Cheon Seong Gyeong: Episode 220

Chapter 1: What Is a Life of Faith
Section 1: A Life of Faith, 26
Section 2: The Purpose and Goal of a Life of Faith, 01

(26)  The issue lies not in the small mistakes you make here and there but in whether you can go forward with absolute faith and obedience to God. If you do not have results, take heart, and have hope. Having hope requires absolute faith and a record of striving to achieve results. Representing all men in the world, I have to overcome a path of tribulation greater than that experienced by anyone in history. I came with authority certified by the spiritual and physical worlds, but you did not. Hence, if you have no accomplishments, you can get by with faith. What kind of faith should it be? It cannot be self-centered faith that is pleasing only to you. Even if you accomplish the Will with such faith, God will not like it. The more you insist on doing things your own way, the more you distance yourself from God and from me. It is not right to say, "I will do what I like and not what I dislike." God has to like what you do. That is where the real issue lies. The same applies to me. This is why I exhort you to have faith, even though you may not practice it as you should. If you believe, you can get by.

(27)  Unification Church members absolutely need to believe in my words. They need to seek hope and faith as they did in the past. In those days members may not have known the entire providence, yet they moved forward, filled with hope and longing for love. So even if you are unable to reach a certain place on your path, you can still believe in my words, have faith in God’s love and advance according to my guidance. There is no other way. You need to go through this course. Even if you may be victorious on the individual and family levels and receive God’s blessing on those levels, you must keep going through the levels of the tribe, people, nation, world, and cosmos. Overall, you need to go up through seven levels. You need to pass through seven stages to reach God. There are seven summits altogether. To reach God we must have absolute faith in God. Whatever God orders, we must absolutely obey.

New life through repentance

(28)  Some people say they will begin their life of faith when they grow old, that they will go to heaven by having faith when they come close to death. They couldn't be further from the truth. You cannot go to heaven that way. The time when you begin your life centered on God is important. If you begin your life of faith in your twilight years, it amounts to having spent a lifetime betraying God. In that case you have to repent proportionally to your betrayal. Those who persist in saying that when they are old they will somehow have faith and then go to heaven are foolish.

(29)  Some members here have lived a life of faith knowing God's Will for only one year, others for more than ten years or half a lifetime. The issue then is whether you have stood still, made progress or retreated. You need to clearly know where you stand and then you can go over the next hill. You may have made significant progress in the past, but if you are at a standstill today, God's living vitality cannot be with you and you cannot maintain a loving relationship with God. You may have made tremendously positive strides in the past, moving forward with boundless value, boundless vitality, and the boundless power of love, but if you are now at a standstill you are already separated from God.

(30)  Repentance is absolutely necessary for fallen humanity to enter God's realm of life and love. If one hundred points worth of sins have accumulated through our ancestors up to now, that much greater effort and repentance are needed. Hence, when we speak of our life of faith, we cannot leave out repentance. We were born through countless generations of ancestors. If our ancestors were good, then as their descendants we will automatically be within reach of God's realm of life. However, if we have evil ancestors, we will find ourselves far removed from God's realm of life. For a person who is distant from God's realm of life to draw near to it, a period of repentance that outweighs the evils committed by his or her ancestors is absolutely necessary. Unless this person completes this task, he or she will be unable to access a world of vitality greater than his or her own. Because of this, the path of faith requires heartfelt tears of repentance.

Living by the Word

(31)  If you have been living a life of faith for ten years, you should have had some experience of struggling to unite with God's heart in those years. If you experienced great joy while carrying out a particular mission, that should stimulate you so that one day you will completely fulfill your task. This idea should be deeply embedded in your heart, so that when you are surrounded with difficulties you can say, "When the spring comes, I will exert myself one more time for this, to the farthest reaches of heaven. Wait and see. When that time comes, I will do this." We need such conviction.

(32)  Faith is necessary to provide the motivation for action. When the Bible teaches us where to find the kingdom of heaven, it does not say merely to believe in it; rather it teaches that the kingdom of heaven lies within us. That heaven is within us does not mean that the subject partner's position depends on the world of the object partner. I determine the kind of subject partner I will be. It is clear that human beings have the impetus that determines this.

(33)  You need to apply the faith you have learned, either spiritually or through me, in your endeavors. Where you do so, there the kingdom of heaven will unfold. When we look at this centered on God, we are in the second position and our environment is in the third position. There are three stages—formation, growth, and completion. Since I am in the central position, I can perfect heaven and also perfect the world. Thus, in the Bible, the second position is always a problem. Whose position is the second position? When looking at God and the created universe, it is the human beings' position.

(34)  The human being is the connector among three points on a line. Therefore, when human beings reach perfection, we will also witness the perfection of God and the universe. Thus, in my pioneering course, what I need absolutely is spiritual experience and practice in coordinating these two worlds. If spiritual experience refers to the spirit, practice refers to the truth; if we call spiritual experience the right hand, practice is the left. When I perfectly align spiritual experience with practice, I emerge as a son of God representing the entire universe.

(35)  You need to have some accomplishments. The issue is whether at least one person on a battlefield achieves noteworthy results. I am not interested in worthless practices. As representatives of God, our families and our nation, we must shed blood in the fight to obtain results worthy of respect. We cannot do this while laughing. However, when we go forward with life-or-death determination, results commensurate with our efforts will naturally emerge. Now is the time to invest our best abilities and leave a legacy of achievements.

Section 2.  The Purpose and Goal of a Life of Faith