of the back seat of your life! More next week!

AND SO IT IS !