HOUSE OF LIGHT

THE SPIRITUAL POVERTY SCROLL OF THE URANTIA BOOK COMMUNITY

For more than twenty-four years I have spoken among you in different ways, with different words, at different seasons, yet the burden of my message has remained remarkably unchanged. I have watched the old heads continue in familiar circles while generations arriving afterward learn many of the same habits. You possess a revelation containing an extraordinary presentation of the Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of humanity, the religion of Jesus, and the Kingdom of Heaven, yet too often the great labor becomes advertising the book, promoting the book, studying the book, defending the book, organizing around the book, and gathering together to examine the book. Thus may abundance of knowledge conceal a genuine poverty of spirit.

I have called this tendency Fifth-Epochalism without Fourth-Epochal living. There are many “5thers,” but where are the “4thers”? Where are those who have so thoroughly encountered the life and teachings of Jesus that the revelation disappears behind the life it was intended to illuminate?

 Where are those who would rather become the message than advertise the messenger carrying it? The world does not primarily suffer because it has failed to hear the name of another book. The world suffers from loneliness, hatred, fear, division, spiritual confusion, selfishness, despair, and the ancient hunger of the human heart to know that it belongs to a loving Father.

A revelation about such realities becomes spiritually poor whenever its students become rich in concepts while remaining hesitant to carry its Kingdom into human relationships.

The heart of the Urantia revelation, as I have encountered it, burns brightest in the Jesus Papers and their Kingdom gospel. There the intellectual architecture becomes a walking person. Truth puts on sandals. Theology sits at tables. Religion touches children, forgives enemies, restores dignity, confronts hypocrisy, comforts the broken hearted, and reveals Father God through a human life. Jesus did not merely explain the Kingdom. He lived it. His life transformed revelation into relationship, doctrine into service, knowledge into wisdom, and truth into love.

And this is where I have warned my brothers and sisters for years: do not mistake the scaffolding for the Temple.

A community can grow numerically while becoming spiritually poorer. Conferences may multiply. Websites may improve. Books may circulate. Study groups may expand. Intellectual understanding may deepen. None of these things is evil; each may serve a worthy purpose. But none proves that the Kingdom has advanced one inch within the human heart. Growth measured by distribution is not necessarily growth measured by transformation. A thousand people discussing divine sonship cannot substitute for one person actually treating the stranger before him as a child of God.

This is the poverty I speak of. It is poverty that can look like abundance.

John the Baptist stood before a religious people who possessed sacred history, sacred writings, sacred institutions, and confidence in their inheritance, yet he called them toward repentance and preparation for something living that was approaching them. His warning was not against truth already received; it was against allowing possession of yesterday’s revelation to become resistance to today’s demand for transformation.

So again I speak to the community I have known for more than two decades: the revelation was never given merely to produce experts in revelation.

Read it. Study it. Preserve it. Question it. Gather around it. Appreciate the minds that have spent lifetimes exploring it. But then get up from the table and walk.

Feed more than the mind.

Feed the heart.

Carry the Fatherhood of God into the street. Carry human brotherhood across the divisions of religion, race, nationality, class, politics, and culture. Carry the Master’s mercy toward people who have never heard of Urantia and may never need to hear the word. Let somebody encounter the Kingdom through your character before they ever encounter the revelation through your bookshelf.

I warned you yesterday.

I warn you today.

If Father gives me tomorrow, I may warn you again.

But no messenger owns tomorrow, and no generation possesses unlimited time. Eventually every community must decide whether it will merely preserve the lamp or walk by its Light.

The tragedy would not be that the world rejected the Fifth Epochal Revelation.

The tragedy would be that those entrusted with its teachings became so occupied explaining the revelation that they failed to demonstrate its greatest revelation:

A human being actually living the religion of Jesus.

And when history finally weighs this generation, may it never have to write across our abundance of knowledge the terrible words:

THEY WERE RICH IN REVELATION

AND POOR IN KINGDOM.

— Richard Van Stinson

Gravity Walker · Forgiver of Dragons

Tablets of Hearts:

The measure of revelation is not how much Light we can explain, but how much Light becomes life through us