Peace be to you. After having reviewed the life of our blessed Lord, and also his revelation

of himself as the son of God, and also his bond to the Father and to the Holy Spirit.

We now come to the subject of the Church.

What do you think of when you first hear the word church?

An institution? an organization, a kind of an administrative body.

Well, you are to be very much excused if you think of it that way because it's partly our own fault.

It is the way we have too often presented the church.

Now we will talk about the church, in other words,

namely in terms of the people of God and as the mystical body of Christ.

As we look at history as revealed in the Bible, not as the inspired word of God as yet,

but as an historical record, we find that it is God that is always in search of man.

It is not man in search of God.

Man does seek God, but not with the same intensity with which God seeks man.

Just think of how much the thought of man and the love of man is in the mind and heart of God.

What is the first reflex thought that we find in sacred scripture of God?

Not the first description of him creating the world,

but the first thought that he has about himself,

and within himself. He would almost guess that, well, his first thought would be about his

life and his truth and his love. And yet, that is not the first thought in Scripture. Open Genesis, and you will find it.

God's first thought about himself is, let us make man. Think of it.

As if God could not exist without man.

God does not need man to complete himself, to fulfill a need. But he needs man as a kind of a gift, that is to say,

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