OUR PERSONAL RELATIONSHIP WITH CHRIST In his recent exhortation Pope Francis says “I invite all Christians, everywhere, at this very moment, to a renewed personal encounter with Jesus Christ, to least an openness to letting him encounter them. I ask all of you to do this unfailingly each day” (Evangelii Gaudium – The Joy of the Gospel #3). What does a personal encounter with Jesus Christ mean? How does one renew it? Pope John Paul II comments in his encyclical Redemptoris Missio (The Mission of the Redeemer #33) that especially in countries which had deep Christian roots at one time there are entire groups of baptized who have lost a living sense of the faith or even no longer consider themselves members of the Church and who live a life far removed from Christ and his Gospel. In other words they have lost a sense of a personal relationship with Christ. We can call them nominal Catholics or lapsed Catholics or non-active Catholics. All these people have been baptized, usually as babies or young children but they have never been evangelized or instructed to the point of making a personal decision to accept Christ as sovereign Lord of their lives. This decision as such has not even be made by many who are practising Catholics. They pray, go to Mass, engage in charitable works but without a sense of a deep personal relationship with the Lord. In the past no one ever spoke of this notion of a personal relationship. It has only come into Catholic Church language over the last few years. For example, Pope John Paul II in his exhortation Ecclesia in Africa (The Church in Africa #57) says that “the new evangelization should be centred on a transforming encounter with the living person of Christ”. One should explain what the new evangelization refers to. The Pope is referring to all those Catholic mentioned above who have lost contact with Christ and the Church. They need to be re-evangelized, to be helped to recover their lost bonding with Christ. To help them there are a number of courses and programmes which lead them towards the moment when they experience Christ in their lives and consciously make a decision to accept him in their lives. This decision is referred to in different ways. Some call it a conversion moment, a deliberate turning to Christ. Others will call it a re-born moment in their lives. Others may refer to it as Damascus moment, recalling the moment when Jesus met with Paul on the road to Damascus and the change it made in Pauls life. Whatever name or term you use, it is the moment of a mature, conscious decision of choosing Jesus as Lord and inviting him into your heart. The point is that this can be done by everyone, not just by those who have strayed. It deepens a persons own personal love and bonding with the Lord. Being human, we can stray. We can distance ourselves from God, Jesus and the Church in varying degrees. A personal relationship with the Lord means we are aware of how we are distancing ourselves and how we are straying. That is why we began by quoting Pope Francis inviting everyone to renew their personal relationship with the Lord on a daily basis. He continues with a little prayer to help people to renew this relationship. He says: “Lord I have let myself be deceived; in a thousand ways I have shunned your love, yet here I am again to renew my covenant (relationship) with you. I need you. Save me once again. Lord, take me one more into your redeeming embrace”. We can nurture our personal relationship with Christ mainly by giving time to God through prayer, reading the Bible, celebrating the sacraments and participating in the life of the parish.
Posted on: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 07:14:28 +0000
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