March 8, 2012
St. John of God
Dear Family of Mary!
"Dear children! Through the immeasurable love of God I am coming among you and I am persistently calling you into the arms of my Son. With a motherly heart I am imploring you, my children, but I am also repeatedly warning you, that concern for those who have not come to know my Son be in the first place for you. Do not permit that by looking at you and your life, they are not overcome by a desire to come to know Him. Pray to the Holy Spirit for my Son to be impressed within you. Pray that you can be apostles of the divine light in this time of darkness and hopelessness. This is a time of your trial. With a rosary in hand and love in the heart set out with me. I am leading you towards Easter in my Son. Pray for those whom my Son has chosen that they can always live through Him and in Him - the High Priest. Thank you." (March 2, 2012)
"With a motherly heart I am imploring you, my children, but I am also repeatedly warning you, that concern for those who have not come to know my Son be in the first place for you." With these words, Our Lady gives us the main thrust of this message. She is imploring us to make "those who have not come to know [her] Son" our main concern, our first priority. She is warning us to do this. She sounds a bit frantic about her children who do not yet believe. There must be something very timely and urgent about their situation. Our Lady would not speak about them in such a way, if it was not urgent.
We are all feeling that it is our faith in God that will bring us through these difficult days. The world is in a mad descent into darkness, it seems. Only God alone will be able to shine light into our lives and show us the way to the future. We are blessed with this certainty, this faith. It is a gift which many of us have received through Our Lady of Medjugorje. But imagine how it must feel to witness this mad descent, and have no belief in God! Imagine the fear! Imagine the depression! Imagine the confusion and hopelessness! Our Lady sees her poor children, so lost. She wants to find them and bring them into the peace that we enjoy. She wants them to discover Jesus and cling to Him. This is her concern. And she is sharing it with us.
But how do we make this concern for those who have not come to know Jesus our first priority? I believe Our Lady answers this question in the rest of this message. Let's begin with that difficult sentence which immediately follows: "Do not permit that by looking at you and your life, they are not overcome by a desire to come to know Him." I think we all took a double take at this sentence! A double negative! But if we think of it in terms of the sentence before in which she asks us to put concern for those who have not come to know Jesus, it becomes clear.
She says to us: Do not permit (Do not let it be) that by looking at you and your life (that when people who have no faith see the way we live and who we are), they are not overcome by a desire to come to know Him (they see that in our life we do not live the love of Jesus, and so they are driven away from Jesus because of our bad witness).
In other words, if we call ourselves Christians, but we live lives of sin, of greed, anger, sloth, pride, gluttony, envy or lust, and we do not put God in the first place, we will drive people away from faith in Jesus. They will not be drawn to Him by a desire to know Him. They will instead be disgusted by Him because of us. It is our witness that speaks volumes about God. Our generous actions, our good choices, our prayerfulness, our kindness, these things communicate God to others.
So the first way to answer Our Lady's concern is to clean up our own act! Which is exactly what we are doing during Lent! We are trying to weed out of our lives all hypocrisy and put God back in the first place in our daily lives. If we start moving in that direction, we will help Our Lady, because our repentance will attract others. They will see us straining to find God, and follow us. We could start a movement!! A movement of hearts towards God!
We will consider the rest of the message tomorrow. Don't forget: "With a motherly heart I am imploring you, my children, but I am also repeatedly warning you, that concern for those who have not come to know my Son be in the first place for you."
In Jesus, Mary and Joseph!
Cathy Nolan
© Mary TV 2012
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