Relationship: You Were Chosen (Kerygma Part 1)

Why did God create us? Why did he bring us into existence? God doesn’t need anything and yet he freely chose to bring us into existence. Dr. Edward Sri ponders these questions and offers his responses to them to start off a five part series on the Kerygma. In this series, Dr. Sri aims to return to the basics in order to help us renew our encounter with Christ through the foundational Gospel message.

Snippet from the Show
We do not earn God’s love. God brought us into existence and delights in us. He brought us into existence because he wanted to share his life and love with us.

Catechism of the Catholic Church, Paragraph 1

God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself, in a plan of sheer goodness, freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life. For this reason, at every time and in every place, God draws close to man. He calls man to seek him, to know him, to love him with all his strength. He calls together all men, scattered and divided by sin, into the unity of his family, the Church. To accomplish this, when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son as Redeemer and Savior. In his Son and through him, he invites men to become, in the Holy Spirit, his adopted children and thus heirs of his blessed life.

“I Thirst” Meditation

I stand at the door of your heart, day and night. Even when you are not listening, even when you doubt it could be me, I am there. I await even the smallest sign of your response, even the slightest hint of invitation that will allow me to enter.

I want you to know that whenever you invite me, I come. Always, without fail…

I know what is in your heart. I know your loneliness and all your hurts: the rejections, the judgments, the humiliations. I carried it all before you. And I carried it all for you so you might share my strength and victory. I know especially your need for love, how you thirst to be accepted and appreciated, loved and cherished. But how often you have thirsted in vain seeking that love outside of me–I who am its Source—striving to fill that emptiness inside you with passing pleasures…

Do you thirst to be appreciated and cherished? I cherish you more than you can imagine, to the point of leaving heaven for you, and of dying on the cross to make you one with me.

I THIRST FOR YOU…. Yes, that is the only way to even begin to describe my love for you: I thirst to love you and to be loved by you–that is how precious you are to me.

If you feel unimportant in the eyes of the world, that matters not at all. For me, there is no one more important in the entire world than you….

All your life I have been looking for your love—I have never stopped seeking to love you and to be loved by you. You have tried many other things in your search for happiness.

Why not try opening your heart to me, right now, more than you have ever done before?...I stand at the door of your heart and knock. Open to me, for I thirst for you.

Reflection Questions:

1. What struck you most from the “I Thirst” meditation?
2. How do the themes from the meditation change the way you view God?
3. How do you think God is inviting you to respond to his thirst for your love?
   

What do You Seek? Encountering the Heart of the Gospel by Dr. Edward Sri

The Good News of Jesus Christ is known as the kerygma , based on the Greek word kerysso , meaning “to herald” or “to proclaim”. It is the core message of Christ that each of the Apostles, the original heralds of the Gospel, proclaimed to the world. It is Christ’s answer to his own penetrating question, “What do you seek?”

This is why the Catholic Church emphasizes the importance of what it calls the “First Proclamation”: the core Gospel of God’s love and the person and mission of Jesus Christ, which ideally we surrender ourselves to, so that a more in-depth, systematic presentation of the Faith can take deeper root in our soul.

Unfortunately, many Catholics today might know facts about Jesus and the Gospel, but they do not know him and this story of his love in a way that shapes their entire lives. How about you? In What Do You Seek?, Scripture scholar Dr. Edward Sri helps us enter more deeply into the Gospel, to ponder the mysteries of God’s love for us and his work of salvation, so that we can be transformed and join in Christ’s work of saving the world. Learn more here!

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