Thoughts to encourage us, as we are drawn to Jesus..

Teach me your ways, O LORD, that I may live according to your truth! Grant me purity of heart, so that I may honor you. ¹²  With all my heart I will praise you, O Lord my God. I will give glory to your name forever, ¹³  for your love for me is very great. You have rescued me from the depths of death. Psalm 86:11-13 (NLT2)

I have not stopped thanking God for you. I pray for you constantly, ¹⁷  asking God, the glorious Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, to give you spiritual wisdom and insight so that you might grow in your knowledge of God. Ephesians 1:16-17 (NLT2)

2  God is my Father! If you meditate on it, you will never let go of this consoling consideration. Jesus is my intimate Friend (another rediscovery) who loves me with all the divine madness of his Heart. The Holy Spirit is my Consoler, who guides my every step along the road. Consider this often: you are God’s… and God is yours.

I show them (the sacraments) due honor when I believe that I truly receive what the sacraments signify and all that God declares and indicates in them, so that I can say with Mary in firm faith, “Let it be to me according to your words and signs” [Luke 1:38].

King David, the writer of the Psalm above, found his identity so enveloped in his intimate friendship with God. So much so that he was called a man whose heart resonated with God’s, for that was his goal. As the church fades in American, we struggle to find to resonate with things. The next book that is right on, the next new believer’s course, the next mission statement, the next strategy of consolidation or repurposing.

Without resonating with the heart of God, none of those options are worth the outcome of a bowel movement.

From his intimate conversations with God, David learns so much of God’s love that he automatically responds with praise. He realizes what God has done, far more than you learn from a theology text, or the latest book written to motivate us to keep trying to do things that are beyond our comfort zones. We see the same heart in Luther’s thoughts on the sacraments. Meditating on them leads Luther to accept, as Mary did, what God has planned and promised. St. Josemaria encourages such meditation as well, as he concludes that when you realize the divine madness that is the love of God, you will never let go of the hope it gives.

You don’t find such love by reading—you have to experience it. That is the idea of knowledge (epiginosko in Greek) . Study alone does not impart such knowledge—it comes by experiencing God’s presence as God reveals and enlightens our hearts. The Apostle Paul, another brilliant man, desires this for his people, and that is what he asks God for, for them.

The purpose of this all – to intimately know God. We all need to experience His presence and love in a way beyond description, but in a way that teaches us.

It is what I desire for myself, as David did.. and what we need to learn to desire, not just for our friends at church, but for all people.

Lord, teach us Who You are… and who we are in Your sight. 

Escriva, Josemaria. The Forge . Scepter Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Vol. 42: Devotional Writings I, ed. Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, Hilton C. Oswald, and Helmut T. Lehmann, vol. 42 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1999), 101.