Sun Myung Moon
2009
True Families: Gateway to Heaven, Chapter Four, Section 3 (page 73-77)
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Your living body cannot be perfected unless your entire existence becomes a foothold for absorbing nutrients. This phenomenon occurs in the natural world. The crossroads of life do not appear over a long period of time but in a single moment.
People who ignore the moments cannot obtain anything precious. Nor can they become great people, or inherit God's throne and crown. To make each moment shine, you should exercise care with each word you utter, each action you take, and even each thought you have. Deal with life and solve problems, believing that the contents of your daily life will all remain as phenomena in relationship to the world. That is the only way the realm of victory is determined.
It is in the moment that the realm of victory is determined. It is the same with the historical realm of victory and the cosmic realm of victory. Those who live with unlimited values capable of making each moment shine brightly can become great people, even saints or God's sons and daughters. In this way, the junction of life and death is crossed in a single moment.
Today, our attitude is the problem. Of course, it is necessary to first desire the coming of the Kingdom and wish for the Will to be done. Yet, what is more important is how we ourselves can personally become one with God's will.
If we refer to a particular hour, it is more important to ask how that hour can be spent to bring ourselves into a greater oneness with the Will than it is to desire the Kingdom of God be accomplished. Thus, we must first create environments as individuals, families, tribes and peoples that will enable us to inherit God's will. Only then can we establish a relationship with God's Kingdom. Then, with God at the center, how do we make a relationship with the Will in this one hour -- if you are given an hour -- within the sphere of your daily living? This is a very important question.
Looking at the history of the providence of restoration, there were four thousand years from Adam's family through Noah's, Abraham's and Moses' families down to Jesus' family. The failures that occurred during this course did not happen over the span of, say, a year. In Adam's family, the Fall of Adam and Eve was not something planned out and put into action over the span of a year or a decade or even several decades. Their mistakes happened in a flash. When we think about how that failure of one moment has been perpetuated over eons of time, we can understand the fearfulness and dreadfulness of the instant.
Due to the failure of that one moment, so many people who walked the path of righteousness in the course of history had to undergo untold suffering, and many races that could not follow the Will fell into the abyss of destruction. All these became a source of a tremendous indemnity offering. When we understand this, we see how fearful a single hour that we just let tick by can be. Even the eternal Kingdom of Heaven does not exist apart from the single moment.
Eternity does not start when we die. It continues on from the moment we come to know God's Will. Here, if there is a leap in the relationship of time or an abyss created for even an instant, eternity will be interrupted.
While walking the path of faith in the course of your lives, do not procrastinate by deferring your providential responsibilities from this year to the next, and then to the year after that, or from your 20s to your 30s, your 30s to your 40s, or your youth to your 40s and to your 50s. You should not live this way. People with such a lifestyle will die without having lived even one day during their lifetimes being in oneness with the Will. They cannot go to the Kingdom of Heaven.
However wonderful a country you may live in, you cannot go to the Kingdom of Heaven if you were unable to live even one day by a victorious standard; you cannot enter the eternal world if you failed to live even one year victoriously. Thus, while it is important for believers to dream of eternity in their lives, it is even more important for them to eradicate evil and become the standard-bearers of goodness in the real world. This is what is most important.
From this perspective, Adam's failure in the moment resulted in eons of anguish. In Adam's family, Cain and Abel were to have dissolved the anguish of their parents, demolished the wall between the brothers and create the starting point for a family of oneness. But the death of Abel, who had been established as the representative of the providence of restoration, was also an incident that happened in a moment's time.
Also in the course of Noah, who toiled 120 years to build the ark, it was in just one brief moment that God issued the command, "Go into the ark, for the day has come to fulfill my desire." Those who followed this order could receive the blessings of the eternal God; those who did not were buried in a realm of eternal judgment.
It was the same with Abraham. God's promise that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sands on the seashore was bestowed in just a single moment. Abraham's sacrificial offering did not require decades but rather a mere day's work. The time it took him to cut the offering and place it on the altar was not more than an hour, yet that single hour historically bore the seeds of all life and death, curse and blessing.
People of faith today should not fear the coming of a day of judgment in the Last Days but worry, instead, about how to connect the time that is given them in their daily lives to the Will of God and how to form an intersection between their lives and the Will.