Heaven Down To Earth - Words of Spiritual Guidance

by Rev. Paul Werner

Chapter 1 - God's Heart

God created only one world, and you have the privilege of being part of it. Any distance you may feel from Him is created by you, not Him. You are the one allowing that gap to exist in your mind. You may even talk about the distance you feel. But that is not what God feels. Through loving you, He reinforces that you are His child and calls you to come to Him. However, you may be one of the many people who responds, "No. You are the great and almighty God. You belong ten thousand miles away from me. I am much too small to be close to you." Such a statement is absolutely untrue; if those words resound in your ears, realize they are from Satan and are totally false. Reject his words. Remember that you live in the house of God's heart and He abides with you every moment.

He resides in the nucleus of each person's heart; God even lives within the drunk in the gutter. God still lives in the hearts of criminals. The point within us in which God dwells is what the Principle refers to as the original mind. Through that invisible thread, God continues to be linked to even those people who deny and reject Him. Just as He suffers with you as you strive to come close to Him, God suffers with those people in their agony and hell.

Everything looks different once we unite with the heart of God. Therefore, it is up to each one of us to discover what that is. Once we long to uncover the essence of God and seek to come close to Him, we will discover that He is not the one with the sword or the sledgehammer. Nor is He the one who wants to punish us. His tactics for drawing us close to Him may seem a bit unusual according to our fallen viewpoint, but His ultimate aim is to live with us in glory and love. We may not understand how being sent into the wilderness will actually bring us closer to Him in the future. Of course He asks us to assist Him in restoring mankind, but He also pushes us ahead encouraging us to cope with our problems and overcome them. Once we do, we will achieve a beautiful, intimate relationship with God, and we will understand His personal heartache much more deeply.

The true nature of God is so different from what most people imagine. He is not at peace; He is not blissful. And He most certainly is not a puppeteer, tugging on strings attached to our minds and hearts in order to obtain a desired response. Although He can hope and even pray that we will follow His words, the response we make is up to us. He begs us to go fundraising, witnessing, and accomplish many other things in this work of restoration. Have you ever heard the pleading in God's voice? He begs us to keep trying to become His assistants; at the same time, He understands the struggles and pain we encounter. He sees how Satan comes and works equally hard to discourage us from making progress. That is why with His tears though invisible and silent -- He touches the core of our hearts so that we will feel His urgency and be motivated to keep going without tiring. Those are the emotions you will experience if you are truly affected by the heart and love of God. He is not a general, commanding His forces with brusque voice or brashness. The Divine One with whom we are concerned is the good God, the God with the heart of compassion that simply melts us.

According to my understanding, it is only natural that we do not always feel in heaven. Most of the time, our emotions sense how His heart is breaking. He can only wistfully gaze at His children who were kidnapped by Satan. When we become concerned with the people in hell who are away from Him, it is hard to feel ecstatic. We see their loneliness and turmoil, as well as experience our own. The emptiness and void they endure can be felt in the atmosphere. When we concern ourselves with the suffering of people, we naturally feel the depths of hell and that is why our emotions go up and down.

When I first listened to the Unification Principle, I begged God to let me feel His heart. The response I got was much different from anything I expected. My eyes became like running faucets which could not be shut off by logic or willpower. I lived in hell during the three days and nights I could not stop weeping. My heart felt God's agony and desperate longing for people to realize He is alive. The concept that God is not yet a joyful God but that His heart has been suffering since the time of the fall, became a reality to me. I experienced Him as a parent, especially when I heard Him crying out for His son Adam. Before that experience, I always assumed that God was happy. Through that ordeal -- by perceiving His tears and suffering, I understood that He is looking for perfected people. He, above any of us, desires that people restore themselves back to true spiritual and mental health and become the true human beings He originally purposed.

For millions of years God has been accommodating the people who have denounced Him and professed that He is not even alive. So many people have blasphemed God. Nevertheless, His heart constantly pours out love to them. He knows that is the best method to extract the people from Satan's territory; Satan is allergic to love. God hopes that some people will be aroused enough to perceive His love. Throughout history, now and again one person did respond to the affection that continuously streamed from God. Sadly, most of the people did not understand anything. But there was a Noah, an Abraham; they perceived something more of God. Jesus' perception was by far the greatest; he began to teach people about this God and introduced Him as our Heavenly Father. When he taught the gospel of God's goodness and love, some people even listened and followed him. Jesus knew God as a Father and conveyed to others his own personal experiences with Him. True Father, who knows Him more intimately than anyone, is just the extended arm of God embracing the people of this world; he is the mouthpiece of God summoning us, "Come back. Come back home."

As we unite more deeply with the heart of God and understand His will, we begin to feel more acutely how God suffers when He looks at humanity. People in every nation of the world are caught in the web of misery. God feels great agony for His created beings who were abducted before they ever knew Him. He looks at their poverty and turmoil and in His sadness, cannot help but weep. As we strive to restore this world, we will lessen God's pain. This is the mission of all religious groups -- to go out and serve humanity, to work for the poor and shed tears for them.

When you set foot on the battleground of life, you have the chance to meet God and experience His heart. The war affords you the opportunity to encounter deep loneliness. At some point, you will probably be cut off from God for a period of a few days or possibly a couple of weeks. It may be a time when it feels as though God has not heard your prayer because He does not reveal Himself to you in any way. But without experiencing all those emotions that God Himself has felt throughout history, how can we experience what makes people tick, or anything about His true nature? Did you know that even when we no longer perceive His presence, the love of God always carries us through our hardships?

It was not the word that existed from the beginning, but the heart of God. It housed the plans and promises of the future world. His love enabled Him to manifest them. The physical, tangible world became a more coarse manifestation of His nature, and a more refined representation of Him is the spirit world. But everything that is created by Him originates from the love which flows from His heart. At the time of creation, the essence of God's master plan for the universe surged forth and thus we find that the three main kingdoms --minerals, vegetation, and animals-are saturated with His love.

The nature of energy is such that it continually perpetuates. Energy is energy because it moves and energizes. The Universal Prime Force of God continually regenerates all creation. Energy refurbishes and reactivates itself because it is composed of plus and minus, and it becomes energy because those two elements engage in the process of give and take. But God's inner energy-His love and heart-contains the ideal. Yet the ideal does not mature of itself, it cannot be accomplished without effort and hard work.

If we really connect with God in prayer, we may be so touched by His love that we will beg to be able to feel His heart. He may question our conviction, but if we are sincere, He will definitely share with us the emotions of His heart.

Over twenty-two years ago, I pleaded with God to feet His heart. I asked for a miracle; I expected Heavenly Father to manifest Himself and say, "My dear son Paul, be assured that this is My truth. I am calling you to follow My son, Sun Myung Moon. This is what I want you to do with your life." But my prayer was not answered in that way at all! He did not answer me with sweet words. Instead, He let me cry for three days and three nights. My whole body was shaking. I couldn't stop my tears; I couldn't regain control. What I experienced was a taste of what God feels when He looks at humanity. Most of the time, that aspect of God's heart is invisible to us.

What He would like us to remember is that the blessings He longs to bestow upon us will come later. As for now, we have to continue to sacrifice. We should never take our commitment lightly. God definitely wants to work through us in a very powerful way. He feels distressed when members become less and less involved in living for Him. He wants to make every one of us into great personalities and wants to see us grow into people who accomplish many things. That is the heart Heavenly Father has for all His children.

There is something in the universe that makes it tick. And there is something within ourselves which gives us direction. That is the original mind which God instilled at the time of our birth. This original mind, often referred to as conscience, is the part of us that is directly connected to the heart of God and is touched by many impulses. Whether a person lives in a desert, in a jail, or in a palace, his original mind lives within him. It operates based on truth. It is inspired by God, and initiates us to come back to Him and to do good.

Every association you enjoy eventually relates back to your vertical relationship. Connect with God. Feel His parental heart. Once you do, you won't center upon or worry about yourself. You won't even feel your own pain anymore. Instead, you will sense the pain of others.

If you felt things with the heart of God, you would perceive the urgency He feels. You would hear the universal clock ticking away, and you would no longer be able to sit still.

Once you are intimate with God, you may bounce from one extreme to the other. You might shed tears of happiness and joy one second, but the next be so sad that you weep in sorrow. The closer you come to God, the more extreme your range of emotional experiences becomes. If you feel spiritually uplifted and look deeply into God's heart and how He created all things, your own heart would feel ecstasy. You can come close to feeling what He did looking at Adam and Eve before they fell. But as you roll that film a few more frames and witness the tragedy of the fall, you will experience how His heart grieves when He looks at the fallen world, and sense His hope for the future.

The burden that God has to carry is unimaginable. A person who comes closer and closer to God begins to share this load and automatically becomes more quiet and serious.

If you feel close to God when you are lonely, it is possible that you may be experiencing the lonely heart of God. However, it may be that you only think you are close to God when actually you are quite far away, feeling lonely because you are separated.

The heart of God cannot be separated from the suffering history of this world. God could smile when Father accepted his mission. Because His son is now working to restore the world back to Him, God feels glad and can even smile occasionally. But most of the time He is too concerned with the anguish felt by humanity. Although He does not need to, God also goes into hell and suffers because He is so closely involved with bringing humanity back to His bosom.

If we unite with the heart of God, we will naturally feel His sorrow and follow Him into hell. The groans of the people in pain will then reach our ears and invoke our prayers of petition. How can we feel as though we are in heaven? How can we pray without tears?

God created His whole universe with the ultimate purpose of becoming joyful. But complete ecstasy can come about only when everyone is happy. If one person is happy but another feels sad, it is impossible for the creation to resound in complete delight. Therefore, until the whole universe is restored and every entity has fulfilled its purpose, God will not feel true joy and happiness in His heart.

As we come closer to God and really develop a strong relationship of prayer as well as a solid heartistic relationship with God through True Parents, we will instinctively become more open and sensitive to both the needs of other people and God Himself. We will become more spiritually keen and the coarseness in our hearts will give way to refinement. Even our physical behavior will change as a result of encountering the heart of God. Once we come so close that our skin even touches God's skin, our feeling for the heart of God will be absolute.

The moment that we withdraw from God, we will no longer feel His heart or perceive His suffering. It is at that moment that we become capable of hurting Him. But if our connection with Him is unbroken, we could never make a mistake that would hurt Him.

Sometimes when you feel disheartened, you don't care whether you offend another person. There may be times when you don't even care if you harm God. The reason you are not concerned is that you are weak and vulnerable at that moment. When your relationship with God is unstable, you don't even mind if you ill-treat someone and may even be happy to lash out. This stems from insecurity about your relationship with God. Yet when you are closest to God and feel His heart, you become more sensitive and could never willfully hurt anyone.

A world of emotions exists within each of us. We often talk about the word "heart," generally referring to it in the context of spirit or the world of heartistic emotions. Yet the "heart of God" is not a usual topic of conversation. In some religions, it is never touched at all. It was mentioned for the first time by Jesus when he introduced God as our Father. But even he did not expound much about the heart of God.

Today we are exposed to a much higher level of truth and understanding through the returned Messiah. We comprehend the essence of God as we learn more and more about Him. At Moses' time, He was a king and we were His servants. During Jesus' lifetime He became a father to us, His adopted children. But today, True Father explains that God is our real parent -- no longer a king or adoptive parent.

We have to fathom deep into the heart of God in order to understand His nature -- why He created all things the way He did, and why He developed a heart within each one of us that is so emotional, so filled with love, so full of desire to receive affection and compassion and to give love to others.

There are many layers of love, but the core of all love is the heart of God. The heart that ticks inside of you is the lifeblood of God. Once we have reached perfection, our perfected heart will be the true manifestation of God's heart. But even now, your heart beats in a way parallel to God's. A great deal that you see with your eyes and transmit through your intellect to your heart are the glimpses of the world that God sees with His eyes. Through all ten of your senses, bring everything you experience back to the heart of God inside yourself. For that is where the actual heart of God resides.

We have to be able to relate our personal existence to the heartbeat of God's worldwide purpose. The heart of God encompasses the whole universe, and that pulse beats and beats. People in countless nations experience incredible pain. God experiences it through His nervous system, and we share the tremor of that heartache once we connect with God.

The truth will help us find the path which reveals the heart of God. By comprehending, God's heart, we will understand the workings of our own. And we will more easily be able to re-create them accordingly; His is the best example of how a heart should be. Everything should be restored in accordance with the standard of God-truth, love, heart, even ourselves and the universe.

Don't feel guilty if you don't always feel happy. This is not yet the time to experience heaven every moment. If you are united with True Parents, whatever you feel is based on what God feels. God rarely feels elated because billions of His children are suffering. Father himself asks, "How can you think about celebrating now? This is not the time for celebration. Don't you hear the cries from the many people in hell?"

Whether or not a person is making his way toward Heaven, the heart of God beats for every person. We are His children and He empathizes with all of us. Of course those who are making efforts to reach out to Him are closer to His heart. He is able to share much more with them and feels more loving toward them. But the heart of God loves everyone; the quality of His love does not change from person to person.

God is unchanging in His love and He does not discriminate; He bestows love upon everyone. Yet not every person is able to perceive this love of God to the same degree. At this time we are able to perceive the love of God in a much greater way than a person who has not heard or experienced much of Him. Nevertheless, the love of God is available for the taking.

In order to really understand the heart of God and perceive the suffering of the prophets and great people of the past, we must go through experiences similar to theirs. They were rejected as they tried to convince people of God's truth. God experienced whatever suffering they experienced. Therefore, if you really want to relate to the past saints, then even in a small way you must be confronted with comparable situations. This will allow you to understand the will of God and the way God worked throughout history. Just as He was, you will be rejected and disappointed. In fact, everyone will probably even suffer a betrayal by his own Judas.

A mother usually gets up early in the morning and makes breakfast, getting everything ready for her children to go to school so that all things are already prepared for them by the time they rise. Many hidden things which we could term as "service" have been done silently, almost invisibly by the mother. The point is that at the time, the children do not realize how much has been done, how many sacrifices have been made by their mother, and how much she has already labored to make them comfortable. They don't know how much love and service and hard work went into the preparations that allow them to go to school without any burdens, warmly clad, and with a full stomach.

That is what God does. He serves us in so many ways that we do not realize the full scope of His activities; He also does them silently and almost invisibly. We may not perceive it, but He even pulls the clouds away in the morning and gets the sun out. Everything He does wells up from the love living deep within His heart.

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