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Voluntarism. The human will is a tremendous force. It can do a lot. Without it, we would not save ourselves. “He who created you without you…,” writes St. Augustine, “will not save you without you.”But even this power must not be overestimated as if it alone is sufficient for everything (so-called Pelagianism) or if Christian perfection should be judged only by performance, especially external performance. At the end of the last century, some said that the time had come to replace passive virtues with active ones. We should worry less about humility, contemplation, adoration, and denial but instead put all our strength into doing something properly for the Church, social justice, and the law. These counsels were often well-intentioned, and there was a piece of truth. However, their one-sidedness quickly leads to consequences contrary to Christ’s life and the teaching of the Gospel. Related to voluntarism is so-called moralism. He who loves God keeps the commandments (Jn 14:21). People with a valid will are better able to keep the laws of morality and the rules of the Church and are faithful in their duties. Can it be said that they are genuinely holier, better than others? We are sure that keeping God’s laws sanctifies a man. The life struggle of Christ against the Pharisees shows how easily
it is to go astray here, too, and how outward integrity can become a mask that covers the fundamental deficiencies of many actual values.
Sentimentalism. The presence of the Holy Spirit purifies all our faculties, hence our affections. The ear of the trained musician becomes sensitive to the harmony of tones and the flow of melody. Religious life awakens sense and feeling for what is, as St. Paul says above (Col 3:1), for the world of God, for holiness. There is an inner joy, a consolation, a peace that the world cannot give. In the words of the Apostle, such is the fruit of the Spirit (Gal 5:22).
Spiritual writers have always wondered whether such inner states are inevitable, whether they are infallible signs of grace and the presence of the Spirit. What if someone completely lacks and feels comfortless, full of contradictions, temptations, and disgust? The “consciousness of grace” question is being addressed again in theology today, even though it is aware of the difficulties. Certainly, the long-convicted need to avoid errors, e.g., Messalianism (4th century), which claimed that we have grace only when we feel it. Temptation and restlessness are said to be symptoms of sin. Even in the early modern period, there are some profound statements from the Church. Feeling and believing in our justification to be saved is not enough. Again, it was emphasized (against Baius) that “the evil lust, though it has its origin in sin, leads to it, but is not itself a sin.” Spiritual writers to this day say of consolations and consolations that often alternate.
Thus, one cannot infallibly measure life by good and bad feelings in God’s grace. Nevertheless, the presence of the Holy Spirit usually gives a person peace and tranquility, an inner contentment. They have, therefore, also right those who testify that they have found happiness and joy, such as the world cannot give in the spiritual life. This, however, every Christian gratefully receives. But he will never substitute for it the search for sentimental “sweet.” devotions, artificially induced enthusiasm, or exaltation.
Exaggerated spiritualism. We believe that Jesus Christ is the true God. But He is a God who became incarnate, was born, lived as a man died, and sanctified human activity and values. Spiritual life is in the Holy Spirit. He, however, “spiritualizes” the whole human person. He is thus given a true sense of what exaggerated spiritualism despises: daily life, its concerns, interests, feelings, and relationships. In contrast, however, compared to God, the world is nothing, not even worthy of attention. The world in God and with God, however, is the beginning of the heavenly Jerusalem, towards which the development of history is directed. Exaggerated spiritualism manifests itself in many ways. Some overestimate miracles, expect extraordinary interventions of God’s power and do not make sufficient use of the means at hand to accomplish good. It is good to think of eternal bliss, but it must be remembered that it is the reward of love. Nothing is more holy to a Christian than prayer, but to it also belongs work, as symbolically the two sisters in the Gospel, Mary and Martha (Luke 10,
38 ). Save the soul, for the rest does not matter! Nevertheless, we cannot throw up our hands in condescension over the misery and needs of our neighbor, over social injustice, over oppression. So-called Quietism (from the Latin word quies – peace) longs for God’s grace to permeate man’s heart. It forgets, however, that God is action, so God’s life promotes activity. Spiritual experiences are not for that, to be drunk with them, as it were, and to fall into passivity, inactivity.
 One-sided Christian sociologist. Love for God, however, is realized through the love of neighbor. The latter, then, is to meet the needs of modern life and be organized. Christians as a whole cannot be alienated from public life, neither from politics nor from culture. And yet, even in the heat of enthusiasm for a good cause, they must remember Christ’s words: My kingdom is not of this world (Jn 18,36). The Gospel is not just a social program.

Andrew joyfully announces to his brother. In the Gospel, we hear how Andrew and John were interested in Jesus and how they came to know him. We who gather around the altar also want to know Jesus, for through him, we know the mysteries of life. Without Christ, we do not understand what life and death are. We are still determining who we are and what our destiny is. Someone has said that knowledge of God gives birth to pride, and knowledge of man gives birth to despair. The prideful are those who claim to know the ways of God and supposedly know what to expect from God. And those who know man’s misery and what he can do fall into despair. Jesus Christ came into the world to reveal God’s love and show us man’s greatness. For man’s salvation, God consented to the death of His Son. Happy are the first disciples who came to know Christ, but we see that the knowledge of Christ is not the goal but the starting point for them. They bring to Christ, other disciples, and then whole nations. Thus, our task is also to bring religiously indifferent people to Christ and open their eyes to heaven. It is a sad fact that the Messiah has already been born and is in our midst, and many have not yet come to know Him.

You know that feeling when you’re trying to steal a little time to devote to God, but your responsibilities won’t let you? And you fall asleep feeling guilty that you didn’t do enough for it every night. You struggle with remorse until you reach an impasse… What wins? Your pride, your fear, or your humility? In your pride, you say: “God will wait, but duty will not,” in fear you mumble to Our Father, “For what if…” and in humility, you say: “God, forgive me, for you are the Lord of time – here I am, I am listening.”
You are not alone in experiencing the struggle with time, but it is a little different. Our busy, duty-laden lives are not the only reason we don’t have time for God…

Why do we forget God?
We are used to giving out of our surplus. If we give something to people experiencing poverty, we provide not the most beautiful and precious things we have but what we no longer need. Piles of clothes that are no longer fashionable occupy the closet. Or the money we donate to people in need only at the end of the month because it has increased to us. So, we are used to giving God the leftovers of our time.

It is not an art to give in excess but to go out on a limb and trust God implicitly. To be frugal, to sacrifice a little of our comfort and give it to those who need it most. Those who love to sacrifice for others sacrifice most of their time for God. Don’t give him your leftovers – the time you have left before bedtime. If you never want to forget God again, start with Him when you wake up first thing in the morning.

Time with God is like a meal you must eat several times daily to fill you up. It is said that appetite grows with food, so why not speak to Him in the morning, at lunch, and at night before bed, but every time you have a moment – in the doctor’s waiting room, on the way to work, or while cooking? Make every opportunity to spend time with God your number one priority.

How can you spend time with God every day? Here are six tips
Start as soon as you wake up. Not all of us are early birds to get up, but what about sacrificing a few minutes of your sleep to God? Pray, give thanks, praise the Lord, or read a few scriptures. If you start talking to God, He will bless your day, fill you with the Holy Spirit, and multiply your time. Sacrifice your discomfort for the souls in purgatory or for your own sake.

Listen to God’s Word while you work.
Sitting down during the day and reading the Holy Scriptures or other spiritual literature is often challenging. However, audio versions can be downloaded to your cell phone and listened to anytime. You can download free Holy Scripture, Christian audiobooks, praise or sermons, and lectures by inspirational people. Listen to them on your way to and from work or home while doing chores that don’t need your full attention. Make the most of every moment and fill your mind with the Word – you will have a wonderful time with God, whom you will never forget.

Read the Holy Scriptures while you wait.
We try to make the most of every spare moment while waiting. It is unthinkable to wait and do nothing at all. We pass the time by surfing the internet on our mobiles or tablets and don’t even realize that we could have spent it more meaningfully. We must remember about good old tried and tested manual work or reading. How many people have you seen today doodling or reading a book in a doctor’s waiting room or while driving to work?

Shorten your wait by reading spiritual literature or Holy Scripture. Why is it important to read God’s Word daily? Reading the Holy Scriptures should guide how we live our lives so we can be saved. It is a source we can draw at any time – in a state of joy, sorrow, fear, or pain. Holy Scripture is a constant reassurance from God of His love for us.

Speak to God with your words.
How many of us wander our minds thinking about ourselves, our actions, our problems, or how others treat us? Our thoughts have great power. They make us proud as we constantly remind ourselves how wonderful we are. Who can praise you more than your ego? Or who can give you more credit for the fact that your neighbor or colleague hasn’t been fair to you than yourself?

Instead of looking at yourself and your neighbors, turn your attention to God, and you will not lose your value. You can only gain. How about talking to God in your own words? Just like with your best friend. Just speak; your God is the best listener. Don’t be afraid to ask him for help because he responds with deeds – undeserved gifts and infinite mercy.

Be receptive to the gifts of the Holy Spirit all day long.
Being close to God also means being receptive to the gifts of the Holy Spirit. God speaks to us through the Holy Spirit, from whom we have received in the Sacrament of Confirmation the gift of wisdom, discernment, counsel, strength, knowledge, piety, and the fear of God to walk in the Light in this world. God’s love and the Holy Spirit guide us through the obstacles in our path. If you do not feel the blowing of the Holy Spirit in your life, there is a mistake somewhere.

The problem is that we often need to remember to thank the Holy Spirit for help, not realizing that the Holy Spirit lives within us. The Holy Spirit can help you make small daily decisions by whispering. If you listen to Him and discern the “feelings” that the Holy Spirit is giving you, you will have fewer problems. How to listen to the Holy Spirit? In the Holy Scriptures, it says: “By their fruits, you will know them…” (cf. Mt 7:16). The fruit of the Holy Spirit is “love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, temperance” (Gal 5:22-23).

Would you be able to sleep? Start praying
No, this is not meant to sound funny. Even if someone says it’s good to start counting sheep to get to sleep quickly, sometimes it doesn’t work. What to do at that time? Have you found yourself yawning while praying? It’s strange, but it works. Can you think of a better and more beautiful way to fall asleep than with a prayer on your lips?

Now, we don’t mean that you should save evening prayer for the late hour of the night when you fall asleep to it. It is intended to be one way of devoting the last minutes of nothingness to God. After all, it is possible to fight insomnia by prayer.

When you give God your time, He will multiply and bless it with graces. God uses a mysterious equation: He does not divide the time you give Him but multiplies it so you will have time for many other duties.

The Cathars, a heretical movement of the Middle Ages, had one more feature besides its gnosticism: it divided people into the perfect and the imperfect. The perfect lived an impossible life, or at least very difficult, for an average person. Thus, so that even a normal, ordinary person might have some hope of salvation, there was a belief that if such a perfect one, a psychic, as they were called in Gnosticism (or a good person, as the Cathars called them), gave an average and therefore still human person, a special absolution, the so-called consolamentum to the dying, before death, then that person would also be saved as a result of it. The perfect one was saved because he was perfect, the others because they received this absolution from them, and based on it, God took pleasure in them and accepted them, even though they were still sinful and carnal.
Does that remind you of anything? It certainly does. Today, we call it clericalism, and this delusion is rampant among Catholics.
It, too, believes that there are men, clerics, or “parish priests and nuns,” as it is popularly called, whom God has chosen for a life of holiness and perfection. In this understanding, holiness and perfection mean that they only pray, read the Bible and the holy books, and do nothing but deal with the Lord God. Therefore, they have neither family nor any other occupation and live in a rectory or monastery, separated from the rest of the world. They are called to holiness, and they save themselves for their holiness.
And then there are the laity who live in the world, have families and jobs, and cannot live anything like that; it is not in their power or ability, and no one expects them to. They are weak and sinful, but they will save themselves because of God’s mercy when God has mercy on them, and despite their sins of worldliness, they will still receive into Heaven. And He will do this if they will at least somehow “support the institutions of the Church,” and if they will at least confess and receive absolution from the priest before they die so that, cleansed of all guilt, they may pass clean before the Judge. And, of course, it is best if such purification occurs regularly, say once a month, and if church attendance is added as insurance, ideally every Sunday, or at least occasionally, on major feasts. Then it should be a sure thing!
It’s similar, very similar.
There are a lot of misunderstandings and misconceptions in the background, from the idea of holiness as basically a superhuman burden or “just praying all the time” to the concept of Heaven as a place where God will let us in or out at will – and whether He will do so is up for debate, will be determined by whether He is still angry with us for our faults and sins and will pursue us with punishments for them, or whether we have managed to “wash” and cleanse ourselves of everything in confession beforehand and come before Him already clean. He is satisfied and graciously lets you go to Heaven. ..
Oh, it’s all been here before. As Ecclesiastes says, “What has been is what will be again. And what has already happened will happen again. Nothing is new under the sun. If there is anything that man would say: “See, this is something new!”, it was already there in the times that were before us.” (Eccl 1:9-10).

Inner transformation requires us to undergo an unpleasant experience in the dark recesses of our souls. According to the opinions of many …this look is nothing more than an admission of a tendency to impatience or the expression of a particular critical spirit. Most Christians will admit quite readily that their sinfulness is more than just a manifestation of behavior that violates established norms. Of course. We struggle with deeper issues, selfish motives, and so on. But at the level of unconvincing generality, most of the time, it stays.
On the other hand, others resist looking at the ugly inside, preferring
to consider struggles rather than sinfulness. “I don’t have enough self-confidence. I’m just so insecure.” “Why am I such a perfectionist? I take everything too much; I’ll go crazy one day.” Such problems provoke sympathetic concern in others and an almost heroic sense of self-pity in ourselves. On the other hand, confessing our sinfulness is condemned by others. Those who speak of their struggles feel noble, while the sinners feel worthy of scorn.

In many churches, a sincere concern to repair the damage in human life has led to an understanding of man that quietly pushes aside sin
. The truth that suffering people need encouragement sometimes focuses our attention too much on people’s struggles and has weakened our ability to understand their sinfulness. In the efforts of some conservative Christians to emphasize the problem of sin again, we can see an inevitable swing of the pendulum away from an emphasis on “helping the suffering.” In the righteous indignation at modern efforts to mitigate the horror of sin by pointing to its psychological conditioning, these people want to point again to sin in its visible form (fornication, laziness, lying, etc.) to emphasize that people often struggle but also sin.
This observation of theirs is accurate. We certainly struggle as victims
of the unkindness of others. We are victims of someone else’s sin. But we cannot excuse our sinful reactions by saying that others have sinned against us. We are responsible for our actions. We are both strugglers and sinners, victims and perpetrators who suffer and hurt. But notice what has happened. If we look within ourselves, we tend to see ourselves as people struggling with our buried pain and psychological complexes. But when we decide it’s time to get serious about our responsibility to follow God, we return to the surface and try to do what we expected. Struggle tends to be associated with looking inward (“let’s see what your real trouble is”). At the same time, sin is typically handled by transforming our outward actions (“It’s time to stop all this introspection and get to work. How much time do you spend with your wife?”).
Committed Christians who want to change have two options: seek help in honestly exposing the pain in their own heart or accept the responsibility of correcting sin in their behavior. Pain in the heart and sin in behavior are two categories we must contend with. And yet neither of them will lead us to our souls’ dark, ugly, distorted corners. Neither of them will help us penetrate the sin in our hearts that we must touch to be inwardly transformed. Sin affects something more than our outward attitudes (sin in behavior), and we must confront much worse problems than deep-seated psychological problems (pain in the heart).
I do not want to deal with external sinfulness or internal struggles in this chapter. I want to expose the sin in our hearts. However, I want to
The Problem of Demanding to be stricter than those who regard inward sin as a tendency to impatience or the occasional expression of a critical spirit. The problem of our heart is much more severe than many think. When we look into the inside, we find more than just ugly memories and painful feelings. In any case, a candid look will reveal something ugly – demandingness. We are a demanding people. Because we stubbornly pass over God’s water sources and dig our wells, our survival depends on the water we dig. Our self-defense mechanisms don’t – work. If we take responsibility for putting our thirst into our own hands, our survival depends on the success of our quest.
We demand that our partners meet our needs; we demand that our children bear the fruit of our godly activity; we demand that our church be responsive to our needs by providing specific services; we demand that drivers who drive slowly leave the overtaking lane of the highway; we demand that we no longer no one to prepare us for the disappointments we have already experienced; we demand that we be given the legitimate joys that have long been denied us. How absurd! Can you imagine an army in which conscripts and societies whose policy is determined by messengers? And yet, here are mere men shouting their orders into space. Such folly is the inevitable consequence of taking responsibility for our happiness- a burden too heavy for our shoulders. When we accept responsibility for what we desperately desire but have no control over it, we irrationally demand
our efforts succeed. The ugly disease of demanding is deeply wedged in our thirsty souls. Inner transformation demands that we face our demanding problem and do something about it. The spirit of demandingness must be recognized to see it in all its horror and then to rid ourselves of it through repentance. Let’s think together about this problem from three different angles:1) how God sees it, 2) how it arises, and 3) what to do about it.

There are two criteria in love that Jesus gave us.
– The first criterion is expressed in words: “Love your neighbor as yourself!” (Lv 19:18). If you do not love yourself, you cannot fully love your neighbor. That is why I have spoken to you about accepting yourself. If you reject yourself, condemn yourself, do not forgive yourself, pull yourself aside, do not recognize your charisma in yourself, and do not love yourself, you cannot love others. You can only love to the extent that you love yourself. If you do not accept yourself, you cannot accept others. If you cannot forgive yourself, you cannot forgive others.
– But then Jesus gives us a second criterion in the New Testament when he says: “The new commandment I give to you, that you love one another. That you also love one another, as I have loved you.” The novelty of this commandment is not in the injunction “Love one another”-we already find that in the Old Testament. The novelty is in the words-” as I have loved you.” The criterion of loving “as yourself” is no longer sufficient. The criterion has become “as I have loved you” (cf. Jn 13,34). And how did Jesus love us? Unconditionally. Next, we will try to explain the word “unconditionally.” This is newness in love.

The difference between secular and Christian love
It will be good to tell ourselves the difference between worldly and Christian love. Ordinary love is based on feelings, attraction, and sympathy. We see this on television or in reading love novels. The decision to forgive Christian love and forgiveness is based on a decision, not feelings. We must understand this. Often, people come to me and say: “I don’t know if I have  forgiven that person or not.” It is impossible to doubt whether we have forgiven someone because forgiveness is a decision we have come to. It is a question of wanting or unwillingness. If you want to forgive a person, you have already forgiven him. If you don’t want to forgive someone, you haven’t forgiven them. Hence, the doubt whether we have forgiven or not doesn’t exist. If we have forgiven someone, it does not mean that we have immediately healed from all the wounds that we have in our hearts. If I have forgiven you, it does not mean that I will immediately start liking you, that I will immediately if I didn’t like you before. Sympathy has nothing to do with love or hatred. If I don’t like someone, that doesn’t mean I hate them. If I like someone, it doesn’t mean I love them. Sympathy or antipathy is an emotional affair that can lead to hate or love but does not necessarily end hate or love.
For example, I’m sure the Pharisees were not sympathetic to Jesus, but that doesn’t mean he hated them. But he certainly wasn’t emotionally attracted to them. It is often the case that we need to distinguish between love and sympathy. What does it mean to love someone and feel compassion for someone? Attraction to a person, positive or negative, has nothing to do with love or hate. And this is where we need to look at the difference between Christian and secular love.