In Order to Receive... | February 25

Click here to read the daily readings from the USCCB website. 

What beautiful complementarity we see in today's first reading and Gospel. In the first reading we see a penitent and humble Queen Esther pleading with God for salvation. In the Gospel, Jesus invites us all to come to Him with the same confidence that Esther had. 

God is a good, good Father who desires good things for His children. But how often do we simply not ask Him? How often are things preventing us from asking Him purely? We recently experienced this at our parish mission. Before we approached the Lord to ask Him for the gift of healing, we needed to pray prayers of forgiveness and repentance. 

God wants to give us every good gift, but we block his grace when we hold grudges or hold on to sins. In the Lord's Prayer we see that God's forgiveness is conditional on our forgiveness of others. We also know that God can't forgive a sin that we haven't asked forgiveness for.

Jesus wants us to come to Him with all of our petitions, but we can't take this passage out of the context of the entire Bible. In order to properly dispose ourselves to receive from the Lord, we must forgive and repent. That's what this Lent is all about.