How to be a True Parent

It has been said millions of times that the toughest job in the world is that of a parent, most particularly the mother's position.

There is probably no other time in history where the children were as collectively rebellious as in the Last Days.  Because of Adam and Eve's mistake, which they made while they were still teenagers, we are witnessing this phenom today.

Now that we are living during the time of restoring humanity back to the position before the Fall, we will see the fruit of fallen history take place.

For parents to educate their children, they must first put their good words into practice.  They should first set the example of being loyal to God's will.

In this way, they create an atmosphere where whatever they say, their children will revere them without ever talking back.

Otherwise, there is no way for the children to follow them.

For this to happen, parents should give their children a heavenly education.  In teaching their children, parents should first be exemplary.

For parents to teach their children about filial piety, then the parents must be children of filial piety first before God.

This means that you, the adults, should be filial sons and daughters according to the heavenly laws so heaven's tradition of filial piety can be established from there.

Parents should educate them to practice filial piety just as their own parents practiced filial piety in the family.

The patriot's parents struggled for the nation even while being driven into desperate circumstances. 

Parents Must First Set an Example

Parents do not make their children practice filial piety just by telling them to do so.

Every parent should want to possess a heart which causes the children to WANT to practice filial piety to spring up within them.

This kind of love does not happen in one morning, but is developed over a long period of influence from the parents.

What does it mean to exert influence?  

Parents should set the example in their daily lives for their children to follow their way. 

You should be experts at putting such things into practice.

As parents, you do not just simply say, "Become great people" but rather, you say, "Go this way in order to become great people."

Fathers must fulfill their responsibility as fathers and the elder siblings should fulfill their responsibilities as elders.

By you becoming people who walk the path of true men and women, who do not deviate from the heavenly law, a pathway will emerge by which you can go the principled course and become the citizens of the one nation.

Then, what should parent's do?

Parents should teach the children to love their brothers and sisters in such a way as the mother and father loves them.  At the same time, they should teach their children to have a love for the nation in such a way. Then they do not need any further education.

When it is time for you to pray, ask God to make your children follow this way since you are doing it this way.

You can only place your children in such a position only after you yourself have set the standard.  Once you stand in such a high position, then God would naturally lead your children in the same direction.

Thus, if you fail to reverse the trend here, then you will be called to account for this failure once your go to spirit world.

Each of your families should have such children that view Mom and Dad as greater than any kings, queens or presidents in the world.

Also, you should be able to show them their mother and father are close and united with each other like no other parents in the secular world.  You should establish such a tradition.

This tradition should be so well planted in your children that they will say that their parents make them proud more than anyone else in the world.

If you look at the parents in the secular world, they constantly fight making a big mess even when their children protest their behavior in tears.

If children are unable to grow up without any tears or sympathy, when they see their parents fight in the secular world, they still exclaim that their Mom and Dad are the best in the world.

This is because they do not know the standard.  This is why you should set the example of a true parent and how children should be.

You should establish a parental bond where adoration flows out from the innermost core of your children's heart.

Thereby, this is where the family precepts and traditions are established.  Through teaching this tradition, the children of the next generation will say, "We will stand in the position as parents."

Parents Are Best Friends and Best Teachers

Have you ever thought where does love originate?

It never comes from the self, but rather from a partner.

Without a partner, love cannot arise. 

We see this pair system in all of creation.

Within humankind, women complement men, and children complement their parents.  Love is never realized without partners, a subject and object partner.

Those who have not been able to truly experience this love of the three object partners, cannot stand of having substantially experienced God's perfect love.

We should give birth to be able to match the rejoicing of God after having created Adam and Eve when we give birth to sons and daughters.

After God spent millions of years to develop the creation, surely he was overjoyed at the time of His first children's arrival.

We learn this in the Divine Principle.  After God created the first parents He told them, "From now on, you will rule over the world.  Our family will be the central family of the world.  Please grow up quickly."  God felt joy and satisfaction after Adam and Eve came into being.

God thus desired to see the day that Adam and Eve would be able to be blessed in His true Holy marriage upon their coming age.

By the same token, when fathers and mothers give all of the energy and love into raising their children well, they want to find good partners to become good husbands and wives.  When this happens, the family thus prospers.

Who are truly your children's best friends?

Not the young boys from the neighboring village. Your children's best friends are none other than you, their own parents.

This is how it should be.  Parents should be liked by their own children even more than their friends.  This is how you should think when raising your children.

Parents must be their children's best friends and best teachers.

While educating their children, parents should not lose their tempers and yell, "Hey you, don't do that!".  Teachers should not say, "You brat! I will spank you if you don't do what I told you.  Don't do that!"  Instead both should educate children with love.

Parents should teach their children in such a way that if they were to ask their children, "Hey, do you think you should do that?" The children will answer in such a way, "You are right, I should not do that because it would make my parents sad."

This is the reason that the parents should be their children's best friends.  Do you think that Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden had friends?  If Adam had any friends, his only friend was Eve.  Next there was just God.

But God did not want His children to be friends with the archangel who was a servant until after the purpose of creation was fulfilled, then Lucifer would have gone to the  next level beyond the servant if he fulfilled God's will.

Instead, Adam and Eve befriended the wrong person.  So, parents should be the best of all teachers, the best of all friends and become the best of all thrills of love.

Love begins from God.

Therefore, conjugal love stems from the parents.

When it is is time for the parents' children to find mates, the parents can say, "Hey, you like each other not because of yourselves but because of the virtues of your parents."  Their children should reply, "You were right, if you had not raised us this way and found such partners for us, we would have been disastrous."

As we have seen in society, marriages that are based on personal choice only without thought to the purpose of the whole, fail to meet the standard.  So who should educate children in love?  They should be educated by their parents.

Children should see that their mother and father love each other with great fun, like two cooing pigeons and learn from this kind of love.  They should be able to say, "Wow, when I see my father and mother together like that, I feel lonely when I am alone.  I also need a partner whom I can love like my parents love one another."

Their parents should teach them how to be like this.

When children are able to repeat this kind of love and extend it out into society, then the world will become a world of goodness and human history will become a history of goodness.  This is what we seek to accomplish.

Chastisement with Love

According to the Revelation of John, one should be hot or cold, but never lukewarm, because the world where love is lukewarm will never do.

If you have a heart of love you can even chastise with a stick. 

While raising your children, if they fail to meet a certain standard, even though you have loved them, then you should sometimes treat them coldly.  If you do not scold them when they are clearly at fault, then they grow up without the capacity to distinguish right from wrong.

Although your Teacher may look amiable, I can sometimes be strict. I can be merciless toward evil, but toward goodness I can be hot like a furnace at thousands of degrees.  When I heard recently that a teacher at a school in the West was in trouble with the authorities for using corporal punishment, I said to myself, "Now that nation will perish!" 


A nation that does not allow the correct discipline of children will soon be a nation of adults that do not know how to behave in the proper way.  Therefore, students should not mind if their teachers strongly guide them in the right direction even with strong chastisement.

There is a saying in Korea, "Give one more rice cake to someone you dislike, and wield a stick for someone you like."

This is the only way to ensure that the right tradition is continued.

Children should forget the pain of their punishment and should be able to shed tears before the love of their parents.

The closer you are to someone, the more you can scold him, saying, "You heathen! Why did you do that?" 

Instead of rewarding him, you can spank him on the calf and scold him, saying, "You rascal, did you do something good or bad?"

But the intensity of our concern for him must exceeds the severity of the punishment otherwise, it will be a sin.


If your punishment is more severe and surpasses the concern for the child, he could become one of your biggest enemies.


Even if you correct your child out of love, if the severity of the punishment exceeded the degree of love then everything will shatter.  Nevertheless, the opposite case happens, then everything is set right.

If we were to say that your love for him is at a level of ten on a scale of one to then, but incurred a minus of five because of a severe punishment, your child would still be grateful at the level of five.

Even still, if you child is unable to accept his punishment well, in order to allow him to come to repentance, you should love him with a greater love than you have shown him in the past.

Thus, even a delinquent child would be able to repent and turn immediately around in front of such true parental love.

However, if you scold your child repeatedly, and speak loudly about how well you have raised him, he will begin to pack his bags. 

But, if you love your child with a greater love, by shedding tears as if your heart would melt for them, they will turn around.

Greater love tends to take the lead in assimilating and integrating all other lesser forms of love. 

Even parents that live in the secular society if they are lax and tell their children not to study because they look tired, that parent does not truly love their child.

Parents should encourage their children to stay up and study even if they have to spank them.

Why is this so?

The parents should be concerned for the future well-being rather than just their present circumstances.  Parents discipline children in this way because they have greater hopes and dreams for their future.

When you give birth to and nurture your children, do so with true love. 

Based on this foundation, if your family members are able to unite closely and learn to love their nation, they will then become patriots.

Hence, parents watch over the growing process of their children and thus educate them.

Sometimes loving parents have to wield a big stick of love so that the children can grow up in the right way.

Children should not complain or protest because of being scolded or even spanked by their parents when they make mistakes.

Children should take such discipline as a lesson.  They should repent seriously and strive to amend their errors.

Such children will be able to grow up correctly and draw near to the center where God abides.



Return for Tomorrow's Post: Parents' Heart Resemble God

This post was rewritten and derived from the textbook Cheon Seong Gyeong Book Four-True Family, Chapter Nine, Section 3-5

God's Purpose Not to Satisfy Public Opinion

Someone might ask, "Reverend Moon, what kind of person are you? You confuse me. You came to America and you disapproved of many things here. You spoke against the Carter administration and now you are criticizing the young people here. You just don't make sense to the American mentality."

How would I answer that? It is no secret that our movement is strictly based upon God's principles; we are a religious movement. Every position I have taken has been as a leader of a religious organization which was initiated by God. I have never said anything for the purpose of
pleasing other people, including Americans.


Reverend Sun Myung Moon



God definitely does not do things for the sole purpose of satisfying the public opinion.

God is above everyone.  He is able to see everything in America, so He is in the best position to give advice and direction from that vantage point.

If your viewpoint is only inside a situation, then it is limited.

This country was born out of the desire to seek God without limit.  Thus, it has no reason to disregard God's will in these Last Days.

The United States must be in accord with God's direction. 

The American youth are experiencing drugs, drinking, club dancing, free-sex, but these are not tools or instruments of God.  How do these thing help advance humanity to a world of peace?

We should focus the excess energy of young people for the sake of mankind and God.

Since we are not able to influence others directly, we set up our own framework within the movement.  The young members are then chased out to do the work of restoration through fundraising and witnessing.

This is not done for Father's sake, but for a special motivation - the sake of America and the world.

Why do you follow this way?

It is because Father has never refrained from what God wanted him to say.  He has worked from the very beginning to teach about the orderliness of nature and the universe.

People of faith should be able to see clearly that the American behavior is against God's will.

The post before this mentioned that children should listen to their parents, yet when the parents tell them not to follow this path of restoration in the movement, we know that the parents are wrong.

What principle should we use in order to determine what is right or wrong?

We must always consider what will maintain the right order of the universe and then we will always come out the victors.

Father is looked down upon as a failure by virtually everyone in the world, but because he has cleared a path for full restoration, he is successful.

We can say our parents look like victors because they have a steady income, are respected and are not persecuted by the community.  But eventually they may end up on the defeated side, while those walking this bloody path of restoration will end up successful.

We may appear as outcasts and losers just as Jesus and his disciples did in his lifetime, but we will become the true victors in the future.  That is as certain as daylight.

Members are constantly faced with sensitive and confusing situations in their daily life, but the Principle prevails always.

We should understand people in all kinds of situations or else we can't reach out to them.  Don't you think God knows all about club dancing?  To know about such thing is never bad.


It really doesn't bother my conscience to go to any place. I even visited the homes of prostitutes when I was younger in order to understand their society and why they did what they did. At that time, I thought, "There is no assurance that even after the Unification Church becomes prosperous, some of the members won't end up in this situation, even among the married couples."


Would it be wrong to educate about drinking by inviting members to drink from a big keg of beer?

If you are able to understand the problems of drinkers by doing that and thus help them, it is not wrong.  However, this does not mean to say you should go out and visit every dreadful place of the world just to see how they operate.  There is too much risk in that.

Members are urged to be clean cut and cut the long hair such as the hippies wear.  There is nothing wrong in this hairstyle, but right behind the well-meaning of peace hippies want, there are evil elements of free-sex and even gangs and communism.

It does not matter to God how long one's hair is.  In the real world a man with long hair is considered to be a hippie living without any responsibilities or rules.

If we are to distance ourselves spiritually from the standards of the world, we have to keep ourselves clean cut and different in appearance.

Established Christian churches tell their congregation, "Don't drink. Period." But if you were to gently ask them why, they would not have an answer.  They would say that it causes bad behavior and fights and loose morals.

If a minister was to pass by such a brawl, he would say, "Poor souls," and continue on.  But if Father was to see such a scene, he would take off his shirt and try to break it up.

"I have always tried to mediate and judge who was right and who was wrong. That is the true role of a minister." 

Who else would break up such a fight?

This sort of toughness is necessary.  It is good to join all sorts of games and sports, becoming not only friends of the players but even a leader among them!  This is why a karate gymnasium was set up in the Unification Theological Seminary.

Where else in the world does such a sport exist in a seminary?

The students of the seminary were asked if they wanted a karate gymnasium and it was explained why it would be a good idea and they each agreed.

The gymnasium was not built in order to become a threat to anybody, but in order to protect ourselves and to be able to preserve the orderliness of society and the world.

There are a lot of evil people who do not understand any language other than strength.

Many people wondered why religious people should take an aggressive stance against communism.  No one was taking a positive approach to ending Communism - not the American government, the FBI or the CI and certainly there were no students taking a stand before the Reagan administration.
Therefore, Victory Over Communism program took up the course.

What is wrong with aggressively stopping Satan? 

If God said that it was wrong for people of faith to fight communism, then we would not do it.  No one else could do it, so we cannot hold back out of fear.

Thus, we launched many demonstrations on college campuses.  Established churches have not been able to tackle the true social problems in America or even understand the true nature of them.

Not many people understand how religion should eliminate the problems of the world.  Would God look down upon such people and say that they were an embarrassment to Heaven?

This may be hard to understand, but the more experience you accumulate, the more you will realize its truth.

Some graduating students are embarking upon careers in the world of art and dance in the future.  In that world, there are no clear-cut strict society and discipline as in religion.  You have to be able to discern with sensitivity and subtlety what is good and bad in those areas.

We must pursue love, but only in its legitimate and orderly form. 

We are all born for the purpose of love, but engaging in the improper order of love is wrong.

The proper order of love:

First, we must try to love our parents and God as our masters.

Whether God and my parents approve of me is indicated by my orderliness.  The most important area is love.  Two people who are about to get married are entering a love relationship for eternity.

Should that person say that they don't care what God, their parents or anyone else says?

This is not the harmonious way.  No matter how strongly you feel that you have found the perfect mate, if God withholds His blessing upon it, will that union be possible to last?

People have come to believe that just because they believe someone is ideal that their family will love them, too.

This is the American pattern to choose someone and present them in front of the family demanding their approval, but this is the wrong way.

Just like in the olden days, majority followed the tradition of order where they present their possible mate first for approval before going on a date or parents chose for their children whom to marry.


I didn't come into being first and then my parents later, and then God. First, it was God, then my parents, and then me, in that order. So in making an important decision about getting married, it should be done according to the right order. Is that right or wrong?


One fiancee told a member that he needed her to come to him now and disregard her parents and if she loved him that she would go.

The girl asked Father whether she should go see her fiancee or he may let her go.  God established the true order of relationships.  A  leader does not have the authority to go beyond God's proper order and give instructions to just go give love at the improper time and say they do not know what the results will be.

A true leader would advise the woman that her fiancee will have to overcome his own desires.  Is that the wrong way or the right way?

Preserving and restoring right love order must be our main concern. 

Our lives themselves are secondary to the maintenance of this principle.

The most important thing in our individual lives is to establish order.  It would be better if we lose our life than to live with a confused standard of order and then later have to pay the consequences.

Dr. Durst has many members who come to him with problems asking for advice.  How can he answer them?

Of course it is natural to be on each person's side and he is concerned with each.  However, he must think about the proper order.

Even though he wants to side with someone he cares about, if his answer violates the principle of love's proper order he cannot do so.

Why are you special Americans?

Because you know these simplistic principles and are following God consistently with your whole heart.  Would you like to be ordinary citizens?

The ordinary way of marriage is to get married right away after your engagement.  The special way is to wait two years and wait to consummate the relationship when you are married.

If you are able to see that this is a valuable principle and apply them in all situations, you will be an eternal victor.  Just like a long-range shot that enters past the goalie in a soccer game,  you will be the victors in the end.

If you have the kind of thinking that as long as you master the principles set forth by God, then you know you can go nowhere else but Heaven.


Every single decision I have made in my life was done according to the principle of proper order. I have come up through many levels to this successful realm and so should you.  That is why I have been teaching you to apply this rule in your own life.

Let us pray.



Return for Tomorrow's Post:  The Right Way -  Just Do It!


This post was rewritten from the speech The Victorious Person and the Defeated Person