<\/p>\n
It\u2019s too good to be true.\u00a0 But it is true- Jesus is God made man.<\/p>\n
The people of Jesus\u2019 time saw him as just another person.\u00a0 They didn\u2019t believe he was God made man.\u00a0 It never even occurred to them, especially the Jewish leaders.\u00a0 But then He says in today\u2019s Gospel:\u00a0 \u201cWhoever keeps my word will never see death\u201d.\u00a0 Yet his word, his teachings were revolutionary; and his promise of not tasting death seemed madness. \u00a0Jesus taught things like love your enemies; don\u2019t condemn others; turn the other cheek; and give to the poor.\u00a0 He used the beatitudes as a rallying cry.\u00a0 And the beatitudes spoke about the humble and the meek and poor and persecuted, not the strong and capable and self-confident and in-control.\u00a0 It was a litany of \u201cdo\u2019s\u201d rather than a litany of \u201cdo not\u2019s\u201d like the ten commandments.\u00a0 Jesus teaching wasn\u2019t consistent with their culture; it wasn\u2019t their way.\u00a0 They had come to interpret the scriptures and the law in human terms because they didn\u2019t seek to \u201cknow\u201d God; they only knew about him and His law.\u00a0 It was like they were trying to recognize the face of a person from a description rather than from a photograph.\u00a0 But in so doing, they were missing so many of the features of the true face.<\/p>\n
The same thing can happen to us.\u00a0 We can study the scriptures and the Catechism and the words and concentrate on knowledge about God and the law of God but, in the process, fail to really know God.\u00a0 And it is in knowing God that we learn the most important lessons about following Him.<\/p>\n
First of all, we can know God by knowing Jesus, his son.\u00a0 That means knowing the Gospels so well that we actually live out the values of the Gospels in our lives.\u00a0 Second, we know God by praying- praying in such a way that God is included in all of our decisions, kind of like we communicate and dialog with a good friend or confidant about our lives.<\/p>\n
Lent is a perfect time to get to know God.\u00a0 We should be taking the necessary time to read the Gospels so that Jesus words in them are a living experience to us, and we should be taking the time to pray and reflect on our lives so we can ask Jesus to help us and to be with us through thick and thin.<\/p>\n
If we know God and have a feel for how His son lived and breathed life on this earth then we will come to be like Jesus.\u00a0 And when that happens, we will have a strong sense of Christian hope- Christian hope that no matter how tough the going gets, when we know God and follow after the way His son Jesus acted, we will be saved for eternal life.\u00a0 Christian hope guarantees that there is something better- everlasting life, because a true Christian will never taste death.\u00a0 And they know it!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Thursday of the Fifth Week in Lent Gen 17: 3-9; Jn 8: 51-59 Dc. Larry Brockman It\u2019s too good to be true.\u00a0 But it is true- Jesus is God made man. The people of Jesus\u2019 time saw him as just another person.\u00a0 They didn\u2019t believe he was God made man.\u00a0 It never even occurred […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[198,92],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.deaconlarry.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.deaconlarry.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.deaconlarry.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.deaconlarry.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.deaconlarry.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=317"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.deaconlarry.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":318,"href":"http:\/\/www.deaconlarry.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317\/revisions\/318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.deaconlarry.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.deaconlarry.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.deaconlarry.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}