The human heart is that which is central to man/woman. Nearly all the references to the heart in the Sacred Scripture: The Old and New Testament refer to some aspect of human personality. The human heart has a much broader meaning than it does to the modern mind. All emotions are experienced by the heart because heart is the inner self that thinks, feels and decides: love and hate; joy and sorrow; peace and bitterness; courage and fear.

He made his people fertile
and more vigorous than their oppressors'
whose hearts he then disposed to hatred of his people
and double-dealing with his servants. - Psalms 105:24-25 -

You have been obedient to the truth and purified your souls until you can love your brothers/sisters, in sincerity; let your love for each other be real and from the heart. - 1 Peter 1:22 -

I denied my eyes nothing they desired, refused my heart no pleasure, a heart that found all my hard work a pleasure; such was the return I got for all my efforts. - Ecclesiastes / Qoheleth 2:10 -

Do not let your hearts be troubled.
Trust in God still and trust in me. - John 14:1 -

They will shave their heads for you,
and put sackcloth round their waists.
They will raise a bitter dirge over you,
in their despair. - Ezekiel 27:31 -

And may the peace of Christ reign in your hearts because it is for this that you were called together as parts of one body. Always be thankful. - Colossians 3:15 -

The thinking processes of man/woman are said to be carried out by the heart. This intellectual activity corresponds to what would be called mind in English. Thus, the heart may think, understand, imagine, remember, be wise and speak to itself. Decision making is also carried out by the heart; Purpose - Acts 11:23 - Intention - Hebrew 4:12 - Will - Ephesians 6:6 - are all activities of the heart.

'Human Heart' often means someone's true character or personality. Purity or Evil - Jeremiah 3:17; Matthew 5:8 - Sincerity or Hardness - Exodus 4:21; Colossians 3:32 - Maturity or Rebelliousness - Psalms 101:2; Jeremiah 5:23 - all these describe the heart or true character of individuals. God knows the heart of each person. - 2 Samuel 16:7 - Since a person speaks and acts from his heart, he is to guard it well.

But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and it is these that make a man/woman unclean. For from the heart come evil intentions: murder, adultery, fornication, theft, perjury, slander. These are the things that make a man/woman unclean. - Matthew 15:18-19 -

The most important duty of man/woman is to love God with the whole heart. - Matthew 22:37 - With the heart man/woman believes in Christ and so experiences both love from God and the presence of Christ in his/her heart.

"So far then we have seen that, through our Lord Jesus Christ, by faith we are indeed righteous and at peace with God since it is by faith and through Jesus that we have entered this stage of grace in which we can boast about looking forward to God's glory. But this is not all that we can boast about; we can boast about our sufferings. These sufferings bring patience, as we know and patience brings perseverance, and perseverance brings hope, and this hope is not deceptive because the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given us." - Romans 5:1-5- 

"On the positive side it says: The word, that is the faith we proclaim, is very near to you, it is on your lips and in your heart. If your lips confess that Jesus is Lord and if you believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, then you will be saved. By believing from the heart you are made righteous; by confessing with your lips you are saved. - Romans 10:8-10 -

"Out of his infinite glory, may he give you the power through his Spirit for your hidden self to grow strong, so that Christ may live in your hearts through faith, and then, planted in love and built on love, you will with all the saints have strength to grasp the breadth and length, the height and the depth; until knowing the love of Christ, which is beyond all knowledge, you are filled with the utter fullness of God." - Ephesians 3:16-19 -

Have you ever noticed the tremendous disparity of point of view between those possess the Divine Faith and those who have it not? Why this difference in point of view between those who have faith, and those who have it not? It is due to the fact that a soul in the state of grace has its intellect illumined, which enables it to perceive new truths beyond reason.

You have exactly the same eyes at night as you have in the day, but you cannot see at night, because you lack the additional light of the sun. So too, let two minds with identically the same education and the same mental capacities look on a Host enthroned on an altar. The one sees bread, the other sees Christ Jesus - not, of course, with the eyes of the flesh, but with the eyes of faith. Let them both look on death: one sees the end of a biological entity, the other an immortal creature being judges by God on how it used its freedom. The reason for the difference is: One has a light which the other lacks, namely, the light of faith.

What then is faith? Faith is not believing that something will happen, nor is it the acceptance of what is contrary to reason, nor is it an intellectual recognition which a man might give to something he does not understand or which his reason cannot prove, for example, relativity. Rather, faith is the acceptance of a truth on the authority of God revealing. Assisted by the grace of God, we believe as true of these things is clearly evident from reason alone, but because of the authority of God, who cannot deceive nor be deceived.

You believe not because of the arguments; they were only a necessary preliminary. You believe because God said it. The torch now burns by its own brilliance. Would you like to know four things which faith will do for you?

1. - It will perfect your reason. Faith is your reason which a telescope is to your eye. It opens vaster fields of vision and new worlds, which before were hidden and unknown. As reason is the perfection of the senses, so faith is the perfection of reason. (Incidentally, reason alone will not get us out of the mess we are in today, because reason unaided cannot function well enough to handle the problems created by sin, by loss of faith, and by misuse of reason.)

Faith is not a dam which prevents the flow of the river of thought; it is a levee which prevents unreason from overflowing the countryside of sanity. Faith will enlarge your knowledge, because there are so many truths beyond the power of reason. You can tell something of the skill, the power, the technique of an artist by looking at his/her painting, but you could never know his/her inmost thoughts unless he/she revealed them to you. In a like manner, you can know something of the Power and Wisdom of God by looking at His universe, but you could never know His Thoughts unless He told you. And the telling of the inner life is Revelation, which we know by faith and by the grace of God.

Without faith many minds are like flattened lanterns, a riot of colour without pattern or purpose, a conglomeration of bits of information, but with no unifying philosophy of life. What a candle on the inside of the lantern will do to its pattern, that faith will do for your reason, that is, converge all your different pieces of knowledge into one absorbing philosophy of life which leads to God. That incidentally is why faith does not necessarily require an education. Faith is an education - God is our Teacher. That is why a little child in the first grade who knows God made him/her and that he/she is made for God is far wiser than a university professor who can explain an atom, but does not know why he/she is here or where he/she is going.

Unless you know why you are living, there is not much purpose in living.

2. - Faith will perfect your freedom. Our Divine Lord said: "...truth shall make you free." - John 8:32 - If you know the truth about an airplane, you are free to fly it; if you know the truth about a triangle, that it has three sides, you are free to draw it. Try to be "broad-minded" and give a square five sides instead of four, as they did in the Dark Ages, and see where you end. Turning the words of Our Lord Jesus Christ around, they mean that if you do not know the truth and you will be enslaved. That is why, as the world denies Absolute Truth and Righteousness, it becomes enslaved. Socialism, for example, is nothing but the compulsory organization of a chaos by the repudiation of Truth and Morality. Never, therefore, believe that you lose your freedom by accepting the Faith.

Many of us may received words and story from friends and others who said and write: "I imagine that you from your earliest youth were surrounded by ordained priests and nuns who never permitted you to think for yourself." Why not throw off the yoke of gossip, mere talk, hearsay and begin to be free. The thing is this: "In the centre of a sea was an island on which children played and danced and sang. Around that island were great high walls which had stood for centuries. One day some strange people came to the island in individual row boats, and said to the children: 'Who put up those walls? Can you not see that they are destroying your freedom? Tear them down!' The children tore them down! Now if you go there, you will find all the children huddled together in the centre of the island, afraid to play, afraid to sing, afraid to dance - afraid of falling into the sea."

Oh! how right was Our Lord Jesus Christ. It is the truth that makes us free.

3.- Faith assures equality to all men/women as children of God. Have you not noticed, if you have worked for or with a person of deep faith in Christ Jesus, that you have always been treated with gentleness, equality, love and charity? You cannot point to a single person who truly loves God who is mean to his fellow man/woman. A man/woman who does not believe in God will soon cease to believe in man/woman.

In vain will the world for equality until it has seen men/women through the eyes of faith. Faith teaches that all men/women, however poor, or ignorant, or crippled, however maimed, ugly, or degraded they may be, all bear within themselves the image of God, and have been bought by the precious blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. As this truth is forgotten, men/women are valued only because of what they can do, not because of what they are. And since men/women cannot do things equally well - for examples: play violins, fly an aeroplane, teach philosophy, or stoke an engine - they are and must remain forever unequal. From the Christian point of view, all may not have the same right to do certain jobs, because they lack the capacity - but all men/women have the right to a decent, purposeful, and comfortable life in the structure of the community for which God has fitted them, and first and foremost of all, because of what they are: persons made to the image and likeness of God.

The false idea of the superiority of certain races and classes is due to the forgetfulness of the spiritual foundations of equality. The Western world have been rightly proud of the fact that they have a civilization superior to others. But they have given the wrong reason for that superiority. They assume that we are superiority because we are white. We are not. We are superiority because we are Christian. The moment we cease to be Christian we will revert to the barbarism from which we came. In like manner, if the black and brown and yellow races of the world become converted to Christianity, they will produce a civilization and culture which will surpass ours if we forget God who truly made us great. It is conceivable, if we could project ourselves a thousand years in the future, and then look back in retrospect over those thousand years, that we might see in China the record of a Christian civilization which would make us forget Notre Dame and Chartres.

4. - Finally, faith will give you peace of soul. In the multitudinous duties of modern life you will do nothing which you cannot offer to God as a prayer; your sense of values will change; you will think less of what you can store away, and more about what you can take with you when you die; your rebellious moods will give way to resignation; your tendency to discouragement, which is due to pride, will become an additional reason for throwing yourself, like a wounded child, into the Father's loving arms; you will think of God's love as an unalterable dedication to goodness, to which you submit even when it hurts.

If you are sick you will see Christ's pierced hand laid upon you, and offer your sickness for your own sins and the sins of the world. If your heart has been broken by infidelity, you will unite your loneliness with the Master who was deserted by His disciples who walked with Him no more. If you are the victim of another's sin, then like the young woman who wrote, the tragedy will be suffered through life for the redemption of the one who caused her ruin. If your son is away in service, you will follow him, not by letter alone, but by prayer, as you both find a common center in God. If you lost your son/daughter in war, then you who spared not a son/daughter to save a world from tyranny, will be solaced by the Heavenly Father who spared not His Son to redeem a world from sin.

Faith will not explain why these tragedies happen, for if it did where would be room for the merit of faith? But it does give you the insight and strength to bear them. Anything in life can be borne if there is someone you love. The reason we are at war is because there are not enough people in love - with God. Faith is a belief in or confident attitude toward God involving commitment to His will for one's life. In modern times, faith has been weakened and mislead in meaning so that some people apply or use it to mean self-confidence. In fact, faith was already present in the experience of many people in the Old Testament as a key element of their spiritual lives. Faith is part of the Christian life from beginning to end. As the instrument by which the gift of salvation is received, faith is thus, distinct from the basis of salvation which is grace and from the outworking of salvation which is good works.

"Because it is by grace that you have been saved, through faith; not by anything of your own but by a gift from God; not by anything that you have done so that nobody can claim the credit. We are God's work of art created in Christ Jesus to live the good life as from the beginning he had meant for us to live it." - Ephesians 2:8-10 -

In the New Testament 'faith' covers various levels of personal commitment. Mere intellectual agreement to a truth is illustrated, even demons are said to believe that there is one God. Obviously, however, they are not saved by this type of belief. Genuine saving faith is a personal attachment to the Lord Jesus Christ, best thought of as a combination of two ideas - reliance on God and commitment to Him.

Faith is like that: if good works do not go with it, it is quite dead.

"This is the way to talk to people of that kind; You say you have faith and I have good deeds; I will prove to you that I have faith by showing you my good deeds - now you prove to me that you have faith without any good deeds to show. You believe in the one God - that is credible enough but the demons have the same belief and they tremble with fear. Do realise, you senseless man that faith without good deeds is useless. You surely know that Abraham our father was justified by his deed because he offered his son Isaac on the altar? There you see it: faith and deeds were working together; his faith became perfect by what he did. This is what scripture really means when it says; Abraham put his faith in God and this was counted as making him justified and that is why he was called 'the friend of God'". - James 2:17-23 -

Grace is one of the key attributes of God. Grace is a gift given by God, and is a favour or kindness shown without regard to the worth or merit of the one who receives it and in spite of what that same person deserves. The Lord God is "merciful and gracious, patience and abounding in goodness and truth". Therefore, grace is almost always associated with mercy, love, compassion and patience as the source of help and with deliverance from distress. - Exodus 34:6 -

In the Old Testament, the supreme example of grace was the redemption of the Hebrew people from Egypt and their establishment in the Promised Land. This did not happen because of any merit on Israel's part, but in spite of their unrighteousness. - Deuteronomy 9:5-6 - Although the grace of God is always free and undeserved, it must not be taken for granted. The gift of grace is given by God, is received by man through repentance and faith. - Amos 5:15 - Grace is to be humbly sought through the prayer of faith. - Malachi 1:9 -

In the New Testament, the grace of God was supremely and given in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Jesus was not only the beneficiary of God's grace. - Luke 2:40 - He was also its very embodiment, bringing it to mankind for salvation. "The Word was made flesh, he lived among us, and we saw his glory, the glory that is his as the only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth. - John 1:14 -

You see, God's grace has been revealed, and it has made salvation possible for the whole human race and taught us that what we have to do is to give up everything that does not lead to God and all our worldly ambitions; we must be self-restrained and live good and religious lives here in this present world, while we are waiting in hope for the blessing which will come with the Appearing of the glory of our great God and saviour Christ Jesus. - Titus 2:11-13 -

By His passion, death and resurrection, Jesus restored the broken fellowship between God and His people, both Jew and Gentile. The way of salvation for any person is 'through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ'. 

Grace is one of the key attributes of God. Therefore, grace is almost always associated with the spiritual gifts: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, trustfulness, gentleness, self-control, compassion and justice. The grace of God was supremely revealed and given in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Jesus was not only the beneficiary of God's grace, but He was also its very embodiment, bringing it to mankind for salvation. By His passion, death and resurrection, Jesus restored the broken fellowship between God and His peoples. The only way of salvation for any person is 'through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.'

"Peter stood up and addressed them. 'My brothers,' he said, 'you know perfectly well that in the early days God made his choice among you: the pagans were to learn the Good News from me and so become believers. In fact God, who can read everyone's heart, showed his approval of them by giving the Holy Spirit to them just as he had to us. God made no distinction between them and us, since he purified their hearts by faith. It would only provoke God's anger now, surely, if you imposed on the disciples the very burden that neither we nor our ancestors were strong enough to support? Remember, we believe that we are saved in the same way as they are: through the grace of the Lord Jesus." - Acts 15:7-11 -

"The Holy Spirit is the One who binds Christ Jesus to all peoples so that they receive grace, forgiveness, and newness of life as well as the spiritual gifts. "Do all you can to preserve the unity of the Spirit by the peace that binds you together. There is one Body, one Spirit, just as you were all called into one and the same hope when you were called. There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one God who is Father of all, through all and within all. Each one of us, however, has been given his own share of grace, given as Christ allotted." - Ephesians 4:3-7 -

The theme of grace is especially prominent in the epistles of Apostle/Saint Paul. He sets grace radically over against law and works of the law. Apostle/Saint Paul makes it abundantly clear that salvation is not something that can be earned or merited; it can be received only as a gift of grace. Grace, however, must be accompanied by faith, hope and love. Indeed, from his fullness we have, all of us, received - yes, grace in return for grace, since, though the Law was given through Moses, grace and truth have come through Jesus Christ. - John 1:16-17 - 

To HIS ACCUSERS' questions, our Lord Jesus Christ gave only the answer of his withering silence. From a worldly point of view, he did the foolish thing. What would you think of someone before a court who might clear himself of a charge by a word, or a show of power, and yet refuses to do so? Well, here is our Lord going to the Cross and to death, simply because he will not do the worldly thing. That was foolishness. The folly of Omnipotence!

And from that day to this, the Church has been robed in the garment of a fool, because she never does the worldly thing. Her saints are fools, because they plunge after poverty like others dig after gold, tear at their body while others pamper theirs, and dare even to swing the world a trinket at their wrist, in order that they might gain an everlasting crown. Her devout nuns are fools who leave the lights and glamours of the world for the shades and shadows of the Cross, where saints are made; her priests are fools because they practice celibacy in a world that has gone crazy about sex.

The Vicar, the Pontiff, is a fool, for refusing to relax the teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ. Yes, the Church is a fool, and all her loyal members are fools, but they are fools only from the world's point of view, not from God's point of view. For with the foolish things of the world God has chosen to confound the wise, and with the weak things of the world to confound the strong.

The Church must always bear the taunt of being not modern and unworldly, as our Lord Jesus had to bear it before Herod. And our Lord warned us that it would be the mark of the divinity of the Church: "If you had been of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hates you... If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before you." In other words: "If you ever want to discover my religion on the face of the earth, look for the Church that does not get along with the world." The religion that gets on with the world, and is accepted by it, is worldly; the religion that does not get on with the world is other-worldly, which is another way of saying that it is divine.

The Church is very modern, if modern means that her members should change their hats with the seasons, and even with the styles, but she is not modern if it means that every time someone changes his hat, he/she should also change his/her head, or in an applied sense, that he/she should change his/her idea of God every time psychology puts on a new shirt, or physics a new coat.

The Church is modern, if modern means incorporating the new found wisdom of the present with the heritage of the centuries, but the Church is not modern if it means sneering at the past as one might sneer at someone's age. The Church is modern, if modern means a passionate desire to know the truth, but the Church is not modern if it means that truth changes with the calender, and that what is true on Tuesday is false on Wednesday. The Church is modern, if modern means progress toward a fixed ideal, but she is not modern if it means changing the ideal instead of attaining it.

The Church is like an old schoolmaster - the schoolmaster of the centuries - and as such she has seen so many students pass before her, cultivate the same poses, and fall into the same errors, that the Church merely smiles at those who believe that they have discovered a new truth; for in the Church superior wisdom and experience, the Church knows that many a so-called new truth is only a new label for an old error.

It is about time that the modern world gave up expecting the Church to die because of the inanity - "behind the times." Really the Church is behind the scenes, and knows just when the curtain will fall on each new fad and fancy. If an announcement had been made a thousand times about a death, and the funeral never took place, people would soon begin to take the announced funeral as a joke. And so it is with the Church. She is always supposed to be behind the times, and yet it is she who lives beyond the times.

At least a hundred voices in every century since her birth have tolled the bells for her funeral, but the corpse never appeared. They are always buying coffins for her, but it is they who use the coffins. They are always assisting at her apparently last breath, and yet she moves. They are always digging her grave, and it is a grave into which the diggers fall, The taunt that she is "behind the times" and "out of touch with the world" will never annoy her, for she knows that it is easy to be in the swim, in the sense of being "up to the times" for even a dead body can float downstream.

                               As a result: IT TAKES A LIVE BODY TO RESIST THE CURRENT.

THE UNIVERSAL/CATHOLIC CHURCH IS THE BODY of Christ Jesus, composed of the many millions or billions of individuals who have been incorporated to it by the SEVEN SACRAMENTS that is: Baptism, and governed by the invisible head, the Lord Jesus Christ, and the visible head, the Vicar of Christ on earth. But a body and a head are not sufficient to constitute the Mystical Christ as the Church. The Church must also have a soul as the principle of its life and its unity. That soul is the Holy Spirit.

And since it is the Holy Spirit that makes the Body, the Church which is the Mystical Body of Christ has been contemporaneous with the centuries. When, therefore, we in the twenty-first century wish to know about Jesus Christ, about his early Church, about history, or know Him and His Church, we go not only to the dusty records but to the living Church. - The One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church - 

-     WELCOME TO SACRED SCRIPTURE / WORD OF GOD / HOLY BIBLE READER'S COMMUNITY     - 

Wishing you, 'Happy Reading', and may God, the Father, the Son of the living God, Jesus Christ, fills your heart, mind, thoughts, and grants you: The Holy Spirit, that is, Wisdom, Knowledge, Understanding, Counsel, Piety, Fortitude, Fear of the Lord, and also His fruits of the Holy Spirit, that is, Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Trustfulness, Gentleness and Self-Control. Amen! God blessing be upon you!

Why do you call Me, "Lord, Lord" and not do what I say?' "Everyone who comes to Me and listens to My words and acts on them - I will show you what he/she is like. He/She is like a man/woman who when he/she built his/her house dug, deep, and laid the foundations on rock; when the river was in flood it bore down on that house but could not shake it, it was so well built. But the one who listens and does nothing is like the man/woman who built his/her house on soil, with no foundations: as soon as the river bore down on it, it collapsed; and what a ruin that house became!" - Luke 6:46-49 - 

If we live by the truth and in love, we shall grow in all ways into Christ Jesus, who is the head by whom the whole body is fitted and joined together, every joint adding its own strength, for each separate part to work according to it function. So the body grows until it has built itself up, in love." - Ephesians 4:15-16 - 

I still have many things to say to you but they would be too much for you now. But when the spirit of truth comes, he will lead you to the complete truth, since he will not be speaking as from himself, but will say only what he has learnt; and he will tell you of the things to come. He/She will glorify me, since all he/she tells you will be taken from what is mine. Everything the Father has is mine; that is why I said: all he/she tells you will be taken from what is mine." - John 16:12-15 -

Your generous contribution and support is profoundly cherish. I sincerely pray that: God blessing be upon you, always. Amen! Bank transfer: Name: Alex Chan Kok Wah - Public Bank Berhad account no. 4076577113 - Country: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.