Personal sanctification - not to run out of Spirit

WORD 2day: Friday, 21st week in Ordinary time

August 30, 2019: 1 Thessalonians 4: 1-8; Matthew 25: 1-13

This is God’s will: your sanctification! St. Paul has the gift of saying the greatest of the things in simplest of terms. Today, he puts across in straightforward terms the life task that we have – our personal sanctification. 

Our personal sanctification comes as a result of our self understanding. ‘Don’t you know that you are the temple of God?’ (1 Cor 3:16), St. Paul would ask elsewhere. That self-understanding as the dwelling of the Spirit of God, is the starting point for a whole journey of personal sanctification. 

At times we tend to understand sanctification in terms of the other, deciding for ourselves who that other will be, depending on our convenience. We wish to do better than someone and derive satisfaction that we are good. We propose to ourselves some one as a point of comparison - either adulate him or her making ourselves little or judge and criticise them in order to feel so pathetically self righteous. Both of these do not fit into the mind of Christ.

My personal sanctification: it is not a victory gained once for all but it is a constant vigilance and continuous labour, explains the parable that Jesus narrates in the Gospel. The lamp of our life needs to keep burning; the oil is given by God – ‘God who gives the Holy Spirit’. The Spirit is the oil that we need to keep our lamps burning, burning always with the desire to remain sanctified dwellings of the Spirit! Not to run out of Spirit, is what I have to ensure towards my personal sanctification.