Feed your faith, not your fears

Max Lucado, famous inspirational author of the book Fearless: Imagine Your Life Without Fear, wrote, “Feed your fears and your faith will starve. Feed your faith, and your fears will starve.”

“Can you imagine a life with no fear? What if faith, not fear, was your default reaction to threats?”

“We subject ourselves to a position of fear, allowing anxiety to dominate and define our lives. Joy-sapping worries, day–numbing dread, repeated bouts of insecurity that petrify and paralyze us. Fear will always knock on your door. Just don’t let it in. Learn to trust more and fear less.”
“That’s what Jeremiah did.  He said, ‘I am a man who has seen affliction under the rod of God’s wrath.’   Jerusalem was under siege.  His world collapsed like a sand castle in a typhoon.  His body ached.  His heart was sick.   And Jeremiah faulted God for his horrible emotional distress.  But when he realized how fast he was sinking, he shifted his gaze.”
“He said, ‘But this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, His mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is thy faithfulness.’ Jeremiah altered his thoughts, shifted his attention.  He turned his eyes and looked into the wonder of God.  His troubles didn’t cease, but his discouragement did.”
Lucado said these powerful words and more in his book Fearless.

Steadfast and gratuitous love

When I drive myself to work, I find myself singing a happy tune of the steadfast love of the Lord as uttered by Jeremiah. I have to admit I just learned that song a year ago in a prayer meeting and it became my favorite.

Steadfast love is repeatedly used in the Old Testament, and it is always associated with faithfulness.

God revealed Himself to Israel through Moses as a God of steadfast love as expressed in Exodus 34:6-7, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands...”

This Holy Week, we commemorate the greatest display of God’s steadfast love for His people, the cross of Christ.  “But God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8)
Fr. Joey Rapadas, rector of St. Joseph Seminary of Ipil in Zamboanga City and Religious Studies teacher at the Ateneo de Zamboanga University, wrote in prizedpearl.blogspot.com about gratuitous love as the theme of the 4th Sunday of Lent.

“There’s no such thing as a free lunch, we say.  Everything has a price.  Everything has to be paid.  Even in the theological exposition of the ‘economy of salvation,’ the expiation framework easily makes sense to most of us:  The cross of Christ is some kind of a payment for our sins. To be saved from sin, someone has to pay the price. This logic we understand quite readily.”
“The readings today, fortunately, offer us another way of understanding the mystery of our salvation.  The readings invite us to see our relationship with God from the point of view of God’s gratuitous love.  For this we need to let go first of our fixation to concepts like profit, interest, price, payment.  We need to accept the principle of gratuity:  The best things in life are for free.”
“Something is gratuitous when it is offered unwarranted, undeserved, unmerited.  It is pure gift. Not demanded or bought.  God’s love to us is gratuitous. This is illustrated in our first reading (2 Chr 36: 14-16, 19-23), when God inspired Cyrus, the King of Persia, to free the Israelites from Babylonian captivity.  This loving act of deliverance was unmerited by an unfaithful people.  Despite their sins, the people of Israel were restored to their own land.”

“St. Paul expresses this in the second reading (Eph 2:4-10) with more clarity of insight into God’s undeserved love and mercy: Brothers and sisters, God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love He had for us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, brought us to life with Christ... For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not from you; it is the gift of God; it is not from works, so no one may boast (vv. 4-9).”
“Moreover, today’s gospel (Jn 3: 14-21) highlights God’s love as His own initiative of giving up His only Son that we may have eternal life: For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him might not perish but might have eternal life. The Son of God is lifted up on the cross as God’s ultimate act of sacrificial love.  Through this sacrificial love, our enslavement to sin has been broken.  Selfishness has been overcome by total self-giving.  And by Christ’s resurrection, death is vanquished; eternal life dawns for all of us who believe.  And all of these come to us for free.  It’s pure gift.”

Lenten invitations

Fr. Rapadas pointed out that we should look into the following invitations of this holy season:

“Conviction.  Are we convinced of the gratuity of God’s love for us? Lent is an opportunity to strengthen our conviction about God’s gratuitous love for us.  It is God’s grace which makes us worthy of Him. We need to surrender to this truth and there can be no stronger proof of His unconditional love than the fact that, by   God’s initiative, His beloved Son was lifted up on the cross... that we may have life.”
   “Celebration.  A true disciple of Christ has all the reasons to be joyful. This season invites us to celebrate the joy of being loved gratuitously.  This is an invitation to a joyful spirituality, living each day with the delight that the new life in Christ brings, living in a loving relationship with God with utmost confidence in God’s unfailing fidelity. May this season help us to truly relish with joy our freedom from sin and death won for us by Christ through His cross and resurrection.”
   “Commitment.   We have been loved unconditionally.  God loves us not because we are good.  God loves us despite ourselves. He loves us warts and all. His love is not because of our merit.  His love is pure gift.  Every day we receive His grace and we experience His mercy as gift. This experience of gratuity invites us to a commitment to self-giving, to be a man-and-woman-for-others, to serve without asking for reward, to give to those who cannot give back.”
    May the Lenten break allow you to appreciate how God’s endless mercy and steadfast love bring new blessings and divine manifestations every day of our lives.

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