A Christian does not forsake the Word of God to follow the word that is in fashion

The gift of being a child of God cannot be “sold off” through a misunderstood sense of normality that leads one to forget the word of God and to live as if God did not exist… The temptation to want to be “normal,” when in fact one is a child of God.

In essence, this means ignoring the Word of the Father and following a single, merely human word—the “word of one’s own craving”—choosing, in a sense, to “sell off” the gift of being chosen in order to plunge into a “worldly uniformity.” The Hebrew people of the Old Testament lived through this temptation more than once, Pope Francis recalled, focusing on the episode set before us in the liturgical passage taken from the first book of Samuel.

In this passage, the leaders of the people ask Samuel himself, who has by now grown old, to choose a new king for them, in reality laying claim to governing themselves. At that moment, the Pope observed, “the people reject God: not only do they not hear the word of God, but they reject it.” And the phrase that reveals this estrangement is the one spoken by the elders of Israel: we want a “king to judge us,” for in this way “we too shall be like all the nations.” That is to say, the Pope observed, they “reject the Lord of love, they reject their election, and they seek the way of worldliness”—much like so many Christians today:

“The normality of life requires of the Christian faithfulness to his election and not selling it off to move toward a worldly uniformity. This is the temptation of the people, and it is ours as well. So many times we forget the word of God, what the Lord tells us, and we take up the word that is in fashion, don’t we? The word of the television series is in fashion too, so we take that one—it’s more entertaining! Apostasy is precisely the sin of breaking away from the Lord, but it is clear: apostasy is plainly visible. Worldliness is more dangerous because it is more subtle.”

“It is true that the Christian must be normal, as people are,” Pope Francis acknowledged, but—he insisted—there are values the Christian cannot make his own. The Christian must believe within himself the word of God and say to him: “You are my child, you are chosen, I am with you, I walk the way with you.” And so he must resist the temptation—as in the episode from the Bible—of considering himself a victim of “a certain inferiority complex,” of not feeling like “a normal people”:

“Jesus said to those on the road to Emmaus: ‘How foolish you are! How slow of heart to understand!’ Their hearts were hard; they could not understand the Word of God. And worldliness softens the heart, but for the worse: a soft heart is never a good thing! What is good is the heart open to the Word of God, which receives it—like the Blessed Virgin, who pondered all these things in her heart, as the Gospel says. To receive the Word of God so as not to stray from our election.”

Let us then ask—Pope Francis concluded—“for the grace to overcome our selfishness: the selfishness of wanting to do things according to my own craving, as I please”:

“Let us ask for the grace to overcome them, and let us ask for the grace of spiritual docility, that is, of opening our hearts to the Word of God and not doing what our brothers did, who closed their hearts because they had strayed from God and for a long time did not hear and did not understand the Word of God. May the Lord grant us the grace of having a heart open to receive the Word of God and always to be able to ponder it. And from there, to take the true way.”

Source: News.va