God’s Encouragement 

Do you ever get discouraged about growing into an intimate friendship with God? Are you tempted, because of your sins or shortcomings, to stop reading Scripture and praying? When you feel like this, how does God feel? Is this a good reason to persevere? God accepts gradual conversion. So should we. All he asks is “forward motion.”  

Exodus 17: 3-7 warns us to be suspicious of any voice that leads toward discouragement or suggests doubt about God’s love, God’s reliability, or God’s readiness to help us. The going was getting tough in the desert. The people were beginning to doubt they would ever reach the Promised Land. They were tempted to go back to the life they had left. They were tempted to take security at the price of slavery. They complained to Moses: “Why did you ever make us leave Egypt?” What voice were they listening to? 

It is characteristic of God to encourage, not discourage; to build up, not tear down. So, the minute we notice that a train of thought is blocking our forward motion, leading us toward discouragement or less confidence in God’s love for us, we need to reject it. When a voice says, “You are just proud and delusional. What makes you think God would ask anything great of you? Be realistic. Be humble and settle for an ordinary, mediocre life.”— that is the time to “sing joyfully to the Lord,” to “acclaim the Rock of our salvation” and dream great dreams, trusting not in what we are, but in who God is. 

Romans 5: 1-8 roots our reason for hope in the fact that God took flesh in Jesus and chose to die for us “while we were still weak.” Paul’s argument is, “Perhaps for a good person, someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.” 

If the worst sins we ever committed did not stop Jesus from dying for us, do we think the sins we are committing now will make him stop pouring out his grace on us? Having died to win us to himself, will he give up when it looks like he is losing us? 

The problem is, when we feel discouraged, we look at ourselves and our failings instead of looking at Jesus and his love. 

What characterizes God’s love is fidelity or steadfastness. The words Moses heard when God “showed him his glory” were: “a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (Exodus 33:12 to 34:6). If we think more about what God is and less about what we are not, we will find the way out of discouragement. 

John 4: 5-42 shows us how Jesus interacts with sinners. He initiates a conversation with a Samaritan woman he meets at the village well. (For the Jews, the Samaritans were like heretics). He begins by asking her for a drink of water. Then, little by little, he gets deeper and more personal with her. When she tells him she has no husband. Jesus answers, “You are right, for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband.” But he gives her credit: “What you have said is true!” 

Was Jesus judging her? The only obvious judgment he made was that she was worth talking to and that she was able to respond to him with faith. And before the day was over, “many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony.” 

Conversion to Jesus—or deeper conversion to Jesus—can begin at any point in our lives, and it does not have to be immediately whole and entire. There is no record that Jesus even asked the woman he met to stop living with the man to whom she was not married. Maybe she wasn’t ready for that. Nor did he ask the Samaritans to give up their false beliefs. He accepted them as they were and was willing to work with them. The point he made to his disciples was, “Look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting!” They should focus not on people’s sins, but on their potential. The role of his disciples is not to drive people away but to draw them in. This means accepting them as they are. 

To accept others as they are, we have to believe that Jesus accepts us as we are. 

Today’s Psalm Response (Psalm 95): The psalm today alerts us to the different “voices that cry in the desert.” If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts. There is God’s voice, and there are other voices that come from our own predispositions, from the influence of the culture, or even from the devil. How do we know which is which? 

Prayer Prompt: Do I focus more on what blocks me—or others—from a full relationship with Jesus, or on what there is in me—and in them—to work with? Can I decide to never let any sin or failing block me from interacting with Jesus in every way that is possible for me here and now? 

— Fr. David M. Knight

View today’s Mass readings, Lectionary #28, on the USCCB website here

Fr. David M. Knight (1931-2021) was a priest of the Diocese of Memphis in Tennessee, a prolific writer, and a highly sought after confessor, spiritual director, and retreat master. He authored more than 40 books and hundreds of articles that focus primarily on lay spirituality and life-long spiritual growth.