Jesus’s Core Teachings

One of the things that make Jesus seem so modern is His amazing understanding of the powers of the human mind. Or more simply put, His understanding of what we might call consciousness. He tells us that if you believe you can do something, then in fact you really can do it. His healing work is generally done with the active assistance of the power of the mind of the person He is healing, to the point where that aspect of the process comes to seem routine. And astonishingly, He tells us that if we believe and trust in Him, we will be able to do even greater things than He does now, presumably once we have listened to Him and sufficiently followed His Core teachings surrounding bringing the kingdom of God on earth.

What Jesus refers to as faith in God often appears to be just as easily seen as faith in the combined power of His mind and our own. A man comes up to Jesus, falling on his knees before Him and saying, “Lord, have mercy on my son, because he has seizures and suffers terribly; for he often falls into the fire and often into the water. And I brought him to Your disciples, and they could not cure him.” And Jesus answers and says, “You unbelieving and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I put up with you? Bring him here to Me.” And Jesus rebukes a possessing demon, who comes out of the boy, and the boy then is healed at once.

Later the disciples come to Jesus privately and say, “Why could we not cast it out?” And Jesus says to them, “Because of your meager faith; for truly I say to you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you” (MT 17:19-21). In another situation Jesus says, “Truly I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says is going to happen, it will be granted to him. Therefore, I say to you, all things for which you pray and ask, believe that you have received them, and they will be granted to you” (MK 11:23-24). Poor Jesus! You can see how exasperated He can become with the gap that still persists between His own faith and the faith of even His closest disciples. Jesus often uses the example of a mustard seed as the tiniest thing there is. And He tells us that if we have even that little bit of faith, we can move a mountain!

If you read right through all four Biblical Gospels, you see Jesus healing people repeatedly and almost constantly. It doesn’t matter what their infirmity is, or even on occasion if they are still breathing: His ability to make people well is amazing. There has to be a secret to it. And there is. You will notice what seem to be the same sets of stories appearing in two or three of the Biblical Gospels, sometimes crowded together or in slightly altered form, and Jesus’s confirmation of the sufferer’s belief in His healing ability isn’t always a part of each story; but you start to suspect that it always did happen. Here is one case where it is included:

As Jesus went on from there, two men who were blind followed Him, crying out, “Have mercy on us, Son of David!” And after He entered the house, the men who were blind came up to Him, and Jesus said to them, “Do you believe that I am able to do this?” They said to Him, “Yes, Lord.” Then He touched their eyes, saying, “It shall be done for you according to your faith.” And their eyes were opened (MT 9:27-30).

It is the power of Jesus’s mind when combined with the power of the mind of the person being healed that does the healing, as is made evident in the case of the woman with the flux of blood:

A woman who had had a hemorrhage for twelve years, and had endured much at the hands of many physicians, and had spent all that she had and was not helped at all, but instead had become worse— after hearing about Jesus, she came up in the crowd behind Him and touched His cloak. For she had been saying to herself, “If I just touch His garments, I will get well.” And immediately the flow of her blood was dried up; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. And immediately Jesus, perceiving in Himself that power from Him had gone out, turned around in the crowd and said, “Who touched My garments?” And His disciples said to Him, “You see the crowd pressing in on You, and You say, ‘Who touched Me?’” And He looked around to see the woman who had done this. But the woman, fearing and trembling, aware of what had happened to her, came and fell down before Him and told Him the whole truth. And He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace and be cured of your disease” (MK 5:25-34).

In His poignant farewell to His disciples before He goes to the cross, Jesus tells them that this sort of powerful mental partnership with Him will always be available to them, and indeed to anyone who believes in Him. He says:

“Truly, truly I say to you, the one who believes in Me, the works that I do, he will do also; and greater works than these he will do; because I am going to the Father. And whatever you ask in My name, this I will do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask Me anything in My name, I will do it (JN 14:12-14).

Jesus calls it faith in God, which indeed it is. Or we also might call it consciousness energy. We know, as indeed He also knew, that the two likely amount to the same thing.