Meditations

Persevere in faith

Firm in the faith

In the early Christian communities persecution was not lacking, as the Acts of the Apostles reported: Some Jews persuaded the crowd. They stoned Paul and then dragged him out of the city, believing him dead [...]. The next day Paul left with Barnabas for Derbe. And when they had preached the gospel to that city, and made a great number of disciples, they returned to Lystra, and to Icòno, and to Antioch, and revived the disciples, and exhorted them to stand firm in the faith, said, you must go through many tribulations to enter the kingdom of God.
[1 Acts 14,19-22].

These warnings of the Gospel, both from the apostles and from Jesus, can also serve us today because, although we are not persecuted, we are nevertheless in a time of great tribulation.

Today in the world there are about eight thousand Christians who are killed a year, and we think we are dispensed from these terrible stories, from this Christian genocide, which is constantly before our eyes, that passes under silence and indifference because nobody cares that these people are massacred, people who did not deserve to live because Christian.

And if it happens to us too, will we be ready? Will we be firm in faith on that day? Who knows if we really have faith? Some Christians today hear certain speeches of conformity, of respectability, of interest. We are in a society from the rampant dictatorship of single thought, if it does not force bodies, it forces souls and minds to speak and behave in a certain way, while other things cannot be named, cannot be written, cannot be discussed.

In past times books were burned and burned for ideological fanaticism, now in our society we prefer to make other types of bonfires: we burn the thought, we burn the freedom of speech, the freedom to be able to manifest their dissent.

However, how many warnings did we receive in the past? True followers of Christ admonished us to pay attention to this or that, not to stray and not to abandon God, to be careful not to compromise on principles that were not negotiable. We did not want to listen to and follow these teachings, instead we negotiated on principles on which there was no need to negotiate and on those that needed to be discussed we kept quiet. Precisely because everyone thought for his own life, he thought to save his own skin, not to have problems.

These days, when you look at the news in the media, you come across a series of terrible things: but where is hope? Hope is certainly not a ray of sunshine that comes from who knows where, hope is us, we who believe and pray in the living God: hope is there, Jesus uses us to bring hope to this world. The problem is to understand if we are firm and if we can withstand the many tribulations that we encounter. And then it becomes absolutely necessary to go further, to discover our life of faith.

Faith is not a habit or a superstition, otherwise it is fideism; faith is something else, otherwise how can it stand up to the false truths that surround us? If it is labile, it immediately collapses, gives way to compromise on everything, accepts anything, also because it does not know the truths of God. What do we know about our faith? How much time do we devote to deepening it?

The fundamental point of the whole question is only one, eternal life. Here on earth we can discuss as much as we want, we may disagree, think otherwise, or feel that this is too difficult or difficult. But the day will come when we will die and what will we tell God there? Will that Judgment be "forever" and what reasons will we bring? What excuse would we give to support our inertia, our laziness, our delays? What will we say to our Lord who died on the cross for us and who constantly called us?

Perhaps the pandemic that plagues the world and the other events that are happening, are a providential help, an invitation to make a profound examination of conscience on our lives to prepare ourselves for this meeting and to ask ourselves: if I had been in the place of these unfortunate brothers, would I be ready for this encounter with God?.