Your Excellencies, distinguished leaders from around the world, Ambassadors for Peace, ladies and gentlemen:

On behalf of the Founders of the Universal Peace Federation, True Parents, Rev. Dr. Sun Myung Moon and Dr. Hak Ja Han Moon, it is my honor to welcome you to Korea for this International Leadership Conference.

As you know, we have just celebrated the Lunar New Year on February 14. So, I would also like to wish you all a “Happy New Year!”

True Parents celebrated the Lunar New Year in a very unique and special way, as a day for all humanity to give honor and glory to God our Heavenly Parents. In this way, the Lunar New Year is celebrated as True God’s Day. So, I would like to also wish you a Happy True God’s Day. Thank you for being here for this important occasion.

Yesterday, we could attend the World Peace Blessing ceremony at the Kintex Hall. The Blessing tradition was initiated by True Parents in 1960, with their own Blessing. It has since expanded worldwide. Millions and millions of couples have received the Blessing over the past 50 years.

God’s original ideal was to have humanity inherit his true love—a love that can bring even the worst evil, even Satan to natural surrender. True love is God’s essence and his divinity and the gift that God wanted to give to his children. This was his will for Adam and Eve. However, we know that within the very first family, Adam and Eve inherited not true love but false love, which was loving oneself more than God. This Fall gave rise to the egocentric history of division and conflict within the human family.

The purpose of the Blessing is to restore the human fall and to establish God’s lineage among all the people of the world. Through the World Peace Blessing we can bring the whole human family together and connect them to God and True Parents. True Parents are the first human beings to fully inherit the essence of God—his true love. To be clear, we Unificationists do not believe that True Parents are the Creator God Himself, but that True Parents have inherited God’s true love and have the value and sacredness of that true love. True Parents teach us that we also are to inherit that true love and create the ideal kingdom that God intended from the time of Adam and Eve.

On November 18, 2009 I was installed as the International Chairman of the Universal Peace Federation. I will do my very best to serve True Parents in this capacity. I am grateful for the great service to UPF carried out by the former UPF Co-Chairs, Rev. Chung Hwan Kwak and my brother, Dr. Hyun Jin Moon. I will do my best to build and expand the foundation they have worked so diligently to establish.

I look forward to working together with all of you, including the distinguished members of the Presiding Council, the Global Peace Council, the Regional Chairs, and Ambassadors for Peace in 194 nations around the world. I hope I can rely on your wisdom, experience and guidance as we move forward to transform this world.

Most of all, I want to say that I will do my best to live up to True Parents’ expectations. I have recently had many very deep, spiritual experiences about True Parents. As you may know, True Father was unjustly imprisoned six times over the course of his life. Recently he miraculously survived a helicopter accident in a way that showed the world how much God has protected and loves True Parents.

There are many accounts among the early disciples who witnessed True Father’s lifeless body being thrown out as dead human garbage in the heaps of death that surrounded the concentration camps that he served in. They scavenged his lifeless, frozen form and thawed him out in a hut. They saw the hand of God as they witnessed him miraculously come back from death.

I had heard these accounts growing up but never knew their true significance. But just last year, I had a transformative spiritual experience. I can say that my spiritual eyes were opened to the true value and significance of True Parents. At the time, True Parents had already asked me to take the responsibility of the international President of the worldwide Unification Movement, but I realize that even so, I had seen them utterly superficially.

I cannot find words to adequately describe my awakening experience. Suffice to say that I came to see that each time my Father was imprisoned, beaten, tortured, mocked, electrocuted, and literally “killed” and thrown out as dead, he did not cry out to heaven for relief. Rather he descended to the very bottom of hell in order to liberate those who were trapped by satanic power.

I realized what kind of love a True Parent had. It was even more than a love that would lay one’s life down for friends, as Jesus said in John 15:13. It was a parental love so heroic and so powerful that it would lay down its life, descend into the most punishing hells again and again, die and die and die again so that the children could be free and see a better tomorrow.

I realized that True Parents were not only beaten and torn and tortured but that they died seven times and descended into hell again and again so that you and I could be freed from all the sins of the world since the Fall. And by the power of that true parental love, they rose from those wretched graves, from the seven deaths and were resurrected seven times by the power of true love!

I began to weep when my eyes were opened to this reality. I could never see True Parents with only my human eyes again. From that point on, when I see True Parents, I see those who embody the true love ideal of the messiah, the returning lord, and the True Parents of heaven and earth. True Parents have this kind of value and significance.

Up till that point I had thought true love was merely “living for the sake of others,” doing service work and being kindhearted, and surely it may be these things, but it is also so much more. I realized that true love, the essence of God, the parental heart was a love so unimaginably profound that it would lay down its sacred life, give away its holy soul, descend into the darkest and deepest Hells again and again so that you and me and our children could enter the kingdom of God. This is the level of true love that our True Parents have inherited and actualized in their lifetime. This is the heroic true love that they ask each and every one of us to inherit, for if we do so then we will create the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.