14 May 2026 - command performance?

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.

If we view the words of Jesus with suspicion we will not understand him correctly. The point is not that his Father forced him to prove himself in order to earn his love. It is not that we have to prove ourselves to Jesus in order to be loved by him. The point is not demonstrating our loyalty by adherence to arbitrary rules. In fact, we are invited to remain within a love and approval we have already been given as a gift. Keeping the commandments is not about anything arbitrary. Rather, the commandments describe reality itself. In the same way that, at a lower level, gravity is a rule that describes how life on earth functions, which we ignore at our peril, so too do the moral laws given to us by God describe the truth of the way things are. Thus, they cannot be mere suggestions any more than gravity is a suggestion. The point of their being commands is not the imposition of a superior being's will over one who is inferior. After all, Jesus himself was obedient to the Father. The point is that the Father loved Jesus enough to make the all things known to him. And Jesus believed, accepted, and lived in accord with that knowledge. As creatures with free will we have another option. That option is to pretend that the commandments are arbitrary, to respond with suspicion, and to prefer our own view of reality to one which is divinely revealed. But we exercise this option at our peril. In doing so we walk off of a moral cliff, expecting, somehow, not to fall.

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

The commandments aren't designed to be repressive or to make us suffer. The reason Jesus came and revealed himself to his disciples and, in turn, to us, was that we might share in the joy of being united with the Father that was properly his own. The Triune God thought the joy the had in one another was so good that they wanted to share it. That was, in a way, the whole reason for creation.

This is my commandment: love one another as I love you.
No one has greater love than this,
to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

On the one hand the goodness and necessity of what Jesus commands seems obviously right and just. But on the other it is often difficult to live out in this fallen world of ours. Love usually entails suffering and sacrifice. But the commandment reminds us that it isn't optional, or only for those who chose to go above and beyond. We are all meant to be defined by love of this kind. To fall short is to fall short of who we are meant to be as human beings. Without the example of Jesus, and his commandment to follow in his footsteps, we would be tempted to excuse ourselves when the going got tough. Without Jesus showing us what love was meant to be we would almost certainly be content to give less than all of ourselves. But he holds us to a higher standard because he desires more for us than even we desire for ourselves.

You are my friends if you do what I command you.
I no longer call you slaves,
because a slave does not know what his master is doing.
I have called you friends,
because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father.

Jesus is not arbitrary in the criteria he gives for friendship with him. He desires all of us to be his friends. Yet to be his friends means we need to share his passion. We must want to walk with him on the shared path of the Father's plan. Without this we would have nothing in common with him, no basis on which to establish friendship with him. We can almost hear how excited he is to let us in on the mystery of his Father's will, and the degree to which that matters to him. And we can also hear the degree to which we matter to him in his eagerness to share all of that with us. He is naturally trying to combine the enjoyment of his two favorite things, his Father, and his creatures.

It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you

We tend to get this backwards and assume that it was we who chose Jesus, that it was the result of a carefully calculated cost-benefit analysis on our part. Because we think we initiated the relationship we tend to insist on earning it. But the terms we impose on our worthiness are always our own arbitrary conditions. He already loved us before we thought of him for the first time. We became aware of him because he chose us and was directing our lives toward him all along. But he also has a purpose for us which we did not decide for ourselves, a purpose that is better than anything we could make up, since it directs us beyond ourselves to our destiny with him. That purpose is love. And in this world it takes the form of going forth and bearing fruit. Yet we know that the fruit is not properly our own, but rather the gift of his Spirit working in us. So we need not strive desperately, but rather cooperate with his gentle guidance in our lives.

Switchfoot - Meant To Live

 

13 May 2026 - guide

 

Today's Readings
(Audio)

I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now.

Jesus did not simply impart to them the full contents of the modern universal Catechism. He knew that they were limited in what they could receive at any one time. He had explained to them the necessity of his death and resurrection as the climactic fulfillment of the Old Testament. But they did not fully comprehend it until after the fact. Once they had seen it and only then did his words about it become more than mere words. We might infer this was true for much of what Jesus had to reveal. Nothing that happened in his life, death, resurrection, Ascension, or in the sending of the Spirit, happened exactly in the way they would have expected. Yet it Jesus had in fact predicted all of it beforehand. It was only once the realities he described became experiences that the disciples were able to make all the necessary connections. It was when his teachings encountered reality that their full depth was revealed. 

What Jesus imparted to his disciples in the deposit of faith was complete, lacking nothing, capable of answering any question. But not all of the questions presented themselves immediately. Thus doctrine only developed when someone like Arius said something that sounded almost true, but not quite. The lived experience of the orthodox faith had to be clarified against all of the many permutations of possible error. What Jesus had said about his relationship with the Father and the Spirit was always the unchanging core. But there were a lot of ways to be wrong about what he said, about who Jesus was. A short list might include Gnosticism, Montanism, Sabellianism, Arianism, Nestorianism, and Monophysitism¹. Because there were so many possible ways to be wrong and only one truth it was necessary for God to provide a way to protect the truth and ensure its availability in subsequent generations. We know the the Scriptures alone were insufficient since most of these famous heresies used them, and found plausible verses that seemed to be in agreement with their teachings, but which were in fact distortions, removed from their proper context.

But when he comes, the Spirit of truth,
he will guide you to all truth.

Jesus promised the Spirit of the truth to his Church. It was a concrete way to ensure that his promise to Peter, that the gates of hell would not overcome it, was guaranteed. After all, losing the truth was to lose everything, since Jesus told us that, "the truth will set you free" (see John 8:32).

Yet the promise of all truth had to extend beyond the Church to the lives of individual believers, although not in the same way or to the same degree. Believers could not be expected to all be such scholars as to determine the true Church from others on their own. They would need the Spirit within them to direct them toward the full manifestation of the Spirit in the Church. The Church herself was radiant with truth in such a way as to be a supernatural sign to believers. And this would correspond to a growing hunger in them for a truly timeless truth, and a definitive source of meaning, a hunger placed in them by the Spirit himself. This too would only happen as they gradually become more open and ready to receive it. We see this in the reading from Acts this morning, where some didn't listen, some wanted to hear more later, and some converted immediately. It was not the clever words of Paul alone that made the difference. It was their openness to the guidance of the Spirit in their hearts. Paul himself would later lean into this aspect of evangelization, about which he said, "my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power" (see First Corinthians 2:4). He learned that too much cleverness could obscure the core of the message, and the necessity of faith to receive it. The more practiced at evangelization he became the more he learned to allow the Spirit to speak for himself.

He will not speak on his own,
but he will speak what he hears

The Spirit doesn't guide us into innovation in the form of clever new ideas with no historical precedent. Rather he guides us ever more deeply into the words of Jesus himself, since "he will take from what is mine and declare it to you". But this content remains relevant, illuminating not only the past, but even the future since he "will declare to you the things that are coming". We tend to prefer innovation, assuming that we already tried standard textbook Christianity and achieved only a mediocre result. But more probably the words of Chesterton on the subject also apply to us: "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried". So rather than seek something new, let's try it the way it was meant to be tried: in the power of the Spirit. As we move through Easter and toward Pentecost there is no better time than now to invite him to fill us once more.

¹) Learn  more about the Great Heresies at Catholic Answers.

 

John Keating - Come Holy Spirit

 

12 May 2026 - convicted

 

Today's Readings
(Audio)

"Now I am going to the one who sent me,
and not one of you asks me, 'Where are you going?'
But because I told you this, grief has filled your hearts.

The disciples were sad because  the best and most loving person they ever knew told them he was leaving them. He had predicted has coming death, but they could not see this is anything other than an unintended disaster. Jesus, though, continued to insist that it was a part of the plan. His going forth from them was not merely in death via the cross, but also victoriously via the Ascension. Because his visible withdrawal from the world was actually the result of his plan, because it was actually the procession of his victory, and leading to his enthronement in heaven, it had the potential to produce immense results even on earth that the disciples had not imagined.

But I tell you the truth, it is better for you that I go.
For if I do not go, the Advocate will not come to you.
But if I go, I will send him to you.

Somehow the invisible mission of the Holy Spirit would surpass even the visible presence of Jesus. The ministry of Jesus was confined to a single locality at a time. But the Holy Spirit would be able work everywhere at once, and without the need for rest. Jesus conveyed the truth in a way that was still external to those who heard him. But the Spirit would testify from within peoples' own hearts. 

And when he comes he will convict the world
in regard to sin and righteousness and condemnation

When we here this trifecta of conviction we might first think they aren't so wonderful that we would trade them for the presence of Jesus. But if we consider them more deeply we will realize their importance. 

The Holy Spirit would convict the world of sin. Where previously people tended to blame others they would learn of the reality of their own culpability. The Spirit would bypass the external defenses of peoples personalities in order to reveal to them their own hearts. But this conviction was not condemnation. It implied the possibility of change, and included the invitation to transformation. The focus was chiefly on the matter of belief in Jesus himself. They would come to see the ways in which they were resisting his appeals, the fact that their unbelief was in fact culpable. They would come to see that it wasn't merely that Jesus hadn't done enough or said enough to be persuasive. Rather they had put him too the test by setting the bar unreasonably high. But when they realized this they would be free to open their hearts to him.

Moreover, the Spirit would help believers to understand in a deep and experiential way the reality of the victory of Jesus. The world held him to be a criminal. And even in our day it does not think highly of many of his teachings. But the Spirit would join believers directly to the one the Father vindicated by raising him from the dead. It was the resurrection power of Jesus that also gave new life to those who were reborn in him. Thus, they were meant to be overwhelmingly convicted of the validity of his claims. The resurrection was to be a reality so central to their lives that they could not second guess Jesus or his words even when the whole world seemed to oppose them. It is confidence of this sort that we see in the scene from Acts where Paul and Silas were in prison, yet still singing praise. They were able to escape, yet stayed to share the Gospel.

We are still tempted to believe that this world is ultimately in the grip of the evil one. It doesn't often look like a place under the sway of divine providence, at least as far as appearances are concerned. If not the devil, we often concede, at least at the level of our feelings, that we dwell in an uncaring world, ruled by abstract laws, or impersonal chance. But in Jesus we already share in the victory over the way things now seem. We already possess the reality of his heavenly victory, which will one day extend even to the physical creation. This makes it possible for us to live with hope in a fallen world. It makes us certain that there is a point to everything, and in particular to our efforts for the name of Jesus.

But Paul shouted out in a loud voice,
"Do no harm to yourself; we are all here."
He asked for a light and rushed in and,
trembling with fear, he fell down before Paul and Silas.
Then he brought them out and said,
"Sirs, what must I do to be saved?"
And they said, "Believe in the Lord Jesus
and you and your household will be saved."

Matt Maher - Because He Lives (Amen)

 

11 May 2026 - testimony

Today's Readings
(Audio)

I have told you this so that you may not fall away.

From this statement we can know that it is possible to fall away. It might seem as though this should not be the case, as though once we have known the mercy and love of Jesus that we could never forget him. We know that there is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus (see Romans 8:1). But we also know that it is possible for those who are in Christ Jesus to not remain in him, else he would not waste words saying to us "Abide in me" (see John 15:4). Like even his own disciples, it is possible to make the mistake of putting ourselves first and leaving him. It is possible through our actions to choose the kingdom of this world to a degree that renders us unfit for the kingdom of God. In many ways this makes our condition worse than being without Jesus in the first place (see Second Peter 2:20). But it only remains worse if we do not repent. As long as we return to the Lord he can use even our sin to help dispose us toward humility and docility in the future. We can become even more unshakable in our devotion to him, more firmly united to his abiding presence.

They will expel you from the synagogues;
in fact, the hour is coming when everyone who kills you
will think he is offering worship to God.

From the perspective of the world robust and orthodox Christianity does not seem normal. It seems rather more like a plague to be eradicated. It seems hostile not only to supposed legitimate moral freedom, but even to the healthy self-image of individuals. Humility is antithetical to the aspirations of the world. The word does not admit of the possibility of culpable error in oneself but only of mistakes committed through ignorance. But because we know ourselves, we know better than that. We know that we have at times known what we should do and failed to do it. We have known what we ought not to have done and yet did it nonetheless. Does it hurt our feelings to know that we are not only not all knowing but not even consistently good? Of course. But should we have artificial feelings based on false pretenses? If we do, it will make it almost impossible to find a cure.

The world outside of us is always at work normalizing something other than Christianity. Sometimes Christianity is directly villainized. Other times the world urges a mediocre and lukewarm version of Christianity that is not dangerous to its hegemony. But both of these poisons infect the very water we drink. It is hard not to internalize some of their implications even without realizing it. And the more this subtle process happens without notice the more likely we are to find ourselves more aligned with the world than with Christ and to eventually make the choice to leave him.

When the Advocate comes whom I will send you from the Father,
the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father,
he will testify to me.

We need a voice, one in addition to our own memory, or the merely human voice of the shepherds who have charge over us in the Church. We need the testimony of the Spirit who can win the battle against the world from within us, not merely from the outside. He can remind us of what is true and help us to keep things straight when we are tending toward confusion. We might not be able to persuade ourselves that the world is wrong when it just seems so normal. Even the arguments we craft to convince ourselves might not be convincing enough, even when they are true arguments. We need the voice of the Spirit within us. Just as no one had ever spoken in the way that Jesus did, with authority, so too does the Holy Spirit speak with authority in our souls, in a way that is not possible for others, not possible even for ourselves.

And you also testify,
because you have been with me from the beginning.

If we want to testify to Jesus (and we should at least want to want that) then we need to be rooted in a principle that is more unshakable than ourselves. We need to possess a testimony that can give us certainty no matter how strongly the world opposes. It is often as though we expect that evangelization of the culture ought to always be easy and smooth. But this is more likely to be the exception than the rule. Easy evangelization might more often be merely self-congratulation among people who mostly already agree. But we are called to let the light of Jesus shine in the darkness. The darkness can and will overcome us alone. But it will not overcome him and us together, united in the power of his Spirit. Evangelization is not finally about human efforts or decisions. It is about preparing the way for the Lord and letting him do the work, as we see in our reading from Acts.

One of them, a woman named Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth,
from the city of Thyatira, a worshiper of God, listened,
and the Lord opened her heart to pay attention
to what Paul was saying.

Songs In His Presence - Abide, O Lord

 

10 May 2026 - Spirit of truth

Today's Readings
(Audio)

I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you.
In a little while the world will no longer see me,
but you will see me, because I live and you will live.

Although they could not see the Spirit of truth, they would see Jesus, risen from the dead and, as Peter wrote, "brought to life in the Spirit". They didn't see the Spirit directly, but they witnessed the transformative effect he had in the life of Jesus, beginning from his baptism, and culminating in the resurrection. Thus, as Jesus revealed the Father who was invisible so too did he revel the Spirit. He did so preeminently by his resurrection. It is therefore appropriate that the creed calls the Spirit "the LORD, the giver of life". Because of this can understand that the situation described in Acts, when Peter and John prayed for and laid hands on those in Samaria to receive the Holy Spirit, that what they in fact experienced was like a spiritual resurrection. It was the being "born from above" about which Jesus spoke with Nicodemus.

I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you.
In a little while the world will no longer see me,
but you will see me, because I live and you will live.
On that day you will realize that I am in my Father
and you are in me and I in you.

The disciples experienced the sorrow of feeling as they had been orphaned when, Jesus, the one who revealed the Father was taken from them in his crucifixion. It seemed for a time that the talk about the unity of the Father and the Son was an unhelpful abstraction at best and a falsehood at worst. The world around them seemed to celebrate while they mourned. But this feeling was only their experience of reality. It was not reality itself. The resurrection corrected this misapprehension. It not only proved that Jesus was the one beloved and chosen by the Father. It opened the door for his disciples to be united to him through his Spirit. They not only saw the words of Jesus fulfilled and proven. They experienced the truth of the reality of his claims in their own lives. They began to participate themselves in the very reality about which Jesus had been teaching them, the life of the Trinity that he himself shared with his Father and with their Spirit. Far from being orphans, they were now sons and daughters, united with the Son to the Father in the Holy Spirit.

The world remains fixed in opposition to the truth because it is invested in falsehoods and addicted to sin. Thus it cannot receive the Spirit and does not want to do so. It would spoil all the fun, or so the thinking goes. Moreover, the world was not privileged to witness the resurrection of Jesus and thus continues to function as if death is the end. It therefore tries to impose its own ideas about making the best of things. The result of imbibing what the world is selling is the darkening of the intellect. It involves succumbing to the spirit of the age, which is a spirit of falsehood. It is this since it is the spirit of the devil himself who "is a liar and the father of lies" (see John 8:44). Since Christians will have to consistently contend with this spirit, directly and indirectly, from without and even from within their own minds, they need the Spirit of truth. The Advocate is not optional with an Adversary of this hostile, hateful, and deceitful. We can't rely merely on what we think and feel. We need God's perspective. The indwelling of the Holy Spirit makes it possible to for God's perspective to become our own. It is not just superimposed externally. Rather we choose it and cooperate with it. We know him not so much because we see him or understand him abstractly as because he remains with us and dwells in us. Thus the trajectory of degeneration on which the spirit of the age sets our minds is more than outmatched by the renewal in the Holy Spirit. We can no longer say with the world that we are not loved, that things are pointless, or that they are heading nowhere. We know that we are loved, the reason God made us, and that it is toward him that our lives are meant to lead.

Always be ready to give an explanation
to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope

Obviously it is impossible to describe the exact nature of the experience of the Holy Spirit, or what it is like to share in the life of the Trinity. But we should be able to say something. We know that Jesus is the reason for our hope. We know that it is him that made the difference in our lives. It is because he came back to us that we are not now orphans. It is because he gave us his Spirit that we see things differently from others. We might not be able to give the precise formulae from Nicea or recite the Athanasian creed from heart. But we can tell others the difference it makes to know and to love the adorable Trinity.

Elevation Worship - Resurrecting

 

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