Embrace all the truths of God

“Isaiah also prophesied about you hypocrites, as it is written:

This people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; They worship me in vain, teaching human precepts as doctrines. "Mark 7: 6-8

Again, Jesus said the harsh truth that the Pharisees had to hear. He directly told them that they were hypocrites and that they were the ones Isaiah spoke of in the quoted passage. It was certainly a tense scene.

Setting aside the drama of the meeting, let us examine more clearly the real quotation of Isaiah. It says four things:

These people honor me with their lips.
Their hearts are far from me.
They worship in vain.
They present their human laws as if they belonged to God.
What would the ideal transformation of these hypocritical errors be like? If the Pharisees were to change completely, what could Jesus say about them? Perhaps he would say the following:

Your cult for me is holy because it truly embraces my divine will in your life.
Therefore, the honor you give me with your lips flows from your pure heart of faith and love.
So what's the key message we should take from this for our own lives? We should draw two simple facts. First of all, the will of God must take our lives and become the basis and foundation of everything. His will, his law, his precepts are our rocky foundations. God established his truth as the basis of human life and we must strive to humbly embrace his law.

His law includes all the publicly revealed teachings of our faith found in the scriptures and in the Church, and includes everything we listen to God speaking to us in our own lives. The Pharisees, in their lack of humility, could not see these truths. Instead, they only clung to their ideas and beliefs. God punished them hard for this for love.

Secondly, we should realize that when we embrace the divine law and its particular will for our lives, we will be pure in heart and be free to love it with external expressions. We will love it from our hearts and this will flow through our words and actions. But this will never happen unless we start with His divine law.

Think today if you are willing to humbly embrace all the truths that God has revealed and if you are willing to make them the foundation of your life. If you do, everything else will flow in love and worship.

Lord, help me to love your holy and divine law. Help me to embrace him wholeheartedly. I believe in you and in everything you have spoken through the ages. I believe in what you speak to my heart about my own life. Give me the grace to embrace your holy will and, in that embrace, to transform me both inside and outside. Jesus I believe in you.