Dying to self

[joshrp]

Peace be with you.

Please pray for us to understand what it means to die to self, and to live only for God and His will. And then pray for God to give us all the strength to do it. We must die to ourselves, and live for God’s plan and will alone. It is only in dying to self, and through a total gift of self in union with the infinite love of God for all creation that we truly find ourselves. Pray for this intention please.

God bless you all and thanks be to God.
Joshua

 

[mgoforth]

Beautiful, Joshua. Amen.

Then Jesus said to His disciples, “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul? For the Son of Man is going to come in the glory of His Father with His angels, and will then repay every man according to his deeds.

Matthew 16: 24-27

 

[Vouthon]

Amen!

What a beautiful and exquisitely written though brother Josh, thank you for this. I consider what you wrote above to be the vety essence of a spiritual and prayerful life.

If I may, I think that this (rather long) quote touches exactly upon what you are saying:

“…Happy souls indeed, who love their friends in God, and their foes for God ! They love many others besides God, but nothing save in and for Him. They not only love Him above all things, but in all things, and all things in Him…You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working ; and just so you learn to love God and man by loving. All those who think to learn in any other way deceive themselves…Behold this divine Lover at the gate, He does not simply knock, but stands knocking; He calls the soul, come, arise, make haste, my love and puts his Hand into the lock to try whether He cannot open it…For the measure in which our heart dilates itself, or rather lets itself be dilated and enlarged, and does not deny the void of its consent to the Divine Mercy, in the same measure the Divine Mercy always pour into it, sheds over it, and increasing and ever increasing inspiration under which we also increase, growing more and more in divine love. Our free will is never so free as when it is a slave to the will of God, nor ever so much a slave as when it serves our own will. It never has so much life as when it dies to itself, nor ever so much death, as when it lives to itself. The indifferent heart is as a ball of wax in the hands of its God, receiving with equal readiness all the impressions of the Divine pleasure; it is a heart without choice, equally disposed for everything, having no other object of its will than the will of its God, and placing its affections not upon the things of God but upon the will of God who wills them…”

- Saint Francis de Sales (1567 – 1622), Catholic mystic, Bishop and Doctor of the Church