#holy obedience

[theinwardlight]

On discovering the transforming power of God’s grace in our own lives, we must bear testimony to this change in us. Some would suggest that the way to do this is to constantly go about telling people that you have discovered God and that they should discover God too. While this can have an impact, and preaching the good news of Jesus is vital when the right opportunity arises, I am greatly challenged by the words of [George] Fox when he said ‘Let your lives preach’. We all have those who live near and around us who may know little if anything of God’s grace in their lives and appear to have no interest in such things. Yet these friends and neighbours are often put off seeking God because their experience of religion is one of hearing judgemental self-righteous preaching, of questioning empty church traditions and symbols, and of seeing in those who claim to be Christians, lives lived that show little of the nature of Christ. When Fox challenged us to ‘Let our lives preach’ he was challenging us to live lives of wholeness, where our actions and the principles we believe in are the same. And if our day to day existence becomes a living expression of integrity, then our neighbours and our friends, that we come in contact with, will see that the God we love is real, not because we tell them so, but because they see the transformation that our relationship with God has created in us. Our God is a God of changed lives.

From Simon Lamb, "The Transforming Power of Holy Obedience"

[ladyandknight]

SAINT VINCENT DE PAUL: “I should like to tell you, to motivate you to the practice of holy obedience, that when God sets me before Madame the general, I determine to myself to obey her as to the Blessed Virgin. And God knows how much good that does me!”

[akacatholicism]

Authority and Obedience

22. Strive to instruct the faithful to follow after love and search for peace, diligently pursuing the works of love and peace so that they may love one another with reciprocal charity. They should abolish all disagreements, enmities, rivalries and animosities, thus achieving compatibility. Take pains to impress on the Christian people a due obedience and subjection to rulers and governments. Do this by teaching, in accordance with the warning of the Apostle,[20] that all authority comes from God. Whoever resists authority resists the ordering made by God Himself, consequently achieving his own condemnation; disobeying authority is always sinful except when an order is given which is opposed to the laws of God and the Church.

- Pope Bl. Pius IX, Qui Pluribus (On Faith and Religion), 1846.

[mybeautifulchristianjourney]

If we haven't learned to be worshipers it doesn't really matter how well we do anything else. Worship changes us or it has not been worship. To stand before the Holy One of eternity is to change. Worship begins in holy expectancy, it ends in holy obedience.

Erwin W. Lutzer

[theinwardlight]

[The Inward] Light is persistent. The Light never ceases to make its Living Witness within each and every human heart, even when it is resisted. Although stubborn resistance and persistent disobedience may greatly dim its luminosity, the Light can never be fully extinguished within us. This is the unfailing love and mercy of God which passes all understanding.

Samuel Caldwell, The Inward Light

[acityhermit]

Day 7 Hidden in Christ

Some ‘mumblings’ on “hiding” and “hiddeness” in God, more reflections on holy obedience, the force of the preposition ‘in’, and lovely, amplifying words by George Herbert, my favourite metaphysical poet (1593 – 1633), in his poem ‘Colossians 3:3’ Eothinon VII Mode grave “Ἰδοὺ σκοτία καὶ πρωΐ… Lo, darkness and early dawn. And why, Mary, are you standing by the grave, your mind full of darkness?…

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[acityhermit]

Day 6 Silence as Sacrament

Upon entrance to the monastery, silence envelops me. “Be silent, all flesh, before the Lord,” exclaims the prophet Zechariah (Zech 2:13). Abruptly, I am separated from the tumult, noise, busyness and endless distractions of the outside world. “Peace, be still!” Jesus orders the wind of noise, confusion and tumult to cease in the midst of our own storms and turmoil. I feel separated from other…

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[roseslaces]

To some minds, perhaps, the deep spiritual reasons which make united worship a high duty and direct means of sanctification, and divided or schismatical worship as high a sin, and as direct a stimulant of those tempers which grieve the Spirit of holiness, are not so much as conceivable; and yet, with their imperfect knowledge of the matter of their obligation, they do not scruple at the slightest offence, or the most trivial annoyance; or because every thing is not ruled and ordered, done and left undone, according to their liking, to withdraw themselves from the unity a parochial altar, or even from the Church itself, and to join with those who are in open and hostile opposition to the Church in which till then they professed to find salvation. Now, what is the secret of all this? It is nothing more than the detection of the spirit of disobedience, which always dwelt i n them, but till then had not betrayed itself. The whole character is told in a single act; and the less important the matter, the more mature and deliberate is the disobedience. The insubordination of a man who sets himself against a rite or a vesture, is very much greater than that of one who gainsays a point of doctrine; for the latter chooses his field in matters which, if any thing can justify refusal of submission, may go farther to do it, than the paltry, trifling, pitiful excuses with which many try to mask their disobedience under a plea of conscience. The less the occasion, the greater the provocation, the heavier the offence.

-Henry Cardinal Manning