Am I the Exception to God's Rule?

The Fr. Mike Schmitz Catholic Podcast

Ascension

Christianity, Religion & Spirituality, Society & Culture

4.9 • 7.1K Ratings

🗓️ 17 January 2019

⏱️ 8 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

God has his commandments and everything, but aren’t there times when there are exceptions to God’s rule?

It’s a trick we’ve all tried to pull. When a particular sin is too hard for us to avoid, we say to God—or perhaps a priest—something like, “I know the Church says don’t do this thing, but in my case it’s different.”

In my case, there are obstacles that make avoiding the sin impossible. In my case, I think doing that thing is justified because of xyz, in my case … etcetera.

This is what Fr. Mike calls exceptionism (not to be confused with exceptionalism).

Exceptionism, Fr. Mike says, is the belief that God will make an exception for you when it comes to his judgment of a certain sin. There’s a reason why we say justice is blind, and our God is the God of justice.

He will always be merciful to the contrite heart, but—contrary to what many people believe today—he doesn’t make exceptions to the law he gave us.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, my name is Father Mike Schmitz and this is The Sense of Resence.
0:06.6	Also, we're sliding into 2019, like someone sliding into 2019, pretty much awesome, always,
0:15.6	right, that we get to the beginning of the New Year or get to the end of the old year.
0:19.4	And we do the assessment stuff, self-assessment, which is a really good thing actually should
0:23.1	do that probably every day.
0:24.1	They call that an examination of conscience or a consciousness examine, kind of very
0:28.8	similar.
0:29.8	Hold on to the video.
0:30.8	Don't worry about it right now.
0:32.2	But we get to the end of a year, we think, okay, how did it go?
0:36.2	How can it go differently in the future?
0:39.0	And yet, there's a lot of stuff that can hold us back from changing the way we know we're
0:43.7	called the change.
0:45.4	You might already know your list of excuses, you might know your list of obstacles, you
0:50.0	might know all the things that hold you back from being the person that you know
0:53.5	you're called to be.
0:54.5	But there's one of these things I want to talk about today because I think it's really
0:57.3	important and it's not just limited to New Year's, it is pretty much, it's pervasive
1:02.8	and it shows up almost any time we hear the Lord's call, but we don't want to move.
1:08.8	And it can be summed up with the line in my case, in my case.
1:14.3	We hear the Lord's call.
1:15.3	It's like, okay, you'll hear it if you don't understand Lord.
	...

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