RRLeath
Member
- Joined
- Jun 10, 2026
- Messages
- 25
JESUS belongs to us. He loves us with a love which no words can tell, nay, above all our thought and imagination; and He condescends to desire, with a longing which is equally indescribable, that we should love Him, with a fervent and entire love.
Alas! for our dearest Lord! Up to this day, what have we done for Him? And see what he has done for us; and the end of His doing it all was to gain our love! We look at a cross and it hardly moves us. We hear of His bitter Passion, but our eyes are dry, and our hearts indifferent. We kneel down to pray, but we can hardly keep our thoughts fixed upon Him for a quarter of an hour. We go into His own most holy presence and we hardly bend the knee lest it should spoil our clothes. We see others sin, and what matter is it to us that Jesus is offended, so long as it is not we who are risking our souls by offending him? Oh, these are strange signs of love. Surely Jesus cannot be much to us if this is the way we feel about Him. Yet so it is. We go our own way, and do our own will. The great thing is to please ourselves, and to make things easy to us. Life must be taught to run smooth.
As for our devotion or sorrow and repentance for sin, it must be kept at arm's length. We must have bodily comforts and worldly conveniences, and our spiritual life must be nothing but a sufficiency of those inward consolations, without which our souls give us pain, because they are not at rest. If we worship God, it is for self; if we do good to others, it is self we are seeking, even in our charity. Poor Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ! Who thinks of Him? who weds His interests? Yet this is the very object of our existance ---to look after the interests of Jesus, and to forward them in every way we can.
-Frederick Faber
““But while they were on their way to buy the oil, the bridegroom arrived. The virgins who were ready went in with him to the wedding banquet. And the door was shut. “Later the others also came. ‘Lord, Lord,’ they said, ‘open the door for us!’ “But he replied, ‘Truly I tell you, I don’t know you.’”
Matthew 25:10-12 NIV
