'You pore over the scriptures, believing that in them you can find eternal life; it is these scriptures that testify to me, and yet you refuse to come to me to receive life!'
JOHN 5: 39-40
Sometimes we get so caught up on the aspects of Christianity, on the "things that we believe" and the "things we are supposed to do" that we forget that Christ should be the center of our faith (and of our whole lives). This happens a lot especially when we start fighting other Christian brothers and sisters of different denominations: "you're wrong", "that's not in the Bible", "you're church is evil!". What if instead of accusing each other of what we think it's wrong in our respective denominations we realize that it is Christ who we praise and adore as our savior. We are all still his Church!!! And look, He is telling us how the Bible should be a big fat arrow that points to Him, not a motive of division among us! May we be one, just as He is one with the Father!!!! If reading the Bible is making you hard-hearted and not leading you to Jesus, then you're not getting the message!!
Always remember He is the truth, the way, and the life! May we come to Him to receive His Spirit!!!
'Can a woman forget her baby at the breast, feel no pity for the child she has borne? Even if these were to forget, I shall not forget you.'
ISAIAH 49:15
I love this verse of the Bible, you guys. It makes me tremble!!! You know, we constantly think of God as a father figure, and many people think of Him as a God who punishes (we've talked about this more than enough). But to have God compare himself to a mother... that's weird, huh? But it's so beautiful and so reassuring. Because when I am afraid, when I am worried, when I am sad, when I feel like my life is falling apart, I tend to have this reaction: I want my mommy. And to have the all-powerful, all-knowing, omnipresent God of eternity tell us that even if a mother forget her baby He will never forget us is well... awe-stricking. Moms don't really need a reason to love us other than our being their kids, right? It's the same with God. Love for love's sake.
Except God tells us that His love goes a step further because, even if you have a broken relationship or don't have a relationship at all with the person who is supposed to love you the most, He, Yahweh, will never forget you. Your name is engraved in the palms of His hands. You are forever His!!!!!!!! And God's love did go a step further when He sent Jesus to pay off the debt of our sins.
Oh, if we could fully comprehend the love of God, if we could fully understand those words, I shalll never forget you. Never ever ever ever ever ever never ever never never never never. I hope I'm getting the point across.
And if you feel like "well, God, my mom in fact did forget me" or "my mom doesn't love me" or the like, God is here for you, to heal that hurt. And if you feel like "eeh... no... I just can't see God as my mother figure... it's weird," well, guess what? He has that covered too. At the foot of the cross, when Jesus is dying for our sins, He tells his apostle John "behold, your mother", referring to Jesus' own mom, Mary. So Jesus gives John a mother and thus symbolically gives us a mother. Imagine! Mary had to see her son being killed in the most brutal way and knowing it was because of our sins. Yet she still forgives us and loves us and cares about us!
So, may you feel the overwhelming, awe-striking, revolutionizing love of God. And may you find in Mary the tender love you seek!
14 After a while Jesus met him in the Temple and said, 'Now you are well again, do not sin any more, or something worse may happen to you.' JOHN 5:14
Uuugghhhhh... this is one of those passages in the Bible that might not sit well with a lot of people. Is that a threat, Jesus? Are you saying that bad things will happen if you don't do what you ask? What happened to the God of endless mercy?! Cris, you said God wasn't a revengeful guy, that He wasn't out to get us!!! Yeah, yeah, I know what I said. And I still stand 100% behind that statement. Look, our God is as much a God of mercy as He is a God of perfect justice. And the thing is, sometimes the things that happen to us are just consequences of our messing up really badly, you know? Not always, but sometimes... yes. Like when a drunk driver gets into an accident. Now, you are probably saying "well, but what about the person who was in the other car and had not been drinking? Why should God allow that to happen to them?!?!?" This is true, they don't deserve it. But you and I have to realize that sin has consequences and that those consequences don't always affect just us. They hurt other people too. And no, it's not fair to those people, but that's the nature of sin. It can happen to anyone, any time. And it's devastating and awful and I'm truly sorry, from the bottom of my heart, if you or one of your loved ones has been a victim of someone else's sin. May God grant you healing and peace! Now, back to this whole threatening business. Remember, God is always trying to reach out to us, to encounter us, to show us how He loves us. But sometimes we are so blinded by our selfishness, our arrogance, and our pride that we fail to see Him or hear Him. God is beckoning you gently with His right hand and you don't listen, so what does He do? He uses his left hook to knock you out. He allows things to happen--yes, bad things--because He knows that's the only way you'll turn to Him, at least to yell at Him. Trust me, this is what happened to me. Only through a sport's injury, the loss of all my friends, and financial problems was He able to get me to turn to Him, initially to only say 'WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME?!?!?!?!' Before that, I just kept trying to rely on myself. So, to some of us stubborn people, God may have to be a little rougher. The solution to this is to simply surrender your life to Him, then He doesn't have to do that kind of thing, you know? I'm not saying that means nothing bad would ever happen to you--tough situations are part of life (and so is death). But when we don't give our lives to God, then we sink further and further into sin and those bad situations are basically impossible to face because we don't have the hope of having an amazing, all-powerful, all-loving God there to help us through! So Jesus is not threatening... He's simply letting us know gently that if we decide to remain in sin our lives will only get worse. May the Lord break our chains and may we, by holding onto Him, be truly free!!! If you are experiencing a rough time in your life or a difficult situation, don't forget that, above all, God loves you tremendously. Ask Him to get your through this and to let you see His hand in your life. May this difficulty produce good fruit in your life.
11 You have turned my mourning into dancing, you have stripped off my sackcloth and clothed me with joy.
12 So my heart will sing to you unceasingly, Yahweh, my God, I shall praise you for ever.
PSALM 30:11-12
Oh, well, look at that. A joyful reading, for once? Well, that's nice, thank you, God. Thank you for this foggy Monday morning and thank you for an awesome lunch. Thank you for letting me wake up this morning.
See, I know life gets rough and sometimes--particularly on Mondays--we just feel like AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH BLEEEEEERRRGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH ASDFJKASDLFJASDFLJASJSDF. But we are alive. And God has given us all beautiful things. We just have to look hard sometimes. There is beauty all around us--and I do realize that sounds super cliched, but it is nevertheless true. We are blessed, in different ways and to different extents, but we are.
Let the Lord turn your mourning into dancing, and strip you from your sackcloth and clothe you with joy! Sometimes we need an attitude check, and God can help you turn that frown upside-down (WOW, I'm just full of cliches today).
But once we see the blessings in our lives, we want to praise the Lord at all times. Because life is beautiful and amazing and mind-blowing. And for all those things that are missing, well... God's there to fill in the blank. Ask Him to flood you with joy. Ask Him to mend the holes in your heart. Trust in His plan. Trust that He will get you through this. He is watching you.
35 Jesus heard they had ejected him, and when he found him he said to him, 'Do you believe in the Son of man?'
36 'Sir,' the man replied, 'tell me who he is so that I may believe in him.'
37 Jesus said, 'You have seen him; he is speaking to you.'
38 The man said, 'Lord, I believe,' and worshipped him.
JOHN 9:35-38
This passage of the Gospel according to John makes my jaw drop to the floor. A man, who had been blind his whole life, is healed by Jesus and immediately realises that He is the Christ, the Messiah. Let me break it down for you:
Jesus: 'Do you believe in the Messiah?'
Blind guy: 'well, who is it?'
Jesus: 'It's me!'
Blind guy: 'Okay!' *starts worshipping him*
Now, our society might look at this guy and say 'whoa, take it easy man! How are you just going to start worshiping some guy you just met?'
But, you see, this guy was blind. Had always been blind. He had never, ever, ever seen the world, a human face, himself! And here comes Jesus and opens his eyes for the first time. And the thing about the blind man's story that is very ironic is that, while he was physically blind, the "eyes" (so to speak) of his heart were open to the revelation of God through Jesus. Meanwhile, the pharisees, who didn't have visual impairments, were blinded by their arrogance and could not recognize Jesus as their saviour! I mean, if you read the passage, the blind man tells them: "You think he's bad? SERIOUSLY? Like, God doesn't do miracles through bad people. We all know this...right?"
SO, my friend, who are you: the blind man or the pharisee? Remember, I said yesterday that I am the pharisee. Well, God loves even the pharisees, and there's hope for us. Notice how in this passage, the evangelist also says that there was conflict among the pharisees because some of them did kind of believe Jesus was special!
The ultimate question is: are you blind? Then ask Jesus to heal you.
10 'Two men went up to the Temple to pray, one a Pharisee, the other a tax collector.
11 The Pharisee stood there and said this prayer to himself, "I thank you, God, that I am not grasping, unjust, adulterous like everyone else, and particularly that I am not like this tax collector here.
12 I fast twice a week; I pay tithes on all I get."
13 The tax collector stood some distance away, not daring even to raise his eyes to heaven; but he beat his breast and said, "God, be merciful to me, a sinner."
14 This man, I tell you, went home again justified; the other did not. For everyone who raises himself up will be humbled, but anyone who humbles himself will be raised up.'
LUKE 18:10-14
We, human beings, have a tendency to be arrogant. When we wander around the world without God, we think that we can do it all on our own. And once we realise that only God is our happiness, we can still fall in the trap of holier-than-thou. It's sooooo easy to see how God blesses us and how He acts in our lives, that we can end up acting like the pharisee, saying "thank you God for making me a good person, not like them..."
Don't get me wrong--everyday, I thank God because He rescued me from the person I was becoming and He protected me in very dangerous situations I kept putting myself in as a teenager and young adult. And I feel so lucky that Jesus and Mama Mary protected me (thanks to the prayers of my mother, mostly) from falling deeper into sin. But this doesn't make me better than you, or you, or you! And I ask God to please give the not only the humility to recognize that I am nothing without Him and that all that I have is thanks to Him, but the love to see you, you, and you as His beloved and not feel that I am better than any of you.
Because I was that pharisee. And I am fighting not to be anymore, and I pray that God helps me not to be it anymore. Because, see... pharisees were not murders, or thieves... they were righteous people, role-models even. But in the process of going through a checklist of "things to do" they forgot that the number one thing to do was to love God, and their neighbours as themselves (which we talked about yesterday).
And I'm not saying that "oh, since being a pharisee is bad, let's just be sinners!" No! Because Jesus explains to us that the tax collector was truly sorry for his sins and clamoring for God's mercy. It's not like "oooh.. well, I'll just do this and I'll just say I'm sorry later " (which many people think that is what the sacrament of confession/reconciliation is like. HINT: it's not).
All I'm trying to say here is that we should all strive for the perfection of the pharisee while at the same time recognize that we need God's mercy, like the tax collector did. It is important to do good things that appear good and not good things that appear evil because we need to give testimony of our relationship with Christ. But our relationship should be a thing of the heart, the will, the soul, and the mind as well as an external demonstration.
So, what if instead of pointing fingers and saying "thank you God that I'm not like her or him" we say "Lord, have mercy on this friend, or this family member, or this coworker. He/she needs you so much. Please reveal yourself to him/her. May he/she encounter you and feel your love!"
I want you to know that the purpose of this blog is not to point fingers in a pharisee-like way. This blog is me saying to you "Hey, I'm broken, I'm plagued with flaws, but the Lord loves me so much. And I love Him. And knowing Him is the best thing that has ever happened to me. And He loves you too. And He's died for you. And He wants to hang out with you. Call Him!"
If God can love me, an ordinary pharisee, be sure that He loves you.
28 One of the scribes who had listened to them debating appreciated that Jesus had given a good answer and put a further question to him, 'Which is the first of all the commandments?'
29 Jesus replied, 'This is the first: Listen, Israel, the Lord our God is the one, only Lord,
30 and you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength.
31 The second is this: You must love your neighbour as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.'
MARK 12: 28-31
Well, if you wanted a condensed version of what God wants from you, this is it. It doesn't get any simpler than that. All the other commandments stem from this. And we've talked about it--when you love God, you want to please Him and do what is good.
But I think we might have a bigger problem with the second half of this commandment. And not because loving 'thy neighbour' is hard (it really is), but because too many of us struggle with loving ourselves.
Just as we are. Just as we look.
Yeah, you might think this is usually a girl issue, but I've met countless men who struggle with loving themselves as well. And the thing is, if you don't love yourself, it is impossible for you to truly love others. Because when we don't love ourselves, we start looking to other people for reassurance, for giving us a self-esteem boost, for making us feel important. And that's not real love... that's more like selfishness. Love is about giving without expecting in return! Love is Christ in the cross!!!
So if you struggle to accept yourself as you are: short, too tall, chubby, skinny, too dark, too pale, etc etc etc... lift up your heart to Jesus today. Ask Him to let you see yourself as He sees you!
Oh, and if you're narcissistic and think you are the hottest thing in this planet--well, bad news bears... you're doing it wrong. We are not beautiful because the world, the over-sexualizing media, tells us. We are beautiful simply because we were created by Him who only makes beautiful, good, whole things!!! And we were made in love--no matter if your parents say you were 'an accident'. God had you planned since before you were born. You are no accident. You are precious. You are worthy. You are enough!
I struggle with my body-image too. But I ask Jesus to fill up the holes made by my insecurities with His love and joy! Come Holy Spirit, come heal our hearts and minds from the unrealistic expectations of this world. Come move within us!
May the Lord teach you how to truly love yourself, that you may love others and change the world!
