God Is Speaking! Are We Listening?
Are we listening to what the Lord is saying to us?
Are we listening to what the Lord is saying to us? When we undergo a crisis of the proportions the Church is suffering right now, scripture always shows that this is God’s way of getting our attention.
Well, has He got your attention yet?
The next thing we learn from scripture is that usually He uses those who are against us to castigate us so that we learn that we strayed from Him.
If we go back to the time of the two kingdoms of the Hebrews: we read of the the prophets and hear them warning the people to change their ways. When the people of Northern Kingdom of Israel did not heed the prophets, the Assyrians came in 722 B.C. and wiped the nation off the map until 1948 A.D.
In 567 King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon conquered the remaining southern kingdom of Judah dragging into exile the political, economic and cultural leaders of the nation. The nation was restored under King Cyrus of Persia after the people learned their lesson to heed the word of God.
God always proceeded these actions by a call to reconversion and to be faithful to the covenant through His prophets. Judah, until 70 A. D. when the Romans destroyed the Temple. In both cases, and the many in between, there were great warnings by the prophets that went unheeded.
Are we listening to what God has to say to us and are we acting on what we are hearing?
God would send his prophets to make a radical call to conversion when his people fell into idolatry. When they turned their back on the Lord and turned instead to the foreign gods and cultures of the nations that surrounded them and they practiced the rituals in adoration of those gods in those cultures.
As Catholics, we can only worship God through Christ, we cannot worship any other god even in the name of Christ. We have to understand that anything we seek that is not Christ is a form of idolatry that God calls us to remove from our lives.
Have we, in fact, done this?
Consider those who reject our faith and who live alternative lifestyles even those we consider sinful, but who put their own lives on the line in order to stand up for what they believe. Now consider how many people claim to be Catholics but who do not even attend Mass for the slightest excuse.
from a recent homily:
“How many people do not go to Mass because they are too busy, too tired, they have baseball practice, they have football practice, hockey, basketball, they want to read the Sunday newspaper they don’t want to go to church, the crisis turned them away from Christ, they want to sleep in, how many excuses can I give.”
People feel that God is so merciful that they can just ignore Him completely because He does not mind. He will forgive them for their ignoring Him — after all, He is the nice old man or as Bill Maher calls him sarcastically, the invisible friend in the sky.
Is He? No. At our baptism He called us to testify to his unlimited love to the world around us. The way we testify is by our lives. If we are not attending Mass and not receiving communion worthily, then we are testifying with our lives against what we claim with our lips and that is exactly what God condemns.
St. John Vianney taught that “It is by deeds and not by words that we show whether we really love God.”1
Meanwhile, God will be more merciful to those willing to put their lives on the line for what they believe in, in service to others, even though they reject what we believe.
The mechanism that allow us to believe we can ignore God is the sin of presumption which literally is: “God is all merciful so I can do anything I want and he will forgive me anyway.” Cf Psalm 19:13 It is a sin against the Holy Spirit and cuts us off from God’s love for we take it for granted. We are like the son who borrows his father’s car, accelerates it to one hundred miles per hour and puts it in reverse knowing that his mild father will forgive him anyway.*
Meanwhile, God will be more merciful to those willing to put their lives on the line for what they believe in, in service to others, even though they reject what we believe. Why? They in their seeking to do good in some form, risked all they have, whereas those who claim to be servants of He who is the source of all good act aloof to the mild demands He places upon them.
If history tells us anything, when God speaks, it is best that we listen and respond. Are we?
*Today that would do no damage as there are computer based safeties in place, but I know a case in the 1970’s where a man’s car transmission had failed. Apparently, his son did the above egged on by his friends. It was a tragic lack of respect for his father.
Photo: Benjamin West [Public domain]
1 Vianney, St. Jean Marie, Fourteenth Sunday After Pentecost; Sermons of the Curé of Ars; 1996 Keeping It Catholic publishing Kindle Version