**Good Prayer Rule

        When you pray, whether you ask for anything or not, never question or doubt. You simply mean every word you say and let it go at that. 

***Christ or the World

         The more you know Christ, the less interesting the world becomes. This is a natural process. If you have gone to heaven first, I am sure you'd never want to come down to live in this world. You either fit heaven above or the world below. 

**Jesus Is "Too Much"

        Communion experience. I felt that the Lord was "too much" for me, not as a burden though. I say "too much" because I was overwhelmed by his love, mercy, generosity, understanding, as well as his holiness, humility, beauty, and omnipotence. I'd like to add that when I submitted myself totally to the Lord, I felt peace, tranquility, and total freedom from the world. No one else could have made me feel that way but the True God.

***God's Mercy Ignored*****

        I see Christ the Lord as the answer to every need of mine. What we most urgently need is God's mercy, but the people of the world are not asking for that from the Lord. This is my big sorrow.

**Letting God Make Us Holy

        It struck me at Mass this morning that God can make us holy. This is a huge deal! To become holy is not something many of us think about, even though we might believe that God would want us to be holy. If we say yes to him, he will certainly make it happen and everything will change for the better for us. This is our chance for him to make us beautiful for him to behold. Do not miss it.

****Way of Living in Christ***

        God is neither limited by space nor time. We are thus unlimited too in loving God, for we can do it anywhere and anytime. Now, do everything with love for Christ and you succeed in loving the Lord unceasingly! You now live in him. 

**Evil-Worse-than-Ever Warning*

        In today's Gospel reading from Luke 6, the scribes and the Pharisees watched Jesus closely, hoping to discover a reason to accuse him. Today's hypocrites are even worse. Corrupt politicians create hoaxes and fabricate false facts in attempts to take down anyone they see as a threat to them. Then look at California. Even after the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that abortion is not a constitutional right, the Democratic governor has proposed to make it a right in the state constitution. When evil has become even uglier, you can be sure that God's chastisement is near.

***Jesus Welcome Challenge

        In today's Gospel reading from Luke 14, Jesus challenged us. He said, "If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple." Also, "Anyone of you who does not renounce all his possessions cannot be my disciple." So we must make Jesus foremost in our lives if we wish to follow him. All his demands are justified if he were truly our God. Personally, I am so glad that he had made clear what's required of us. For without such guidance, we would be lost, not knowing whom to follow nor how to live our lives so that we may be set free and gain eternal life. Meet his challenge and we'll be greatly rewarded in the end!

***Our Greatest Offer to God***

        The greatest offer we can make to God is to surrender ourselves completely to him so that we become 100% obedient. This enables us to love him with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our mind. Guess what: Now we experience the greatest possible freedom this side of heaven! 

***A sin Realized!

        Since I am doing the First Saturday devotion, I went to confession this morning. Confession officially starts about ten minutes after Mass is over. I have learned that if you are the first one to receive Holy Communion, you are likely to be the first or at least near the first in line for confession. But today when I saw that many people were trying to get to the line as quickly as possible, the Lord made me see that it is a sin to leave the pew to join the confession line right after receiving him when the Mass hasn't even ended yet. I should have spent that time thanking, savoring, and adoring the Lord on knees, and not thinking about anything else. So I withdrew from the line and went back to the church in the afternoon to confess this sin. I am glad to have realized that what I thought was a clever thing to do clearly did not come from the Lord. 

**God Is Serious

        When you have a most serious intent, you do something most serious to fulfill it. This was exactly what God did when he gave his only Son to die on a cross in our place in order to save us from eternal death. This is going to the extreme all right. Saving all of us must be his most serious intent. There is no way you can say that the Lord did all that for nothing! So let's get serious and know that we can now be saved from sin! 

***Our Only Savior*

        We were born sinners. We can try to stop sinning on our own, but what guidelines should we follow? Our own or someone else's? Living in this secular, material world filled with temptations, how long can we remain untouched? But we have Christ who can not only take away our sins after we repent of them, but also remove our tendency to sin as well! For he is our Lord and creator, the only one capable of fundamentally changing us to save us from sin. 

*Motives of the Heart

        In today's first reading from 1 Corinthians 4, Paul writes that the Lord will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will manifest the motives of our hearts. If our motives are always good and pure, even if we fail in what we do, we do not need to worry about God's judgment. Know the Lord well and he'll take care of your motives.

***Standing Up for Faith and Tradition

         I wish this would happen in this country too.

**Becoming like God

        We surrender ourselves to God so that can become like him. Once we become like him, we experience tremendous freedom and satisfaction. 

**True Humility

        One who is humble is not affected by what others think of him nor what he thinks of himself; he only cares about what God thinks of him.

**Responding to God's call

        In today's Gospel reading from Luke 5, Jesus called Peter, James, and John, and they left everything and followed him. This is way the we should respond to the Lord's call, and he is always calling us! He may want us to pray more, to fast, to tell a friend about Christ, to stop complaining or worrying, to watch less TV, to get up early in the morning, etc. We must respond without hesitation. It does take discipline, but to say "I'll do if for your sake" to the Lord each time starting out can get you going. Soon you'll know the joy and satisfaction of always answering his call.

**Be Truly Wise in the World

        In today's first reading from 1 Corinthians 3, Paul writes that the wisdom of this world is foolishness in the eyes of God and that the thoughts of the wise, as it is written, are vain. To me, the world knows how to make gains for itself well, but what profit would there be for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? (Matthew 16:26) We all are going to depart from this world one day. True wisdom is following the Lord now so that you gain life for all eternity. It goes way beyond and above the wisdom of the world.