James 1
5If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you. 6But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. 7That person should not expect to receive anything from the Lord. 8Such a person is double-minded and unstable in all they do.
Jeremiah 36
20After they put the scroll in the room of Elishama the secretary, they went to the king in the courtyard and reported everything to him.
Let Us Become the Citizens Who Take Possession of the Kingdom of Heaven
Rev. Sun Myung Moon
June 2, 1957
The topic of the sermon that I want to reflect upon with you is “Let Us Become the Citizens Who Take Possession of the Kingdom of Heaven.” I will speak briefly on this topic.
You know clearly that for us who are fallen, the world that everyone hopes for is the Kingdom of Heaven. This Kingdom of Heaven is not something only human beings desire. You also know very well that God also yearns for the time of the realization of the Kingdom of Heaven where He can live in joy for eternity, forging the eternal parent-son relationship with all human beings centering on the original love, which was the ideal of creation. Until now, He has been repeating His toilsome works for that goal through the Holy Trinity.
The Kingdom of Heaven we sincerely wish for today is not only the hope of human beings but also the hope of God. Consequently, the ideology that can build this Kingdom of Heaven must pass through the individual level and possess world quality and universal quality to agree with the heavenly principles. Therefore, unless we construct this Kingdom of Heaven on earth, God’s dispensation of salvation cannot be completed, and the goal of our faith cannot be completed.
Accordingly, God, who has the mission as the Creator who created human beings, must take responsibility and attain this Kingdom of Heaven, and the fallen men also must take responsibility and fulfill it even at the cost of sacrificing everything. When we think about this, although through the long course of history God has been longing for the appearance of one person who can bring to pass this idea of the Kingdom of Heaven and take pride in it on behalf of humanity, but until now, that one person has not emerged on this earth.
Consequently, since the creation of the world until today, the idea of heaven that God is seeking to find through human beings is not to be concluded as one individual ideology. While it is an individual ideology, at the same time, it is a world and universal ideology and the eternal ideology that the all created things are pursuing. You must again take to heart the fact that longing for the time that this ideology can be established, God has been walking the road of patience, toil and suffering for 6,000 years.
Then, how can God and human beings create relations? The relations can be created centering on the ideology of the Kingdom of Heaven. At the level where the Kingdom of Heaven can be constructed, the ideology of human beings and God’s ideology of creation are achieved.
Therefore, God who has passed through the long 4,000-year history since Adam hoped to establish people at one point and connect them with the whole internal heart and the external ideology of God. Jesus Christ was the person who was established as that central figure. Thus, before sending Jesus Christ to this earth, through John the Baptist He has chosen and raised, God predicted, “Repent! The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!” However, the kingdom can be realized not through John the Baptist but through Jesus Christ.
Hence, on John the Baptist rested the responsibility to unite the whole Israelite people and guide them toward Jesus. However, because John the Baptist did not fulfill that responsibility, the idea of the Kingdom of Heaven that he was crying out did not have anything to do with Jesus. So, the cry of John the Baptist, “Repent, the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!” did not consummate as the idea of the Kingdom of Heaven that only corresponds to that time, but left behind as the idea of the Kingdom of Heaven prophesied through all the people who have the mission of John the Baptist after him no matter which era of history, and as a result, the laborious hands of God continued to be at work.
You also must never forget that during the 2,000 years after Jesus, many prophets have labored hard to introduce God. Although John the Baptist shouted, “Repent, the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand,” Jesus Christ who came to actually introduce and manifest that Kingdom of Heaven had to die on the cross. So, after that until today, the ideology of the Kingdom of Heaven which is the center of God and man’s eternal hope, could not be realized through man on earth and in heaven.
You should understand that the Israelite people losing Jesus Christ ultimately brought the result of losing the idea of the Kingdom of Heaven that John the Baptist predicted. At the same time, they even lost the master of the Kingdom of Heaven who could help the Israelite people overcome the hardships that they encountered horizontally. Therefore, we must claim back the ideology of the Kingdom of Heaven that Jesus lost when he came, and bring it to perfection.