20110516 New (Lord's Prayer 3)

The Priest's Embolism (expansion of a petition) after the Lord's Prayer

Deliver us, Lord, from every evil, and grant us peace in our day. In your mercy keep us free from sin and protect us from all anxiety as we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.

Evil is real. There’s two main sources of evil: demons and us. Evil is when things are not the way God made them to be. If your leg breaks, that’s evil because you count on your leg to be stable and help you move about. But it’s not as bad as when we choose to do evil. Something bad may have happened to your leg, but when we choose to sin and do evil, we are freely choosing to break our relationship with God. Demons will work hard on us sometimes to push us to sin. They do this because they hate the fact that God chose to become one of us and because we have the freedom to return to God and be forgiven by Him. They are stuck in their evil and hatred and therefore resent us, even though they hate God.

It is important to remember our lesson of justice. Justice is treating each person or group of persons as they should be treated. It is also important to remember that it is justice that leads to peace and not the other way around. You cannot create justice simply by avoiding conflict. Justice is an exercise of love conquering fear. We seem to have an evolutionary push to try and get all we can out of everyone we can. Love for others helps us to get past the fear that we might get hurt or go without and take care of others first. In loving others first, we work to bring justice into our homes, communities, and society.

Only by grace can we do all of these great things. Grace is the life of God shared with us. Grace is God giving us His strength. God is able to give us all the grace we need to love others as we should and avoid sin because God IS Goodness and Love.

It can still be hard to trust in God, though. We know how weak we are, and it’s hard to accept that even God can make us strong enough to be a saint. Even so, it is never good to spend time worrying about something difficult in your life and whether you will be able to overcome it. Rather, take that anxiety and channel it into preparing for trials and struggles. Prepare for the hard things in life like Noah prepared for the flood, but know that God is your strength and protector like David did when he faced Goliath.

Faith, hope, and love are what we call the “theological virtues.” We call them this because they deal with God. We have faith in the one true God. We hope in Him to deliver us from evil and into the heavenly kingdom. And we strive to love Him and love our neighbor as Jesus commanded.

20100707 New (Lord's Prayer 1)

Lord's Prayer Part I

"Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."

God created us to love and serve Him and to be happy with Him in Heaven. At the end of our lives, we hope that is where we shall go. We only know a few things about Heaven, but we know that God loves us and knows what is best for us, therefore we trust that Heaven will be the greatest thing possible for us.

To be able to go to Heaven, however, we must observe God’s law on Earth. God created the whole universe good. In the beginning, some of the angels rebelled and thus were expelled from Heaven. We recognize therefore, that following God’s will is necessary for us to enter Heaven.

Thankfully, we can recognize God’s law, not only in Scripture, but also, using our God-given intellect, in the world around us. This is what we call the “natural law.” Everyone, whether Christian or not, is required by God to observe these laws because they are available to all of us.

As persons who long to be with God in Heaven, we must do all we can to love God and one another on Earth. We must also do what we can to make sure that people treat one another as they should be treated. This is called “justice.” While we cannot make people love each other, we can do things to help make sure that they do not treat one another with injustice. This is part of what we must do to bring a little bit of Heaven’s ways to Earth.