Thursday of the First Week of Advent
If people start to praise you for a certain accomplishment, remember that they are judging things differently than God does. God alone probes the heart, and if God finds no charity in your heart, then you are to Him no more than a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal. You’re only making noise, empty noise. Jesus put it better: “Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the Kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven” (Matthew 7:21).
And what is the will of God the Father? To find out, we must study scripture and the teachings of the Catholic Church. Sometimes prayer helps, too, but sometimes prayer only makes it worse. Someone might make a bad or even a sinful decision and try to justify by “praying over” it. If your prayer ever leads you to reject sacred scripture or to reject Church teaching, then you know that your prayer has gone astray and is in need of correction. That is why St. Ignatius Loyola gave rules for thinking with the Church to people making the Spiritual Exercises.
If we ignore or reject God’s will as it has been revealed, and if we, instead, take pride in our worldly accomplishments, let us beware. Jesus warned us about this: “Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name? Did we not drive out demons in your name? Did we not do mighty deeds in your name?’ Then I will declare to them solemnly, ‘I never knew you. Depart from me, you evildoers’”(Matthew 7:22-23).