self-forgetfulness

• instead of self-sacrifice

180:5.12And all this clearly in­di­cates the dif­fer­ence be­tween the old re­li­gion and the new. The old re­li­gion taught self-sac­ri­fice; the new re­li­gion teaches only self-for­get­ful­ness, en­hanced self-re­al­iza­tion in con­joined so­cial ser­vice and uni­verse com­pre­hen­sion. The old re­li­gion was mo­ti­vated by fear-con­scious­ness; the new gospel of the king­dom is dom­i­nated by truth-con­vic­tion, the spirit of eter­nal and uni­ver­sal truth. And no amount of piety or creedal loy­alty can com­pen­sate for the ab­sence in the life ex­pe­ri­ence of king­dom be­liev­ers of that spon­ta­neous, gen­er­ous, and sin­cere friend­li­ness which char­ac­ter­izes the spirit-born sons of the liv­ing God. Nei­ther tra­di­tion nor a cer­e­mo­nial sys­tem of for­mal wor­ship can atone for the lack of gen­uine com­pas­sion for one’s fel­lows.

• cease thinking about yourself and your troubles

191:1.2When Pe­ter thought of the lov­ing look of the Mas­ter as he passed by on An­nas’s porch, and as he turned over in his mind that won­der­ful mes­sage brought him early that morn­ing by the women who came from the empty tomb, “Go tell my apos­tles—and Pe­ter”—as he con­tem­plated these to­kens of mercy, his faith be­gan to sur­mount his doubts, and he stood still, clench­ing his fists, while he spoke aloud: “I be­lieve he has risen from the dead; I will go and tell my breth­ren.” And as he said this, there sud­denly ap­peared in front of him the form of a man, who spoke to him in fa­mil­iar tones, say­ing: “Pe­ter, the en­emy de­sired to have you, but I would not give you up. I knew it was not from the heart that you dis­owned me; there­fore I for­gave you even be­fore you asked; but now must you cease to think about your­self and the trou­bles of the hour while you pre­pare to carry the good news of the gospel to those who sit in dark­ness. No longer should you be con­cerned with what you may ob­tain from the king­dom but rather be ex­er­cised about what you can give to those who live in dire spir­i­tual pov­erty. Gird your­self, Si­mon, for the bat­tle of a new day, the strug­gle with spir­i­tual dark­ness and the evil doubt­ings of the nat­u­ral minds of men.”

• Jesus’ s.-f. shows how Father could so fully manifest himself through him

196:0.8The faith of Je­sus vi­su­al­ized all spirit val­ues as be­ing found in the king­dom of God; there­fore he said, “Seek first the king­dom of heaven.” Je­sus saw in the ad­vanced and ideal fel­low­ship of the king­dom the achieve­ment and ful­fill­ment of the “will of God.” The very heart of the prayer which he taught his dis­ci­ples was, “Your king­dom come; your will be done.” Hav­ing thus con­ceived of the king­dom as com­pris­ing the will of God, he de­voted him­self to the cause of its re­al­iza­tion with amaz­ing self-for­get­ful­ness and un­bounded en­thu­si­asm. But in all his in­tense mis­sion and through­out his ex­traor­di­nary life there never ap­peared the fury of the fa­natic nor the su­per­fi­cial froth­i­ness of the re­li­gious ego­tist.

196:0.9The Mas­ter’s en­tire life was con­sis­tently con­di­tioned by this liv­ing faith, this sub­lime re­li­gious ex­pe­ri­ence. This spir­i­tual at­ti­tude wholly dom­i­nated his think­ing and feel­ing, his be­liev­ing and pray­ing, his teach­ing and preach­ing. This per­sonal faith of a son in the cer­tainty and se­cu­rity of the guid­ance and pro­tec­tion of the heav­enly Fa­ther im­parted to his unique life a pro­found en­dow­ment of spir­i­tual re­al­ity. And yet, de­spite this very deep con­scious­ness of close re­la­tion­ship with di­vin­ity, this Galilean, God’s Galilean, when ad­dressed as Good Teacher, in­stantly replied, “Why do you call me good?” When we stand con­fronted by such splen­did self-for­get­ful­ness, we be­gin to un­der­stand how the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther found it pos­si­ble so fully to man­i­fest him­self to him and re­veal him­self through him to the mor­tals of the realms.