Many posts on this website mention that God's plan for His ideal world is opposite of the world we see in today.
The Divine Principle focuses this reversal in dominion from God's world at the beginning with the first parents a man and a woman who instead of following God's holy warning to wait for maturity to partake in sexual pleasures, followed the servant archangel to do as they please.
Then we can see that religion was later born to teach humanity to go in the opposite direction of the archangel and to follow Him back into His bosom. Once all of humanity follows God's ways of love and not the fallen, archangel way of love, then we would naturally observe a world full of love and peace - an Utopian world full of God-like people.
All religions emphasize self-denial and sacrifice in order to achieve the highest form of love.
Without exception sacrifice is necessary for you to form an intimate relationship with God. Why should sacrifice be the highest form of love's fulfillment? There are many, answers but let us analyze this through the major religions.
Christianity has delivered the message of putting the love of God above all for centuries as well as other prominent religions in history. Each major religion has a foundation in love.
Buddhism preaches a life of mercy and benevolence which is actually in essence practicing love for our fellow man. Each religion emphasizes that one practices a life of self-denial instead of self-centeredness. Why does one have to make such effort from our sinful being?
Because sin originated when the first parents of humanity practiced living based on one's own desire leaving out God's purpose. Therefore, without exception, in order to reverse this fallen deed one must live a life of sacrifice to form an intimate relationship with God.
Why is sacrifice the highest way for the fulfillment of love?
Mind and Body Unity
When we look at the mind and body, which is less evil when it comes to sin?
Christianity along with other religions deem the flesh to be the tool for evil and bring it to submission through being humble before God. This is why religions practice subjugating the body to weaken it so the body will listen to the good mind and become one.
Religion practices being humble, meek and sacrificing of oneself as virtues so the body is forced to unite with the mind. God has been leading mankind toward this way of life. But if man does not respond to God's call, then His efforts are in vain.
God blessed humanity with free will in order to have objects that are on equal footing with Him. In this way, as humanity has continued to deny God, He sacrifices Himself in wait for humanity to return instead of forcing unity. Thus, in order for God and man to unite, it is a mutual effort.
Is Religion Necessary?
Many wonder why we need religion.
It is said that if one follows the dictates of the conscious, then there is no further need for education. But when in our daily lives, living moment-to-moment do we observe ourselves faithfully following our good mind without the need of placing much effort?
The reason is because sin causes an extreme struggle between the mind and the body.
Without going through the path of religion there is no way to reconcile the mind and body, no hope that some day you will even get close to God.
The contradictions within man cannot be resolved without the process of religion.
In this case, religion is absolutely necessary for man to return to their original position before God. Religion was not placed on earth to last forever. When we look at the original Garden of Eden before sin was born, God and man communicated freely without the need for prayer, religion or a mediator.
Once man gets rid of this struggle within themselves and unites directly to God, there will be no need for religion. The ultimate goal of religion is to liquidate sin within humanity and unite him directly with God.
Those who oppose religion have an original mind and conscious that pulls them toward the desire for peace. Such a person will effortlessly try to bring humanity into wholeness just through man's thoughts and efforts alone. We do not have to look far in history to see that this thinking is impossible.
This is how atheistic communism arose by trying to bring a world of peace without God, but through force, stripping away the very gift God gave each of us.
Even God does not demand that His own children follow Him, but dictators have believed peace could be achieved in this way. It is not a lasting peace and it is only superficial. Communism or those who live without God as their base, they try to find their comfort through things in the material world in which they see. Their joys, harmonies and love are based on the material goods in which they can harbor. Such a life will be easily blown away like a leaf in a storm because material is not everlasting.
All of this brings us to the logical conclusion that religion will not be needed by man for eternity, but will be consummated by the emergence of man in perfection.
Many church leaders and foundations would not like to hear that one day their position will be liquidated. Many wars have started between religions and different sects as man placed his own thinking and limited power on God. This way has brought more confusion and frustrations to God's efforts to bring His children back toward the original way of Heaven.
It is logical that on our journey toward peace we start out from the very bottom of the fallen state. The journey will lead us into the ultimate goal of total and perfected union with God. The opposite ideology places emphasis on the material world.
Which is more perfected: the mind or the body?
The body is limited but the mind has no limitations only that which we place upon it. The only way this world has hope to come out of this unfallen state is through the search of God through religion. This longing for God brings hope for the union of men and God to be accomplished one day.
Father Moon has dedicated his life and body suffering the most for the sake to find the solution to the question of how to reconcile the war between mind and body. This is an all important question as if every individual was to absolutely live according to God's will and form families, this world would quickly become a world of peace.
What we seek and need most is not God Himself, but God's love.
Religion has existed for thousands of years and yet, the unity between man and God is still a distant dream as conflicts, racial and national barriers arose. Therefore, there should emerge a religious movement that rises above these barriers and unite all people together with the common dream of humanity obtaining unity with God's love.
There should be a movement that erases these setbacks because God Himself embraces all races, levels in society, nationalities. He does not express His love based on these aspects that only separate people. If God limited his love based on race, then He becomes an imperfect God.
When a religion exists that can bring people from different aspects of life together in the name of God, then let's observe the religions that have a foundation and where it may be lacking in bringing world unity.
Religions are God's tools and they should be universal
True salvation springs from union with the love of God, which manifests everywhere in a fair and justified manner. Which race you belong to makes no difference at all. It cannot be said that the love of God works only in the Western hemisphere; it shines throughout the earth. Any religion which proclaims the segregation of the races is a false religion.
A new religion is needed which embraces all men equally.
Religion has the goal of saving people.
World salvation comes from union with the love of God which manifests everywhere in a fair justified manner. God's love is not based on which race or which side of the hemisphere one lives. God's love shines throughout the earth just as the sun. Any religion that pronounces separatism is a false religion.
For instance, Jews and Christians should not feel that they are the only people who deserve the love of God. They must feel instead that they are merely servants who must bring the love of God to all humanity.
If we were to view from God's high standard of love, would He think that unity would come from the whole world turning to Judaism, Christianity or Islam? Would you think that God would limit Himself to just one religion to shine through? Religion is simply just a tool for God. God's love is supreme and encompasses the highest possible level. Everything in creation is a part of it and is surrounded by it. The love of God encompasses all human existence.
Religion was meant to be universal, not reject the basic principles of God's love.
When we look at this standard, is modern Christianity perfected?
Christians dictate that at the end of the world of judgement, only Christians will be lifted up in the air to meet the Lord and live there forever and all others will go to hell. Is this the right attitude to have? This kind of thinking is based upon a cruel God and an imperfect ideal.
A revolutionary concept must come to Christianity and enable it to meet the criteria of perfection that God originally intended. Father Moon says that is the Unification Church. There must be a movement that clearly defines God's intentions and bring humanity back on the correct path toward salvation.
What is the Unification Church supposed to do?
"First of all, make one world and elevate it into a world of God. Encouraging self-centered individualism is Satan's final strategy to demolish this world and this nation and we must destroy this satanic concept. What am I trying to contribute to you?
You have never really tasted the true love of parents or of husband and wife and brothers and sisters. I am trying to ignite in you spiritually the ecstatic joy of God's love so that it will not be just a concept to you but be a presence in your daily life.
One phenomenon sets the Unification Church apart: Our members often meet me in dreams or visions and in all kinds of spiritual circumstances. The power of spiritual experience already exists and embraces each one of you every day.
Those of you who have such experiences, raise your hands. In the mundane world those things may seem abnormal and certainly they have never been seen in any other religion in the past. Physically I am very far from our missionaries all over the world but I am just as close to them as I am to you. This is a most vivid testimony to the significance of our movement.
I want you to know that tremendous sacrifice has been paid in order to come to this level today. Many nations have collapsed and many millions of people have died for this. Since it comes to you without too much effort you don't realize its value and you think that this is common everywhere. It certainly is not.
We are a religion of experience and feeling because God is not a conceptual God to us. He is the master of our daily lives. As soon as you come into this atmosphere you immediately become a recipient of new spiritual power and presence, but for people outside our Church it is an unfamiliar and perplexing thing to grasp." SMM
Do you want to know the secret for meeting God in your daily life?
The most important element in order to reach the love of God in our daily life is to conquer the body. The body has three fundamental desires:
The first urge is that the body gets hungry and looks for food.
How to conquer the body was one aspect Father Moon worked hard to answer.
He found that he had to have a love for God more than the love of his body when he became hungry. This is why many religions place emphasis on subduing the body through fasting, prayer and service to others to weaken the body's cries for attention.
When a person demonstrates their love for God through sacrifice, one sets a superior standard for the love for God as stronger than the love of food. Jesus was the ultimate example of a person who conquered that particular desire and went through a forty-day fast for the sake of the chosen people.
Many other saints and prophets led the same way of life such as Moses and St. Francis, leading a life of sacrifice.
Why is this a high standard for religion? Because hunger is the worst kind of suffering the body can experience. When one forgets their own need for food while in search after God, they make a precious statement about their dedication to their faith.
If you have completed a seven-day fast, when the last day arrives some may have been watching the clock closely and for the moment it was time to eat again. Others will think that they have felt hunger until praying, loving and going after God more than their desire for delicious food on the last day. The latter is the true way of thinking when one fast.
One's longing for God over the love of food is the real test.
"Until I was thirty there was no day that I was not hungry because I deliberately went without food in order to test myself. At that time I was so hungry that if someone was eating nearby my mouth hung open and saliva drooled out even without my being aware of it.
When it gets hungry enough, the body just automatically reacts that way. You can't say you have overcome your body until you have conquered desperate hunger by the power of your love of God." SMM
The second fundamental urge is for sleep.
Can you demonstrate that your love of God is stronger than your body's desire for sleep?
You will pass this test when you think of God and He becomes so real and relevant that your intense love of God conquers your deep desire to sleep. When we search through history and observe the life of those who seriously pursued God, they all lived an ascetic life that seemed harsh to those in the fallen world.
They fought their desire to sleep hard and would endure all kinds of things to fight the body such as stabbing and cutting their own flesh just to keep awake!
For seven years, Father Moon only slept for two hours a day. When he was being tortured for preaching the word of God during the Japanese occupation, he was forced to stay awake for two full weeks and was whipped each time his eyes closed.
During this torture technique, he learned to conquer his body and even sleep with his eyes open. Through this technique of conquering his body, many revelations and secrets held for thousands of years were revealed to him.
We need to win this love of God and show that our love is more intense than anything that tries to separate us from his love.
When you become sleepy at a time you are doing God's work, you should be stronger than your craving for the comforts of sleep. We all have that feeling when we are performing a mission where we are ready to collapse from exhaustion, but your love should conquer that feeling in such moments.
It is most difficult to go beyond the level of hunger and sleepiness for the love of God.
It may be hard at first, but each day like a muscle we can exercise this need by going to sleep a few minutes later extending it each day and/or waking up a few minutes earlier each day until we finally have a less need for sleep.
Jesus had to conquer all those bodily desires. The Bible said that he fasted for forty days and furthermore, we can well imagine that his life was a struggle both day and night. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus asked his closest disciples to stay awake and watch with him while he prayed desperately, but what happened to the disciples? They fell asleep.
Why was this mentioned in the bible and why is it so significant to why Jesus finally told them that it is done and to finally get their rest. We will understand Jesus' frustrations in keeping his disciples awake when they kept falling asleep when we know that this means that it shows where their true hearts lay.
A true follower of Jesus in his deepest hour of need would have stood by his side until the final moment, not only did his disciples sleep when he begged them to pray during that hour, but scattered when he needed them the most. This says sufficiently that satan still had a hold on them that they could not fight their bodily selfish desires for the love of Jesus and God.
Jesus' disciples could not win over sleep and Jesus told them that though their minds were willing their flesh was weak.
This is not some hazy spiritual concept. You must overcome precisely these things in your life. I would not speak this way to you unless I had tested out everything in my own life.
The third desire you must conquer is the urge for physical love.
The worst kind of temptation for religious people always comes in the form of sex. The need for sex outside of marriage and away from God is the beginning of sin in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve misused their sexual organs before the time of maturity.
Satan creeps into men's prayers in the form of a beautiful woman.
Men and women have different and distinctive sexual desires. Your intense love for God should surpass the desire and need for carnal love that is not linked to Him. When we look at this high standard of God in comparison to the young people in America, we see that they have much to overcome.
America's permissive sexuality, "sleep with whomever and how many you want", has killed the moral life of Americans like a dirty rag. A once prosperous nation has been shocked to its knees due to the promiscuous free lifestyles of its citizens.
This is why every major religion has practiced the life of celibacy. The body is viewed as the worst enemy and has three formidable weapons: the desire for food, the desire for sleep and the desire for physical love.
"I have fought the same battle that you are engaged in but you have no idea how many tears I have shed to win over these temptations."
Return For Tomorrow's Post: Allow Us to Discover Where Our Hearts Lie
This post was rewriten and Based upon the Speech, Core of Unification
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