Saturday May 24, 2025

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Day after day the churches grew stronger in faith and increased in number. (Acts 16:5)

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Good News Reflection for:

Saturday of the 5th Week of Easter
May 24, 2025

Today’s Readings:

Acts 16:1-10
Psalm 100:1-3, 5
John 15:18-21
bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/052425.cfm
USCCB Podcast of the Readings:
bible.usccb.org/podcasts/audio/daily-mass-reading-podcast-may-24-2025

What is blocking your faith?

Jesus gave us the Holy Spirit to send us out in mission to change the world by helping others see a faith that’s alive. A supernatural faith. This means we have to have a personal relationship not just with Jesus Christ but with his Holy Spirit.

Sin blocks this kind of faith. And the biggest sin today is idolatry: the idolatry of thinking that something other than God himself should be in charge of our lives.

It could be the idolatry of money, thinking that if we get rich, this will solve our problems and we will be happy.

It could be the idolatry of self, wanting to do what we want to do rather than discerning what God wants us to do. The moral relativism that was increasing as I was growing up and increased a lot more while my kids were growing up — it’s still going further and further. The envelope of evil is pushing the moral relativism to the Nth degree to see how far we can go. This is so destructive, but people don’t know it. People don’t know that they are destroying their eternal souls.

It could be the idolatry of science, where if something is improvable by scientific methods it can’t be true, therefore, why worship God? Or the idolatry of the career, where the career comes first and, if it keeps me from going to church, so be it.

Fear is often our idol. We trust the messages of fear more than we trust God and what he has told us in scripture.

We need to identify how we commit idolatry. God wants to work the miracle of unlocking righteousness by curing our wrong thinking. He does it through the Holy Spirit. He does it through the Sacrament of Confession and the Penitential Rite at Mass.

We also need to get to the root causes of what leads us to trust our own idolatrous thinking instead of God’s Word. A Christian counselor could help us with this, or a spiritual director.

God wants to do miracles in our lives. Why don’t we believe it? It’s because we are believing something else. And that “something else” is our god. Even though Jesus is our Lord and Savior, our faith is diminished by idolatry. The Holy Spirit should be so active in us that others learn that the Catholic Faith is amazing.

For more on this, listen to these two podcast episodes:

1. “The sin that blocks faith” @ gnm.org/footsteps8
   and…
2. “The virtue that releases faith” @ gnm.org/footsteps9

© 2025 by Terry A. Modica

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