Category Archives: Christianity

Priest surprises by singing Hallelujah at wedding ceremony

Posted on October 22, 2021 by | 5 comments

https://youtu.be/Qg5NN4fG-HE

St. Augustine said to sing is to pray twice.

What a beautiful voice this priest has.

~E

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Sunday Devotional: A personal relationship with God

Posted on October 17, 2021 by | 6 comments

Hebrews 4:14-16

Brothers and sisters:
Since we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens,
Jesus, the Son of God,
let us hold fast to our confession.
For we do not have a high priest
who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses,
but one who has similarly been tested in every way,
yet without sin.
So let us confidently approach the throne of grace
to receive mercy and to find grace for timely help.

Did you know that physical images of God are prohibited as idolatry in Jewish synagogues and Muslim mosques?

That’s because contemporary Judaism is Rabbinical Judaism of the 10th century which inherited the Second Temple period’s opposition to images. Despite what the Book of Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew Bible (and the Christian Old Testament), says in Genesis 1:27 that “God created man in His own image,” Judaism became an abstract faith wherein God is an intangible being with no physical form or material features. Therefore there is no way to draw or sculpt an image of Him.

Islam, too, in the name of avoiding idolatry, rejects the portrayal of God in any physical image. Like synagogues, mosques are devoid of figurative images. According to Islamic theology, God has no body or gender, and there is absolutely nothing like Him in any way whatsoever. God is transcendent, unique and unlike anything in or of the world as to be beyond all forms of human thought and expression.

Like Judaism, Islam rejects the doctrine of the Incarnation — that God took human form. Both Judaism and Islam, therefore, reject the notion of a personal God as anthropomorphic and demeaning. That also means this: Mere humans  cannot have a personal relationship with God.

Of the world’s major religions, only Christianity believes that God took human shape, wherein the Second Person of the Triune Godhead incarnated Himself for the express purpose of sacrificing His life as recompense for Adam and Eve’s  unimaginably calamitous sin of pride and disobedience in that first garden, so that humanity can be redeemed.

That also means that, being both divine and human, God in the Second Person had human experiences. He knows, understands, sympathizes and empathizes with us — our hopes and fears, triumps and travails, joys and sufferings. In the words of St. Paul:

For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has similarly been tested in every way, yet without sin.

Not only that, God invites us to a personal relationship with Him — to speak with Him, tell Him of our worries and concerns, and ask Him for help.

How blessed we are!

Tell Him you love Him with your whole heart, your whole soul, your whole mind, and with all your strength.

And may the love and peace of Jesus Christ our Lord be with you,

~E

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Sunday Devotional: To whom we must render an account

Posted on October 10, 2021 by | 1 comment

Hebrews 4:12-13

Brothers and sisters:
Indeed the word of God is living and effective,
sharper than any two-edged sword,
penetrating even between soul and spirit, joints and marrow,
and able to discern reflections and thoughts of the heart.
No creature is concealed from him,
but everything is naked and exposed to the eyes of him
to whom we must render an account.

Did you know a life review is common in near death experiences (NDEs)?

“There is evidence that a type of judgment occurs at the time of death. This judgment involves a review of a person’s life and results in their placement in the spirit world. Sometime after the judgment the person is assigned (in many cases this assignment is self-imposed) to a specific place or level in the other world – a place where his or her spirit feels most at ease.” (Dr. Craig Lundahl)

From Kevin Williams, “The Life Review and the Near Death Experience,” NDE, September 22, 2019:

The life review is an amazing experience having many interesting characteristics – not all of which are found in every life review. The following is a list of some of those characteristics.

a. Instantly becoming everyone you came in contact with in your entire life (feeling their emotions, thinking their thoughts, living their experiences, learning their motives behind their actions).

b. Reliving every detail of every second of your life, every emotion, and every thought simultaneously.

c. Re-living the way you dealt with others and how others dealt with you.

d. Viewing a few special deeds in your life.

e. Replaying a part of your life review to focus on a particular event for instruction.

f. Viewing past lives and/or your future.

g. Feeling a strong sense of responsibility.

h. Feeling a sense of judgment or self-judgment (often these feelings transform from judgment to self-judgment).

i. The review is a fact-finding process rather than a fault-finding process.

j. Your motives for everything will be as visible as your actions.

k. The negative events you expected to see did not show up because you had a change of heart.

[…] The life review reveals how God is concerned about deeds – not creeds. This fact becomes crystal clear during a person’s life review. Many [near death] experiencers have expressed the astounding realization of how life on earth is one gigantic “test” for which our deeds will be graded during our life review. […]

The overwhelming consensus among experiencers is that love is supreme. Love is where we came from. Love is where we will return. Love is what life is all about because love is God.

May the peace and love of Jesus Christ our Lord be with you,

~E

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Sunday Devotional: From the beginning of creation, God made them male and female

Posted on October 3, 2021 by | 8 comments

Genesis 2:18-24

The LORD God said: “It is not good for the man to be alone.
I will make a suitable partner for him.”
So the LORD God formed out of the ground
various wild animals and various birds of the air,
and he brought them to the man to see what he would call them;
whatever the man called each of them would be its name.
The man gave names to all the cattle,
all the birds of the air, and all wild animals;
but none proved to be the suitable partner for the man.

So the LORD God cast a deep sleep on the man,
and while he was asleep,
he took out one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh.
The LORD God then built up into a woman the rib
that he had taken from the man.
When he brought her to the man, the man said:
“This one, at last, is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
this one shall be called ‘woman, ‘
for out of ‘her man’ this one has been taken.”
That is why a man leaves his father and mother
and clings to his wife,
and the two of them become one flesh.

Mark 10:5-9

But Jesus told them,
“Because of the hardness of your hearts
he wrote you this commandment. 
But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. 
For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother
and be joined to his wife,
and the two shall become one flesh.
So they are no longer two but one flesh. 
Therefore what God has joined together,
no human being must separate.” 

Our Lord said, “But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female.”

Not “male and male,” or “female and female,” or  “she-male and he-male” trangenders.

And yet, as reported by LifeSiteNews, in an airplane interview on September 15, 2021, while ruling out same-sex marriage, Pope Francis expressed his support for civil unions of homosexuals because “we are all equal.” He said: “There are laws that try to help the situations of many people who have a different sexual orientation. If they want to support a homosexual couple in life together, states have the possibility of civilly supporting them.”

Br. Martin Navarro Ob. S.A. warned that the Pope’s support for same-sex unions “is tacitly equating a same-sex union with a family.”

That is why some call Francis the anti-Pope.

May the peace and love of Jesus Christ our Lord be with you,

~E

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Sunday Devotional: Our bodies are a temple of the Holy Spirit

Posted on September 26, 2021 by | 3 comments

Numbers 11:25-29

The LORD came down in the cloud and spoke to Moses.
Taking some of the spirit that was on Moses,
the LORD bestowed it on the seventy elders;
and as the spirit came to rest on them, they prophesied.

Now two men, one named Eldad and the other Medad,
were not in the gathering but had been left in the camp.
They too had been on the list, but had not gone out to the tent;
yet the spirit came to rest on them also,
and they prophesied in the camp.
So, when a young man quickly told Moses,
“Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp, “
Joshua, son of Nun, who from his youth had been Moses’ aide, said,
“Moses, my lord, stop them.”
But Moses answered him,
“Are you jealous for my sake?
Would that all the people of the LORD were prophets!
Would that the LORD might bestow his spirit on them all!“

As you just read in the above passage from the Old Testament‘s Book of Numbers 11, also known as the Fourth Book of Moses, the bestowing or conferring of the Spirit of God was a rare and special favor granted to very few.

But the Second Person of the Triune Godhead so loves us that not only did He become incarnate for the express purpose of sacrificing Himself as recompense for the cataclysmic sin of Adam and Eve so that we can be redeemed, Jesus the Christ also ensured that we would not be abandoned by His departure. As it is recounted in John 14:19, 18, 16-17, Jesus told His apostles;

“[T]the world will not see me anymore…
I will not leave you as orphans;
I will come to you.
And I will ask the Father,
and He will give you another advocate
to help you and be with you forever….”

So what do we have to do for the gift of the Spirit of God?

Acts 2:38

Then Peter said to them,
“Repent and be baptized,
every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ
for the forgiveness of your sins,
and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.”

For the baptized, our bodies literally are the hosts — the temple — of the Holy Spirit. As St. Paul reminds us in 1 Corinthians 6:19:

Or do you not know that your body
is the temple of the Holy Spirit
who is in you,
whom you have from God,
and you are not your own?

We, therefore, should treat our bodies with respect by not abusing it with drugs, alcohol, gluttony and sloth, and by taking good care of it with nutritious food, exercise, rest and sleep. Most importantly, as St. Paul counsels us in Romans 6:13:

Do not let any part of your body
become an instrument of evil to serve sin.
Instead, give yourselves completely to God,
for you were dead, but now you have new life.
So use your whole body as an instrument
to do what is right for the glory of God.

Thank God for the gift of the Holy Spirit, and tell Him you love Him with your whole heart, your whole soul, your whole mind, and with all your strength.

And may the peace and love of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you!

~E

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Sunday Devotional: Book of Wisdom foretold the killing of Jesus

Posted on September 19, 2021 by | 4 comments

Wisdom 2:12, 17-20

The wicked say:
Let us beset the just one, because he is obnoxious to us;
he sets himself against our doings,
reproaches us for transgressions of the law
and charges us with violations of our training.
Let us see whether his words be true;
let us find out what will happen to him.
For if the just one be the son of God, God will defend him
and deliver him from the hand of his foes.
With revilement and torture let us put the just one to the test
that we may have proof of his gentleness
and try his patience.
Let us condemn him to a shameful death;
for according to his own words, God will take care of him.

Mark 9:30-32

Jesus and his disciples left from there and began a journey through Galilee,
but he did not wish anyone to know about it.
He was teaching his disciples and telling them,
“The Son of Man is to be handed over to men
and they will kill him,
and three days after his death the Son of Man will rise.”
But they did not understand the saying,
and they were afraid to question him.

God is outside space and time.

And thus the incarnation, persecution, mocking, and death-by-crucifixion of Jesus, the Son of God, had been amply foretold in the Old Testament. The concordance of the above passages from the New (Mark 9) and Old Testaments (Wisdom 2) is but one example.

Here are some more:

Isaiah 7:14

Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

Numbers 24:17

there shall come a Star out of Jacob, and a Sceptre shall rise out of Israel, and shall smite the corners of Moab, and destroy all the children of Sheth.

Micah 5:2

But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting.

Jeremiah 23:5

Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and shall execute judgment and justice in the earth.

Zechariah 9:9

behold, thy King cometh unto thee: he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass.

Zechariah 11:12

So they weighed for my price thirty pieces of silver.

Psalm 22:1, 16, 18

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?

they pierced my hands and my feet.

They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture.

And yet, despite the concordances of Old and New Testaments, so many then and now obdurately refuse to believe that Jesus of Nazareth is the Son of God.

When Jesus came to the Israelites, and despite all His miracles — walking on water; calming a stormy sea; multiplying a few fishes and loaves to feed thousands; healing the blind, lame and the sick; resurrecting Lazarus and the daughter of Jairus from the dead; casting demons from the possessed — most of them not only rejected Him, they had Him executed.

How perverse is that!

So today, when you hear His voice, be not “hard of face and obstinate of heart” (Ezekiel 2:4).

Listen.

And open your heart, mind and soul to Him.

What do you have to lose?

May the peace and love of Jesus Christ our Lord be with you,

~E

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Sunday Devotional: ‘Take up your cross and follow me’

Posted on September 12, 2021 by | 2 comments

Mark 8:27-35

Jesus and his disciples set out
for the villages of Caesarea Philippi. 
Along the way he asked his disciples,
“Who do people say that I am?” 
They said in reply,
“John the Baptist, others Elijah,
still others one of the prophets.” 
And he asked them,
“But who do you say that I am?” 
Peter said to him in reply,
“You are the Christ.” 
Then he warned them not to tell anyone about him.

He began to teach them
that the Son of Man must suffer greatly
and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes,
and be killed, and rise after three days. 
He spoke this openly. 
Then Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. 
At this he turned around and, looking at his disciples,
rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan. 
You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”

He summoned the crowd with his disciples and said to them,
“Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself,
take up his cross, and follow me. 
For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,
but whoever loses his life for my sake
and that of the gospel will save it.”

What a grim reading for today.

For the first time, Jesus predicts His impending persecution, terrible suffering, and death by execution. Then, He warns that being His follower is not a path of roses, but one of self-abnegation and suffering:

“Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.”

Christians actually have had it good in America, compared to both the early Church and the many persecuted Christians across the world today, especially in the Middle East where Christianity is near extinction.

But the days of the comfortable U.S. Christian are rapidly fading, as the light of Christ dims in post-Christian and Left-radicalized America.

No matter what the future brings, we are to heed the words of St. Paul in his letter to the Ephesians 6:10-16:

Finally, draw your strength from the Lord and from his mighty power. Put on the armor of God so that you may be able to stand firm against the tactics of the devil. For our struggle is not with flesh and blood but with the principalities, with the powers, with the world rulers of this present darkness, with the evil spirits in the heavens. Therefore, put on the armor of God, that you may be able to resist on the evil day and, having done everything, to hold your ground. So stand fast with your loins girded in truth, clothed with righteousness as a breastplate, and your feet shod in readiness for the gospel of peace. In all circumstances, hold faith as a shield, to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one.

 

In the meantime, we take strength and solace from our Lord’s words and promise in Matthew 16:25-27:

For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? . . . For the Son of Man will come with his angels in his Father’s glory, and then he will repay all according to his conduct.

May the peace and strength of Jesus Christ our Lord be with you,

~E

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Sunday Devotional: Be Strong, Fear Not!

Posted on September 5, 2021 by | 5 comments

Isaiah 35:4

Thus says the LORD:
Say to those whose hearts are frightened:
Be strong, fear not!
Here is your God,
he comes with vindication;
with divine recompense
he comes to save you.


I don’t know how it came to be that so many view Jesus the Christ as an effeminate wimp.

Is it because He allowed Himself to be tortured and crucified, without fighting back?

But do they not know that Jesus’ suffering and death were redemptive and restitutory?

The dictionary defines “restitution” as reparation made by giving an equivalent as compensation for loss, damage, or injury caused.

Every wrong must be rectified. But our first parents’ Fall was so cataclysmic that not only was human nature itself perverted so that all of Adam and Eve’s progeny would be born with the stain of Original Sin with an inclination to evil (fomes peccati: tinder for sin), no man could restitute for that first sin. Only God Himself, in the person of the Son, could make amends — by incarnating in flesh, to be tortured, suffer and die on a cross.

As Jesus explained in Luke 22:22: “for the Son of Man indeed goes as it has been determined.”

Jesus couldn’t be further from being an effeminate wimp.

A physical laborer — carpenter — by trade, Jesus must have been brawny and strong. He would have to be strong to withstand being whipped until the flesh on His back was stripped, have 1″-2″ long thorns pierced into his head (try piercing your scalp with just a pin), carry a cross weighing 75-125 lbs, then be nailed to a cross by 5″-7″ long iron spikes. (See “Good Friday: Remembering His Passion and Sacrificial Love”)

Nor does Jesus expect us to be wimps.

He instructed us in Luke 22:36: “if you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one.”

He didn’t mean a spiritual sword. By “sword,” He meant it literally.

Furthermore, why would He tell us to acquire a sword if He doesn’t expect and want us to use it in self defense?

The equivalent of a sword today is a gun. Molon labe!

So as Isaiah 35:4 commands us:

Be strong, fear not!

And may the peace and love of Jesus Christ our Lord be with you,
~E

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Posted in Christianity

Please pray for DCG and her dad

Posted on September 1, 2021 by | 18 comments

DCG will be absent from BodyandSoul for a while because she is in Eastern Washington taking care of her father who came down with the demon COVID19 virus.

Her father had been sick all last week and went to ER last Friday. Fortunately, his vitals, oxygen level and breathing were all good, and was sent home.

But then, being very weak, he fell and went back to ER. Fortunately, nothing was broken, and his vitals and breathing were also good, but he is still very weak and sleeps all day.

DCG asks for our prayers.

Please pray that her father recovers quickly, that DCG remains healthy and be returned safely to us soon.

Thank you,

~E

18 Comments

Posted in Christianity, COVID-19

Sunday Devotional: Be doers of the word, not hypocrites

Posted on August 29, 2021 by | 1 comment

Mark 7:6

He [Jesus the Christ] responded,
“Well did Isaiah prophesy about you hypocrites, as it is written:
This people honors me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me….”

Reading the New Testament makes evident how much our Lord hates hypocrites. See Luke 6:42, 12:56; Mark 7:6; and Matthew 6:2, 6:5-6, 6:16, 7:5, 15:7, 16:3, 23:13, 23:14, 23:23, 23:25, 23:27, 23:28, 23:33, 24:51,

The dictionary defines “hypocrite” as “a person who pretends to have virtues, moral or religious beliefs, principles, etc., that he or she does not actually possess, especially a person whose actions belie stated beliefs.”

Even worse are preachy hypocrites who “Do as I say, not as I do.”

In the coronavirus pandemic, so many prominent Democrats are shown to be hypocrites. While they preach to us — whom Katie Couric called “the great unwashed” — that we must wear masks, they themselves don’t.

The latest example is host of CBS late-night talk-show host Stephen Colbert.

On August 21, 2021, while thousands of Americans were (and many still are) trapped in Afghanistan, at the mercy of the brutal Taliban, Colbert was dancing maskless with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (NY-D). (Breitbart)

https://youtu.be/2pXYDM9y_qU?t=77

But it’s not just Democrats who are hypocrites.

We all are, if we say pretend to having a virtue, while saying one thing but doing another.

James 1:21-22

Humbly welcome the word that has been planted in you
and is able to save your souls.
Be doers of the word and not hearers only, deluding yourselves.

And may the peace and love of Jesus Christ our Lord be with you,

~E

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