Be Transfigured Ministries

We all the know the pain of being hurt by the words and actions of others. Too often I hear “I forgive but I don’t forget.” When we refuse to forget what others have said or done to us, we truly haven’t forgiven them, but we are holding on for some future moment when we can hold it over their head. Christ has warned us, it is only when we forgive AND FORGET, just as He has done for us, can we be forgiven by God and welcomed into paradise.

When confronted with illness, most especially when healing does not come, we are tempted to challenge God, “Why!?” The same was true for the Disciple who were unable to heal a boy who had a demon. Christ’s response to them, and to us, “Because of your unbelief.” We must take the seed of faith planted by our parents at our baptism and nourish and cultivate the seed to become a great tree of faith strong enough to move mountains. The seed of faith requires prayer and fasting and the sacramental life of the Church. We need to stop asking why, and start praying and fasting and give the seed of faith some attention. We can no longer let the seed of faith to be ignored in our life.

When we are faced with the storms of life, it can be very tempting to focus on the storm rather than Christ. It is very easy to become crippled with fear when we take our eyes off Christ. God is present in the Church and He promises that when we need Him, we will find Him in the Church. When we turn our attention to God, and when we leave the cares of life outside the doors of the Church, we will be comforted and protected by God.

God Wants Co-Workers

God has given to each person, whether a believer or not, certain gifts and talents to assist others. When we are faced with the needs of others, sometimes our temptation is to excuse them away to others maybe because we fear we don’t have enough resources, or maybe we think we don’t have time. In either case, it is only when we allow God to bless others through our cooperation, through our efforts, that God’s mercy and blessing is experienced by others. When we accept our role as coworkers with God, not only will there be enough time and resources, in fact there will be an excess of leftovers.

When we are faced with spiritual and physical illness, we sometimes need to be reminded that God wants nothing more than to heal us, especially our souls. When the elites of the day witnessed God’s miracles healings, they accused Christ of partnering with the devil. Even after they witnessed God healing the blind, they remained blinded to God’s love and grace. Even after they witnessed God those who had been healed give praise to God, they insisted on using their voices to accuse God. We sometimes fall into this same habit. Sometimes we remain blind, out of sinful pride. Sometimes we don’t open our mouths to praise God. Now is out chance to let God heal us, so that we can share the Good News with everyone. God wants to heal us, and He wants us to share this news with others.

The Lord challenges us to seek first the Kingdom of Heaven in our lives without worrying about tomorrow, next week and next year. Just as He makes sure the birds of the air have their needs met, He promises us that we are of more worth than the birds. He promises that we will always have enough when we seek Him first without anxiety about the future. The world is a very anxious place, but we must have courage and faith in God that His promise to care for us when we put Him first.

When God called His first disciples to follow, they dropped their nets and left everything they knew behind to follow a new way of thinking with God. They were willing to leave their own logic behind and live as God wants, and God was able to heal the crowds from every disease they had. When we are willing to step out of our comfort zone and leave our way of thinking behind for God’s way of thinking, we too can be the agents of healing in our society. We can be the vaccine that heals the pain and suffering of our society.

In a secular society that is focused on worldly desires, God desires for us is live holy lives as the Saints have done for more than two thousand years. The Saints lived lives dedicated to God instead of the world. They were willing to confess God in front of others, and they were willing to treat others with love, no matter how they were persecuted. Holiness is being willing to live for God rather than the world. Now is the time for us to live holy lives, and then we will affect change in others around us.

Transcript

On the Feast of Pentecost our Lord said that if we believe in Him as the Scripture says, the Holy Spirit will gush forth from our inner beings as living water. The Holy Spirit will gush forth from our mouths in the words we speak to each other, from our hands in the way we treat each other and from our minds in the way we think about each other. This is our chance to bring peace and comfort to a suffering world. We cannot wait for governments and politicians to solve the problem. It will be our willingness to treat each other with love and dignity, as the Holy Spirit desires for us, that can bring light into the dark world. This is our chance to be like Christ and bring peace and light into the world.

A Bible Study on the Book of Romans based upon the homilies of St John Chrysostom in Tarpon Springs, Florida. This session originally LIVE STREAMED on Tuesday, June 2, 2020.

https://www.LiveANewLifeInChrist.org/romans