Saturday, August 24, 2013

LIVE OUT THE FAITH

To become a follower of Christ is a choice and as Jesus says, it is a difficult one. Our faith tells us that heaven is real, but faith alone is not enough to carry us up there. To profess the faith and to know the content of our faith are surely important, but it is incomplete. We need to work our faith out and make it a reality. Otherwise, our faith becomes mere rhetorical exercise. In the frank words of St. James, “faith without works is dead (Jem 2:17).” Faith is God’s grace yet, it is up to our freedom to make this God’s gift fruitful.




It is a radical choice to live up our faith daily. We can be baptized as Catholics or Christians, yet we never go to the Church. We profess our belief in only one God, but we enjoy reading horoscopes, consulting fortunetellers and use religious items as mere protective amulets. We can easily shout, “God is good all the time,” but we have a lot of complains in our lives. We are often instructed by Jesus Himself to love our enemies, yet we maintain hatred, remain vengeance-oriented and take pleasure when our enemies absorb misfortunes.

We like being called a follower of Christ, but we do not actually follow His footsteps. We want to be Christian, yet we adopt our own suitable styles instead of Christ’s examples. This is a serious problem and indeed we might flung heaven. If we try to paraphrase today’s Gospel, it will sound like this: We knock the gate of heaven and shout “Lord, I am your follower”, but the Lord says, “I do not know you because you never actually follow me.”


Lord, give us determination and commitment to live our faith daily, to act what we profess and to do what we believe. Amen

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