Beloved Heavenly Father, today we commemorate the ninth Chil Pal Jeol. On this day, July 7, in 1997, a day which saw the coincidence of eight sevens, the dispensational significance of this repetition was proclaimed, as well as the Cosmic Sabbath of the Parents of Heaven and Earth. We came here today, closely observed by the blessed members and all things in the universe -- the spiritual and physical worlds -- to commemorate the ninth anniversary and set out toward the tenth. We are truly grateful for Your allowing us this day of commemoration, celebrated here in Kodiak as we usher in the era wherein the Parents of Heaven and Earth can completely clear away the history of indemnity and bequeath to the whole universe the blessing of liberation.

Permit all of us, Your children who have come together here to celebrate this day, to march forward from this month to the next and ever after, so that we henceforth make rapid progress in everything we do and contribute toward fulfilling the providential will. We thank you for this era of liberation and amnesty1 that is now upon us, wherein all spirits who were sacrificed in service dedicated to God in the course of history -- centered on the four great saints of the heavenly world who are guarding and attending the Parents of Heaven and Earth -- can receive the blessing of liberation, and the spiritual and physical worlds can be unified and all can be mobilized in full force.

Hoping and praying that You will accept this hour of the proclamation of the liberation, amnesty and freedom of the entire universe as well as the celebration of this joyous day, we would like to commemorate this day. So please accept with joy this occasion that all those here, including the Parents of Heaven and Earth dedicate to You with minds unified as one, and with one body and one heart. We offer You our utmost gratitude, and report and proclaim this in the name of True Parents! Amen! Amen! Amen!

Unable to forget about me, and with the things I've told you embedded deep in your hearts, you should discover from the word that it is you who are destined to be resurrected as owners of the universe.

With this knowledge, your efforts should be directed toward developing loyalty and filial piety. Your families should change through being connected to the path God has walked. They should become families of devoted sons and daughters formed from the union of holy sons and holy daughters, the families of patriots -- and finally -- families directly descended from God that have been given the blessing of being able to serve Him. Such are the tasks still left for you to complete, duties you need to fulfill before you pass on to the next world. You should never forget this. This is the advice I want to give you. Do you understand?

There still remain many tasks for you to be aware of. There may be some who fly high together with others; and there are many who get going under their own steam.

When wild geese decide to move, to travel a great distance, they appoint a leader. That leader need not be old. All that is required in a leader is knowledge of the path to follow, knowledge of all the landmarks, so that he will know when we have passed through the era of the individual and the era of the family, as well as the landmark that indicates where we should enter as the families of the tribe, race, nation, world, and universe, and thus guide us and the universe to become one with God.

Only when such a person comes to God to practice filial piety toward Him, can the perfection of life be brought about. Not only the family of devoted sons and daughters but also the national family, and subsequently, the nation itself can be perfected, followed by the perfection of the world family and of the world itself, and then the perfection of the family of heaven, earth, and the cosmos. Only then can we attend God.

Christians today think that it only takes faith to receive salvation, but is that true? I wish they would read the messages Saint Paul has sent from the spirit world. The members of the Unification Church fully understand all such messages and have attained a position that is higher than those who have sent them; so they require nothing from the earth. The time for that has already passed, and they can now make requests of Heaven. Those who do not know the truth about the spiritual world will be seen as nothing but fools. Therefore, you should be aware of the fact that if you step forward without any knowledge of the spiritual world, you will not be able to freely travel to and fro between the physical and spiritual worlds.

Cast away those people who are holding their heads high, thinking they are the best. The person seated here before you is the one who is truly great. He stood before God in the heavenly court and turned the kingdom of heaven left to right. Without first having brought the spirit world to submission, unification cannot be achieved on earth.

No matter how hard the world tries to kill off and get rid of me, they will never succeed. Who could possibly kill me off in the era of perfection? We have dressed in all kinds of rags, rags of the individual, rags of the family -- in fact, all the tattered clothes left to us from our ancestors in all corners of the world. We need to take them off. Where should we do that? In the house where they were first put on us. We need to take them off inside that house and fly off from there. That is what the house is for.

We are all wearing rags and tattered clothes, aren't we? Are we, or aren't we? I'm telling you this, because I know I'm not being discourteous, early in the morning of the day we commemorate Chil Pal Jeol. I am not treating you like adults; instead, I am calling you things like "rascals," so that I leave an impression you will remember. Listen attentively to what I say today; the expression "You rascals!" needs to go through several stages, eight or nine of them, in the course of training.

I believe some of you may be thinking to yourselves, criticizing me for saying such conceited and arrogant things at the beginning of this meeting, without having greeted you, but I am still going to go ahead and give you this advice because your criticism is unjust. When you realize this, you will start living a whole new life. You need to take your clothes off. Inside your houses, you need to take off the rags you're wearing.

Wives and husbands have committed all kinds of unfaithful acts toward each other, and denied each other lives they should have had, haven't they? They need to cast all that off and begin anew as the sons and daughters of the free God, and fly across the great sky and arrive at the kingdom of heaven of the original homeland. This is the task given you.

You need to study me. That's my advice, but it is your choice to follow it or not. Because I am worried that when you pass on into the spiritual world, you will get no further than that place corresponding to what you have or have not achieved, I am giving you, in the position of the children, these words of advice on this day of commemoration. I hope that deep, deep in your hearts, you will cherish what I am saying and work out this task in eternity. You would not be able to work it out if I did not help you. If after listening to all this, you still go off doing what you want to do... You need to understand how fearsome the ramifications of what I am saying on this day, Chil Pal Jeol, really are. You are hearing this message for the first time, aren't you? You should discover for yourselves that today's prayer and sermon were spoken from the position of the ideal that can more than clear away and make a clean slate of the satanic world. This is the task I have set for you.

Would you like to follow and watch me? Take a look. Would you be satisfied with just looking at me, or would you like to follow me? [To follow you.] If you are to follow me, you need to start from the position of a servant of a servant -- a servant of a servant following a course of the heart -- to a servant, an adopted child, an illegitimate child, and finally a legitimate child.

Legitimate children must know their mother. Having been born from her, they need to sit on her lap, be embraced by her. They need to know who their father is. They should be in a position to say, "No one can separate me from or break my connection to my father." The origin was created and made eternal by God, and that beginning will remain there forever. We cannot relinquish our everlasting responsibility to connect that beginning to our own clans to remain for many generations to come.

When you pass on from this world to the next, all you can do is stand before the gates of the kingdom of heaven and wait, for you will not be able to cross over the threshold of the palace. That's the problem. Even though you may have received the blessing through the Unification Church, you would end up in paradise, where you would have to understand the content of Cheon Seong Gyeong , that is, my teachings. You would have to discern whether the speeches were given in the morning or in the evening, in the eras of the individual, family, nation, or cosmos, though those speech excerpts may all appear similar. Though you may not have known this before, they are arranged in a certain order of rank.

When preparing an offering table like this, you should not thoughtlessly mix all the fruit up. Each type of fruit should have a place for itself, as you can see from this, for only then can the fruit put up a good front and maintain its dignity, which allows God to look upon it with interest; you cannot place the fruit as you like in a haphazard way. You need to understand that only those things that are in order can have their existence recognized in this environment. Do you think all people should be treated like that? Do you understand?

The Unification Church holds great authority. No matter how freely you have lived your life, were I to look at you sternly and say, "You rascal," none of you would have any freedom whatsoever. Even those who think highly of themselves would be drawn into my sphere if I were to stand still and gaze at them with my mouth closed. There exists something that prevents them from changing the environment and drawing me to their spheres.

I have met many leaders of nations, and many who claimed to be knowledgeable, but no matter how much I urged them to speak -- and they had come with every intention of speaking -- the moment they stood in front of me, words failed them. Did you know about that? There is something that makes it so. In the presence of God, it is the responsibility of a son to console Him and sometimes make Him cry. It is a circumstance that only a son can be in. The same holds true for you. Do you have something of substance deep within you that might cause me to weep or that might deeply move me? If one's whole being is false, do you think he can become true just by pretending to be true? The sons and daughters of presidents say, "We have the worst father." Their own wives cannot trust them.

I have many sons and daughters. Because I have not treated them as my children, they have stood against their own parents until now. What I want them to do is to continue their studies from the age of twenty-four to thirty-four, even when they are fully-grown, while I am walking the path to achieve liberation. They are quite smart and have been admitted to top universities in the United States. What they have found in those universities is that their own teachers respect me. Though my children themselves do not think of me as their father and so have set their minds on not living with me, in their own universities they find that the person everyone else respects the most is their own father.

From a footloose and fancy-free position they have done all kinds of things and have determined to have nothing to do with me, their father; but when they come to the place where I have built a palace, they find that I am in a position that they, not in a million years, could ever have reached. So though I have said nothing to them, they have no choice but to naturally submit and return to their places as my sons and daughters.

I continue to see the need to educate the Korean people. Once you get to know the situation of the Unification Church, and what kind of life the founder of the Unification Church is leading and how great our sphere of influence is, you will consider yourselves to be superior to others, but you have yet to learn all the details of the course of a pioneer that you should have learned. Pioneers are to you like an unknown world, an unknown heaven and earth.

That is why, once I pass on to the spiritual world, I will have to draw up a whole new educational program. Did you know that? If you have not completed the program on earth, how will you keep up with the program in the spiritual world? That is why you need to practice absolute faith, absolute love and absolute obedience. Even this thing I have in front of me was created by God with absolute faith. Faith does not mean hope or desire in the way that people who speak about faith think it does. It should be faith in the relationship between God and man, which means absolute faith, absolute love and absolute obedience....

Have you ever valued the things of the world by viewing them from this perspective? You only do as you like. You would like all the money in the world to be yours, wouldn't you? Would you like to make everything yours while the 70 million people of your race look on? That is the way a thief thinks. You would be committing fraud. I am frank to the members of the Unification Church, and in this regard I am different from your mothers. Yes, we all need to become qualitatively different.

I am only saying this because you have come to attend this celebration on this joyous day, and all I can do for you in return is to dress you up in nice clothes. Even if you don't want to listen to what I'm saying, if what I am saying exists in you, or rather on you like garments, and you live as if it does, your coming here today will not have been a waste of time. That is why I am telling you this.

The word "moon" refers to the truth, doesn't it? It also signifies an altar dedicated to God. Sun Myung Moon! The Chinese character for "sun" is made up of two Chinese characters --  "fish" and "sheep." They represent the ocean and the land. The word "myung" consists of two characters meaning "sun" and "moon." The altar of the sun and the moon, the sea and the land; the person who has built an altar by elucidating the truth on the foundation of heaven and earth and who serves that altar is "Sun Myung Moon." It is a great name, isn't it? [Yes.] The name may be great, but how about the person himself? (Applause)

1. We have hitherto translated seokbang as "becoming completely free," or existing in that state; however, we feel that the word "amnesty" may at times better reflect the concept of having the record wiped clean and the freedom from the past sins that this represents; see Father's speech on the seokbang era on page 15 of the April 2004 issue of Today's World

Edited for Today's World

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