7/23/14 Saul 14
I
reached out to a teenager named Saul with the gospel at a park, who told me he
had just completed his catechism classes and was confirmed in his Catholic
Church. Still, it all seemed new to him,
from an explanation of our God-given conscience in knowing good from evil, to
our sin in breaking God’s laws and commandments, to our need for forgiveness in
restoring us to a right relationship with God, to the salvation found in Jesus
Christ. As a high school teacher, I can
tell when my students “understand but don’t get it”. What I mean by this is that it is possible to
understand individual ideas without being able to see how they relate to each
other to form a larger concept. Saul
understood the parts of the gospel, but he didn’t “get it”. So I gave him some
Gospel tracts to read in the hopes that he would be able to gradually come to a
better understanding, but as I turned to leave he said “I just have a
question. In my catechism class they
said something about God is love. What
does that mean?” So what does it
mean? A lot of people take it to mean
that God loves us no matter what and without consequence for our sins, or that
being a Christian just means to act loving in all that you do. But I pointed Saul to the cross, the greatest
demonstration of love that has ever occurred – “But God demonstrates his own
love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Romans 5:8
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