The First Commandment includes having faith, hope, and worship in God. Hope is a supernatural virtue; it is the anticipation of attaining the glory of Heaven and the help of the grace of God. Against hope are two extremes: despair and presumption. When we despair, we abandon the possibility of forgiveness and when we are presumptuous, we claim to love God but do not follow up with actions. We can either do evil actions in the expectation that we have already been saved, or because we haven’t done any egregiously evil actions claim that we are already saved. Presumption can fester in one’s heart: either we grow complacent in living our faith over time or think we have no need to enter the Church because we are already good people. St. Thomas Aquinas taught us how to pray to be ensured of being saved by God: we must pray for (1) ourselves and (2) the things necessary for salvation, and to do so both (3) fervently and (4) diligently.
【Spiritual Talk】 Fr. Ho talks about the First Commandments
