Good News Reflection
Thursday of the 28th Week of Ordinary Time
October 14, 2010
Today's Readings:
Eph 1:1-10
Ps 98:1-6
Luke 11:47-54
http://www.usccb.org/nab/101410.shtml
USCCB Podcast of the Readings:
http://ccc.usccb.org/cccradio/NABPodcasts/10_10_14.mp3
Is God your foster father or adoptive father?
Is God your True Father? Have you been fully adopted or are you just in foster care?
When my mom was four years old, she was put into the home of foster parents. Ten years later, they finally adopted her. In-between, she didn't know to which family she truly belonged.
In today's first reading, Saint Paul tells us that through Christ Jesus, we are Father God's adopted children. This is his will and pleasure! He gets excited about it. His heart swells with joy thinking about YOU as one of his adopted kids. In fact, he wanted to father you since before he created the world!
He gave life to each of us, but our sinfulness keeps us from being his true children. Jesus came to earth to teach us how to be true children, by his words and by his example, and then he took our sins upon himself and died with them on the cross. This cleared the way for us to become Father God's adopted children. Have you fully entered into this adoption?
A child who does not understand that he or she is truly and unconditionally loved by the adoptive family longs to go back to the family of origin, even if it had been an abusive household. We naturally prefer the familiar over the unknown. Are you still longing to go back to old, familiar, sinful patterns? Are you still rationalizing that they are not really sins? Or are you instead fully embracing your new life in the family of God?
Sinning is a sign that we don't know how much God loves us and how good he is to us.
Think of how easy it is to place conditions on our love for others. Conditional love is not God's nature. It's not really love at all. It doesn't exist in God's household. When we treat others kindly only because they meet our needs or live up to our expectations, we have re-entered the old home-world of conditional, fake love.
When do you doubt God's love for you? Our Father is inviting you to discover that he has no conditions for loving you – he has only UNconditional love for you. You can trust him completely. You can believe that he will always take care of you, even while life's circumstance seem to indicate otherwise. This is life as an adopted child. God is always working in the circumstances to eventually produce many blessings for you.
We live as a child of God when we understand that he adopted us to rescue us from the bad conditions of our birth family, i.e., the inheritance of sin that began when Adam and Eve committed the Original Sin. God's household has been our true family ever since our baptism. Anything we do that separates us from our new, true identity should be taken to the Sacrament of Reconciliation so that we're quickly restored to our rightful relationships in the family of God.
God removed us from our birth homes because he loves us dearly. Let's stay with him.
© 2010 by Terry A. Modica
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