Acts 18
4 Every Sabbath, Paul went to the Jewish meeting place. He spoke to Jews and Gentiles[b] and tried to win them over. 5 But after Silas and Timothy came from Macedonia, he spent all his time preaching to the Jews about Jesus the Messiah. 6 Finally, they turned against him and insulted him. So he shook the dust from his clothes[c] and told them, “Whatever happens to you will be your own fault! I am not to blame. From now on I am going to preach to the Gentiles.”
Richard: We have to get out of our “holy huddlle” and mingle with others and provide the words of salvation.
Ezekiel 31
10 King of Egypt, now listen to what I, the Lord God, am saying about that tree:
The tree grew so tall that it reached the sky[c] and became very proud and arrogant. 11 So I, the Lord God, will reject the tree and hand it over to a foreign ruler, who will punish it for its wickedness. 12 Cruel foreigners will chop it down and leave it wherever it falls. Branches and broken limbs will be scattered over the mountains and in the valleys. The people living in the shade of those branches will go somewhere else. 13 Birds will then nest on the stump of the fallen tr
Let Us Understand God, Who Wanted to be Proud
Rev. Sun Myung Moon
February 8, 1959
We have not known the God who could never take pride in His creation. We did not know that He saw His pride turn into sorrow and manifest itself in tears.
Therefore, now we must find the original heavenly nature and original love of which God longs to be proud. Accordingly, as the people who possess the original heart of love that can relate with God, you must cultivate yourselves to become those in whom God can take pride. Although God has been yearning and searching for the one person who can bring shame to Satan and provide God with a source of pride, He has not been able to find such a person.
People want to boast. It is human nature to put one’s self forward and boast about oneself. We have the desire to boast about our parents, our children, and the whole of our family. Furthermore, we have the desire to be proud of our tribes, our nations, our world, and the whole of heaven and earth. Although you are fallen people, your original minds that seek to boast about things are controlling both your lives and history. You have to understand this.
Why do we think of such a desire as wrong? It is because of the human fall. In our daily lives, we want to boast about everything we have. We do not want to boast about them to just our neighbors, but to everyone in the world. The desire to be proud is not an evil desire; it is an impulse of the original mind. This is the original mind through which you can enter the Kingdom of Heaven. It is the desire of our hearts to boast about ourselves and be famous on the level of the society, the nation and the world.
Why does such a desire move in our hearts and stir our feelings? It is because we have the natural desire to boast. Our minds have this desire because, if God and human beings had become one in the ideal manner, that would have been the source of pride for us as well as God. This is why we are moving in this direction, even though we fell. This is why we are struggling to find the central value of the whole cosmos.
However, because human beings fell, the laws concerning pride were not in line with the Principle. They were opposed to it. People should have followed the intentions of their original hearts and pursued the laws of the Principle; yet because of the fall, they lost everything and headed in the opposite direction. As a result of this, the directions that our original minds pursue and the actual environment in which we live are diametrically opposed to one another.
We are searching for God and the path of the Way. In whom should we take pride? Before we take pride in ourselves, we must boast about our center. If we want to be proud of our nation, rather than being proud centered on ourselves, we must be proud of a patriot of that nation. When we are proud of our tribe, we must be proud of its center. The same thing is true for the family.
Therefore, fallen people must reject and transcend themselves to find the source of their pride in the center of a group, province, nation, world and God, who is the center of heaven and earth. Unless we do this, we can never stand as the source of God’s pride.