My Gospel of the Kingdom of God...
Look upon the coming of the kingdom in the hearts of men as a gradual development .. a progressive evolutionary ascendancy, like the leaven in the dough as heat is applied or like the growing of the mustard seed in its inherent pattern of unfoldment.
The kingdom of heaven is your 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.
Phases of the Kingdom...
I distinctly teach a new concept of the double nature of the kingdom in that I portray the following two phases:
First. The kingdom of God in this world, the supreme desire to do the will of God, the unselfish love of man 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.
The Priority of Preeminence...
Entrance in the Kingdom where God’s Will Comes First and Foremost
I teach that, by faith, the believer enters the kingdom now; that two things are 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, God has forgiven; that ye make such forgiveness personally available by the act of forgiving your fellows.
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.
Awakening into Faith and Purity...
That faith, simple childlike belief, is the key to the door of the kingdom, and having entered the door, there are the progressive steps of righteousness in the development of thine soul vesture capable of embracing and living the vision of eternity which every believing child must ascend in order to grow up to the full stature of the robust daughters and sons of God.
It is in the consideration of the 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 insofar 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.
Living Religious Spirituality...
I teach a living religion that impels .. urges .. and inclines believers to engage in the doing of loving service beginning with their duty to God the Supreme who is the totality of all lives becoming actualized.
I teach that ethics is a derivative of true religious spirituality. Religion is a cause and ethics is its result.
Growing in Righteousness, Dignity, and Honor...
The righteousness of any act must be measured by the motive; the highest forms of good are therefore unconscious, authentic, natural, and not the resultant effects of merely a behavioral change in personality.
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 all human lives.
I teach that the religion of the kingdom is a genuine personal experience which no one can contain within themselves; 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.
Michael of Nebadon
