CALLED TO HOLINESS — 20160814

As I shared in last week’s Bulletin, the call to holiness is a call to personal transformation. This call comes to us from God Himself. It is a call to freely and voluntarily imitate the way that Jesus lived. The emphasis is on VOLUNTARY! Because God created us in His image and given us the potential to grow in His likeness, He gave us an opportunity to freely come to know, love and serve Him. As His children, He wanted us to have the freedom of return His love. As you know, when we feel forced to love another person, our love is sterile and quite meaningless. God’s only desire for us is to come to love Him as free humans.

When you think about the chance God took when He created us with a free will, you have to know that He unconditionally loves us. Even though He infused His life into us, He was willing to take the chance of us rejecting His love because He wanted us to be free – to be more like Him.

When you think about this you have to know that God sees us as His greatest, creative achievement and that we are joined to Him in a very intimate and unique manner. This is proven by the fact that He voluntarily embraced human nature and actually came into our world in order to demonstrate His love for us.

Out of love, He was willing, as a man, to confront the challenges that life presented to Him so that He might show us that life’s challenges and struggles are not punishments but, rather, that opportunities to spiritually, psychologically and socially grow – to actualize the potential He has given us to be like Him.

He came into our world in order that we might discover, by reflecting on the way that He lived, the true meaning and purpose of life. When we discover the real meaning and purpose of life we begin to experience the absolute beauty and wonder of life and, yes, true happiness. True happiness is knowing that life is a most precious gift and that this Gift is none other than the Giver – God – Himself.

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