May 22, 2021 – Christ Lives! In Him I Trust!

“Your business is to follow Me.” —John 21:22

Today, on the last day of our novena to the Holy Spirit and the next to last day of the Easter season, we read the last words of the Acts of the Apostles and the Gospel of John. May today be the beginning of our never again refusing to act on God’s commandments.

When the Lord commands us to follow Him to Calvary, He doesn’t want us to turn and ask: “But, Lord, what about him?” (Jn 21:21) The Lord doesn’t want us to hinder the spread of His Word by comparing ourselves with others. Furthermore, the Lord doesn’t want us to delay in acting on His commands because we have too many problems. For example, “with full assurance, and without any hindrance whatever, [Paul] preached the reign of God and taught about the Lord Jesus Christ” (Acts 28:31). St. Paul acted on the Lord’s command even though he was in an unfamiliar city, under house arrest, awaiting trial before the Roman emperor, and rejected by many Roman Jews (see Acts 28:16, 19, 24). St. Paul had plenty of problems and excuses for not acting, but he obeyed the Lord.

When we receive the Holy Spirit, we too perform the “acts of the apostles.” We don’t question God, compare ourselves with others, or get bogged down in our problems. We act (Jas 1:22). Let today be the last time we fail to act on God’s commandments. May today be the beginning of the uninterrupted acts of us, His disciples.

Prayer: Father, on this last day of the novena to the Holy Spirit, may I fix my eyes on Jesus and obey His every command.

Promise: “There are still many other things that Jesus did, yet if they were written about in detail, I doubt there would be room enough in the entire world to hold the books to record them.” —Jn 21:25

Praise: St. Rita, famous as the patron of impossible causes, is also a patron of troubled marriages, infertility and parenthood.

From a treatise on John by St Augustine

“If you abide in me”, he says, “and my words abide in you, you shall ask what you will, and it shall be done unto you.” For abiding thus in Christ, is there anything they can wish but what will be agreeable to Christ? So abiding in the Saviour, can they wish anything that is inconsistent with salvation? Some things, indeed, we wish because we are in Christ, and other things we desire because still in this world. For at times, in connection with this our present abode, we are inwardly prompted to ask what we know not it would be inexpedient for us to receive. But God forbid that such should be given us if we abide in Christ, who, when we ask, only does what will be for our advantage. Abiding, therefore, ourselves in him, when his words abide in us we shall ask what we will, and it shall be done unto us. For if we ask, and the doing follows not, what we ask is not connected with our abiding in him, nor with his words which abide in us, but with that craving and infirmity of the flesh which are not in him, and have not his words abiding in them. For to his words, at all events, belongs that prayer which he taught, and in which we say, “Our Father, who art in heaven.” Let us only not fall away from the words and meaning of this prayer in our petitions, and whatever we ask, it shall be done unto us. For then only may his words be said to abide in us, when we do what he has commanded us, and love what he has promised. But when his words abide only in the memory, and have no place in the life, the branch is not to be accounted as in the vine, because it draws not its life from the root. It is to this distinction that the word of Scripture has respect, and to those that remember his commandments to do them. For many retain them in their memory only to treat them with contempt, or even to mock at and assail them. It is not in such as have only some kind of contact, but no connection, that the words of Christ abide; and to them, therefore, they will not be a blessing, but a testimony against them; and because they are present in them without abiding in them, they are held fast by them for the very purpose of being judged according to them at last.