**Burdens on Your Soul

        Back to the Basics. If you do not have inner peace, that's because you have not repented of your sins to God to have them removed yet. Sins are burdens on your soul and heart. One who has his sins all forgiven by God is a new creature, for his soul and heart are no longer burdened. Now he feels free and experiences peace.

**Our Need for Humility

        Jesus, God the Son, came to us on earth. He, being God, created us and knows everything about anything, the past, the present, and what's going to come. Compare to what he knows, we know absolutely nothing! Yet we often behave as if we know more than he. This is being absurd and out of order. But if we are humble enough to realize that we can only know what he allow us to know, that is, recognizing our place before him, then we are back in his favor. Humility is a powerful virtue. It restores our relationship with God, enabling us to get all the way into heaven. So vanquish your pride with humility.

****On Verge of Self-Destruction

        In these dark, evil days, one blessing I see is that we finally realize that the only necessary, sensible, and righteous choice for us to make is to surrender ourselves to God completely. There is not another way out of our predicament, quandary, or the mess we're in due to the lack of faith in God. We are on the precipice of self-destruction unless we turn to God and convert. If you see this, then you see hope. 

**Live in Christ, Not the Past

        Some people plan a lot for their posterity. They want to be sure their family or descendants and their possessions will be taken care of. Even though they seem to be planning ahead, from the point of view of a Christian who lives in the Lord, they still seem to dwell on the past, for what will be the past in the future is important to them. When we are with Christ, we become detached from the past and no longer look back.

*Two Nice Ways of Living

        There are those who have a dream project in mind and spend much of their lifetime to make it a reality. Such projects completed can be quite beautiful or even benefit a community. This is a nice way to live. But if this is all they wish to accomplish, I feel sorry for them. For essentially they are shortsighted and still self-centered. The other nice way of living is far superior on a high level. You set your sight beyond this life. You secure your eternity first and then do everything for God's sake on earth. As a result, you enjoy freedom, peace, and joy on earth. One looks ahead, while the other only wishes to be satisfied in this life..

***Realities to Wake Up To*****

        God's mercy is infinite, while his justice is absolute. To not get forgiven by him, you have to be absolutely dull-witted! When the Lord saves you, you are saved forever! When you get yourself condemned against his will, you are doomed forever. These are the realities you should know whether you believe or not now.  

***Salvation or Damnation***

         Here is what I have come to know and believe. To be saved, all we need to do is to believe that Christ is our Lord and Savior and then follow him. To be damned, we only need to reject him as God and Savior. The God of Christ is our pivot. The choice is ours to make. Whether you believe what I believe is your choice too. The wise move is to investigate all this with an open, objective heart to arrive at your own truthful conclusion (while there's still time).

**Evil Is Real

        Good advice from our good Mother. 

The Perfect Prayer Again

        I have posted about the Lord's Prayer as the most perfect prayer, for it defines our relationship with God and saying it with all your heart and soul can transform you into a saint! Listen to Fr. Goring's take on this prayer in today's video of his. 

***Most Unfairly Rejected One***

        God loves us to death and wants us to love him so that we may receive even more blessings from him. We have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Yet we find it hard to love him because to love him, we need to obey him. Setting pride aside, can you think of one good reason we should not obey him? God wants to embrace us only, so rejecting him can only come from us! I am speaking out for the One who is being most unfairly rejected by the most number of those who were supposed to have been created in his image.

***We Are Here for a Purpose

        With so many prophecies coming from heaven nowadays, warning us about what's going to come, it becomes increasingly clear that God cares about us and wants us to be ready for it. I definitely see the purpose why we are here. We can no longer say that we happen to be here and don't know what's going to become of us. Good and evil are engaged in a fearsome spiritual battle fighting for our souls, and we are to choose sides. The earth is our testing ground. Our final destination will depend upon what we do on earth, and all that will be revealed when we answer to God. Yes, our whole life is purposeful.

**Moving Toward God*

        To obey God.we must disobey ourselves. These two efforts are to be carried out at the same time, for we must give ourselves up to surrender ourselves to God. Depending upon how much humility you have, you can accomplish this instantly or not even your whole lifetime will be enough for you. You get to make your liberation instant, prolonged, or delayed for ever. This is the challenge. Imagine that heaven is right there before your eyes, would you still hesitate and not move toward God? The truth that heaven is there, except that you are not able to see it yet. People say seeing is believing. For those who have faith, believing is all they need and God lets them know that they got it right.

*****Reviewing Reality Once More

        All the posts I've done on this blog have been to glorify God, the God of Christ, by letting you know that he is the true God and how good he is! What we need to know is simple if we believe. There's good and there's evil. We all have a soul that lasts forever. But man has sinned from the beginning and needs salvation, and Christ has come and shown that we can have eternal life if we believe in him to have all our sins taken away by him. It turns out that we make things hard for the Lord and ourselves, for our pride stands in the way. Jesus has already told us that we need to be humble to be exalted. If we let him be our Lord, we become free. But we still prefer to be in charge of ourselves and the struggle against submission to God continues on. It's been like that generation after generation and will most likely continue on to the day of our final judgment. Man has fallen once and is falling again, forever this time, if it doesn't wise up. Again, for whose who believe, especially like a child, they already have their eternity taken care of and are just waiting for the finest day of their whole existence. The disparity between the believers and nonbelievers is as great as that between heaven and earth. I'd cast aside my pride and listen to God for both his and my own sake. The clocks keeps ticking, so we have little time to waste.

***Garabandal Prophecies

         Once more it's good to hear these messages. Of course, to believe or not is all up to you. To believe in Christ or not is up to you too. For me, since I already believe fully in Christ, I don't have a thing to worry about anymore. No matter what happens, my eternity is absolutely secure in him.

***Dying in Order to Live

        In today's Gospel reading from John 12, Jesus said to his disciples, "Amen, amen, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit." To be fruitful, we must die in Christ first. Otherwise, we remain our old selves, still disconnected from the Lord. To be truly born again, we need to believe in the Lord and die in him first. So die in Christ before we die and we'll have life abundantly.

***Doing All for God Only

        Today is Feast of St. Lawrence. In reading I from 2 Corinthians 9, Paul writes, "Each must do as already determined, without sadness or compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. Moreover, God is able to make every grace abundant for you, so that in all things, always having all you need, you may have an abundance for every good work." This is great encouragement for me, for the Lord at times seems to want me to do things going against my grain. But obey I must. To make it easy, I need to realize that I am to do whatever for the Lord and not for anyone else or myself. I am merely his instrument. He'll always be with me if I stay with him.

**Preparing for the Inevitable

         The Lord also made me see that I was on my way going to him and now was the time to prepare myself for the best possible meeting with him. All of us should be doing this on earth now. What's inevitable should always be of foremost importance to us.

*****Feeling Free with God

       It's 2:53 AM now. I feel the Lord is really drawing me close to him and I can't sleep. I know that he's right with me, feeling the intimacy only possible with God. There is absolutely no barrier between him and me. He made me see that when we feel absolutely free to know him, we are free. It's good to know.