The great light which illumines the whole earth has already come and through Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour we have hope of eternal glory with God our Heavenly Father. The Spirit of God has revealed this truth in us and as we live in the Spirit, we hear clearly His docile promptings as He leads us on our pilgrim journey home to Him. Let us remain steadfast as we open our hearts to listen daily and do the Will of the Lord our God for us.
Yes indeed we must be wary for there are even many false prophets amongst us and even unbelievers will spin convincing notions that strive to lead us away from our beliefs in Christ Jesus our Lord. We can only be led astray if we continue to live in the ways and the thinking of the world. Those who do not live in the Spirit, will likely have warped interpretations of scripture and hence a warped understanding of the Lord our God, of His mercy and His love. They might say things like God at the beginning was God for the Jews alone and even if the Gentiles wanted to know Him or receive graces from Him they could not until Jesus Christ was born. Do they not know that Father Abraham was a gentile? God’s mercy and love has always and will forever be constant for all His creation! We need to repent of our sins, our human thinking, our pride and to humbly take up our cross and follow Jesus.
Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. Amen (Heb 13:8)
First reading
1 John 3:22-4:6
The Son of God has come and given us the power to know the true God
Whatever we ask God,
we shall receive,
because we keep his commandments
and live the kind of life that he wants.
His commandments are these:
that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ
and that we love one another
as he told us to.
Whoever keeps his commandments
lives in God and God lives in him.
We know that he lives in us
by the Spirit that he has given us.
It is not every spirit, my dear people, that you can trust;
test them, to see if they come from God,
there are many false prophets, now, in the world.
You can tell the spirits that come from God by this:
every spirit which acknowledges that Jesus the Christ has come in the flesh
is from God;
but any spirit which will not say this of Jesus
is not from God,
but is the spirit of Antichrist,
whose coming you were warned about.
Well, now he is here, in the world.
Children,
you have already overcome these false prophets,
because you are from God and you have in you
one who is greater than anyone in this world;
as for them, they are of the world,
and so they speak the language of the world
and the world listens to them.
But we are children of God,
and those who know God listen to us;
those who are not of God refuse to listen to us.
This is how we can tell
the spirit of truth from the spirit of falsehood.
Gospel
Matthew 4:12-17,23-25
The people that lived in darkness have seen a great light
Hearing that John had been arrested, Jesus went back to Galilee, and leaving Nazareth he went and settled in Capernaum, a lakeside town on the borders of Zebulun and Naphtali. In this way the prophecy of Isaiah was to be fulfilled:
‘Land of Zebulun! Land of Naphtali!
Way of the sea on the far side of Jordan,
Galilee of the nations!
The people that lived in darkness has seen a great light;
on those who dwell in the land and shadow of death
a light has dawned.’
From that moment Jesus began his preaching with the message, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is close at hand.’
He went round the whole of Galilee teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the Good News of the kingdom and curing all kinds of diseases and sickness among the people. His fame spread throughout Syria, and those who were suffering from diseases and painful complaints of one kind or another, the possessed, epileptics, the paralysed, were all brought to him, and he cured them. Large crowds followed him, coming from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judaea and Transjordania.
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