Pyeong Hwa Gyeong (065) - True Families : Gateway to Heaven - 4
2. The importance of the moment
Your living body cannot be perfected unless your entire existence becomes a foothold for absorbing nutrients. This phenomenon occurs in the natural world. The crossroads of life do not appear over a long period of time; they arise at a single moment.
People who ignore the moment cannot obtain anything of value. They cannot become great people or inherit God’s throne and crown. So, to make each moment shine, you need to exercise care with each word you utter, each action you take and even each thought you have. Deal with life and resolve problems, believing that the contents of your daily life will remain as phenomena through which you maintain a relationship to the world. That is the only way the realm of victory is determined.
It is in the moment that the victory is determined. It is the same with the historical realm of victory and the cosmic realm of victory. Those who live with unlimited value capable of making each moment shine brightly can become great people, even saints, and even God’s sons and daughters. In this way the junction of life and death is crossed in a single moment.
Today our attitude is the problem. Of course it is necessary to desire first the coming of the kingdom and wish for the Will to be done. Yet, what is more important is how we ourselves personally can become one with God’s Will.
If we refer to a particular, hour, it is more important to ask how we can spend that hour to come into a greater oneness with the Will than it is to simply desire that the kingdom of God be accomplished. So we first must create the environment—as individuals, families, tribes and peoples—that will enable us to inherit God’s Will. Only then can we establish a relationship with God’s kingdom. Then, with God at the center, how can you make a relationship with the Will in this one hour, if you are given an hour, within the sphere of your daily life? This is a very important question.
Looking at the history of the providence of restoration, there were four thousand years from Adam’s family through Noah’s, Abraham's and Moses’ families up to Jesus’ family. The mistakes that occurred during this course did not happen in the span of, say, a year. In Adam’s family the Fall of Adam and Eve was not something planned out and put into action in the span of a year or a decade or even several decades. Their mistakes happened in a flash. When we think of how the breakdown of that one moment has been perpetuated for eons of time, we can understand the fearfulness and dreadfulness of that instant.
Due to the misstep of that one moment, so many people who walked the path of righteousness in the course of history had to undergo untold suffering and many nations that could not follow the Will fell into the abyss of destruction. All these became a source of a tremendous indemnity offering. When we understand this, we can see how fearful even a single hour that we let just tick by can be. Even the eternal kingdom of heaven does not exist apart from the single moment.
Eternity does not start when we die. It continues on from the moment we come to know God’s Will. Here, if there is a leap in the relationship of time or a gap created for even an instant, eternity will be interrupted.
So while walking the path of faith in the course of your lives, do not procrastinate by deferring your providential responsibilities from this year to the next, and then to the year after that; or from your twenties to your thirties, your thirties to your forties; or from your forties and to your fifties.
You must not live this way. People with such a lifestyle will die without having lived even one day in oneness with the Will. They cannot go to the kingdom of heaven.
However wonderful a country you may live in, you cannot go to the kingdom of heaven if you are unable to live even one day according to a victorious standard; you cannot enter heaven if you do not live even one year victoriously. So, while it is important for believers to dream of eternity in their lives, it is even more important for them to eradicate evil and become the standard-bearers of goodness in the real world. This is what is most important.
From this perspective, Adam’s mistake of one moment resulted in eons of anguish. In Adam’s family, Cain and Abel were supposed to have dissolved the anguish of their parents, demolished the wall between the brothers and created the starting point for a family of oneness. However, the death of Abel, who had been set up to fulfill the providence of restoration, also occurred in a moment’s time.
Consider the course of Noah, who toiled one hundred and twenty biblical years to build the ark. It was in just one brief moment that God issued the command, “Go into the ark, for the day has come to fulfill My desire.” Those who followed this order received the blessing of the eternal God; those who did not were submerged in a realm of eternal judgment.
It was the same with Abraham. 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, rather a mere day’s work. The time it took him to cut the offering and place it on the altar was not more than an hour; yet that single hour historically bore the seeds of all life and death, curse and blessing.
People of faith today need not fear the coming of a day of judgment in the Last Days. Instead, worry about how to connect the time that is given you in your daily life to the Will of God, and how to form an intersection between your life and the Will.
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