PDF file: 20211002_Grand Autumn Service_Kyoshu-sama
Congratulations, everyone, on today’s World Church of Messiah Grand Autumn Service.
First, I would like to thank all the staff at Hotel New Otani Osaka for their tremendous understanding and cooperation as well as their consideration on numerous matters. It is due to their support that we are able to hold this service today, and for that, I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to everyone at the hotel. Thank you very much.
We now enter autumn, the season of harvest.
We humans sow seeds of various crops, grow them while receiving the blessings of nature and harvest the crops, the fruits, when ready.
What then is the fruit that God, the Creator, harvests?
It is nothing other than we humans. It is nothing other than each one of our hearts.
How did He make our hearts?
In order to make His own children, God, in the beginning and in heaven, prepared souls named Messiah, that is, spiritual bodies, and through them, He created all creation, including all the various elements, and caused all of it to evolve.
He then assembled all of His creations and created a human body and its sensory organs, known to us as the five senses. And through the sensory organs, God created, at the very end, our consciousness, that is, each one of our hearts.
In this way, our spiritual bodies have been used in the divine work of creation from the beginning, from the time God created all creation in heaven.
Our spiritual bodies were together with God in heaven and were serving Him from the beginning.
How awe-inspiring this is!
Regarding the spiritual body, Meishu-sama wrote, “Besides a physical body, a human being possesses a body of spirit that appears to be nonexistent, and its shape is the same as a physical body.” Meishu-sama taught us that this spiritual body whose shape is the same as the physical body is our true body and that one’s spiritual body and physical body are connected by the law of the spiritual preceding the material.
Our true body is, in fact, our spiritual body.
We have always belonged to heaven, before and even now.
As Meishu-sama said that the spiritual body and the physical body are inseparable, they do not exist independently.
There is a physical body only because there is a spiritual body.
We have a physical breath only because we have a spiritual breath.
God uses our spiritual and physical bodies as part of His one body and nourishes our two bodies as one.
God uses the breath that we now inhale and the breath that we now exhale as one, as His very own breath.
We are able to breathe consciously only because our breath is the breath to communicate with God.
The five senses are the same. It is only because we have a spiritual eye, ear and other spiritual sensory organs that we have a physical eye, ear and other physical sensory organs.
The eyes exist to see God. The ears exist to hear His voice.
As I said earlier, God made our consciousnesses, our hearts, through our sensory organs.
Even with regard to this consciousness, it is only because we have a spiritual and true consciousness that we have this consciousness, too.
At the center of our consciousness exists the true consciousness, and God uses this spiritual consciousness and physical consciousness as one.
Why did God give us a heart, a consciousness? That is because He wanted us to inherit His own consciousness and make us His children through our communicating with Him using sonen and words, which are the expressions of the consciousness, the heart.
God made this truly precious heart with deep love and great care. That is why the heart is the fruit of God’s creation, the fruit that God wishes to harvest.
God has always wanted to harvest our hearts as His fruits.
However, we have been using our five senses—touch; sight, the function of the eyes; hearing, the function of the ears; taste, the function of the tongue; and smell, the function of the nose—as our own as well as using our hearts, our consciousnesses, as our own, contrary to God’s wish. We have been using them in order to make ourselves better than others and judge all things according to our own criteria of good and bad, that is, according to our own convenience.
Since we have been living like this, we have always compared ourselves to others. Sometimes we felt proud, thinking that we were better, and sometimes we put ourselves down. We evaluated ourselves and others, judging who was superior or inferior.
How haughty and arrogant we have been!
More than that, we did not even realize that we were sinful in the eyes of God because of our selfish posture of rebelling against Him. We held onto our hearts so tightly, thinking that they were ours, and in the meanwhile, we have been saying things like “I believe in God,” stubbornly living our lives with our human strength.
That is why God was not able to harvest our hearts as the fruits of His creation.
And that is why God put the burden of our sins on Jesus, and through the blood Jesus offered, God delivered us as ones who have been atoned for and forgiven, that is, He harvested us through Jesus’s blood.
How great is the love of God! How immense is His grace!
What we must not forget is that once we are redeemed, we belong to the one who redeemed us, that is, we now belong to the one who paid the price for our sins.
Our hearts are no longer ours. They belong to God who sent Jesus to the world.
God put an end to our selfish way of living and has welcomed us into the new phase of His work of creation.
Through the name of Messiah, God is now drawing near to each one of us with authority and power, saying, “I have already harvested you as the fruit of My creation.”
He is now patiently waiting for each one of us to come back to heaven as one who admits the sin of rebelling against God and as one who has been redeemed from that sin, something Meishu-sama himself did.
Everyone, if God is trying to communicate with us, we should also try to communicate with Him and respond to His wish.
Our hearts have been purified and atoned for by the sacred blood. If so, shouldn’t we, together with everyone, offer our hearts as the fruits of God’s creation just as Meishu-sama did?
We humans sort out our harvests according to their appearance, but God does not do that. He harvests and accepts any kind of heart.
Let us believe in His benevolence and open up our hearts that have been closed like a hard stone. Let us shatter our hardened hearts, lay them open undisguised and offer them to God. If we are able to do that, I am sure that God will gladly harvest those hearts as His fruits.
Let us also offer our sensory organs that are the foundation of our hearts, our consciousnesses, and say to God, “O God, through the name of Messiah, I now return to You all my sensory organs like my eyes and ears that I have been using as my own until today. May You use them as Your eyes, as Your ears, as Your sensory organs so that Your will be done.” Let us, in this way, wish that our sensory organs can be nurtured to be more balanced.
We offer money to God.
Money represents all creation and is something indispensable for us. It is inevitable, therefore, that various thoughts and feelings come to our minds and hearts when we think about money or sums of money, be it large or small.
That is why we need to offer it through the name of Messiah. In this way, God is able to receive not only our feelings relating to money but also many other people’s feelings relating to money as feelings that have been atoned for and forgiven, regardless of how good or bad those feelings are.
God is using our sonen, breath and money, which represents all creation, in order to receive our hearts, encouraging us to serve in the divine work of salvation that brings salvation to many.
Why are we able to serve in this kind of work of salvation? It is because we are what Meishu-sama calls “residents of heaven” whose true bodies belong to heaven.
That is why God is uniting the thoughts and feelings of all humanity and its ancestors, both our paternal and maternal ones, to our thoughts and feelings, making us feel as if they were ours, and is accomplishing the work of salvation through them.
For the salvation of the planet earth and humanity that lives on it, let us recall that we are ones who were sent from heaven. And let us return to heaven and surrender all that we see, hear and feel as the glory of the divine work of salvation.
God is now remaking everything into something new by using all the things He receives from us. So let us wholeheartedly serve in the divine work of creating the future as the Church that bears the name of Messiah!
O God, all of us will set this firmly into our hearts through our outgoing and incoming, our incoming and outgoing breath, so may Your will be done. We now surrender all of ourselves to You through the name of Messiah.
Thank you very much.
