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 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:

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 fiancée, 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 is 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:

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:

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":

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. 

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