The Sunday Sermon Archive

Dear Friend,

There is no unmitigated happiness in this life. Our lives are a continual flow of happy and unhappy events. The Apostles rejoice over the presence of Our Lord, and are later saddened by His absence. So it is in all our lives. The everlasting joy that we long for awaits us only in Heaven. Here below we must take the good with the bad. We must strive to make good use of even the bad so that it will become good for us in eternity.

God is good and merciful in arranging our lives here on earth in this manner. If we consider our fallen nature and our tendency to become overly attached to the temporal things of this earth, we see that we are very prone to allow people and things to usurp the place of God in our hearts and minds. (We are prone to readily fall into idolatry.) So God arranges that the things we allow ourselves to become attached to, will be taken away from us. If we receive only good things we tend to forget God, we become filled with our own pride and vanity. We attribute these good things to our own efforts and thus rob God of the honor, glory, praise and thanksgiving that are due to Him.

On the other hand if He were to give us nothing but evil or suffering, our frail nature would easily fall into despair. We would be inclined to think that God has forgotten us or that He does not care about us, or does not love us. Or we will fall so far as to even begin to doubt the existence of God altogether.

In this temporal life we receive both temporal good and temporal evil to keep us in a state of virtue. This balances us so that we do not fall to one side of sin or the other. God knows our strengths and our weaknesses. He measures out just how much we need of temporal good and evil in this life. We often think that we do not deserve this evil or sometimes even a good thing, and in this we are in essence denying God. We are saying that God does not know what He is doing. God knows better than we do what is for our salvation.

If we are forced to suffer more than others it is not that God is being unfair or unjust. On the contrary He is being most fair and most just because we obviously need this cross more than our neighbor. The cross that God has fashioned for us is unique for us. It is only for us; it is the perfect medicine not only to restore spiritual health, but to build and maintain it. Our cross is the correct size and weight. It is good for us, but would not fit our neighbor very well. Likewise, our neighbor's cross would be very ill suited to us. Thus, it is truly childish and foolish to be envious or jealous of what God has given our neighbor.

Only God is good. All the good things in this world are given to us to remind us of the only true Good (God). These things all lack the one property that we long for: eternal goodness. They are all temporal, so they are to be used for a time. They are to be used as a means to an end. They are all defective because they are not eternal. They are corruptible, perishable, and can become dangerous for us if we allow ourselves to serve them. Just as we receive good at times and evil at times we often perceive only good or only evil at different times in our lives.

All that God has made is good, and He has made all things. In this light we see nothing but goodness all around us. There are souls that at times have this positive attitude motivated by the love of God. They are happy and contented with what ever they receive.

Then there is the opposite extreme that sees evil in everything around us. We see that all things are vain: "vanity of vanity, and all in vanity." They are all empty; and deceptive in giving us the illusion of having that peace and happiness that we are in search of. Upon closer examination though we can see that these things are not evil in themselves, but it is our use of or perception of them that make them an evil for us.

For example: human sexuality has been given us by God. He has made us male and female. He has given us the natural desire to unite and reproduce. This is a good thing and not an evil. It is does its best good in the correct use of it as God intended it to be used in the married state and for the procreation of children for the love of God. But, this same good becomes for us a terrible evil when it is abused in either fornication or adultery. And in this state it often leads to or is idolatry. Those who pursue only the pleasurable aspect of this gift, to the exclusion of the responsibilities attached to it, make a god out of His gift _ this is idolatry.

All that God has made and all that He does is good. He gives and takes away as He sees fit, and it is always for our eternal benefit. Let us learn to love Him and thank Him both when He gives us pleasure and joy and when He gives us pain and suffering, knowing that this is just what we need for our souls at this time.

Franciscan Benefactor Seraph Subscription Vocations Have you remembered God?