If We Truly Know God, We will do These. Friday of the 4th Week of Lent
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Breakfast with the Word: Friday of the 4th Week of Lent
John 7:1-2, 10, 25-30
If We Truly Know God, We will do These
As the season of lent gradually is coming to the end, the readings continue to show us what happened towards the end of Jesus’ public ministry and the reason the Jews are determined to eliminate Him.
In today’s gospel, John tells us that the Jews were out and eager to kill Him. Because of this, Jesus stayed more in Galilee. But as the Jewish feast of the tabernacle draws near, He later went up to Jerusalem but privately without drawing more attention.
Probably, He went alone without His disciples. Yet when the people in Jerusalem saw Him, they said to themselves, “Is this not the man the Jews want to kill? Yet he is speaking and walking freely”.
They immediately objected that He would not be the Christ because it is written that when Christ comes, no one will know where He comes from. But they know where Jesus comes from.
Therefore, these people who saw Jesus by saying this, show that the people were still expecting another Messiah despite the presence of Jesus.
Therefore, they do not know who Jesus is.
Their reason is only that they know His background and family. They know where He was born but it was written that no one would know where Christ would come from.
Now because they do not know Jesus, they did not take Him seriously. They see Him as someone ordinary. Because they did not know who Jesus was, they spoke ill of Him.
The same is true of us. When we do not truly understand or know who Jesus is, we may only be going to church but do it for the sake that others are doing it.
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Signs that You have Faith in God
If We do Not Truly know God.
If we do not truly know God, we will even talk ill of Him when we encounter problems or when we do not understand what He is doing in our lives.
Just as the people are doing today because they do not truly know who Jesus is. If we do not know and understand God truly, our faith will be shallow. One who truly knows and understands His God will always stay faithful even when He does not understand what God is doing.
The Jews were not seeing the type of messiah they expect in Jesus and that is why they rejected Him.
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Also, we tend to deject and abandon our faith when we are not seeing the type of God that we want. You want a God that does signs and wonders but instead of that, God comes with challenges.
You want God that will uplift you and fulfil whatever you ask in prayer but instead of that, God comes in another way of answering the prayers the way He wants. Then, because of that, you lose faith in Him.
If we truly know God, we will trust Him at all times. Then we will constantly love to listen and obey His words.
If we truly know God, we will take Him seriously unlike what the Jews did today. If we truly know God, we will never take God as secondary or ordinary. We will take God as the first and the last, the beginning and our end. If we truly know God, we will take His words seriously and live our lives for Him.
If we truly know God, we will trust His ever loving and merciful heart. We will know that He is not heart hardened. We will constantly long to communicate with Him in prayer.
God desires that We Know Him.
In today’s gospel, Jesus continues to teach the people that He is not ordinary. He tries to let them know that He comes from the Father.
He says to them ‘there is one who sent me and I come from Him, and you do not know Him, but I know Him because I have come from Him and it was He who sent me.’ Yet the people wanted to arrest Him.
In essence, We will see in this statement someone who desires that they know Him but they have already hardened their hearts to Jesus. That is why they seek to arrest Jesus.
Sometimes when we harden our hearts or when we already made up our hearts to do evil, it is very hard to stop, despite the preaching we hear. The reason for this is that we are yet to know and understand who God is.
When we know how He loves us, we would not love to abandon Him. If we truly know God, we would not like to continually sin against Him. We would always love to come to His presence.
If we truly know God, praying to Him then should not be a burden. But today, we only go to church but harden our hearts to God’s voice, hence evil continues to increase in the land. When problems come, we are the first to lose faith. We have to know that God has His appointed time as we see in today’s gospel.
His Time had not yet come.
The people would have arrested Jesus today but His time had not yet come no one laid a hand on him. John tells us that Jesus’ time “had not yet come” (John 7:30).
Here, He is referring to the hour of the Cross, to the precise and precious time of Christ’s submission for the sins of the entire Humankind. His time has not yet come, but it is getting very close.
It will be at Calvary when our Lord will bring to its end His Celestial Father’s will. At the hour He will accomplish His mission. Christ continuously spoke many times about this definite and determining hour (Mt 26:45; Mk 14:35; Lk 22:53; Jn 7:30; 12:27; 17:1).
Then, before the feast of Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to pass from this world to the Father.
So, before this hour the Jews tried everything either to arrest Him or kill Him but couldn’t, Until the appointed time.
The point we are trying to make here is that God has His way of doing things. We believe that whatever is not according to His plan will never come to pass.
In life never think that every hope of survival is lost. We may be passing a lot of challenges and we tend to lose faith. Let us never think God has abandoned His creatures. Everything happens better and perfectly at His appointed time. We keep hoping and believing in Him.
The type of Messiah that the Jews are expecting makes them not know and understand that Jesus is the Messiah. They are unable to welcome Him. Therefore, when what we expect from God does not come the way we want, it is not a reason to lose hope or lose our faith in God.
In His appointed time, He will perfect His will. Let us trust whatever God is doing, for the fact, God is the one in charge.
Therefore, if we truly know God, we will trust whatever that He does, both the ones we understand and the ones we do not understand.
May God bless you, dearest, protect your going in and coming out. May He continues to be with us even in the times difficulties Amen
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