Everyone Who Listens to the Father Comes to Me
“For the Souls in Purgatory – Eternal rest grant unto them O Lord”
John 6:44-45
No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him, and I will raise him on the last day. It is written in the prophets: ‘They shall all be taught by God.’ Everyone who listens to the Father and learns from him comes to me.
Grace Prayed For
Father, continue your hidden work of drawing us toward your Son. May we cooperate with that movement rather than resist it.
Reflection
There is something immensely relieving in these words, and also something that requires careful receiving.
Jesus is describing the interior work of grace — the way the Father draws people toward the Son before they have the vocabulary to describe what is happening to them. ‘No one can come to me unless the Father draw him.’ This is not a statement of exclusion; it is a statement of gift. Coming to faith is not purely the result of our decision-making. It is a response to something that has been stirring in us, pulling us, making us restless.
Many people in retreat settings can identify this experience retrospectively. Looking back over their lives, they can trace a thread — a longing, a question, a series of encounters — that seems to have been going somewhere all along. They were being drawn before they knew the name of what was drawing them.
The phrase ‘taught by God’ is stunning in its intimacy. Isaiah had prophesied a day when all would be instructed by the LORD himself — not through intermediaries only, but through an interior instruction, a direct communication of truth to the attentive heart.
To ‘listen to the Father’ is to develop the spiritual practice of inner attention: noticing what moves us toward truth and love, what stirs longing, what quietly insists despite our resistance. It is to treat our own deepest intuitions about goodness and meaning as data rather than dismissing them.
This is especially valuable for small group work. Invite your group to consider: Where do you sense you’ve been drawn by something beyond your own initiative? What in your life feels less like a decision you made and more like a homecoming you arrived at?
The Father has been teaching you longer than you know.
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Sharing
Jesus last words on Earth were to his disciples, can be found in Matthew Chap 28 when Jesus told his disciples, “Then Jesus approached and said to them, “All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age.”
Jesus calls all of us to share in his redemptive mission here on Earth. I would ask you to share this Scripture reflection with your family, your friends and your acquaintances, and then share it with a couple of individuals that you may may not be comfortable sharing with, keeping in mind always the words of Jesus, And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age
Author was assisted by AI in the drafting of this Post