9 May 2026 - if the world hates you

Today's Readings
(Audio)

If the world hates you, realize that it hated me first.

If we can't win the approval of others it doesn't necessarily mean that we did something wrong. It might just mean that there are certain games that the world plays that we as Christians can no longer indulge. Approval in the world is not typically awarded to the virtuous or the excellent. Rather, approval is given quid pro quo in return for expressed allegiance, and is paid for in favors that are often unsavory. Others implicitly ask, "To what lengths will you go for me? Won't you compromise your stubborn values for my sake?". Needless to say, they don't take kindly to a negative response. But if we value the opinions of those still trapped in the corrupt systems of the world too highly we won't be able to resist trying to please them. 

I have chosen you out of the world

What can counterbalance all of the lack of acceptance and indeed often outright hatred from the world? Only approval that matters more can do so. And this we have from Jesus himself. On the one hand there are all those many people who refuse to except us because we refuse to play along. On the other, there is Jesus who has chosen us specifically, from all those many people in the world, to be especially his, peculiarly his own. The love of Jesus not only explains why the world hates us. But it makes that hate bearable. On our own the only option we might find in response to the hatred of others could be to express hatred in response. But because we have been loved by Jesus we remain free to love even our enemies, just as Jesus himself loved us even while we were yet sinners. 

If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you.
If they kept my word, they will also keep yours.

We can't do things so perfectly that we never provoke a response of negativity from others. Neither should we assume that it was our skill or ability that provoked a positive response. Sometimes we do fail and provoke others beyond what the truth requires of us. But a positive response from others never really comes down to a lack of skill of cleverness on our part. Rather their response really comes down to the word of Jesus. All we can hope to do with this word is express it clearly and without creating scandal by our example. When we do this, it is more than able to speak for itself, to persuade, to change hearts, transforms minds, and alter the course of lives forever, just as it did for us. The messengers should not think overmuch of their own importance. They should not fixate on receiving adulation from those to whom they deliver the message because of their presentation. Instead they should deliver the message, knowing that, if nothing else, this pleases Jesus. And pleasing him is what matters.

When it is the approval of Jesus that we seek we will be sufficiently detached from our own plans that the Holy Spirit can change our direction and alter our course when he desires. Imagine the wasted effort if the disciples insisted on trying to go on into Bithynia even when the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them. If they had been looking to one another for approval they might have been dragged down by mutual disappointment at the failure of their plans. But they were only about pleasing Jesus, so they happily allowed him to reroute their journey. This not only saved them wasted effort, but even opened opportunities they might have otherwise missed.

During the night Paul had a vision.
A Macedonian stood before him and implored him with these words,
"Come over to Macedonia and help us."

Whom is God putting before us, imploring our help? Are we sufficiently free from the world's games to do it? If not, let's try to remember the fact that Jesus has chosen us. And that should matter more than anything the world has failed to give us.

Know that the LORD is God;
he made us, his we are;
his people, the flock he tends.

Newsboys - It Is You

 

8 May 2026 - to be his friends

Today's Readings
(Audio)

I have called you friends

Jesus desires us to be his friends. He reveals to us everything he heard from his Father, making us more the mere servants, but rather, co-conspirators in accomplishing his Father's will. But he asks us to respond to his love for us by loving him in return. This means we can't stop at knowing what is important to the heart of Jesus. We must cooperate to bring it about. And what is this plan with which he expects us to cooperate? Is it finally a matter of arbitrary behaviors and rituals? No, rather: "love one another". But it is not love by any standard whatever. It is specific, "as I love you". What Jesus revealed to his disciples, and what he is inviting us to understand, is the magnitude of his love for us. This love is meant to be the starting place for our own response and effort.

It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you
and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain

We often get things precisely backward. We believe that we ourselves evaluated Jesus and chose to follow him after careful consideration and cost-benefit analysis. Then we assume that we earn his friendship by obeying commandments which we often do not fully understand or accept. After that, we hope that he will explain things and, perhaps, finally begin to love us. But he reveals his love first and only then asks us to respond and cooperate. He explains the plan for our salvation from the beginning so we can work with him to help bring it about. The fact that his friendship is in some way conditional on doing what he commands us is only true after that friendship is established. It is not the reason for the friendship. It is rather a definition of what sort of friendship it is meant to be, the shared interest we must pursue. If we will not pursue it we will be the ones walking away in another direction, not Jesus.

Since we have heard that some of our number
who went out without any mandate from us
have upset you with their teachings
and disturbed your peace of mind

The Apostles and presbyters described in Acts were concerned that other people were making things overly complicated for the early disciples. What was meant to be about the love of Jesus and friendship with him was being dragged back into rituals that were now obsolete, having been fulfilled in Jesus himself. So the messengers chosen to clear up the confusion were themselves exemplary friends of Jesus, Barnabas and Paul "who have dedicated their lives to the name of our Lord Jesus Christ". They, together with Judas and Silas, explained to the early disciples that the point was not a sort of rules maximalism. Instead they commanded only simple necessities to ensure that all of the friends of Jesus, whether Jew or Gentile, could share a common life, directed toward the one common goal of responding to his love. 

Is it true that the Church has probably more rules than any other institution on earth, and if so is this not excessive? Yes, but no. The rules of the Church are precisely in response to all of the many ways in which she has been challenged by people going out without mandate from her and saying things that sounded just true enough to disturb the peace of mind of those who listened. Perhaps when we are in the middle of reading some finer point of canon law we don't realize it. But the Church is designed to be the place where friendship with Jesus can flourish and grow, drawn by his Father, and united in his Spirit. It is meant to be a place where all of us can join together with one voice in the psalmist's song of praise.

My heart is steadfast, O God; my heart is steadfast;
I will sing and chant praise.
Awake, O my soul; awake, lyre and harp!
I will wake the dawn.

CityAlight - He Calls Me Friend

 

7 May 2026 - the remain thing

Today's Readings
(Audio)

If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love,
just as I have kept my Father’s commandments
and remain in his love.

We don't think of obedience as being in any way connected with love. Americans in particular are suspicious of anything other than unrestricted freedom, and tend to oppose anything that feels like an attempt to control us. However, if we listen to Jesus we immediately see that he understood things differently. His relationship to his heavenly Father was defined in terms of obedience to his commandments. But this was vastly different from the obedience proper to slaves or even employees. This was instead the obedience proper to a Son whose Father was perfect and loved him with a perfect love. There was no suspicion or coercion involved in obedience of this kind. Jesus chose to obey because he trusted his Father, and because he wished to reciprocate the unlimited love he received by doing only and exactly what his beloved Father wished in return.

We are not merely being asked to keep some abstract laws. Much less are we being asked to submit ourselves in an ultimate sense to any self-serving human systems of authority. It is not as though we are being asked to follow the laws of a state so that we can enjoy the privileges of citizens. It is much deeper than that. We are being invited into the relationship of Jesus with his Father. We are invited to it in terms expressed as commandments because those terms express the absolute priority the Father is meant to have in our lives. They could not be suggestions, as though the Father's will must ultimately pass the scrutiny of merely human judgments. No, instead we need to abandon the suspicion about his will that characterized the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden. Commandments in this sense are different from suggestions because we can only respond wholeheartedly to commandments if we trust the one from whom they come.

I have told you this so that
my joy might be in you and
your joy might be complete.

The point of our obedience is not that the Father or Jesus gain anything from it, but rather we ourselves. To obey does not denigrate us as we are wont to imagine. Rather it ennobles us, making us more like Jesus himself. It was his trusting relationship to the Father that was the source of his own joy. It is that very joy that he invites us to share.

Remain in my love.

For us, the commandments ensure we remain united to God by ensuring we don't prefer those things which are contrary to it, all the many forms of disordered self-love. The goal of the commandments is therefore good. And Jesus himself, the perfect example of living for such a goal, is imminently compelling. Why should we continue to hesitate or hold back? What we have been asked is not the "yoke that neither our ancestors nor we have been able to bear", spoken of by Peter. It is rather the yoke that is easy and the burden that is light to which Jesus himself invites us. 

Newsboys - Beautiful Sound

 

6 May 2026 - growth opportunity

 

Today's Readings
(Audio)

I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine grower.
He takes away every branch in me that does not bear fruit

Jesus is the source of our ability to bear fruit, but he is not a guarantee that we will bear fruit. He wants us to remain in him. The fact that he encourages us to do so implies that the contrary possibility also exists. When we refuse to bear fruit, when we refuse to share the love and mercy we ourselves first receive, we may have the appearance of being Christians, of being united to the vine, without actually being so. If we refuse to let his life flow through us so as to bear fruit the Father will ultimately ratify what we have already in fact decided by removing us from the vine. 

So, why not just take the easy way out and bear fruit? But it turns out this path is not without difficulties. We must submit ourselves to regular pruning in order to direct ever more of our energies toward those things which are life-giving rather than on dissipation and distraction. But when we are used to expending our lives toward certain ends it is not a comfortable process to have those aspects of ourselves pruned. The temptation might be to say that fruit isn't worth the trouble of the continuous process of purification it apparently requires. We can experience a life free from the annoyance of outside interference if we simply refuse to cooperate with the vine grower. But such a life is actually not a life, since it is disconnected from Jesus who is the source of life. But if we remain in Jesus, even though it may seem difficult at times, even though the pruning process might often feel overwhelming, we will bear fruit. It isn't that we have to achieve a certain level of skill ourselves. We just need to submit and let it happen even when our flesh rebels and we are tempted to withdraw.

Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit,
because without me you can do nothing.

It may at first seem like there are some things we can do without Jesus. But are there really? Without him holding us in existence we cannot even take our next breath. Apart from Jesus all we can do is embrace the illusory reality of sin, doing non-things that accomplish nothing real. Our responsibility is to let Jesus do his work within us. The more we become aware of this work he is doing the more we will have the choice between embracing it or refusing it. As Christians who know our faith and have heard these words of his we have been given much indeed. And to whom much is given, much is expected.

If you remain in me and my words remain in you,
ask for whatever you want and it will be done for you.

The more we concede to the work of Jesus within us the more aligned we will become to his larger plan for the world. We will become more effective in choosing to cooperate with him. It will become more and more true that we only want what he wants. And that is when miracles happen.

John Michael Talbot - I Am The Vine

 

5 May 2026 - prizing peace

 

Today's Readings
(Audio)

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.
Not as the world gives do I give it to you.

The world gives us a peace that is the result of a temporary lack of negative feelings and circumstances. It is merely a lull between crises. It comes about when we manage to momentarily elude our anxieties. We are occasionally able to distract ourselves from the things we fear. We don't always have to directly engage those things in life with which we struggle. But the trouble with peace of this sort is that it always comes up short. It circumstantial by definition. Even if we happen to have immense resources and spend them all, along with all of our effort, to protect it, we cannot achieve uninterrupted peace of this kind. And the harder we try the more it tends to hurt when something breaks through the barriers we have built and we are confronted by the intrusion of an apparently indifferent world.

'I am going away and I will come back to you.'
If you loved me,
you would rejoice that I am going to the Father;

The peace that Jesus gives is different from that of the world. It does not require that we only always experience positive feelings and circumstances. It is durable enough to provide us with stability even in the midst of suffering. Paul and Barnabas told the disciples that, "It is necessary for us to undergo many hardships to enter the Kingdom of God", and they did not sense this to be in contradiction to the good news they proclaimed. 

We probably wonder if this sort of peace, that is present in the midst of pain, is really anything other than pretense and propaganda. But it is vastly different to experience trials, hardships, and suffering, when we abide in the peace of Jesus, than to do so without it. We don't need to experience the desperation that is so common to the rest of the world in the face of suffering. We don't need to feel as though something went wrong, or is irreparably broken. We can move through the highs and the lows of life with a profound and unshakable trust that God is in control. Then, no matter what life throws at us, we won't overreact and make matters worse. We may not always see or understand what God is doing in the world. In fact, we do not often understand the ways in which God brings greater good from the many evils we see around us. But we know that even when he seems absent he is still working. He is always arranging everything for our good, not in an obvious way, like Santa Claus, but as rather as one whom we can trust because he knows us better than we know ourselves. 

I will no longer speak much with you,
for the ruler of the world is coming.
He has no power over me,
but the world must know that I love the Father
and that I do just as the Father has commanded me.

Even the ruler of this world, the devil, need not cause us to lose our peace since he has no power over Jesus in whose hands are all of our lives. It should, perhaps, give us pause that we ourselves are all to able to extricate ourselves from his protection. But even when we think about that possibility we should not overestimate ourselves and underestimate God's mercy and his desire to save us. In any event, we don't need to worry as though the devil has ultimate power over us since the one who is living within us is greater than the one living in the world (see First John 4:4). We never need to succumb to his wiles or let ourselves be deceived by him again. We have recourse if it happens. But better to remain seated in the power of the peace of Christ.

MercyMe - Greater

 

4 May 2026 - let him in

Today's Readings
(Audio)

Master, then what happened that you will reveal yourself to us
and not to the world?

Judas, not the Iscariot, was asking an apparently fair question. Why were the Father and the Son apparently holding back, and not simply revealing themselves to everyone? It seemed from what Jesus said almost as if people needed to first prove themselves by expressing their love for God by keeping the commandments, after which, if they succeeded sufficiently, God would reciprocate.

Whoever loves me will keep my word,
and my Father will love him,
and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him.

Yet, upon reflection, it was clear that it did not begin with the disciples or any other potential recipients of God's favor. Rather, it (at least this stage of it) began with the Word taking on flesh, living among us, and extending to humanity the invitation to faith. Those who really believed what Jesus said would embrace his commandments and build their lives on them like houses built on solid rock. God was not holding back the fullness of his self-revelation because he was stingy or indifferent. Rather, that revelation was something that could only be experienced in its fullness by those who cooperated with the grace of God to open their hearts to it. And this was done precisely through the obedience of faith. If God instead merely blasted humanity with the fullness of his glory all at once, if he revealed himself to all equally without preparing them first, they would simply not be able withstand it. In the Old Testament it was known that no one could see the face of God and live. Even Moses, the greatest of the prophets, was only permitted, by a special privilege, to see his back. Marvelously, we have a higher destiny than that. God does intend for us to see his face. But he must first prepare us to do so. He works with us by degrees, revealing a little more of himself each time. And the more we respond with eyes of faith the more we ourselves are transformed and become more able to see him.

And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another (see Second Corinthians 3:18)

we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is (see First John 3:2).

We must embrace reality as God understands it, rather than as our darkened minds tend to interpret it. The words given to us by Jesus are not arbitrary, but represent the ultimate nature of things. He gives us his words in order that our lives might be conformed to reality, not illusion. Ever since Adam and Eve chose to believe the lie of the snake in the garden we have needed this healing transformation. And now, through the words of Jesus, it is possible.

The Advocate, the Holy Spirit
whom the Father will send in my name --
he will teach you everything
and remind you of all that I told you.

God did not want to merely reveal himself in an intellectual or abstract way. Rather, he wanted to come and dwell in our hearts. But he only wished to do this for those who would welcome him. He did not want to be an invasive species or an uninvited guest. He wished to make his dwelling in us. We can think of the commandments as the blueprints for the design of operations of the spiritual temples that our hearts are meant to become. True understanding is a gift of the Holy Spirit who reminds us of everything Jesus revealed. When the Spirit reminds us of the teachings of Jesus it does not end at intellectual comprehension. Rather we also remember the context of relationship with the Triune God into which those teachings fit. And because they exist in that context of mutual love we also remember that which flows from that fact, their power. 

yet, in bestowing his goodness,
he did not leave himself without witness,
for he gave you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons,
and filled you with nourishment and gladness for your hearts.

God has not in fact neglected anyone, even the world who has not yet responded to his revelation. He has everywhere scattered the seeds of witness to his reality, proving that he does desire the whole world to turn toward him from their idols. But he now wants to use us as he first used Jesus, and then his Apostles, to extend his invitation and to share his message. We should not be afraid to do so, since we are only being asked to nourish the seeds he himself, in mercy and compassion, has planted.

 

Brandon Lake - Son Of Heaven

 

3 May 2026 - dwelling place

 

Today's Readings
(Audio)

Jesus tells us, "Do not let your hearts be troubled". But how do we not? Is it even possible? He tells how: "have faith also in me". And yet many of us believe ourselves to have faith while often still experiencing troubled hearts. Is there something deficient in such faith? Perhaps deficient isn't the right way to look at it. But it may be true that our faith has not yet had its full effect in renewing our minds. It might extend to God in some abstract sense, but not Jesus in the concrete matters of daily life. And this is how many of us often are. We affirm belief in a creator but are less confident that anyone is still around to run things. We dare not apply our faith to circumstances for fear that they will not turn out well. And yet it has always been a fundamental teaching of the Church that circumstances, whether good or ill, only happen as directed or permitted by God's providential care. If we can learn to believe that God is not only real but that he is also really in control we can dampen the degree of anxiety we feel when things seem to be going poorly in our lives and in the world, as they often and with increasing frequency seem to do.

In my Father's house there are many dwelling places.
If there were not,
would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you?

Jesus did not abandon us, but went away specifically for our sakes. He left so that the Spirit could come and unite us to him even more perfectly. He is absent in body but his guidance is even more intimately available to us than ever. Through his enthronement in heaven and his uniting us to himself by his Spirit he is even now preparing our hearts to dwell with him forever. This is no less true when times are difficult. In fact at such times, it is, if anything, even more true, since it is then that our union with him can gain the most strength. When we have the opportunity to prefer nothing to him we also have the opportunity to change our relationship to those things which are merely temporary. Our idols won't save us in our daily struggles. But our relationship with Jesus is the one thing that can sustain us. He is our shelter in the storm, no matter how fierce.

Master, we do not know where you are going;
how can we know the way?

Jesus' plan seems elusive or even convoluted to us much of the time. We protest that we do not really know how to connect what we are supposed to do in our daily lives with this grand vision of union with God forever. But Jesus told Thomas that it was not, after all, so very complicated. Although he did not tell us the future in such a way that we could determine for ourselves the right path, he himself remained present to us, showing us the way. More than trying to solve reality like a riddle we are meant to focus on living in union with Jesus himself. The closer we are to him the more we can be sure that we are in fact going the right way, that we are grounded in the truth, and headed toward eternal life. There is no way to express this that is better than participation in the Sacraments of the Church, in which our unity with Jesus grows. From there, the love of Christ that we receive impels us on. We are sent out on mission to the world, to love the world as Jesus first loved us.

Master, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us.

Perhaps we are too eager to look elsewhere to find what we need. We have been given an embarrassment of riches as our Christian inheritance. We no longer need to search for meaning as though our lives depend on it. We don't need to desperately seek the next experience that might finally fulfill us. We don't need to look to the left or the right. What we need has already been given. He himself already lives within us.

And your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, “This is the way, walk in it,” when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left (see Isaiah 30:21).

We are empowered for service, though in a different way from the deacons described in Acts. A significant part of our mission is to ensure that no one is missed or neglected, especially by our prejudices. Each of us has different gifts and will therefore live the mission in different ways. We are to become living stones, each one of us fitting uniquely and irreplaceable into the spiritual house of God. We are all priests, prophets, and kings. But we live these realities differently. For the fullness of God's plans for the world, the full dawning of his "wonderful light", we are all essential.

 

BNC Digital Music - Proclaim His Marvelous Deeds