In today's first reading, Jeremiah 31: 31-34, the Lord says to us through the prophet that "the days are coming...when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah....I will place my law within them, and write it on their hearts; I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer will they need to teach their friends and relatives how to know the Lord. All, from least to greatest, shall know me,..., for I will forgive their evil doing and remember their sin no more!" You and I have the law of God--the law of love--written on on our hearts. We know right from wrong and are reminded by the Spirit every time we ignore what God has engraved on our heart.
To confirm and reinforce this message of love and forgiveness, Jesus became sin for us upon the cross, putting sin to death and clothing us in a robe of righteousness, as St. Paul reminds us in 2 Corinthians 5: 21: God made [Jesus] who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." In Ephesians, Paul says to us: "...[P]ut on [your] new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness" (Ephesians 4: 24).
Have I forgotten God's love? Am I too busy attempting to find salvation elsewhere where God is not? Have the excitements of the world blinded me? Has my heart become so hardened that I no longer sense the spirit nudging me to return to the Lord, to offer Him a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, to give Him my heart in sacrificial love for the life of those with whom I live and work, pray and play?
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