Category: Prayers

“Abishai whispered to David: ‘God has delivered your enemy into your grasp this day. Let me nail him to the ground with one thrust of the spear.’ ” –1 Samuel 26:8 Abishai gave David the traditional “wisdom of war,” that is: “Kill, nail, and spear the enemies before they do it to you first.” In other words, “do unto others before they do unto you.” David surprisingly rejected Abishai’s standard advice (1 Sm 26:9). In this he prefigured Jesus, the Son of David. Jesus didn’t just talk about having mercy on our enemies. He paid the price for mercy by...

“He was transfigured before their eyes and His clothes became dazzlingly white.” –Mark 9:2-3 On Transfiguration mountain, Peter, James, and John saw Jesus’ glorified body. They also saw how their own bodies would look in Heaven. “He will give a new form to this lowly body of ours and remake it according to the pattern of His glorified body” (Phil 3:21). Imagine Jesus’ transfigured body as the pattern according to which our lowly bodies will be remade. God began renovating our bodies when He bought them at the price of His blood (1 Cor 6:20). Yet even though He owns...

“I for My part declare to you, you are ‘Rock,’ and on this rock I will build My Church, and the jaws of death shall not prevail against it. I will entrust to you the keys of the kingdom of heaven.” –Matthew 16:18-19 The Lord wants us to be one as He and the Father are one (Jn 17:21). “It was in one Spirit” that we “were baptized into one body” (1 Cor 12:13). The source, center, and culmination of our faith is receiving and being in unity, union, and Communion with the Lord and each other. The Lord has...

“Do not even go into the village.” –Mark 8:26 The village in today’s passage was Bethsaida, a place Jesus elsewhere condemned for its advanced hardened and unrepentant attitude (see Mt 11:21-24). This is the only incident in the Gospels in which Jesus had to heal a person in two stages. Possibly the extreme hardness of the village made it more difficult for a healing to take permanent root. First, Jesus “led [the blind man] outside the village” (Mk 8:23). Healing often occurs best away from the skeptical crowd, by either getting away from the crowd or putting the crowd out...

“His heart was grieved.” –Genesis 6:6 God’s “heart was grieved” because man’s heart desired nothing but evil (Gn 6:5-6). God’s heart was broken because man’s heart is hardened, disobedient, and rebellious. Jesus revealed the condition of His heart through the image of the Sacred Heart, bleeding and surrounded with a crown of thorns. God said His heart was grieved, but no one ever suspected that this would be literally true when God became a man and thereby actually had a human heart. Likewise, no one suspected that our hearts would be so perverse that we would murder God by our...