Speak Lord: Call us to holiness

The second reading on Sunday continues our reading of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.

And it contains both challenge and encouragement.

I want to urge you in the name of the Lord, not to go on living the aimless kind of life that pagans live. Now that is hardly the way you have learnt from Christ, unless you failed to hear him properly when you were taught what the truth is in Jesus. You must give up your old way of life; you must put aside your old self, which gets corrupted by following illusory desires. Your mind must be renewed by a spiritual revolution so that you can put on the new self that has been created in God’s way, in the goodness and holiness of the truth.

Ephesians 4:17,20-24

The Lord comes to us to change us. He comes to heal, restore, guide us to ourselves, to the fulness of our humanity to likeness to him.

This change was gifted to us in baptism, but our receiving, ‘owning’, and living of this gift is the work for a lifetime. We need to grow into it, to become skilled in being ourselves.

Today is the day for freshly welcoming and enjoying the gift and the opportunities it brings us.

• What illusory desires befuddle you? What helps you see through them?
• What most attracts you about the newness to which God invites you?

Fragment of frieze of saints. Czartoryski museum Cracow, Poland. (c) 2013, Allen Morris.