Being Filled with Knowledge of God's Will

In today’s first reading, Colossians 1: 9-14, St. Paul prays for us, asking that the Lord fill us with knowledge of God’s will and that we  walk in ways that are worthy of the Lord and fully pleasing to Him.  We are capable of fully pleasing God only because Jesus died for our sins and rose from the dead to new life, ascended to His Father and dispatched the Holy Spirit to be with us until the end of time.

 With Jesus, we, too, have died to sin and rose to new life in Him, with Him and through Him in our Baptism,  at our Confirmation, and by our participation in the Eucharist and the sacrament of Reconciliation. The God-life within us and in the world is secured by the Power of the Holy Spirit, with whom we are cooperating when we do what is right and just in God’s eyes, when we follow God’s commands and seek to do His will. 

We see the power of God operative in human life in the story given in today’s Gospel, Luke 5: 1-11 where Peter and his companions cooperate with Jesus.   Jesus gets into Simon’s boat and asks him to move out a short distance from the shore. From there He teaches the crowd and, when finished, asks Peter to row out into the deep waters and lower their nets for a catch. Peter tells Jesus that they have been fishing all night long and caught nothing but at His command will again lower the nets. The catch is so great that their nets were being torn and they needed help getting the fish into the boat. Two boats were filled to the point of sinking. Seeing this, Peter falls down before the Lord and says: “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.”

Can anyone of us not afford to partner with Jesus and obey the will, the commands, of our God?