Pyeong Hwa Gyeong: Episode 374
Pyeong Hwa Gyeong: A Selection of True Parents’ Speeches
Book 9: The Role of Nations in Realizing World Peace
Speech 15: The Path for America and Humanity in the New Millennium, pg 1401-1404
The Path for America and Humanity in the New Millennium
February 25, 2001
Garden of Prayer Cathedral, New York, USA
“We Will Stand!” fifty-state speaking tour in the United States
Respected and distinguished guests from home and abroad:
I would like to express my gratitude to you, the members of the clergy and leaders from all walks of life, who, despite your busy schedules, have convened here today to hear my message. I would like to first return all glory and thanks to God for His constant presence and protection.
Now is the time to complete Heaven’s providence
During the course of my life, I have totally committed myself to the salvation of humankind centered on God’s Will. As a result, I came to realize that God is not sitting on a throne of glory and honor but is a God of agony, grief and lamentation, endeavoring to save His children, who are suffering in hell as a result of the human Fall. Ever since I understood the Will of God and His heart, I have lived my life with single-minded devotion to accomplish His Will, paying no heed to time or space and forgetting everything else.
When I reflect upon the eighty years of my life filled with misunderstanding and persecution, it is just amazing that I can be with you today. I believe it is entirely thanks to God. On this day of such great significance, in order to understand human history and the world from the perspective of God’s providence, I would like to speak on the topic, “The Path for America and Humanity in the New Millennium.”
When viewing human history as God’s providence of salvation, the Last Days is a turning point when the evil history of Satan concludes and God’s good sovereignty begins. Accordingly, the Last Days is the time when everything is brought to fulfillment. Thus, in the Last Days individual perfection is to be realized, family perfection is to be realized, and the perfection of a people, of a nation, of the world and finally the complete perfection of the cosmos are to be realized.
In past ages, whenever the time of the Last Days was heralded in God’s providence, God led humanity to a God-centered ideology. However, we failed to fulfill our responsibility to stand in the position of goodness and eradicate evil history. Nevertheless, God is eternal, unchanging, absolute and unique, and God’s Will is also eternal, unchanging and absolute.
Therefore, through the true individual, true family, true society, true nation, true world and true sovereignty, God will surely build the world in which He can live, freely traveling and acting both in heaven and on earth.
Then what is the original world for which God is seeking? It is a world that is centered on the True Parents. However, from the very beginning, due to the Fall of humankind, we lost the True Parents of humanity and the true world. Therefore, nothing in the world, not the land where we are living, human ideology or anything else, can connect us directly to the True Parents.
Who will take responsibility for this world?
We ourselves must first be restored to trueness. By so doing, when true parents, true husband and wife, true children, true people, the true creation, the true sovereignty and the true cosmos are born and can communicate with God in heart, the evil world will eventually come to an end.
The Last Days are the time when this ideal will be realized. It is the time when the Second Advent will occur. Accordingly, in the Last Days there will be no catastrophic physical phenomena such as a judgment by fire, the destruction of the earth or people levitating into the air. Instead, it is a time when the history of evil that has been entangled with countless tragedies will be untangled.
Thus, it is the time when all these levels that have lost their vertical connection with God will be restored. We have been longing for such a day, and that is the final destination at which we all must arrive.
However, the individual, the family and the nation are estranged. Moreover, all kinds of problems such as air pollution, food shortage, religious struggles and racial conflicts are constantly arising throughout the world, causing disputes and even wars. Who then is going to take responsibility for this world? This is a serious question. Communist countries in the past could not transcend nationalism. Nor can today’s superpower nation, America, transcend the idea of Americanizing the world. When a nation places its self-interest first, it will not be able to lead the world.
Therefore, we need a people or a nation willing to sacrifice for a higher purpose and to strive to build or become an ideal nation that embraces the entire world.
With this in mind, I came to this country, the United States of America, in response to the call of God. I have been investing my utmost effort to revive America, by educating the youth of a country faced with a moral crisis and declining Christianity.
The core teachings of True Parents
You might be curious about what I am teaching young people. It is actually simple. First, it is to live for the sake of others. More specifically, my teaching is that the individual is to live for the family, the family for the society, the society for a people, a people for a nation, a nation for the world and the world for God. If we do this, God will be with us.
In the family, parents need to live for their children, children for their parents, the husband for his wife and the wife for her husband. Anyone who lives for others more than for his or her own self will become a central person on the side of goodness.
Second, I am teaching people to “love your enemy.” God Himself sacrificed Jesus, His only begotten Son, for our salvation. Since God did this in order to save the children of His enemy Satan, the devil had no power to exercise any authority before God. Even Satan has no choice but to surrender voluntarily before the God who loves Satan’s children more than His own. Satan’s pattern has always been to strike first, only to lose in the end, and God’s strategy has been to win in the end by taking the first blow and initial loss. Living with faith in such a heavenly law is the very secret explaining how I could lay my foundation, dispatching missionaries to 185 nations throughout the world despite fierce persecution and misunderstanding.
Even when studying the history of Christian missionary activities, we discover that theirs was a path of persecution and martyrdom, beset by enemies. On such a way, during the course of a two-thousand-year history, this trail of blood became the fertilizer of the soil in which a powerful democracy could develop. Today, however, Christianity, which once was the source of power and strength for democracy, is facing a crisis. Christian nations have lost the right direction; they deny God, Jesus and God’s providence. Now we even hear voices asserting, “God is dead” or “God does not exist.” Hearing them, how do you think God feels? His heart has been searching for His children, sacrificing everything He has, with hope that He could see a great day, and hoping it would be today.
FFWPU, USA