Family is Training Ground of Heart

If there is a wealthy family, then what kind of fortune should the one in the child's position receive?  They should be able to inherit the fortune of the grandparents and the parents.

Why do you think we need grandparents?

We need grandparents because they represent the living history of the past, the ancestors in history who lived before.  Everyone has at least one childhood memory of loving their grandparents, hearing their stories and spending time to get to know the history of the family lineage.

The parents represent the present and the children are symbolic of the future.

Children are also the center of the whole.  The center of grandparents, the center of parents, the center of God are all founded on true love.

Thus, when you love and respect your grandparents, it means to learn to inherit all the past.  Through loving your father you learn from the present.  Through loving children you learn about the future.

So, what does one inherit from their grandfather and grandmother, and father and mother?  You inherit true love.

Although your grandfather and grandmother are old, they united in true love.  Your mother and father are united.  You should be like them and inherit the future.

But, we cannot inherit the future unless we become a true family.

When we take a look at the three generations, it is like looking at the universe.

The love of the universe resides in the true family that represents the present and future.

The Family is a Model for the Heavenly Kingdom

When we observe the animal world, we see that male and female animals love each other.  This is a textbook from which we learn about the love of the universe.

Without a grandmother and a grandfather, we feel unstable.  It is only with them that we can move straight into the Kingdom of Heaven.

Grandparents, mother, father and children will all go to the Kingdom of Heaven.  The model and textbook for all of this is the true family that is centered on God's love.  We see that this is opposite of the current families where separation, divorce, fights, selfishness and destruction is at the very core.

Those who loved the true grandparents, the true parents, the true children, the true family, nation,world and true universe will automatically go to the Kingdom of Heaven.

We can think of the ideal family as a type of educational material that teaches us how to establish the Kingdom of heaven.

A person who loves his grandfather has a model to love all the people of his grandfather's age in the world as their own flesh and blood.  If he loves the people of his parents' age as his own, he will be able to travel freely throughout all the nations.

If he thinks of the young people of all nations as his own sons and daughters, he will be able to travel freely within the Kingdom of Heaven even though there are twelve pearly gates and directions.

A person who loves people in the world as his own family will have no boundaries even when he goes to the spirit world.

Therefore, the family is a textbook which shows us how to make a connection with the Kingdom of Heaven.

When you apply this principle to the national level, then you will become a patriot.

When you apply it to the world, you will be a saint. When you practice it in heaven and earth, you will become God's children, or holy sons and daughters.  People have such a desire.

You should become a person who can embrace all the sons and daughters of every race as well as their grandsons and granddaughters.

In this way, you should stand in the position to become the owners of the family who with true parents love, and love the people of the world with true love.

When you stand in the position to represent the family that practices true love connected to the original parents through God's love, you finally enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

The Family Brings Together the Love of Three Generations

The family encompasses the whole of history, the present and the future.

What is the ultimate point that God has sought for six thousand years?  It is the true family where love is interconnected and where all are united in love.

Everything that exists comes under love's dominion.

We cannot cut our relationship with this absolute source of love.

Adam and Eve's original mission was to establish such a true family.  They were not just to end up as man and woman, but instead as God dreamed of a new family where they would be united.  This is the first starting point towards establishing men and women.

Thus to be able to enter the Kingdom of Heaven safely, you have to find a family and within the realm of that family in this world, enter and live in a place where you can feel satisfied in God's love.

Only then can you go beyond this world as well.

In order to form the family realm of love you have to be unconditional. 

Parents represent the past, the husband and wife represent the present while the children represent the future.

To love one's partner during your lifetime is the equivalent to God loving the world.

It is where the oneness of parents, a couple, and the children offer their love that represents heaven and earth.

With this as a foundation, they would tell their descendants to follow them.  The original homeland of the heart, the place where heavenly affection is felt will be remembered in heaven and earth.

What do you think that God would be looking for up until now?

He has not been seeking a subject partner, rather He has been looking for an ideal object partner.

He has searched for those who resemble God and possess the inner and outer aspects of the world He created.  The starting point would be the family.

The best representative of the universe is family. 

To be one with the parents is the same as the past and the present meeting.

At that point, you can love the past by loving your parents, love the present through loving your partner and love the future by loving your children.

Therefore, you can deeply experience the love of three generations within the realm of the family.

This is the placed where the three kinds of love are concentrated within the family.

The Kingdom of Heaven begins in the family.  It does not unfold anywhere else.

That is all the Kingdom of Heaven is:  it is a 3-D extension of the family and not something that goes beyond the family realm.  Therefore, when you embrace your husband or wife, you should think that this is a man of the world becoming one with a woman of the world.

The place where you make a condition to love all of mankind begins in no other place but within the relationships of the family unit.

Therefore it makes sense that the world's problem began with the first family, therefore, all of the problems of society can be remedied within the family.

You should live your life this way.

Loving your parents connects history with the present and paves a road for God to come to you.

Therefore, children should love their parents to connect the human beings of history with yourself as an inhabitant of the present, that is to unite the past and the present. 

Parents love your children centering on yourself to connect the present with the future.  A philosophy that practices and sings the praise of such a love for thousands of years is Unification Thought.

The Family is the Training Ground of the Heart

We cannot live separate from the heart.

Even if you are the president of a country or have global wealth or authority, you would not be able to live if you had no place to express your heartfelt joy.

Without the expression of heart, how can you feel the deepest satisfaction from the people who are under your command, office or the people who follow you?

You must feel it in your family.

You should be able to return home after a long day and feel joy through your spouse and children.  This is a primal joy.  It is the same with God.  You should be proud of this joy in front of others.

Even if God was to snap His fingers and restore the world, He would not be able to feel any joy if there is not a family centered on love to share His love.

Even though the Western trend is to abandon the family after a certain age, we need our families after all.

Parents are meant to be the head of the family and teachers should be the head of the educational institutions which represent society.

Parents assist your physical development as you grow up as well as help you emotionally.  Then why do we need school?

It trains us for life in society.

If family is the school where we learn the true basic emotions, then school is the experimental training ground of society.

But, society is not where this training ground ends.  It ends with the national level.  Once people have experienced everything from the family to the societal level, they go on to the next level.  The president is the fruit of the third stage after the formation and growth stages.

Today, many people complain about the president, but this attitude is learned within the family with children who dishonor and complain about their own parents.

A seed divides, sends roots down and a shoot up, then through circulatory action, growth begins.

After such division comes a synthesis when flowers and fruit are produced.

Schools raise the children needed by the nation through educating them to serve the nation. Training is not real life, but a preparation stage for the life they will live.

Therefore, you should not make the wrong preparations.

How do you describe a family unit?

Family is the training ground for the heart.  It is a place where you train your heart to love.  This is why you should live with affections like brothers and sisters at school and also live affectionately like brothers and sisters in a nation.

Proper parental education is needed at school, in society and also by the nation.

Parents should pass everything in the realm of heart on to their children. 

Parents should build a foundation of heart for their children through teaching them to follow their parents' rightful footsteps in living a certain way in the family, society and in the nation.

When you look at a family, it is not necessarily a good one just because you see that they have a good house and a good environment.

On the other hand, a family might have a bad environment, or a shabby house, if it offers peace and you are connected to all things in your life to it, then it is a good family.

This home has a foundation of heart where the parents and children live for the sake of each other.

This is the original homeland where memories and the source of motivation for all living begins.  Then it becomes the base to determine how much happiness we have in life.



Photos courtesy of: freedigitalphotos.net

Return for Tomorrow's Post: The Three Great Loves

This post was rewritten and derived from True Family Cheon Seong Gyeong Book 4, Chapter three

The Family is the School of Love

"The Kingdom of Heaven is a world of love, a world that exists for the sake of God, where people live for the sake of God." 

"The family is an encapsulation of history. It is connected to history, with its origin in God. You inherit the family vertically. However, inheritance must take place in a perfectly vertical manner, at a ninety degree angle.

The grandfather and grandmother, representing God, have already inherited this." 

Your grandfather and grandmother are the encapsulation of your ancestors.  When you think about it, your grandfather is an heir to the traits and bloodline of all the different ancestors who lived at different times in history.  Then he is God's heir who, centered on God, connects us to that history.

The family unit encompasses all of human history.  It connects to history with its origin in God.

The grandfather and grandmother are representatives of the past, the bygone ages, and the mother and father represent the present age. The sons and daughters represent the future. 

Therefore, your grandfather and grandmother are the past, your mother and father are the present and the children are the future.  Then when it is our turn to have children we inherit the past, present and future and pass this down to another generation.  These three set of parents and three ancestors must connect their three loves and love the four generations.

The Fall represents God not being able to see or have a direct relationship with His grandson.

The Kingdom of Heaven starts from the family. 

How is this?  The grandfather represents God, the mother and father represent the present, and the sons and daughters are the future. In this way, the past, present, and future are all condensed in the family.

In the family, the grandfather represents God, the mother and father represent the present and the children the future.  In this way, the past, present and future are all in your family.

Thus, the mother and father represent the world, with the grandmother and grandfather in the position of the past God, the mother and father the present God and sons and daughter are in the position of the future God.

However, through true love, they are all equal.

When the central core is living for the sake of others in true love, they are able to develop a view of essential oneness and equal value.  When the four different directions meld into one, we will be able to live eternally as God's love partner based on this logic of true love because that place is eternally protected by the fortune of God's love.

What is the family? It is a training ground through which we can inhabit the ideal nation and world with love. Furthermore, it is a training ground through which we can even occupy the heavenly kingdom and God.

Wouldn't it be precious to experience the direct relationship with God as our love partner?  Right now only through the Messiah or aid of angels do we communicate with God, but we must return to the state of Adam and Eve before the Fall.

The reason we seek the truth is so we can perfect our families and feel infinite love and happiness when we are there.

If we have not given true love here on this plane, we will choke once we are in spirit world - they will not be able to breathe.  Only true love is the air.  We are to live our earthly life as a training ground that prepares us to breathe in the next world.

Your family is the textbook of love. 

When you see someone of your grandfather's age, you should think that you will love him even more than your own grandfather. 

When you are out in town and you come upon someone who is your grandfather's age, you should think to love him even more than your own grandfather.

The same with if you come upon someone who is the same age as your father or mother, you should welcome him or her whether he is black or white or of a different nationality.  When you see a young person, you should love and relate to them as if they are your own son or daughter.

Imagine a world full of men and women who think of others in this context.

What is the Kingdom of Heaven?

It is the place where you can love the people of the world as you love your family, and such people are the people of the heavenly kingdom. What do the four generations of your grandfather and grandmother, your mother and father, your wife, brothers and sisters, and your children make up? 

It is a place full of people who love strangers as if they were a member of their own family.  Such people are people of the heavenly kingdom.


There are four generations in your family. The grandfather/grandmother, your mother/father, your wife/husband, brother/sisters and your children.  What do they make up?

They make up your family which is a textbook how to relate to the people of the world with true love of the universe as a person of the heavenly kingdom.  This family textbook is the foundation in which you receive such a teaching.

God's love manifests itself in the things of creation. 

Parental love appears in children.  Also, where there's a husband, the wife's love will appear, just as when we can witness the parents' love by looking at their children or seeing the wife's love by looking at the state of her husband's clothes.

What about God?  We can see His love by looking at the things that He created in this world for His children you and me. 

God's love appears in order: First is parental love, next comes conjugal love, children's love and then the love of brothers and sisters.  This is also known as the Four-Position foundation centering on the love of God which creates the kingdom of heaven on earth.

If you only have love, then you can be friends with God and also have him as our Father.

There is a saying that earthly life is just a journey and we are just travelers.  During this journey, we should strive to experience vertical and horizontal love.  After creating a family based on the love of true parents, husband and wife, true brothers and sisters and true sons and daughters, we should expand this foundation on the horizontal plane throughout all families in all directions.  

Then this model of a true family should be expanded to the tribe, nation and world level.  Then this world of true love will connect to God and we call this the Kingdom of Heaven.

God's love opens the gate of salvation.

We must inherit God's true love, true life and true blood lineage which we lost due to the Fall.  We should know that there is no salvation of mankind without this inheritance.  

The worst of all sins is to break something and scatter the pieces in all different directions.  The worst and most hated of all enemies is one that has destroyed love.  There is no devil as bad as the one that causes children to despise their parents and destroys a couple's relationship keeping them from loving one another as husband and wife.

Because of the Fall of our first human ancestors, we first lost brother and sister's love, then conjugal love, then lastly children's love. Without restoring this lost love, we cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

Due to the Fall we lost the four-position foundation: we first lost brother and sister love, then conjugal love, then lastly children's love. This four position begins in the family which we learn how to relate with the world centered on God.

Imagine going to the local cafe and being able to sit with any family of your chose which you never met before and speak to one another like brothers and sisters.  Without having true love as a possession, we will never be able to enter the Heavenly Kingdom.

We must still prepare for this day even if it comes ten thousand years from now.

Since God is the original substance of true love, when we are connected to true love, we all become one. The parents represent God as a living God in their own right. 

Since God is the origin of true love, if we all possess true love then we are connected and become one.  The parents represent God as a living God in their own right representing one aspect of God's divided nature.  The son's and daughters are seen as an additional God.

This family unit built by three generations through true love is the foundation to build the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.

If we do not establish this true standard within the context of the family, we will never realize the Kingdom of Heaven and go beyond Paradise.

The family is the center of the universe.

The perfection of the universe depends on the perfection of the family.  Then, if you love in the universe just as you love in the family, you will be able to travel freely anywhere in the universe.   God, in this case, stands at the center of all love as the parents of the entire universe.  This is the formula for the family.

The basis for an original, God-centered family includes all the love of men, women, sons, daughters, parents and God.

When you love your parents, your husband and your sons and daughters in this place of unity, it will be like living in the heavenly kingdom.  So where does this heavenly Kingdom start?

It starts in every family. It does not magically unfold somewhere else.  The heavenly kingdom is just the 3-D expansion of the family.

It is not outside the family.

When you think of embracing your spouse, you should think that you are a man and a woman becoming one on behalf of the world.

The family is the place where you substantiate your love for humankind through action. 

We should have respect for our own flesh and blood and respect our parents and grandparents as the owners of our house who represent the heavenly right of kingship.  But we despise them because they are old.

There is the old saying the "generation gap" that has created a division between the different generations of the family.  Did God invent such a word?  No, Satan created this word.  Can love dwell in this phrase "generation gap"?

Do we live the way people lived within a family a thousand years ago?  Was there a different way to love then?  The ways are the same and the means of loving are the same.  What has changed are the inner aspects.

If we had not Fallen, the formula for love would have remained unchanged for a hundred million years.  Even if Heaven turns upside down as long as the three generations of grandparents, parents and children strongly unite the same as an iron fortress, then they will be able to bring about the heavenly kingdom anywhere they go.

The fundamental source for the seed of God's love and the seed of life is this lineage. 

If we cannot establish this, then there will be no hope for the heavenly kingdom on earth, the heavenly kingdom of peace or the world of happiness and freedom.

We talk about paradise or the heavenly kingdom, but it is not a place you can go alone. How much peace can you have if your husband is in hell and you are in paradise?

If you have seen the movie "What Dreams May Come", you see it illustrates this very point of a husband who went to hell to bring his suicidal wife to heaven and all of his children back together to live forever.

The Kingdom of Heaven is a place where you go together with your parents, brothers and sisters - your family.  First we learn how to live united in love on this horizontal plane.

What is the heavenly kingdom? You talk about going to paradise or the heavenly kingdom, but you cannot go alone. The Kingdom of Heaven is a place where you must go together with your parents and brothers and sisters. 

Return for Tomorrow's Post: We Come From One Root

Today's text was rewritten and derived from the Textbook: Cheon Seong Gyeong Book Three - True Love Chapter Four - Love and Family written by Dr. Rev. Sun Myung Moon.