DAILY HOMILIES #healing

Dear friend, do you constantly complain about others? Or are you a Jacob who knows how best to take advantage of whatever may be their situation? When did you last ask for a blessing from your parents or an older person?

God will never force His way into your life if you do not make Him welcome. I mean, we all have a choice, to be possessed by the Holy Spirit or to be possessed by evil spirits such as lust, materialism (greed), wrath, pride, envy, gluttony, sloth, etc.

While the leper believed God could do anything, Abraham fell on his face and laughed when God told him that his wife Sarai would have a child. Abraham thought that God had already done his best with Ishmael. Like Abraham, we sometimes look at our external condition and assume what we have now is the best God can ever do. As long as we believe it, there is no limit to what we can achieve. Never doubt the power of God.

If you have God the Father and God the Son living inside you, will anything be difficult for you? Jesus said: “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in me will also do the works that I do, and greater works than these will he do because I go to the Father.” (John 14:12).

It is not possible for us to understand everything about God. Like the Holy Eucharist, there are still so many things about God that remain mysterious to us. No matter how high the temptation may be for you to walk away from God, let us remember that the best is yet to come. God has not changed and will never change a bit. Just hold on. Don’t quit on God.

Because Jesus once took our flesh, Jesus knows exactly what it means to be betrayed, insulted, made to suffer injustice, seriously grieved, lied to, treated with ingratitude, and so on. Through his suffering and death, Jesus has gone through every possible emotion that we go through. This makes Jesus the perfect High Priest as the Book of Hebrews explains

Like Lazarus who was bound all over, sin ties us down and keeps us stagnated spiritually. That is why we need Jesus in our lives. And it really doesn’t matter how deep sin may have crushed us. It is not too late today to repent and begin to live a new life in Christ.

As much as God is not interested in the death of the sinner, the truth is that there is something about sin itself that predisposes us to danger. As we see in the story of the prodigal son, sin takes us away from the Father’s house; it removes us from the protective embrace of God.

Naaman almost lost out of his supernatural healing because he looked down at the Jordan River. Of course, it was not the cleanest river in the world. Thanks to his servants who spoke sense into his head; it wasn’t the water itself that would cleanse him but his faith in God.

Jesus said: “All things are possible to him who believes.” What is clear from this encounter is that even though the disciples were commanding the demon, deep down within them, they were not expecting the demon to obey. Everything is possible if you believe. The question is: “Do you believe?”

Having realized what they had done, Adam and Eve became ashamed and hid away from God. Their eyes had become open and they suddenly felt unworthy of God’s presence, they died to innocence. They could no longer approach God freely as before. God can never lie; He wasn’t joking when He said they would die if they ate of the forbidden tree.

An example of the love that sustains family is what we see in the Gospel passage when a woman was willing to swallow what seemed like an insult just for the sake of the healing of her daughter. She so loved her daughter that she was just not ready to take “No” for an answer. If this kind of love exists in our families, the world would be a much better place.