Prayers relating to the life course
“Beloved Heavenly Father, I thank You for Your grace, and for having shielded me in my struggles from my childhood until now; during those years I have been apprehensive of any humiliation or shame that Heaven might suffer. Among all the good things on this earth, there is nothing more precious than connecting to Your original heart. Knowing this, we must infinitely long for that relationship. We must keep in mind that those who experience Your love will have no regrets even if they forget about all the things of this world. Now we must seek the ideal world, the original homeland where we live by Your love. We must prepare today on earth for the day of our birth as liberated children endowed with the authority of freedom of our third life.
We must know that just as we needed to be healthy in the womb to be born to lead a healthy life on earth, we need a wholesome earthly life to have a wholesome life in heaven. As the world today is one of conflict under the dominion of evil, we must we must be resolved to fight to the death in order to be blessed with the cooperation of heaven and earth and to keep in step with the dynamic fortunes of the universe. We must resolve that our descendants will never be placed in the same position as we have been.” (49-308, 10/17/1971)
“Beloved Father, when we think of how You exist and have toiled unremittingly to usher in a new spring, we must become Your infinitely grateful and joyous sons and daughters who lament the fact that we have yet to offer our entire life and love to You. In our predestined relationship with You, our lives are meant to be harmonized, and completely absorbed in and by You so that we too, may greet the new spring.
We must realize that only when we greet spring for the first time will the flowers bloom. We must not become such pitiful souls who have never done so. Just as a flower goes through summer and autumn before blooming and bearing fruit, we too are to undergo a similar process to bear fruit.
We know that for a tree to bear fruit, it first absorbs life elements through its roots, trunk and branches in summer, concentrating a perfect life force to bring forth a second life. Similarly, we must become the sons and daughters who are introspectively determining whether we have a life force welling up in our hearts – one that is capable of rebirth in a new world even if our bodies should die.
No matter how much time flies by, no matter how fiercely the storms rage, our inner life force must withstand the intrusions of the environment and persevere persistently on the path of growth. Only in this way, can we welcome the new spring and become a seed, the original source of a second life, which can be planted again.
Likewise, no matter how pathetic we may look externally, if we maintain our value as the original essence that can enhance the spiritual life force and as a seed that can be planted in the infinite world, we are not miserable people even though we may think we are. Please allow us to realize that the more miserable we may appear externally, the more our internal value is complete and guaranteed.” (32-36, 06/14/1970)
“Father, we recognize that if we lack the heart to attend You and bow down humbly to You, we will have no relationship to You in the eternal world. Open the doors of our hearts to feel Your heart; let us today hear Your voice welling up from the depths of our hearts so that we may regain our lost selves. Help us to appreciate Your historical course of toil and trouble to find each one of us, that we may humbly bow our heads before You.” (4-280, 09/14/1958)
Sun Myung Moon
The purpose that people desire
God does not have a body. God created with the intention that all things would represent His body and that Adam would represent His face.
Originally, God was to be the spiritual focal point and Adam was to be the physical focal point. These two focal points were supposed to generate two axes that would meet at a 90-degree angle: the first is God’s purpose of creation, and the second is the purposes that people desire. Had Adam and Eve not fallen, then representing the face of God they would have occupied the positions of father and mother eternally in the spirit world; yet due to the Fall, this was not possible. Had there been no Fall, everyone could have gone to heaven simply by attending their parents as though they were attending God. (119-109, 07/04/1982)
The reason for birth
The world we live in is round: the sun is round, the earth is round and the stars are round; even our mouths are round. Everything has an inherent round aspect.
In fact, every interactive pair in the universe relates by means of one entity revolving around the other. Such interactive pairs form a spherical shape through maintaining a relationship with the greater whole. Why, then, are we born? We are born to beat in rhythm with this vast universe. Ocean waves lapping against the shore lap against our hearts as well. Gentle breezes sighing serenely lull our hearts into serenity. Flowers in bloom release rich fragrances and stir the fragrances in our hearts. (104-122, 04/22/1979)
To be born in love, raised with love, to live with love and to die with love makes us grateful for our birth, our life and our death. You came to be born because you participated in a moment when your father and mother expressed the utmost love for each other. You were participants in that love. Since you were born out of your parents’ love, you can consider yourself to be the flag of your parents’ love, which they planted at your birth.
Your flag flutters to express love. We are all meant to live for the sake of love throughout our lives. You should wave the flag of love for your mother, wave the flag of love when you see your father, and wave the flag of love for your siblings. (103-258, 02/25/1979)
The relationship between a moment and a lifetime
Your body cannot be sound and whole unless you have a continual foothold on life, able to absorb whatever nutrients may come your way at any time. This is the way of all living things in the natural world. The turning points of life depend not what happens over a long period of time, but on how you deal with a single moment.
People who ignore the moment can fail to obtain something precious. They cannot become great people. They cannot inherit God’s throne and crown. To make each moment shine, you should exercise care with each word you utter, each action you take, and even each thought you think. Deal with life and solve its problems, believing that how you deal with the day-to-day challenges of life will remain to determine your connection to the world.
The only way to gain ultimate victory is to do well in each moment.
Meeting the challenge of each moment will make you a victor. The same applies if you are fighting for a historical victory or even a cosmic victory. Those who know the infinite value of one bright shining moment and live accordingly can become great people, even saints, even God’s sons and daughters. A single moment can determine whether you are on the path of life or death. (31-217, 05/31/1970)
Today, our attitude is the problem. Scripture tells us that we should first seek the coming of the Kingdom of God and pray that God’s will be done. Yet the more important issue for each one of us is how I, as an individual, can move forward in unity with God’s will.
Consider this current hour; how can we spend it in such a way that it becomes entirely one with God’s will? That is far more valuable than just sitting there hoping for the Kingdom of God to appear. Therefore, we should use this hour to create the conditions that will enable us as individuals, as well as our families, tribes, and nations, to inherit and accomplish God’s will. This is the way we can make a place for ourselves in God’s coming Kingdom. Thus, the question is this: How do you spend this one hour, if you are given an hour, to make God’s will your first priority within the context of your daily life? The way we spend each moment of our life is a very important issue.
Looking at the history of the providence of restoration, four thousand years elapsed from Adam’s family through Noah’s family, Abraham’s family, and Moses’ family down to Jesus’ family. Yet each of the failures that prolonged the providence did not happen over the span of, say, a year. In the case of Adam and Eve, their fall was not something planned out and put into action over the span of a year or a decade or several decades. Their mistakes happened in a flash. Yet the failure of that one moment had consequences that have persisted through eons of time. Considering this, we can understand that a single moment can have a great and terrible impact.
Due to the failure of that one moment, countless people who walked the path of righteousness in the course of history had to undergo untold suffering. Due to the failure of that one moment, many nations could not follow God’s will and fell into the abyss of destruction. They became part of a gigantic offering of indemnity that was required because of that one moment. When we understand this, we see that each hour we just let tick by can be fraught with terrible consequences. Even though the Kingdom of Heaven is eternal, it does not exist apart from what we do in each single moment.
Eternity does not begin when we die. It begins from the moment we understand God’s will. From that moment on, if we interrupt our relationship with God’s will for even an instant in time, it can create an abyss that interrupts our walk with eternity.
Therefore, as you walk the path of faith through the course of your life, do not procrastinate by deferring your providential responsibilities from this year to the next, and then to the year after that, or from your 20s to your 30s, or from your 30s to your 40s, or from your 40s to your 50s. You should not live like that. If you persist in your secular lifestyle, you just might end up dying without having lived for the sake of God’s will for even a single day. In that case, how can you possibly go to the Kingdom of Heaven?
It doesn’t matter that the country you live in is blessed; you will have no place in the Kingdom of Heaven if you were unable to live even one day by a victorious standard. You may face one crucial day or one crucial year in your life when, if you fail the test, the consequence will be that you cannot enter eternal life. Thus, while it is not wrong for believers to spend their days dreaming of eternity, it is far more important that they actually join in God’s work to eradicate evil and become the standard-bearers of goodness in the real world. Consider that Adam’s momentary lapse resulted in eons of anguish. Consider Cain and Abel, who were supposed to dissolve the anguish of their parents, demolish the wall between the brothers and create the starting point for family unity. It only took a moment for Cain to murder Abel, yet that brief incident destroyed the providence of restoration that Abel had been elected to lead.
Noah had toiled 120 years to build the ark. But when the time came, God issued the command, “Call the people to come into the ark, for the day of My judgment has come.” The people had only one brief moment to follow this order and receive the blessings of the eternal God. Those who did not were drowned in the deluge.
In Abraham’s case too, God’s promise that his descendants would be “as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sands on the seashore” was bestowed in just a single moment. Abraham’s sacrificial offering did not require decades but merely a day’s work. The time it took him to cut the animals for the offering and place them on the altar was not more than an hour. Yet the way he spent that single hour bore the seeds of life and death, blessing and curse, for subsequent history.
Today’s believers should not be anxious over the coming judgment in the Last Days. Rather, they should be anxious about how they can take each day that God has given them and devote it to the will of God. They should be anxious about how they can link their lives to God’s will. (37-217, 12/27/1970)
Infancy and the three orderly stages of the growing period
How did God create Adam and Eve? The Bible says He created them from the soil, but what kind of soil was it? Where did He begin? Which part of the body did He create first? We should not think that God created Adam and Eve as adults. He created them as babies. We know that every existence attains maturity after passing through three ordered stages of growth.
Adam and Eve were no exception to this logic. This leads us to the notion that God must have gone through the experience of a mother who conceives a child in her womb, gives birth to it, and then nourishes it.
Logically, Adam and Eve must have begun as infants and then entered the growth stage. Had they not fallen, they would have continued to the completion stage. This is natural law.
What was Adam and Eve’s infancy like? We must proceed from the concept that the invisible God nurtured them as babies. Their origin was in the realm of the formless, and by passing through a certain process, they entered the world of form. (225-198, 01/20/1992)
Our life path
Since the society, nation and world in which we live are far from ideal, all manner of suffering happens. Good and evil are at cross-purposes. If we take a random sample of a hundred people, we would find that each of them is jostling for advantage in an “every man for himself” struggle within their circumstances as they cope with the demands of their daily lives. Consider that in ordinary life, most people lack the confidence that the tasks they planned in the morning can be completed by the end of the day. People who have a wider range of responsibilities need proportionately greater drive and determination to bring their daily work to a successful conclusion. If their determination and drive are below par, their day will not be success. A series of such bad days can turn into months, and months into years.
Our situation also makes it difficult to meet monthly goals. To be successful, we need enough drive and determination to overcome all the complicated situations and circumstances we may encounter during the month. If that drive and determination are missing, our efforts that month will not be successful.
Having a successful year requires that we equip ourselves with a fighting spirit, with an inner drive strong enough to thrust aside all the challenges of each and every one of its 365 days. We can then celebrate a victorious year. If we live one year like this, and then the next, and continue in this way, it will eventually add up to ten, twenty and thirty years. Over time it becomes the path of a victorious life. (31-30, 04/12/1970)
No person living on earth can escape the constraints of time. It is true today, and it has been true throughout history. Individuals, families, tribes, peoples, nations and the world all move within the limitations of time.
People everywhere have goals they strive to attain. They focus on their goal for ten years, twenty years, thirty years, seventy years, indeed, their entire lives. The greater our goal, the stronger our inner commitment needs to be if we are to accomplish it. We need to have an inner determination that surpasses the difficulty of the goal, and maintain it without faltering through the allotted period. Otherwise, the goal will elude us. (31-149, 05/24/1970)
The original homeland that we must seek
You may not know of the reality of the spirit world, but God has given me special grace to have clear insight into that unseen world.
Digging into the root of that world, I found its principles to be quite simple. In the spirit world, only those who lived altruistically, in line with God’s universal principles, can enter the higher realms. The realm that is entirely structured along these lines is the ideal Kingdom of Heaven.
Heaven is humanity’s original homeland. Today we are exiles from our original homeland and dwell in the fallen world. Yet we still seek our original homeland, and we are destined to return someday. But as we could not find the way back by our efforts, God in the course of history has laid out paths for our journey.
That is why God has raised up various religions. God set up each religion as a training ground to equip people for one of these paths appropriate to their race, culture, customs and traditions. Taking into account the diverse cultures that exist throughout the four corners of the earth, God set up various religions as the training grounds for equipping all humankind to become eligible to return to the original homeland. As people progress upward along these paths toward higher ground, God is leading humanity to converge toward a unified religious world.
In all religions, what is the central teaching that guides people to the original homeland? It is to live for the sake of others. The more highly developed religions emphasize this principle. Thus they teach their adherents to be gentle and meek, to place others above themselves and live for their sake, and to serve others sacrificially. These teachings serve to instill discipline in us, so that we can abide by the laws of the Kingdom of Heaven. (78-117, 05/06/1975)
Our highest path in life
As we walk along our life’s path, where should we be heading? Our destination is to possess God’s love – to be owners of God’s love. To possess the love of God is life’s highest and final goal. Everyone, men and women alike, should take the path to this destination. Our life path should be a journey to the God of infinite love.
Of all the ways that human beings live, this is the loftiest path. On that path we may face life-and-death situations even ten times or a hundred times, and we may have to continue the search even after we die, yet we never stop searching for the love of God.
What is our greatest desire? It is to possess God’s love. You may have met God, but if you did not discover a love that is even more precious, then you have not made God your own. Therefore, you must strive to possess God’s love. Once you have love, there would be no problem even if God were not with you. When we possess God’s love, God’s love becomes my love and my love becomes God’s love. The internal and the external become one for the first time. A nation based on such love would be an ideal community. There would not be upper and lower classes.
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When we dwell in that place of love, we feel that everything under the sun is good and exists for our sake. God’s love has that quality. Therefore, the heavenly world, the Kingdom of Heaven, is a world filled with love. This is our final destination. (39-210, 01/10/1971)
The standard of birth and the standard of life
The wrong standard of birth
People in today’s world boast of their social status or family background, all the while unaware that they were misbegotten at birth. They do not know that they were born from the love, life and lineage of Satan, the enemy of God. This is a serious problem.
Due to the human Fall, all people have been born from Satan’s love. Satan’s love has been passed down through the generations to their parents and then to them. Satan’s blood is flowing in the life of every mother and in the life of every father, and that blood now flows in each of us. Each of us is a fruit of these three.
For this reason, each of you belongs to the lineage of Satan. To put it another way, Satan’s blood is running through your veins. Therefore, Satan propagates his “ideal” fruit in the natural course of things. Meanwhile, God strives to redeem those same men and women and transform them into the pure and wholesome men and women of His original vision.
Your beginning was in Satan’s love. You were born from his lineage.
Your starting point was wrong. Since you came from the wrong starting point, you must return to the correct starting point. Where is that correct starting point? How far back do we need to go? We need to go back to the origin. As we originated from false parents, we need to return and start anew from true parents. How serious is this? It is imperative to inherit God’s love, life and lineage afresh.
That is why, when you receive the Blessing, you undergo a ceremony for changing your lineage. Just because it is a Unification Church ceremony, you should not think of it as some ordinary ritual. It is like a wonder drug, an antidote to restore the dead back to life. You must believe in it more than your own life.
The mistake our first ancestors made was so serious that it caused the suffering of countless people throughout the course of human history. People have paid a ghastly price for having perpetuated illicit love in the fallen spiritual and physical worlds, with far-reaching consequences for individuals, families, societies, nations and the world. Knowing this, we cannot commit the same mistake again. Never again! (216-109, 03/09/1991)
The standard of life
Eternal life does not refer only to an eternal existence in the spirit world. It means living for eternity in the bosom of God’s love.
God created each individual to live with Him in a relationship of Lover and beloved, Subject partner and object partner. You are the beloved of God. God cherishes the ideal of true love more than He values Himself. Although God is the absolute and eternal center of life, His ideal is even more eternal, and the center of that ideal is true love. Love is realized with a partner, and the partner of God’s love is you.
Love has the power to bring two individuals into oneness. Love can unify a nation. When two people are in a relationship of true love, they will accompany each other through any situation. The same applies to your relationship with God. When you live this way, you can inherit God’s entire fortune and even His entire heart. I went through a miserable course to discover this reality, and now I stand on its foundation. It is sublime and lofty. I would not exchange it for anything in the world. It is an amazing grace.
Because God and I love each other in this way, He lets me stand in the same position with Him, where we can share true love for eternity. The spirit world is in a different dimension from this limited earthly world. We cannot move freely within these mundane confines, but as the spirit world is a realm of a higher dimension, you can do anything there; you can even leap across time. You can have whatever you desire anytime and anywhere, so long as your desire is motivated by love.
We were originally created as eternal beings. If on earth we become people of true love who enjoy an eternal relationship with God, then when we go to the spirit world, we will enjoy such freedom. The first standard of life is the criteria of good and evil, the second is the original starting point, and the third is eternal life. (216-107, 03/09/1991)
Sun Myung Moon