Readings: Isaiah 48:17-19; Psalms 1; Matthew 11:16-19
There is a great blessing for us when we understand and accept God as a Father. To enjoy the full benefit of having God as our Father, we need faith and obedience. Faith means believing all He says and obedience is acting according to all He commands.
In the First Reading of today, the Lord tells His people that what He asks them to do is not for His sake, it is not to satisfy some need in Him but for their welfare.
This we must keep in mind – whatever God directs, commands or instructs us to do, is for our own good. We may not understand why but it is for our benefit.
Going further, the Lord laments the unfulfilled potential of His people, the unreceived blessings, and their unrealised destiny because they didn’t obey. If they had obeyed, their happiness would have been like a river, their children and descendants would have been numerous, they would not have suffered the shame they suffered in Babylon.
In 1 Samuel 13:13, Samuel told Saul, “You have done a foolish thing…You have not kept the command the LORD your God gave you; if you had, he would have established your kingdom over Israel for all time.”
Saul lost a destiny, a blessing, a potential because he was choosy in obeying God as opposed to acting in complete obedience.
Sometimes we can also be choosy in our obedience to God and in what we believe.
In the Gospel of today, we see that attitude of being choosy with God in the generation that Jesus talked about.
They were offended by John’s austerity and were unimpressed by Jesus’ gregariousness.
They rejected God’s message first because of their hardheartedness and secondly because they wanted God to make sense to them before they could believe and obey. When we expect God to make sense to us before we obey Him, we lose a great deal.
Today, let us pray for living faith in God, a faith that enables us to trust Him completely. Let us pray for a spirit of total obedience, which will enable us to act according to what He commands without dragging with Him. Let us pray that the Lord may restore to us whatever we might have lost through disobedience and unbelief.
Sermon preached by Rev. Fr. Emmanuel Baraka-Gukena Okami on December 15, 2023