Sunday 8th February – 5th Sunday of the year

Reflection: 1 Corinthians 9: 16-19, 22-23

HUMBLE YOURSELF!

The mandate to evangelize by its very nature calls us to embrace humility. The Catholic Encyclopedia describes humility as “a quality by which a person considering his own defects has a lowly opinion of himself and willingly submits himself to God and to others for God’s sake”. As Christians, we must humble ourselves completely in order to let God work through us. Humility is a virtue through which we can preach the gospel to others even without words – our lives would speak volumes about Christ.

St Paul explains: “I am a free man, nobody’s slave; but I make myself everybody’s slave in order to win as many people as possible” (2 Cor 9:19). Just like this great Apostle, our lives must exemplify humility if we truly consider drawing people closer to God as part of our Christian duty. Our Blessed Lord, whose gospel we proclaim is Himself the perfect example of humility: “For even though he had the nature of God…he took the nature of a servant…he was humble and walked the path of obedience all the way to death (Phi 2:6-8). Christ was able to reach out to the sick, oppressed, demon-possessed and sinners and ultimately grant us salvation because he humbled himself and took the form of man.

Let us take as our most important mission the need to draw others closer to God by laying aside our ego for “those who humble themselves shall be exalted and those who exalt themselves shall be humbled” (Lk 18:14).

PRAYER: Help me to remember oh Lord that my life is but a breath and teach me to be humble. Amen.

KNOW YOUR FAITH: YOUCAT 300 – Why do we have to work to form our character?
We must work at forming our character so that we can freely, joyfully and easily accomplish what is good. A firm faith in God, in the first place, helps us to do this…with God’s help, firm dispositions, not having ourselves over to disorderly passions, and directing our faculties of intellect and will more and more consistently towards the good.

HIDE A TREASURE: “Happy are those who are humble; they will receive what God has promised”. Matthew 5:5 GNB

Readings for Today: Job 7: 1-7; Psalm 147: 1-6; 1 Corinthians 9: 16-19; 22-23; Mark 1: 29-39