Pyeong Hwa Gyeong (049) - The True Family and I
4. The purpose of religion
The world cultural spheres were formed according to the different human circumstances and antecedents. To this day, religious people have not known that the purpose of religion is to prevent the body from continuing to lead the mind. Had there been no Fall, religion would not have been necessary.
Something went very wrong and religion became necessary to correct it. What does God intend to do through religion? God intends to discipline the body. You will not be saved just because you believe in religion, or go to heaven just because you believe in Christianity. However, it is the children who are centered on God’s love who can go to heaven. Adam’s family was to have had the love of God at its center. It was to have had a blood relationship with God. The kingdom of heaven is the place where such families dwell. We need to dominate the body in order to strengthen the power of the conscience. A liberated conscience then will lead our body, and we will return to the bosom of God’s love as original beings free from sin.
Therefore if we ask what religion is supposed to do, the answer is that it needs to motivate our body to do everything it hates to do. What does the body hate most? To serve others! To sacrifice for others! Furthermore, religion asks us to be an offering. The offering is destined to shed blood and be capable of sacrificing its life. Therefore, the Bible tells us that a person who is willing to lose his or her life shall find it, and a person who wishes to find his or her life shall lose it. What this paradox teaches is that if we live according to the flesh, we are going to go to hell. If we gain victory over our flesh and liberate our conscience, we will go to heaven. If we subjugate our body’s wishes and put our conscience in a totally subjective position, we will liberate the unlimited and infinite hope of the conscience.
In the course of history, there have been numerous religions and religious leaders. Yet those who believed in those religions and in those leaders were not able to attain total control over the body and could not deny themselves completely. They could not liberate the conscience and place it in a position to relate with God on the original basis. We sinful people did not become true olive trees. Instead we remained wild olive trees with our roots in a false love. Human beings were to have had roots in God’s true love yet we established roots in Satan’s love. How are we going to resolve the problem of being wild olive trees instead of true ones? This remains an inevitable and crucial task.
If you study yourself, you will notice that your conscience knows everything about you. The conscience is closer to you than your own parents are. It desires to possess true love, to be embraced eternally in God’s bosom. When we marry, we separate from our earthly parents, not from our conscience, with which we are born. The conscience loves us and its mission is to transform us into eternal sons and daughters of God. |