Prayer for Illumination
I beg you, most loving Savior, to reveal yourself to us, that knowing you we may desire you, that desiring you we may love you, that loving you we may ever hold you in our thoughts. Amen.
— St. Columbanus, 543-615
TEXT
1 John 2:3-11 (The Message)
Here’s how we can be sure that we know God in the right way: Keep his commandments.
If someone claims, “I know him well!” but doesn’t keep his commandments, he’s obviously a liar. His life doesn’t match his words. But the one who keeps God’s word is the person in whom we see God’s mature love. This is the only way to be sure we’re in God. Anyone who claims to be intimate with God ought to live the same kind of life Jesus lived.
My dear friends, I’m not writing anything new here. This is the oldest commandment in the book, and you’ve known it from day one. It’s always been implicit in the Message you’ve heard. On the other hand, perhaps it is new, freshly minted as it is in both Christ and you—the darkness on its way out and the True Light already blazing!
Anyone who claims to live in God’s light and hates a brother or sister is still in the dark. It’s the person who loves brother and sister who dwells in God’s light and doesn’t block the light from others. But whoever hates is still in the dark, stumbles around in the dark, doesn’t know which end is up, blinded by the darkness.
READ
True love casts out fear, light chases away darkness, and authenticity cancels hypocrisy. The world waits—filled with fear, sitting in darkness, waiting for a genuine, authentic love.
This is the world Jesus came to save, the world he willingly shed his blood for, a world he asks us to go into…. casting out fear, chasing away the darkness, and living as authentic reflections of the One who sent us.
Prayer of Response
Fill us, we pray, with thy light and life, that we may show forth thy wondrous glory. Grant that thy love may so fill our lives that we may count nothing too small to do for thee, nothing too much to give and nothing too hard to bear.
— Ignatius Loyola, 1491-1556