Any person’s success in becoming holy is directly related to how well they can discern what is right and wrong, and that is directly related to how well they can see evil for what it is. If you can’t see the error from truth in yourself or the world around you, you are already compromised and seduced to corruption. Great evil occurs and is allowed because evil is not seen for what it is: evil. Satan has to tempt you to see error as truth, and you have to agree to it. This is happening on a grand scale in the world. Sin is sin.
One reason the Ten Commandments and Church Teachings are clear is because they expect a clear response, a response that is unmitigated, uncompromised, and spoken with an undivided heart. If we want true peace, whether that be in our own hearts or in the world, the intercessor warrior (as we are called to be) must have a clear understanding of the truth that is simple, unfettered, and deep as they are deep. We are all on the journey to conform our lives better to the Truth that never changes, Who is Jesus Christ and His authentic teachings of the Catholic Church, which includes the Ten Commandments and love of God and neighbor.
Intercession is successful in establishing God’s Kingdom in the world in so far as we give to souls from our hearts this solid truth, this perfect devotion to Truth Who is Jesus. We don’t have to be on a street corner preaching, but we need to be willing to, if God calls us to. The world would be better if we did, in my humble opinion, because at least then, we would be testing our own conviction of the truth in our hearts and not cowering to the comfortable life of social convention. Didn’t the Apostles do the same?
Every soul will, at their death, be confronted with the reality of how much they put Jesus first in their lives. If you go to Jesus with a sincere heart and ask for forgiveness, He will forgive you because He sees the sincerity as true trust in Him. You believe in Him who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and He will free you from your sin. (For Catholics who have mortal sin, this means confessing to a priest in good standing with their bishop.)
But we must also give mercy to Jesus by doing His Will, and that means conforming our lives to His Teachings, not making up our own teachings – no matter how weak or distant we are to right-living; no matter how estranged, hurt, tortured, persecuted, or pagan – because His words to us are the one true Way, Truth, and Life. We need Jesus and His caring Mother all the more because of our inability to conform to Him. And that is why, among other reasons, Divine Mercy devotions are recognized by the Church all the more, especially during this Year of Mercy by the Catholic Church.
In that way, we can have an informed understanding of the path of conformity; not permission to sin or creation of our own pagan laws, but hearing the calling of the Eternal Shepherd, Jesus Christ, to join His flock no matter how far we have strayed. God doesn’t want to bring justice, a correction to His Will that is equal to our actions against God; but rather conversion, repentance, and a willful desire to love Him and all of His teachings, and to embrace Him in true loving devotion, forever in love with Him.
We are made for God and certainly God is made for us! Jesus’ teachings, therefore, are made for us, and we are made to follow them so we can have Jesus in fullness. The teachings are intended to teach so we can be perfect students of what? Students of true love of God and others! The teachings aren’t themselves the end, God is the end! A true love relationship, rightly oriented, rightly understood, rightly established in our hearts, rightly lived, rightly and deeply ordering our whole being into the image and likeness of God, so that we can be a gift to Him who is fully the most perfect gift to all of humanity: Jesus, the God-man.
If we don’t see evil for what it is and strive to live heroically the true teachings of the Catholic Church, we aren’t going to be at peace, because the image and likeness design in our bodies and souls, minds and spirits will be singing the hurts of defiance against our God-given nature. Sickness of all proportions will abound in us, misery upon misery of sins, confusion to the point of seeing good as evil and evil as good, wandering with no hope of certitude in anything. Relativism will undermine and corrupt us to the point of spineless slugs. We will be puppets of Satan and bear little resemblance to Christ at all, but for those who know the truth, we will be responsible at our deaths for what truth we were given but didn’t live out.
The response of having been given the truth is to live it out. We are responsible for a correct, full, and undivided response to the truth we are given. God will forgive grievances against Him if we go to Him admitting our fault, but we must not tire of keeping Him first in all moments of our lives and throughout our lives to the last breath. He is our reason for living, for truly He is Life itself, and that will never change no matter how much we or the world around us sins.
Warriors of True Love of God and Neighbor
A warrior’s weapons are only as good as their heart. That is to say, you are only as good as what trueness to Truth you have in your heart. If you are not morally strong, neither will your intercession be strong. Being a warrior expects, by the name itself, to be hardened in the practice of being a guardian, protector, defender, and even champion of the Truth.
In our case, it is true to love all people in the world because God loves them all. We are not better than God; we follow His lead. The truth of the gospel is summarized in the Greatest Commandment: Love God above all else and your neighbor as yourself. In this world of compromise of truth, we add, “truly” love God and neighbor, as a way of placing ourselves on the side of Truth who is Jesus. And we know, in this statement, it isn’t simply Truth to the exclusion of love, but rather living the truth of this gospel summary which plainly says, “love.” Our warrior lives cannot exist without love. Love by its nature is self-giving, generous, and heroic. It cannot stop giving of itself, being generous to the point of being heroically loving of all.
And in the same understanding, you cannot compromise the Truth because we can’t be true if we compromise the Truth. Truth expects with no exceptions to be undyingly faithful. There are no exceptions and there will never be exceptions because Truth doesn’t change, and our faithfulness to Him who is eternally True should never, ever change, no matter what. Every failure to be faithful to truth is an opportunity to reconcile to Truth.
And what makes this reconciliation easier, even a joy, and even more so than that – a renewal of marriage to Jesus Christ – is a true love of Jesus! You realize you need Jesus, not simply because it is right, morally correct, logically good, biblically consistent, faithfully saintly, or even respectfully indignifying, but simply and oh so very necessarily because in all you are, in the center of your heart, in the fiber of your being, you speak one, consistently undying language of the theology of the body of God’s Heart that says:
“I am made for YOU because I was made from You and I desire nothing else than to be be ALL YOURS! And may no man, woman, error, evil, mountain, obstacle, entity, falsehood, sin, or institution of any design, prevent me from having You who desires completely to have me as You designed me in every aspect of my being to be Yours!”
We will be judged on how much we are Jesus’ and how much we have sought to help others be all His. If we are not truly loving others as Jesus truly loves us, we are not yet living the kingdom of God. But if we are, and God be praised if we are, we are truly living the life He has called us to live, fulfilling the gospel, building the kingdom of God, and we can rest in His arms on His stable chest, and hear His Sacred Heart beat blessings, love, and grace into us because we are all His in all we are. And His divine, True Love is pumping through us out into the world, making the world fertile, rich, loving, and devoted to Him and His Mother. This is a heaven on earth, a New Jerusalem, an everlasting kingdom, a true little paradise flowing into the world.
May we all be warriors of true love of God and neighbor, fearlessly loving all with trust in the Truth, the authentic teachings of the Catholic Church, the Ten Commandments, and the belief that by living lovingly true to this, we are justified and worthy before God.