Trusting God's grace means trusting God's love for us rather than our love for God. [...] Therefore our prayers should consist mainly of rousing our awareness of God's love for us rather than trying to rouse God's awareness of our love for him, like the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18:26-29).
Interpretation
Trusting in God's grace emphasizes His love for us over our own efforts to love Him.
This quote by Peter Kreeft highlights the importance of relying on God's unmerited grace and love rather than focusing on our own attempts to earn His favor. It suggests that true prayer should be about recognizing and awakening our awareness of God's unwavering love for us, rather than trying to gain His attention through our own expressions of love, as illustrated by the biblical reference to the priests of Baal who struggled to attract divine acknowledgment.
In practice
During a sermon on faith, this quote can be used to emphasize God's love for humanity.
Remembering the facts of death and Heaven gives us an even more pressing reason to learn to pray: We do not have an infinite amount of time. We are one day nearer Home today than we ever were before. I guarantee you that after you die you will not say 'I spent too much time praying; I wish I had watched more TV instead.'
Like apes, we breed, sleep, and die. Yet like God we say, "I am." We are ontological oxymorons.
The modern mind always tends to reduce the greater to the lesser rather than seeing the lesser as reflecting the greater.
Our soul, like Mary's body, is to receive God Himself if only we, like her, believe, consent and receive; if only we speak her truly magic word fiat, "let it be." It is the creative word, the word God used to create the universe.
Protestants believe that the sacraments are like ladders that God gave to us by which we can climb up to Him. Catholics believe that they are like ladders that God gave to Himself by which He climbs down to us.
One of the few things in life that cannot possibly do harm in the end is the honest pursuit of the truth.
It is seldom we have the heart to throw ourselves, if I may so speak, on the Divine Arm; we dare not trust ourselves on the waters, though Christ bids us. We have not St. Peter's love to ask leave to come to him upon the sea. When we once are filled with that heavenly charity, we can do all things, because we attempt all things - for to attempt is to do.
Instead of focusing on the great men of God, I prefer to focus on the Great God of men.
For all of us, we put our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. He's in our boat. And when those storms come and those waves (of life) come, He's in the boat with us.
The greatest act of faith is that which rises to your lips in total darkness together with the sacrifices, sufferings and wholehearted efforts of a determined will to do good. This act of faith strikes through the darkness of your soul like lightening. In the midst of tempest it raises you up and leads you to God.
I place no hope in my strength, nor in my works: but all my confidence is in God my protector, who never abandons those who have put all their hope and thought in him.
Thank God for the battle verses in the Bible. We go into the unknown every day of our lives, and especially every Monday morning, for the week is sure to be a battlefield, outwardly and inwardly in the unseen life of the spirit, which is often by far the sternest battlefield for souls. Either way, the Lord your God goes before you, He shall fight for you!
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