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REVEREND SUN MYUNG MOON SPEAKS ON
Father, You have endured the long course of history and fought to gain the glory of Heaven! Please allow the day to soon appear in which You alone receive the glory of the providence. We know well that Your original will has been ruthlessly trampled down by a myriad of satans from the time the human beings committed the error. We did not know Your situation. We did not know that You must find someone to serve the will which was to be realized by human beings on the earth because that will was violated.
We know that the history of the providence is one in which You toiled with no one to serve the will. You worked endlessly hard to convey the will, which is burning in Your heart, to humankind. Father! Please allow us to be heavenly sons and daughters who can exert all our effort to possess Your will in our hearts and to follow Your path of glory through the providential will and course of history. Since we know that Your will is to find true sons and daughters, please be with us so that we can build a country, world and universe where we can serve You as true sons and daughters and give You joy. Help us realize that this is the country and will of Your hope.
Your greatest joy and hope, after fighting for six thousand years, is for true sons and daughters to harmonize with all things and offer songs of praise to You. We must become heavenly sons and daughters who can offer everything and set out to build such a country.
Father! We are infinitely distant from that day. Please allow us to be sons and daughters who can understand Your will, the chosen sons and daughters who can come forward with an offering of life, for the sake of the day of Your glory. Let us do this regardless of constant battle, mistreatment and death.
Father, since I have come here on the earth with a shimjung centered on the will, in place of the glory of the son, please look after us and come here personally and rule over us.
Please allow this to be a time when we can serve and bow to You as true sons with a true purpose. Since we know that the forces of a myriad of devils attack all people gathered for the will, we eagerly hope and desire that You eliminate the force of darkness infiltrating each of our minds and bodies and embrace us in Your generous bosom so that we can establish the age of Your glory within our lifetimes.
As we have gathered before You at this time, please rule over us. Since this is a holy day, please bless all the people. Please bless the thirty million people. We eagerly hope and desire that this will become a time when we can return glory and joy to You.
Please bless us so that we can clear away all the wrongful conditions we have accumulated in the past week and be offered as living sacrifices in the image of true sons and daughters who harbor the heavenly will. Please move among us personally. We eagerly request this. We pray in the name of the Lord. Amen.
Father! Please remember this day and reveal the granted grace. Reveal through our hearts the granted movement of life. If You can, please grant the glory of resurrection to us, even though we have been disloyal.
Please rule over our minds and bodies. We have realized that although we have our minds, they are not ours; although we have bodies, they are not ours. Our minds seek the direction of goodness, yet our bodies seek the direction of evil. Hence, we know that You treat us with the understanding that we are struggling between the two and have not stepped outside the realm of Heaven's lament. Father, You will have to have pity on us and give us the heavenly grace of life and the strong power of resurrection in our hearts.
Although the body tries to subjugate the mind, the heavenly will is for the mind to defeat the body and establish one victorious standard whereby the mind can eternally subjugate the body. We know that an inevitable battle lies before us in which we have to establish such a standard in ourselves.
Please allow us to feel that the wars that appear continuously before us are not to be feared. Let us feel that all the sorrows encountered in such combative circumstances are not as great as the sorrow caused by the fact that the mind is subjugated by the body in the struggle between them.
Father! Please arouse in us a strong heart and strong grace. We eagerly hope and pray that You will help our minds possess the power to subjugate our bodies. We know that unless we achieve a life centered on the mind, our lives cannot be resurrected. Thus, Father, our minds have to rise like lava.
Allow shock and ecstasy to envelop our bodies and our environments through the mind that faces life, the mind that encounters grace, the mind that can harmonize with the work of resurrection. Father, we eagerly hope and pray that You allow such a heavenly work of re-creation to appear in us.
Although our minds are infinitely soaring high toward Your glory, our bodies are infinitely exhausted and struggling. Father, please control this environment. Allow the joyful garden to appear soon before those whose bodies move in accordance with their minds. Beloved Father, we eagerly hope and desire that if there are such sons and daughters, they will be remembered eternally in history. Bless them so that they can dominate the earth and move Heaven.
We know that unless the people on earth realize a Kingdom of Heaven in their minds, they cannot form a Kingdom of Heaven based on the word. Unless they can achieve peace of heart, they cannot build a peaceful country. First, please allow us to restore deep in our minds the heart that can be highly inspired and delighted by You, the heart that can sing to You. We know that Heaven is longing for the one whose body moves and harmonizes with that mind.
Father, we have been fighting to become such people. Please allow us to restore the victorious image You desire through the heart that burns in the mind of each of us.
Please allow such people to gather at this time. Give us the ability to serve You with dedicated hearts and to remove all the elements that can be conditions for resentment. Beloved Father, we eagerly hope and pray that in this way You will allow Your victorious hands, which can more than dominate all, to stay near us. Please allow us to understand that unless we achieve the heavenly kingdom of the heart and of peace in ourselves, the glorious heavenly kingdom has nothing to do with us.
Father, among Your sons and daughters gathered here, is there someone who has the glorious qualification to meet You directly because of his eager heart of yearning for You? Is there someone who is trying to bow to You as a living sacrifice, inspired by the heavenly heart that serves You?
Is there someone whose praiseworthy and tearful heart challenges the path of death and infinitely resonates with the heavenly shimjung and turns into a movement of life? Is there one who seeks to hold a gathering of peace? We know that if such a heart is absent in us, You will be sad, our hearts will be sad, and today's meeting will end in sorrow.
Father! Please reveal Yourself here in glory. Come to us as our personal Master. If there is someone who has felt Your grace, open his heart and inject Your hope again. Many lives are captured by the power of darkness and are moaning in the world of death. Father, we eagerly hope and desire that You will remake them by bringing the life and authority of resurrection.
Thus, allow us to serve the coming Lord and solemnly bow down to You with our hands pressed together. Please allow us to feel that those who try to be loyal to You receive many tests. Allow us to feel that we are descendants of those who betrayed Heaven beyond measure.
We eagerly hope and desire that You allow us to realize that we have become a sacrifice to Satan and have stood on the forefront of blocking the heavenly course. Let us bow down to You for forgiveness, with irrepressible regret and tears.
Father, please have pity on those who have gathered here. Satan is trying to invade their hearts. Please make a separation, and become a beacon to set the direction of their hearts right. Please come personally to those who have gathered here. Let this be the time when even the body, led by the mind, can sing of Your glory in joy, moved by Your grace, and can bow to You representing the whole. Father, we eagerly hope and desire this.
Father, today is a holy day. We know that everyone has severe wounds from the past week of life. Please forgive us for having moved far away from Your shimjung and for having been submerged in sorrow in the wrong place. Please personally anoint us with Your fragrant oil. Please grant the people here at this time the grace to long for You and to receive the seals.
We know that the God of the Trinity works hard to help miserable people. He visits those who deplore their lowliness to look to Your compassion and try to sing of Your preciousness. Please guide our hearts to see Your value and lament our lowliness so that we are not found inadequate to receive Your grace.
Since today is a holy day, please bless the thirty million people and the whole of humankind. Father, please act so that the millions of saints surround us and offer a bow of joy. Brothers and sisters are gathered everywhere, praying across the country with lonely hearts and concern for the will. Do not remove Your hand of compassion from them; protect them with a loving hand. Please do not let us fall down exhausted as we go over the hill of toil in the last days. When we offer ourselves to You after having endured till the end by holding Your hand, please accept us.
We eagerly hope and pray that You will enable us to achieve the task even in difficulty; to uphold the will even in sorrow; and to advance the will even in frustration, thereby becoming sons and daughters to be remembered in Your heart. We eagerly request that today You will embrace us with Your special grace, promise us Your whole grace, and hold us until the day of victory. Please rule over this time according to Your will. We pray in the name of the Lord. Amen.
Father! After receiving the word, we have come to yearn for the image of Jesus of two thousand years ago. A turbulent world and self-centered people lay before Jesus as he tried to convey the word. We realize that as he gazed at them, infinite sadness flowed from his heart.
Jesus was looking at the situation where the Jewish church was not only suffering from factional strife; its members were also fighting among themselves. As we reflect on the characteristics of the age, people boasting of themselves, hiding their faults and exposing others' defects, we can see how intensely woeful the heart of Jesus must have been as he carried the responsibility for the world and the age.
We can imagine the heart of Jesus, who nevertheless said, "Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you." (Matthew 7:7) Although it was the nation, church and individual who were to ask, seek and knock, since they were not doing so, Jesus had to ask, seek and knock in their place. Father! This was a woeful thing.
Although Jesus longed to be sought after, he had to seek out others. Although Heaven had made preparations for a long time in history, desiring that humankind would serve Jesus, Jesus was not served. Father, we eagerly hope and desire that at this time You will enable us to feel the grieved heart of Jesus in this position.
Although Jesus could only shed tears and lament over the people on earth, he longed for the land to be blessed by the Father. Please bring that image of Jesus before our eyes today. Enable us to hear his voice of instruction, to quietly adore and experience the heavenly shimjung flowing from within his heart, and to bow in tears. Father, we eagerly hope and desire this.
We have come to You with our hands upraised and bare. Please be compassionate. Please leave nothing in our hearts but You. Let our hopes, desires and demands be for nothing but what is Yours. We eagerly hope and pray that You will make us sons and daughters who can live holding onto, experiencing and fighting on with hearts deeply shaken by Your infinite shimjung.
Father! Please have compassion on the audience here. As we have realized that our minds and bodies are not our own, let the leading authority appear who can claim them and everything else as Yours. Let this be the time of promise when You can personally seal us, calling us Your sons and daughters.
Father! I have come here with the words You have granted. Please be present here. Remove any distance between the heart of the giver and the hearts of the receivers. Father, we eagerly hope and desire that You allow us to come to You with one heart and to return glory to You by making ties with humankind. As we ask You to rule over everything and reveal everything according to Your will, we pray in the name of the Lord. Amen.
Jesus appeared on earth as the substance of God's hope. Before he came, God had been working for four thousand years, installing numerous prophets and good ancestors with a desperate and sorrowful shimjung.
The only purpose for God's providential work in history was to establish Jesus, the substance of hope, and to realize the hopes of Heaven, the ancestors, and the whole of humankind. We know that Heaven and our ancestors fought for this moment.
Jesus stood in this position. Jesus was God's only son, a value not exchangeable with anything in the world. When Jesus appeared, so could God. When Jesus rejoiced, so could God. When Jesus was glorified, so was God. Jesus came as the glory of Heaven, equal to the whole from the beginning to the end. Without him, nothing on earth or in heaven could reveal its value, not even the seat of the heavenly power. Jesus was the priceless center of the whole.
Jesus came with that heavenly value, yet he was seen from a human standpoint. The Jewish nation boasted of their ancestors, their history, and about being the chosen people, yet Jesus had a value greater than any righteous person in their history. He was the center of heaven and earth, without whom they could not gain their lives, establish their church, organize their nation, or found the desired homeland.
God did not send Jesus for sorrow nor did He send him so that the earth would receive him and be frustrated. God sent Jesus as the central figure heaven and earth could receive and rejoice over.
Every action of Jesus should have been able to paint the glory of Heaven. The feelings he had in daily life should have been feelings of glory that could strike down the historical conditions of resentment. However, the life of Jesus was not like this. From the day humankind received him, they should have put Jesus in a glorious position. They should have served him and praised him to the utmost.
When the nation left him, however, Jesus stood in the position of having lost the nation. Although God sent Jesus to hold onto the nation, He could not but lose him. After losing him, He also lost joy and the heavenly kingdom. We should know this fact.
We should know that Jesus was not meant to have such a fate. When he was hit by tragedy and perished on the cross, he promised to gain the glory of victory without suffering this tragedy again and to establish the day when heaven and earth could rejoice. We should know that the day he referred to was the last day, the day of the Second Coming.
Jesus came to the earth with God's mission. He went through an earthly life and went to the spiritual world. Now he is fighting along with the Holy Spirit to achieve the historical purpose of God. We should long for this Jesus. We should repossess this Jesus. We must live with this Jesus. To do this, we should live with God. We can live with Jesus only when we live with God. What then should we do? We should be the ones who fulfill the hope of God, Jesus, and human history. We should know that, without doing so, we cannot stand before Jesus when he comes in glory.
What path should we follow to receive this Jesus? This is the problem. Even if Jesus comes down from heaven to the earth, we are unable to receive him as we are today.
We can receive and serve him only after we have the shimjung to connect to his situation and complete the task he was to carry out on the earth. We should know that the day when we meet this Jesus is the day of Second Coming, the day to which today's Christians look forward.
Therefore, to receive Jesus, it is necessary to fulfill our responsibility on the earth. We can meet him only then. Thus, the title of my speech today is "Let us Follow the Way of Jesus." I will speak upon this topic.
The angel foretold Mary's mission to her. At this time, Mary backed away, saying, "Since I do not know a man, it cannot take be." The angel said, "Since this is a work of the omnipotent God, you shall conceive by the Spirit." Mary then replied, "Lord! I am Your servant; do as You will." When a meager virgin responded thus to Heaven, it was a historic moment.
When we think about the Lord today, we easily think about his cross and glorious resurrection; but we should go back further and consider the situation of Mary and the position of Joseph's family.
This one remark of Mary's: "Lord! I am Your servant; do as You will," which she uttered when she heard the final word of Heaven, provided the foundation for Heaven to come to humankind after four thousand years of toil. At that time, Mary showed her heart toward the will of the Lord. We should consider here that Mary had waited more eagerly than anyone else for the one who would come with the will. With the pure heart of a virgin, she longed more zealously than anyone else for the Savior to come to Israel.
From the fact that she said, "Lord! Do as You will," we should understand that Mary had greatly hoped and prayed for the hidden will of God to appear. We should know that Heaven came to her upon the foundation of her putting the heavenly will first. It was the same for the saints. The birth of one saint required the foundation to receive him. Thus, for the birth of saints, parents are needed who can bear them and serve as the foothold of the will.
Mary said after being told about the birth of Jesus, "Lord! Do as You will." This remark should be made at least once by every fallen person. Not only Mary, but anyone seeking the path of life must have the heart to say, "Lord, do as You will." Without such an answer, no one can make a connection of life with Jesus.
Jesus came on such a foundation. After conceiving, Mary thought about the will more than anyone else did as the baby grew inside her womb. Believing that when the baby was born, the Messiah would appear and clear away the resentment and sorrow of the nation, Mary must have thought more than anyone else about the time when God's will for the earth would be realized. Jesus was born in this way.
Without Joseph's family, how would Jesus have been born? If it had been known to the world that Mary had conceived a child as a virgin, she would have been stoned to death according to the law of Moses. This was the worst violation of the law; it was considered unpardonable in the social circumstances and situation of the age, the worst shame upon the nation. Since Mary and Joseph had a shimjung ardent enough to defy all the circumstances and come forward for the will, Mary could give birth to Jesus.
Joseph and Mary took steps thinking only of the will. Because of this, when their footsteps ran into the evil world, Heaven opened a way for them to live. Jesus came through such footsteps. We should think about Jesus, who prepared himself for the day when he could realize his purpose by going through the three-year course in Egypt and living a quiet life as a helper of his father, who did carpentry work for a living.
Among the words in the Bible, there is a passage, "Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you." (Matthew 7:7) Jesus declared this with a desperate heart when he embarked upon a pioneering course with the new gospel.
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