INSPIRING QUOTES ON DIVINE FILIATION:
GOD IS MY FATHER! I AM HIS BELOVED CHILD!
HE LOVES US FOR WHO WE ARE: HIS CHILDREN
Pope Francis said: “A father doesn’t love his child for what he or she does, for the results shown, but simply because it is his child. He wants his child to do well in life and tries to draw the best out of each one, but is always aware of how much value the child already has in his eyes.
That is our real ‘stature,’ our spiritual identity: we are God’s beloved children, always. So you can see that not to accept ourselves, to live glumly, to be negative, means not to recognize our deepest identity. It is like walking away when God wants to look at me, trying to spoil his dream for me. God loves us the way we are, and no sin, fault or mistake of ours makes him change his mind.”
-Pope Francis, Homily at World Youth Day in Poland, 31 July 2016.
St Thomas Aquinas writes: The worship of God has the highest right to be called piety, and God has the highest right to be called our Father. If we realise we are God’s children, we will be devout, with the devotion of good children who treat their father with respect and veneration: in a word, with love.
“We are not the accidental and senseless product of evolution. Each of us is the fruit of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.” – Pope Benedict XVI
Does this idea truly influence our daily lives?
“Lord, I thank you for loving me; I am sure that you love me; help me to be in love with my own life! Not with my faults, that need to be corrected, but with life itself, which is a great gift, for it is a time to love and to be loved.”
–Pope Francis.
—God is my Father! If you meditate on it, you will never let go of this consoling consideration.—Jesus is my intimate Friend (another re-discovery) who loves me with all the divine madness of his Heart.—The Holy Spirit is my Consoler, who guides my every step along the road.
Consider this often: you are God’s… and God is yours.
-St. Josemaria
CHILDREN WHO ENTRUST AND ABANDON THEMSELVES TO THEIR FATHER HAVE NOTHING TO FEAR
“Over the years, I have sought to rely unfalteringly for my support on this joyous reality. No matter what the situation, my prayer, while varying in tone, has always been the same. I have said to him: ‘Lord, You put me here. You entrusted me with this or that, and I put my trust in you. I know you are my Father, and I have seen that tiny children are always absolutely sure of their parents.’”
-St. Josemaria.
As soon as you truly abandon yourself in the Lord, you will know how to be content with whatever happens. You will not lose your peace if your undertakings do not turn out the way you hoped, even if you have put everything into them, and used all the means necessary. For they will have ‘turned out’ the way God wants them to.
Call him ‘Father’ many times a day and tell him—alone, in your heart—that you love him, that you adore him, that you feel proud and strong because you are his child.”
-St. Josemaria.
Rest in divine filiation. God is a Father — your Father! — full of warmth and infinite love.—Call him Father frequently and tell him, when you are alone, that you love him, that you love him very much!, and that you feel proud and strong because you are his son.
-St. Josemaria
GOD THE FATHER NEVER REJECTS HIS CHILDREN
“God is waiting for us, like the father in the parable, with open arms, even though we don’t deserve it. It doesn’t matter how great our debt is. Just like the prodigal son, all we have to do is open our heart, to be homesick for our Father’s house, to wonder at and rejoice in the gift which God makes us of being able to call ourselves his children, of really being his children, even though our response to him has been so poor.”
-St. Josemaria
Even though at times we may look upon God as a Master whose servants we are, or as a cold-hearted Judge, he remains faithful to his Love as Father. The possibility of drawing close to him after we have fallen is always a marvelous opportunity to truly discover him. And it also reveals to us our own identity. It is not simply the fact that he has decided to love us, because he wishes to, but rather that we truly are, through grace, God’s children. We are children of God: nothing and nobody can ever rob us of that dignity. Not even we ourselves. Therefore, on seeing the reality of our weakness and our conscious and voluntary sin, we should never lose hope. As Saint Josemaría said: “That is not all. It is God who has the last word—and it is the word of his saving and merciful love and, therefore, the word of our divine filiation.”
-St. Josemaria
GOD’S LOVE AWAITS US. LET US ALLOW OURSELVES TO BE LOVED BY HIM
The “sense” of divine filiation changes everything, as it changed Saint Josemaría’s life when he unexpectedly discovered this “new Mediterranean.” How different is the interior life when, instead of basing it on our own progress or resolutions for improvement, we center it on the Love that goes before us and awaits us! If we give priority to what we ourselves do, we make our spiritual life revolve almost exclusively around our personal improvement. In the long run, this way of living not only risks leaving God’s love forgotten in a corner of our soul, but also leads to discouragement, since we stand alone in our struggle against failure.
But when we center everything on what God does, on letting ourselves be loved by him, on welcoming his Salvation each day, our struggle takes on a very different tone. If we are victorious, gratitude and praise will spring up quite naturally from within us; and if we suffer a defeat, we will return trustingly to God our Father, asking for forgiveness and letting ourselves be embraced by him.
– https://opusdei.org/en/document/new-mediterraneans-i-that-first-prayer-of-a-child/#_ftn27
Defeat does not exist for a person who seeks to welcome God’s Love every day. Even sin can become an opportunity to remember our identity as children and return to God our Father, who insists on coming to greet us saying “Son, my son!” And as it did Saint Josemaría, this realization will give us the strength we need to follow our Lord once again. “I know that you and I will surely see, with the light and help of grace, what things must be burned and we will burn them; what things must be uprooted and we will uproot them; what things have to be given up and we will give them up.”
-St. Josemaria
But we will do so without becoming anxious or discouraged, trying never to confuse the ideal of Christian life with perfectionism. -Fernando Ocariz
Then we will center our lives on God’s Love for us, occupied with loving. We will be like small children who have discovered a little of their Father’s love, and who seek a thousand ways to show their gratitude and respond with all the love, little or much, they are capable of expressing.
THE JOY OF KNOWING THAT GOD IS OUR FATHER.
Cheerfulness is a necessary consequence of our divine filiation, of knowing that our Father God loves us with a love of predilection, that he welcomes us, helps us and forgives us.
—Remember this and never forget it: even if it should seem at times that everything is collapsing, nothing is collapsing at all, because God doesn’t lose battles.
-St. Josemaria
A son of God fears neither life nor death, because his spiritual life is founded on a sense of divine filiation. God is my Father, he thinks, and he is the Author of all good; he is all Goodness.
—But, you and I, do we really act as sons of God?
-St. Josemaria
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