Meredith Sprunger's Synopsis of The Urantia Book
Synopsis of Paper 144
AT GILBOA AND IN THE DECAPOLIS
1. As time passed, the twelve became more devoted to Jesus and increasingly committed to the work of the kingdom. Their devotion was in large part a matter of personal loyalty. They did not grasp his many‑sided teaching; they did not fully comprehend the nature of Jesus or the significance of his bestowal on earth.
2. John had taught his disciples a prayer, a prayer for salvation in the coming kingdom. Although Jesus never forbade his followers to use John's form of prayer, the apostles very early perceived that their Master did not fully approve of the practice of uttering set and formal prayers.
3. “Prayer is entirely a personal and spontaneous expression of the attitude of the soul toward the spirit; prayer should be the communion of sonship and the expression of fellowship. Prayer, when indited by the spirit, leads to co-operative spiritual progress. The ideal prayer is a form of spiritual communion which leads to intelligent worship. True praying is the sincere attitude of reaching heavenward for the attainment of your ideals.
4. “If, then, persistence will win favors even from mortal man, how much more will your persistence in the spirit win the bread of life for you from the willing hands of the Father in heaven. Again I say to you: Ask and it shall be given you; seek and you shall find; knock and it shall be opened to you. For every one who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks the door of salvation will be opened.
5. "Which of you who is a father, if his son asks unwisely, would hesitate to give in accordance with parental wisdom rather than in the terms of the son's faulty petition?... If you, then, being mortal and finite, know how to answer prayer and give good and appropriate gifts to your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give the spirit and many additional blessings to those who ask him? Men ought always to pray and not become discouraged.
6. “These stories I tell you to encourage you to persist in praying and not to intimate that your petitions will change the just and righteous Father above. Your persistence, however, is not to win favor with God but to change your earth attitude and to enlarge your soul's capacity for spirit receptivity. "But when you pray, you exercise so little faith. Genuine faith will remove mountains of material difficulty which may chance to lie in the path of soul expansion and spiritual progress."
7. Jesus said: "If, then, you still desire such a prayer, I would present the one which I taught my brothers and sisters in Nazareth:
Our Father who is in heaven,
Hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come; your will be done
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our bread for tomorrow;
Refresh our souls with the water of life;
And forgive us every one our debts
As we also have forgiven our debtors.
Save us in temptation, deliver us from evil,
And increasingly make us perfect like yourself."8. Jesus was particularly averse to praying in public. Up to this time the twelve had heard him pray only a few times. They observed him spending entire nights at prayer or worship, and they were very curious to know the manner or form of his petitions.
9. Jesus taught the twelve always to pray in secret; to go off by themselves amidst the quiet surroundings of nature or to go in their rooms and shut the doors when they engaged in prayer.
10. Jesus taught that effective prayer must be:
1.Unselfish—not alone for oneself.
2. Believing—according to faith
3. Sincere—honest of heart.
4. Intelligent—according to light.
5. Trustful—in submission to the Father's all‑wise will.
11. When Jesus spent whole nights on the mountain in prayer, it was mainly for his disciples, particularly for the twelve, The Master prayed very little for himself, although he engaged in much worship of the nature of understanding communion with his Paradise Father.
12. The earnest and longing repetition of any petition, when such a prayer is the sincere expression of a child of God and is uttered in faith, no matter how ill-advised or impossible of direct answer, never fails to expand the soul's capacity for spiritual receptivity.
13. In all praying, remember that sonship is a gift. No child has ought to do with earning the status of son or daughter ...Therefore must the kingdom of heaven—divine sonship—be received as by a little child. You earn righteousness—progressive character development—but you receive sonship by grace and through faith.
14. Prayer will lead the mortals of earth up to the communion of true worship. The soul's spiritual capacity for receptivity determines the quantity of heavenly blessings which can be personally appropriated and consciously realized as an answer to prayer.
15. Prayer and its associated worship is a technique of detachment from the daily routine of life, from the monotonous grind of material existence. It is an avenue of approach to spiritualized self‑realization and individuality of intellectual and religious attainment.
16. Prayer is an antidote for harmful introspection...Jesus consistently employed the beneficial influence of praying for one's fellows,. The Master usually prayed in the plural, not in the singular. Only in the great crises of his earth life did Jesus ever pray for himself.
17. Prayer is the breath of the spirit life in the midst of the material civilization of the races of mankind. Worship is salvation for the pleasure‑seeking generations of mortals.
18. Prayer is the sincere and longing look of the child to its spirit Father; it is a psychologic process of exchanging the human will for the divine will. Prayer is a part of the divine plan for making over that which is into that which ought to be.
19. Abner had assembled all of his associates at the Gilboa camp and was prepared to go into council with the apostles of Jesus. For three weeks these twenty‑four men were in session three times a day for six days each week... These men had many difficulties to discuss and numerous problems to solve. Again and again would they take their troubles to Jesus, only to hear him say: "I am concerned only with your personal and purely religious problems. I am the representative of the Father to the individual, not to the group...But when you enter upon the co‑ordination of divergent human interpretations of religious questions and upon the socialization of religion, you are destined to solve all such problems by your decisions.
20. The first item the group agreed upon was the adoption of the prayer which Jesus had so recently taught them. It was unanimously voted to accept this prayer as the one to be taught believers by both groups of apostles...But the most serious of all their problems was the question of baptism...They finally agreed: As long as John lived, or until they might jointly modify this decision, only the apostles of John would baptize believers, and only the apostles of Jesus would finally instruct the new disciples...for the joint council had unanimously voted that baptism was to become the initial step in the outward alliance with the affairs of the kingdom...John's apostles preached, "Repent and be baptized." Jesus' apostles proclaimed, "Believe and be baptized."
21. Always does the socialized religion of a new revelation pay the price of compromise with the established forms and usages of the preceding religion which it seeks to salvage. Baptism was the price which the followers of Jesus paid in order to carry with them, as a socialized religious group, the followers of John the Baptist. John's followers, in joining Jesus' followers gave up just about everything except water baptism.
22. Abner, the chief of John's apostles, became a devout believer in Jesus and was later on made the head of a group of seventy teachers whom the Master commissioned to preach the gospel.
23. John had now been in prison a year and a half, and most of this time Jesus had labored very quietly; so it was not strange that John should be led to wonder about the kingdom. John's friends interrupted Jesus' teaching to say to him: "John the Baptist has sent us to ask—are you truly the Deliverer, or shall we look for another?" Jesus paused to say to John's friends: " Go back and tell John that he is not forgotten. Tell him what you have seen and heard, that the poor have good tidings preached to them."
24. "Verily, verily, I say to you, among those born of women there has not risen a greater than John the Baptist; yet he who is but small in the kingdom of heaven is greater because he has been born of the spirit and knows that he has become a son of God." Many who heard Jesus that day submitted themselves to John's baptism, thereby publicly professing entrance into the kingdom. And the apostles of John were firmly knit to Jesus from that day forward. This occurrence marked the real union of John's and Jesus' followers.
25. On this afternoon Jesus continued to teach, saying: "But to what shall I liken this generation? Many of you will receive neither John's message nor my teaching...John came neither eating not drinking, and they said he had a devil. The Son of Man comes eating and drinking, and these same people say: 'Behold, a gluttonous man and a winebibber, friend of publicans and sinners!' Truly, wisdom is justified by her children. It would appear that the Father in heaven has hidden some of these truths from the wise and haughty, while he has revealed them to babes.
26. “Come, therefore, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and you shall find rest for your souls. Take upon you the divine yoke, and you will experience the peace of God, which passes all understanding."
27. John the Baptist was executed by order of Herod Antipas on the evening of January 10, A.D. 28... When Jesus heard their report, he dismissed the multitude and, calling the twenty‑four together, said: "John is dead. Herod has beheaded him. Tonight go into joint council and arrange your affairs accordingly. There shall be delay no longer. The hour has come to proclaim the kingdom openly and with power. Tomorrow we go into Galilee."
Discussion Questions
1. What is the purpose of persistence in prayer?
2. How does prayer change our attitudes and enlarge our soul’s capacity for spirit receptivity?
3, Is nonverbal prayer more useful that verbal prayer?
4. How does faith remove material difficulties to spiritual progress?
5. Is divine guidance given only to personal spiritual problems and not to group religious problems?
6. Why was there disagreement between the disciples of John and the apostles of Jesus in the use of the terms “repent” and “believe?”
7. How will the socialized religion of the Fifth Epochal Revelation be effected by the historic religions?
A Service of
The Urantia Book Fellowship