You are Merciful to Me, I Love You Lord, I’ll Obey Your Laws
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We begin Week 3 of our Sunday Lenten Challenge with this opening prayer:
Trust And Believe
Lord,
I believe you want to give me the grace to go deeper in prayer this Lent. Help me to be present to you so that I’ll intimately pray these next 15 minutes with my heart fully open and willing to receive that grace. Please help me open my heart and pray with more intensity. I want to be able to visualize myself with you so I can feel your presence more intimately in my life this Lent. Lord, give me the grace I need as I strive to complete these 6 days of Sunday Lenten meditations. I am choosing to take up my cross and humbly follow you all the way to Calvary and I want to do it with my whole heart.
AMEN.
Because of Your Mercy I Want to Obey You
Let’s contemplate God’s mercy, especially when we put things above Him in our lives, like money, and honor, and material possessions. Ask yourself, have I made an idol out of the material things in my life that I love? Let’s meditate on God’s passionate love for us, for His Church, and how He offers His mercy when we come to Him in prayer.
Opening Prayer
Lord Jesus Christ,
I believe you are truly here and present to me right now. I desire to be present to you. Guide my heart and mind toward obedience. Speak to me today and give me knowledge about how to walk in your ways. You are merciful to me, Lord let me be merciful to others. You have given me commands to live by. Lord help me obey your laws because they are right and you are trustworthy. All your precepts are good and they are given to me so that I will be blessed and prosper. Please, Lord, I need to walk in your ways.
Please send me your Spirit so that I can worship you with a pure heart and without distraction. Help me to separate myself from all worldly attachments and spend these 15 minutes reflecting on my need of renewal with my heart and mind completely fixated on you. Jesus, you are merciful to me. You know all my weaknesses and that I can’t elevate my heart or my mind without your help. Thank you for sending me your Spirit to pray my mental prayer well and to love you in a way that is pleasing to you. I want to grow to love you more perfectly and to obey your laws.
Thank you, Lord, for every consolation, desolation, time of silence, difficult trial, and temptation of the evil one. I understand that everything that happens in my life is by your holy will, whether it be your divine providence or your permissive will due to my sin and negligence. Please humble me as I walk with you toward Jerusalem. Help me obey your laws and do so with great love in my heart for you.
AMEN.
Say Nothing Just Take Him In
Spend 1-3 minutes in silence gazing at the Lord with love and gratitude, in a prayer of silent contemplation.
Make a Movie In Your Mind
The ground beneath your feet is trembling. You’re standing at the base of Mount Sinai with the whole camp of Israel, tents stretching out behind you across the wilderness floor, and above you the mountain itself is wrapped in thick cloud, smoke pouring from its peak like a furnace, though no fire burns there that you can see. Thunder rolls without stopping, and every so often a trumpet blast —impossibly loud, impossibly long— cuts through the noise, growing louder each time rather than fading. You were told, along with everyone else, not to so much as touch the base of this mountain, on pain of death. The people around you are pressed back, afraid, some covering their ears, some weeping. Moses alone climbs upward into the cloud, disappearing from sight. And then, out of the fire and smoke and thunder, a voice begins to speak —not to Moses alone this time, but to all of you, words carved not on stone yet, but already carved into the trembling air itself…
To obey Your Laws
Exodus 20:1-17
In those days, God delivered all these commandments :
“I, the LORD, am your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, that place of slavery.
You shall not have other gods besides me.
You shall not carve idols for yourselves in the shape of anything in the sky above or on the earth below or in the waters beneath the earth; you shall not bow down before them or worship them. For I, the LORD, your God, am a jealous God, inflicting punishment for their fathers’ wickedness on the children of those who hate me, down to the third and fourth generation; but bestowing mercy down to the thousandth generation, on the children of those who love me and keep my commandments.
You shall not take the name of the LORD, your God, in vain. For the LORD will not leave unpunished him who takes his name in vain.
Remember to keep holy the sabbath day. Six days you may labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD, your God. No work may be done then either by you, or your son or daughter, or your male or female slave, or your beast, or by the alien who lives with you. In six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them; but on the seventh day he rested. That is why the LORD has blessed the sabbath day and made it holy.
Honor your father and your mother, that you may have a long life in the land which the LORD, your God, is giving you.
You shall not kill.
You shall not commit adultery.
You shall not steal.
You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his male or female slave, nor his ox or ass, nor anything else that belongs to him.”
Paul later writes to the Corinthians about a wisdom that looks like foolishness, and a strength that looks like weakness. The Law given at Sinai, thunderous and unapproachable, was holy— but it could only show you your sin, never wash it away.
“The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing,” Paul writes, “but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18). What began at Sinai in fire and trembling would one day be fulfilled not in more thunder, but in the crucifixion of Christ, that the world would call foolish, and we would come to know as a gift of salvation.
Visualize Christ
Passover has drawn pilgrims from every direction, and the Court of the Gentiles—meant to be the one place in the whole Temple complex where non-Jews could come and pray—has become something else entirely. The air is thick with the bleating of sheep, the low groan of oxen, the fluttering panic of doves in wooden cages stacked three high. Moneychangers sit behind low tables, coins clinking as they convert Roman denarii and Greek drachmas into acceptable Temple currency, taking their cut at every exchange.
The smell is overwhelming — animal dung, incense drifting over from the inner courts, sweat, dust. You’ve come to pray, like everyone else here, but there’s nowhere quiet left to do it. Then you see him—Jesus, moving through the crowd with a cord of knotted rope in his hand, his face set with an intensity you haven’t seen before. He begins overturning the moneychangers’ tables, coins scattering and rolling across the stone floor, doves bursting free from their cages. The crowd around you freezes, stunned, some outraged, some strangely moved. Someone demands to know what right he has to do this…
Let us take a moment to reflect on the message in the Gospel.
In Three Days I will Raise it Up
John 2:13-25
Since the Passover of the Jews was near, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. He found in the temple area those who sold oxen, sheep, and doves, as well as the money changers seated there.
He made a whip out of cords and drove them all out of the temple area, with the sheep and oxen, and spilled the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables, and to those who sold doves he said, “Take these out of here, and stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.”
His disciples recalled the words of scripture, “Zeal for your house will consume me.”
At this the Jews answered and said to him, “What sign can you show us for doing this?”
Jesus answered and said to them, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.”
The Jews said, “This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and you will raise it up in three days?”
But he was speaking about the temple of his body. Therefore, when he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they came to believe the scripture and the word Jesus had spoken.
While he was in Jerusalem for the feast of Passover, many began to believe in his name when they saw the signs he was doing. But Jesus would not trust himself to them because he knew them all, and did not need anyone to testify about human nature.
He himself understood it well.
Be Completely Real
Think back to Sinai —the fire, the trembling, the impossible law carved into stone. And think of the Temple courts, tables overturned, Jesus’s zeal for his Father’s house burning so fiercely that his own disciples would later remember the words of the Psalm: “Zeal for your house will consume me” (John 2:17). When the crowd demanded a sign to justify what he’d done, Jesus told them, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up” — and John tells us plainly that he was speaking of his own body, the true Temple, soon to be destroyed and raised again.
This is exactly the paradox Paul names for the Corinthians: “We proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called… Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:23-24). The Law at Sinai could tell you what was wrong. Only the cross could redeem you.
As we read over this passage we see the anger Jesus felt for the moneychangers in the temple. They were materialistic and transactional. They had turned the sabbath into another day of business; their hearts were far from loving God. They were making money off of religion for self gain.
Have you ever been transactional? Do you look at things from a transactional perspective? Do you frequently count the cost, and weigh decisions based on what you may or may not gain from them? Or lose?
Does this carry over into your spiritual life? Is Jesus revealing to you a lack of love for God while engaged in the things of God? Only God knows the heart of men. Let him probe your heart and give him a moment to speak to you.
Now listen to the second part of Jesus’ teaching, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.”
Ponder for a moment what the disciples said about this. They tell us that in the moment they were not sure what the Lord meant, but later, after his death and resurrection they understood clearly.
Take a moment to ask Jesus questions from your heart. Ask him questions about his Body, and how you might receive it with love in holy Communion. Ask him, “Lord, am I transactional? Do I lack respect for your Body and Blood? Do I make myself a worthy dwelling place?” Linger a moment and wait for his response. Has he shown you something? You may want to write it down.
What love is, and what it isn’t…
Love is an act of my free will. I must choose to love God and the act of loving Him means I must be selfless and sacrificial. It is a self-giving act of my will to love Him. Love is not a feeling. It does not come to me through my passions. Love is a decision that I make every day to do acts of charity toward God and my neighbor and to obey the law of the Lord. How I am is how I love.
God, if I say with my mouth that I love you, and I am not willing to obey your laws and follow your will, this would make me a liar. Lord, you are merciful to me. Give me the grace to love you. Without your grace I am incapable of love and I want to say I love you truthfully, with a pure heart. AMEN.
Are You Listening?
Ask yourself honestly: where in your life have you been relying on your own wisdom, your own strength, your own sense of what makes sense to you — the very things Paul says God delights in overturning?
Is there a “table” in your own heart that needs to be turned over, some marketplace of self-reliance crowding out the quiet place of prayer God actually wants there? Bring that to him now.
Ask him to consume you with the same zeal he had for his Father’s house, and to help you make your heart a perfect dwelling place for him instead.
Pray the next Lenten Meditation
The Fourth Sunday of Lent, Year B
Whoever Lives the Truth Comes to the Light
Fourth Sunday of Lent, Year B. God so loved the world that He sent His Son, and whoever lives the truth comes into the light.