Restore the Good in Our Lives

Fr. Lloyd Baugh SJ - July 23, 2020

 

“We are Christians already, Lord, and we really do believe in you. But there are areas of our lives in which we are still resisting you, still choosing other “treasures,” still trying to pretend that we are something we are not. So we ask you, Lord Jesus, to change those areas too, to redeem them. Help us to acknowledge them and to claim your healing grace.”

When we are dealing with God, we are not dealing with someone who can be bought off. We are dealing with Ultimate Reality, Ultimate Truth, Ultimate Love, that strikes deep into our lives and exposes whatever it finds. God, and our saving relationship with God is absolutely the greatest Treasure we can hope to possess.

The only way we can meet this Awesome Reality with any possibility of survival and chance of acceptance is with honesty, simple honesty, just saying to God who we are and what we do.

Because, when we say that, then the healing Grace of Jesus Christ is able to take us, to remove the evil from our hearts and to restore the good. Jesus’ Grace will transform us into the kind of people that we want to be, and that God hopes us to be. We need to recognize the saving power of that Treasure. We need to pray David's great prayer: 

Search me, God, and know my heart;
test me and know my anxious thoughts.
See if there is any offensive way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting.
(King David, Psalm 139)