Fully Alive (2026)
One
Fully Alive
Why did God create you? God created you to share His own divine life. He created you to become like Him and live with Him forever. That is holiness. That is sainthood. But we think holiness is vague. It is not! The Sermon on the Mount spells it out.
Read Matthew chapters 5, 6, and 7. Everything Jesus teaches there. The Beatitudes, prayer, forgiveness, purity, trust, generosity, love of enemies, is a portrait of the person fully alive. St. Irenaeus famously said, “The glory of God is man fully alive.”
To become holy is to let Christ form His life within us until our lives begin to look like the Sermon on the Mount. So over the next few weeks, we are going to walk through it step by step in these Rosary meditations. Not just to study it. To practice it.
God made you to be fully alive. The Sermon on the Mount shows us how.
Two
Our Design
God created every human person with an exquisite design. The Sermon on the Mount is simply Jesus revealing that design. God designed our intellect to know the truth, our emotions to resist evil and prompt us to good, and our will to choose what is good, not to destroy ourselves or others. He designed marriage for faithful love and the joy of family. He designed us to speak the truth instead of gossip. To forgive instead of resent. To pray instead of trying to live without Him. To trust our Father instead of living in fear and anxiety. To be generous instead of becoming slaves to money.
To love, not only our friends, but even our enemies. Jesus summed up this beautiful way of life in the Golden Rule, “So always treat others as you would like them to treat you.” That is why, near the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill them.”
Jesus did not come to abolish God's beautiful design for the human person. He came to reveal it in the Sermon on the Mount and to call us to live it.
Three
Living by Our Design
The Sermon on the Mount reveals our design. And living according to that design makes you more free not less. We often think God's commandments or the Church’s rules restrict our freedom. Nothing could be further from the truth. God did not give us the moral law to make us less alive. He gave it so that we could become more fully alive. Every commandment, every line of the Sermon on the Mount, protects some part of the person God created you to become.
Jesus tells us not to hate because hatred makes you less free, not more. He tells us not to lust because use makes you less free, not more. He tells us to forgive because resentment imprisons the soul. He tells us not to worry because anxiety steals the peace of children who trust their Father. He tells us to love our enemies because evil begets more evil. Love makes you free and powerful.
The moral law is not a burden imposed upon us. It is the path to freedom and to becoming fully alive. To live the moral law is to live according to our design. To break that law is to break our design. And to break our design is to break ourselves.
Four
This Is Humanly Impossible!
The Sermon on the Mount shows us what to live. It is our very design. And to live it makes you more free not less. But you can’t do it by will power alone. But Jesus never intended us to. He gives us His own life in Baptism. He nourishes that life in the Eucharist. He restores that life in Reconciliation. He sends the Holy Spirit to form His own life within us. Only Christ can live that life. And that is exactly what He desires to do in you.
Receive Him as often as you can in the Eucharist. Go frequently to Confession. Let the Son of God live through you, so that you can live fully alive.
Five
How We Cooperate
The Sacraments give us Jesus. But the Catechism (1128) reminds us that the fruits of the sacraments depend on the disposition of the one who receives them. We must learn to cooperate with the grace we receive. How? By daily meditation.
Read or listen to the Word of God, like we are doing here. Think deeply about it. Ask the Holy Spirit what He is saying to you. Apply it honestly to your own life. Then make one concrete resolution to live what Jesus has shown you. That is the resolution, not merely to admire His teaching, but to do it. Each day, examine yourself. “Did I remember and practice my resolution? Did I do what Jesus told me?”
Over the next few weeks, with the help of Mary in the Rosary, we are going to walk through the Sermon on the Mount one step at a time. Each day we will think about one part. Each day we will choose to live one part. Then we will practice it. Little by little, Christ will form His own life within us. And that is how saints are made.