A Life of Attendance

1. You should live a life of attendance and encourage each other to be strong. Up to now, you received salvation through a life of faith, but from now on, you will find salvation through attendance. If humankind had not fallen at the outset, you would attend God as your way of life.

Attending God is something you do with your whole heart daily. Wherever you go, you should always feel that your father is in front of you your mother is behind you, and that Heaven is with you at every moment, to your right and left, above you and below you.

When you, as Unification Church members, carry out your mission, and our public responsibility in the church, you may run into difficulties that you cannot resolve on your own. When this happens, you should purify your mind, cleanse your body with a bath, and pray sincerely to Heaven.

When you pray, ask God for His guidance, and He will show you the way to go. If He does not, it is only because your heart does not reach the standard of God's heart; if it does, He will surely answer you.

If you entrust everything to God and rely on Him when you face difficulties, keeping a prayerful heart, God will guide you in the right direction through your intuition. (150-294, 1961.04.15)

2. In this age, you are justified by living in attendance to God. You attain salvation through attendance. Previously, you were saved through paying indemnity. However, you must now enter the age when you attend Heaven. There must be a nation where everyone lives in attendance to Heaven.

Jesus was chased out because he did not have such a nation. It is the same for you. You must go forth holding on to the Word that I am conveying to you. Satan has no power to deny the Word. Since even Satan recognizes God, if you substantially build a family that is aligned with the Word and with the heavenly world, then centering on your family you can freely expand your foundation.

How can a nation emerge without families? It is from our families that our tribes can emerge. Centering on our tribes, we can create our nation, and from that point, God's world will emerge naturally. This is the expansion that will take place starting from blessed families. (354-222, 2001.09.27)

Now is the era when we live in attendance to God

3. The Unification Church does not discuss the kingdom of heaven based on faith alone. We say that the righteous are justified by attendance, that we are saved through attendance. But to attend God, you need to know Him. It is not a problem to attend Him once you understand the teachings of the Unification Church.

Once you truly understand them, you will know God and find it natural to attend Him. Having said that, I ask you: how regularly do you feel God's presence? How many times during your twenty-four-hour day do you feel His presence?

Can you expect to be saved through attendance if you attend God two hours a day? You should need God more than you need to breathe and seek Him more desperately than a choking person gasping for air or a dehydrated person who craves a drink of water. God is more essential than food. (033-231, 1970.08.16)

4. You have to know God's situation and circumstances, understand His heart, and then consider Him to be you would your father. He is your Father, my Father, and our Father.

Why should learning about God, listening to Him, and attending to Him be our way of life?

It is so we can come to understand God's circumstances and heart as they were expressed in the pages of the Bible. It is to understand that God is our Father, who has been wounded, trampled upon, rejected, and torn to pieces.
(8-253, 1960.01.17)

5. The standard for true relationships is the parent-child bond of heart between God and human beings. No one in authority can undermine this bond of heart, for it is eternal, unchanging, and unique. It is a bond with absolute authority.

When you come forth with this authority, all beings bow their heads before you. When you move with the authority of this bond of heart, the entire universe follows you. This is an ironclad rule of the universe. (007-105, 1959.07.26)

6. If you do not dare to embrace people of all different colors and live with them as family, you will not be able to attend God in the ideal world, the kingdom of heaven. That is why in the Unification Church there is interracial marriage among members of different skin colors.

I encourage Koreans, Japanese, and Americans to intermarry. If I did not do that, would not be able to take the lead responsibility in helping all humankind enter the world of the heart.

If I did not do so, people would ask why, among the people of different colors, I only loved people of one color and did not make the condition to love people of another color, so I encourage Koreans to marry people of all colors.
(177-068, 1988.05.15)

7. A life of attendance is not easy. It is not easy for you, and it is not easy for me either. If I have to deal with an issue concerning attendance, I cannot sleep. I know that unless I attend God, He will be restricted; that without me, He cannot be liberated. It should be the same for you in attending me.

You should make me feel that I am powerless without you because only when you expand the scope of your activities can I broaden the stage of my activities.

Therefore, you should understand that you determine the circumstances that surround me, and you should have a heart to create an expansive environment for me in all spheres of life. Again, a life of attendance is not easy.

You must attend to God with more heart than the heart of parents who love their children. Your parents took care of you for twenty years or more, but God has been raising His children for tens of millions of years.

Tens of millions of years have passed since humankind emerged. For tens of millions of years, God invested Himself and devoted Himself to meet the Son whom He has yearned for.

Just because you have devoted yourself, do not think that you have offered all that you have. Even after devoting yourself, you should think it is still not enough. (301-186, 1999.04.26)

8. God is near you. His concern for each of you exceeds that of anyone else. Everyone thinks that their parents love them the most, but God's love is greater and deeper than that love; it is deeper and greater than any human love in this world.

Hence, you should become people who can feel God's loving embrace and call Him Father. You should become true sons and daughters who can experience God's internal heart, in the position where you can say, “Now I know my Father's sorrow.”

If you can become such sons and daughters, you will become the owners of the kingdom of heaven in which you attend God. No one will be able to take that kingdom away from you. (002-235, 1957.06.02)

Our mindset during a life of attendance

9. God is not a fantasy. He is not just an idea or an abstract concept. He leads and guides our daily lives. Furthermore, he is always with us as the master of our daily circumstances. He does not exist just so that we can attend Him, but to live together with us, sharing love.

All my life I have been fighting battles in circumstances where God could not be properly attended. No matter how hard the world opposes a person like me, and no matter how hard Satan strikes me or tries to undermine me, they cannot prevail as long as Heaven approves of me. Since I have this foundation, whoever attacks me ends up toppling over. (168-112, 1987.09.13)

10. To attend God, we need to begin by placing Him amid our hearts and minds and then become completely one with Him in our bodies. Without doing so, there is no way for us to liquidate the devil's world. That is why we view this time as the age of attendance, the age when we are justified by attendance.

We are saved through attendance. God is not a distant God way up in the sky. We should attend God as our subject partner in our daily life. How do we attend Him? By using the law of indemnity, we must unravel all the sorrowful and painful circumstances that God has endured throughout the ages of history.
(144-274, 1986.04.25)

11. Why do we seek justification through deeds, justification through faith, and justification through attendance? Without justification, good and evil cannot be distinguished. The evil world cannot be separated from the world of goodness. God is the standard of righteousness and goodness.

The way God believes, the way God works, and the way He attends God must always be at the center. Satan cannot accuse righteous people who resemble God. (161-219, 1987.02.15)

12. God believes, works and lives in attendance; if we live with the same standard, then we will create an environment where Satan cannot intervene in Olive's life.

Although we may be within Satan's realm, if we establish the standard of righteousness that makes an environment where we can be with God, then Satan will withdraw.

That does not mean that attendance in the Completed Testament Age is the only thing that will remain after the Old Testament Age based on deeds and the New Testament Age based on fa has passed.

We need all three: the works of the Old Testament Age, the faith of the New Testament Age, and the attendance of the Completed Testament Age.

Even in the Completed Testament Age, we need to have faith and do good works. They are inseparable, by the same logic that tells us that growth occurs based on the formation stage, and completion happens based on the growth stage.

This is particularly so at this time because justification by attendance means developing our lives to usher in the era of the kingdom of heaven.
(161-219, 1987.02.15)

13. In the Old Testament Age, sacrificial offerings were made to lay the path for the Son to come. In the New Testament Age, the Son was sent and sacrificed to lay the path for the Parents to come.

The blood of Christians was shed for the Second Advent of the Lord, paving the way for the True Parents to come. The age of the Unification Church is the age of the True Parents. It must pave the path for God to descend to the earth and dwell upon it.

Because God has come to the earth, we can obtain salvation through attending God. This is how history is developing. We sacrifice things of a lower level to recover the Son.

The Son has to live, even if it means sacrificing the creation. All things of creation are in lamentation because they cannot experience the glory of God's love and the realm of His children's love. (177-158, 1988.05.17)

14. What kind of devotion should true sons and daughters offer? It should not stem from a life of mundane reality. Instead, you should offer devotion of hope, glory, loyalty, and attendance. If this is the kind of legacy you leave behind when you pass over to the next world, the kingdom of heaven will belong to you and Heavenly Father will be your Father.

Until now, you have offered devotion while going through the course of indemnity. However, from now on, you should offer devotion to join the realm of attendance so that you can offer attendance to Heaven. Those who can do this will join the first resurrection.

To join the realm of attendance, you must have the heart to comfort God. God is a grieving God, and you can comfort Him by making painful conditions of devotion through which you can participate in God's sorrowful circumstances.

The providence of restoration introduces us to these circumstances, by revealing the indemnity conditions that people have made before God. (17-245, 1967.01.29)

15. From now on, you must lead a life of righteousness through attendance. By leading a life of attendance we can become a family of filial children, patriots, saints, and divine sons and daughters.

In the Era before the Coming of Heaven, we fought with Satan. That time has now passed, giving way to the Era after the Coming of Heaven, the era of the kingship of peace.

This is inevitable. Each one of us must follow this path. It is not someone else's path, but yours. If you do not follow this path, you will have trouble in the next world. (492-237, 2005.04.16)