Disease

We have to make countless decisions every day. Sadly, many of us fail to seek God's wisdom. Instead, people in desperate situations often make desperate choices.
But when we make decisions that violate the Word of God, the consequences can be grave. Unwise choices can lead to the destruction of marriages, relationships, families, careers and even life itself.
Some people constantly make wrong decisions based on their faulty belief systems rather than on God's guidance. They think their decision-making processes are under their own private control. But in truth, their choices become casualty covenants with the enemy, resulting in the negative outcomes they have come to expect.
A casualty covenant is a conscious or unconscious agreement made with forces of darkness that may lead to bondage, distress, disease or death. This type of agreement is binding and strong enough to change the course of a person's life.
These subconscious agreements that exist in the mind and emotions can affect our thoughts and behavior without our awareness. Satan's carefully engineered suggestions and strategies are designed to bring death not only to our dreams but also to our bodies.
Psychiatrists recognize that we can make unconscious decisions and judgments that bring about either delight or disaster in our lives. They call these "self-fulfilling prophecies" and death wishes, which can open the door in people's lives to a spirit of death.
Casualty Covenants Affect Our Health
One area in our lives that these covenants can affect is our health. You have heard people say such things as, "All the men in my family died of heart attacks, so I probably will too."
Christians are not immune to accepting this lie of the enemy. If our relatives suffer or even die from a particular disease, we may become vulnerable to the suggestion that we will contract the same illness.
Believing in our hearts and saying with our mouths that we might develop certain diseases fulfills a biblical principle in a negative way. From our hearts, we are speaking what we believe will come to pass; and, therefore, we will have what we say (Mark 11:24).
Satan wants to rob us of life so he uses the leverage of an inherited curse or a genetic disease to persuade us to agree with his lies by speaking and believing them. If we allow that kind of satanic input to dominate our thought life, it becomes easy to make an agreement with our deadly foe, accepting distress or disease as inevitable.
When we lack knowledge of God's Word or are disobedient to its truth, we are like open targets in a pitching booth at the county fair: We can be hit by one of the devil's balls of fire and never know what happened!
Only by understanding and obeying the Scriptures will we avoid being defeated by the devil. Jesus said that knowing God's truth sets people free. This is God's will for all men (John 8:32; 1 Tim. 2:3-4).
That's why we must not be ignorant of Satan's devices. We must follow Jesus' example when He was tempted and counter each temptation with God's Word (Matt. 4:5-11).
We cannot let ignorance of the Bible, religious tradition or false teaching cause us to believe that we can't be deceived into making a covenant that results in casualties to ourselves and our loved ones. If Satan sought to convince the Son of God to agree with him in the wilderness, we can expect him to try to trick us into agreeing with him as well.
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True Greatness

Greatness has nothing to do with who you are or what you have done or where you have been, in worldly terms. True greatness is in who you really are. There is greatness at all levels and stations of life.

Usually, the simple, lowly, and humble -- humble, at whatever level they may be, in whatever role they are called to play -- are the "greatest" in Heaven's eyes, not those who deem themselves great. Be great in the Eyes of God, not the world, and your life has been a smashing success. Be great only in worldly terms and the destination is purgatory (unless there has been an equal measure of spiritual achievement).

To be great in God's Eyes it is necessary to do His Will, at every opportunity, every waking moment; to dedicate ourselves to that. Period. Always remember: the janitor, the motel cleaning woman, a store manager, the mogul (a wealthy man can be humble), a world leader, may have the same level of greatness.

We can't tell from the outside. We can't judge from the exterior, the facade. It's like passing a house: there is no telling, from its immediate appearance, what is transpiring inside.

A pure soul is independent of that. We are called to live this life transparently -- in such a way that there is nothing to hide, and with a self-knowing that knows no embarrassment when we are right with Him.

Simplicity is a key. What's on the surface, as we all know, is not always the true value. In fact, complex ornamentation should be a warning sign.

Look at Jesus: on the Cross. He wore virtually nothing. He had nothing to hide.

It's how we come into this life; it's how we will leave. Spiritually, it is how we should live our lives: no facade.

The Blessed Mother comes with the transparency of crystal that completely blinds with its light.

Our society is now built on having a facade. We have gone to the extreme of cosmetic surgery, tattoos, and even altering the physique that God made. Yet we can't hide our true selves to God, no matter how we distort ourselves nor what we adorn ourselves with.

This also redounds to purity: a pure soul has nothing to alter, nothing to hide. This comes through examination of conscience, something that should not be done only during Lent, or on other special occasions -- periodically. It's to be done each night. Every evening, in prayer, or after reading Scripture, we should ask ourselves: what have I enjoyed this day that came from sin (imperfection) and what have I enjoyed that came from a focus on God?

As a priest was noting the other day, once upon a time a woman set out to buy a silver soup ladle. The salesman at the silversmith's was more than obliging, showing her many ladles. Most were very fancy, gilded pieces with embossed handles and arabesques. She just couldn't decide. Finally the salesman brought out one that was plain and unadorned. But the price!

It was nearly double the rest.

When she asked why, the salesman explained, "You see, on ornamental ware, the flaws of the material don't show. The defects are covered up by ornamentation. As you can see, the plain ladle is free of defects. If there were any, you would easily notice them."

It was that simple.

Are we? Are we that simple?

Strip away make-up, strip away the fancy car, strip away the fancy words about what it means to be a genuine disciple of Jesus, and it all comes down to whether or not we are loving, caring, and forgiving.

No amount of ornamentation nor fancy words nor extravagant devotion can cover that up.

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Holy Spirit

Pius XII and John Paul II both lamented our “loss of the sense of sin.” It’s an intriguing concept in the abstract; at a personal level, it’s haunting. But do we really understand the phenomenon? And are we free ourselves from the patterns that lead us to that loss? For my part, I’ve become increasingly aware of the continuing need for invoking the Holy Spirit, not only to provide guidance, but to reveal who we really are.
Prominent politicians and celebrities are often unashamed of their public views and private lives. So it only seems fair to point to their life patterns as a warning to others: the news stories of a wealthy and obscene pop star going through another bitter divorce and custody battle. And so forth.
For those of us in the business of conversion from sin, it’s easy to identify the fork in the road where such people chose the path to immorality. In one such case, a celebrity admitted she left the Catholic Church as a teenager when she found herself mocking the notion that someone could be condemned to Hell for a single, willful impure fantasy. The refusal to repent this attitude started her on a life of sexual debauchery. It comes as no surprise to anyone with a true Catholic mind: we become what we freely choose. But are we truly aware of what we have become?
We all have – to one extent or another – demanding personal and work schedules. A schedule may enhance our lives by directing our work (and recreation). In executing our activities according to a schedule, we often experience a healthy sense of accomplishment. But when pressed for time because of distractions, we often cut a few corners and rush things, although we are usually not impatient over the “big things” such as getting a large task done on time.
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Universalism

Universalism – the ugly twin sister of Indifferentism is Universalism–the teaching that God loves everyone so much that he would never send anyone to hell. In other words, in the end, everybody will be saved.  Why bother if we’re all going to get into heaven simply because God is such a nice Santa Claus type figure in the sky who will make sure everyone succeeds? Like indifferentism, the Catholic Church is riddled with universalism and it’s cowardly half breed sister semi-universalism. This is the belief that there is a hell and there might just be a few people there, but there won’t be many and maybe even the ones who are there will serve their prison sentence and be allowed into heaven after all. Universalism is a cowardly, unScriptural and unChristian. It doesn’t take a Thomas Aquinas to figure out that this teaching means not only the death of evangelization, but eventually the death of the church.
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Porn

"Pornography violates all relational values between the individual and self, the individual and society, the unity of our families and our moral fabric and fiber as a nation," Josh McDowell stated. "When we objectify and demean life by removing the sanctity of the human person, our future is at risk."
The study is titled "The Porn Phenomenon."
"Porn addiction is not regulated to any race, religious background, or socio-economic status," Haley Halverson, director of communications for the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, told LifeSiteNews. "Most people think that pornography could never touch their community, their church, or their family, but because of the internet, pornography has become so pervasive that it is creating a public health crisis in America."
Author Steve Farrar wrote, "A number of years ago a national conference for church youth directors was held at a major hotel in a city in the mid-west. Youth pastors by the hundreds flooded into that hotel and took nearly every room. At the conclusion of the conference, the hotel manager told the conference administrator that the number of guests who tuned into the adult movie channel broke the previous record, far and away outdoing any other convention in the history of the hotel."
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