Category: Prayers

“Blest shall you be when men hate you, when they ostracize you and insult you and proscribe your name as evil because of the Son of Man.” –Luke 6:22 Jesus is a Sign that is contradicted (Lk 2:34). He says: “Blest are you poor” (Lk 6:20) and “Woe to you rich” (Lk 6:24). By contrast, most of us say the opposite. The rich don’t like to hear their lives may be wasted (see Eccl 1:2), and the poor don’t like the idea that God may never want them to be rich. Jesus can get both ends of the economic spectrum...

“By the sweat of your face shall you get bread to eat.” –Genesis 3:19 God had told man that he would get bread to eat by the sweat of his face (Gn 3:19), by working hard to plant, till, harvest, grind, and prepare grain for bread. Nevertheless, God then mercifully sent His only Son to feed us bread, and heavenly bread at that (Jn 6:32-33ff). In Jesus, the Bread of Life (Jn 6:35), God has reversed the heavy consequences of the fall of man. Whoever eats the bread Jesus gives will never be hungry (Jn 6:35) and will have eternal...

Jesus “said to him, ‘Ephphatha!’ (that is, ‘Be opened!’)” –Mark 7:34 When Adam and Eve sinned, they were expelled from Paradise, and the door to Paradise was closed (Gn 3:23-24). Human beings then began to be closed off to God and to one another (see Gn 3:8ff). After the first sin, death entered the world and closed us off from the happiness of everlasting life. During the centuries following the first sin, more and more lives were closed down by sin’s escalating effects, such as war, sickness, starvation, racism, and violence. Then God became Man and walked into a closed...

“When she got home, she found the child lying in bed and the demon gone.” –Mark 7:30 Our secular humanistic society likes to pretend that there are no demons, or, if there are demons, that not many of them are active around us. However, Pope St. John Paul II has stated that we in the Western world live in a culture of death. This implies that Satan, the prince of death (Heb 2:14), probably has his hosts of demons very active in our society, cities, neighborhoods, churches, and families. In our times, it may be even more appropriate to say...

“The Lord God planted a garden in Eden…and He placed there the man whom He had formed.” –Genesis 2:8 God freely and lovingly created man and gave him the breath of life. God not only provided man with an abundance of good food, but He also blessed man’s spirit by creating an environment that was “delightful to look at” (Gn 2:9). All of this was a sheer gift from God. In the world He created, God did not require man to produce his own food; that requirement was chosen by man when Adam and Eve decided to handle their own...