The Catechism in a Year (with Fr. Mike Schmitz) - Day 21: Believing God (2024)

Episode Date: January 21, 2024

Fr. Mike continues reflecting on the meaning of faith and how it works in our lives. We learn that faith is a grace from God, a supernatural virtue that is not contrary to human freedom or reason. Fr. Mike reminds us that to have faith is not just to believe in God, but to believe God and everything he says. Today’s readings are Catechism paragraphs 150-155. This episode has been found to be in conformity with the Catechism by the Institute on the Catechism, under the Subcommittee on the Catechism, USCCB. For the complete reading plan, visit ascensionpress.com/ciy Please note: The Catechism of the Catholic Church contains adult themes that may not be suitable for children - parental discretion is advised.

Hi, my name is Father Mike Schmitz and you're listening to the Catechism in a Year podcast, where we encounter God's plan of sheer goodness for us, revealed in Scripture, and passed down through the tradition of the Catholic faith. The Catechism in a Year is brought to you by Ascension. In 365 days, we'll read through the Catechism of the Catholic Church, discovering our identity in God's family as we journey together toward our heavenly home. This is day 21, we're reading paragraphs 150 to 155. A couple things keep in mind as we get started. I'm using the Ascension Edition of the Catechism, which includes the foundations of Faith Approach, but you can follow along with any recent version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Also, you can download your own Catechism in your

reading plan by visiting ascensionpress.com slash C-I-Y. And also you can click follow or subscribe in your podcast app for daily notifications. As I said, today is day 21. Praise the Lord. Three weeks, you guys. No, that might not seem like it's anything significant. It is incredibly significant because I think we I said this the last couple of days. I think we've gotten through some of the grindy things, some of that kind of like, what, where are we going? Where's the traction? Where's my footing? And here we are yesterday able to launch into this,

what's our response to God's revelation? And today we're gonna continue talking about that. In fact, yesterday we talked about these great individuals who had great faith, Abraham and Mary. And there's also Sarah, of course, but Abraham and Mary being that incredible example, Abraham the model of obedience, because remember we talked about how

it's called the obedience of faith from Romans chapter one. By faith, man completely submits his intellect and his will to God. We're gonna talk about kind of another, in some ways, another definition or another aspect of saying the same thing about what it is by faith. For example, the first line from today's reading is, faith is first of all a personal adherence of man to God, which is such an incredible thing. We're going to talk about how the fact that we have faith, if we have faith, it's a grace.

So it's a gift that comes from God, but it is also a completely free act on our part where we freely assent, where we freely cooperate with this. So faith is both a grace and it is a human act. And what is that? Faith isn't just having a feeling, we talked about this before. Faith isn't just having kind of the sense, this kind of idea that God exists, but we're believing in God. And Christian faith is believing in not only in just a general God But God the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit and so we're gonna talk about that today So so good. I'd say a prayer as we get started Father in heaven

Give you thanks in praise May your name be known around this entire world May your name be known may your identity be known By every person who breathes on this planet this entire world. May your name be known, may your identity be known by every person who breathes on this planet. We ask that you please make yourself known to us. Help us to have faith in you. Help us to freely ascend to you.

Give us this personal adherence to you as we know that you're not a thing, God. You're a who. You're a father, son, and Holy Spirit. You are a Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. You are the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and we entrust ourselves to you now. And we ask that you please help us to entrust ourselves and adhere ourselves to you for all time into eternity

by your grace. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen. As I said, it is day 21, we're reading paragraphs 150 to 155. St. Paul wrote to Timothy the words, I know whom I have believed. To believe in God alone.

Faith is, first of all, a personal adherence of man to God. At the same time, and inseparably, it is a free ascent to the whole truth that God has revealed. As personal adherence to God and ascent to His truth, Christian faith differs from our faith in any human person. It is right and just to entrust oneself wholly to God and to believe absolutely what He says. It would be futile and false to place such faith in a creature.

To believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God. For a Christian, believing in God cannot be separated from believing in the one He sent, His beloved Son in whom the Father is well pleased. God tells us to listen to Him. The Lord Himself said to His disciples, Believe in God, believe also in me. We can believe in Jesus Christ because He is Himself God, the Word made flesh. As Saint John writes in the Gospel, No one has ever seen God. The only Son who is in the bosom of the Father has made Him known.

Because He has seen the Father, Jesus Christ is the only One who knows Him and can reveal Him. To believe in the Holy Spirit. One cannot believe in Jesus Christ without sharing in His Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit who reveals to men who Jesus is, for no one can say Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit, who searches everything, even the depths of God. No one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. Only God knows God completely.

We believe in the Holy Spirit because He is God. The Church never ceases to proclaim her faith in one only God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The characteristics of faith. Faith is a grace. When Saint Peter confessed that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God, Jesus declared to him that this revelation did not come from flesh and blood, but from my Father who is in heaven. Faith is a gift of God, a supernatural virtue infused by Him.

As Dave Erboom states, before this faith can be exercised, man must have the grace of God to move and assist him. He must have the interior helps of the Holy Spirit who moves the heart and converts it to God, who opens the eyes of the mind and makes it easy for all to accept and believe the truth. Faith is a human act. Believing is possible only by grace and the interior helps of the Holy Spirit, but it is no less true that believing is an authentically human act. Trusting in God and cleaving to the truths He has revealed are contrary neither to human

freedom nor to human reason. Even in human relations, it is not contrary to our dignity to believe what other persons tell us about themselves and their intentions or to trust their promises, for example, when a man and a woman marry, to share a communion of life with one another. If this is so, still less is it contrary to our dignity to yield by faith the full submission of intellect and will to God who reveals, and to share in an interior communion with Him. In faith, the human intellect and will cooperate with divine grace, as St. Thomas Aquinas wrote,

believing is an act of the intellect assenting to the divine truth by command of the will moved by God through grace. Okay, so, damn, this is so good. I don't know if you caught this, but this is just so powerful and so beautiful. One of the things we recognize that's being declared is that faith is a gift. So faith comes from God. One of the things that we recognize is that no one on their own can come to a recognition and acknowledgement.

No one can come to a place of deep and abiding trust or faith, right? No one can come to a deep place of personal adherence to God without God's help, which is remarkable. You know, thanks be to God that we've already established that God wills that all people be saved, that God wants all people to be saved. So he's going to give the grace, he's going to give the opportunity to have the gift of faith to all human beings because God wills that all be safe. Now of course we can say no to that. That's because faith is also a human act. We're going to talk about that later on. But this paragraph 153 and 154, that faith is a grace. It is a gift of God, a supernatural virtue

infused by him. And faith is a human act. And it's so powerful. I love the fact that here in paragraph 154 it says, believing is possible only by grace and the interior helps of the Holy Spirit. Of course, we established that. But it is no less true that believing is an authentically human act. And I love that the next step they take here in the catechism is to make sure that we know that is to make sure that we know that that faith, that human act is neither contrary to human freedom nor to human reason. That when we personally adhere ourselves, right?

When we obey God, that doesn't go against our freedom. That doesn't strip us of our freedom. That's an exercise of our freedom. In fact, one of the ways we can even understand what freedom is is sometimes in our culture, right? In our world, we think that freedom is the ability to do whatever you want. I'm free if I can do whatever I want. But over the course of centuries and millennia,

the church has discerned that freedom isn't the ability to do whatever I want, it's the power to do what I ought. And so if God exists, then I ought to have faith in Him. If God is good, then I ought to personally adhere to Him, right? This powerful thing. And so to be able to trust in God and cleave to His truths, that does not contrary to human freedom.

That's an expression of human freedom. And also, it's not contrary to human reason, right? To believe that God truly is, right? This is true, that He is true. He's truth Himself that doesn't go against human reason. And man, we talked about this yesterday, right? That even if we don't know everything about the next step, or even if we don't know everything about God,

we can take the next step. In fact, the example that's offered here is in human relations. You know, we don't know everything about the other person, and yet we can still make promises to them. We can still believe in their promises to us and we can even still share a communion of life with each other. And again, that's so powerful, right?

Cause we can do that in our human relationships with each other and here's God who's revealed himself to us. So our response gets to be what we've been talking about for these last two days. Our response gets to be not just belief, not just trust, but that sense of I completely submit my intellect and my will to you. Why? And this is so, so, so important. It goes back to the very first paragraph that we read today, paragraph 150. It says, as we said, faith is first of all personal adherence of man to God. So I'm adhering to God. I'm sticking to him like scotch tape, or maybe, maybe, maybe like Velcro.

I don't know. But it says, at the same time, and it's separately, this personal adherence to God, I'm sticking to Him like scotch tape, or maybe like Velcro. I don't know. But it says, at the same time, and inseparably, this personal adherence to God is a free ascent to the whole truth that God has revealed. And this is so, so critical because then the next step is, so it's not partial truth. It's one of those things where I think we can sometimes be tempted to pick and choose, right? We can sometimes be tempted to go through the buffet and say, okay, I like this about God. I don't like that about God. I like this about the church He established. I don't like that about the church. I accept this. I reject that. And that's

one of the reasons why, oh man, I think it was Saint Augustus who had once said that if you believe what you like in the gospels and reject what you don't, it is not the gospels you believe in, it's yourself. And that's one of those pieces that is summed up here in paragraph 150. He says, it is right and just to entrust oneself wholly to God and to believe absolutely what he says. No, yes, it goes on to say, it'd be futile and false to place such faith in a creature, any human being, to believe everything they say. Absolutely, that'd be ridiculous. Be futile and false.

But it's right and just to entrust oneself wholly to God and believe absolutely what he says, that because he's God and he is truth himself. And so whenever we get that temptation, right, that temptation to kind of pick and choose and say, well, I like this about Jesus' teaching, I don't like that about Jesus' teaching. We have to stop and say, wait, if Jesus is who he says he is, and he is who he says he is,

then he is truth itself. And no falsehood can come from him. And if he establishes church and gave it his Holy Spirit and his authority to teach in his name. Then again, then it's true. And I get to have this ascent. I get to have this faith as it goes back to paragraph 150. The free ascent to the whole truth that God has revealed. I love this. Just go back to this one line. We'll close on this one.

It is right and just to entrust oneself wholly to God and to believe absolutely what He says. I know that for many of us listening, that could be a challenge to believe absolutely what He says. And yet, that is our call right now. And so my invitation is, if I struggle, if you struggle, if we struggle to believe absolutely what God says, then we pray for the gift of faith.

Remember, this is not only human act It is also a grace tomorrow We're gonna be talking about like how do we get to this place of faith and understanding that that we're gonna make the claim That faith is certain which is sometimes for many of us like that's crazy. Yeah, how could faith be certain? We're gonna talk about that tomorrow, but we need our faith to grow So we can believe absolutely what God says. And because of that, we need to pray. You know, prayer is a funny thing.

Sometimes we pray out of a place of strength and a place of power, a place of certainty. Sometimes we pray out of a place of faith. And sometimes we pray into a place of certainty. Sometimes we have to pray into that place of power. Sometimes we pray into that place of certainty. Sometimes we have to pray into that place of power. Sometimes we pray into that place of faith. So wherever you are today, pray. Pray into faith. Pray by faith. And pray for faith. I am praying for you. Please pray for me. My name is Father Mike and I cannot wait to see you tomorrow. God bless.