Here’s a great mental exercise! Connect the dots! Be Catholic! Try it! Start with Dot One:
- There are over 300 prophecies predicting the coming of Jesus, God’s promised Messiah. The prophecies are very specific, telling us clearly from which People, Tribe, and House He would come. The date and place of birth were clear. That connects to Dot 2:
- If we truly believe Jesus to have been The Messiah, we realize that He did not lie. We understand that He could not be wrong about anything. Connect that with Dot 3:
- We realize that His instructions are to be obeyed. We know that He said “If you obey My commands you are My friends.” And, on to Dot 4:
- We know that one of His oddest commands was repeated an amazing thirteen or fourteen times in the short space in John 6, between verses 27 and 64. Each of those times, Jesus clearly said what He boils down to one, frequently repeated bizarre sentence: “If you do not eat My Body and drink My Blood you do not have life in you.” We may, and should, choose to read those passages for ourselves and proceed to Dot 5:
- No one knew what that meant. We do know that verse 6:66 records: “After this, many of His disciples left Him and stopped going with Him.” We go to Dot 6 realizing that many didn’t get that far!
- To be among the faithful, we connect “If you do not eat My Body and drink My Blood you do not have life in you.” with 12:47 “If anyone hears My words and does not keep them faithfully, it is not I Who shall condemn him . . . . . the word itself that I have spoken will be his judge on the last day.” We think about how important it is to obey Jesus, rather than some ambitious man with a Marketing Plan, as we connect to Dot 7:
- John 14:16, is very clear: “If anyone loves me he will keep My word, and My Father will love him, and we shall come to him and make our home with him. Those who do not love me do not keep My words.” If we are blessed, we go on to see His words in Dot 8:
- John 15:5 shows us how what happens to those who receive Him: “Whoever remains in Me with Me in him, bears fruit in plenty; but cut off from Me you can do nothing.” That describes all who refuse to receive His Actual Body and Blood. Now, Dot 9 takes us to the only place that provides what is necessary for us to live “with Me in him.”
- Jesus only founded One Church, saying to only one man, at only one time, the words of Mt. 16: 18-20: “Verily, verily I say unto you thou art Peter and on this rock I build My Church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. I give you the keys to The Kingdom of Heaven; whatever you bind on earth shall be considered bound in Heaven; whatever you loose on earth shall be considered loosed in Heaven.” With that in mind, we go to Dot 10, The Last Supper:
- At The Last Supper, Jesus made sense out of His Great Winnowing Command, “If you do not eat My Body and drink My Blood you do not have life in you.” He blessed bread, and Transformed it, saying “‘Take and eat, this is My Body.’ Then, He took a cup of wine, blessed it, and said, “Drink all of you from this”, He said, “For this is My Blood, the Blood of The Covenant. . .”
- Here, at Dot 11, we realize, “If we do not receive His Blood, “the Blood of The Covenant. . .”, we cannot be part of The Covenant. This Catholic Faith is a serious business! Then, if we have the energy, we consider Dot 12:
- Dot 12 is where we see if God wants us to be in His Covenant. We ask our self “Would Jesus have only wanted the handful of people at The Last Supper to receive His Body and Blood and have life in them? Were they the only ones accepted into the Covenant? OR, would He Who Fulfilled the Prophecies have had The Power to ordain a Priesthood with had the power to forgive sins and bring about The Miracle of Transubstantiation in The Only Church He Founded for those called to The Covenant in succeeding generations?”Our immortal soul depends on us doing the right thing. Connect the Dots! Be Catholic! Try it! There is only one way to let our soul live in joy, forever!
