Out of the blue… a song popped into my head. The chorus captivates me…

That’s an unbeatable combination. It hits my top three list of things I love: stories, song, and our Savior! These are words from the hymn Blessed Assurance. I suggest listening to the song. Draw the lyrics into your heart:

Note: Check out the story of the hymn’s blind lyricist, Fanny Crosby. Did you know she wrote over 8000 hymns!

What is our Blessed Assurance? Jesus is ours. We belong to God. We are created to be with Him; now and forever!

We are heirs of an eternal Kingdom of endless Light and Love. Nothing can separate us from the Love of God:

18th century Methodist preacher John Wesley characterized blessed assurance as the assurance of being saved from sin and death.

It’s true. Christ’s Love has secured our salvation. Yet, our willful refusal to live in His Divine Will (God’s Love and Mercy) can keep us from being washed in the blood of the Lamb. To live in His assurance, we need to accept His Grace, lift our shameful eyes, meet His gaze heart-to-heart, and soak in His Love. This is tough. His Love is super SUPER intense!

Consider how each thought, word, intention, decision, action, and inaction propels us along a path. The wide path is full of amusements; enticements, comforts, power, prestige, and “materially and worldly desirable” things. However, if our eyes are fixed on Him, the path becomes narrow. When we claim our freedom in His Precious Blood, loving Him more and more because He is SO worthy of our love, the breadth of our path with its options are considered using a different calculus.   

Our choices reflect what we value. I’m not a fan of the existential philosopher Albert Camus but I agree with his assertion, “life is the sum of [our] choices.”

While earthly pursuits can be agencies of heavenly blessings, and creative expressions of living our Life for and in God, they can never be ends in themselves. When our…

• pursuits,
• goals,
• achievements,
• penchant for comfort,
• needs for security, and
• supercilious habit of living to “click the checkboxes” of others’ expectations

become selfish, obsessive, self-asserting fixations, they inevitably fail to satiate our deepest and truest longings that only Jesus can. 

How do we reap the fruits of our Blessed Assurance? What’s expected of us? And how can we uphold our end of the bargain?

Are you ready for some fun with words? Here’s a serious question:

How can we insure ourselves against the clamorous proclivities of our fallen natures so that we ensure our participation  in His Blessed Assurance?

Law Abiding vs. Love Abiding

Take a moment and reflect on this gospel account:

As Jesus started on his way, a man ran up to him and fell on his knees before him. “Good teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

“Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered. “No one is good—except God alone. You know the commandments: ‘You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, you shall not defraud, honor your father and mother.’”

“Teacher,” he declared, “all these I have kept since I was a boy.”

Jesus looked at him and loved him. “One thing you lack,” he said. “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”

At this the man’s face fell. He went away sad, because he had great wealth.
Mark 10: 17-22

The young man has it all. He’s law abiding; following all the statues and decrees of the Jewish customs and laws. He’s got wealth and he’s kneeling before the One who’s ready to give His Blessed Assurance of eternal life. The young man asks the question we’re posing. What could go wrong?

Jesus answers him. Jesus tells the young man to leave everything behind and follow Him. Mark’s account includes a crucial detail:

“Jesus looked at him and loved him.”

The young man fails to return Jesus’ loving gaze. He’s caught up in his world; his world of things, his world of intents, and his world of laws and precepts that in his mind and heart represent the most important things. He is encumbered by the enslaving weight of his choice. It’s not meant to be that way. Jesus didn’t come to abolish the law. Jesus came to intimately and relationally fulfill and embody God’s Law of Love.

The real question is: How do we lift our eyes to accept the Love of Jesus and co-participate in God’s Blessed Assurance?

The TYT Method

What if… through the power of His Grace, we adopt and inculcate a consistent conscientious behavior of:

Turning to Him, at all times, for all things so that our eyes become forever fixed on His Loving gazing, accepting it with all of our heart, mind, soul, and strength,

Yielding to His Will so that we become bathed and immersed in His lavish Mercy and Love, and

Trusting Him with our life’s details and relationships so that we become new creations forged into glorified children of His Kingdom.

Let’s call this our TYT method. It’s easier said than done but here are three simple guiding principles for getting started:

1. Pause our chatter. Left to our own devices, our monkey brains run in a million directions. More often than not, we’re hapless, prey to our fears and expectations.
   Turning to God means halting our runaway reactions. We’d be smart to develop a relentless habit of prayer. Our prayers don’t need to be eloquent or wordy. All we have to do is turn the locus of our attention and control from our finite perspective to our Father’s infinite one. Humbly coming before the One who Loves us perfectly is guaranteed to bring us peace, perspective, and wisdom.
   
   
2. Invest our love. We attract what we crave. Do we love attention? Do we love safety? Do we love being in control? Like a car’s governor that moderates its speed maybe we’re guilty of meting out our love to keep ourselves “safe” from exposing our authentic, raw, vulnerable selves. When we invest our capacity to love into the heavenly bank account of God and receive the interest of His enduring Love we become temples of holiness; good flows into us, Christ’s virtues flower in us, and our lives become rich cornucopias overflowing with scrumptious life-giving fruits. Yielding to God demands we invest our capacity to love and be loved in sanctifying ways that many times will fly against the world’s ways.
   
   
3. Accept our limits. It’s time to abandon the myth of self-sufficiency. Ditch the Koolaid. Its saccharine consuming purpose is hell bent on rotting our teeth and keeping us from biting into nourishing wholesomeness. Evil perpetuates the lie that we can be and ought to be gods. We can do it all! We are supposed to be masters of our worlds. Just scope out our parcel of wants and desires, assiduously work the land and reap the rewards entitled to us. As the adage goes, decide what we want, make it all about us, build our kingdom, and then reach for the stars. These days the insidious pounding garish dissonant ballad of “me, myself, and I are all that matter” rules the airways. But, here’s the real Way, Truth and Life: we’ve got nothing of value to offer ourselves or others without God – we’re nothing without God and, – we can do nothing without God. With God, we become co-participants in All through Christ Jesus.  Accepting our limits leads to true freedom. When we relinquish our will to His we celebrate our eternal wedding feast in Communion with Jesus Christ who is our All in All.

I chose the words Pause, Invest, and Accept for the TYT guiding principles because the first letters of each word spell PIA. According to LatDict.com pia means, “affectionate, tender, devoted, loyal (to family) holy, godly, pious, devout.” That needs to be our goal!

Fastening our Button

Saturday before mass at the Carmelite monastery I heard in my heart, “wrap up your Blessed Assurance reflection with a button metaphor.” Here you go:

1. The Fabric – represents God’s Mercy and Love. It’s the ontological field; God’s Supernatural reality. We belong affixed to His Fabric. We’re an essential part of His Fabric. Be assured, He takes great delight in each one of us!
   
   
2. The Button – with its four holes represents Jesus’ cross and His perfect selfless sacrificial Love. Through the exaltation of the cross we’re invited to embrace and accept God’s mysterious Blessed Assurance of eternal life.
   
   
3. The Thread – represents us. We need to take up our cross, wrap our lives around it, and follow Him. Jesus will thread us like a camel through the eye of a needle (Mark 10: 25) and take us as His bride. All we need to do to is lift our eyes meet His gaze, and accept His Mercy and Love.
   

Here’s a video on the same topic but with a different twist…