challenges

• the great challenge › to construct new, appealing philosophy of living

2:7.10The re­li­gious chal­lenge of this age is to those farsee­ing and for­ward-look­ing men and women of spir­i­tual in­sight who will dare to con­struct a new and ap­peal­ing phi­los­o­phy of liv­ing out of the en­larged and ex­qui­sitely in­te­grated mod­ern con­cepts of cos­mic truth, uni­verse beauty, and di­vine good­ness. Such a new and righ­teous vi­sion of moral­ity will at­tract all that is good in the mind of man and chal­lenge that which is best in the hu­man soul. Truth, beauty, and good­ness are di­vine re­al­i­ties, and as man as­cends the scale of spir­i­tual liv­ing, these su­preme qual­i­ties of the Eter­nal be­come in­creas­ingly co-or­di­nated and uni­fied in God, who is love.

• mortal life is short and intense test

14:5.1On Uran­tia you pass through a short and in­tense test dur­ing your ini­tial life of ma­te­rial ex­is­tence. On the man­sion worlds and up through your sys­tem, con­stel­la­tion, and lo­cal uni­verse, you tra­verse the mor­ontia phases of as­cen­sion. On the train­ing worlds of the super­uni­verse you pass through the true spirit stages of pro­gres­sion and are pre­pared for even­tual tran­sit to Ha­vona. On the seven cir­cuits of Ha­vona your at­tain­ment is in­tel­lec­tual, spir­i­tual, and ex­pe­ri­en­tial. And there is a def­i­nite task to be achieved on each of the worlds of each of these cir­cuits.

• accept without complaint

48:6.35From them you will learn to let pres­sure de­velop sta­bil­ity and cer­tainty; to be faith­ful and earnest and, withal, cheer­ful; to ac­cept chal­lenges with­out com­plaint and to face dif­fi­cul­ties and un­cer­tain­ties with­out fear. They will ask: If you fail, will you rise in­domitably to try anew? If you suc­ceed, will you main­tain a well-bal­anced poise—a sta­bi­lized and spir­i­tu­al­ized at­ti­tude—through­out ev­ery ef­fort in the long strug­gle to break the fet­ters of ma­te­rial in­er­tia, to at­tain the free­dom of spirit ex­is­tence?

• stimulate true believers

48:7.75. Dif­fi­cul­ties may chal­lenge medi­ocrity and de­feat the fear­ful, but they only stim­u­late the true chil­dren of the Most Highs.

• the great challenge › to make personal contribution to Supreme

117:4.10The great chal­lenge that has been given to mor­tal man is this: Will you de­cide to per­son­al­ize the ex­pe­ri­en­ci­ble value mean­ings of the cos­mos into your own evolv­ing self­hood? or by re­ject­ing sur­vival, will you al­low these se­crets of Su­prem­acy to lie dor­mant, await­ing the ac­tion of an­other crea­ture at some other time who will in his way at­tempt a crea­ture con­tri­bu­tion to the evo­lu­tion of the fi­nite God? But that will be his con­tri­bu­tion to the Su­preme, not yours.

138:9.1This some­what monotonous pe­riod of al­ter­nate fish­ing and per­sonal work proved to be a gru­el­ing ex­pe­ri­ence for the twelve apos­tles, but they en­dured the test. With all of their grum­blings, doubts, and tran­sient dis­sat­is­fac­tions they re­mained true to their vows of de­vo­tion and loy­alty to the Mas­ter. It was their per­sonal as­so­ci­a­tion with Je­sus dur­ing these months of test­ing that so en­deared him to them that they all (save Ju­das Is­car­iot) re­mained loyal and true to him even in the dark hours of the trial and cru­ci­fix­ion. Real men sim­ply could not ac­tu­ally desert a revered teacher who had lived so close to them and had been so de­voted to them as had Je­sus. Through the dark hours of the Mas­ter’s death, in the hearts of these apos­tles all rea­son, judg­ment, and logic were set aside in def­er­ence to just one ex­traor­di­nary hu­man emo­tion—the su­preme sen­ti­ment of friend­ship-loy­alty. These five months of work with Je­sus led these apos­tles, each one of them, to re­gard him as the best friend he had in all the world. And it was this hu­man sen­ti­ment, and not his su­perb teach­ings or mar­velous do­ings, that held them to­gether un­til af­ter the res­ur­rec­tion and the re­newal of the procla­ma­tion of the gospel of the king­dom.

138:9.2Not only were these months of quiet work a great test to the apos­tles, a test which they sur­vived, but this sea­son of pub­lic in­ac­tiv­ity was a great trial to Je­sus’ fam­ily. By the time Je­sus was pre­pared to launch forth on his pub­lic work, his en­tire fam­ily (ex­cept Ruth) had prac­ti­cally de­serted him. On only a few oc­ca­sions did they at­tempt to make sub­se­quent con­tact with him, and then it was to per­suade him to re­turn home with them, for they came near to be­liev­ing that he was be­side him­self. They sim­ply could not fathom his phi­los­o­phy nor grasp his teach­ing; it was all too much for those of his own flesh and blood.

138:9.3The apos­tles car­ried on their per­sonal work in Ca­per­naum, Beth­saida-Ju­lias, Cho­ra­zin, Gerasa, Hip­pos, Mag­dala, Cana, Beth­le­hem of Gal­i­lee, Jo­ta­p­ata, Ramah, Safed, Gis­chala, Gadara, and Abila. Be­sides these towns they la­bored in many vil­lages as well as in the coun­try­side. By the end of this pe­riod the twelve had worked out fairly sat­is­fac­tory plans for the care of their re­spec­tive fam­i­lies. Most of the apos­tles were mar­ried, some had sev­eral chil­dren, but they had made such ar­range­ments for the sup­port of their home folks that, with some lit­tle as­sis­tance from the apos­tolic funds, they could de­vote their en­tire en­er­gies to the Mas­ter’s work with­out hav­ing to worry about the fi­nan­cial wel­fare of their fam­i­lies.

• the great challenge › to achieve better communication with Adjuster

196:3.34The great chal­lenge to mod­ern man is to achieve bet­ter com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the di­vine Mon­i­tor that dwells within the hu­man mind. Man’s great­est ad­ven­ture in the flesh con­sists in the well-bal­anced and sane ef­fort to ad­vance the bor­ders of self-con­scious­ness out through the dim realms of em­bry­onic soul-con­scious­ness in a whole­hearted ef­fort to reach the bor­der­land of spirit-con­scious­ness—con­tact with the di­vine pres­ence. Such an ex­pe­ri­ence con­sti­tutes God-con­scious­ness, an ex­pe­ri­ence might­ily con­fir­ma­tive of the pre-ex­is­tent truth of the re­li­gious ex­pe­ri­ence of know­ing God. Such spirit-con­scious­ness is the equiv­a­lent of the knowl­edge of the ac­tu­al­ity of son­ship with God. Oth­er­wise, the as­sur­ance of son­ship is the ex­pe­ri­ence of faith.