PDF file: 20201001_Grand Autumn Service_Kyoshu-sama
The Portuguese audio version of the Sacred Word of Kyoshu-sama is available here.
Congratulations everyone on today’s World Church of Messiah Grand Autumn Service.
Last year, on September 30, as mentioned in President Narii’s greeting a moment ago, overcoming numerous hardships and difficulties and united as one under a new organization structure, we began our journey into a new future in order to serve in the new gospel of salvation that Meishu-sama brought to all humanity.
Through Meishu-sama, God took away the wall that we made among ourselves. That is, God allowed us to gather as one under Meishu-sama, going beyond the churches we used to affiliate with, positions we used to hold, age differences and how much experience we have. To this—to this blessing—I, together with all of you, would like to once again offer my most sincere gratitude to God and Meishu-sama.
It is thanks to the inauguration of this new organizational structure that we were able to make a new start under the name of World Church of Messiah from this February 4—the name Meishu-sama named with unyielding determination. For this, I am overwhelmed with emotion today—on this day of the one-year anniversary of the inauguration.
I am also filled with gratitude and happiness as all of you have walked together with me for the past year, truly seeking Meishu-sama.
I would like to extend my thanks to President Nakadomari of Sekai Kyusei Kyo, President Narii, Vice President Shirasawa and Vice President Kawatani. For they strive to move forward together with me all the time. Let me say that I have complete trust in the organization of the church under these four, and I pray that the current organizational structure will be further strengthened from here on, too. From now onward, receiving the divine guidance of Meishu-sama, I wish to courageously discard the “shell of old faith” existing within me and move forward single-mindedly on the path of new salvation by this new faith together with all of you.
Through the following hymn of Meishu-sama, I feel that we are being told to put on a new heart:
“A new world! / It should be built upon new soil. / Ah, this is the truth!”
Now, in deep awe and fear of God, I say that God, the one and only Lord God, before setting out on His work of creation, in heaven, gave birth to the spiritual children who were given His very own consciousness as well as His soul and breath of life. He then named each one of them with the same name—Messiah.
God first sent out the spirits of all creation in order to create the earth as a part of heaven.
After completing this task, God sent His spiritual children to the earth, and using all creation, He created self-consciousness—the sense of “I,” entrusted it to His spiritual children and made them individuals. These individuals are no one else but us, human beings.
As such, we feel as if we possess our own consciousness, this sense of “I,” but it was God who allowed us to have it. Why? So that we with our own free will can return to heaven and be born once more as His children, that is, to have a new birth.
Let me be clear: our sense of “I” that we feel as though is ours is, in fact, not ours. It belongs to God.
Yet we used this consciousness that belongs to God as our own, used it to judge what was right and wrong based on our own criteria and became haughty and arrogant as if we were better than God—this is how we sinned against God.
You should know that it was inevitable that we would commit this sin because no one can escape from sensing God’s consciousness as if it is their own.
God, the owner of all consciousness, is trying to forgive us sinners, acquire our sense of “I” as His and merge to be one with us. In short, He is trying to make us His own children.
To grant forgiveness to His children, it was absolutely necessary for God to have the atonement of sin.
That is why God had no choice but to send Jesus to the world and make him offer his blood and life to God.
God received Jesus’s blood as the blood of atonement and welcomed the soul of Jesus into His heaven. God then resurrected Jesus and made him His son, the Christ, the Messiah. At the same time, God decided to forgive the sins of all humanity and remade all the worlds—heaven and earth, the spiritual world and the material world—into a new world. This new world is something completely different from the one that preceded it. It has no darkness, and it shines with eternal life and God’s glory.
Two thousand years later, Meishu-sama came into the world with a mission. He came to bring the work of salvation to the entire earth, God’s true will of making not only Jesus but all humanity His own children. Meishu-sama sensed that humanity was already living in the new world and expressed this as the “transition from night to day.” He awakened us who were living in the darkness and guided us into light and life. And to truly fulfill his mission, he was born anew as a child of God, Messiah.
Meishu-sama achieved this so that we humanity can recall the will of creation we were initially granted in heaven by God, our true Father, be born anew in accordance with this will and live with God for all eternity.
The entire universe and the inside of us are already abundantly filled with light, and our hearts—our consciousnesses—are completely freed, being guided and nurtured in the second phase of creation in which all creation will be renewed.
In one of his hymns, Meishu-sama wrote:
“Ah, people of the world! / Know that the divine light has already started to shine. / So open up the door of your heart!”
Through this hymn, I feel that Meishu-sama is encouraging us—urging us—to be open-minded and surrender each one of our hearts to God rather than holding onto them thinking that they are ours and need to be tucked away somewhere deep inside.
In order for God to accomplish His second phase of creation—to welcome all humanity into heaven and make them His children—God needs our hearts, our consciousnesses, at any cost. He needs our thoughts and feelings.
We, therefore, should say to God, “O God, forgive me as I have been taking possession of Your consciousness. I now surrender my consciousness to You. Please, O God, use it so that Your will be done.”
Isn’t this what Meishu-sama meant when he spoke about the importance of “leaving your ego” and “removing and discarding your ego and attachment”?
You do not need to regard your ego or feelings of attachment as something negative, something that you must push away from yourself. How can we discard them anyway when everything—absolutely everything—exists in the sonen of God, in heaven existing at the center of our consciousness, and is already atoned for, forgiven and welcomed into the hand of God? There is nowhere to discard anything, is there?
Many people who seek salvation depend on the workings of our hearts and sonen.
The thoughts and feelings of all our ancestors; and the thoughts and feelings of all the people in the world that arise from family issues, problems in their daily lives and all the various issues that are currently developing on the earth, be they large or small in scale—God gathers all these thoughts and feelings in our thoughts and feelings. And through our thoughts and feelings—through us who accepted the atoning blood existing in the name of Messiah—God is trying to welcome them into His heaven as something that has been forgiven and made sinless.
In 1927, soon after Meishu-sama realized the mission he had been entrusted with by God, he composed the following hymn:
“To you who recognize that there is no God, / There is no God. / To you who recognize that there is, / God exists.”
Through Meishu-sama, we were made to know that the one and only God exists. It is a tremendous blessing that we came to know this truth. However, through this hymn, I feel that Meishu-sama is asking each one of us whether we, by our own free will, recognize that the one and only God exists or not, that this is something directly related to each one of us or not—and not simply be satisfied by knowing the existence of God as information.
Being our Creator and the true Father, God always thinks of us and is saying to us, “You are in My thoughts and feelings.”
On our part, we need to—each one of us needs to—respond to Him with a thought, “O God, You are always in my thoughts and feelings!”
In the same way, since we were made to know that the sins of all humanity have been atoned for and forgiven through the blood Jesus offered, through his act of petition, it is crucial that we accept this atonement as something directly related to each one of us and say to God, “O God, it was You who prepared the sacred blood, atoned for and forgave my sin!” This, I believe, is how we can respond to the grace of God and is something that God wants to hear from us.
Accepting the forgiveness and grace of God as something directly related to us—to you—is, in fact, how we can bring salvation to all. Because, remember, each one of us carries with us all that exists both in heaven and on earth.
Meishu-sama guided us through many sacred words and through many kinds of activities, but his sole will that penetrated in all that he left for us was this: for us to turn our hearts, our sonen, to God and His workings in whatever we think and do.
When Meishu-sama collapsed with a brain hemorrhage on April 19, 1954, he repeatedly said that “From now on, we enter the world of sonen.” Meishu-sama wanted to convey to us so strongly that the time has come for us to serve God through our sonen.
In order to educate and nurture us, God treasures each one of our thoughts and feelings, each one of our sonen.
And isn’t it true that because we have our thoughts and feelings, we can communicate with God and serve Him?
We must thank God for allowing us to have thoughts and feelings, and, together with everyone and everything, let us serve in the work of salvation that God is now advancing through using our thoughts and feelings. Let us first determine this in our hearts and then do whatever we have to do in our daily lives and in our service to the divine work.
Know that our way and posture of serving God is what God wishes to reap as the fruits of His own work.
I feel that God now wants me to remember the following hymn of Meishu-sama:
“Ah, the time is near! / The time when God, / Who planned the course of humanity, / Is going to reap!”
May the salvation and comfort of the church that bears the name of Messiah be shared with all that exists on the planet earth.
I return all glory, authority and grace to God who is one with the name of Messiah.
Thank you.
