God’s Mercy
That is what God’s mercy is like: a great light of love and tenderness because God forgives not with a decree, but with a caress.
— Pope Francis, The Name of God Is Mercy, p. xvi
Category: God
10 Posts
God’s Love Is Personal.
Realize that God loves you as an individual, not simply in the abstract. God cares about you personally, much as a close friend would. Remember how God speaks to you in personal, intimate ways, in your daily life and in prayer, which only you can appreciate. This is a sign of God’s personal love for you.
— James Martin, S. J., The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything, p. 385.
Making Us Good
As the love of him who is love transcends ours as the heavens are higher than the earth, so must God desire in his child infinitely more than the most conscientious and loving of mothers can desire in hers.
He would have his child rid of all discontentment, all fear, all grudging, all bitterness in word or thought, all measuring of his own with a different gauge than he would apply to another’s. He will have no curling of the lip, no indifference toward any person, no desire to excel over another. He will not have him receive the smallest service without gratitude, would not hear from him a tone to jar the heart of another, a word to make it ache.
From such, as from all other sins, Jesus was born to deliver us — not primarily, or by itself, from the punishment of any of them. When all are gone, when the sin nature which causes them has been put to death and his Spirit substituted inside the part of our hearts that rules our deeds, then the holy punishment will have departed also.
He came to make us good, and therein blessed children.
— George MacDonald, Hope of the Gospel “Salvation from Sin,” quoted in Discovering the Character of God, edited by Michael Phillips, p. 41
Never Tired of Forgiving
The Lord never tires of forgiving: never! It is we who tire of asking him for forgiveness. We need to ask for the grace not to get tired of asking for forgiveness, because he never gets tired of forgiving.
— Pope Francis, The Name of God Is Mercy, p. xi
Loving God
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart.†If we are angry at God because of something that happened to us or because of something going on in the world, and we are reluctant to admit our anger either because it seems disrespectful or because we fear that God will punish us for being angry at Him, we won’t be able to “love God with all our heart.†We can only love him halfheartedly. The wife who is afraid to tell her husband how bothered she is by some of his habits, for fear that he will be upset with her and perhaps even leave her, will not be able to love him wholeheartedly, and that inability will affect their relationship. The adolescent who is scolded for being angry at his parents “after all we’ve done for you,†or whose hopes and dreams are mocked by his parents, will learn to keep his feelings to himself. That will be an impediment to his being able to love his parents as wholeheartedly as he would like to.
Accepting anger, ours and that of people close to us, has to be part of any honest relationship. If the opposite of faith is not doubt but despair, then the opposite of authentic love, wholehearted love, is not anger but pretense, censoring our feelings. I don’t believe God is fooled by that, nor do I believe that is what He wants from us. God will accept our anger, justified or not, so that we can then go on to love Him “with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our might.â€
— Harold S. Kushner, Nine Essential Things I’ve Learned About Life, p. 129-130.
Self-Acceptance
Self-acceptance is the first step to holiness. But for many the path to self-acceptance can be arduous. Men, women, and children in ethnic or social minorities, with physical disabilities, with dysfunctional family backgrounds, with addictions, or those who feel unattractive, uneducated or undesirable may struggle for many years before accepting themselves as beloved children of God.
But the journey is essential. Many gay men and lesbians, for example, have told me that the real beginning of their spiritual path was accepting themselves as gay men and women — that is, the way that God made them. Coming to see themselves in this way, and, more important, allowing God to love them as they are, not as society might want them to be, or think they should be, is an important step in their relationship with God.
“For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb,” says Psalm 139. “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” God loves us as we are because that’s how God made us.
— James Martin, S. J., The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything, p. 380-381.
Wouldn’t Trade It
My dear readers — what do you do with the fact that hundreds of thousands of the dearest and most valiant saints would tell you that even though they have passed through terrible affliction, their most precious and fervent prayers unanswered, they would not trade it for anything in the world? They would not trade it because of what they have learned of God, learned of love, learned of hope.
John Eldredge, Moving Mountains, p. 223
Forgiveness and Deliverance
There is an important misapprehension in the words of the messengers of the Gospel in the New Testament. It is wrongly thought that they threaten us with punishment because of sins we have committed, whereas in reality their message is of forgiveness, not of vengeance — of deliverance, not of evil to come.
No man shall be condemned for any or all of his sins that are past. He needs not dread remaining unforgiven even for the worst of them. The sin he dwells in, the sin he will not come out of — that is the sole ruin of a man. His present, his live, sins — those pervading his thoughts and ruling his conduct, the sins he keeps doing and will not give up, the sins he is called to abandon and clings to — these are they for which he is even at this moment condemned. “This is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.”
It is the indwelling badness, ready to produce bad actions — the indwelling sin which leads to sins — that we need to be delivered from. Against this sin, if a man will not strive, he is left to commit evil and reap the consequences. To be saved from these consequences would be no deliverance; it would be an immediate, ever deepening damnation. Jesus came to deliver us, not rescue us from needful consequences. It is the sin in our being — no essential part of it, thank God! — the miserable fact that we as a very child of God do not care for our Father and will not obey him, causing us to desire wrongly and act wrongly — this is what he came to deliver us from, not the things we have done, but the possibility of doing such things any more.
— George MacDonald, Hope of the Gospel, “Salvation from Sin,” quoted in Discovering the Character of God, edited by Michael Phillips, p. 40-41.
We Need Faith.
To me, faith in God is a lot like marriage, which is faith in another person. It means a rock-solid commitment to giving God the benefit of the doubt, not because God needs it (I’m pretty sure God could get along without us if He had to) but because we need it. I choose to believe in the reality of God not because logic demands it or because the arguments for it are persuasive, but because the things I do take on an additional dimension when I do. Joys become more significant and disappointments more bearable when I do.
— Harold S. Kushner, Nine Essential Things I’ve Learned About Life, p. 121.
Fire from Heaven
Joy is a response to the Lord’s presence. The people rejoiced because God responded to them, kindled their sacrifice. Has the fire of God come down and consumed your sacrifices? All your piety, your churchgoing, your repentance, your efforts to be good — do these produce shouts of joy? If not, something’s wrong; your sacrifice isn’t complete.
— Mike Mason, Champagne for the Soul, p. 17