My dear friends, I wanted to take this time at the homily here today at Mass to teach you a little bit about how to do mental prayer with the Scriptures, because it's something that we read every day, both at home and when we go to Mass, we hear the sacred Scriptures. So I wanted to give you a method of encountering them where you could begin to do some mental prayer with the Scriptures.
Mental prayer is thinking about God or thinking about the great truths of God, and in this way, drawing closer to God through love, because as St. Thomas so beautifully says, we cannot love what we do not know. So spending time with God in Scripture and mental prayer helps us, brings us closer to God through our intellect, through the truth.
And just to back up one step, you know, there's four things that we do with the Bible. There's four different things. One is that we read it. We just read it like we read any other book. That way we know what's in the Bible, and we know the stories. When we come to Mass, everything is chopped up into little sections, so if all you do is come to Mass and hear the Scriptures, you'll never know what follows what, what's coming next, what came before, what's going on in the story at this point. You just get the Scriptures all chopped up, because they're for a different purpose at Mass. They're for liturgy and for drawing us to the Holy Eucharist.
So we have to sometimes just read the Bible, read parts of the Bible over and over, so we get to know the story, because we know a lot of other stories, but these are our stories. These are our family stories that God has given us, so we have to come to know them as well. And so we read the Bible.
The next thing we do is sometimes we study the Bible, and then we get a study Bible and we look at the footnotes or we read a commentary or we listen to a podcast about the Bible. But there's a time, too, there's a time in our life for studying the Scripture. Then there's a time to pray with the Bible. It's also a book of prayer. So there's times when we use the Bible for our prayer. For example, the book of Psalms is the prayer book of the Bible, so the whole Church, you know, does the Liturgy of the Hours, which is praying with the Psalms every day. 
But we can also, which we're going to talk about today—praying with the Bible—we can dive in there, too, and do some other kinds of prayer with the same text.
The fourth thing is that I like to teach about what we do with the Bible. So it's read it, study it, pray with it. And then the last one is memorize some text. Get some verses memorized. Boy, you need to have those in your toolbox. When you are in trouble, you can just pull it right out any time you need it because you've got it memorized so well. So it's good to spend time memorizing verses as well.
I mean, just put it—I just thought of this yesterday—get a little index card, write the verse out, put it by your computer so every time you go on there, there's that verse. All you've got to do is read it and read the address so you know where it is. Let's say 1 Corinthians 12 or something. Then over time, you'll know it, right? Because how do you know the Our Father? Well, you've said it 5 million times, right? So just keep repeating it, repeating it, reading the Scripture, and you'll start to get verses memorized in your toolbox.
Okay, so meditating or praying with the Scripture, one way that relates just back to what I was saying earlier is this relationship, identity, and mission. You can use that acronym RIM: relationship, identity, mission. You can use that for meditating on God's Word.
So here we have Luke 10, by the way. Luke 10 is one of my favorite summaries of the Christian life. There are two places in the Bible where the Christian life is summarized that I’ve found so far, Mark 6 and Luke 10. This is Luke 10. It's one of my favorite chapters. He sent the 72 out. Oh, yeah, by the way, you are the 72. You are the 70. It's not other people. All of us are sent out. So He sent out His 72, which is us.
And then they come back, and they're excited because demons are subject to the authority of Jesus. So they are excited about that. So what does that tell us about our relationship with God, just starting with relationship, that demons are subject to the authority? It tells us that Jesus is God and that we are very important to God because angels and demons are higher than us on the plane of creation, but they're subject to the authority of Jesus. It tells us that God is protecting us.
And what does it tell us about our identity? Well, if He's protecting us because He loves us very much, in fact, we know that we are the children of God. So we are in God's family, and this proves it here.
What does it say about the mission? Well, part of our mission is standing up against evil in this world, praying against the devil. We have the St. Michael prayer after Mass. Part of our mission is spiritual combat against the evil one. And so that's part of our mission—what Jesus empowers us to do—and they're subject to us because of the power of God.
And then He goes on to talk about, at that moment, Jesus rejoiced in the Holy Spirit, and you can do the same thing again. What's that teach me about my relationship, my identity, and my mission? In this way, the Scriptures will start to open up to you more about your relationship with God, more about your identity with God, and more about what does God expect me to be doing.