what makes god's word less effective - 24th week saturday
The first hindrance is the devil. The devil takes away the word by keeping people from hearing it, from understanding it and from responding to it. So we hear God’s word but we do not believe it or we promptly forget it. So whenever we hear God’s word we rationalize saying – that is old-fashioned, the Lord does not really mean that, the preacher has no credibility. Or something like this - Father I like your homily. What part of the homily you liked? I don’t know, but I like it. So the word is taken away by the birds, forgotten.
The second hindrance are pressures, or in the parable, the rocks, that stifle our resolution to do good. We are off to a good start, but we seldom prolong the good that we resolved to do because of our addictions to certain sins, or the overwhelming desire to succeed or gain material possessions. Our will is not strong enough and we succumbed when pressured to do the opposite.
The third hindrance is our tendency to enjoy the pleasures of life, a life consumed by the cares and pleasures. No time for church but so much time for recreation and television. No money for charity but so much expense for vacation and rich food. These are not actually sinful but there seems to be an imbalance or a lack of priority in our Christian life. And this is where most of us fail.
These are the 3 hindrances that make the God’s word less fruitful in our lives. Think about these.
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