The Commandments Part 1

EWTN Global Catholic Radio and St. Joseph Communications proudly present Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen. This 50-part series was recorded on photograph records in the 1960s and the sound quality is sometimes limited. But the word of God spoken by Archbishop Sheen is timeless. And now here is Archbishop Fulton Sheen. Have you ever been guilty of speeding? If you were when you came into the garage after exceeding the speed limit, did you ever bend your head over the steering wheel and weep? Did you ever shoot game out of season? Did it ever cause a great remorse? It is very obvious that here there is a breaking of the law and there is not just exactly the same kind of feeling that follows the breaking of the laws, there is that follows the wounding of someone that we love. We have been insisting all along that the standard norm of our morality is not just a law, but a person. Not something that is prohibited, but rather charity and love. That is why some people will feel greater sorrow for sin than others. It all depends upon how much we love. Suppose you cannot sing. Suppose you could not carry a key on a ring. And you were put into a choir where everyone else could sing. You hit a false note. The director of the choir would look at you with a very sorrowful face. All the other singers would turn toward you and give you a dirty look. Why is it that they act that particular way to you? It is because they feel that discord much more than you do. You are not musical enough to appreciate it, but they are. So too there are some people who do not appreciate the love and the mercy of God. And therefore they are not so much inclined to feel a regret as those who have just a vague concept of deity. I do not mean to say that they are without blame. Just as there was a reality to you hitting a wrong note. I only say that where there is the love of Christ, there is first of all a refusal to do anything that would wound him. And secondly when we do hurt him, we feel a greater conviction than sorrow. That is the difference between love and love. Between sin and the natural order and sin and the supernatural order. Just let me give you a few more differences to explain it. When we are governed solely by law, when we are not in the state of grace, but when we do wrong, we have a sense of guilt. When however we are in the state of grace and we sin seriously, we have a sense of pollution, of shame, of defilement. The difference between the two is very much like the remorse of Cain or Judas compared to the remorse of the prodigal son, who said that he had sinned against his father. Then to in the natural order, we are apt to have a fear of temporal punishments. Whereas in the supernatural order of grace, we are governed by a sense of the holiness of God. Another difference is that in the natural order, our sorrow very often extends only to some sins. And particularly the more shameful ones, not always to such sins as averse selfishness. But when we are penetrated by the spirit of Christ, then we even are sorry for our bad motives, for our evil thoughts, anything that inspires a bad action. The final difference. In the natural order, the grief for a call for a sin is often vanishing and temporary. As it was in the case of the judge who heard Paul, remember Stakewood scripture, says something that is indeed very striking. The dog goes back to his vomit and sometimes sinners will go back again to their sin simply because they were not penetrated with the keen sense of the reality of sin. But if, however, we live in the supernatural order, then there is an enduring conviction of sin. Then we become very much like Peter. It was said that he so much regretted his sin that he had furrows in his cheeks, the tears that he shed for denying our Blessed Lord. Our aim then is to imitate the life of Christ himself. Now this does not mean that we have to be born in a stable, that we have to visit Egypt, that we have to dispute with our teachers at the age of 12, or that we have to change water into wine or go to a wedding at the age of 30. No, it means that each of us is to do what Christ himself would have done in our place. We are not to copy Christ, as for example, a student will copy a great master in an art gallery. We are rather, as we said, to have the spirit of Christ in us, this being understood. We now come back to the law that should govern all of our moral life. We repeat it because it is so important. Our Blessed Lord said, thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart and with thy whole soul and thy whole mind. This is the greatest of the commandments, and the second is light to this. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. Notice that all the ten commandments were summed up in love, and you never can have love except by and to a person who is opposite you. Now, who is the person that is opposite you? God and neighbor. That is why when we are in love with someone, we speak of our love. As we said before, namely, there is a bond uniting the two of us, so that the basis of moral life is an earthly trinity. Just as there is in heaven the trinity of the father, the son, and the Holy Spirit, so on earth there is a trinity of moral relations. I, thou and God, just as there is a dialogue between me and you and God. So there is the eternal dialogue of love, father, son, and Holy Spirit. Our Blessed Lord, the night of the last supper, spoke of the heavenly trinity as the module of this earthly trinity of love. These were his words. He was talking about how he revealed the father's love to us, and he said to us, to his heavenly father, that the love thou hast bestowed on me may dwell in them, and I too may dwell in them. You observe therefore that the norm of our love of neighbor is not just the love we have for ourselves, but the love that Christ has for us. That's the foundation of love. Another point. These two commands, love God and love neighbor, we said, sum up the ten commands. The ten commandments refer to love of God and love of neighbor. The first three commandments are related to God. The last six commandments are related to neighbor. And in between the first three and the last six comes the fourth, honor thy father and thy mother, and God put this in between the two. Love of God and neighbor, because the parents in the home take the place of God, and obedience to parents is a very high form of justice. It is related not only to neighbor, but also related to God. Therefore we disobey God. We are in some way offending against one of the first three commandments about adoring God, keeping holy His name, keeping holy the Sabbath. Now we are not so much concerned here with telling you about sin, about the vices you have to avoid. What interests us is to increase in you the love of God. In other words, to construct a positive moral strong imitation of Christ. All we will mention the sins in passing, but you will find these sins for your examination of conscience in the particular catechism which we have recommended, and you will also find them in any prayer book where there is an examination of conscience. Now this is not a complete enumeration of sins against these first three commandments, but they are some of them. Anyone would violate the general commandments of love of God or the first three of the Olaw. If you refuse to recognize God as creator or redeemer and sanctifier, if there was a hatred of God, failure to worship, failure to attend mass on Sundays and holy days of obligation, if there was a rebellion against God for the trials and crosses he permitted. If there were such things as idolatry, superstition, blasphemy, cursing, sacrilege, loss of faith, presumption, despair, dishonoring the Sunday and the light. But we are not just to avoid these sins, we really must know why should we worship God? Why should we honor Him? Why is His name holy? If we understand this, the first commandment of love God with our whole mind and our whole soul. Then perhaps we will not fall into any of these sins. That is what we are going to explain. How do you think of God? Do you think of Him as someone on a throne who's sultzen, who pouts and gets angry if you do not go to mass on Sunday? Or if you blaspheme? Do you think it makes him unhappy when you do not pay any attention to him? Or do you think that he is a kind of a benevolent grandfather who's indifferent to what you do? Who likes to see you go places and do things and have a good time regardless of how you do it? No, God is not like either picture or the other. Does He lose something when we do not worship Him? Of course not. We do. But first, why worship God? What is worship? worship is a contraction of worship. It is a manifestation of the worth in which we hold another person. worship is a sign of value. You applaud, for example, an actor on the stage. You may applaud an athlete. And when you do so, you're putting a value on his worth. Every time a man takes off his hat to a lady, he is worshipping her. Now, what does it mean to worship God? It means to acknowledge in some way his power, his goodness and his truth. If you do not worship God, what do you worship? Nine times out of ten, it will be yourself. If there is no God, then you are a God. And if you are a God, I am an atheist. Because I cannot believe in that kind of a God. The basic reason today, why there is so little worship of God, is because, man, denies, he is a creature. Without a sense of dependence, there can be no worship. But that is the definition of worship. Now, why should you worship God? But you have a duty to worship God, not because he will be unhappy if you do not. But because you will be unhappy. Let me prove that to you. Suppose you are a father. Your little boy brings to you at Christmas time a little, ten cent knife that he bought. Do not you value that little knife more than a box of very fine cigars from your insurance agent? If you are a mother and you have a little girl, have you not often received a handful of yellow dandelions from your little daughter? And have they not pleased you more than a number of roses from a dinner guest? Do these fridialities make you any richer? Do you need them? Do you need that knife? Do you need the dandelions? Would you be imperfect without them? No, there are no use to you. Well, why then do you love them? Because your children are worshipping you, because they are acknowledging your love and your goodness. And by doing so, they are perfecting themselves. In other words, they are developing along the lines of love rather than hate. Thankfully, rather than in gratitude and service rather than disroity, they are becoming more perfect children and more happy children. Now, just as you do not need that little knife for those dandelions, these are just God need your worship. But if they are giving us a sign of your worth in your children's eyes, then they are not prayer, adoration, worship, a sign of God's worth in our eyes. If you do not need your children's worship, why do you think God need yours? If their worship is for their perfection, not yours, then may not your worship of God be not for his perfection. But yours. worship is your opportunity to express devotion, dependence and love, and in doing so, you make yourself happy. A lover does not give gifts to the beloved because she is poor. He gives gifts to her because she is already in his eyes possessed of all gifts. And the more he loves the poor, he thinks his gifts are. If he gave her a million, he would still think he had fallen short. If he gave everything, it still would not be enough. One of the reasons why we take price tags off our gifts is not because we are ashamed of what we paid for them, but because we do not wish to establish a proportion between our gift and our love. When therefore a man gives, a young woman gives his gifts to not make her more precious, but they make him less inadequate. By giving, he is no longer nothing. The gift is his perfection, not hers. Worship and light manner is our perfection, not God's. To refuse to worship is to deny dependence that makes us independent. Worship is to us what blooming is to arose. To refuse worship would be like a rose cutting itself off from the sun on the earth, or a student denying that history can teach you many things. To withhold admiration from one who deserves it is the sign of a jealous, conceited mind. Down deep in his heart, a man who refuses to worship God knows that he is not a creator. He even knows that he could not be godless. If there were no God, God made you to be happy. He made you for your happiness. Not his. God would still be perfectly happy if you never existed. God has no need of love for his sake. For there is nothing in you of and by yourself which makes you lovable to God. As a matter of fact, most of us poor creatures are very lucky if we receive any affection from human beings. Why is it that God finds us lovable? It is because He puts some of His love into us. That is how we are to find everyone else lovable to when we put some of our love into them and they become lovable. God does not love us therefore for the same reason that we love others. We love others because we need. We live in poverty. Someone has to supply our lack. But God does not love us because He needs us. He loves us because He puts some of His love into our cause. He put that is why we are valuable. When therefore God asks us to love Him with our whole heart, our whole mind, their whole soul. It is because He wants us to be happy. God bless. With our Bishop Bolton Sheen on GWTN Global Catholic Radio.