6. He answered and said to them, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites,
as it is written:
‘This people honors Me with their lips,
But their heart is far from Me.
7. And in vain they worship Me, Teaching
as doctrines the commandments of men.
Worship is not a matter of Sunday, nor is confined to a building. If we understand the meaning of worship, our life will be different. The worship involves two things, drawing near to God and honoring Him. When we worship God we need to draw near to God, and we need to honor Him.
We would like to call drawing near to God as fellowship and honoring God as service.
Fellowship and service are the two important aspects of our worship of God. We need to listen to God, and we need to talk to Him. This is a fellowship
we have with God. If you want to listen to Him, you need to come to His Word. So, every day, we need to come to the New Testament to read it,
study it, think about it, meditate on it, and pray to the Lord Jesus. The Lord Jesus will enlighten us to speak to our hearts and lead us into the truth. Then we shall know the truth, and the truth will set us free from all the sinful negative things in our lives. So that is how we can have fellowship with Christ. Then, with the word we received, with the enlightenment received, we should talk to Him. We should praise and thank Him. We should pray to Him.
Then, after having fellowship, we also need to honor Him. In honoring
Him, we should go beyond singing songs, we should honor Him with the righteous deeds/life. That righteous life will be produced by having fellowship with Him. It is a spontaneous thing. When we have fellowship with
Christ, automatically, our life will be changed. We have been saved to worship. And we worship to be saved.
Hebrew 7:25
"Therefore, He is also able to save to the uttermost, those
who come to God through Him, since He always lives to make
intercession for them."
The Lord Jesus saves those who come to God through Him. We are being sanctified, so the sanctification, the transformation, the renewal is a lifelong process. So for that, we need to come to God every day. That is the meaning of the complete Salvation. God wants to save us to the uttermost. He doesn't want to give a partial Salvation. He wants to give us the complete Salvation. For our Salvation to be completed, we need to come to God every day, Only by coming to the Word of Christ, our minds can be renewed. Our thinking, our desires, can be renewed. We can think the way God wants us to think, we can desire what God wants us to desire, we need to fellowship with Him. We need to come to his Word every day.
Hebrews 10: 22
"22. let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having
our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with
pure water."
So the way to fellowship with God is through the experience of the powerful death of our Lord Jesus Christ. That means to have fellowship with God...to have fellowship with Christ we need to lose a little bit of our earthly comfort and our time. When we do that, we can enjoy the heavenly blessings, the spiritual blessings, which the world can never give. The spiritual blessings, the heavenly blessings are so precious. When we do that, we can draw closer to God.
So the worship means drawing near to God and honoring God. We can honor God only by drawing near to Him. Unless we fellowship with Him, unless we draw closer to Him, we will never be able to honor Him as He wants. God is asking us to fellowship with Jesus Christ by coming to the New Testament every day to receive the speaking of the Lord. And then with that speaking, we should every day, praise Him, thank Him and pray to Him. And then we should confess His name to others. We should share the joy we received from Him with others. So that way we can honor Him in our daily lives.
May the Lord Jesus Christ strengthen each one of us to do that. Amen.
“I considered this message my special task. Providence has assigned it to me in the present situation of man, the Church, and the world” ( Pope St. John Paul II November 22, 1981)
The knowledge of St. Faustina and the revelations bestowed on her coming from Jesus became known to Pope John Paul II early in 1940. It was at the time when he was studying for the priesthood secretly, in a seminary in Krakow.
The first he heard of these revelations was from another seminarian Andrew Deskur who later became a Cardinal also. Andrew told him about Saint Faustina Kowalska and the message of Divine Mercy she claimed she had received from the Lord.
It was during the time that she received the messages from Our Lord, that Karol Wojtyla was forcibly working under the Nazi occupation forces in the factory, which was in view of the convent and can still be seen today from the convent cemetery where St. Faustina was first buried.
Karol Wojtyla visited the convent frequently, first as a priest and then as a bishop. He went there often to pray and in later years gave retreats there as well. It was Karol Wojtyla, as Archbishop of Krakow, who after St. Faustina’s death, was the first to consider bringing St. Faustina’s name before the Congregation for the Causes of Saints for consideration as a figure worthy of being put forward for beatification.
During the Second Vatican Council, he approached Cardinal Ottaviani about the desire of the faithful in Poland to have Saint Faustina raised to the honours of the altar. Cardinal Ottaviani told him the first step to take was to get together the testimonies of all those who knew her, while they were still alive.
Archbishop Karol Wojtyla delegated his auxiliary bishop, Julian Groblicki, to gather the information in order to begin the Informative Process of the life and virtues of Saint Faustina. In September 1967 the process was completed, and in January 1968, the Process of Beatification was inaugurated. Because of the positive outcome of the informative Process, inquiries from many places, especially from Poland and, in particular, from Archbishop Wojtyla, were sent to the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. They asked whether the prohibitions of the 1959 Notification were still in effect. In response to these inquiries, the Sacred Congregation issued a new "Notification" dated April 15, 1978, which stated, “This Sacred Congregation, having now in possession the many original documents, unknown in 1959 and having taken into consideration the profoundly changed circumstances and having taken into account the opinion of many Polish Ordinaries, it now declares no longer binding the prohibitions contained in the quoted "Notification".
On the first Sunday of Advent, November 30, 1980, Pope John Paul II published his second encyclical letter “Dives in Misericordia” (Rich in Mercy) , in which he describes the mercy of God as the presence of a love which is greater than any evil, greater than any sin and greater than death. In this encyclical he calls on the Church to devote itself to pleading for God's mercy for the whole world.
The publishing of this second encyclical was probably the most important event in the life of the Holy Father and in his relationship to St.Faustina and the message of Divine Mercy.
It was as Archbishop of Krakow, that Karol Wojtyla defended Saint Faustina when her credibility and the message of Divine Mercy was questioned in Rome. This came about due to a faulty translation in Italian of her diary, which was sent to the Congregation for the Protection of the Faith.
Pope John Paul II, who said that he felt spiritually "very near to Saint Faustina and had been thinking about her and the message of Divine Mercy when he began ‘Dives in Misericordia’. On November 22, 1981, Pope John Paul II made his first public visit outside of Rome following a lengthy recuperation. On the Feast of Christ the King, he travelled to the Shrine of Merciful Love in Collevalenza, near Todi, Italy. There, within a few days, an international congress was held to reflect on the encyclical ‘Dives in Misericordia’.
After celebrating the Holy Sacrifice of the Eucharist, he made a strong public declaration about the importance of the message of mercy.He said, “A year ago I published the encyclical ‘Dives in Misericordi’. This made me come to the Sanctuary of Merciful Love today. By my presence I wish to reconfirm, in a way, the message of that encyclical. I wish to read it again and deliver it again. Right from the beginning of my ministry in St. Peter's See in Rome, I considered this message my special task. Providence has assigned it to me in the present situation of man, the Church, and the world. It could be said that precisely this situation assigned that message to me as my task before God”. (Extract from the homily by Pope John Paul II at The Shrine of Merciful Love in Collevalenza, Italy, November 22, 1981)
On Mercy Sunday, April 10, 1991, two years prior to the beatification of Saint Faustina, Pope John Paul II spoke about Saint Faustina, relating her to his encyclical and emphasising her role in bringing the message of mercy to the world, “The words of the encyclical on Divine Mercy (Dives in Misericordia) are particularly close to us. They recall the figure of the Servant of God, Saint Faustina Kowalska. This simple woman religious particularly brought the Easter message of the merciful Christ closer to the whole world”.
On Mercy Sunday, April 18, 1993, Saint Faustina was beatified by Pope John Paul II in St. Peter's Square. He began his homily with a quotation from her diary: "I clearly feel that my mission does not end with death, but begins”. Her mission continues and is yielding astonishing fruit. It is truly marvellous how her devotion to the merciful Jesus is spreading in our contemporary world and gaining so many human hearts!
"Where, if not in the Divine Mercy, can the world find refuge and the light of hope?" is an expression of the theme of Pope John Paul II's pontificate. In his ‘Regina Caeli’ talk of April 23, 1995, immediately after he had concluded celebrating Divine Mercy Sunday at the Holy Spirit Church, Pope John Paul II exhorted us to personally experience God's mercy, “In a special way, today is the Sunday of thanksgiving for the goodness God has shown man in the whole Easter mystery”.
This is why it is also called the Sunday of Divine Mercy. Essentially, God's mercy, as the mystical experience of Saint Faustina Kowalska, who was raised to the honour of the altar in 2000, helps us to understand, reveals precisely this truth: good triumphs over evil, life is stronger than death and God's love is more powerful than sin.
All this is manifested in Christ's paschal mystery, in which God appears to us as he is, a tender-hearted Father, who does not give up in the face of his children's ingratitude and is always ready to forgive.
We must personally experience this mercy if, in turn, we want to be capable of mercy. Let us learn to forgive! The spiral of hatred and violence which stains with blood the path of so many individuals and nations can only be broken by the miracle of forgiveness. When Pope John Paul II made a pilgrimage to the Shrine of Divine Mercy in Lagiewniki, Poland, on June 7, 1997, he addressed the Sisters of the Congregation of Our Lady of Mercy in a very personal way, reflecting on Divine Mercy and giving an amazing personal witness to the influence of Saint Faustina and her message, “I have come here to this Shrine as a pilgrim to take part in the unending hymn in honour of Divine Mercy. The psalmist of the Lord had intoned it, expressing what every generation preserved and will continue to preserve as a most precious fruit of faith.
There is nothing that man needs more than Divine Mercy, that love which is benevolent, which is compassionate, which raises man above his weakness to the infinite heights of the holiness of God. In this place we become particularly aware of this. From here, in fact, went out the Message of Divine Mercy that Christ himself chose to pass on to our generation through Saint Faustina. And it is a message that is clear and understandable for everyone. Anyone can come here, look at this Image of the merciful Jesus, His Heart radiating grace and hear in the depths of his own soul what Saint Faustina heard, "Fear nothing l am with you always" (Diary, 586).
And if this person responds with a sincere heart, "Jesus, I trust in you," he will find comfort in all his anxieties and fears. The message of Divine Mercy has always been near and dear to me. It is as if history had inscribed it in the tragic experience of the Second World War. In those difficult years, it was a particular support and an inexhaustible source of hope, not only for the people of Krakow but for the entire nation. This was also my personal experience, which I took with me to the See of Peter and which in a sense forms the image of this Pontificate. Do not neglect any of these dimensions of the apostolate”.
On Mercy Sunday, April 30, 2000, before some two hundred and fifty thousand pilgrims and the television cameras of the world, Pope John Paul II canonized Saint Faustina Kowalska, ‘the great Apostle of Divine Mercy’. In doing so, he also approved the Divine Mercy message and devotion by declaring the Second Sunday of Easter as "Divine Mercy Sunday" for the universal Church. In one of the most extraordinary homilies of his pontificate, Pope John Paul II repeated three times that Saint Faustina is "God's gift to our time." She made the message of Divine Mercy the "bridge to the third millennium." He then said, “By this act of canonization of Saint Faustina I intend today to pass this message on to the third millennium. I pass it on to all people, so that they will learn to know ever better the true face of God and the true face of their neighbour. In fact, love of God and love of one's neighbour are inseparable.
Exhorting all of us to join our voices to Mary, Mother of Mercy, and St. Faustina, "who made her life a hymn to mercy" and directing us to "sing the mercies of the Lord forever" (Ps 89:2), he ended the homily with these words, “And you, St. Faustina, a gift of God to our time, a gift from the land of Poland to the whole Church, obtain for us an awareness of the depth of Divine Mercy; help us to have a living experience of it and to bear witness to it among our brothers and sisters. May your message of light and hope spread throughout the world, spurring sinners to conversion, calming rivalries and hatred, and opening individuals and nations to the practice of brotherhood”. Devotion to Divine Mercy is the strong and clear mandate given to the Church in these revelations. We have seen in St. Faustina's canonization to sainthood the fulfillment of this mandate. By canonizing her, the Church itself has established Divine Mercy as today's devotion for all. So today, fixing our gaze with St. John Paul II on the face of the risen Christ, let us make our own prayer of trusting abandonment and say with firm hope, Jesus the risen Lord, I trust in you.
Most Merciful Jesus, You yourself have said, "Learn from Me for I am meek and humble of heart." Receive into the abode of Your Most Compassionate Heart all meek and humble souls and the souls of little children. These souls send all heaven into ecstasy and they are the heavenly Father's favorites. They are a sweet-smelling bouquet before the throne of God; God Himself takes delight in their fragrance. These souls have a permanent abode in Your Most Compassionate Heart, O Jesus, and they unceasingly sing out a hymn of love and mercy.
The Resurrection of Jesus was the most important event in the history of the world. When the Lord appeared in the 'Upper Room' to the apostles pointing out His wounds, it was to demonstrate He was the Crucified Christ, and to show He had resurrected from the dead. The final proof that He was God. He then bestowed on the apostles the power to forgive sins, which was in effect Divine Mercy coming into the world.
It was the beginning of the Church on earth. In 1931 He appeared as the same image in another room, this time the room of a young nun, again showing His wounds, emphasising the power of those wounds as rays from a font of reconciliation and renewal, rays of love and mercy. This was Divine Mercy, His victory on the Cross, His resurrection, coming into to a very sinful world once again. A world that was about to plunge man into the depths of depravity in a horrific world war.
He asked her to teach the world again of why he died on the Cross to give sinners another chance of obtaining God's Divine Mercy, and pardon their sins if they returned to living by God’s commandments. He was also reminding man that His death on the Cross, Divine Mercy was for all mankind (And there are other sheep I have that are not of this fold, these I have to lead as well. They too will hear My voice, and then there will be one flock and one Shepherd. John 10:11 – 18)
The commandments of God are built into every human born, in the form of a conscience that was given them at birth, it is the spirit of God within them, if you deny your conscience, you deny God.
The image that appeared to the apostles was the resurrected Christ. The Resurrection was the start of the Christian Church. The image that appeared to Saint Faustina was the same image that started the Christian Church. His appearance to Saint Faustina as the same image was to renew the Church, to renew belief in the Cross, in the Resurrection, in mans salvation.
In the beginning he said “I have not come to call the righteous, but to call sinners to repentance”. (Luke 5:32) For the same reason He appeared again on earth to Saint Faustina, to save sinners from eternal damnation. His message of Divine Mercy is a warning to mankind to exercise their conscience, come back to God and live by the Commandments.
Who are the sinners? – sinners are those who offend human nature, God’s creation, and the dignity of man.
Those who sincerely say ‘Jesus, I trust in You’ will find comfort in all their anxieties and fears. There is nothing more man needs than Divine Mercy – that love which is benevolent, which is compassionate, which raises man above his weakness to the infinite heights to the holiness of God. ~St. John Paul II ~
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The Resurrection of Jesus was the most important event in the history of the world.