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SearchDiscernment and Practicality
The all-consuming and indomitable spiritual faith of Jesus never became fanatical, for it never
attempted to run away with his well-balanced intellectual judgments concerning the proportional
values of practical and commonplace social, economic, and moral life situations. The Son of
Man was a splendidly unified human personality; he was a perfectly endowed divine being; he
was also magnificently co-ordinated as a combined human and divine being functioning on earth
as a single personality. Always did the Master co-ordinate the faith of the soul with the wisdomappraisals of seasoned experience. Personal faith, spiritual hope, and moral devotion were
always correlated in a matchless religious unity of harmonious association with the keen
realization of the reality and sacredness of all human loyalties — personal honor, family love,
religious obligation, social duty, and economic necessity.
The faith of Jesus visualized all spirit values as being found in the kingdom of God; therefore he
said, ―Seek first the kingdom of heaven.‖ Jesus saw in the advanced and ideal fellowship of the
kingdom the achievement and fulfillment of the ―will of God.‖ The very heart of the prayer
which he taught his disciples was, ―Your kingdom come; your will be done.‖ Having thus
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conceived of the kingdom as comprising the will of God, he devoted himself to the cause of its
realization with amazing self-forgetfulness and unbounded enthusiasm. But in all his intense
mission and throughout his extraordinary life there never appeared the fury of the fanatic nor the
superficial frothiness of the religious egotist.
The Master‘s entire life was consistently conditioned by this living faith, this sublime religious
experience. This spiritual attitude wholly dominated his thinking and feeling, his believing and
praying, his teaching and preaching. This personal faith of a son in the certainty and security of
the guidance and protection of the heavenly Father imparted to his unique life a profound
endowment of spiritual reality. And yet, despite this very deep consciousness of close
relationship with divinity, this Galilean, God‘s Galilean, when addressed as Good Teacher,
instantly replied, ―Why do you call me good?‖ When we stand confronted by such splendid selfforgetfulness, we begin to understand how the Universal Father found it possible so fully to
manifest himself to him and reveal himself through him to the mortals of the realms.