Category: Daily Prayer

“Continue, therefore, to live in Christ Jesus the Lord, in the spirit in which you received Him.” —Colossians 2:6 Saul met Jesus on the road to Damascus (see Acts 9:3ff). Jesus struck Saul blind and implied that Saul should stop persecuting Jesus’ Church. In three days, Saul was baptized into Jesus and thereby accepted Jesus as Lord, Savior, and God. This was the beginning of Jesus’ revelation of Himself to Saul. Saul (later to be named Paul) became “rooted in [Christ] and built up in Him” (Col 2:7). Paul came to realize that “in Christ the fullness of deity resides...

“On another sabbath He came to teach in a synagogue where there was a man whose right hand was withered.” —Luke 6:6 “The scribes and Pharisees were on the watch to see if He would perform a cure on the sabbath so that they could find a charge against Him” (Lk 6:7). They assumed Jesus would have to work to heal the man with the withered hand and thereby violate the sabbath. Jesus healed the man, but without working. All He did was speak, and all the man did was stand and stretch out his hand (Lk 6:10). Thus although...

“If one of you decides to build a tower, will he not first sit down and calculate the outlay to see if he has enough money to complete the project?” —Luke 14:28 To be disciples of Christ, we must make the radical decision of totally giving ourselves to the Lord. If we decide to do anything less, our Christian lives will be unfinished, and we will be ridiculed and defeated (Lk 14:29ff). Some Christians in the USA have not made a total commitment to Christ. So they, especially Catholic Christians, are repeatedly portrayed as fools by the media. Moreover, one...

“Why are You doing what is prohibited on the sabbath?” —Luke 6:2 Keeping the sabbath is a sign that we want to be holy and that the Lord makes us holy (Ex 31:13). Keeping the sabbath is to be considered a perpetual covenant between us and the Lord (Ex 31:16). Therefore, the law of Israel specified that anyone who does not keep the sabbath “shall be put to death” and thereby “rooted out” of God’s people (Ex 31:14). Aware of this teaching in Exodus on keeping the sabbath, we can see why some Pharisees criticized Jesus’ disciples for “picking a...

Jesus “is…” —Colossians 1:15 Many of you have talked and listened to Jesus for many years. You are baptized, that is, immersed in Him. You have even gone so far as to receive Jesus’ Body and Blood, soul and divinity. Considering all this, you should know Jesus very well and very deeply. If you lived when St. Paul lived, if you lived before the New Testament was written and collected, if you lived before the Church had a creed or a catechism — could you have experienced and expressed many deep things about Jesus? Even now, can you say from...