Does your faith involve the whole of your being?
The prophet Jeremiah at times has issues with God’s methods: You duped me, O Lord, and I let myself be duped, he says. God calls Jeremiah as a prophet but God doesn’t give Jeremiah his whole message immediately, and Jeremiah suffers rejection because of it. And yet, when Jeremiah decides he’s done – I say to myself I will say his name no more – he realizes that his bond with the Lord nevertheless continues, a bond that is physical as well as spiritual: God’s name becomes like fire burning in his heart, imprisoned in his bones. Having opened himself to the love of God, Jeremiah continues to experience that love in his heart and flesh both, an experience that causes him to maintain his total commitment to the Lord in spite of himself.
If we are, as Peter does in Matthew’s Gospel, to proclaim Jesus as the living God, then we need to mean it in the depth of our beings, and live accordingly, denying ourselves, abandoning any self-interest, recognizing that we belong utterly to God. We live by the grace of God, we exist because of God alone, and so we must dedicate ourselves wholly to life in him, accepting the cross, surrendering all, physically and spiritually, to the Lord. Paul reminds the Romans that they must offer their bodies as a living sacrifice, dedicating the whole of themselves to the love they are called to. God created us whole, spirit and flesh, with a a capacity to know him and to love him. Self-focus, self-interest, the flesh: none of this has any place in that relationship. If we were thus transformed by the renewal of our minds, we would constantly echo the refrain of Psalm 63: my soul is thirsting for you, O Lord my God. It is an expression of our desire for God that consumes both spirit and flesh, and for a life in which no aspect of our lives is not engaged by God. Faith has to involve the whole of who we are, the entirety of our being. May we too long at every moment to experience the presence of the God like a fire burning in our hearts, that we might know the depths of his constant love.
This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.
Image source: www.wordclouds.com
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