Friends, welcome to Word on Fire Catholic Ministries. Word on Fire is an apostolate dedicated to the mission of evangelization, using media both old and new to share the faith on every continent and to facilitate an

encounter with Christ and his church.

The efforts of Word on Fire engage the culture and bring the transformative power of God's word where it is most needed.

Today we invite you to join Bishop Robert Barron as he preaches the gospel and shares the warmth and light of Christ with each one of us.

Peace be with you. Friends, we're at the 30th Sunday of Ordinary Time. The year goes by fast, doesn't it? We're almost at the end of the liturgical year.

The readings is kind of a rare thing when all three of them do have a kind of a golden thread running through which is the idea of the call of

of the primacy of God's action in the life of salvation. Whenever we start thinking, okay, this is my project.

So I'm going to work on my spiritual life and I'm going to get in a better friendship with God

and I'm going to read these books and I'll make some progress.

You're on the wrong path.

On the biblical reading, grace always comes first.

It's always God's action. Now listen, with which we cooperate. So I mean God wants us cooperating with his grace. He doesn't want us to become the puppets. No, but he acts first.

And if that's not the case, then we're on ipso facto we're on the bad path.

And we think I'm launching this process. Okay, so first reading from the Prophet

Jeremiah, here's what we hear. He's talking about the exiles of Israel and this is a

big theme in the Old Testament, you know, the northern tribes of Israel were exiled by the Assyrians.

And then about a century and a half later,

the southern tribes are threatened by the Babylonians.

They're eventually carried off into exile. So deep in the

Old Testament consciousness is the idea of, someday the exiles will come back. Someday all the tribes will be gathered again in Israel. So here's

Jeremiah now expressing it. Behold, I will bring them back. This is God speaking now through Jeremiah.

Behold, I will bring them back from the land of the north. I will gather them from the

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