Becoming a Divine Being

By Damian J. Anderson
Damian.Anderson@gmail.com
Washington Family Church
Sunday December 15, 2002

I would like to start by reading Father's words from a sermon entitled "Let Us Experience the Sorrow of God" that he gave on March 2, 1958:

The people who are experiencing the heart of God in their lives as He works amid the historical sorrow cannot behold God without shedding tears, no matter where they are. When you are aware of the will of God and are fighting to become His sons and daughters, if you have a comrade with whom you share the same cause, God will come there and shed tears.

Where is the source of God's grief? It is inside us. At the same time it is inside this nation, this world and all things. We must bring an end to this and carry on the movement to restore the joy of God. The center of life for us is experiencing the grief of God.

The problem is whether we have set the standard to mobilize the spirits of the spirit world, of which people are not aware, and have them bear witness. The spirit world is also demanding this. Because the spirit world is aware of the heart of God, if there are people on the earth who make such an appeal, then the spirit world will mobilize the spirits to help in the affairs of the earth in seeking to realize the ideology of the Kingdom of Heaven.

What is the reason that the spirits in the spirit world cannot come to this earth? It is because this earth is made up of barriers of lamentation. If the environment we dwell in is free of the conditions of lamentation, if through our bodies we can become free from the conditions of sorrow, and if we have entered the realm of peaceful rest in which we do not feel any fear when we are threatened by Satan, then God will help us. To cling to the people who mourn, worry and shed tears for the sake of the Father, Satan must stand in the same position. The forces of Satan will then be fundamentally dismantled.

The topic of my sermon this morning is "Becoming a Divine Being."

Do you feel God's presence? Do you feel it just occasionally, or do you feel it at every moment of every day in every cell of your body? Men, do you know who you are? You were intended to be the body of God, and the object of God's spirit. Women, do you know who you are? You were intended to be the object of love of the one true God who would fully possess the body of your husband.

Do you know God? Do you know what God lost and why He has such profound sorrow? In his sermon "The Ideal Spouse" which he gave on February 4, 1969, Father tells us the following:

In a sense, Eve would have become the future wife of God. This is because once Adam became one with God, and God's spirit dwelled within him, then Adam would be the embodiment of God Himself. Therefore, for God, his wife was violated by Satan. We have not subdued the one who hurt God. So God has been persevering with a hope to restore His ideal of creation in the midst of deep sorrow. When you think about that, you cannot just steal God's wife for your own sake and have children who do not care about Heavenly Father at all. But this is the reality of the fallen world today, and the current relationship between Satan and God. Viewed from that perspective, Satan is both our enemy and God's enemy. You are from the fallen world. Therefore, if you decide to go the path of restoration, it's better to finish it quickly, "whatever it takes, I want to reach the top." With such a burning desire you must be determined to find your original self.

What is God's grief? It is not just that he lost his children. No, it is far more than that, it is far deeper and more tragic than that. God lost true love. He lost his wife. God created Adam and Eve not just as His children. He created them so that Adam would become totally one with God so that God's spirit would completely dwell in Adam's body. Then he wanted to take Eve as his wife and make love to her as his wife. Eve was not just Adam's wife, she was God's wife, the wife of the God who was one with Adam.

Many of us say that we want to know God's heart. Do you really want to know God's heart? Do you really want to know? Allow yourself to empathize with God, to imagine how He feels. In the beginning, God was all alone, but he had a burning desire to love, and to be loved. He decided to create a being whom He could love, He made a man, in whose body He would dwell in oneness, and He created a woman as His wife, whom He wanted to love with His whole heart and His whole mind and His whole body.

In that first family, God's fiancé, Eve, was seduced by Satan, and she inherited Satan's nature rather than God's nature. Worse than that, Adam who was supposed to carry God's seed was then seduced by his wife and inherited the evil spiritual nature from her and he became like her, inheriting Satan's nature, rather than God's nature. From then on, he carried Satan's seed rather than God's seed.

Well, you may ask, what does this have to do with me? That was a very long time ago. Yes, it was, but it affects God to this day. While God was raising up his young wife to the position where He could fully embrace and love her with all His heart and passion, she was seduced and bore the children of His enemy. Imagine you men, you are ready to be married, and a man comes along and seduces your wife-to-be and has children with her, but you still love her. So, what do we do these days when a woman leaves a man? What do people say to such a man? They tell him that it is a tragedy but that it is over and he has to move on with his life. That's what people say. Did God just get on with His life as if nothing had happened? No. No he did not.

God watched that family that was to be His family, which had become the family of His enemy. He watched as they had children, first Cain, then Abel. He watched Cain kill Abel and He surely wept that day. He saw the generations of men and women born, live and die, and he saw them become more and more barbaric to the point where He wanted to kill every last one of them. He repented for having created man and sent the flood judgment at the time of Noah. He saw Noah's family then invaded by the same evil, and determined to pursue a course of preparing a nation to receive the Messiah. For two thousand long years, God prepared the chosen people of Israel to receive the Lord when he came. He taught them with prophets, but most of them were rejected and many were martyred. He taught a heavenly tradition in the hope that it would change their character for the good. But when Jesus came as the Lord, he was rejected as an impostor, just as the prophets of old were rejected, and then he was finally crucified.

What was Jesus' mission? It was the same mission as that of Adam. Saint Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 15:45: "So it is written: "The first man Adam became a living being" ; the last Adam, a lifegiving spirit." Jesus was the man who came to fulfill the hope of Heaven, but he was mistreated, rejected, crucified. Again, God wept.

Call to your mind the history of the last two thousand years, the history of warfare, and bloodshed, torture and brutality in the name of Christ, struggle and cruelty of immense proportions on every continent, in every era, up to the present day. God loves as a father every single person who was brutalized. God loves as a father the Native Americans who were cheated out of their land by the white man. God loves as a father the black men, women and children who were sold into bondage by their enemies of their own color on the shores of Africa to the white man. God loves as a father the Jews who died in the Holocaust. And God loves as a father all those who labored under great difficulty to spread the gospel of Christ, so that he might return in glory.

Think about your own experience. Think of the children who live in the miserable streets, abandoned by their fathers, abandoned by their mothers. Think of the killers in our city right here, people who kill without a thought of the harm done to others, think of the sniper. Think of all the evil things that happen in this world because we do not know God. Just imagine how God feels as the father of every single human being, not only the victim but the victimizer. People talk about the evil of slavery. Abraham Lincoln pointed out that slavery did not just degrade the black man. It degraded the white man too. The victim is degraded but at least he is innocent. The victimizer is in an even more miserable position because he will suffer in the eternal world for the evil he did.

But is God the father of the people of this world? He loves us as a father, but we were not born from His family. We were not born into the Kingdom of Heaven, which is the birthright of the children of God. We were not born of True Parents who embody the true love of God. No, we were born into Hell, we were born into a world of suffering and misery, without even knowing why. We were born as Satan's family and not God's family. Satan is the ruler of this world and not God.

There was a time when I realized that I had been born into hell and I cried out to God to know why I had been born into hell. I was so desperate to know, "Why God? Why was I born into hell? I did not ask for this. I did not choose to be born into this hellish world, I did not choose this." God spoke to me and said that He did not choose it either, but this is my fate and we have to deal with it together. God did not want us to be born into a suffering world, yet we were, despite His best intentions. When I realized this, I wept bitterly.

You have to know that when you empathize with the suffering people of this world, then you are feeling the heart of God who also feels the pain of all those who suffer as His own pain, who would prefer to take on our pain than for us to have to suffer.

Understanding the heart of God is such an important step in the path of holiness, of becoming a whole person, a true person, a divine being. What is a divine being? It is a person who has God's nature. It is a person who loves as God loves. It is a person without a shred of selfishness. It is a person of complete goodness. It is a person who feels God's heart all the time, every moment of every day, in every cell of his body, in every part of his being, in his mind and body. Are you like that? Do you know anybody like that?

Now here is a question for you. Where does Satan live? We hear that he lives in hell, but we live in hell too. So where in that hell does Satan live? He lives in our bodies, my body, your body. Do you experience God in every cell of your body every moment of every day? If the answer is no, then Satan lives in your body. Who is this Satan who lives in your body? It is the many evil spirits who live in the spiritual realm who want to feel the carnal experiences of your body. Those evil spirits are in a relationship with the great Satan, the one who started it all. That is why we cannot feel God, because our body is infested with evil spirits. What does religion teach us as the way to expel Satan from our body? Religion teaches us self-denial. If Satan is to inhabit our body, then he has to share the conditions there. So how does that Satan feel if I don't eat for three days? He does not like it. How does he feel if I stay up all night and pray in tears with empathy for God and His suffering children? Satan hates that. How does Satan feel if I do without sexual gratification for days, or months, or years? He hates that most of all. He also hates it when we serve others and love others. He is not comfortable in that environment.

As we make the conditions in our body favorable to God by disciplining our body to live for the sake of others, and denying our carnal appetites, then Satan and the evil spirits who plague us from the invisible world, they leave. One by one they leave. At a certain point, something miraculous happens. When the last Satan leaves your body, God reclaims his property. He reclaims you and your body, and His true love power rushes in to fill the void left by the departing demons. This is the teaching of the Divine Principle, that when we deny our physical body, when we go a suffering path that is so terrible that Satan cannot follow, when we do this without complaint, without expectation of reward, without any hint of Satan's nature, then he no longer has any claim over you and he has to leave. And when Satan leaves, God rushes in. This happens on a cellular level. We get sick because of the spirits in our body. When we deny our physical appetites, Satan leaves and our body is healed.

As God comes to inhabit our body, we begin to have immense energy, we come to see things in perfect lucidity that were previously hazy, and we come to have the confidence and wisdom and serenity that comes when God is present. Have you seen how True Father has immense energy that never seems to flag when men half his age are desperate to eat or sleep? This is because he lives in the realm of God's true love power all the time, every moment of every day, and it fills every cell of his body. Also, he lives in permanent communication with God every moment of every day. The true man is online with God all the time, he does not need to pray. He feels God's feelings as His own all the time.

Why do we have the experience of God for a moment and then lose it? Think of it like the sun piercing the clouds on an overcast day. The sun may break through for a moment, but it cannot last, as there is so much cloud obscuring the light coming from the sun to us. The Principle teaches us the need to separate good from evil within ourselves. In the section on the lessons learned from Abraham's family, in the Divine Principle, we read one of those lessons:

Fourth, Abraham's cutting the sacrifices in two provides a lesson that each of us must divide our own self as an offering to separate good from evil. A life of faith involves putting ourselves in the position of an offering. Only by dividing good from evil in ourselves can we become living offerings pleasing to God. We should constantly separate good from evil within ourselves, according to the standard of God's Will. If we neglect to do this, a condition is set up for Satan to invade.

Exposition of the Divine Principle - Part II, Chapter 1, Section 3.4

So what does this mean in practice, in our everyday life? It means that I need to look at my attitude, motivation and purpose in every thought I think, every word I speak, every action I take, everything, everything, everything. In my every thought, word and deed, I need to check my attitude, motivation, and purpose. When I do things for the church, how come I get burned out? Well ask yourself, what's your motivation? Are you doing it for God's will, or for glory for yourself, for credit, for recognition? "Oh, I'm such a good person because I serve True Parents." You really have to check your motivation in everything you do. If your motivation is impure, God cannot accept that offering. If you do it but you have a horrible attitude, "Oh, I'm serving God but I really don't want to be here, " then you had better not be there. There is no point. So we really have to purify ourselves and check ourselves moment by moment. Pray constantly to check our attitude, motivation and purpose in everything we think and feel and say and do. We are responsible for our feelings, we are responsible for our thoughts, for our actions and our words. I have to examine whether I am being unselfish and Godly, or whether I am being selfish and Satanic. To be able to distinguish clearly between good and evil in myself, I need God's word. Father encourages us to read his words every day. Why? So that we can clearly know good from evil, and voluntarily choose the good.

Can we trust our conscience? You can only trust your conscience when you have dominated your evil thoughts, words and deeds, when you have mastered your physical body. Father tells us that when you master your physical body, you liberate your conscience. As long as you have not mastered your body, your conscience is unreliable. Deny your physical body until you like it, until you don't mind the discipline. Take cold showers, fast, pray all night. We have all been through periods of sexual abstinence in our lives. Abstain until you don't mind. We need to purify ourselves. Father teaches us that the dividing line between Heaven and Hell is the way in which we use our sexual organ. When you reach the point where the discipline of your physical body is easy, at that point, you graduate from your training. Serve others until you love it, deny what you like until you don't care. When you master your physical body and your physical desire, you will meet God, I guarantee you. When the mind and body are united centered on God's purpose, then God's love power descends on you.

Is there anything we can do to assist ourselves in this process of becoming a divine being, which will accelerate the process? Yes there is. We need to find someone who is closer to God than we are, learn from them, listen to them, obey them if necessary. The Divine Principle tells us the following:

In relationships at every level of society - from those between individuals to those at the level of families, communities, societies, nations and the world - we find that one party is in the role of Abel and the other is in the role of Cain. In order to restore society at each level to the state originally envisioned by God, those in the Cain position should respect and obey those in the Abel position. Jesus came to this world as the Abel figure to whom all of humanity should have submitted and followed. For this reason, he said, "no one comes to the Father, but by me." (John 14:6)

Exposition of the Divine Principle - Part II, Chapter 1, Section 1.2

So who is my Abel? Is it my boss? No, it is someone who is closer to God's heart than I am, and someone who can teach you something. The Messiah is the Abel figure for all humanity, but he cannot be in a personal relationship with each one of us in this physical world, so we need to interact and learn from others. However, when we earnestly pray, holy men and women can come to us from spiritual world to teach us, Jesus or True Father will come to us in dreams and visions to teach us, even on a daily basis. If you have not had this experience, then you need to pray and ask God to speak to you directly. But if you ask God to speak to you, then some of your prayer time must involve keeping quiet and listening.

When Jesus was asked "How should we pray?" he said, "Go to your private room, and when you have shut the door, pray to your Father who is in that secret place, and your Father who sees all that is done in secret will reward you. In your prayers, do not babble as the pagans do, for they think that by using many words they will make themselves heard." (Matthew 6:6-7) Speak simply and honestly and clearly to God. And then listen. Don't just talk to God and then walk away. You have to listen. When you have a conversation with someone, there is a time to talk and a time to listen. If you want God to speak to you, you have to listen, you have to be quiet. You have to find a place that suits you, whether it is your bedroom, or a prayer room, or a chapel, or out in nature. Wrap up and bundle up. Father used to go out and pray in the snow with just a simple blanket over him, and pray for hours.

I would like to conclude by reading some more of Father's words from the sermon I read from earlier "Let Us Experience the Sorrow of God":

Now you must examine your minds. If members have made some mistake, then you must consider it your own and shed tears. If the people have made some mistake, then you must become those who can take responsibility and shed tears. If there is such a person, then even if the people decline, he will not. If a person sheds tears for the world and represents the heart of God, then even if the world perishes, that person will never perish. Furthermore, you must clearly understand that if a person sheds tears for the sake of Heaven, even if he is in a sad situation because he is living for the sake of God, he is then living in blessed grace.

Accordingly, when you shed tears for God, you must perceive God's eternal love and fulfill the mission as God's representative. The people who are immersed inside such a heart do not need prayers. They do not even need the notion of faith. Before they pray, they are already feeling the heart of God.

Therefore, you must experience the sorrow of the heavenly principles. Stepping above the lamentation of all things, you must become true people who can connect directly with the situation of God. If there are such people, though it might seem that they are declining, they will never decline. Even if they are mistreated and chased out, their heirs will always emerge.

You are walking a path different from that of others today. Ladies and gentlemen, do not hold grudges against anyone. Rather, you are to receive the benefit of indemnity through the tears you shed for their sake. Today you are enjoying the privilege of experiencing the grief of God and shedding tears before anyone else. However, you have to understand that Heaven shed tears for you first. Moreover, you must not forget that all people are members of one family.

If there is one flock on the earth who holds each other's hands and worry for the will of God and the heavenly principles and bow their heads in tears and great awe, then even Heaven will bow before them. Because they are the one visible sacrifice, all people will bow their heads before them. Although the sacrifice Abraham offered was small, Abraham and all of heaven and earth bowed their heads before that offering of sacrifice.

Therefore, when you stand in the position of offering , you must think what kind of condition you are going to set. Are you going to set the condition of offering for the sake of the individual? Or are you going to set the condition on the level of the family, the society, the nation or the world? The heavenly value will be determined based on the condition of offering you have made.

What then is our wish, we who have come forward after having pioneered the difficult environment? There is no other hope than that of becoming the true sons and daughters who experience the grieving heart of Heaven and bow before it.

You must always pray, "Father, please let us feel the sorrow that penetrates deeply into Heaven and earth. On that foundation, let us become the sacrifice for all people." You must shed tears and mourn. You must become the members of unification who can connect with the heart and situation of the Father. You must go forward holding up the flag of war to alleviate that grief.

You must feel the grief of God in your life in order to eliminate the universal grief that has remained to this day and restore all things which are overcome by the conditions of lamentation. Moreover, you must understand that you have come forward as the pioneers who are fulfilling this will. You have to keep in mind from this time today that you must become a new person.

I would like us to sit and just listen to God for a few moments. Attempt to understand God's feeling for you in this world. Try to look at yourself as if God is looking at you, and think how does He feel about you right this moment, about your life, about what you have done up to this point, about your goals, and what you are going to do from now on. God's desire is that you become a divine being and He wants to support you in doing that. I encourage you to pray but also to listen to God and to make sincere effort every day to be a true person that God can fully embrace. Thank you very much.