Choosing Jesus

I have sketched a three-point plan over the past three weeks to help us create good Catholic habits - weekly Mass, daily prayer, and monthly confession. These habits prepare our hearts to receive the love of God in a deeper and more personal way. The sacraments are powerful vehicles of grace in our lives, but they are not magic. We have to develop a receptive and responsive heart to the graces God wishes to shower upon us.
​
Through developing these good Catholic habits our hearts are more aware of and open to God’s call to a deep personal relationship with Him. He wants us to know and experience the personal love He has for each of us. Pope Benedict XVI reminds us that “being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction….”

I desire nothing more than to help you deepen your relationship with Jesus. I want to encourage you to become an “intentional” disciple of Jesus. I will be trying to lay out what that means and how to do it. 

The first part of this process is reacquainting ourselves with the kerygma. The kerygma is the Greek term referring to the preaching or proclamation of the basic outline of the life, passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is the nucleus of the Gospel (the Good News) that awakens initial Christian faith. It leads us to say that “Jesus is Lord.”

All of us who have been baptized will eventually be called to make a personal choice to live as a disciple of Jesus Christ in the midst of his Church. Below are two quotes to pray with this week and some questions to ponder.

St. John Paul II described the kerygma as “the initial proclamation by which a person is one day overwhelmed and brought to the decision to entrust him or herself to Jesus Christ by faith.”

Pope Benedict XVI: “Faith is above all a personal, intimate encounter with Jesus, and to experience his closeness, his friendship, his love; only in this way does one learn to know him ever more, and to love and follow him ever more. May this happen to each one of us.”

Where am I at in my relationship with Jesus? Have I made a commitment to Jesus as Lord of my life? Have I entrusted my life to Jesus?