Our Mission in the Last Days of Providential History

Founder's Keynote Address ,Rev. Sun Myung Moon Congratulatory Banquet ,Crown of Peace Awards Washington, DC ,December 13, 2004 Respected leaders from countries around the world, representing all religions and nations! Let us first gather our hearts together. Let us sincerely offer glory and gratitude to God, the True Parent of all creation and Lord of true love. And let us make today a day of the greatest value, a day that will be remembered as having provided a new foundation for America. The Cold War held humanity captive to fear and insecurity for half a century. Communist machinations and duplicity deceived people of faith and all humankind. That has ended. We live in a new century. And yet, how secure and happy are we? Look at the world. Young people, now liberated from the yoke of communism, are enjoying their freedom to such an extent that they are in danger of running pell-mell off the cliff of debauchery. Instead of seeking God's ideal of creation, they embrace the perspective of selfish individualism and become slaves to free sex. This gives rise to all manner of social evils. Homosexual activists have hoisted the flag of the so-called "gay" movement. They advocate marriage between people of the same sex. Put simply, this is barbaric and it infuriates Heaven and humanity. Imagine, for a moment, the world that would result from what they advocate. Humanity would become extinct within two generations. Those who turn away from Heaven's will dig their own graves in the soil of decadence and immorality. The evil of this age has its own punishing consequences. The incurable disease known as AIDS is a sign of this from Heaven. Even as we sit here, is not this cursed plague infecting thousands of innocent people? Is it not casting them onto the path of death? Another plague, known as divorce, is destroying family values. It is throwing humanity into an unprecedented crisis. Children suddenly find themselves separated from one parent and being raised by a stepfather or stepmother. In some cases, they are even placed in foster homes and orphanages. They are not at fault, yet their tiny hearts are left with scars that will never heal. Who will compensate them for the parental love that was snatched away from them? Then we turn our eyes to the conflict in the Middle East. What began as a struggle between religions is now grinding the entire world in a crucible of fear over terrorism and murder. Meanwhile, the Korean peninsula, my homeland, tragically remains the world's only divided nation. It still awaits its day of unification with deep longing. By what means can we possibly save today's world, where morality and family values are utterly degraded? Leaders from around the world, tonight I would like to convey to you a new message from God to the six billion people living in this age. It is both His commandment and a revelation. The title of this message is "Our Mission in the Last Days of Providential History." The Manifestation of the True Parents The fall of Adam and Eve, our first ancestors, imprisoned us within the dungeon of false love, false life and false lineage. We drag the chains of a history of unfathomable damnation and resentment. All people without exception have inherited Satan's false blood lineage accumulated through a history of thousands and tens of thousands of years. We are trapped by that history, with no choice but to lead speckled lives littered with falsehood and evil. This is humanity's fate. There is no escape from this predicament, regardless of human effort. Humanity has waited eagerly for the day when someone would save us from our fallen condition. Humanity writhes in agony, engulfed by evil and falsehood, because due to the fall of the first human ancestors everyone is bound to the filthy and dreadful lineage of Satan. Therefore humanity awaits the coming of someone who is of the lineage of Heaven and has no relation to Satan's lineage. This is the True Parents, who are able to liberate us from the Satan's bondage. We must understand that humankind is in a position to consider Satan our parent. In biblical terms, we are in the position of wild olive trees, separated from the true root. The True Parents, who are sent as the Savior and Messiah of all humanity, have the mission to ruthlessly cut down the wild olive trees that have been growing for thousands and tens of thousands of years and graft them into the true olive tree. This represents the change of humanity's blood lineage. The True Parents come to complete this great revolutionary endeavor on an inter-religious and international level. The True Parents do not appear just because someone wants it, or anywhere at any time. They can manifest only in the providential Last Days. The term "Last Days" means the moment when the restoration providence, which Heaven has carried forward throughout history, bears its final fruit. In other words, we meet the original era of the True Parents only in conjunction with heavenly fortune. The providence to save humanity is administered by Heaven, so how can you know where you stand in it? Only the True Parents, who come with Heaven's love, life and lineage, know the providential time. Knowing the providential time, they work in line with it to bring the providence to its conclusion. Only the True Parents come with the authority to govern the spirit world. By this authority they have mobilized the leaders of the four major religions and myriads of good ancestors in order to take responsibility for your eternal life. Leaders from around the world! While you were unaware of it, humankind has entered a new realm of grace. Heavenly fortune has arrived. I openly declare to Heaven and Earth that I have received Heaven's anointing and that I have been entrusted with the mission to be humanity's True Parent. We are now in the Last Days of God's providence. This is the era of the Holy Blessing, by which humanity's lineage is changed from Satan's lineage to Heaven's lineage. Now the Era After the Coming of Heaven is unfolding within the realm of Ssang-hab Shib-seung. In the Era Before the Coming of Heaven, those who pursued evil prospered and it was difficult to distinguish right from wrong. Now Heaven no longer condones that diseased and disordered world! Have powerful hope, as you live in accordance with the path of Heaven. You can come to resemble God, with His attributes being absolute, unique, unchanging and eternal. Practice a life of living for the sake of others, and you will go through a revolution of character. Following this path will enable us to establish the Kingdom of God on Earth that is, the Peace Kingdom, where we all can live together. Heaven has longed passionately to see this come to pass. The Mission of Homeland Liberation The term, "homeland liberation," may sound unfamiliar. You probably think that you never lost your homeland, so you have no need to recover it. The homeland to which I refer today, however, is different from the one you usually think of. I refer to the original homeland, the Kingdom of God on Earth that was lost at the fall of the first ancestors, Adam and Eve. What would the world have been like had the fall not occurred? God would have blessed Adam and Eve in marriage. They would have produced children who were sinless and true, and become true parents. That family would have served as the nucleus of the Kingdom of God on Earth. The children would have formed the realm of God's third generation. Centering on God, they would have established an eternal kingdom of peace on this Earth. Adam and Eve would have been the king and queen of an Adamic tribe, Adamic people, and Adamic nation that represented the realm of three ages. Adam's kingdom would have continued eternally. That would have been humanity's eternal homeland, the Peace Kingdom. Unfortunately, history did not start out that smoothly. The fall of Adam and Eve orphaned humanity for thousands and tens of thousands of years. We lost our homeland and lived like vagabonds drifting here and there, begging for food. Humanity was to have attended God as the vertical True Parent. All the world's people would have lived as one family in accordance with the principles of absolute faith, absolute love and absolute obedience. Instead, we find ourselves divided from one another by all manner of barriers and international boundaries planted by Satan. What, then, is the true meaning of homeland liberation? How do we begin to accomplish it? Homeland liberation means to transform this world into a new nation, the true homeland. We will not find this homeland anywhere in today's world. It emerges out of a process of re-creation through love. God's new homeland has no borders. It is a part of the original creation that bears no relationship to the fall. So homeland liberation begins with a life of true love, in which we love even our enemies. If we sow soybeans, we will harvest soybeans, and if we sow red beans, we will harvest red beans. If we sow revenge, which is Satan's seed, we will harvest an evil fruit, more bloodshed. On the other hand, wherever we sow true love, by forgiving and embracing our enemies, a tree of goodness will grow. This is the law of the universe, and it never fails. We find humanity's true homeland, the homeland of the true God, on the path of loving our enemies. This path begins with loving our individual enemies, and extends to loving our family's enemies, our tribe's enemies, our nation's enemies, and the world's enemies. This is how we establish the tradition of true love, true life and true lineage. As world leaders, what do you consider your mission? As long as Satan's sovereignty rules the world, you do not really have a country. I know there are some 200 countries in the world, but has even one nation brought God's will into reality? Is even one a true homeland for God and humanity? The world's six billion people, through no fault of their own, were born as Satan's descendants, carrying the false lineage. Irrespective of whether you are citizens of the United States, Japan, or whatever nation, Satan's love, Satan's life and Satan's filthy blood still flow in your body. Unless you remove this stained legacy of the fall from yourselves, you will never realize the dream of homeland liberation. For this, you each must experience a revolution of character, a true love revolution. The Three Great Revolutions of True Love How can we accomplish a revolution of character and come to resemble God? Because we descended from the fall and are born with fallen nature, each of us must go through three great revolutions in order to accomplish the perfection of our character. I call these 1) the revolution through making atonement, 2) the revolution of conscience, and 3) the revolution of heart. The "revolution through making atonement" means to recover your internal and external right of ownership by completely atoning for the past. After you have done this victoriously, you then live by a standard beyond that for which any atonement is required. This requires that you purge yourself completely of all the habits and thoughts that you accumulated during the Age Before the Coming of Heaven. It is completed when you accomplish it in the realms of the individual, family and nation. On that basis you can fulfill and perfect an ideal family, a family of true love based upon the absolute values that are the standard for life in the Age After the Coming of Heaven. In God's family ideal, these absolute values are perfected in a three-generation family composed of parents, husband and wife, and children. Only after the birth of their children can a man and woman stand in the position of owners of true parental love. Only after marrying and cherishing his wife is a man able to own true conjugal love. Similarly, it is the younger sibling that makes the older sibling an owner of true sibling love. Thus, in any relationship, it is the object-partner who places the subject-partner in the position of an owner of true love. To fulfill this position the subject-partner must live for the sake of that object-partner, invest in that person and forget that investment, and sacrifice for the sake of a greater purpose. Here we create absolute values that are eternal and unchanging. In this way, parents, husband and wife, and children bring each other to perfection as owners of true love. Thereby they form a three-generational realm in the family. The family settles into an eternal realm of unity. They live with absolute values in interdependence and eternal communion with God. Further, you take the revolutionary step of returning all your property and ownership rights to Heaven. Give up your lingering attachments. This cuts all your ties with the satanic world and separates you from Satan. In exchange, you will inherit all those things and more with Heaven's blessing. In other words, you will accumulate Heaven's riches, riches that have been separated from Satan and over which Satan can never again claim ownership. What is the "revolution of conscience"? It is an inner revolution by which you become absolutely obedient to your conscience. You cannot deny that you endure an unending struggle within. Your conscience, which tends toward goodness, struggles against the desires of the flesh. To bring an end to this shame-ridden inner conflict, you need to clearly understand the conscience and its function. Your conscience possesses pinpoint awareness of your every action, every step and every thought. It knows before your spiritual teacher knows. It knows before your parents know. It knows before God knows. And it tells you the right action to take in every instance. What results from violation of the conscience? You feel guilt. Dust settles on your soul; it becomes filthy and scarred. These scars on your soul cannot be removed for eternity. They are fearful baggage that you take with you when you enter the spirit world. I am voicing a supreme command that you work in a revolutionary way to overcome your physical desires, accept the guidance of your conscience, and live in oneness with Heaven's will. Treasure the unblemished, clean and pure state of your soul. What is the third revolution, the "revolution of heart"? God created human beings as His children. What, then, is the tie that binds you and God together? It is the true love and true heart that exist between a parent and child. If a parent and child do not communicate with true heart, how can they possibly maintain a relationship of true love and true respect? We have lived for thousands of years within the realm of the fall. Our hearts continue to be enslaved under false parents, false love and false lineage. To remove this yoke, you must live with true love, forgiving, giving and sacrificing continually. This is the life that Satan hates most. By doing this, you return to the realm where God's heart rules. If your heart is still bound by selfish individualism and still pursues the vain glory of the satanic world, you are on a dark and dismal path whose end is despair and lamentation. On the other hand, if you lead a constructive life, being the first to yield and give to others, then your heart will be bound in eternal oneness with God's heart. This requires that you first sever your heart's ties to the false parent and be engrafted onto God's lineage through the Holy Marriage Blessing instituted by the True Parents. Through the True Parents, who are incarnations of the invisible God, you will secure the true love and lineage of Heaven. The Mission of the Personal Emissary Respected ladies and gentlemen, until today you have led fairly conventional lives. Now, however, I call you to take on a mission as Heaven's direct emissary. As individuals, there are many differences among us. We are large and small, wide and narrow, tall and short. Despite our differences, God is commissioning us to become Heaven's direct emissaries. Let us be patriots who proudly uphold Heaven's lineage of goodness. Let us stand resolutely, with heavenly authority, and answer the call to liberate our homeland. How can you qualify for the mission of Heaven's personal emissary? You must desire the liberation of your homeland a thousand times, even ten thousand times more than your desire for the present reality. You must be determined to liberate the homeland even at the sacrifice of your life. Eating or sleeping, coming or going, every action you take should be for the sake of establishing the Peace Kingdom. The Bible teaches, "Seek ye first His kingdom and His righteousness." Go forward with confidence, because while your body may belong to the realm of the satanic world, you have been reborn with a true lineage. You are Heaven's direct emissary for the purpose of establishing the homeland. Do you recognize God's plight? He is a Parent who, in one instant, lost His children, was forced to suffer a history of maltreatment, and was blocked at every turn as he sought to unfold His will. Let us become filial sons and daughters capable of understanding this sorrowful heart of God. How can you be leaders unless you know the truth and practice it? Leaders of the world, please think deeply about how you came to be here today. Did you simply come half out of sincerity and half out of curiosity, hoping to enjoy a Christmas party? Whether you like it or not, you have now received Heaven's call. I suddenly received Heaven's command when I was a young man of sixteen. I accepted His call, and ever since I have spent my entire life, over 80 years, walking a course of blood, sweat and tears. It was to rescue humanity from Satan's dominion and to bring God into a state of true liberation and complete freedom. Just as I did, you too can now accomplish the exalted will of God for harmony and peace on an inter-religious and international level. That is, you can complete the sacred task of establishing the homeland. You and Reverend Moon are one, with the common denominator being absolute faith, absolute love and absolute obedience. You as well as I are to be true parents and kings and queens of peace. Today, heavenly fortune is with us. We now have the opportunity to establish our common homeland that will also be Heaven's homeland. That homeland requires sovereignty, territory and godly people. Heaven's lineage of goodness must extend powerfully throughout that homeland. The pulse of God's providential history must be felt there in a way that cannot be experienced anywhere else. If it is possible to build this homeland right now, how can you hesitate? Please complete the mission of Heaven's direct emissary. Please live as prophets who have been given the promise of eternal life. Ladies and gentlemen, I recently founded the Mongolian Peoples' Federation for World Peace, a movement to bring together people of Mongolian descent from throughout the world. My intent certainly is not nationalistic. This is a comprehensive movement for peace. The people of Mongolian ancestry are the descendants of Cain and Shem, the eldest sons of Adam and Noah, respectively. God called Noah's family to restore through indemnity the historical errors committed by Adam's family. Now, in the final period of the providence, Sham's descendants can accomplish their mission as the first born among humanity. Thus, it is a movement to comfort God's heart of pain over Adam's family, which lost Abel by murder and waited 130 years to establish Seth. It is a movement to make the world into one brotherhood and one family by enabling us to tear down the walls of the heart that divide us, that all humanity might live together in a society characterized by interdependence, mutual prosperity and universally shared values. It is a providential step to hasten the establishment of God's homeland. I think we should return gratitude and glory to God and True Parents. They have enlightened us about the incredible providential age in which we are living. They even have bestowed on us the glorious mission to establish Heaven's kingship as direct emissaries. Through all eternity, we will gratefully glorify and praise True Parents, who have inaugurated the Era of the Opening of Heaven and Earth After the Coming of Heaven. Therefore, we offer this Coronation Ceremony for the Peace King to True Parents today. This is unprecedented in history and will never be repeated in the future. True Parents have established the realm of true liberation and complete freedom. Just as the sun rises with brilliant light in the eastern sky, heavenly fortune is now shining upon all people. The curtain of darkness that shrouded us for thousands and tens of thousands of years is drawing back at last. The divine command to complete Heaven's will is taking root in your hearts. This is a path of destiny you cannot avoid. Therefore be courageous and stand up! We have the Age after the Coming of Heaven working with us. You can experience with certainty the meaning of Jesus' teaching that those who lose their life will live and those who seek their life will die. Let us resolve heroically to do whatever it takes to complete the sacred task of homeland liberation and establish the Peace Kingdom, God's ideal of creation on this planet Earth. Please engrave the heavenly command you received today deep in your heart. From this time forward, as a leader chosen by God to build the Fatherland, you must pledge to lead a beautiful and precious life. Everyone here without exception will eventually pass on to the spirit world. You do not want to carry with you any regret. Today I have conveyed to you God's message for the new era. I pray that God's blessings will forever be upon you, your families, and your mission as His direct emissaries. Thank you.

Building Our Common Legacy Faith, Family, Freedom and Peace Centered on God

Filial Children of God  are Patriots Who Strive to Liberate His Heart Rev. Sun Myung Moon December 13, 2004 Washington, D.C. Distinguished present and former heads of state. Respected members of the clergy. Leaders from America and around the world, ladies and gentlemen. I come to this gathering today to deliver a message from God, a warning for the six billion people now living on the earth. I know all too well God's timetable and the direction of His Providence. In all of history, no one has understood with certainty God's circumstances or God's heart. But today, in this era of the providential Last Days, I can reveal them to you. In so doing, I hope to present a correct understanding of the responsibility we must shoulder and the direction we should take. I would like to speak to you on the topic, "Filial Children of God are Patriots Who Strive to Liberate His Heart." God's Grief and Sorrow Why did God create human beings? God is the source of true love. Yet the joy of love wells up in the heart only in the context of a relationship. A solitary being cannot experience it. Even God could not experience any stimulation as long as He existed all alone. Alone, He cannot love. For His love to blossom, God needs objects to love. For this reason, God created human beings to be His children, partners in His true love. God is the Father of all humankind, and we are God's sons and daughters. In creating us, God invested everything — the bone of His bone, the flesh of His flesh, and the marrow of His marrow. Parents raise their children hoping to reach that most exalted place where parent and child come together — that central point where their loves converge, their lives converge, and their ideals converge. In this way, the omniscient and omnipotent God created us to grow into a position on par with Him and equal to Him in rank. Then, what is required to complete God's ideal of creation? Beyond anything God can do, there is the human element. Because God's ideal is the oneness of God and human beings, God cannot be perfect until human beings reach perfection. How God must have yearned that the first human ancestors, Adam and Eve, would become beings of infinite value reflecting His image. Yet because Adam and Eve fell, God no longer had His own true sons and daughters. Tragically, God could not establish His family capable of possessing the deep bonds of true love and propagating a divine lineage. Instead, Adam and Eve were seduced by the false parent. Their family was entangled in the chains of false love, false life, and false lineage. As a consequence, we — their descendants — suffer from an incessant struggle between the mind and body. Adam and Eve fought constantly, and so did their children, resulting in murder. They did not become the exalted beings whom God could relate to as His eternal son and daughter. God could not glorify them as the true ancestors and true parents of humanity. Yet with their fall, God lost the only son and daughter He had. What happened between Adam and Eve that caused them to fall? Was it, as the Bible literally says, that they ate the "fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil"? Could merely eating a piece of fruit be the original sin? Could our ancestors by eating a piece of fruit doom thousands of generations of their descendants to be sinners? No. It is because the root of sin was planted in the lineage that it continues on forever in accordance with the laws of inheritance. The only transgression that can have such lasting impact is a mistake of love, committed between two people of the opposite sex. Eve committed adultery with the archangel Lucifer, and they became one. When Eve then joined with Adam, she bound him in that same oneness. As a result, Adam and Eve built their family on a conjugal relationship that centered not on God but on Satan, the fallen archangel. Consequently, all human beings, because we are descended from Adam and Eve, have inherited Satan's lineage. According to the Principle of Creation, love determines the right of ownership. In a relationship of love the partners possess a right of ownership with respect to each other. By this principle, Satan used his ties of illicit love to claim ownership over fallen human beings. Satan took over the role of the "father" of humanity, even though the true Father of humanity is God. This is why Jesus, in the Gospel of John Chapter 8 verse 44, chastised the people as children of Satan, saying: "You belong to your father the devil, and you want to carry out your father's desire." Christians today may think that almighty Jehovah sits on His royal throne, and because He is omniscient and omnipotent, He can give orders as He pleases and have everything go exactly as He wants. In reality, God sits in a place of wretchedness and harbors tremendous grief. God had intended Adam and Eve to become the ideal counterparts for His pure, essential love. Can you imagine the sorrow in God's heart when they fell? It was infinitely worse than the sorrow that Adam and Eve experienced; indeed, no one in this world has experienced anything nearly so painful. The most tragic loss is to lose what is most precious. Carrying this grieving heart, God has to this day pursued the path of restoration in order to recover His lost children. There is nothing vague or ambiguous about God. He possesses a definite character. He desires to form a relationship of the highest true love with human beings. He desires to share with each of us the most exalted love and joy eternally. But God lost the starting point for this, due to the mistake of the first human ancestors. The fall of Adam and Eve caused such damage. God is the original True Parent, yet He was robbed of His rightful parental position. How heartbroken He is over this! God looks upon His fallen children, who inherited the lineage of the enemy Satan and refuse even to recognize that He exists. How excruciating must God's heart be each and every moment, as He observes humanity's wretched condition! For God, nothing was more precious than to have flesh and blood counterparts who could share His true love. God would not have traded His beloved children for the entire universe. His sorrow upon losing them was as if He had lost the entire creation. He felt that His entire purpose for creating the universe had collapsed. He became a God whose enemy unjustly robbed Him of His cosmic throne. The fact that God invested His love so completely, in keeping with the principles of absolute faith, absolute love, and absolute obedience, only made the results of the fall even more devastating. God was plundered of His ideal, plundered of His beloved son and daughter, and plundered of His sovereignty over the cosmos. And yet, forbearing all these years, the innocent God has had to endure Satan's false accusations. Seeing the history of lamentation that befell the world following the fall, the Book of Genesis says that God grieved in His heart. The Apostle Paul said, "Creation groans, our ancestors groan, and all humanity groans, waiting in eager anticipation for the appearance of the sons and daughters of God." All creatures desire to escape this realm of lamentation. God's inmost heart is broken as He surveys human beings struggling, leading lives of no value, having lost the glorious value with which they were originally created. God cries out in grief and agony, saying, "You are supposed to be my direct lineal children, possessing My love, My life, and My lineage. You should be enjoying all the glory of the Kingdom of Heaven. My heart is grieved to see you wearing the mask of the defeated, struggling in pain, lamentation, and despair until the end of your meaningless lives." Do you think that God, omniscient and omnipotent and seated on His glorious throne, would say to His children: "Come on up here. I'm not going to leave this seat"? Or is it more likely that He would kick His throne out of the way and come down to where we are? It is important for you to know that for tens of thousands of years, even millions of years, God has been wailing tearfully, crying out, "Oh, My son. Oh My daughter." You may ask how the omniscient and omnipotent God could be in such a pitiful state, but God cannot get over the shock of losing His beloved sons and daughters. If there were a way for God to solve this problem on His own, He would not have had to suffer as He traveled the long, lonely path of the providence of restoration. Why God Doesn't Punish Satan Directly No caring parent would stand by idly while her child suffers. Hence, it must be impossible for the all-loving God to abandon humanity, His beloved children, to perish eternally. God is absolutely committed to recovering us and the world that He originally envisioned. This is the reason that God has ceaselessly worked His providence of restoration to save humanity. Know how intensely God has labored to make progress in the providence of restoration! God is our True Parent. As He carried out the providence, God's heart felt the pain of human beings as His own pain. Yet it was excruciatingly difficult for God to carry out the providence of salvation, because the original human ancestors who committed the fall received Satan's false love and false life. Ever since, Satan has acted as humanity's false parent and false lord. You may raise the question: "God is omniscient and omnipotent. How could He stand by, seemingly impotent, while humanity went down the path of destruction?" It is because human beings committed sin in a realm where they are totally responsible; therefore, they are required to fulfill the conditions needed to resolve that sin. God cannot liberate us from sin unconditionally. If He could, He would have liberated the first human ancestors in the Garden of Eden instead of casting them out. Furthermore, restoration has been even more difficult because Satan uses his ties of lineage to enslave human beings as their master. The fall was something that should never have happened under the original standard of the ideal of creation. Therefore, God was not in a position to intervene, even though He was the Creator. Having been robbed of His position as the original Parent, He could not cover for His children's mistake. On the other hand, neither can the omniscient and omnipotent God simply solve the problem by sending judgment on the fallen human world and Satan. Since God created human beings to be His eternal partners in true love, He cannot just annihilate them. Instead, with true love God has labored to carry out the providence of restoration. Though all the while enduring Satan's contempt and accusations, His response is always to sacrifice and give unendingly. Satan mocks God, saying, "How can you hold fast to your principles, now that the lineage of true love, which was supposed to be the foundation of the ideal world, has been utterly degraded? Your ideal of creation — the absolute realm of love where true people live together as one — that is something You will never see." In this situation, how can God reply? It is an impossible situation. Why does God carry on with His restoration providence while enduring such suffering? Is it because He is omniscient and omnipotent? No, it is not. The ideal of true love is the reason that He seeks to recover His beloved sons and daughters. With true love, God ignores His own circumstances and works to understand the circumstances of human beings. If people are sad, God approaches them by comprehending their sadness. If people are angry because they have been treated unjustly, God approaches them by first understanding the reasons for their anger. We Need to Know God's Circumstances and Heart Respected leaders, in your communion with God, have you fathomed His suffering heart? Have you shed tears for God? Have you ever attempted to take on a task that would lighten God's load, even a little? Would you struggle to do it, even if it meant that each of your limbs might be torn from your body? You haven't. On the other hand, God ever draws near to comfort us in our difficulties. Through the long ages, He has sought out the children who betrayed Him with an unchanging parental heart. God, our Parent, remains in the realm of lamentation until every last human being has been freed from lamentation. Because He is in this position, we must comfort God and bring Him true liberation. How are we to liberate God? God lost His beloved children. God is confined in a place where He cannot love humanity with the original love that parents give their children. Therefore, our task is to establish a realm of true liberation for God where He can freely give love to all humankind. God's confinement was brought about by the human fall, so human beings must become victorious sons and daughters who transcend the limits of the fall. This is what will bring God true liberation. Human beings have lived ignorant of the tremendous pain in God's heart. When I first understood the pain of God, I wept for weeks. Please know that such profound circumstances lie behind the founding of the Unification Church. Longing for those who betrayed Him, those who were embraced in the bosom of the enemy, God has been calling out, "My son! My daughter!" But have you even once cried out, "My Father!" so loudly that it made you hoarse? Have you ever passionately called for your Father until it made your tongue dry and you began to choke? As fallen people, what do we have that would enable us to relate with God? Our emotions and the perceptions of our five senses are entirely profane. Nothing in us is acceptable. Under the laws of justice, we have nothing that will let us relate to God, but under the law of love there is a way. God's True Liberation and Complete Freedom Because human beings fell, God could not be free. Hence the first human ancestors also were imprisoned and lost their original freedom. Following this, the angelic world, all religious people, and ultimately all humanity came to be imprisoned. God lives in prison. How can we free Him? We must become filial sons and daughters of God, more so than the original children whom He lost. We must do better even than the original children were supposed to do had they been filial and not fallen. Even if we were to accumulate ten times as much merit in every aspect and relate to God with great filial piety, it would not be easy to bring God back to His original heart, in order that He might dwell in true freedom. Yet at an early age, I made a determination "to truly liberate God with my own hands," and I have lived accordingly throughout my life. What is the true mission of religion? It is, with a heart of love, to truly liberate God, truly liberate humanity on earth and in the spirit world, and truly liberate the planet earth. Many people think that God will liberate us. But now that we recognize that God's heart is under confinement, we understand that we should liberate God and bring Him into complete freedom. God has long been searching for people burning with zeal for true love, having the faith that says, "I see now that God is in prison because of me. I see now that God is receiving Satan's accusations because of me. I see now that Jesus suffered because of me. Oh, Father, I will carry You to the place of true liberation. I will carry Jesus and the Holy Spirit, too, to the place of true liberation." To this day, there has not been any sovereign country on earth where people of true love have established God's dominion. Despite this, people are singing praises to the Almighty. In such circumstances, how can God's heart be free? There have been no filial children before God. There have been no social and political structures founded upon true love that would enable people to fulfill the way of the patriot, the way of the saint, and the way of divine sons and daughters in Heaven and earth. Hence there has been no way to establish and protect the heavenly kingdom. These circumstances left God with no place to stand. Consequently, God has remained until now imprisoned — in a state of virtual captivity. How are we to resolve this grievous situation? The only way is to carry out a movement practicing the love that is God's original essence. The final stage of religion must teach in detail about God's pitiful suffering and the injustice He has endured, and it must connect human beings to the world of His original heart. Let us join in a true love movement to bring God true liberation and complete freedom. If we do not set this standard of love, the heavenly way cannot be set right and the ideal world cannot come on this earth. This true love movement is bringing an end to the history of division between Cain and Abel. To that end, we are bringing together the Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace and the Peace U.N. (World Peace Council) in the Abel position, and the Mongolian Peoples' Federation for World Peace in the Cain position, (all organizations I founded) into a single unity. I call on America to take on the role of the elder brother, representing the free world, and lead all nations toward the fulfillment of God's will. To do this, America needs to put aside selfish and individualistic thinking. When political parties and ethnic groups place priority on their self-interest, they divide and mislead the people. America must build a true nation, blossoming with true freedom and peace. Then God will want to reside in your families and in your communities. For this noble goal, let us all stand hand in hand and establish the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, the Peace Kingdom, where God's ideal of creation is fulfilled. There, God will enjoy true liberation and complete freedom. I pray that God's blessings may be with you forever.

God’s Homeland and the Peace Kingdom Are Built on the Foundation of the Realm of His Liberation and Release

The Reverend True Father Sun Myung Moon Address on the 50th Anniversary of the Founding of the  Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity May 1, 2004 Seoul, Korea  Respected present and former heads of state, distinguished guests from around the world, leaders of all fields of Korean society: I am sincerely grateful that such a large number of you have taken time from your busy schedules to attend today’s event. It seems like yesterday that on May 1, 1954, in a humble dwelling known as the “House of Three Gates” in Seoul’s Buk-hak Dong, I and a few disciples who were with me raised a signboard that read “Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity” and offered a most serious prayer to Heaven. Today, this has become the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, which continues its steady development and has mission headquarters in 191 countries. How could anyone say that this is anything other than a miracle of Heaven? I received God’s call when I was a vibrant youth of 16 years, and started out on this path of Heaven with unbending determination. It has been a path of indescribable pain and suffering. At each climax of indemnity, sacrifices were made that led to pools of blood, sweat and tears. It was the path of a lonely man. I swallowed desperate tears of blood and hid them within myself to comfort the heart of God, who was grieving over the tragic situation of the son He had sent forth. My life of over 80 years has been lived to teach the truth that I received from Heaven. As a way of summing up what I have taught, I would like to speak today on the topic of “God’s Homeland and the Peace Kingdom Are Built on the Foundation of the Realm of His Liberation and Release.” Distinguished guests, everything I have ever taught is permeated with one point above all else. That is that we must know God and spirit world with certainty. It is not enough to have God vaguely in our head, like a mathematical formula that we once memorized. Instead, we must carve His existence onto our hearts, even into our bones. We must know the relationship that God has with us, and the attributes He possesses. We must know about the ideal world that He desired in the beginning, and when that world will be brought about. We must have the same degree of knowledge of spirit world. The world after death definitely exists independent of human beings’ will, and we must know it accurately, if we are to use our time in this world to prepare thoroughly for the next. Ladies and gentlemen, please quietly place your hand on your heart and think seriously. If everyone truly knew that God exists and always lived in attendance to Him, what would keep us from solving the problems in today’s world? I declare to you very bluntly today: God exists and He is our Parent. He lives and carries out His work within each person’s life. He exists without form. If you think of Him as large, He is infinitely large, but if you think of Him as small, he is also infinitely small. Every human being possesses a mind, but can anyone locate the mind with confidence and certainty? Energy clearly exists and sustains life, but energy is invisible. In the same way, God absolutely exists with attributes of eternality, changelessness and uniqueness, but He cannot be seen with the human eye, which is one part of the human physical body. Because God is the original body of energy, we will not be able to see Him even in spirit world. This is why we say that God is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent. Because He has no form, there is nothing to keep Him from going anywhere He pleases in the world of existence. He could pass right through your body without you feeling anything. He could step on you as He passes by while you doze off, and you would not know it. Think how convenient that is. What would you do if God were to appear and involve Himself in every little thing you do? If you had to live with God visible to your eyes, what would you do? Probably you would not last a day before having a nervous breakdown. You cannot see the incredible amount of air that is passing through your body even as you sit here. So how could you possibly know how God, who exists without form, passes through you as He carries on His work? Rather than foolishly saying, “Show me God and I’ll believe,” you should be grateful that God is invisible to our eyes. Leaders from around the world, do you have love? Do you have life? Do you have a lineage and a conscience? Then, have you ever seen love? Can you say that you have seen life, lineage or conscience? You clearly know these exist, but you must acknowledge that you cannot feel or see them. You only know them because you sense them with your mind. A similar logic applies to the question of whether God exists, or whether a person has or has not seen God. No one can say that they have not seen God or that He does not exist. When God enters into the mind, the mind knows it. When the omniscient and almighty God is with you, you can call for saints who died thousands of years ago to come to you and you can clearly see who is sitting on the other side of a thick wall. When the eternal God enters your heart, such things are possible. Eternity cannot be grasped in the context of time, but time exists within eternity. The universe in which we live is wrapped in mystery. The size of the vast universe is as great as 21 billion light years across. If a light year is the distance light travels in a year at a speed so fast that it can go around the Earth seven and a half times in a second, then try to imagine what God, who created the universe and manages it, must be like. How large would He have to be, and how heavy? God is the great king of wisdom, so He made it so that He would exist without form, enabling Him to go anywhere in the universe instantaneously or enter even into the eye of a needle. When we search within for the best place to receive God, our greatest treasure, the natural conclusion is, “The heart is the only appropriate place.” No place can be safer or more comfortable for Him. The heart is able to stand in the position of God’s object partner and exist for eternity by engaging in spherical motion, and this is the reason that human beings can have eternal life. If humanity had not committed the fall but had been born through parents possessing an original nature of goodness, then it would not have been necessary to argue with each other about whether God exists. We would have known this naturally from the time we were born. Just as an infant does not learn how to suckle its mother’s breast while it is in the womb, but naturally learns how to do so as soon as it is born, so also people born into a world where the fall of the human ancestors had not occurred would have naturally attended God as their Father throughout their lives. When God created Adam and Eve as the first human ancestors, He wanted to establish them as substantiations of Himself. So He arranged for His masculine nature to be placed within the mind of Adam and His feminine nature to be placed within the mind of Eve and remain there for eternity. This did not mean that God would be divided in two. Instead, while residing in the minds of Adam and Eve, He would exist as a harmonized being of dual characteristics and as a unified being centering on love. As a result of the fall, humanity lost everything. We fell into a false world. We appear to have sight but in fact are blind, not even knowing whether God exists. What could be more tragic in the history of humankind? If Adam and Eve, created in the image of God, had grown to maturity without falling, achieved perfection, and acquired the position of the parents of humankind, all human beings would have been able to recognize the reality of God’s existence through Adam and Eve. It would have been impossible even to imagine people arguing with each other, saying, “God exists,” and “No, He doesn’t.” God would have lived with us and shared our emotions for eternity as the Parent of humankind. He would have been the center of our life and the root of our existence. We truly know God only when we feel Him in our heart and understand the reality of His existence in the course of daily life. We know God’s existence only through experience. When we understand the reality of God’s existence directly through experience in our daily life, we will be able to sense God’s will from moment to moment naturally. We will be able to act in accordance with His will without being told. We will become people who cannot sin even if we try. It was intended that the formless God would take on substantial form as human beings and exercise dominion with the character and appearance of an owner, not only over all of creation in this world, a world of form, but even over the sprit world. This is why our highest priority in life is to know God with certainty. Ladies and gentlemen, let us think for a moment about human life. We spend our first lifetime in the womb of our mother. The ten months that we spend there as a fetus is a period of water-borne life, because we are bathed in the amniotic fluid. We cannot speak or move about freely, but this does not mean that our term in the womb is not life. During this period, we clearly possess a life given to us by Heaven, and it is a period for us to prepare for life on the earth, which is the next phase. The fact that we don’t breathe through our nose during this period doesn’t mean there is no life. The human being as a fetus in the womb cannot imagine what life will be like in the next phase, on the earth. It cannot imagine a world outside its mother’s womb. It cannot imagine not receiving all nourishment from its mother through the umbilical cord. Human beings, though, are created so that when the time comes we bring our life in the womb to a close and begin life on the earth. Irrespective of our wishes, this happens in accordance with the laws of the universe. A new, vast world that we could never have imagined appears before us. Our water-borne life ends, and our new life on earth begins. The ten months of life in the womb transitions into an earthly life of 100 years. Human beings then live in a wide variety of unique ways and prepare for the final phase of our existence, in the spirit world, that is, the world after death. A world that is eternal and endless awaits us, but human beings living in a physical body are no more capable of imagining the spirit world that we were of imagining life on Earth while we lived in the womb. Our lives of some 100 years on Earth will transfer into an eternal world that transcends time and space. In the womb, we received nourishment from our mother through the umbilical cord, and during our time on earth we receive the three basic elements, the universe’s water, air and light. Once we enter the spirit world, however, we will no longer have need of physical nourishment. We instead will breathe love as we live eternally. So human beings, without exception, live through three stages: ten months in the womb, 100 years on earth, and an eternity in the spirit world. This is not something that we do by our own choice. It is a blessing and grace given by Heaven. What could be a blessing and grace greater than this? So when I say you need to know the spirit world well, it is not enough to live with a vague faith in the existence of the spirit world. On Earth we must know how to prepare for life in the spirit world, where we will live eternally, and then prepare ourselves thoroughly. Just as a child that develops a problem while in the womb may spend his entire life after birth in poor health, so too if we fail to recognize Heaven’s will during our short life on Earth and commit sin or carry out evil deeds, we will eventually pay the price in the spirit world according to the principle of cause and effect. It means that our spirit self will have to suffer indescribable pain and indemnity in spirit world. Once the physical body has been shed, it will be too late. When the physical body dies, it returns to the earth as a handful of dirt, but do you think that our life, our mind, our heart, and our hopes are also buried? It is absolutely not so. Our 100-year-long life is recorded, photographed and automatically evaluated without fail in our personal computer, built by God, called the spirit self. This is why all of us, during life on earth, will stop and check ourselves again and again, and ask our unsteady mind and heart: “Where are you going?” The saints, sages and spiritual masters are those who spent their entire lives wrestling with such issues. None of them, however, were able to present clear answers. It is true that their teachings have remained with us, allowing religions to be formed and sacred texts to be published, guiding the mass of people for their lives. It is also true, though, that humanity still lacks even the ability to have dominion over our own mind. I have toured the world hundreds of times to declare Heaven’s truth and educate people. No matter where I go in the world or what kind of audience I face, I always ask one question. I issue a challenge, saying, “If there is anyone here whose mind and body are not in conflict, please raise your hand.” So far no one anywhere has dared to raise a hand. What does this tell us? It means that human beings are still slaves to the fallen nature that we inherited from our first ancestors, Adam and Eve. We have not yet escaped that yoke. This is evidenced by the confessions of saints and sages who spent their lives in fasting and abstinence and consistently pursued paths of incredible suffering. Their confessions that they could not root out the desires of the flesh before they had to leave this world remain as pitiful cries to their disciples who still insist on following in their footsteps. Those who are counted among the saints and sages are now declaring with one voice that I, Sun Myung Moon, have brought for the first time from Heaven the truth of true love that they could not grasp, and that their followers and descendents on Earth should follow my teachings absolutely and practice them. People in spirit world who regret that they could not meet Rev. Moon while they were on earth and attend him as Savior, Messiah, Returning Lord, and True Parent during their lives here are sending a flood of messages. The resolutions that these people adopted in the spirit world now echo around the world. In the near future, all religious people will begin to receive revelations directly from the founders of their own religion, and there will be a great migration of people being guided to attend Rev. Moon as the True Parent. They will gather as the clouds to learn from Rev. Moon the truth of true love that enables them to unite their mind and body. They will learn the way of the true family, leading to their singing together the praises of eternal happiness as parents and children on Earth and in Heaven. Communists of the world who insisted there is no God and passed away as sacrifices to materialism, intellectuals of the world who as journalists commanded an entire generation, and even dictators and emperors who brandished the sword of absolute power and sacrificed countless lives, have shed tears of repentance before me and begged for forgiveness through their messages and resolutions from spirit world. Any among you who still cannot believe with certainty the reality of the spirit world may still not be sure whether to believe these messages. To you my advice is this: “You will see for yourself when you pass on to spirit world!” But once you go down that path you can never return, no matter how much you may strike the ground in lamentation. Once in the spirit world, a person cannot do anything on his own about the sins he committed while on earth. So your ancestors now are observing your life in tears, waiting for an opportunity to help you in a way that indemnifies their sins. I am telling you clearly that thousands, even tens of thousands, of your ancestors’ eyes are watching your every step and every action, sometimes with tears of heartbreak and other times with joy. Is there still anyone who cannot believe the reality of spirit world? Distinguished guests, once we come to know God with certainty and know not just the concept of the spirit world but also its reality, our life can move forward as smoothly as a car on an expressway. Just as the car will reach its destination safely if the driver follows the rules of the road, keeps his hands on the steering wheel and doesn’t fall asleep, so too we only need to live in line with the direction from our conscience, which is given by Heaven. This is where our mind and body become one and where the blossom of human perfection blooms and bears fruit. Going deep into the mountains will not perfect one’s character, and extensive reading of sacred texts and philosophy books that line library shelves will not unite the mind and body. God is the great King of wisdom. He did not place the path to perfection in some far off place. Instead, He placed it in the place that is nearest to us, the place that is most private and safe. He prepared and placed that path inside your conscience. Ladies and gentlemen, your conscience is your master. It is your teacher. It stands in the place of your parents. Your conscience is the first to know everything about you. Your conscience knows all your thoughts. It knows before your teacher, before your parents and before even God knows. Think how much advice your conscience gives you over your lifetime. Day and night, every time you have an evil thought, it scolds you, saying, “Hey you!” It never grows tired as it works constantly to pull you over rivers and mountains. The conscience always stands as the true master, protecting you and trying to help you. Yet, how often have you gone against your own conscience? What should be done about your body, which has thoroughly mistreated this precious irreplaceable teacher that the universe bequeathed to you? Your conscience was given to represent the Parent who makes it possible for you to inherit the original love. Do you intend to idle your life away, embracing only your physical body and enslaved by its desires, allowing it mercilessly to trample the conscience? That is why I, too, as I began to pioneer the way of truth, set as my slogan, “Before seeking dominion over the universe, perfect dominion over yourself.” I discovered that there is only one way to resolve the conflict between mind and body, and that is “the way of true love.” Unity between mind and body can be achieved only when the mind sacrifices itself for the sake of the body time and again, thus practicing “true love that lives for the sake of others.” When you follow the path set out by your conscience, your mind will come to embrace the universe. When this happens, you will be able to communicate with your heart. Whenever you start to do something, your conscience will immediately show you the effects of that action. This experience proves that God resides within your heart. The person who attains this position will enter the state of being of one mind, one body and one thought with God. He or she will live in a world of one circle and one harmony. This is the ideal world, the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth that God desired in the beginning when He created Adam and Eve. Respected guests, it is now more than 80 years since I began my search for such incredible secrets of Heaven and began to walk the path to lead humanity. It has been the path of a lonely and pitiful man pushing my way through suffering and difficulties that are unprecedented in the past and unrepeatable in the future. It has been a path that has proven and taught the reality of an omnipresent God. Every one of the six billion people in the world are blind. Though they appear normal, they cannot see even an inch in front of themselves. But this has not kept people from pretending to be philosophers and theologians with respect to Heaven’s truth, bringing grief to God throughout history. The providence of restoration that sought to live for the sake of God and take pity on God never even had a chance to begin. I cannot count the days I spent in tears and lamentation after I came to know this world of God’s inner heart. Who could even dare to imagine the grief-stricken God? He has carried out His providence for thousands, even tens of thousands of years after the first human ancestors, whom He created as His children and tried to place in the eternal position of His object partners in true love, fell into the path of the human fall. God was sorrowful and mortified. Anger exploded within Him, and His heart overflowed with grief as He walked this course. He came as the Father and King of glory, but the enemy Satan stole His throne and His position as Parent. Though He was clearly alive and carrying out His providence, people said “He’s dead,” and they mocked and mistreated Him. Still, He persevered on the path with patient endurance, waiting for the day when human beings would themselves understand the truth. Please understand that it is because God conducts His providence on a foundation of true love, which lives for the sake of others, and on the basis of eternity, that He did not just annihilate the universe and begin again after witnessing His children descend into the bottomless pit of the human fall. With the power of His omniscience and omnipotence, He could have judged the world and Satan at once, smashing them to pieces. Though He has this power, He has chosen until now to absorb all the contempt and accusation into Himself. He has placed Himself in a prison-like environment, because He is our Father. Ladies and gentlemen, have you spent even one day before our Father God, shedding tears of sincere sympathy and repentance? Can you stand before God and close your eyes as if to block out how He bites His tongue and endures humankind that inherited the lineage of the devil and became the tool of Satan, and how He waits impatiently for the day of His liberation and release? This is the reason that my life has been more serious than any other in history. As I walked this fateful course of restoration through indemnity, I had to go the way of the perfection of character in order to stand as the Lord of judgment and determine the sin of the devil Satan and judge him. I had to send as many as four of my young children, whom I loved deeply, to the spirit world, and I have had to cast even my remaining children out into the wilderness. I stand before you as one who has received Heaven’s appointment as Savior and True Parent for the sake of liberating and releasing God and, on that foundation, liberating and releasing humankind. I do not come out of a need for money and power, or honor and fame. For more than 80 years, I have lived oblivious to morning or evening, day or night, even weathering the coldest winters and harshest snow and rain, in order to move as quickly as I could along the heavenly path. Even in the torture chamber, where my flesh was torn from my body and I was made to vomit blood, I never prayed for God to save me. Instead, my life has been that of a filial son, patriot, saint, and divine son of Heaven and Earth who sheds tears to comfort God’s heart as He weeps to look upon the tragic state of His children. I left my parents and homeland behind to follow the straight and narrow path to human salvation, that is, the path of true love that lives for the sake of others. My life of never compromising and never acting in a cowardly manner may seem incredibly pitiful and bleak from a worldly point of view. No torture or punishment could make me compromise from the heavenly path. Neither could six imprisonments stand in the way of the True Parent’s search for his children. As I sat in a cold prison cell and watched drops of water fall from an eave, I pledged to myself, “Just as those droplets will eventually bore a hole through a boulder, the day will certainly come when these hot tears that fall from my eyes will melt the heart of God frozen in grief and liberate and release Him.” That is how I have lived. It has been a sacrificial course of practicing a love that loves the enemy more than my own children and of offering everything to teach all six billion people in the world. In line with this, I went to America in the early 1970s, and announced, “I have come as a fire fighter to extinguish a fire and as a physician to cure a disease.” It is important that we understand that, more than 30 years later, humanity has entered a new age. Finally, heavenly fortune is settling on the planet Earth. The blood, sweat, and tears I have shed on the course of restoration through indemnity for the sake of human salvation are now beginning to bear fruit. In 2001, at the opening of the 21st century, I dedicated the “Coronation Ceremony of God’s Kingship,” offering to Him the day of His liberation and release. This marked the beginning of the opening of the age of God’s direct dominion. On that foundation, the “Coronation Ceremony of the King of World Peace” was held this year on March 23 in a Senate building of the United States Congress. World leaders of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and members of the United States Congress gathered to crown me as the king of world peace. How can this possibly be a human work? Just as the French prophet Nostradamus prophesied, and as is clearly recorded in the Orient’s greatest book of prophesies, “Kyeok-Am-Yu-Rok,” Rev. Moon has come as the one who has received Heaven’s appointment and fulfilled the responsibilities of humanity’s True Parent and the king of peace. So now, leaders from all walks of life and from all over the world are surging forward in a giant wave to join the ranks of people working to build the Peace Kingdom on this earth. They are acknowledging that peace cannot be achieved without my help. This is true not only on the Korean peninsula, the only place in the world where the conflict between democracy and Communism still divides an innocent people and land, but also in the Middle East, which has become the most serious and bloody conflict threatening world peace. On April 10 this year, I declared the “release of the angelic world,” the “release of Cain and Abel,” and the “release of the Parents of Cheon-ju, Cheon-ji, Cheon-ji-in.” [Parents of the Cosmos, of Heaven and Earth, and of Heaven, Earth and Humankind.] By marking May 1 with the declaration, “God’s Homeland and the Peace Kingdom Are Built on the Foundation of the Realm of His Liberation and Release,” I am completing the spiritual conditions on many levels that are needed for God to exercise His authority of all-immanence, all-authority, all-power and all-transcendence. Together with God’s liberation and release, a world of freedom, peace, unity and happiness is spreading across this land. In this respect, there is a special meaning to today’s commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, which I established. Heavenly fortune is with each of you present here today. Though our time together is short, you can become people of the Kingdom of Heaven simply by living according to what I have taught you today. That is, first live in the certainty of God’s existence to the point that you can feel His presence against your skin. Second, be certain of the reality of the spirit world and use your life on Earth to prepare for your eternal life in the spirit world. Third, live in attendance to your conscience as you would your teacher, your God, or your parents. The flames of true love, now fanned by the spring breezes of the 21st century, are spreading like a wildfire across the Earth. Exchange marriages are becoming accepted among young people belonging to traditionally enemy countries as a matter of faith. Just as water, air and light will flow to fill even the smallest space, the movement of true love is flowing and covering the Earth. Young people of intellect who will inherit God’s love, God’s life and God’s lineage and settle the Peace Kingdom on the Earth are now waking from their sleep. Eminent world leaders, I hope that you, too, will join the ranks of the owners of Cheon Il Guk [the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth] who are to “establish His Kingdom and His righteousness,” and become a revolutionary army of true love, putting into practice the truth of true love that grows larger the more that it is given. Thank you.

Declaring the Era of the Peace Kingdom Address to the United States Congress

Rev. Dr. Sun Myung Moon Declaring the Era of the Peace Kingdom Address to the United States Congress March 23, 2004 The United States Capitol Washington, DC Respected members of the United States Senate and House of Representatives, religious leaders from around the world, distinguished guests, I would like to express my sincere gratitude for your presence here this evening in such a large number, in spite of your busy schedules. Ladies and gentlemen, The starting point to unravel the problems humanity faces today is the certain knowledge of God, the Father of all creation and, on that foundation, the building of true families that live in attendance to God. This calls us to establish and attend God in our families, not as a concept but as the substantial Parent of us all. To do this, we first must clarify the relationship between God and humanity. God is the original entity of true love, true life and true lineage, and He is the True Parent of all people. If human beings had not fallen, we would have reached perfection in God's true love as His true children and lived in attendance to Him as our Parent. God's plan was for perfected human beings to bond as true husbands and wives, bear and raise true children so that they would live in a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, and then live together eternally in the heavenly world as families in the Kingdom of Heaven. Think about it for a moment. If your father went to hell and only your mother went to Heaven, what kind of Heaven would that be? If your parents were to go to hell and only you children went to Heaven, how could that be called Heaven? The Kingdom of Heaven is where the whole family lives together in an eternal peace kingdom. On earth as well, God will reside where a whole family has established a kingdom of heaven. In such a family, the world of God's original ideal, the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, takes root. How, then, are we to bring about this family heaven on earth? First, each member of the family needs to complete his or her individual character. Each person has to shed the fallen nature that has passed from the fall down through the generations, and achieve the perfection of his or her character. In other words, each person must be victorious in the struggle between mind and body. Then the world of harmony will bear fruit in each individual's perfected character, a state of one heart, one mind and one thought. Fallen nature, which causes jealousy, envy, greed, hatred and all other evils, will never again take root in the person who has achieved this state. Shedding the fallen nature is not easy. The reality of fallen human beings is that we vacillate even when trying to break habits formed over the relatively short span of a few years or decades, like smoking or drinking alcohol. We cannot expect, then, that it will be easy to cast off fallen nature, which we inherit through lineages going back thousands, even tens of thousands of years. It is impossible by human effort alone. We need to stand on the foundation of absolute faith, establish God as our vertical axis, and struggle our entire life. Even then, it is a difficult fight. We cannot even think we will gain victory unless we enter a state of absolute love for God, loving Him even more than we love our own parents and children, and attending Him as our True Parent. We cannot hope to win this fight without a foundation of absolute obedience to God, following Him even at the cost of laying down our life. Herein lies the reason that religions place fasting, sexual abstinence, sacrifice and penance in the uppermost position. We must be born again, recast as new persons in whom Heaven can reside and with whom the spirit world can cooperate. We cannot betray an iota of shame even if our entire life and being is exposed before all God's creation. Our character should be like a "high noon settlement," on the straight vertical line of God's grace without the slightest shadow, so that Satan will flee from our presence for eternity. Second, individuals who achieve such completion of character come together to form true families, and the members of these families work together to establish what I call the "four great realms of heart." Such families resemble, in form, an individual who has accomplished the complete oneness of mind and body. I have said that the Kingdom of Heaven is a place we enter family by family. Not every family, however, is qualified to enter Heaven automatically. You need a foundation to be a true family and to complete the four great realms of heart. A true family that can enter the Kingdom of Heaven is composed of true individuals who have completed the four great realms of heart in themselves and who are of a lineage centering on God. What do I mean, then, by the "four great realms of heart"? I refer to the perfection of the heart of parents, the heart between a husband and wife, the heart of children, and the heart of siblings. This is found in a true family bound by God's original true love, true life and true lineage through a chaste three-generational lineage of grandparents, parents, and (grand) children. Here, the love between parents and children establishes the vertical relationship between upper and lower; the love between the husband and wife establishes the horizontal relationship that brings left and right into definitive oneness, and the love between siblings establishes the relationship between front and back. In this way, God's ideal of creation is no longer a mere concept or dream. It is perfected in reality through the completion of the four great realms of heart centered on true lineages, family by family. The realm of parental heart is acquired naturally as parents go through the process of bearing children and then raising and educating them with true love. In other words, it is the heart that enables the parents to own true love with respect to the children. Without children, no one can own love as a parent. Next, the realm of conjugal heart is the love relationship that extends true lineage. In this, husband and wife each are grateful for the other having established them as an owner of love, and each learns true love through giving and receiving with the other. They enjoy learning of true love when the husband lives for the sake of his wife, even if it means sacrificing his own life, and the wife attends her husband with the heart of attending God. The perfection of the husband-wife relationship is possible only on this basis. The moment a bride and groom share love on their wedding night with God's blessing, they inherit the palace of true love, the palace of true life, and the palace of true lineage. The wife, through her husband, receives God's ideal son, who is also Heaven's older brother, Heaven's husband, and Heaven's parent. The husband stands in the corresponding position in receiving his wife. When the realm of conjugal heart is perfected, the relationship between the husband and wife also becomes absolute, unique, unchanging and eternal, because God is absolute, unique, unchanging and eternal. So the term "divorce" cannot even exist. Theirs will be a life of happiness, filled only with the blossoms of mutual respect and love. Next, how can we describe the heart of children, and how is it obtained? The parents are the center, in God's position in the family, and it is impossible for a child to be born without parents. For these reasons, the relationship between parent and child is established not by human morality but by a heavenly morality. Thus the parent-child relationship is a vertical relationship, not horizontal. It is not a relationship of destiny, which means that human effort can change it, but it is a relationship of absolute and eternal fate. Children experience and learn the heart of true love as they attend their parents in daily life, placing their parents in a position higher than themselves. Through a natural process, they come to understand that the love, life and lineage that they inherit from their parents originate in God. Children who watch and learn from their parents in this way will grow up to become husbands and wives who have no fallen nature, and ultimately they will obtain the position of true parents themselves. The spherical motion of the family unit that continually repeats the three-generational pattern in this way is the basic model for building the Kingdom of Heaven. Lastly, the realm of the heart of siblings arises through brothers and sisters who live as a family in attendance to the same true parents. I said earlier that the heart between brothers and sisters establishes the relationship between front and back. True parents are a husband and wife living in truth, and children who attend such parents will naturally learn the discipline of heavenly morality and ethics among siblings. It will be a beautiful sight, where a younger brother attends and reveres his older brother as he would his father, and the older brother looks after his younger brother with a loving heart. The older brother represents "front" and the younger brother represents "back." The older brother represents the father, while the younger brother represents the mother. The perfection of the realm of heart between siblings is the foundation for all people to live for the sake of others through love and service. Respected guests, as the number of "true peace family kingdoms" perfecting the four great realms of heart increases, "true peace tribe kingdoms," "true peace nation kingdoms," and ultimately the "true peace world kingdom" will appear. In this way this will become the original world of God's ideal, the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, the eternal Kingdom of Peace on Earth. I am declaring this here today. Humanity has lived without the certain knowledge that establishing true families is the most serious, foundational commandment of Heaven. A new era has arrived today. The number of people around the world who have received my teaching and are standing resolutely for the sake of building the Kingdom of Peace is growing by leaps and bounds. Heaven and earth are shaking with the cries of bright young people who are determined to build true families even if they must offer their lives in order to protect their purity. Already, we find hundreds of millions of blessed families around the world. These families are shoring up a world in which ethics and morality are rapidly deteriorating. That is not all. The spirit world is one step ahead of us in breaking open the age of the peace kingdom. Starting with the five great saints, more than 120 billion blessed families are working day and night to cooperate with us on earth and prepare for the day that is to come. According to the Principle of Creation, God's ideal world should be completed first on earth. Although people today are descendants of the fall, God's unending love and the spirit world's cooperation now allow us to understand the nature of the heavenly kingdom. Please recognize that it is time to accomplish a true love revolution of overwhelming proportions, taking as our example the miraculous accomplishments of the spirit world. The time has come for you as well to open your hearts and receive the secrets that Heaven is disclosing in this age through me. In one sense, I am a human being living with a physical body like each of you. But in the context of Heaven's providence, I am God's ambassador, sent to earth with His full authority. I am sent to accomplish His command to save the world's six billion people, restoring them to Heaven with the original goodness in which they were created. The five great saints and many other leaders in the spirit world, including even Communist leaders such as Marx and Lenin, who committed all manner of barbarity and murders on earth, and dictators such as Hitler and Stalin, have found strength in my teachings, mended their ways and been reborn as new persons. Emperors, kings and presidents who enjoyed opulence and power on earth, and even journalists who had worldwide fame, have now placed themselves at the forefront of the column of the true love revolution. Together they have sent to earth a resolution expressing their determination in the light of my teaching of the true family ideal. They have declared to all Heaven and Earth that Reverend Sun Myung Moon is none other than humanity's Savior, Messiah, Returning Lord and True Parent. This resolution has been announced on every corner of the globe. Respected guests, it is now only a matter of time. Look at the world. Do you see anything that gives you real hope for the future? Sooner or later, we have to give what we have to our descendants and leave this world. What gift could be more precious than that of completing the family ideal in your family, so as to guarantee eternal peace and happiness for your children? Surely no one who has such an opportunity should hesitate to take up the task of building the peace kingdom on earth, for which God has waited thousands of years. I have reached the advanced age of eighty-five, by the Korean way of counting. But I will continue to work harder than anyone else until the day the Earth overflows with God's true families, guns in the Middle East fall silent and give way to fireworks of peace and joy, and shouts of mansei [eternal victory] celebrating the unification of my homeland Korea echo across the Pacific to be heard in America. I hope that you leaders representing the world's six billion people in this ceremony will join hands with me. I call you to take the lead in building what is God's original ideal and the desire of all humanity, the peace kingdom on the Earth. Thank you.