Lec # 94 – 12th
Sunday of OT – June 25, 2017- Fr. Bresowar
My brothers and sisters, it
is very good to be here with you to celebrate the Holy Mass. Jesus Christ is
Lord, He is God and King, He is our salvation and our only Hope. He is the
prince of peace, the Lord of Lords. He is the mighty one, the victor over
death, He has conquered sin and the devil. By his sacrifice on the cross, we
are healed. By His grace, we are saved. There is no other name in Heaven and on
Earth by which we are saved. Every knee will bend at his name.
The time is coming soon,
where every man and woman will give an account for their lives. In the Gospel,
our Lord tells us that those who acknowledge Him before others, he will
acknowledge us before His father on our judgment day. And he warns that those
who deny him, he will also deny before Our Father. That day is going to be terrible
for some, and glorious for others.
He then tells us, as he does
throughout the Gospel, to not be afraid of the rulers of the world. The world
is passing away, we are here one day, and gone the next. He does not want us to
fear the ones that can hurt us here, but only the one who can kill the soul and
the body forever in Gahanna, which is another word for Hell. This is the devil
or Satan.
My brothers and sisters, why
does Jesus tell us to fear the devil? This is a question we should think about.
Many people do not fear Hell
or the devil, they mistakenly think that they can continue to live in sin,
being disobedient to our God, and that so long as they believe in God, they
have nothing to worry about. This is a grave mistake.
Jesus never said that all we
have to do is believe and we can continue to live in sin. He never said that at
all. He told us to not be afraid of
earthly persecutions and struggles, but he never told us to be comfortable or
complacent in our faith. Our world, our culture, our country is what Jesus is
calling us to leave out of. He says no man can love his live in this world and
in the next at the same time, he will either love his life here and hate it in
the next, or he will hate his live here and love it in the next.
And the ruler of the world is
Satan. Satan has dominion for now over the world, and those who try to save their
lives here are following the devil, and we can see evidence of this everywhere.
The devil hates God, and everything God creates. So he sets out to convince men
to be their own gods, and to distort the Truth. He wants that which is beautiful
to be distorted and ugly. He wants to destroy marriage, sex, the priesthood,
family, life, nature, you, me, everything. He distorts sex through pornography
and lust, trying to get us to commit mortal sin through fornication or
self-abuse. He seeks to kill the most innocent and pure through abortion,
murder and rape. He destroys marriages through infidelity and contraception,
anger and jealousy. He corrupts the youth through bad music, drugs, alcohol, pornography
and fornication. He wants us to worship pleasure in the flesh, yet he, the devil,
fears those who walk in the light of Christ, those who go to confession
regularly and receive the Eucharist. He fears those who are living in the
sacraments of marriage in the Church as God wants us to live it, and priesthood
of Jesus Christ. He fears those who reject the false allurements of the world. He
fears them, because they have Jesus Christ living in them. He fears the blessed
mother Mary the most, and so when we pray the rosary, he really fears us if we
are living in grace, because he is afraid of her. She crushes his head with her
humility.
The devil is a loser. He is
not going to win. He is a murderer and a liar. A fallen angel, He has already
lost. And yet he still wages war against us every day by tempting us to reject
God and to choose sin.
We must reject Satan, we must
reject sin. I hate sin, and yet it is so easy to fall into sin. When we do sin,
we must repent immediately.
When we repent, and do penance,
we have no reason to fear. Christ has given us His victory through the cross
for those who repent and believe.
Many people know they are
living in sin and do nothing to change it. Others sin, but they repent of it
and try not to sin anymore. Why? Because by God’s grace, they see how damaging
it is, how horribly it hurts us. They love what God loves. God loves us so much
that he doesn’t want us to hurt ourselves through sin.
Those who repent and change
their lives have great reason to rejoice, as the angels rejoice in Heaven,
because although death came into the world through the sin of man, Life has
been restored through the obedience of Christ.
The sacraments are where the
real power is. Baptism, Confirmation, the Eucharist, Marriage, Priesthood, the anointing
of the sick, confession. Living in the grace of the sacraments gives us what we
need to be holy married couples, to be holy priests, to be holy Christians, to
evangelize the truth, to be witnesses of Christ before others.
Without the grace in the
sacraments, even if we pray and ask God to fix everything here, even if we try
to live good lives, even if we do everything we think we are supposed to do, we
will be denied, because only grace is what saves us, only grace is what answers
our prayers.
Jesus says we must acknowledge
him before others, and we do this when we confess our sins regularly, and we
eat his body and drink his blood, and when we are obedient to God’s law, when
we live in the sacraments which he reveals in Sacred Scripture and gives us
through his Holy Church.
If we do this, then we really
have nothing to fear. It is difficult, it requires discipline. Our Lord says
that many people choose Hell, the road is wide that leads to damnation, over
Heaven, because of they don’t want to be obedient. They fall into the easy
traps of the devil who tells us, like he told Adam and Eve, that we don’t have
to do it God’s way.
Let us not be one of them.
Let us choose Heaven and do whatever is necessary to live in the grace of God.
It is our choice, no one is going to make us repent and believe and be obedient
to the Catholic Church, which is the exact same as obedience to Jesus, because Christ
and the Church are one. He has given all authority in Heaven to His Church. He has bound Himself to His bride, His Church.
Despair has no place in our
lives, the time for excuses is way past us, now is the time to repent, pray for
each other, acknowledge Jesus to our families and friends and even strangers,
and walk by faith and hope and love, until the day which will come very soon,
when we will stand before God and give an account of our lives.
God Bless you, please pray
for me; I really need your prayers, and I will pray for you.
