I have made it clear to you that the kingdom of the heavens is the Omnipresence of God the Supremacy which includes every Kingdom and all creatures.
All lives are members of this One Supremacy Kingdom, and must begin with, and be centered in, the dual concept of the truth of the fatherhood of God .. the motherhood of Deity, and the correlated fact of the brotherhood and the sisterhood of humankind.
This new gospel of the kingdom renders a great service to the art of living in that it supplies a new and richer incentive for higher living. It presents a new and exalted goal of destiny, a supreme life purpose.
The acceptance of such a teaching, I proclaim now will liberate each human life from the age-long bondage of animal fear and materialistic enslavement, and at the same time it will enrich human living with the following endowments of the new life of spiritual liberty and divinely-ordained purposeful destiny in the progression of life .. the plan of the progressive ascendancy of individuals:
1. The possession of new courage and augmented spiritual power. The gospel of the kingdom is to set humankind free and inspire you to dare to hope for eternal life.
2. The gospel carries a message of new confidence and true consolation for all creatures.
3. It is a new standard of moral values and spirit-urged impulses, a new ethical measurement and gauge wherewith to measure human conduct and to give evaluation and understanding to your place in this universe. It portrays the ideal of a resultant new order of human society.
4. It teaches the pre-eminence of the spiritual compared with the material; it glorifies spiritual realities and exalts superhuman ideals.
5. This new gospel holds up spiritual attainment as the true goal of living. Human life receives a new endowment of the more mature soul vestment receptacle, moral values by which personality may progress, and the actualization of divine dignity ripening all meanings and virtues and vision.
6. I teach that eternal realities are the result (reward) of righteous earthly progressive striving for truth, order, and unconditional love. Humankind's mortal sojourn on earth acquires new meanings consequent upon the recognition of a noble destiny.
7. My 21st Century gospel affirms that human salvation is the revelation of a far-reaching divine purpose to be fulfilled and realized in the future destiny of the endless service of the surviving sons and daughters of God.
8. My 21st Century gospel is actualized in the personal experience of realizing the higher qualities of spiritual living; that these realities of the spirit experience are progressively translated to new and higher levels of divine certainty and eternal grandeur.
I teach a newly revealed concept of the double nature of the kingdom in that I portray the following two phases of entering the kingdom of God the Supreme:
First. The kingdom of God in this world, the supreme desire to do the will of God, the unselfish love of human beings which yields the good fruits of improved ethical and moral conduct.
Second. The kingdom of God in heaven, the goal of mortal believers, the estate wherein the love for God is perfected, and wherein the will of God is done more divinely.
I teach that, by faith, the believer enters the kingdom now through their own Individualized God Life dwelling g therein. In my gospel Revelations there are two things essential to faith-entrance into the kingdom:
1. Faith, sincerity. To come as a little child, to receive the bestowal of sonship as a gift; to submit to the doing of the Father’s will without questioning and in the full confidence and genuine trustfulness of the Father’s wisdom; to come into the kingdom free from prejudice and preconception; to be open-minded and teachable like an unspoiled child.
2. Truth hunger. The thirst for righteousness, a change of mind, the acquirement of the motive to be like God and to find God.
Sin is not the child of a defective nature but rather the offspring of a knowing mind dominated by an unsubmissive will.
Regarding sin, I teach that God has forgiven; that we make such forgiveness personally available by the act of forgiving our fellows, and by the full accountability of claiming the creative nature.
When you forgive your brother and sister in the flesh, you thereby create the capacity in your own soul for the reception of the reality of God’s forgiveness of your own misdeeds.
I teach that faith, simple childlike belief, is the key to the door of the kingdom; that, having entered the door, there are the progressive steps of righteousness which every believing child must ascend in order to grow up to the full stature of the robust sons of God.
It is in the consideration of the spirit technique of receiving God’s forgiveness that the attainment of the righteousness of the kingdom is revealed.
Faith is the price you pay for entrance into the family of God; but forgiveness is the act of God which accepts your faith as the price of admission.
And the reception of the forgiveness of God by a kingdom believer involves a definite and actual experience and consists in the following four steps, the kingdom steps of inner righteousness:
1. God’s forgiveness is made actually available and is personally experienced by man just in so far as he forgives his fellows.
2. Man will not truly forgive his fellows unless he loves them as himself.
3. To thus love your neighbor as yourself is the highest ethics.
4. Moral conduct, true righteousness, becomes, then, the natural result of such love.
It therefore is evident that the true and inner religion of the kingdom unfailingly and increasingly tends to manifest itself in practical avenues of social service.
I teach a living religion that impels its believers to engage in the doing of loving service by first individual prayerful intimacy with God, and by praise-motivating worshipful adoration and do one communion with the Spirit of God living within each h human mind and heart.
Righteousness and the ethics of living is grown out from this holy relationship. I teach that true religious spirituality is cause and all ethical morality is a result.
The righteousness of any act must be measured by the motive; the highest forms of good are therefore unconscious.
I am never concerned with morals or ethics as such. I am wholly concerned with that inward and spiritual fellowship with God the Father which so certainly and directly manifests itself as outward and loving service for man.
I teach that the religion of the kingdom is a genuine personal experience which no man can contain within himself; that the consciousness of being a member of the family of believers leads inevitably to the practice of the precepts of the family conduct, the service of one’s brothers and sisters in the effort to enhance and enlarge the brotherhood.
The religion of the kingdom is personal, individual; the fruits, the results, are familial, social.
My teaching gospel exalts the sacredness of the individual as contrasted with the community. I give loving recognition to the idea that human life develops character by this praiseful and Prayerful relationship communication and loving communion with Infinity, and the end results of this satisfying relationship is that a unselfish service motivation emerges; that human beings unfold their moral nature in loving relations with their fellows.
By teaching that the kingdom is within, by exalting the individual, I hereby strike a deathblow with the old society in that I am ushering in the new dispensational epoch of true social righteousness and divine order.
This new order of society the world has little known because it has refused to practice the principles of the gospel of the kingdom of heaven. And when this kingdom of spiritual pre-eminence does come upon the earth, it will not be manifested in mere improved social and material conditions, but rather in the glories of those enhanced and enriched spiritual values which are characteristic of the approaching age of improved human relations and advancing spiritual attainments.
In the course of the many lectures which I have given .. and the many sermons which I have delivered, I emphasize always the five essential transformational phases, or epochs, of the kingdom, and they are:
1. The personal and inward experience of the spiritual life of the fellowship of the individual believer with God the Father.
2. The enlarging brotherhood of gospel believers, the social aspects of the enhanced morals and quickened ethics resulting from the reign of God’s spirit in the hearts of individual believers.
3. The supermortal brotherhood of invisible spiritual beings which prevails on earth and in heaven, the superhuman kingdom of God.
4. The prospect of the more perfect fulfillment of the will of God, the advance toward the dawn of a new social order in connection with improved spiritual living—the next age of man.
5. The kingdom in its fullness, the future spiritual age of light and life on earth.
Wherefore must you always examine my teaching to ascertain which of these five phases you may have reference to when I make use of the term kingdom of heaven.
By this process of gradually changing man’s will and thus affecting human decisions, I, Michael and my associates are likewise gradually but certainly changing the entire course of human evolution, social and otherwise.
Once again, I place emphasis on the following five points as representing the cardinal features of the gospel of the kingdom:
1. The pre-eminence of the individual.
2. The will as the determining factor in man’s experience.
3. Spiritual fellowship with God the Father.
4. The supreme satisfactions of the loving service of man.
5. The transcendency of the spiritual over the material in human personality.
This world has never seriously or sincerely or honestly tried out these dynamic ideas and divine ideals of my doctrine of the kingdom of heaven.
Yet, be not discouraged by the apparently slow progress of the kingdom idea on Urantia.
Remember that the order of progressive evolution is subjected to sudden and unexpected periodical changes in both the material and the spiritual worlds.
My new 21st Century bestowal as an incarnated Son is just such a strange and unexpected event in the spiritual life of the world.
Neither make the fatal mistake, in looking for the age manifestation of the kingdom, of failing to effect its establishment within your own souls.
I had promised a new revelation of the kingdom on earth and at some future time; I also promised sometime to come back to this world in person. And these promises are becoming fulfilled now.
Truly it is to become realized that certain social results would appear in the world as a consequence of the spread of the gospel of the kingdom; but I intend that all such desirable social manifestations should appear as unconscious and inevitable outgrowths, or natural fruits, of this inner personal experience of individual believers, this purely spiritual fellowship and communion with the divine spirit which indwells and activates all such believers; that the truth-loving personality soul, the one who hungers and thirsts for righteousness, for God, is admitted by faith to the spiritual kingdom; to realize each one's living ideal of the establishment of the kingdom in their hearts by the spirit’s domination and guidance of the individual believer, and by the established Spirit of Truth Holy Comforter which comes to guide every man's life into all Truth.
There will supplant the olden and outdated misrepresentations of my teaching gospel with a newly understood proclaiming of “the kingdom of God is at hand”— a return to the high spiritual concept of my living teaching and ideal, so that you will proclaim that the kingdom is the will of your heavenly Father dominant and transcendent in the heart of the believer—and you will come to realize the need to accomplish doing all this without in any way referring either to some visible and tangible church on earth or to the anticipated second coming of Christ today which I am fulfilling unbeknownst to most all men and women.
My return upon the world stage brings this newly clarified revival of my actual teachings, and such a restatement as will undo the work of my early followers who went about to create a sociophilosophical system of belief regarding the fact of my sojourn upon the earth.
Human lives continue to sleep in the cocoon in which my kingdom concept now slumbers.
The kingdom of the divine brotherhood is still alive and will eventually and certainly come forth from this long submergence, just as surely as the butterfly eventually emerges as the beautiful unfolding of its less attractive creature of metamorphic development.
Michael of Nebadon
