Section 5. God's Blessing Allows You to Inherit Love and Joy
A glorious new morning will dawn on the day when God assumes a physical body. Even more glorious will be the moment that He has a son and a daughter through whom He can experience the love of husband and wife. Still more glorious will be the moment when He can love His grandchildren. The day God can love His grandchildren will be more glorious than when He can love His son and daughter.
How do you think God explained to Adam about the joy He felt at the moment He created him? Was it enough to say to Adam, “This is how happy I was”? People can only understand the joy of parenthood when their first baby is born and they become new parents themselves. Likewise, we can only understand God’s happiness at the creation when we give birth to our own sons and daughters. When children are young they can’t comprehend parental love, but they come to understand it later in life when they have a family and begin raising their own children. Then they understand, “So this is how my parents loved me when they were raising me.”
Therefore, the day your child gets married is a day of glory, and the day your child has a child of his or her own is a day of glory. (Blessed Family-934, 01/22/1978)
You need to know God’s love. How can you really know it? First you need to experience the love of your parents and learn to express your love for them in acts of service. Next, you need to experience conjugal love with your spouse and learn to express your love by serving him or her well. Next, you need to experience what it is like to love your children and know how they love you. You will learn that to be a parent you cannot just give orders to your children, but must learn to understand and serve them as well. This is the way you learn about God’s love. Until you have cared for children like this, you are still incomplete and will not be able to truly understand God’s love.
Without having the experience of raising your own children, you cannot begin to fathom how much God has loved human beings, His children. Similarly, until you have experienced life as a husband, you cannot know God’s experience of loving a woman as His wife, and without the experience of being a wife, you cannot know God’s experience of loving a man as Her husband. Although you may already know what it is like to be a child of God, you cannot truly understand God’s parental love until you become a parent yourself. Therefore, to become a true parent who knows God’s love, you need to have sons and daughters. (133-138, 07/10/1984)
Parents want their children to be married because they want to bequeath to them all their parental love. When the parents die, they leave behind their substantial selves with their descendants. This is why we need descendants.
Love continues forever. Since love is the highest human desire, everyone has their arms outstretched wanting to inherit it. When parents have bequeathed their love to their descendants, they can stand proudly before God when they arrive in the spirit world.
It is in the family that love becomes complete. We say that the path to the Kingdom of Heaven runs through the family, because the family is where we can realize the realm of oneness of love. (Blessed Family-934, 09/21/1978)
The principles that we should follow can be seen in nature. Seeds are sown in spring, in summer plants reach their full growth, and in autumn they bear fruit. Winter is a time for storing up seeds for next spring’s planting. Likewise, when you go through winter-like harsh times, you should put things in order and carry the essence of the new seed of life deep within your heart. Only then will you have seeds to plant again when spring returns.
Having thus equipped yourselves, you will be prepared to become parents and bear sons and daughters in your likeness. You will know to raise your sons and daughters to follow the same principles as you do. (26-158, 10/25/1969)
Why do people feel sad when they do not have sons and daughters? It is because they cannot complete the circle of life. When you see birds feeding their young, you recognize the deep love of the mother bird. People generally like children more than adults. While they show polite respect to adults, they demonstrate warm affection to children. You can realize how much your parents loved you when you have your own sons and daughters and raise them. (Blessed Family-934)
Everyone should get married, have children and raise them. This is the only way they can know both children’s love and parental love.
It seems that many people these days avoid having children. They hesitate to have children because children may limit their freedom to marry and divorce.
But when people fail to establish the four-position foundation, they cannot go to the Kingdom of Heaven. This is because they do not fully know God’s heart of love for human beings. (Blessed Family-934, 04/26/1982)