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SearchDo Not Imitate His Life, Share His Faith
To ―follow Jesus‖ means to personally share his religious faith and to enter into the spirit of the
Master‘s life of unselfish service for man. One of the most important things in human living is to
find out what Jesus believed, to discover his ideals, and to strive for the achievement of his
exalted life purpose. Of all human knowledge, that which is of greatest value is to know the
religious life of Jesus and how he lived it.
The common people heard Jesus gladly, and they will again respond to the presentation of his
sincere human life of consecrated religious motivation if such truths shall again be proclaimed to
the world. The people heard him gladly because he was one of them, an unpretentious layman;
the world‘s greatest religious teacher was indeed a layman.
It should not be the aim of kingdom believers literally to imitate the outward life of Jesus in the
flesh but rather to share his faith; to trust God as he trusted God and to believe in men as he
believed in men. Jesus never argued about either the fatherhood of God or the brotherhood of
men; he was a living illustration of the one and a profound demonstration of the other.
Just as men must progress from the consciousness of the human to the realization of the divine,
so did Jesus ascend from the nature of man to the consciousness of the nature of God. And the
Master made this great ascent from the human to the divine by the conjoint achievement of the
faith of his mortal intellect and the acts of his indwelling Adjuster. The fact-realization of the
attainment of totality of divinity (all the while fully conscious of the reality of humanity) was
attended by seven stages of faith consciousness of progressive divinization. These stages of
progressive self-realization were marked off by the following extraordinary events in the
Master‘s bestowal experience:
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1. The arrival of the Thought Adjuster.
2. The messenger of Immanuel who appeared to him at Jerusalem when he was about twelve
years old.
3. The manifestations attendant upon his baptism.
4. The experiences on the Mount of Transfiguration.
5. The morontia resurrection.
6. The spirit ascension.
7. The final embrace of the Paradise Father, conferring unlimited sovereignty of his universe.