Happy New Year, everyone! In deep awe and fear of God, I say that the one and only God lives eternally within us and within all creation. The purpose of God’s creation is to bear children in His own likeness, Messiahs. Before He began creation, He completed ahead of time, in heaven, all the works necessary to accomplish His purpose of creation, and only after this, in the name of Messiah, did He begin creation together with His breath. Everything that was created was named Messiah and is united with the one and only body of God, with creation taking place within each and every one of us. All the members around the world who are welcoming this glorious new year are being newly nurtured with each passing day by the true gospel of salvation that we are granted through Jesus Christ and Meishu-sama in order to be born anew as God’s children. For this, let us all give thanks to God our Father. I look forward to walking on the path with all of you this year too. Meishu-sama wrote the following hymn, “I remove from people the beastly nature / That delights in strife and war / And create instead / Those who seek peace.” As he said, he is setting out to recreate the heart of strife and war that humanity carries into a heart of peace. When we speak of strife and war, we usually think of conflicts between people or countries for example, that is, relationships between human beings. We do not think very much about the relationship between us human beings and God our true Father, do we? Regarding this relationship between us and God, Meishu-sama wrote the following hymn: “O God, I have disobeyed You and, thus, sinned! / Repentant, I now have become one who kneels before You.” He acknowledges that he had a relationship with God where he disobeyed God. What does it mean exactly to disobey God? Through God’s great love, we were given life, consciousness and soul to become human beings. Even still, we made those our own. Regarding this matter, it is written in the Bible that God commanded the human being, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:16–17), but the human being took the fruit from that tree and ate it. To take it and eat it means to make it your own, does it not? Even though God had forbidden it, we disobeyed God and made life, consciousness and soul our own. For this, we became arrogant, we put ourselves above God and with our self-created yardsticks of good and evil, we fought amongst ourselves. This very way of living of ours was actually, as Meishu-sama says, our posture of disobeying God, our hostility toward God, our warring against Him, wasn’t it? No human wisdom or effort could change this kind of human posture of disobeying God. I cannot help but think that, on Meishu-sama’s side, this is precisely why he believed in God, who sent Jesus to the world to forgive human beings for disobeying Him, and received, with his whole body and being, the blood Jesus shed to atone for those sins and the blessing from it. On God’s side, He accepted the blood that Jesus offered, forgave us, reconciled us to Himself and welcomed us into heaven. Peace exists in heaven. God lives in that heaven. It is because our reconciliation with God exists there that reconciliation and peace between the people of this world is possible, is it not? As ones who have received the atoning blood of Jesus, I would like for us to offer the following thoughts to God: “O God, You allowed us to be reconciled to You. I will return to heaven together with everyone and everything, so please govern over all of us with the peace and comfort that lies with You.” In this way, God sets out to bring peace that exists in the name of Messiah through us. As we praise this God, let us dedicate ourselves still further in the practice of the true three pillars of salvation—prayer, food and music. And as the dedicatory work for the construction of the Sacred Ground of Soil that was born last year in July in the land of Angola, in Africa, has begun, and as the members in Brazil burn with a passion of possibly taking on the mission to construct the Sacred Ground of Water, let us deeply engrave into our hearts the noble heart of Meishu-sama who poured his utmost strength into the construction of sacred grounds as projections of heaven. Let each one of us put in our all toward the construction of the Sacred Ground of Fire that is the Holy Sanctuary of the Messiah, and together with many people, let us become ones who can always turn our hearts to the heaven existing within us. Let us determine within ourselves that through the outgoing and incoming breath and the incoming and outgoing breath, the blessing in the name of Messiah that God already accomplished in heaven may be shared with all of humanity and all its paternal and maternal ancestors who are connected to Israel, with all the children who will be born into this world from now on and with all creation, and thus serve in the divine work of creating the future. For all of you who serve God in this way, I pray that this year will be a year of hope, filled with light and comfort. Thank you very much.