Luke 4
18 “The Lord’s Spirit
has come to me,
because he has chosen me
to tell the good news
to the poor.
The Lord has sent me
to announce freedom
for prisoners,
to give sight to the blind,
to free everyone
who suffers,
19 and to say, ‘This is the year
the Lord has chosen.’”
Luke 18
1 Jesus took the twelve apostles aside and said:
We are now on our way to Jerusalem. Everything that the prophets wrote about the Son of Man will happen there. 32 He will be handed over to foreigners,[f] who will make fun of him, mistreat him, and spit on him. 33 They will beat him and kill him, but three days later he will rise to life.
34 The apostles did not understand what Jesus was talking about. They could not understand, because the meaning of what he said was hidden from them.
The Religious Person’s Attitude
Sun Myung Moon
March 29, 1959
The title of the sermon I am about to give you is “The Religious Person’s Attitude.” I will speak briefly upon this topic.
You have flattered yourselves that you are religious. We have gone forth not longing for this nation in the present state of affairs, but longing for the eternal kingdom. You have neither seen nor been to that kingdom. You simply proceeded forward, believing that the word you had heard was true.
We cannot consider that the intrinsic qualities of faith jell with all conditions of reality. I believe that, for those trying to lead a true life of faith, this only happens when the great infinite Heaven, the garden of eternal ideology that we cannot even imagine, has a reciprocal relationship with the being called “I.” Heaven will press me constantly and warmly to make an effort to attain the ideology in reality. The path of faith continues upon that basis alone.
The kingdom we long for cannot be elucidated by dreams or imagination or even by wise conjecture. That world is necessary for us. It is the limitless world of the ideal; the world of goodness, happiness, love, and the ideology of which we dream. That world is the heavenly kingdom of faith in which we wish to live. From a worldly point of view, those who keep faith with the intrinsic qualities of that world might be seen as extremely pitiful, terribly lonely, or ultimately sorrowful. It depends upon how you view them. If there is one who feels and experiences Heaven’s heart, even in such a situation, and feels the shock and the stimulus of that realm of the heart, no matter what kind of persecution, suffering or death tries to block the way, nothing can stop him from going this path.
Letting this kind of heart stimulate the mind and letting that mind push the body to move, trying to feel and experience the life in which one unconsciously walks forth toward the endless territory, is the very life of a religious person in this world today. Only when one can lead life with this kind of stimulus and manifest the far-distant ideology as the power of real life is one a truly religious person. Going further, only when one cultivates the foundation of mind with which he can push out power, even the sweeping wave of death, from his surroundings can Heaven acknowledge him as a truly religious person. That is how I see it. What is felt through self-realization, when we cry out facing Heaven, is greater than anything felt through doctrine or thought. The same thing can manifest itself as the value of light in our minds and bodies and in the heart of our life circumstances.
The religious life can be considered going through the path of victory in such an important decisive position. We know very well that throughout history, this path has been heaped with persecution, sorrow, the cross, and death. Because we have this kind of history and tradition, today you also are placed in a position where you must not betray this historical course of faith. For that reason, I must stress that it is more valuable than anything else that we assume a correct attitude of faith today.