Welcome to Finding God in Our Hearts. The following production Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is a weekly program of deep spiritual insight on Scripture, revealing the indwelling presence of God. Monsignor Fisher is a Catholic priest, a member of the Diocese of Dallas, and founder of the Pastoral Reflections Institute, a nonprofit in Dallas, Texas, dedicated to to enriching your spiritual journey. We appreciate your listenership and if you find this program valuable, please subscribe and share with your friends. This program is funded with kind donations by listeners just like you. Make your donation@pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com Good morning.

Today we celebrate the first Sunday of Lent. The Opening Prayer Grant Almighty God through this yearly observance of Holy Lent that we may grow in understanding of the riches hidden in Christ by worthy conduct pursue their effects through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen. A Reading from the Old Testament from the book of Deuteronomy 26, chapter 4 through the 10th verse, Moses spoke to the people, saying, the priests shall receive the basket from you and shall set it in front of the altar of the Lord God. Then you shall declare before the Lord your God. My father was a wandering Aramean who went down to Egypt with a small household and lived there as an alien.

But there he became a nation great, strong and numerous. And when the Egyptians maltreated and oppressed us, imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the Lord, the God of our fathers, and he heard our cry, saw our affliction, our toil, our opposition. He brought us out of Egypt with his strong hand and outstretched arm, with terrifying power, with signs and wonders bringing us into this country. He gave us this land flowing with milk and honey. Therefore I have now brought you the first fruits of the products of the soil which you, O Lord, have given me. And having set them before the Lord your God, you shall bow down in his presence.

The Word of the Lord. Responsoial Psalm Be with me, Lord, when I am in trouble. A Reading from the New Testament from The Letter of St. Paul to the Romans 10, 8:13 Brothers and sisters, what does Scripture say? The Word is near to you, in your mouth, in your heart. That is the word of faith that we preach.

For you have confessed with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead. You will be saved. One believes with the heart, and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth, and so is saved. The Scripture says no one who believes in him will be put to shame. For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek. The same Lord is Lord of all, enriching all who call upon him.

For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord Jesus will be saved. The word of the Lord. The verse before the Gospel. One does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of my God. The reading for this first Sunday of Lent is taken from St. Luke, fourth chapter, first through the 13th verse, filled with the Holy Spirit.

Jesus returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the desert for 40 days to be tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and when they were over, he was hungry. The devil said to him, if you are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread. Jesus answered him, it is written, one does not live on bread alone. He took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a single instant. The devil said to him, I shall give you all your power and glory, for it has been handed over to me, and I may give it to whomever I wish.

All this will be yours if you worship me. Jesus said to him, in reply, it is written, you shall worship the Lord your God, and him alone shall you serve. Then he led him to Jerusalem, made him stand on the parapet of the temple, and said to him, if you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here. For it is written, he will command his angels concerning you, to guard you with their hands. They will support you lest you dash your foot against a stone. Jesus said to him, in reply, it also says, you shall not put the Lord your God to the test.

When the devil had finished every temptation, he departed from him for a time. The Gospel of the Lord Foreign we begin this Sunday with what is considered to be one of the most important times in the liturgy of the Church. The liturgy is our way of connecting with God through a ritual. And we listen to his word and we believe that he becomes present to us and enters into us. It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing, ritual. It’s held the church together through all kinds of situations.

We long for that which we cannot understand. A ritual somehow makes it real. It doesn’t create it, but it opens us to what is real, what is true, who we are, who God is, what we’re here for. Now, if you’re like me, you might have fallen into a trap. That is, at least as a child, I was there, and it’s this. I thought about human beings and I listened to the stories of scripture, and especially the beginning of the story in Genesis about Adam and Eve.

And in some naive way, I thought, well, these people are just like me, just like everyone. These are humans. We’re all the same. We’re all made by God. We don’t change that much. Well, nothing could be further from the truth.

Human beings have changed dramatically, dramatically in the short time that we’ve been recording the relationship that God has with him. Maybe one thing that might help you is to think about time and think of the changes that have happened over the last 20 years, 50 years, 100 years, 200 years. It’s like, my gosh, it’s a different world completely. And we are having to adapt to this world, and we are changing. The story of Adam and Eve happened to the human race close to 5,000 years ago. We were just coming out of the Iron Age and going into the Bronze Age, making certain weapons more effective.

I mean, I’d love to have seen, you know, what community life was like then, and it wouldn’t be anything like what we live in. It was supposedly a thousand years after that experience of human beings that we end up with the story of God entering into the people of the Israelites. We hear about that in the first reading. A people in slavery brought to freedom by God, who intervenes in their life and guides them and talks to them, not directly, but through a prophet and patriarch. So just remember that that first event of human nature’s response to a God who created a beautiful world and then didn’t have the ability to say no to a temptation that came basically out of their human nature, but evil was there, and it played off people’s human nature, which evil always does. And all Adam did was he gave in to a lie that he believed.

He didn’t maybe have any kind of real experience to know the lie was a lie. And so he bought into it, and his wife bought into it. And then we have our first human being encountering God. And the worst part of that story, in terms of its misinterpretation, is it seems that God made us. And then we showed ourselves to who we are, and it disgusted God, and he kicked us out because we wouldn’t obey him. And somehow sin, then we are told, was invented, caused by this man called Adam.

And I remember hearing that and thinking, that’s not fair. I mean, he did that. Maybe I wouldn’t have done that. But it wasn’t a story about one man’s sin. Adam was the symbol, the image of who we were then a much lower level of consciousness. We liked things being given to us, we could see beauty.

We knew we needed a partner and God was there and it was wonderful and idyllic. But then human nature came along and seemed to mess it all up. But I want to say something to you now that I’ve never ever said before, and I believe it with all my heart. I want you to stop thinking that sin in the eyes of God is something that is disgusting and horrible. And whenever we participate in anything that feeds our human nature over what God is asking us to be, don’t ever believe that that is somehow a turn off or he turns away or he kicks us out, we have to go to an institution to get back in. No.

Think of our human nature as the thing that God is most attracted to, with all of its goodness and all of its impurity and disobedience. He loves human beings as we are made, not as we are eventually drawn into being through his grace. No, he loves us as we are, as we love a child when they’re messy and out of control and we look at that beautiful being, knowing what’s in store for them and who they’ll become. And God certainly knew the future of human beings would be something awesome. So stop thinking that our faults are an obstacle. Think of Jesus as God, as the doctor.

And we have diseases and we come to Him. What doctor would slam the door and say, ugh, I can’t stand disease? No, he loves us in our brokenness, completely, thoroughly. So I want you to look at this first reading or this first set of readings in Lent. Because Lent is a time when we’re presented with the core of the message of our God. I want you to feel something with me.

First of all, we know that the purpose of God entering into our life is to do something for us that we couldn’t do on our own. And so best way to describe that is he’s come to free us from that which enslaves us, lies, enslave us. Patterns of behavior in humanity, in our lower nature enslave us. And the enslaving is somehow being caught in a selfish state that’s static and focused only on self. And we think the more we satisfy this self, the happier we’ll be. And that’s not what we’re made for.

We’re made for so much more. And he knows that. So we have this story of freedom that is sought for us by God. And what it requires from us is trust and fidelity. And if you just take this group of people, Old Testament people, and let’s say they’re part of the first Adam, they never could do it. They could never, ever be faithful.

They tried and tried and tried, and the only thing God could do is lighten the requirement over and over and over again until at the end, he said, all right, you’re never going to follow my rules and laws. So I’ve got to do something mysterious that will put the law and rules in your heart, and you won’t be needing to be told. You’ll know what to do. Well, how’s he going to accomplish that? With a new Adam, the second Adam, and that’s what Jesus is called in the scriptures, the new Adam. And what’s different?

How is the new Adam different than the old Adam? I can’t imagine how to describe in words the change, but we’re going to learn something about what the effects of the change are when we see the devil doing his work, as he always does, trying to convince people that the most important person in the world is themselves and that they’ve got to follow that lower human nature and take care of themselves, because that’s survival gets something for you. It’s even amazing to me that when God was working with people as they were, he set up a religion that in a way, kind of promised that do the rules, do the laws, and you’ll get what you want. I will bless you. If you don’t do what you’re told, you’ll be diseased and you’ll lose your family, you’ll get leprosy. I mean, it was a kind of prosperity story.

Do what you’re told and you’ll get what you want. And that’s about as far as you could take the old Adam. But now we have a new one. His name is Jesus. And what do we know about him? Well, we know one thing.

He’s not just an ordinary human being, but he’s also a God. But it’s not that he wanted to be treated like a God. He wanted to be treated like a human being. But what we know is when he was baptized, God entered into him. And as soon as God entered into him, along comes the devil to test him. But for us, it is a beautiful story about what potential we now have because of what Jesus represents.

And that is a redeemed human being. What’s a redeemed human being? A person filled with divinity. It never existed there before. All the old Adams were never able or capable of becoming what God wanted them to be. And one of the ways to understand what redemption is, it’s an influx, an overflowing amount of Light and truth and grace that comes into people so that they begin to know what they’re really meant for.

They know their destiny. And their destiny is to become like the God that created them. That’s what God so loves and is excited watching a creation that has free will becoming exactly what God longs for it to be. And it’s not done on their own. That’s the big lesson of the Old Testament. They can’t do it.

Go into them. I’ll be one with him. I’m in this figure. Jesus, Devil knew that he had this new power. So he tests him on it. See how selfless he is.

So he’s just been 40 days without food. He’s hungry. So any human nature that is hungry, that hungry, would do anything to have something to eat. So he says to Jesus, now look, you have power. I know you have more power than any human being has ever had. So go ahead and make some bread and have a nice, wonderful hot bread with butter and jam and honey and put your feet up and say, well done.

I did a good job not eating for 40 days. And the shock to the devil, or maybe the fear in the devil, is that Jesus didn’t sound like the first Adam. He said, you know, I’m here not to take care of myself and just feed my physical needs. I’m really here because I want one thing, my new life in me. This God in me is drawing me to something. And it’s so beautiful because all he wants me to see and he wants to show it to me is the truth.

And you know what he’s saying to me? Yeah, bread’s important. It nourishes people. But Jesus said, you know what I’m thinking I’m going to do? I’m going to be bread. I’m going to be the bread for people.

I’m going to feed them, give them life. The bread of life. The devil tries another angle. Well, you know, human beings love the wonderful world that they were promised in the Old Testament. I mean, you know, everything going great. Major crops, major farms, everything was successful when they did the law.

I know you want that, so I’ll give you all that. It’s my world, that world. I’ll give it all to you if you just trust me over that other voice inside of you. And Jesus said, oh, no, I don’t worship you. I know you. I see you.

I figured you out. I only worship the God who can bring me life, Real life. Peace, wholeness. The last temptation. Okay, so you’re strong and you’re going to give yourself away and you’re going to somehow not buy into the things that I’ve always been able to talk people into wanting more than anything else. So what do you think God’s going to get you through this without you being destroyed?

I mean, you can’t get up there and say all this. I mean, the church won’t like it. I mean, anybody that’s going to go against what everybody’s known forever is going to be in trouble. So he’ll probably. I mean, how do you know he’s going to take care of you? Most Interesting Response God, your power within us is beyond what we can imagine, and one of the gifts you give us is a heart open to receiving a truth that the mind has a really hard time comprehending.

Open our hearts during this season. Fill us with the faith. It is our inheritance and understanding of the gifts you are to us. It will stop this craziness of feeling that every time we fail, you turn your back, which is not who you are, but what we’ve been told you are by those who long for us to do better. But separating us from you is the most dangerous thing that anyone can do and free us from the thought that our faults do that. And we ask this in Jesus name.

Amen. The music in our program was composed and produced by Ryan Harner for this show. Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher, a listener supported program, is archived and available on our website pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com and available anytime, anywhere and for free on our podcast Finding God in Our Hearts. You can search and subscribe to Finding God in Our Hearts anywhere you download your podcasts. Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is funded with kind donations by listeners just like you. You can make a one time or recurring tax deductible donation on our website pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com we thank you for your listenership and your continued support.

Without it, this program would not be possible. Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is a production of the Pastoral Reflections Institute, a NonProfit in Dallas, Texas dedicated to enriching your spiritual journey. Executive Producer Monsignor Don Fisher Produced by Kyle Cross and recorded in Pastoral Reflections Institute Studios. Copyright 2020.