Symmetry of Soul Tuesdays

As he approached his twentieth birthday, Jesus depended more and more upon the ultimate guidance of his heavenly Father, while he assumed the fatherly role of guiding and directing the children of his earth family. He was becoming experienced in the skillful wresting of victory from the very jaws of defeat; he was learning how to transform the difficulties of time into the triumphs of eternity. Th...

Rebecca lived for only one purpose—to await the hour when Jesus, to her, the greatest man who ever lived would begin his career as a teacher of living truth. And she followed him devotedly through his eventful years of public labor, being present that day when he rode triumphantly into Jerusalem; and she stood by the side of Mary on that fateful and tragic afternoon when the Son of Man hung upon t...

On Saturday afternoon, December 3, A.D. 12, death for the second time struck at the Nazareth family. Little Amos, their baby brother, died after a week’s illness with a high fever. After passing through this time of sorrow with her first-born son as her only support, Mary at last and in the fullest sense recognized Jesus as the real head of the family; and he was truly a worthy head. The reading e...

By the age of sixteen Jesus had acquired the full growth of his human intellect, not the full experience of human thinking but the fullness of capacity for such intellectual development. He possessed a keen and analytical mind, a kind and sympathetic disposition, a somewhat fluctuating but aggressive temperament, all of which were becoming organized into a strong, striking, and attractive personal...

With the close of this fifteenth year Jesus completed the traversal of that dangerous and difficult period in human existence, that time of transition between the more complacent years of childhood and the consciousness of approaching manhood with its increased responsibilities and opportunities for the acquirement of advanced experience in the development of a noble character. The reading encompa...

The adolescent Jesus’ profound periods of meditation, his frequent journeys to the hilltop for prayer, and the many strange ideas which he advanced from time to time, thoroughly alarmed his mother. Sometimes she thought the lad was beside himself, and then she would steady her fears, remembering that he was, after all, a child of promise and in some manner different from other youths. The reading...

It was during the calendar year of his fifteenth birthday that Jesus first formulated the prayer which he subsequently taught to his apostles, and which to many has become known as “The Lord’s Prayer.” Also during that year, Jesus found a passage in the so-called Book of Enoch which influenced him in the later adoption of the term “Son of Man” as a designation for his bestowal mission on Urantia....

Of all Jesus’ earth-life experiences, the fourteenth and fifteenth years were the most crucial. These two years, after he began to be self-conscious of divinity and destiny, and before he achieved a large measure of communication with his indwelling Adjuster, were the most trying of his eventful life on Urantia. It is this period of two years which should be called the great test, the real temptat...

Jesus, leaving Jerusalem with his parents, paused on the brow of Olivet; he raised his staff aloft and, quivering from head to foot under the surging of intense emotion, said: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, and the people thereof, what slaves you are—subservient to the Roman yoke and victims of your own traditions—but I will return to cleanse yonder temple and deliver my people from this bondage!” The r...

In a very amazing way Jesus participated in the temple discussions but always in a manner consistent with his youth. Sometimes his pointed questions were somewhat embarrassing to the learned teachers of the Jewish law, but he evinced such a spirit of candid fairness, coupled with an evident hunger for knowledge, that the majority of the temple teachers were disposed to treat him with every conside...

Again and again, during the Passover week, his parents would find Jesus sitting off by himself with his youthful head in his hands, profoundly thinking. They had never seen him behave like this, and not knowing how much he was confused in mind and troubled in spirit by the experience through which he was passing, they were sorely perplexed; they did not know what to do and longed to be back in Naz...