SUNDAY SERMON: By grace we are purified and sustained
Learn to trust yourself less and trust God more. PHOTO | FOTOSEARCH
What you need to know:
- You can learn a lot by examining what it means to have faith in God.
- Don’t be afraid to admit that, despite your efforts to do all the right things, you have some serious defects.
- Learn to trust yourself less and trust God more.
Has anyone ever talked to you about going deeper in love for God? If you’re interested in discovering what that is all about, begin with these words from the Letter to the Hebrews: “Let us leave behind us all the elementary teaching about Christ and go on to its completion, without going over the fundamental doctrines again... This, God willing, is what we propose to do.”
It never hurts to review the basics. You can learn a lot by examining what it means to have faith in God, even though you have covered it dozens of times. It also helps to go beyond that.
The Letter to the Hebrews stresses the need to overcome two weaknesses, which may be holding us back. First, we may be upset with God because of unanswered prayers. We think he has failed to do something we feel is absolutely necessary for our happiness. The letter reminds us: “We all had our human fathers who punished us, and we respected them for it; all the more readily ought we to submit to our spiritual Father, and so earn life.”
If I might use the phrase, a second weakness consists in being “stuck” in the Old Testament. Because we “keep the Law”, we think our fulfilment of the Law is the one thing that makes us pleasing to God. This, in turn, makes us all the more upset with God when he seems to refuse to answer our prayers.
The letter explains all this by comparing the Old and New Testaments. The first testament was focused on Mount Sinai, where God’s appearance terrified everyone, even Moses. The second testament is different: “What you have come to is Mount Zion and the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem where the millions of angels have gathered for the festival, with the whole Church of first-born sons, enrolled as citizens of heaven. You have come to God himself, the supreme Judge, and to the spirits of the upright who have been made perfect; and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to purifying blood which pleads more insistently than Abel’s.”
What does this have to do with going deeper? Don’t be afraid to admit that, despite your efforts to do all the right things, you have some serious defects. Learn to trust yourself less and trust God more. Learn to believe, as one saint said, that “Jesus was just as happy with Peter’s repentance after his fall as he was with John innocence.” If you can live with no stain of sin, wonderful. But don’t despair if you see that you need to be purified by grace not just once or twice but many times.
