SUNDAY SERMON: Nothing goes wrong when doing God’s will
As long as we are ready to do the will of God, nothing can go wrong, no matter how “wrong it goes” in the eyes of the world. PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP
What you need to know:
- Don’t worry too much about what the world calls victories or defeats.
- Give thanks to the Lord and try again.
It's common wisdom to talk about the glass that’s half empty and the glass that’s half full. Christ wants us to be as optimistic as anyone else. But Christian optimism is a bit different.
Worldly optimism ultimately aims at success. Christian optimism aims at doing the will of God. As one of the saints wrote: “Don’t worry too much about what the world calls victories or defeats. How often the ‘victor’ ends up defeated! You say you’ve failed? We never fail. You placed your confidence completely in God. And you did not neglect the human means. Convince yourself of this truth: your success this time was to fail. Give thanks to the Lord and try again.”
Worldly optimism is mostly based on the “power of positive thinking” — or in the extreme case, the advice I often heard when I was growing up: “Fake it till you make it.” There’s nothing wrong with the notion of positive thinking. But worldly optimism tends to focus on “celebrity success”. In other words, less on doing good things and more on being noticed.
Christian optimism aims at doing good and succeeding at it. But failure doesn’t make a Christian depressed. More importantly, success doesn’t make us proud because we would rather pass unnoticed.
Mother Teresa of Calcutta, the nun who spent her life taking care of the poorest of the poor, was given the Nobel Peace Prize and achieved something akin to celebrity status. But then people turned against her when she encountered failure.
A journalist then asked her: “What do you think about your mission now that you are no longer a success?” Mother Teresa answered: “Jesus did not ask me to be successful. He only asked me to be faithful.”
St Paul wrote in the Letter to the Romans: “We know that, by turning everything to their good, God works together with all those who love him.” What does the apostle mean?
Let’s say you’re married and you have been trying for many years to have a child without any success. From a human point of view, you and spouse can feel like a failure. You may even have relatives who look down on you or talk behind your back. Pay no attention to those wagging tongues and remember that God is going to use this “failure” for something good. How? That’s up to God. That’s what St Paul means when he talks about God “turning everything to good”.
This is the secret of Christian optimism. As long as we are ready to do the will of God, nothing can go wrong, no matter how “wrong it goes” in the eyes of the world.
