Timothy 3
8 Church officers[d] should be serious. They must not be liars, heavy drinkers, or greedy for money. 9 And they must have a clear conscience and hold firmly to what God has shown us about our faith. 10 They must first prove themselves. Then if no one has anything against them, they can serve as officers.
11 Women[e] must also be serious. They must not gossip or be heavy drinkers, and they must be faithful in everything they do.
12 Church officers must be faithful in marriage.[f] They must be in full control of their children and everyone else in their home. 13 Those who serve well as officers will earn a good reputation and will be highly respected for their faith in Christ Jesus.
2 Chronicles 28
9 Oded lived in Samaria and was one of the Lord’s prophets. He met Israel’s army on their way back from Judah and said to them:
The Lord God of your ancestors let you defeat Judah’s army only because he was angry with them. But you should not have been so cruel! 10 If you make slaves of the people of Judah and Jerusalem, you will be as guilty as they are of sinning against the Lord.
11 Send these prisoners back home—they are your own relatives. If you don’t, the Lord will punish you in his anger.
Let Us Not Weaken Our Determination Toward Heaven
Rev. Sun Myung Moon
February 23, 1958
As we approach the last days, God is making demands upon us. Jesus and the Holy Spirit are also appealing to us. You must feel deep down in your flesh and bones that God is longing, even in this hour, for us to become the victorious heroes who can eradicate Satan by becoming the embodiment of the Father and possessing His determination. By doing so, you must attain the qualifications to say, “Please allow me to inherit the determination of Heaven. Please give me the determination of the apostles, who persevered through the course of a blood-drenched altar.” The time has come when we must have a new realization of how wrong it is for us to want to go to Heaven without having done this.
The responsibility to awaken Christianity rests with us from now on. If the determinations of God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit manifest themselves by becoming connected to us, then we will be performing works that can dominate history.
In the Bible verses I read at the beginning of this sermon, the aching heart of God, who had to bring judgment upon Sodom and Gomorrah, is expressed. When God was about to cast down judgment upon those cities, there was Lot, the nephew of His beloved Abraham. God allowed Lot to escape from the judgment. He did not let Lot escape from the judgment because of his personal merit. Because God loved Abraham, He allowed Lot, who did not have any personal merit, to escape the judgment. It does not mean that the family of Lot understood the heart of God.
Although Lot and his two sons escaped to the place God directed them to, Lot’s wife did not understand the will of God. Because she turned back with more longing for the house and environment that she used to live in than she had concern about her determination toward the will of God or was fearful for Heaven, this became the condition for her to receive the wrath of God even before Sodom and Gomorrah did.
There is a path which human beings must walk. That is a path in which we must follow the will of the heavenly principles and be determined to face any kind of difficulty. This is the fateful path that all fallen people must walk. Lot’s wife died because she did not have the determination to step forward without regard for all the things that belonged to her. If she had believed in her husband, who obeyed the direction of Heaven, as the representative of God and had complied with his directions, then she would not have died.
In the course of providential history that God led, God raised someone who could represent His heart so that if the people could not believe in God, they could at least believe in his words and make a determination. However, those who cannot even do that will not avoid the judgment.
When we examine ourselves, we experience suffering because we are people of the fallen lineage. We feel in the back of our minds the desire to do our best for the great will of God and to offer our bodies and minds as the sacrifice, making a new determination and putting it into action. Yet the reason we cannot actually carry out this determination in action, though we feel it, is because we are members of the fallen tribe.
Adam and Eve would not have fallen if they had cherished, deep in their hearts, the words of God given at the time of the creation, “Do not eat of the fruit.” They should have realized that they had the substantial responsibility to make an unchanging determination based on the thought that they were in an inseparable union with the words and to govern all things.
The reason Adam and Eve fell is that Adam and Eve could not become one and because Adam could not become one with God. As a result, they divided into many directions. Because they were acting according to their own whim in the environment of free will and freedom, they destroyed the ideal garden of the creation. Even in the last days, if one promotes freedom without first securing determination centered on God, the free world will also be dismantled. This is the way the principles of the universe work. If Adam, who should have represented God, had the determination that no matter who tried to tempt him into violating the will, he would never violate it; if he had governed Eve and the archangel based upon this, then he would not have fallen. No matter how much Eve, who had fallen first, tried to seduce and tempt him, Adam would not have died. If Adam had not fallen, then Eve could have been easily re-created.
Because they betrayed Heaven, they became distant from the heavenly will. Because they did not establish the granted words and will as the one center of their hearts, Adam, Eve and the archangel divided and went their own separate ways. We who are their descendants are in the environment in which we cannot believe tomorrow the things that we believed today. We cannot believe in the next century the things that we believe in this era. We cannot believe in the last days the things that we can believe in the next century.