WHAT IS THE DIVINE MERCY?
It is God loving us to the extreme. Graphically speaking, it is God tearing out His Sacred Heart to give us His love. It is God outloving our sinfulness. He wants us to recognize that His mercy is greater than all our guilts, fears and doubts. Thus, we must place all our trust in Him and receive His mercy and let it flow through us to others. Then all may come to share in His joy.
The Divine Mercy message can be summed up in three letters TDM: Trust the Divine Mercy.
T – Trust in our Lord Jesus Christ with all our heart, soul, mind and spirit for He is good. He knows us, loves us, dies for our sins and saves us from eternal damnation. Contrariwise, the devil gives us nothing that is true, good or beautiful. He keeps saying, “I hate you, I despise you, I want you to go to hell, I want you to be damned, but you love me, obey me and serve me better than your God!” What a mockery! But why? Why don’t we trust in God’s Mercy?! Make a commitment to trust in Jesus. Submit yourself to Him. Trust in His Divine Mercy.
D – His Divinity is all-powerful. In a word, our Lord Jesus Christ is the Almighty God. His Mercy is also almighty. It is above and beyond our sins and sinfulness. Jesus wants us to pray to Him with confidence, to repent for our sins and to receive His Divine Mercy so that we may be forgiven and in turn bring His Mercy to the whole world. With Jesus, we can do all things. Pray to Him for nothing is impossible to His Divinity.
M –His Mercy is the essence of His Divinity. It is loving kindness overflowing. It is God outloving all our sins, shames and guilts. He wants us to let His mercy possess our life and let it flow through us to others. As the Lord has promised in the Beatitudes, “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall be shown mercy” (Matthew 5:7). This is His command: “Be merciful, even as Your Father is merciful” (Luke 6:36).
HOW TO BE MERCIFUL?
According to the teaching in the PRAYER TO BE MERCIFUL TO OTHERS, we can do three things: DO, SPEAK and PRAY.
1. DO the Works of Mercy. One concrete way is to distribute this Novena.
2. SPEAK Words of Mercy by ENCOURAGING and BLESSING each other everyday with a smile.
3. PRAY this Novena and the Divine Mercy Chaplet.
THE WORKS OF MERCY
Our Holy Mother, the Roman Catholic Church, has taught us fourteen ways to love ourselves. We are to be merciful to our body seven times and to our soul seven times in the work of serving our neighbors. Serving others is loving ourselves. This is called Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy.
Seven Corporal Works of Mercy:
Feed the hungry.
Give drink to the thirsty.
Clothe the naked.
Welcome the stranger.
Heal the sick.
Visit the imprisoned.
Bury the dead (e.g., the aborted babies).
Seven Spiritual Works of Mercy:
Counsel the doubtful.
Instruct the ignorant.
Admonish the sinners.
Comfort the afflicted.
Forgive offences.
Bear patiently those who do us ill.
Pray for the living and the dead.
This list of the Works Of Mercy is taken from our Holy Father, Pope Francis, in his Bull of Indiction of The Extraordinary Jubilee Of Mercy, MISERICORDIAE VULTUS, given in Rome at Saint Peter’s Square, on the 11th of April, the Vigil of The Second Sunday of Easter or The Divine Mercy Sunday in the year of our Lord 2015.
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