050225

 

First Friday
Weeping over daily Mass at Knock
So contrite and sad and sorry for my sins

Spent an hour or so organizing prayers

Reading TLWoT while on bike for 70m
God knew this is EXACTLY what I need to be reading actually; there is such beautiful reverence of FOOD & SCENT. Sensual things seen and described lovingly AS THE GIFTS OF GOD THEY ARE.

Praying to God to help me overcome OCD rituals
Only took like 5 minutes today!! THAT'S AMAZING!!
Thank you Jesus and Mary!!

Bible App= I NEEDED THIS EXACT CONSOLATION TODAY
https://www.bible.com/en/videos/49334?orientation=portrait&utm_content=STORY_CLIP&utm_medium=SHARE&utm_source=YVAPP

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...sharing of our resources with another person as a way of either reinforcing good relationships or building good relationships when they’ve been damaged by something is something that we’ve always done and it’s built into human nature. You find this kind of reciprocity in every human culture, and so it’s natural for humans to take what they do with themselves and apply it to the divine as well, either God or the gods... if you want good relations with the divine or if you want to repair relations when they’ve been damaged, well, you do the same thing, you present a gift. You offer something to the person you want good relations with whether it’s a human or a God, and that offering, that gift you offer, is an offering or a sacrifice.

The concept of sacrifice is found in every human culture. Every human culture has a religion, every human culture has some form of sacrifice. It just is a question of what form does it take and that tends to be, it’s not exclusively based, but it tends to be based on what kind of resources do people have. 

We find all of these being taken up in scripture where God working with the ancient Hebrew people, He’d given them human nature and all of this sacrifice stuff falls right out of human nature, and so given the cultural context at the time God, even though He himself doesn’t have any needs and so He doesn’t need sacrifices... but He’s willing to accept these from them as a human gesture that they want good relations with God and they want to say they’re sorry when they’ve sinned and things like that. 

Now, when you offer a gift to someone, especially if it’s a really important person and you really want good relations with them, you want to give them as expensive a gift as you can afford. If you’re meeting with, let’s say, a president or a pope, you don’t want to just give them a pack of gum. You want to give them something nicer than that. There’s a tendency to say, okay, what’s the most precious thing I have and if I give the person the most precious thing I can give them, that signifies a lot of goodwill on my part and hopefully they’ll display a lot of goodwill back to me.
Well, the most precious thing a lot of people have is their kids, and so at various points in world history there have been cultures that have been built around sacrificing or that have involved sacrificing other human beings... and so we find strict prohibitions on human sacrifice and specifically child sacrifice in the Bible. This is a distortion of spirituality, this is evil, this is not something God wants, this is an abomination... Yes, God does want your devotion that puts Him above everything else but, no, He does not want you to literally sacrifice your children.

You cut the first sheaf and then you take that to the temple and give it to the priests, and the priests would then present it to God as what’s called a waive offering. They would carry it in front of God, and then after it’s been presented to God it gets to be eaten, because God doesn’t need it, it gets to be eaten by God’s officials, by his subordinate workers, by priests.


⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️❤❤❤❤❤God is not bound to forgive us in any particular way or to forgive us at all, so it’s His choice when we’ve sinned, it’s God’s choice to forgive us. Now, He’s made that choice and He’s chosen certain means to do it...He chose to send Jesus to the cross...

⭐⭐[He forgave us in this particular way partly] to build on these elements that are part of human nature, because people all over the world understand the concept of gift giving and sacrifice and establishing good relations by these means and repairing damaged relations by these means. By building on this pattern, this is something people all over the world WOULD be able to understand on an intuitive, emotional level once the details are explained to them... It’s part of the universality of the gospel, the image of Jesus on the cross offering himself, because he’s not just the sacrifice, he’s also the priest who’s offering the sacrifice. This is a self-offering, and so it shows us God’s love for us that He’s WILLING to do this. He’s willing to undergo this horrible ordeal on our behalf... this demonstrates God’s love for us.

‼️‼️‼️...it shows us the gravity of our sins, the fact that it took the death of the son of God to atone for them, shows us just how awful our sins against an infinitely holy God are, the ingratitude that we show an infinitely holy God when we do something gravely contrary to His will when we commit mortal sin. It takes THIS to atone for that. As the author of Hebrews says, the blood of bulls and goats could never take away sin. Bulls and goats have a little bit of value, but they don’t stack up to our sins. This requires something much more than that to really make atonement for that, and so that’s why God took that on Himself because we didn’t have the ability TO pay that price, but He DID and so He CHOSE to do it out of His LOVE for us.


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 There’s got to be some way in which we continue to participate in that sacrificial way of thinking about life... We actually participate in a number of ways. Now, the way that many people will think of first is through the Eucharist, because the Eucharistic sacrifice is the current outworking of Jesus’s sacrifice to the cross. The cross happened once for all, Jesus died once, he’s not dying again, but in heaven he continues to intercede for us with his father on the basis of what he did on the cross, and the sacrifice of the mass is the earthly outworking of that ongoing intercession that Christ is doing in heaven. As part of the Eucharist, people bring up the elements and that’s part of the way in which ordinary Christians today participate in a ritual of sacrifice. We also bring up other offerings. They take up the collection or the offering at mass.
Now, today, since we don’t live in a primarily agrarian society but one with a developed economy where people have money, people tend to give money... today because money is more convenient for us, that’s what we tend to use for the offering although some people donate other things...Those are ways we do it.
(MONEY = POWER, FREEDOM, CHOICE, CONTROL = GIVE ALL THAT TO GOD!!)

⭐⭐⭐Also, we find a parallel stream in the Bible of a kind of spiritual sacrifice in addition to the physical offerings that were presented at the temple. Praise, for example, is described as a sacrifice in scripture, because what you’re doing there is you’re offering something, the gift of praise to God, to establish good relations or repair damaged relations. You’re praising him for his goodness, and so praise becomes a kind of spiritual sacrifice. Also, and this is right there in Romans 12. Now, by the way, I want to comment on something. Some people associate sacrifice too closely with death. They think a death has to occur in order for something to be a sacrifice. We’ve seen that’s not the case here. People, when they offered the first sheaf of wheat, they just waived it for God. They didn’t destroy it, so it didn’t involve a death, or pouring out a drink offering like they did at the temple, nobody dies when you’re pouring out a drink offering. That’s just a symbolic way of giving it to God. Same thing with praise, praise doesn’t involve a death.
Well, in Romans 12:1, you have a very interesting passage. It actually seems to, in a way, hark back to an incident in the Old Testament. If you look in Numbers, Chapter 8, there’s a moment where God has the entire tribe of Levi, all of the Levites, presented to God as a waive offering to consecrate them to God’s service at the tabernacle. They obviously aren’t dying, they are a living sacrifice. They’re being presented to God so that they can serve Him. Well, we find in Romans 12:1 St. Paul telling his Christian audience, “Present your bodies to God as a living sacrifice, for this is your spiritual worship.” By living for God and consecrating our actions to God, we, like the Levites, are a living sacrifice that is presented to Him, and that’s part of our spiritual worship is by living for God. That’s also part of why in the prayers in the mass the priest talks about, “We’re presenting the entire people to God,” and so this has an echo there as well.
Today as Christians, we still perform sacrifices in a variety of ways. Sometimes we give monetary sacrifices, sometimes we donate time to helping people, to doing good works. That’s a way of presenting our bodies to God as his servant, so that’s part of our spiritual worship. We sacrifice our time, we sacrifice in the Eucharist, and we also sacrifice praise, so we have a bunch of ways in which sacrifice is still a part of our faith even though we no longer do the animal thing anymore.


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Grace is the basis of salvation and the standard for Christian living. Peace is part of the fruit of the Spirit and a frequent trait mentioned as important for Christian living... Both grace and peace come from the Father and the Son.

While salvation from the penalty of sin happens at the moment a person accepts Christ, the process of becoming more like Christ is exactly that: a process. Paul is completely sure that this "sanctification" will continue in the lives of these believers... that God will continue to sanctify the believers... This conviction comes from Paul's trust in the power of Jesus Christ... this assurance is grounded in the work of Jesus Christ.
...Paul has no doubts about their salvation and their faithful service to Christ.

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ministry of the gospel... included defense (speaking against false teaching) and confirmation (positively presenting the gospel).

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...one of the more convicting things about reading prayers like that is what we discover about his priorities and hopefully ours as well. Whereas nothing is off limits in prayer, certain things ought to be front and center... Paul prays for an increase in love and knowledge and discernment and purity and righteousness and the glory of God...  I trust that the Holy Spirit can bring to bear on our hearts whatever conviction we need to feel about how we pray both for ourselves and for others!

Paul does not tell us whether this love is to be for God or for one another, probably because he intends both. One thing is certain: any professed love for God that does not find expression in a love for others is hypocrisy! In fact, it is simply impossible... How does your love for the Name of God display itself? By “serving the saints.” ...when non-Christians look upon us from the outside the one thing that will impress them is how we love one another. They couldn’t care less about the excellence of our Sunday services or the precision of our theological understanding. What will captivate their hearts and bring them back for more is the way we put aside petty personal preferences and selfish ambition and envy and competitiveness and love one another as God in Christ has loved us.

⭐⭐⭐...he wants to see it increase and deepen and intensify. We never love perfectly in this life. There are always flaws in our feelings for others and ways in which our generosity and sacrifice and service for them fall short. As much as we might otherwise prefer, we can never reach a point in our relationship with one another where we feel satisfied and content and think that we’ve done enough. We can never rest on our laurels of love and say, “Well, I’ve just about exhausted what is possible in loving this person. They ought to be thankful for what I’ve done for them.” No. Love is never a static achievement for the Christian but always and ever a dynamic process of growth and expansion and improvement... Love CAN increase far beyond what we think is possible. We may believe that we have loved to the full extent possible for us, that our hearts are stretched to the breaking, that we have at some point reached the limit of what is reasonable to ask of a human being, but Paul evidently believed that love could grow and expand and become increasingly more passionate and authentic and could express itself in far more concrete and tangible ways than we have even begun to imagine.
Here he prays not simply for the maintenance of love in their midst, not simply that they hold fast to the status quo, but that they experience excess, fullness, an overflowing, a love that ignores boundaries, a love that knows no limits!

⭐⭐‼️‼️Listen again to how Paul said it in 1 Thessalonians 3:12 - “and may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, as we do for you.” If their love is to increase, indeed if our love for one another is to increase, God has to make it happen. Yes, we are responsible to love others, to do whatever is needed to clear away obstacles and to extend forgiveness and to overcome bitterness and jealousy and envy and rivalry and all the sinful impulses that hinder us from loving others. Yet it is clear that Paul believed God MUST be present and prior, working in our hearts TO make this possible. After all, if love were entirely within OUR power to produce, why would Paul have bothered in praying for it? He goes to the throne of grace and asks God to work in the hearts of these people to alert them to ways in which their love is weak and self-serving, asks him to enlighten their minds to see the depths of how God has loved them in Christ, and pleads with God that his Spirit might convict them and stir them and empower them and enable them to overcome the defensiveness and selfishness that so often hinders our love for others.

⭐⭐⭐True and lasting and Christ-like love must be characterized by knowledge... knowledge of God and his ways and in particular the manner in which he loves sinners like you and me... Our love must be grounded in and flow out of a knowledge of why we should love... to love well we must understand how we ourselves are loved by God in Christ... if we are to forgive one another properly and sincerely we must first be fully aware of and in touch with the depths of the forgiveness that God has given us in Christ... It isn’t enough simply to exhort a Christian to love. We need to go deeply into the knowledge of what it means when he says that “Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” Here we are given not only the ground or reason why we love others but also the pattern or paradigm we are to imitate as we love others.

‼️‼️‼️People love others for all sorts of illegitimate reasons: they feel it is their moral obligation, but their heart isn’t engaged; some are trying to repay a debt they think they owe; others are trying to put someone else in their debt, hoping that by “loving” them the other person will do something in return; and then of course sometimes what passes for “love” is mere flattery. This is loving without knowledge... we only love well and to the glory of God when our love for one another is driven and energized and governed by the knowledge of the kind of love that God had for us in Christ. That’s the simple reason why you will never be able to love someone in “knowledge” so long as you live in ignorance of the gospel.

‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️...true love, the sort of love that will accomplish good in the life of the beloved, must be characterized by discernment... the spiritual ability to make difficult moral decisions in the midst of a vast array of competing and confusing choices. Gullible and naïve love is worse than bad. It is destructive... We must remember that no matter how passionate we feel, no matter how extensive our sacrifice may be, we have not loved someone well if we fail to awaken them to the perilous condition in which their sin has placed them. If you think loving someone well means you keep silent about both the temporal and the eternal consequences of their beliefs and their behavior, you are sadly mistaken. You are loving in the absence of discernment. If you love someone without speaking the truth to them for fear that it might hurt their feelings or damage your relationship with them or get them in trouble with someone else, you have failed to love them well. Loving with discernment means that you never communicate your affection or support for them in such a way that they feel free to continue in a lifestyle of unrepentant sin. If you in any way endorse their behavior or minimize its immorality or simply write it off as if everyone is entitled to live as they please, or if you love in such a way that you are fearful of passing judgment on them, you have failed them, you have not loved them well... To shower someone with love and affirmation and affection without fulfilling the painful and costly task of pointing out to them the eternal consequences of their sin is not only not loving them, it is loving yourself more than you love them. Your refusal to identify their sin and call them to repentance is probably done to protect yourself, to guard your own heart from the distress that will likely come from creating discord in the relationship. You’re afraid of their anger, their rejection of you, you’re afraid they will label you as prejudiced and arrogant and judgmental. Your so-called love of the other is in actual fact selfish love of self. You are more concerned with how the truth will boomerang and affect you, than you are with the impact their sin will have on them... if it is in fact true that certain unrepentant lifestyle choices threaten your eternal destiny, if it is in fact true that heaven and hell hang suspended on the choices people make in this regard, it is the worst imaginable expression of calloused indifference, indeed hatred, of the other for you not to say so!

...all too often in the name of love people will give a false assurance of salvation to someone who is living in unrepentant unbelief and immorality. Thinking that it would be “unloving” of them to challenge the legitimacy of someone’s profession of faith, they pat them on the back and assure them that although we may not agree with each other right now at least we can all be assured we’ll spend eternity in heaven together. That is not loving! That is the utter absence of discernment and can actually contribute to that person’s damnation! Learning how to love with knowledge and discernment is absolutely essential if we are to “approve what is excellent and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ”... we need to be diligent to cultivate a more discerning and knowledgeable love! He tells us that we need to develop greater moral purity and blamelessness.

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Listen bro stop copypasting you aren't REMEMBERING ANYTHING!!!

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⭐The "love" credited to the Philippian church is not simply a feeling of affection. It is an active, lived-out love... a selfless, sacrificial concern for the benefit of others.
However, Paul is not merely concerned with love. Even though it's a critical characteristic, it's not the only important aspect of the Christian life. He specifically prays for two other qualities: knowledge and discernment.
⭐True, biblical love requires knowledge. We grow in love when we learn more about God's love for us, and about how to love others.
⭐In addition, love includes discernment. Discernment helps us love better by allowing us to focus on God's kind of love. His love is unconditional, rather than human love, which typically focuses on ourselves.

A growing love helps us "approve what is excellent"... love is the "more excellent way"... excellent and profitable for all people. Those who grow in love will be morally pure. 

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Paul is praying for these Christians that their love would grow and overflow. This teaches us something about love. Love does not happen to you but is a decision. Love is a choice within our control... Love is not merely a feeling that have for others but a choice that we make in our minds and hearts. It is a decision to love the Lord our God with all of our heart. In the same way, it is a decision to love our neighbor as ourselves. It is a decision to love one another... It is a decision to grow in love and abound in love. Please consider love as a work in progress. Love expands and grows as we make the decision to act in the interests of God and the interests of one another.

But notice that Paul does not say that you simply must love more. Rather... love must be purposeful and directed... Love must be guided and directed by discerning wisdom. Love must possess with it a knowledge of God and Christ and the things of God. Love must also possess a moral discernment... love does not exclude the mind... Love acts in concert with the mind... We need wisdom and discernment to know what will be the proper act of love to show. Love is not blind. Love is not foolish. Love is wise, discerning, and judicious. In the scriptures, godly love is never spoken of as following your heart and disregarding your mind. Love must have moral discernment. Love for others must be based on the love of God... we are to love with moral discernment and the knowledge that comes from God. We do not just love without discernment, which is the world wants. But that is not what God says. Many times love requires doing hard things... Discernment is necessary so that we will actually do what is loving, not what we think is love.

We must be able to judge what is right and good. We are called to be discerning people. Love abounding in the knowledge of God and in moral discernment is how we walk in Christian purity. Out of our overflowing love for God we will be able to comprehend the excellent and holy things of God. This is an exciting outcome when we consider the holiness of God... God is holy and this is the means by which we will able to know judge what is excellent. Not only will we know right and wrong but we will be able to live at a higher level of spiritual devotion and obedience. Growing in our love for God is how we are able to make the right choices spiritually. This is the way to move from spiritual immaturity... Our actions will come from pure and sincere motives and desires. This is spiritual maturity!
...You will become what God has called you to be, that is, pure and blameless as you await the day of Christ, by determining what is excellent and having spiritual discernment, which only comes from a deepening and growing love for God. Loving God changes how we evaluate life and make decisions. If you wonder why people make decisions that seem so wrong, so illogical, or so strange, this is one of the primary reasons. Drawing nearer to God changes us so that we will discern what is excellent and make decisions that follow the excellent things of God.

⭐⭐⭐Second, as our love grows for the Lord we will be filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ. This is going to lead to explosion of fruit in our lives... You cannot make fruit happen. You cannot will fruit to grow... All that I can do is give the proper care... When growing fruit, all you can do is make the soil ready for planting. Fruit is a natural occurrence. Growing love will result in right living. We do not need to look at the fruit of the Spirit and wonder how to grow in those areas. We must grow in those areas when we draw near to God and abound in love. We cannot help but grow in righteousness. Paul says that we will be filled with righteousness. It is not your working; it is the outcome.

The blessed person is the one who takes his delight in the law of the Lord and meditates on God’s word day and night... What did this person do so that fruit is flourishing? He delighted in the law of the Lord... Fruit is not humanly generated by divinely generated... GOD is doing this work in you. Fruit will occur when we delight in God’s instructions and meditate on them. Jesus said the same thing to his disciples.

Finally, the goal of the transformed life is that glory and praise are given to God... all that has occurred in our rich blessings in Christ is for the praise of his glory... The purpose of our existence is to be to the glory and praise of God. This is the ultimate reason for our actions. We grow in love, which will cause us to be able to choose what is excellent, and bear the fruit of righteousness, so that God is praised and glorified... everything we are doing on this earth is to cause God to be glorified.

⭐⭐Three wonderful results occur when we draw near to God, abounding in love, and delighting in God’s instruction.
1. A transformation will occur in your life. You will be able to discern what is excellent.
2. You will be able to have the spiritual aptitude to choose the right path. You will bear fruit as God desires for you.
3. Your life will be a picture book and monument that brings glory and praise to God. Love the Lord your God and enjoy the rich benefits of a relationship with him.

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The self-sacrifice of the Servant causes many to be accounted righteous because he bore their iniquities as a sacrifice of vicarious atonement.

In this way he makes many to be accounted righteous, not only by removing the barrier of sin that stands between man and God but also by providing the grace needed to live a righteous life.

Evil seemed to prevail over Christ. He is the most innocent man that ever lived on this earth, he is God, but he suffered and died at the hands of the people. But in dying voluntarily for the sins of humanity, by bearing their iniquities, and then rising again on the third day, Christ prevailed over evil once and for all. Evil still exists and people still suffer, but they do not suffer alone, they suffer together with Christ, and they can look forward to their final victory in him. “With his stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5).

Christ’s suffering is redemptive but so is the suffering of each and every person if it is voluntarily accepted. Christians are called to follow the example of Christ. The example of Christ leads to the cross, to the offering of self in love. By uniting their suffering to Christ’s, each Christian can give their offering of self. By not opening their mouth when they are oppressed and afflicted, each Christian can give their offering of self. By joyfully accepting unavoidable suffering, each Christian can give their offering of self.
(OPPOSITE OF LOVE IS PRIDE = PRIDE SAYS "I SHOULDN'T HAVE TO SUFFER")

Before the suffering, death, and resurrection of the Suffering Servant, the Messiah, Jesus, entrance into Heaven was impossible. Man lived under a death curse of his own making. Unable to pay the price for his sins, man could not be cleansed in order to enter into the Heavenly kingdom. Through his sacrifice of vicarious atonement, Jesus, fully man and fully God, paid the price for sins and bore the iniquity of all. By removing the barrier of sin, Christ made way for the Holy Spirit to cleanse each man and to dwell in him, readying him for the kingdom of Heaven.