"He who eats of Me will yet, hunger."(Sir 24:29) If you’re really trying to conform yourself to God, you’ll be aware of your failure and there will be a desire for knowledge. Our society has developed technologically because there was always a desire for a more and more perfect performance. Unless you have that desire to know which comes from the desire to love more, nothing more can happen. The essential thing is loving God, and love is motivated by knowledge. If you really think you’re not loving God as much as you should, you will be saying, what is wrong with my understanding? If you have no questions it is a sign that you’re not motivated very much to love.

If you do nothing wrong and feel anxious you should ask yourself why am I feeling anxious? Doesn't God love me? Probably I think God's loving depends on what I can do but it really doesn’t. That doesn’t mean I can do anything I want. How does God's loving depend on me and how does it not depend on me? What is that wrong understanding? I don’t understand how to reconcile the way I stop God from loving me when I sin and the fact that God loves me no matter what.

This is the way you should use your mind and not act like a dumb animal when you see yourself not living right. Your relation to God depends upon the right use of your reason. It is important to learn how to use your mind in the right way if you want to grow in charity.
Prayer is asking. But in order to ask you have to know what you want. When you see your thinking isn't clear, then make it clear. If you were investing money and you kept on losing, you wouldn’t say, my thinking's not clear, and keep on losing money! You would try to make your thinking straight.

Yet whatever your bad habits, you're sorry, you make restitution, and you go on sinning. There must be something very wrong with your understanding. What's wrong is that you make the resolution and then you rely on your own resolution. God shows you can't rely on your own resolution.

The final cause and purpose of the whole operation is for you to realize that when you hate the sin, not only do you hate it but you don't have the power to overcome it, and the resolution should be to stay closer to God. If you're really sorry and you understand this, you rely on God more. After you have sinned it is a new moment, and God would want you to have that experience so you will rely on Him more. But then you don't conclude that you can go on doing what you want. If you're really relying on God, you're relying on Him to move your free will to do what He wants. The mistake of your understanding is that you can't get the two things in focus. The truth is that you depend on God totally and you depend on yourself totally. The whole problem for your understanding is to see that these two things are one: God wants you to depend on Him totally to energize your will to move itself freely. God doesn't move you like a football! If you have free will, the reality of God moving you is that you move yourself. You were unable to see that your reliance on God is one thing with relying on yourself. It is like getting two images to become one.

When you're sincere in your relation to God and things go wrong, you use your head; otherwise you're a hypocrite, you don't really want any relation to God. But today you hardly ever meet a person who wants a relation to God who uses his head about it. There is a kind of rational despair.

We begin this process with what we already know. If you practice what you know you’ll know what to practice. Whatever defects there are in your understanding, God will help you in those if you practice whatever you know. The process of becoming what you already are is not a passive process like the development of the embryo, it is a rational process. As you get closer to God you use your head in the right way as an integral part of the process.
The way you use your head is based on faith. Just as in mathematics you have certain axioms - you believe them because they're given - and then you reason from them, so with faith we reason from our faith which is given. You don't become perfect in faith if you just accept it; you have to be a doer, not just a hearer of the Word. (Ja 1:22) For man to be a doer entails a rational development. Even apart from faith it would be natural to use our minds to escape from anxiety.

When you want to escape, ask yourself why in relation to faith. You don't know by reason that God loves you no matter what; you have to know it by faith. You know by faith that Christ is your Redeemer. The principles themselves are not sufficient, as reasoning is not sufficient in itself. The reasoning from those principles is what is sufficient.

There are two kinds of anxieties: one that is right and one that is wrong. Given our fallen nature, whenever there is some good that we want and we don't have yet, there would be some normal anxiety in relation to the activity to acquire what we don't possess. The morbid anxiety is one that doesn't move you to act or to change and that anxiety does not come from faith.

If you say, I should be hating the sin but I really don't, and you find out you still like it, what would you deduce from that? That you're really sincere in asking God while you still continue to do the thing you want to do? But what is God's reason for all of this? It is His will that you need to be left in this state, so you unite yourself to Him in that state, with those very defects; otherwise you’ll always be in a state of anxiety and you’ll think that God can't love you because you have those defects. The mere fact that something is good doesn't mean it is good for you now. The ultimate measure is God's giving; otherwise you would withdraw from God when you thought something was wrong. When you reason rightly you discover that it is God's will that you should be left with those very defects, even the defect of not desiring to avoid sin.

In the wrong mentality you would be afraid to reason that way because you would think it was an excuse for sin. The root of the evil is that you have a secret conviction that you could overcome the bad habit by yourself and if it doesn't go away there must be something deficient in you. You can compare sin to a woman having a baby: when she feels stirrings in her belly she better get to bed or she’ll have a miscarriage. Sin is like those stirrings, a sign that you should go to Jesus at once.

With a false conscience you would think that you should make a strong resolution. You don't realize that when God leaves you with your habits it is a sign that you should stay closer to Him. Otherwise you’ll withdraw and the devil will try to take over. Jesus said, "Forgive them for they know not what they do."(Lk 23:34) I'm saying that you better understand what you are doing, what you really want, and why you want or don't want something. For example, you don't want to jump to the moon. Why not? Because you can't. If you think you can't have a thing, after a while you’ll say you don't want it. It is in the nature of man to want to be with God, and if you don't actually want to be with Him, what is the reason?

The reason is that it is irrational to want what is impossible. So if you're convinced that it is impossible, you won't want to be with God. Then the privation of not being with God destroys you. But why do you think this way? You think it is impossible to be with God because you think your sins separate you from God. And you think this way because of a misconception of your evil in comparison with God's goodness. You should see your evil as something God permits in order for you to get closer to Him. In our society you see your evil as something which separates you from God.

In the right understanding, you see your goodness as the effect of God's; so if you don't have what it takes in yourself, you trust God all the more. We want to be loved but we’re convinced we don't have what it takes, and we're convinced of this because our whole society thinks God's loving us depends on ourselves.

Reason works in technology; why can't we use our reason to get to God? We can, but our consciences are deformed. Your conscience is formed by your parents and if theirs is wrong then yours will be wrong. If they believed that they had to have what it takes in themselves, then you do too. But why did Jesus take care of the poor, the weak, the sinners, those who don't have it in themselves? He said, "I came to save what was lost."(Cf. Lk 19:10) Our response should be: I am lost, save me! That is the beginning of a true conscience. You should see with your mind that it is true that you are lost, then make an act of confidence in Him, as you are. If you think that act of confidence is imperfect, then you think you shouldn't go to Him, or that you won't be accepted. But God isn't as critical as you are! An act can be substantially perfect and be imperfect in another sense.

Wisdom for us is not to penetrate to the ultimate principle of things. Faith by its nature is a mystery because by it we reach God Who is a mystery. When you use your mind to go to God, you should use it to know what to do, but not to try to penetrate the principle. When you're aware of your deficiencies, you should go to God trusting Him, and if you still feel anxious, then you want to know too much. The measure of understanding is to know what to do; you always use your mind in order to know what to do. But you shouldn't use it to try to penetrate the principle, because the principle is God.

For example, you get mad at someone. Getting angry is an appetite for revenge; you get angry because you think your dignity has been offended. If you think that your peace will depend on the sustaining of your dignity, then you forget that your dignity is in Jesus Christ and that in yourself you're a sinner. Looking at yourself that way, you turn to Jesus remembering that excessive anger is a sin against faith. You reason to this, understanding your anger, but the reasoning terminates in Jesus.

If you get depressed after the anger, then you go to Jesus that way; otherwise you would want to take delight in yourself as a person who doesn't get angry. But it is God's will to let you get angry; so you go to Him realizing that you're a person who gets angry. This way you use your mind to get close to God - not to penetrate mysteries. This way you can rejoice in your infirmity.(Cf. 2 Cor 12:9) The more you believe that, the more you’ll get closer to God and He won't have to let you fall into sin to get closer to Him. Remember also that you use your mind to be united with God - not to hate yourself. The end is to be united with God and you hate yourself as giving you a motive to be united to Him. You don't go to God without hating yourself; but you could hate yourself in such a way that you won't go to God, either. Real mental hygiene is to see the evil but to recognize that the evil in yourself is infinitely less than God's goodness and love. When you know that and believe it, only then can you know how evil you are in yourself. When you look at it in the right way the evil you see in yourself brings you closer to God because knowing the evil and knowing that it is nothing compared to his goodness, you can never forget His goodness. This is how you use your mind in the faith in the right way. You don't use it too much or too little; you know enough to move you to go to Him for everything.

How does the false conscience get started? When your father makes you feel that you're unacceptable, then your will is really paralyzed. A good father communicates the two things: that he loves you and hates the evil you do, but that the evil is nothing compared to his love. There is no evil when you turn to Jesus; but there is a deficiency He wants us to be left with. Don't you think God knows your deficiencies as much as you do? He says, "Come over to Me all ye who are burdened."(Mt 11:28) Do you think He wants you to go to a psychiatrist to get your emotions in perfect shape in order to go over to Him?

All your questions turn on one thing: you think you have to be as perfect as God to go to God, instead of realizing that your very going to God the way you are is the way in which you become perfect.

The lesson this morning is to teach you to use your mind in the right way in your relation to God. When you get anxious or fall into sins habitually, you should ask yourself what it is you're not understanding - not to penetrate the mystery, but to learn what to do. The devil tries to paralyze your will by making you think you're impotent. You can't change of yourself, but you can become whatever God wants you to become, which is to become perfect.
All you should want in your reasoning is to remove all the impediments which prevent you from being in Jesus now. If your reasoning doesn't bring you to Jesus now, it is stupid. If I believe I'm united with Jesus now, I will believe I’ll be taken care of in the next moment, too. When you use your mind in anything, if you rest in anything short of the actual union in Jesus, your reasoning is wrong now, at this moment. What will help you is not your understanding, but being united to Him.

In our relation to God the end and purpose of everything is to be united with Him now. Otherwise your hope would not be in God, it would be in yourself; otherwise you would want your perfection to be in yourself, and that is not hope. The motive of hope is God's goodness, not yourself or your understanding. Your understanding has to reach that fine point of being united with God now and if you want anything short of that it is stupid. If you really love God, that is all you want now. When you love a person, you want to kiss that person now - not make plans for a house you're going to buy, etc. That could come afterwards.

There are two wrong ways to think: 1) not to use your mind, like a vegetable; or 2) to use your understanding to reach understanding, like an intellectual who wants intercourse with his own mind.

A sign of how much you live by faith is how contented you are to be united with Jesus now. This is also a very good sign of what is going to happen to you in the end. Otherwise what will you do at the moment of death? The right use of your mind is a mark of predestination. If you're attached to anything outside of being united with Jesus now, when you die what will you have? Despair. You must form that habit of contentedness in being united with Jesus now.

Compare: Mary: "How can this be true, for I know not man?(Lk 1:43)
Zachary: "How should I know this? Why should I believe this, because I am an old man?"(Lk 1:18)

Mary's response was she didn't know what to know or to do in order to conform to God, and she wanted to find out. Zachary's response was that God's command was not conformed to his own understanding. He had an angel of God come to tell him, and he said: prove it!
But this conformity to God's commands implies the function of the father. When a child withdraws from the father he is withdrawing from God, because then he withdraws from all authority. Now children don’t believe in their fathers or God and they know they can't believe in themselves either; that is why there is so much violence.