ONE LORD! ONE MASTER!

          

            This past weekend I had the pleasure of serving as Head Spiritual Director of a retreat-type program we call Cursillo or in its longer form Cursillos in Christianity. The name of the program comes from the Spanish word for  “small” or “brief.” It is a brief course in Christian living. It is a three-full-days retreat program that seeks to empower and encourage believers who attend the weekend retreat to serve in their churches and their communities at large as committed followers of Jesus Christ. The program in divided in such a way that men attend alone the first weekend and the women attend alone on the subsequent weekend. Later, there are many opportunities for the entire community of Cursillistas to come together for encouragement and service.

            One of my responsibilities was to close the weekend with a charge, in this case a charge to the men who just made their Cursillo and the men who served them in the team–the cooks and the speakers.

            The passage I used to close the weekend was Luke 16:13 “No servant can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon/money" [NKJV]. I focused on “What does a man who serves two masters look like?”

Because some of the men asked me if I had a copy of the message, which I did not, I decided to make it my blog for this week. Here are some of the points I made to them:

What does a man who serves two masters look like?

1- He is unsure of who he is, he does not know what he stands for and therefore stands for nothing that lasts, his values are in contradiction, as are his priorities and worst of all he is unsure of whose he is. His personality shows it.

2- He acts sporadically, one day he is hot and the next he is cold. Jesus said in the Book of Revelations that a person should either be hot or cold. The one who is lukewarm, He will vomit out of His mouth.

3- He is untrustworthy, because you never know how he will act and you can never depend on him.

4- He will ultimately betray one master or the other. His heart is compromised, as is his integrity.

5- He is useless to the Kingdom because his testimony cannot survive; he is in fact a hypocrite.

What does a man who serves One Master, Jesus Christ, look like?

1- He makes no compromise with evil, nor makes excuses for bad behavior. For him following Jesus is an issue of surrender and not of convenience. He has but one Lord and Master, whom he serves and follows.

2- He firmly attaches himself to Christ through daily prayer, study of His Word and service.

3- He lives in the world because that is where Jesus wants him to serve Him, because that is where those who need Jesus are and he is called to bloom where he is planted.  But he is not of the world, he belongs to Jesus Christ and God’s Kingdom is his kingdom.

4- Such a man is true and trustworthy. His heart is firmly planted in the will of God.

            I pray you are as blessed by reading this message as I believe the men were by hearing it.

            Let’s Blog!

            Fr. Jose+