Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00 <inaudible>. They've been a long stretch of cool gray jersey weather that was followed suddenly by heats. Um, and sunny, clear blue sky. He was to say what the heat and sun falling right after it could wedding rain like that. The grass just sprung up. It looked like a really good crop of grass. And shortly before this was stretch weather, I fell right next to our seminary, had decided to go into the sheep business show. Anyhow, a number of us took advantage of that weather and went for a walk. And during the course of the walk we have in the past by the pasture where this guy kicked out a sheet right there in the pasture there was you walking with some effort. Zine Carter's weren't quite moving right and she looked kind of stiff, I thought right away. Oh, it looks like she's got the staggers. Now what we call staggers, at least where we're from, is more properly called grass tetany.
Speaker 0 01:07 It's called tetany because the muscles start locking up and stiffening up and it's called grass tetany because it's caused by the grass caused by the grass. I thought sheep ate grass. They do. Okay then how can grass cause tetany, but at least the part of the world I come from grass tetany happens most often when he has spring weather pattern, like the one we describe, it's real cool and drizzly for quite awhile and then all of a sudden you get a good heat. Don't that grass springs up beautifully, but for some reason that grass as beautiful will look in that conditions will often cause use or even cows, especially if they're nursing to develop a magnesium deficiency. So when you see that kind of weather pattern, you start looking for the staggers and when you see the staggers, that kind of behavior, it's essential that you've got a magnesium deficiency on your hands.
Speaker 0 02:04 Now, if you let this run its course in pretty short order that you will go down and then she'll die right where she fell within a day or so. If you get to her within 24 hours of the onset of this disease, it's a really easy problem to cure. You get to her, you just pour a little magnesium citrate solution down her throat. She'll just get up, right like that. It's just amazing now to stand up and walk away if you get to a certain time, if not a bullet's going here. So anyway, ran back up to San Marin and called the local farm supply store and asked him if they had any magnesium citrate solution. No, obviously in the east they have different laws or something. You have to get it from that man. Okay. So then I went and explained to the guy that the, you most likely had the staggers, although I wouldn't have veterinarians.
Speaker 0 02:50 We raised sheep, told him how it happened and although it's really the cure, you have to get that Mag citrate in there quick because it progressed very far. There's nothing you can do. I went back up to the pastor to check at you and by this time she's a lot worse. Her hindquarters are completely seized up and now she's literally staggering. Around that evening I went up there to check on her and she was down. At any rate, within a day or so, she died. They didn't get to her on time. That old view is this crazy long grass. It looked good, smells good, and I'm sure to you tasted good, but it didn't have what she really needed that wound up killing her. There's a lot of obvious applications in their phone lines, but for today, just for the sake of time, we'll take a brief look at one in today's Gospel, our Lord tells us that he's the good shepherd and that we're his sheep and he says that he knows and calls his own sheep by name and leads them out and the sheep follow him for they know his voice.
Speaker 0 04:00 Our Lord says that his she follow. Let's face it these days, how many Catholics actually follow our Lord in any serious manner? How many so-called Catholics do we sneak gallivant around? Almost taking pride in the fact that they rechecked a whole handful or more of the doctrines and teachings of Christ our Lord. They've got a supernatural case to the staggers instead of a magnesium deficiency. Instead of lacking some mineral, they've got a virtue deficiency. They're lacking in a theological virtue. The supernatural virtue of faith. The virtue of faith enables Catholics to hear the voice that our Lord speaking to us, to his church, speaking to us through his holy scriptures, speaking to us through sacred traditions like this beautiful divine liturgy, speaking to us, Susan fowl teachings of his pope's and Ecumenical Council. So what is this theological virtue of faith? Faith is a supernatural virtue. Supernatural means it's above our nature.
Speaker 0 05:17 It has to be given to us by God. It can only come from God. It's totally beyond our nature. So it's a supernatural virtue. What does it enable us to do to believe all the truths which the Catholic Church teaches? And why do we believe all those truths? Because those truths were revealed by God and God candidate to save us and Arpita seed. So we believe all the truths which hitters teaches because they're revealed by God who cannot deceive us. The absolute importance of his virtue is crystal clear from scripture. Hebrews 11 six without faith, it is impossible to please God. Without faith, it's impossible to please God. In other words, there's two basic choose. When we're looking at faith. First off our reaction, God said something. So I believe that God said it. I believe in. That's the relationship and importance of it is no faith, no salvation.
Speaker 0 06:20 So God sent it. I believe it. No faith, no salvation. Okay. So given all that, given that it's absolutely essential to preserve our faith, and given that we're surrounded by literally millions of people who are staggering around with weak, almost non kissing faith, how is this? Well, we can say just as there's a typical weather pattern with staggers where you get cold weather or cool, drizzly weather fall by hot weather with grass, there's a typical pattern with the supernatural problems with the faith. Alright? People have been baptized and maybe they only have a basic second grade sort of understanding the faith. And that's fine. When you're a second grader, there's a lot of people that had an incredible amount of knowledge, very powerful intellects, highly educated, and they can't carry on an intelligent conversation about the basic truths of the faith. And they may have been going to church for 40 years or more and they're just plumbing ignorant.
Speaker 0 07:16 Okay. They've never invested the slightest in effort, in investigating or trying to deepen their faith or learning their knowledge of God's revealed truth. That's one possibility. Or May even in reading or listening to heretical nonsense, modernistic authors and modernistic creatures, and they haven't sufficiently resisted that kind of poison, or maybe they'd been infected by the strictly naturalistic outlook to totally permeates our society in which God, Heaven, hell, all the supernatural realities are completely sort of erased out as if they don't exist. And if they bother to reminds of something like the 10 commandments on a piece of stone, get that Outta here. We don't want to think about any of those kinds of things until we have to, you know, the second word dead, we're in front of the judgment seat with totally naturalistic society. That attitude, or maybe these people become proud and smug and disdainful of what they smugly consider to be a hopelessly outdated, pre-scientific intolerant attitude of true believers or filing.
Speaker 0 08:23 Maybe they'd just been leading lives of sin. So you have these predictable patterns. It's ignorance, Harris' feet, naturalism, pride or sin. That's what all these things come about. So give always surrounded by Skagit people who have carelessly disregarded the most important health. They're supernatural health engraved in these pastures of pride. Pastors of Harrison, last modernism, naturalism, sin. Pastures that look good but don't have what it takes to keep the pastures which you face. Spend much time there will kill them. Given that we're surrounded by people with this kind of supernatural disease, what can we do to protect ourselves, to keep ourselves from coming down with this kind of supernatural staggers? What can we do to strengthen? Increase our faith so we don't have a deadly faith deficiency. We have to nourish our faith. We have to feed our faith. Faith is supernatural. Now when we're considering this, there's two things we want to keep in mind.
Speaker 0 09:31 First, again, we believe things because God said so. We don't believe them because we can see it or understand exactly how it works. Finally, we believe because God says that when we're a little kid, we believe things cause dad said so. It's the same kind of attitude except God, our dad might be wrong. God can't be okay. He can't deceive us. So it's not crazy. He's God and his word is truth. Now, there are some aspects of our faith that even though we believe in because God said so, they're easy to tell. The fact that the pope is the head of the church is the revealed truth. But we can also tell by observation, unless when these dissenters who seem to be the only people on earth that can't figure out who the pope is and all seem to walk around like they have more powers than he does, or they're certainly more infallible in their own minds, any anyway, we believe everything God is revealed because he can need a deceive and our B to c.
Speaker 0 10:23 So even though we believe some things that we can see, there's plenty that we believe that we can't see. We typically don't see our guardian angel. We don't. That doesn't mean we don't believe in them. We typically don't see the devil. That doesn't mean he isn't real or to see how amazing his power, the supernatural power that God's given us to stop and consider one truth that all Catholics believe. We believe that there are certain men, they call them priests, they can whisper quiet words over a piece of bread. That bread becomes a man and that man is God.
Speaker 0 11:06 We all believe that. We believe in because God said so, not because we can see or understand exactly how that works. It's totally impossible to believe without that supernatural power. Okay? We do that because God gave us the power to believe it. Okay, so we believe because God sits on his authority. That's the first point. The second point is that since the virtue, faith has to do with belief, that means it's rooted in our intellects. Since it's within our intellect, it's rooted in our mind, but this is a key idea in the whole sermon, the key ideas, however eager we may be to accept whatever truth is, God is revealed. We still have to know us. They are in order to accept him, okay? In order make that the thing she, we got the virtue to believe these trues. When we were baptized, God gave us the supernatural power to believe.
Speaker 0 12:00 The truth is when we're baby, but he didn't tell him what they were. Those of us who are baptized as babies have to be taught. Okay, we got the power, but we didn't get to truths. We have can feed, nourish and strengthen his power. How? By getting the truths. If we don't do that, we'll be all ips. People with the supernatural staggers. That's their problem. So how do we get the truth? Saint Paul says that faith comes by hearing. Faith comes by hearing. We first get those truths as children with our Bible stories. When dad mom reads those to us by hearing the lives of saints, when dad or mom reads them to us, like going to the catechism at that amount and by saying our prayers from Santa Rosary with dad, mom, parents, do you want your kids to get you keep their faith? That's a question like saying, do you want your kids to go to heaven?
Speaker 0 12:54 If you want them to keep the faith, you have to pass it to them. That's your most serious obligation. As a parent, that's the thing that you have to answer for it directly before everything else. With respect to your duties as a parent, how did they do in that department? Okay. If you don't pass it onto them, they're not going to make it to their teenage years. Volume, miracle, grace, which sometimes happens, but we don't want to gamble that way. Okay? On the other hand though, if we nourish his faith with those divine truths, what happens? It gets stronger and stronger and as it becomes stronger, there's a whole series of events that happen. As we nourish the faith, we get more hungry to know more of those trues. We want to know more about God and what he said to man. We start realizing there's all kinds of beautiful things he's revealed.
Speaker 0 13:45 See, we can't love someone unless we know them. That's just an abstraction. We fall in love with someone we know. The more we know about God, the more we know about what he's revealed, the more we realize that he's infinitely good and worthy of all I love and the more we want to know about it. We keep finding more and more in love with him. Okay? That's the key to growing in holiness. That's the key to making it to the storm. So there's five to be in the kind of person that people want to be around rather than the kind of person that people want to avoid all the time. The world wants one thing, which is holiness. It hurts that they want. Okay? Anyway, the second point is, since the virtue, faith has to do with belief. It's where in intellect and so we feed and nourish our faith by learning and pondering the truth which God has revealed.
Speaker 0 14:33 Let's get practical and take a brief look at several matters to strengthen inertia thing. But before we do that, there's a basic rule and if they seek precaution, the basic rule, the basic rule is we have to be open to the truth. No matter what it costs us personally, the truth will set us free. Now, this attitude is the exact opposite of the smug dissenters who sit in judgment deciding what they will believe and what they will reach at. They're going to decide what's true and false. It reminds me of some middle child in a high chair sitting up there as if they're smarter than God in some high chair telling God, well, yes, we'll believe you when you say this and we won't believe you when you say that. It's unbelievably arrogant when we stand back and think about what the dissenters are actually saying when they're rejecting things.
Speaker 0 15:22 Okay? So we have to be humble before the truth. All revealed truth. Everything that church teaches, even when it hurts. That's the basic rule. And guess what? It hurts everyone. Why? Thanks Adam. We're all messed up in some way. So it's gonna make an adjustment on all of us. The Catholic religion makes demands on all of us. We know that they're not unreasonable. The price, the truth, you know, salvation is free, but it isn't cheap cause it hurts. Okay? That's the basic rule. We've gotta be open to the truth. The basic precaution. We can't afford to endanger our salvation by listening to a reading, anything heretical or unorthodox or by non-catholic preachers. The faith is something supernatural. We don't, and we can't afford to put God to the test. How we put him to the test and messing around with dangerous bad things and then expecting him to preserve our faith.
Speaker 0 16:17 It's as if we grease a cliff dance around it in a wind storm and then hope that we don't get thrown off and okay, we have to preserve our faith. No faith, no salvation. Sandell Fox says quote, a single bad book will be sufficient to cause the destruction of an entire monastery. Close Crow. We gotta be careful what we read, what we listened to. If we can take out a whole monastery, he can take you eye I out pretty easily. They've got a lot of her shoe. We're just out here. Okay, so what are the methods we use to strengthen and nourish our faith? Quick look at two, listening to good cds or tapes and doing good reading. It's the first list of reliable orthodox tapes or CDS. The late great father and sk has a series of albums and various topics that I can't recommend highly enough.
Speaker 0 17:09 They shipped. Sheen is still preaching, converting people, even though he's been dead since 1979 there's plenty of things like that out there. As long as they're Orthodox, you're going to be in good hands. Okay? There's plenty of great ones out there. Second thing, spiritual reading. See Now fox, this gives us some advice on how to do spiritually. First, we pray for life before we start reading. Second, we read with the goal of loving God more. Third, we read slowly with a attention. We're not trying to race for a spiritual book. We're trying to reach though lean. What's God saying to us for when we receive any of light, we pause and raise your mind up to God. Something strikes us. We just stop and talk to God about it from fifth. Then we take a devotion from something we've read to ponder in the course of that day.
Speaker 0 18:01 Something to roll around and consider. Okay, so pray for lie. Read with intention of loving God more slowly with attention. When we hit anything that strikes us, pause North Carolina. God, it takes something away from that to ponder. What should we read in the first place? The scriptures, especially the Holy Gospel, those in their inspired words of God. They're love letters from God to us, so those are going to strike us every time in different way. Second, in the second place, spiritual works and the saints and holy offers things like the invitation of Christ, the story itself, interest. Let's do anything good like that. Third lives of the saints in general, we should select spiritual books that have solid, practical doctrines regarding Christian life. For spiritual reading, we want me to have solid, practical doctrines. There's plenty of stuff with all kinds of different, this is what we're looking for here.
Speaker 0 18:56 Solid, practical, hates. Okay, let's close. We live in times which there are literally millions of Catholics have a case. The supernatural stay. Their faith is extremely weak. They can't clearly hear Lord's voice even crazy in the pastors of pride, pastors and modernism passed through the naturalism, the pastures that sin, he then Gracie and pastures that look good but don't have what they need to keep the faith and it's killing them. Without the faith, it's impossible to please God. No faith, no salvation. We have been given this incredible gift. We believe God by the gift of faith. We accept everything that God has revealed, but we have to nourish that faith, which we should do. How? By listening it. Good tapes or cds by reading good spiritual books refer <inaudible> on a daily basis. We want to increase our love for God, and we do that by increasing our knowledge for him. After all, our religion is the story of a love affair. It's the story of a love affair. He laid down his life for poor snickery little sheep like us, his sheet, and we don't deserve it.
