I wanted to deserve the favor of God

Monday January 17, 2022

Jesus said to him : I have been with you so long and you do not know me, Philip ! He who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say : Show us the Father ? John 14. 9

Declared righteous on the basis of faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Romans 5.1

I wanted to deserve the favor of God

"I am a physicist by training. Young, I thirsted for the truth, the truth of the created world, but I could not find an answer to my deep questions : "Who am I ?", "What is love ?" It was through a failure in love that I wondered about God. How to "connect" with him ? I believed in a Creator God, powerful, intelligent, but distant. By rereading the Gospels, a word of Jesus struck me : “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” I understood that Jesus was the incarnate, visible, historical image of God.

In a youth camp, I heard about the Holy Spirit. And I said to myself : "Ah ! this is the connection of the distant God with my heart empty of love and full of anguish". That evening, I invited God to come into me. I didn't sleep all night but afterwards, I realized that I had a peace, a tranquility, an extraordinary rest that I had never known. This peace was the sign of the coming of the Lord into my heart.

My knowledge of God as Father has been progressive. Indeed, I functioned as a perfectionist... and I wanted to earn God's favor. But I discovered that the Father is Jesus who presents him to me. He reveals God to me as a God of grace, which is the opposite of performance. I learned little by little to act not to deserve grace, but from the gift of God's presence and of his love which are there, in the middle, at the beginning, and at the end of my work. It's another way of being, another way of living."

Paul Hemes

Source (The Good Seed)