Immaculate Conception Church 7000 JFK blvd North Little Rock, AR 72116 US
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Homily
NINETEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME
Today we focus on study and it fits into the readings. Again we know that studying is not the same as book knowledge. We are studying a person – Jesus Christ. When we talk about study, it’s about getting to know Jesus more intimately. When we do that, we can hear His voice and we can recognize Him because Jesus said, “My sheep recognize my voice.” The only way to recognize to voice of God is by getting to study Him and to know Him. When you get into a relationship with anybody, you study them. You don’t sit there and get a book out and say, “Hmmm – now what about you? I think you’re psychotic." You don’t do that kind of stuff if you love somebody. What you do is you sit there and you study that person is you watch them. You spend time with them. And so, we go to the Old Testament. Now God says to the prophet, “I want you to go up to Mount Horab and I’m going to talk to you.” And so he does. Now, he had to have the gift of discernment which came from studying God and knowing who God was for him to know the difference between what was not of God and when God was present. Correct? So, he goes up there and he’s waiting of for God and a great wind comes and he recognized that God was not in that wind. Then there was a fire and oh, the fire came and there was a big fire and people might say, “That was a sign from God.” The prophet says, “Nope, God is not in that fire.” Then an earthquake came and when the earthquake came, everything shook. Again people would be going around today saying, “God is coming to get us. God is coming. Jesus is coming.” They’d all go crazy. The prophet knew – nope – God was not in that earthquake. And then a whispering sound came and because the prophet knew the person of God, he hid his face because he knew that was God. Talk about discipleship. I was really struck about how you've got to teach people how to be disciples. They talk about total commitment. The guy struck it off, he said, “We’re not looking for total commitment. That’s not enough. We’re talking and we’re asking people for absolute surrender to Jesus." And when you can absolutely surrender yourself to Jesus, you show that by the time. So, everyone here studies something, right? Sure – you study how to make money. You study how to be healthy whatever it is. How often do you really study how to fall more in love with Jesus, to get to know him? Again, that’s the purpose of life. Why did God make me? God made me to know Him, love Him and serve Him. The way you know Him is you study Him. So, you need to sit there and the first thing you need to do is you spend time with the Word of God. How often? Every day – because the Word of God will give you that power not to be afraid as we’re gonna talk about in a few moments in the Gospel. When you listen to God, He’ll take away your fear. He just will. So when people, you know, how often are you afraid? You know you are afraid of getting cancer. You are afraid of whatever it happens to be. You’re afraid of losing your money, not having enough work, family issues – you know, whatever it is. People walk around in fear and Jesus says, “Where’s your faith today? Why are you afraid?” If we spend time in His Word, He’s giving us a way not to be afraid. Another thing to study God is like at the end of our church and throughout the world, there is those Lighthouse Media CD racks. And those Lighthouse Media racks, they have almost everything you could ever imagine about the faith. Now, you can get those for $3. If you are really bored, you can go online and I have almost 125 talks on line and you can download them into your IPad. Each one’s an hour. But if you are in the car, you put in one of those Lighthouse CD’s, you take one and put it in there and then for 15 minutes as you are driving to work every morning, you listen to something that will bring you closer to Jesus. You study Jesus so that you’re not wasting time. People like to waste time. Why would you waste any time? You got go and listen to all that music, why not listen to something that will bring you closer to Jesus? You can do that. You can do that when you wake up in the morning – have a CD on and when you wake up you are listening to Jesus. At night before you go to bed, put something on that you can listen to more about Jesus on. Get a spiritual book. Decide what you are going to do. And in that spiritual book read 5 pages a day or a chapter a day or a couple pages a day so that you are always growing and learning and not staying where you were. Think about it – every night when you go to bed, if you didn’t learn something more that day, what was the day for? You didn’t grow. Here, you can’t just grow about “Oh, I learned about more money”. You’re gonna die anyway. But if you learn about Jesus, that is eternal knowledge. That is something that will keep you alive forever. So because God is infinite, you can never know Him enough. You’ll always be growing in knowledge of Jesus. So, do something like that. In a couple weeks or in a month, we are going to start weekly meetings and I’m going to teach for 45 minutes every week between masses, so, you come to that so you can grow in love with Jesus. It’s not just about mind stuff. It’s about intimacy. Now, here is Peter today in the Gospel. Peter is fine but he’s sitting there and he wants to test God or test Jesus to see how powerful he is. So, he says, “Jesus, if it’s you (he really didn’t know Jesus yet, did he?), If it’s you, Jesus, command me to come to you on the water.” Jesus says, “Come." Peter came out and as we all know so well, he walked on water. Whoa! We can walk on water too if we obey the command of Christ. You know, Come! OK – and he did it and he was fine as long as he looked his eyes on Jesus. As long as he focused on Jesus, he learned about God, he learned about power. He learned about faith. He learned about strength. But as soon as he learned the three things we always talk about, when he looked back and saw the boat and thought, “That boat seems much more comfortable than walking on water”, he started getting afraid and when he looked at his past. Or when he looked at the storm around him. "It’s storming." And when he looked at himself, "Look it, I can’t walk on water. I’m just a man.” That’s our excuses for why we don’t do God’s will. We make excuses by saying, “Well, you know, I’m just a man. I’m just human. I’m not a saint. I’m not Father. I'm not this…” And we make excuses. Whenever we look at our self, our past, or the storm around us, what does that give us? Fear. It causes fear. So, we do this almost every day. Almost every day we still live a life of fear because we look at ourselves, the situation around us or our past. And Jesus looks at us and says, “Why?” And when we start following, and again, how did Jesus, how did Peter learn to grow? He cried out, “Jesus, save me." And He did. As soon as he refocused on Jesus, he was fine. You see what God’s trying to teach us? That we need to grow in our knowledge of God. We need to do that in very ways that is going to take us out of our comfort zone. It’s gonna make us do things we normally don’t do. You normally don’t study. You normally don’t do extra prayer. You normally don’t read the bible. You normally don’t do that so, you’re going stay in fear. But, if you obey the command of God and He says, “Come. It’s time to learn. Time to trust and love.
God Bless,
Dc. Ron Stager
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