Cheon Seong Gyeong: Episode 143

Cheon Seong Gyeong Book 5: True Family
Chapter 4: The Education of Children and the Kingdom of Heaven in the Family
Section 3: Parents’ Love and Responsibility, 08
Section 4: Children's Education, 04

(8)  As a blessed couple, you tell your children to study. But your sons and daughters will not become children of filial piety and loyal patriots just by you telling them to study. What if they say, "Our parents suffered in the Unification Church, so we will not walk such a path"? You need to teach them the way of love that can digest even such suffering. Thus, even if they may have to skip meals, parents should take their children around their town loving the people, praying, and shedding tears for the nation. The children may dislike this when they are little, but when they grow up they will say, "Our father and mother are the best." They will understand why their mother and father were not there for them, and as they mature they will realize that their parents tried to love the nation, serve God’s Will and save humankind, even at the cost of paying less attention to their children. You should not live carelessly. Your worrying about your children does not make them do well in life. What is important is to feed them the food of love.

(9)  Children follow their father and mother's example, so please attend and worship God properly in your home. Show your children that their father is a man of prayer. Let them know that their father is serving God and living for the sake of others. Through this, you lay the foundation so that your children unconsciously will come to respect and admire you.

(10)  In the future, when your children research your life history, they may discover many stories of misery and difficulties. Yet if they say, "My father suffered like this in the past. To raise me and educate me, my father walked this way of suffering," it will not make them unhappy. Rather, it will make them respect and serve their parents more. We often experience the truth of this. Children cannot be disloyal when they find that their parents never stopped shedding tears for them.

(11)  In matters of love, do not be lukewarm. Choose one, either cold or hot. Sometimes you need to be cold. When you raise your children, even though you love them, if they fail to respond to your love, you should be strict, even challenging them. You should not accept the way they are if they are just thinking, "Okay, whatever." For this reason, once I gathered the church leaders and scolded them. They responded, "Whoa, what kind of teacher is this?" I can be a most frightening person. Although I am a good-hearted person, I also can be the most difficult person to relate to. I can be merciless toward evil, and for the sake of goodness I also can be as fiery as a sizzling hot, thousand-degree furnace.

(12)  Love's original nature is to live for the sake of others. Giving to others from within one's original essence is the nature of love. Where did that love come from? It came from God. Since God is the subject partner of absolute love, the original nature of love is giving. Parental love is the closest to that original nature; that is why parents always want to give to their children. If your child does not accept your love, you should show that child even greater love; then even a child who behaves like a hoodlum will be able to repent and turn around.

(13)  Parents have to be able to represent God. You should say to your children, "Children! Please love your brothers and sisters more than you love me; please love your neighbors, your country, and the world more than you love me." If you educate them in this way, you will stand out as true parents among parents. In this way, your sons and daughters will move forward and your family will develop into a center of greater goodness.

(14)  There are three things you should leave behind when you conclude your life on earth. The first is the way of the Principle; you must leave behind the fact that you led your life in the way of the Principle, according to the Will. The second is to leave good descendants on earth. The third is the education of your descendants to be good and effective for the sake of the world. These are three core responsibilities.

(15)  You should leave for your sons and daughters a tradition that teaches them how to lead their lives well. By fighting hard battles in your mission countries you are leaving behind a tradition for your descendants. This is a great opportunity to educate your children based on your experience, reporting to them, "We worked under these kinds of hardships." It is your opportunity to establish a tradition that you can leave behind as your legacy. Tradition is the issue. What you have done will remain; it sets an eternal tradition.

(16)  Unless you set up a tradition for your family, you cannot set up a tradition for your people. If there is no tradition among your people, there will be no citizens in the nation. Blessed families need family law. We need standards for children's education and laws for the family. Otherwise, we will fail as parents, and when our children call us to account for this we will have nothing to say. The family law is that before you love yourself, you have to love the nation, the world, and God. A wife should be able to testify out of respect for her husband, "My husband loves the nation, the world, and God even more than he loves me."

Section 4.  Children's Education

(1)  What is it that parents should give to their children while educating them. Education should not be about knowledge but, rather, about love. Both father and mother should teach how to become one by loving one another. They should become a father and mother with whom God is pleased, and the mother and father should be pleased with one another. At the same time, they should strive to be parents whom their children like; then the children will want to make their parents proud of them. This is how parents should educate their children.

(2)  Whether centered on God or Adam and Eve, the key is the four-position foundation. No matter how you look at it, it is the same four-position foundation. For this reason, we should receive education about love from God, based on His love. What is the origin of this education? It does not begin from human beings.  Since God is their Parent, Adam and Eve should be educated about love by God. How is the standard of Adam and Eve's value determined? It is in accordance with the education they receive from God about love. For how long did Adam and Eve require this education? It was necessary until they figured out God's standard of value for the completion of love. In other words, they should have reached full maturity based on the love they received from their Parent.

Love, original sexuality, and education for the Blessing

(3)  Becoming a parent puts you in a position to represent God. Thus, as a teacher, you have to teach your children the principles of love, the love of the family and the ideal of the nation, and raise them to become owners of the family and nation with proper qualifications. To this day our children are being educated in schools that do not provide the most essential education. They provide technical education. The home should be the place of character education. This is where parents bequeath the original lineage. Parents have a solemn duty to establish a tradition connected to lineage with a perspective of thousands of years and to pass it on to their children. But this is not predestined; rather, it is a destiny we are responsible to accomplish. We cannot change our mother and father. We cannot exchange our brothers and sisters. Knowing this, we need to establish the family tradition in the presence of God and bear fruit as true parents and true teachers. By this means, we are recreating a lineage based on love. After doing so, we need to leave behind us the position of true owners of a true lineage that can last forever.

(4)  Blessed families must think concretely, not just conceptually, about God's sovereignty, God's people, and God's territory. It is now time for us to take action, taking responsibility for this mission. Every step we take should be toward this purpose. Even when educating children, parents have to think about how to raise them to become people who can fulfill the Will and mission. A mother should think this way even when she nurses her baby. If we live like this, although we are only individuals, we represent the life, hope, and value of the whole, with a value that can stand before heaven and earth.