{"id":10564,"date":"2015-08-02T04:00:01","date_gmt":"2015-08-02T03:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vultuschristi.org\/?p=10564"},"modified":"2015-07-30T08:12:16","modified_gmt":"2015-07-30T07:12:16","slug":"already-i-loved-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vultuschristi.org\/index.php\/2015\/08\/already-i-loved-you\/","title":{"rendered":"Already I loved you"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"sanctus-alphonsus-de-ligorio1\"From a Sermon by St Alphonsus Maria Ligouri, Bishop & Doctor of the Church<\/strong><\/p>\n

All holiness and perfection of soul lies in our love for Jesus Christ our God, who is our Redeemer and our supreme good.\u00a0 It is part of the love of God to acquire and to nurture all the virtues which make a man perfect.\u00a0 Has not God in fact won for himself a claim on all our love?\u00a0 From all eternity he has loved us.\u00a0 And it is in this vein that he speaks to us: \u201cO man, consider carefully that I first loved you.\u00a0 You had not yet appeared in the light of day, nor did the world yet exist, but already I loved you.\u00a0 From all eternity I have loved you.\u201d
\nSince God knew that man is enticed by favours, he wished to bind him to his love by means of his gifts: \u201cI want to catch men with the snares, those chains of love in which they allow themselves to be entrapped, so that they will love me.\u201d\u00a0 And all the gifts which he bestowed on man were given to this end.\u00a0 He gave him a soul, made in his likeness, and endowed with memory, intellect and will; he gave him a body equipped with the senses; it was for him that he created heaven and earth and such an abundance of things.\u00a0 He made all these things out of love for man, so that all creation might serve man, and man in turn might love God out of gratitude for so many gifts.
\nBut he did not wish to give us only beautiful creatures; the truth is that to win for himself our love, he went so far as to bestow upon us the fullness of himself. The eternal Father went so far as to give us his only Son.\u00a0 When he saw that we were all dead through sin and deprived of his grace, what did he do?\u00a0 Compelled, as the Apostle says, by the superabundance of his love for us, he sent his beloved Son to make reparation for us and to call us back to a sinless life.\u00a0 By giving us his Son, whom he did not spare precisely so that he might spare us, he bestowed on us at once every good: grace, love and heaven; for all these goods are certainly inferior to the Son: \u201cHe who did not spare his own Son, but handed him over for all of us\u201d: how could he fail to give us along with his Son all good things?<\/p>\n

Responsory<\/strong>.\u00a0 The Lord will do || the will of them that fear him: and he will hear their prayer, and save them: * The Lord keepeth all them that love him.\u00a0 V. Whosoever is born of God, commmitteth not sin: for his God\u2019s seed abideth in him. * The Lord \u2026 Glory be \u2026 The Lord \u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From a Sermon by St Alphonsus Maria Ligouri, Bishop & Doctor of the Church All holiness and perfection of soul lies in our love for Jesus Christ our God, who is our Redeemer and our supreme good.\u00a0 It is part of the love of God to acquire and to nurture all the virtues which make <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-saints"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paVypq-2Ko","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vultuschristi.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10564"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vultuschristi.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vultuschristi.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vultuschristi.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vultuschristi.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10564"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/vultuschristi.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10564\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10568,"href":"https:\/\/vultuschristi.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10564\/revisions\/10568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vultuschristi.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vultuschristi.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vultuschristi.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}