Growing God within us!

WORD 2day: Saturday after Epiphany

Jan 11, 2020: 1 John 5: 14-21; John 3: 22-30

Be on guard against false gods; beware of idols, warns the Word 2day. An idol is anything other than God, that tends to replace God! There can be many such things in our lives that take away the prime place that belongs to God - it could be money, it could be our undue attachments or addictions, it could be our ego or our selfishness. It is important to identify the idol round the corner, ready and waiting to grab the place from the rightful Divine. 

The first reading repeatedly reminds us: we are born of God; we are of God; we are in God and we belong to God... It is a call to realise what we are transformed into, at our baptism. As the solemnity of baptism of the Lord nears, the discussion has turned from yesterday, to who acts in our baptism and what happens through it! 

It is from heaven that we receive our baptism, and it is the Lord who chooses us and makes us God's own. In this sense, sin would be choosing something over and above God; and that something, could be a desire, a possession, a person, a value, a thing, an ideology or a habit! Even if it may seem apparently good, nothing of these can overtake God. When they do so, they become idols, our idols round the corner. Nothing, absolutely nothing, can replace God! Therefore, every sin is a form of idolatry: God being replaced by something else! 

Let us remember... as children chosen to belong to God, we should be convinced, that always in our life, God should increase and everything else should decrease! The call is this: Growing God within us, that we decrease and God increases, that we disappear and God appears in us, that we may show the world, we belong to God!