The Sunday Sermon Archive

Dear Friend,

"Blessed are they who hear the Word of God and keep it." (St. Luke 11:28)

A woman who heard Jesus speaking was moved to cry out that the mother of Jesus was truly blessed. "Blessed is the womb that bore Thee, and the paps that gave thee suck." (St. Luke 11:27) Our Lord points out that His mother's blessedness was because she heard the Word of God and kept it. Bearing Jesus in her womb and nursing Him at her breast would have been no greater honor than any mother has if it were not for the fact that she has heard and was keeping the Word of God.

It is not enough for us to have once received the grace of God. We must receive and keep the grace of God. The Israelites of the Old Testament received the graces of God in the Law of Moses, but they did not persevere in the graces of the Law because they rejected the fulfillment of the Law in the Messiah, Jesus Christ. Many Catholics are baptized, but then fall into heresy or schism, some even become apostates losing all faith in Jesus and boldly worship demons.

We see very frequently in the Scriptures that we must continue or persevere if we are to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Many are called but few are chosen. We see Our Lord rebuking the Jews in the Gospel for today because they rejected Him Whom they so long waited for. Jesus shows that the devil was cast out of them but now has returned with seven others worse than the original. Their sad state is now worse than before when they only had one devil. Now, they have eight.

Many have one devil driven out when they are baptized, but because they are careless or indifferent the devil returns with others and they now stay away from the Sacraments, the Mass and even the Church. Without these sources of grace, the life of Christ soon withers up and dies in our souls. This soul soon becomes like a breeding ground for devils as all sorts of sins and evil habits are multiplied.

We must strive to truly appreciate the graces that we have been given so that we may hold onto them. We will not be blessed simply because we once heard the Word of God. The Word must be kept alive in the soul. The world and the devils are constantly striving to destroy the Word of God in our souls in one way or another.

Sometimes there is a complete and sudden loss of faith as men fall from the true faith into atheism or paganism. Perhaps more frequently, the loss is gradual or even imperceptible. The Catholic soul is frequently enticed by Protestantism, often through some sort of "rationalism" which is simply a loss of faith. They refuse to believe one or more truths that Jesus has given us in the Catholic Church because they are incapable of understanding it. (If they could understand it, then it would not be called faith.) Faith is when we believe because Jesus has said it, not because we can understand it. For example, we believe that Jesus is truly present in the Holy Eucharist because Jesus has said: "This is My Body" not because we can see or understand it. Protestants protest against faith because they cannot verify the beliefs and the practices of the Faith with their own science or reason. They have made a god out of "science" or "reason."

Some gradually fall into greater and greater sin, and rather than humbly confessing their sin and repenting, they simply rationalize their sin so that they no longer think of it as sin. This is how the evil of divorce has become acceptable in the Protestant world. The murder of infants in the womb is rationalized and justified until it even appears as a virtue.

In the world of Modernism and Materialism, it is easier to understand and accept a "Memorial Meal," or "Last Supper," rather than hold onto the belief that the Holy Mass is one and the same with the Sacrifice of Calvary. Jesus making Himself truly present on Catholic altars (Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity) for the purpose of offering Himself in Sacrifice for us and making Himself our Food in the Holy Eucharist, is a hard saying and they refuse to believe in it. To solve their dilemma, they simply reinterpret the Mass and the Sacrament. They modify the Mass to make it more conformable to a meal and gradually change the beliefs of all those participating — making them unwittingly become Protestants.

We are not free to choose what we want to believe or do not want to believe. We are not free to worship in the church of our choice. God has commanded us to believe all that He has revealed and to worship Him in the manner that He has prescribed. He has clearly given us a Sacrifice rather than a Meal. This is what the Church has preserved and handed down to us for over two-thousand years. It is a Protestant invention to replace the Sacrifice with a meal.

It is not enough for us to have once received and believed. We must keep the faith. This Lenten Season, let us cast the devils and sin out of our lives as we renew and strengthen the Faith that Jesus has given us, so that we may persevere to the end in blessedness.

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