 Now, seriously, it is why we need the Holy Spirit to experience faith, hope, and love. And the reason why I chose that particular talk is because the church has been really good at telling us the what. I don't think we've been effective at telling the why. And particularly, the youth need to understand better why. And so this is something I'm wrestling with all the time in the ministry that I do. I'm a full-time missionary evangelist, particularly evangelist, and I have an apostate called New Evangelization Ministry. So I go around the country and I do parish missions and I do trainings on evangelization and discipleship, but particularly how to do that in the local Catholic church. Yeah, because, you know, we get the view for a 5,000-foot view from the big dogs that tell us, oh, we need to evangelize. But then when you ask them, how do you put it into a local parish, just like, yeah, no, we're just casting vision. You need to take that. But take the vision and put it in the local parish and you're like, huh, you know? So this is what I feel called to do. So such a joy to be with you. Now let's pray. Name of the Father and the Son of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Take a moment and just, let's be still. The Lord invites us to silence that sometimes has noise and ambient noise, but the silence of the Lord is a place where he meets us, where we stop and acknowledge that he is looking right at us and he's always there. It's the place we meet him, interiorly. That silence. Let's just sit there for a second. Heavenly Father, once again we ask for your spirit to come. Lord, you be our teacher today and just give me the graces to get out of the way. But you come and minister to our hearts in a way that each of us need to hear you regardless of whether I say the words or not. Lord, you're just going to move us along the journey for whatever reason you decided to call us to be present. So help us to see something that we need to see, something we can walk away with here. One golden nugget that we can chew on for the rest of the afternoon and continue to move us forward in this journey of following you. Place in our hearts a longing to go deeper, to not be satisfied with a feeling in a moment, but that we would get to you and whatever that means. And Mama Mary, no one desires that we come to know your son more than you do, for you are the premier evangelist. Mama, lead us to your son as we pray together, Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus, Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen. Name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. If you need a seat, there's more seats here in the Protestant section of the group, or they've opened up the upstairs, too. Hi. You guys are creeping me out, you're staring down at me, aren't you? So, smart, nice chair, I'm not going to lie. If you have your Bibles, phones, or some technology that allows you to open up the Word of God, we're going to look at John chapter four, starting at verse five. Many of you already know this story. It's probably one of the favorite stories we hear from God, John's Gospel. It's a story we all, maybe in a lot of different ways, can relate to. It has to do with the Samaritan woman at the well. And I dare say most of you probably know the intricacies, so I'm just going to give you a couple of the basics behind it in terms of context. But there's just some real, some questions here that I have of this text that really leads to this idea of, you know, if the Scriptures say faith, hope, and love remain, abide in them. And there's two different ways. It's either remain or abide, which kind of changes a little bit, depending on the original Word, how they choose to translate that, abide or remain. Let's have that same context of you're in it, that idea that we should enter in and remain in the faith and in the hope and in the love. So here's this woman at the well. So let's just start. We're going to dive into verse five of John chapter four that says, so he came to the Samaritan city called Sikar near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son. As well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well, and it was about noon. The Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, we'll talk about that in a second. So she comes to the water at noon, you know what's going on. If you haven't heard it in the homily that's been preached on it a hundred times, right? She's there at the middle of the day because the town basically, the women of the town hate her guts. Why? Because she's sleeping around with their men. And so imagine being in that particular situation, you know, imagine being there. If you haven't seen the chosen, the way their rendition of it, such a beautiful image, right? I don't think in that moment she has any experience, even though the scriptures say three things remain. I don't think she has any experience of faith, hope, and particularly love. Imagine that with me. She's there. She needs to get the water, heat of the day. She feels shame, outcast, used, thrown away, used again, thrown away, used again, thrown away. She's just a profound constancy of rebuke and rejection. What does she think about herself? Does she loathe herself? You know, the more of these kind of questions that you sit with a passage, right? One of my practices that I really love to do is go into a passage and I, you know, sometimes the Lord just kind of, the Spirit just hits me right through the eyes about this one thought and I just enter into questions. I just enter into it and I spend time chewing on it, just kind of reflecting on what was her life like. And the more I reflect on it, and this is why the Spirit does that, is because I think he says, yeah, well, Ralph, while you're asking this question about her, let's take a little peek into you. And then he shows that light into our own lives, right? And for me, that little boy in that little black box, you know, in a lot of ways that boy of mine could resonate with that, you know. For me, that little boy had a sexual abuse situation at eight and a half years old. For me, that little boy, six months later, was introduced to pornography found in his brother's closet. And then after three years of sneaking down to that closet was addicted to porn. So I could understand that self loathing. I could understand that idea of being broken and unwanted. I could understand the need to pretend. Almost sell yourself, you know? I remember as a young youth minister walking around secular campuses, high school campuses where I'd work and, you know, reach out in two. And it's almost as if I saw the students walking around campus with a for sale sign, for sale, I'll give you what I've got if you'll just accept me. Because, you know, that's the game, right? That's how it's played. So here's this great example of a woman who, of a person who doesn't have the experience necessarily of faith, hope and charity. She has understanding of, and this is what I was alluding to at the very beginning and Dave, Father Dave, you know, made fun of me. I didn't know it was a verb or an out. But she understood the teachings of the Jewish faith because she knew that a Jew can't be talking to a Samaritan. She understood the norms. A man can't, she understood the taboo of a man can't be seen in public speaking to a woman privately like that. So Jesus coming to that situation, she knew all of that stuff. So she had in the concept of the faith, knowledge of the tenants of the faith, the noun, but she had nothing to base or enable her to stand and act in faith on those teachings. The only thing she had was a broken, it's a broken life and pain and suffering and struggling, you know, kind of the stuff that we have. Only maybe not to that level of desperation. It's funny, I don't know if this is your experience or not, but I feel like, you know, the terminology BC has changed with COVID. It's no longer before Christ. It's now, what was like, like before COVID, right? Before COVID, we had this wonderful idea that we had really a lot of tremendous faith in God. And I think what the Lord, one of the things the Lord did with COVID was hold away the fake veneer of the false faith that we thought we had, because boy, we sure freaked out when that came around, right? We want to say that it was a disease, you know, it's a virus and that virus was a pandemic, but frankly, I think the real pandemic that we're wrestling with today, the real one, it's not a virus. It's loneliness. People are alone and they are struggling, they are hurting. And they feel alone and they feel ostracized and so here's this woman, classic example, woman at the well. So what does Jesus do? Because, you know, Jesus has a divine appointment with her. It's so cool. And, you know, I love the way he works. You know, he could have sent two or three guys into town to get food. Hey, why don't all of you guys go into town? Go get the food. And they're like, you know, again, put yourself in the closet. But Lord, it only takes like two of us, we could do this, maybe three. Why do you want? Would you just all go into town? Okay, fine, Jesus, what's up? What's wrong with the world? Just asking a question. But Jesus saw her, loved her, and wanted to free her. So notice what he does, because it's a great example of evangelization, right? He comes up to the well, the woman is there, comes up to the well, and in verse 10, oh, no, verse nine, the Samaritan woman, oh, verse eight, oh, no, verse seven, the Samaritan woman came to draw water and Jesus said to her, give me a drink. He's deciding, then verse eight tells, you know, the disciples wanted a town. Samaritan woman said to him, how is it that you would you ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria? And then again, sharing what her knowledge and understanding explains what's going on. And Jesus answered her, if you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, give me a drink, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water. So what's the gift of God, first of all? If you knew the gift of God, what's that? If you knew the gift of God, what's the gift he's referring to? Holy spirit and love, because Holy spirit is often defined as the love that flows from the father to the son and back again, but the person, the spirit, if you knew the gift of God, he'd give you a living water. So you can imagine her like, I'm gonna go to this well every day. You know, but this woman can only speak within the resources that she has at hand. She cannot interact and talk particularly to God who she doesn't know is standing right in front of her without the capacity to actually begin to enter in. I'm gonna show you how this works and how this unpacks, but she looks at him as only in human context. Jesus is now speaking to her, not in human terms, right? If you knew the gift of God, immediately moves from a, give me a drink of water. Let's start someplace. We're both here for water. Then he moves from speaking physically to spiritually. And he goes, and she says, you know, why are you doing this? And then he tells her, he drops the bomb shell and says, I'll give you a living water. And she responds and says, sir, you don't even have a bucket. How are you gonna get the water? She's thinking totally physical human terms, which I think a lot of times we end up doing. We may go to God spiritually, but then we think he's gonna answer all of our concerns physically because it's what we know. She's thinking it's like legit water. Like, you know, he's gonna pour me a glass or something. And that's not where he's going. And then she goes on and says, are you greater than our ancestor, Jacob, who gave us the well and with his sons and flocks drink from it? And I'm sure Jesus at that point is going, well, yes, I am greater than Jacob. You know, he's my son kind of thing. But Jesus responds to her again, listen to what he says. Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again. But those who drink of the water that I give will never be thirsty. The water that I will give them will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life. So you see where he's going. So now we're gonna ask two questions. What's the water we're drinking? Is it just water from our earthly lives? Is it just, you know, I'm going to, like what gives us life? When we are suffering and we're hurting really bad, what do we go to? Like remember those two weeks of COVID when no one could leave and everything was shut down? What did you go to? I mean, a lot of people, well, wouldn't that be nice? I'd like to say I went to prayer about 24 seven or did we give ourselves to other things to kind of help manage the incredible discomfort of the unknown? Like some people binge watched programs on TV. Of course, you know, one of the essential elements that was open was the alcohol store. So that was good, right? What did we go to? What do you go to when it's not God, when it's not prayer, that's from the world that you believe will help sustain your life? Cause that's what this woman's doing. Cause she's not tapped into the faith, the hope, not yet. So she has to go to the world. What are the things of the world that we go to that we believe gives us life when it's not God? Because that's what we're growing out of, right? First, we started with a life apart from God and we're learning how to live a life in God. And so in the midst of that, we're learning to let go of the stuff and come into the new life and the new everything else that's going on. So here's this woman going through that teaching. I'm going through that whole experience and she's, she doesn't understand. It's going right overhead because, and here's what I want to point out too, she does not have the capacity to understand and Jesus knows it. Jesus knows he's telling her stuff that it is impossible for her to understand. I'll give you another example of that happening in the scriptures in just a minute. So you know what Jesus does. So she says, give me this water cause I don't want to keep coming back to this well and drinking again. And he says, great, go get your husband. Oh no, no, no, I'm not married. Yeah, you're right. The last five guys you've been with haven't been your husband either. So what does she immediately do? She starts deflecting. Like we do. Ooh, that light, you know, that we want to be children of light. And it's a little too bright right now. Let me deflect. So you Jews believe we have to worship in Jerusalem. We think it's okay to worship on the Mount. Let's get the focus off me and back on to some theology thing cause you're obviously a holy man and you know way too much about me. Ever felt like that? Like you're too afraid to get to that light cause like, well, if he's willing to expose this to me, what else does he know? Duh, he knows everything, right? But we like to live in that, you know, imaginary idea that our private world is really our private world. But he sees everything. Okay, so what does he do? He says something to her. He says, woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you, and I'm looking at verse 21, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know. We worship what we know, God, intimate relationship. For salvation comes from the Jews and then he gives her the big one. But the hour is coming and is now here. That's a telltale sign when he says is now here, why? Cause Jesus is the Christ. Kind of like a signal. It's here, right? The hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. For the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth. So his order of business is he's moving to bring her to the truth. The truth is you know you're not living right. You know you're living in sin. And it's actually a profound act of love. Why? Because the truth is no one can heal until they enter the truth. Pick whatever it is that you need healing up. Emotionally, physically, spiritually, medically. I got an appendicitis but I hate doctors and hospitals and all of a sudden my appendix ruptures until I accept the truth that I'm in a lot of pain and it is no longer tolerable. Will I go to see a doctor and have him cut me open, right? And then when I'm done with the surgery it's not the poison that I'm gonna be struggling with. It's the fact that a sucker took a knife and cut my side open and took out the ruptured appendix and the poison. But I had to come to the truth of that just like the Lord needs to gently bring us to the truth of our little black boxes, the contents of what's in there. And we gotta see it, gotta own it. And what we're trying to do with the world has been training us to do because the world trains us to bury it in the box and then live a lie. But even though you and I were made to live the truth only, right? Live the lie. What happened back there? Never happened. And I'm gonna spend the rest of my life living in the future never, never letting anybody know what I got in the past. But you know that little boy? When everything's quiet, he talks. In the midst of that silence that we're now avoiding where we meet God, he talks. And in that silence, he says, does anybody love me? Will anyone accept me just the way I am? Broken. Because he's believing all these lies. In that sexual abuse situation, a demon came alongside me and spoken to me and said it's your fault because you chose to go down to the army to play. You chose to go to the basement to play army. So therefore your choice makes it your decision, your fault. And an eight and a half year old kid, confused and broken, simply just ate the lie, believing it was truth. So here I am protecting Satan's work in my heart, thinking that I'm protecting myself. And Jesus, all the while is looking at me and looking at the Samaritan woman at the well going, I see you, I know you, and I'm here to free you. But I gotta do a little surgery. I gotta take you to the truth. I need you to see what's really going on and I need you to own it. Because once you own it, then we can take care of it. Because then you can give it to me. And instead you're burying it, just trying to run away from it, along with all those lies that haunt you every day. And that's what we wrestle with, isn't it? We wrestle with the feelings that constantly attack us. We wrestle with the thoughts that we get attacked with that we hear all the time. You're no good. You're a short hobbit. You'll never be tall. You're not big and buff like the rest guys. And every one of us has a voice that whispers into us that tries to get us to question our own identity. Tell me that's not true. Every one of us in this room, half the battle of your spirituality is your battle for your own identity. And unless we enter the truth, we can't receive the truth that he wants to show us. Okay, well, where are you going, Deacon? This is getting really deep here. So the woman said to him, I know the Messiah is coming who was called Christ. When he comes, he will proclaim to us all things. And he'll proclaim all things to us. Jesus said to him, I am he, the one who you are speaking. Just out of curiosity, use your imagination with me. What do you think happened to her? The moment he said, I am he. Yeah, I feel like ever been struck by lightning? I have, like legit lightning coming down from the sky. I have, that's why I have no hair. Good bye. It went through one arm. I happened to be holding onto to a metal pipe of sorts when it hit a tree, came up through a root, went up one side, went through one arm, through my chest and down the other. And this little boy, boy, I can't play basketball because I got no ups, but I jumped super high that day. I think that's what happened to her. She had this amazing charge of I am he. And in that moment, right, this insertion of just the spirit just comes and touches her right where she needed to be touched, bam. And all of a sudden, because it doesn't say it, the text, it's devoid of, you know, all it says is then the woman left the water jar and went back to the city and said to the people that hate her guts, come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done. He can't, he cannot be the Messiah, can he? And then, you know, the rest of the story. See, it wasn't without that encounter and then the Lord given her that touch with the spirit, boom, all of a sudden, she gains this amazing insight. Well, why is that so significant? All right, in your Bibles, if you will, go to John chapter three. You know this story, the story of Nicodemus. Just a real quick, I wanna show you the difference because I wanna reiterate to you that point, that idea that sometimes, if a person doesn't have the Holy Spirit alive and activated in them, they do not have the capacity to understand anything about the kingdom of God. They can't understand Jesus in a blessed sacrament because they can't see it. They lack the capacity. So I wanna show you that's a keyword. They lack the capacity to operate in the manner with which they were created to live. And that's what I wanna unpack for you today. So, you know what he does. Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night because he's avoiding all the rest of the guys and he doesn't want them to realize that he's becoming a believer because he's got real questions. So Nicodemus approaches him and he basically asks him a question. It's fun to see, again, Jesus, the master fisherman because he's going fishing for a theologian, right? So he comes to him and he says this. Nicodemus comes and says, Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God. I'm looking at verse two of chapter three. For no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God. And Jesus says to him, very truly, I tell you, now anytime Jesus says in the gospels very truly or truly truly or verily verily or amen, amen. That's basically him saying, perk up, I'm about to throw down a big dog truth, right? That's what he means, amen, amen. Like, this is so serious, this is what's gonna happen, here it comes. And he came to Jesus, he says, I very truly, I tell you, no one here comes can see the kingdom of God without being born from above. Born from above, take that word born. You know, our Protestant brothers and sisters take that word born as born again or born the word above, born again or born of the spirit. But we both mean the same thing when Protestants say born again, are you born of the spirit, right? That's what they're saying when they say born again. Or are you born again Catholics? You know, hear that question. So, Nicodemus, now look at Nicodemus' reaction. He lacks the capacity. He cannot understand what Jesus is seeing because he does not have the Holy Spirit. How can anyone be born after growing old? Can one enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born? He's thinking only physically. Can't understand it spiritually. I mean, think about it. He's sitting there going, imagine what he's imagining. What are you saying? A grown man enters his mom's womb? How? For both of us? Like, that's impossible. What are you talking about? But Jesus doesn't answer his question. Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and spirit. It is impossible to get to heaven without the Holy Spirit. It cannot be done. I could spend my entire life going to church and never once give my life or heart to God and done all the good things that a secular humanist would do to take care of people but never once wanna give my life or heart to God and never receive the gift of God. Gifts singular, not spiritual gifts of the spirit, gift of God, which is the third person of the Trinity. So here, Jesus, our Lord is the one that's telling us without the spirit, it's impossible. So when people come to you, you crazy flaming Charismatics if you're one of them. Why do you keep saying everybody needs this? Because Jesus said so. Where? Well, let's just go to John chapter three, right? There's a great way to begin to start a conversation saying, well, what does Jesus mean here? Does Jesus say here that a person who has a master's degree in theology like Nicodemus can see the kingdom? Apparently not. So it's the spirit. Okay, so why is that so critical? So for me, again, I'm just a simple guy, worked in youth ministry for 23 years and then fated formation for seven and then the Lord said, time to get out and go. Because I was working with youth, he's always come and asked me the hard questions. Well, why? And so I was always wrestling with Lord, I need to have a great way to be able to respond to the youth. I don't understand how to do this. How do we articulate this in a way that people can see? Because, you know, I'm just a simple guy, like around my house, if something's broken, my wife will come to me and go route, the toilet's broken. So I don't want her to keep telling me the toilet's broken, so what do I do? I go look at the toilet, jiggle the switch, nothing's happening. Lift up the tank, look in there. Oh, wow, yeah. The chain's off. Go in there, some of you are probably going, I have no idea what he's talking about, but. Take off your tank, you'll see a chain. Okay, so maybe some of the new toilets, don't even have that, it's getting all high tech. Next thing you know, there'll be computers in our toilets and that'll be really scary, okay? But anyway, so are you going, I see what's wrong and then I work on trying to fix it. So I'm trying to figure out how, when we committed original sin, we did not. None of us here committed original sin, none of us are guilty of original sin. We just all bear the consequence of original sin, which means we lost God. So what does that look like? And so let me give you this example that I hope will help concretize in your mind a way to illustrate why we need the spirit so that we might have life and experience this amazing faith, hope and love, okay? The church teaches that we're basically, it's a fancy church, we're bipartite. And the catechism it teaches that we basically consist of two parts, body and soul. But the church in the early days, some of the big dog thinkers wrestled with that when they were going through the word of God because in the word of God, Paul uses three times. He says body, soul and spirit. So they were really kind of wrestling with, are we really two, body and soul or body, soul and spirit? And so one of the big dogs basically came forward and said, look, when you have it, when someone dies and you open up the casket, I mean, the physical body's there, but the rest is gone. So there's really just two parts. So the church says, great, we're two parts. But then after them, the scholastics added, you know, again, we're chewing on what the teaching is, what's going on. And they're now all of a sudden going, well, okay, so we'll accept that that's true, two parts. But if we're two parts, then why does Paul delineate between three? And then on top of that, why does Mother Mary do it? What, what do you mean? Luke chapter three, her great magnificat. My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my rejoices in God, my Savior. So why is she doing it? So they started to look at that. And as they started to look at that and started to look at functionality, capacity, how we operate, it became very clear, and this is an illustration for us to begin to understand that functionality and how it works. It became very clear. Everybody understands that we have a body. This is the part of us that occupies time and space. We're made a physical matter. And with our physical existence, we have the five physical senses, sight, touch, right? But understand this because the five physical senses operate in the same manner that spiritual senses operate. We need something outside of our senses to enact, to activate them. Our eyesight doesn't work unless we have light, our sense of hearing doesn't work unless we have sound, same as true on a spiritual realm. So tuck that away, right? So body is a part of us that occupies time and space, and because we have the five physical senses, we become conscious of our physical world. We touch it, we interact with it, we see it, we hear it, we smell it, taste it, right? So then we're gonna move to the soul, which I've defined, I'm illustrating with two parts. There's a lower function and a higher functionality of the soul. The lower function of the soul, we're going to call the soul. This is a part of us that has our intellect, our ability to feel emotions and free will, self-determination, self-death, right? This is the three part. Well, how do you know these, I mean, you're intellect, deacon, shouldn't that be the higher function? Nope, lower function, okay? Well, how do we know that's true? Because when a person's in mortal sin, their intellect still works, so do their feelings, and so does their free will. They're still in operation, they're not taken away. So the interesting thing is that a person can live their entire life in just their body and the lower function of their soul and never even know this part of them exists. That was my experience. That was my experience until I woke up, until I came to encounter the Lord. And the way I use it in my testimony when I'm speaking sometimes, I'll say that when the moment I encountered the Lord and the Holy Spirit came upon me, there was a part of me that woke up that I didn't even know existed. I just woke up, like, oh my gosh, I now see something that I could never see before and it wasn't with my physical eyes. I could now see with a sense of spiritual sight that I'd never had before. It's incredibly profound. So which leads us to the next part, which is the higher function of our soul is the spirit. The spirit part of us is the part of us is spirit that enables us to engage in communion with God who is spirit. You see, we must have spirit. We are spiritual beings like angels so that we can engage in communion spiritually with our creator. We're made that part. That's part of being made in this image, right? So that's the part of us that the design was this and here's what I want to understand because when we speak evangelistically, we're trying to convince people that they need Jesus. Like you need to have Jesus. How many times have we told our kids you need Jesus? You little hell you, turn or burn baby, right? We feel like it's on us to convince people and the difference is I would say is that what we need to start doing is figuring out how to help people see they need Jesus and here's the reason why because there's a part of us that is made of spirit and when the way God designed is that when we're connected to God, to the Holy Spirit, we receive mainline power. We receive mainline understanding and insight into what's going on. That's what happens when we're exercising spiritual gifts of the spirit, the supernatural manifestations of the spirit. The spirit is moving through our spirit and manifesting those gifts in us and through us for the benefit of the body of Christ. That's the way it operates. That's how it works. It's through this higher function of our soul, about our spirit called the spirit. That's what happens. And with that, we also have power, power for self control, self control. So I'll show you how this works. Keith, can I borrow you? Sit right there. Close your eyes and when you, besides my voice at some point, when you encounter my being and I'll be the only one encountering you, when you encounter my being, say now, out loud so they can hear you. Said now. The moment I touched, he didn't see him, he didn't see me coming, he had his eyes closed. Like, we don't see God coming. But the moment my being connected to his being, it was instant connection. And then we started communicating. He felt my hand on his shoulder. What does that feel like? Oh, don't get spiritual on me. How does it feel? Good. Yeah. What do you mean good? Like, what does it feel like, literally? Like a load of weight. Like a load of weight? Yeah, a load of something. Because I'm so big and strong. Okay, good. So he's been communicating to me as well because I feel the warmth of his body. I had a pulse here a second ago. Okay, so, but you see how that works. The minute the connection, and if I take my hand off, the connection ceases. We're meant to be connected to God, the Holy Spirit, for eternity. We were never meant to be disconnected. And we were born like this. We were conceived like this. That's the problem. Like Blind Bartimaeus doesn't know what he can't see. Right? He heard, had to hear from people that Jesus could heal him. So he cries out to the Lord. But the minute he regains his sight, and I'm not talking physical, I'm talking spiritual, only then does Bartimaeus become a believer. He had to regain his sight. Okay, so what happens? So this is the way we're supposed to work. What does that look like on an everyday basis? So let's just say you're living your life and your body who's dealing with physical stuff for the world, turns around and goes, hey, you know, we're hungry. We didn't have breakfast or lunch. We need to get something to eat. And the decision maker right here, because Free Will says, well, you know, yeah, we should get something to eat. Okay, let's do it. You know, how about ice cream? Let's eat a half a gallon of ice cream. I love that. But this part of us that's connected to God goes, no, no, no, no, hold up, cowboy. Because the minute you eat a half a gallon of ice cream, we're all gonna be hurting on the pot for a long time after that, right? Ain't gonna happen, right? So now we're, God is infusing wisdom, knowledge, understanding about this porcelain idol. Okay, right? So finally, the decision maker takes in reinforcement from the body, input from the body, and the spirit, and then acts in a wise and prudent manner. So what happens with original sin? Because I said, remember, none of us are guilty of original sin, but we all are bearing the consequence of it. Blessed Fulton Sheen said, the moment we commit original sin, the spiritual part of us is suppressed. Boom, shut the gates closed. And we're no longer operating the spirit. This is the capacity, the functionality of our souls that we lost when our ancestors said, rejected God. So now we're just living this way. And this is all we know. You wanna know why you have disordered passions to physical things? Because we grew up with the gate closed. And we've grown attached to the physical things. That's why it was so easy for me to dive into porn and give myself to the porn. And that's why it took 11 years for the Lord to heal me of that addiction when I was actually serious about wanting to fight it. You know, when I stopped playing the games of, well, yeah, I'm just gonna look at these images or those images or that's what's going on. So when God comes to us and he looks down and he sees what's going on, he doesn't see a bunch of sinners who had just caught up in a bunch of vices that are just horrible and filthy. And yeah, like the demons want us to do, they're the ones tempting us to do it. And then they come back and kick our butts because we did it. Same voice may sound different, but they're the ones, right? Come on, just call, go for it. You're not hurting anybody. It's great. And then what you do it like, you are a filthy son of a. And then the voice begins. You know what the sad thing is? We begin to believe it. We begin to be living it. We be living it. And here's the word of God trying to penetrate with the truth and we're listening to which voice, the only voice we have available because the gates closed. I have no access to faith, hope and love until the gate gets open. It is impossible because I was made to be wide open. I was made for the Lord to just flow through me. Okay, so what happens? Jesus comes, does the heavy lifting, dies for our sins and then has the church and then enter entrance of baptism. Boom, gates gets opened. And now we're exposed to the living waters, but half of that time is done when we're infants, right? Most of us baptizes infants, were we properly disposed to do our own baptism? Yes or no? No, nope, not even close. That's what the parents supposed to raise them up doing if they know what they're supposed to raise them up doing. Right? But if that's not happening, then boom, this is what's taking place. This is just all of a sudden. So finally we get to the age of reason and that kid receives first communion, first confession, but you know those guys are little. They could steal a cookie and when you say did you, did you take cookie? Nope, well lying's a mortal sin. The minute we commit mortal sin, whoop, there's the gate closed. If I'm a demon assigned to you, my job is to make you live this way. My job is to get you to do the mortal sin and then give you a bazillion reasons why you don't need to go to a priest to confess your sins. Come on, it can't just be me that totally can relate to that statement. And maybe you do go, but maybe you're caught in the other fun little thing where you know you got this nasty sin you gotta confess so you're trying to figure out how do I say this in a way that doesn't make me look so bad? Right? You wanna know why that happens? Because we've replaced our fears. We've let go of fear of the Lord and we've replaced it with a fear of man. We're more afraid of what other people think of us than we are of what God thinks of us. So Jesus sees this and immediately comes with a church baptism and then a person comes up and they go to confession, boom, gate gets open. But if you're anything like me and now remember, just let's just take Deacon Ralph as a great example who was addicted to porn. So I was frequenting porn a lot in my youth because I started at nine years old and was going, and I wasn't necessarily going to confession. So if I looked at porn and never went to confession, then my gates closed all the time. But let's just say now, my senior year of high school, I have a conversion experience and now I'm going back to church, I've re-entered the weapons and utilizing the weapons of the church, sacraments like my brother Deacon was talking about and all of a sudden I open up the gate because I go to confession. How long does it take? Because I'm still addicted and I'm not letting anybody know what's going on. Whoop! So you understand how this works because what Jesus said is that if you drink the water that I give you, you set it to the Samaritan water well, then what will happen to you is in you, you will become like a font of living water. I want you to understand what that looks like. First of all, two images. I have five girls. So you know that when girls are at a young age and they don't have much hair yet and you got to do something with their hair and the only thing you can do is that little sprig in the top, right? And their hair just goes, right? Imagine that's what we all look like and that all of our kids and friends and people that we know see this sprig of water just flowing from the top of your head. And the benefit of that is to take our empty cups, our empty souls and come up to a person and we now start receiving the Holy Spirit from you. If the fountain is flowing, if the gate is open, but if the gate is closed, you got nothing. You could take your kids to mass every day but if your light is out, they can't see the light of God, nor understand it, nor desire it, right? That's what's going on. That's the spiritual battle. It's all about keeping this gate closed. What does God want? God wants you to come back. And so for me, when I got serious because the Lord confronted me, I cried out to God, I tried to do it on my own for three years. You know why? Because I wanted to remain in the darkness. I didn't want anybody to really know that I was a porn addict because I was afraid of what you would think of me. Even today, they don't want deacons talking about this kind of stuff. But it's the truth. I'm not gonna put my boy back in the box. Jesus died to get me out of the box and I wanna keep that gift. So I opened it up and I go to confession. Now I start going and literally, you wanna know what it looked like at first when I first started, when the Lord came and convicted me. He says, you need to come and I want you to go to confession. No receiving Jesus and a blessed sacrament. This is what my life looked like for real. I mean, I was going to reconciliation so often I pretty much had a mailbox outside the confessional for real. It was just, it was crazy. And then comes the dreaded time when I'm at mass with my kids. And you know what it looks like? I go to mass. I go to mass and my family's there and I'm sitting in the pew. And the way I do it is I get up out of the pew and I walk and I let my kids go out in the aisle first and then I'm gonna go down the aisle. But this one time I had sinned and I could not go to confession to the priest before mass. But my wife is there, my kids are there and I don't want anybody to know. So what am I gonna do? I'm gonna go, I get up to go receive communion. All my kids get up and I stand in the aisle and the spirit says, sit down in my mind's ear. Sense of spiritual hearing. Ever heard that voice? I mean like with a very strong command, like sit down. I don't like that voice. I don't. I know it's love, but he was very firm with me. Sit down, but sit down. And I sat down and then, you know what happened? I'm sitting there and my little girls, three-year-olds, the twins come walking up to me because they were the first ones out that went around to get their blessing and come back around and so they're surprised. Daddy's sitting in the pew. Daddy, why didn't you go to communion? And of course, there's my wife going, a lot of light, especially from my little ones. And I knew from that day on that this was gonna be the last day that I would ever put myself in a situation where I can't receive communion with my family. I wish I could say that was the last day I did porn, but I wasn't done yet. So what happens? So the spirit comes and starts flowing. The longer the gate is open, the more conversion occurs. The less the gate is open, there's no movement. You understand how this works. We can't experience any love unless the gate is open. But if we go to sin, self-protection, all the rest, boom, the gates close, no hope. It's all here. It's all the channel. Okay, I got one more passage just so you know that this isn't just some kind of crazy, weird, deacon hobbit, weird teaching. First Corinthians chapter two, great, we're almost done. First Corinthians, if you don't know, if you're looking it up, it's after Genesis. First Corinthians chapter two, I'll start with 11. Actually, I'll start the second half of 10. For the spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For what human being knows what is truly human except the human spirit that is within. So also, no one comprehends what is truly God's except the Holy Spirit of God. Verse 12, now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Holy Spirit that is from God so that we may understand the gifts bestowed upon us by God to get that unless we have the spirit, we can't understand what God wants to gift us with. Verse 13, and we speak about these things, not in words taught by human wisdom, but look up here, but words taught by the spirit. So the lessons that we need to learn are not necessarily lessons taught with human wisdom. It's the lessons from the spirit, spiritual words, spoken, interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual. Verse 14, those who are unspiritual, what does that look like, Deacon? What does Paul mean? Those who are unspiritual are unable to understand them because they are spiritually discerned only till the eyesight is restored. This is the why. This is what's happening in us unless we have the Holy Spirit alive and activated in our hearts, unless we're in a constant state of grace like Deacon Harold was talking about, then we go out and then all of a sudden the spirit because he's already flowing because we're in a state of grace, now he's free to flow and manifest himself in your joy, in your love, in your peace, in your faith. But if we're still living in that, I'm afraid of what people think of me, so I'm gonna just keep the gate closed. Then we're in a world of hurt because we're not living the way we were intended to live. We're actually living a false religion that we're making. That's called idolatry. It's a lie. That's why it's so challenging for us. It's so hard because we're so used to, we're coming out of a life like this. We don't know anything but this, so this new concept, that's why that step out of the boat, right? Or the rich young man, what's it gonna look like if I let go of my riches? Because we don't have this sight to see even or experience the love of God that would surround us and give us a sense of peace. You know the fruits of this, so just so you understand what it feels like and what it looks like to operate properly is that this part of us, close enough, this part of us has the feelings, the anxiousness, the fear, right? All the anxiety and all the other garbage that comes along here. This is what we feel here. This part of us enables us to experience and I would use a different word because we tend to use the word feeling but I wanna give you a different word. When this is open, the gate is open, we don't feel the fruits of the Holy Spirit. We sense them. Why? Because when the gate is open and you start getting used to walking this way with the Lord, you can sense the spirit of the joy, the fruits of the Holy Spirit and feel the feelings at the same time. So let me, let's make sure we're clear. Faith for example, the verb faith, to go and actually live out with our lives what we believe to be true from God's word and His promises and what He can do. The verb faith does not take away the fear. You understand that feelings are something that the demons have the ability to insert false emotions in you. Did you know that? They have the ability to make you feel something that's not really yours and make you believe that it's you. St. Ignatius teaches us that in his spiritual exercises. So you can feel fear and peace at the same time. So what do we do with that? What does God want us to do with that? God wants us to pay attention to what He is saying and not the other voices that are speaking into us. Oh, we'll feel, we will experience them both at the same time. But we're meant to rise above what we're, you know, because I'll give you one, okay, I'll give you one last really important piece of this puzzle that we need to see. And that is that I believe in my experience in just talking with people and watching how I've grown and seeing that same thing happening in other people's lives is this. When we're young, we go through an event. Could be really traumatic, could be small traumatic, whatever, but it ends up being kind of scary. And I believe a demon can come up next to us and go, oh my, that was really scary. And you're like, yeah, that was, I don't ever want to feel that again, do you? No, no, no, no. Well, you listen to me and I'll help you and well, I'll protect you. And that demon of fear settles up next to us and then becomes really close because that's the voice we hear all the time. And then we then give that spirit of fear greater authority in our lives. You know what we do with that? We give them permission to become a spirit of counsel. They counsel us. And so whenever that voice speaks, we obey. We obey. And as Christians, we're still battling that voice. Why? Because we don't go out and evangelize much in public, in the public square. We were even afraid to talk about real stuff in our faith lives in church. Because what will people, or you come up to talking about, I want to tell you a crazy story and I'm afraid to tell you because I don't want you to think I'm crazy, but, and then they share this amazing story of God showing up. I'm like, do you believe me? I mean, like, well, yeah, that sounds like God. Oh, good, because I thought I was crazy. But that's spirit of fear. Dude, you can't talk about that. What will people think? So the day that I experienced freedom from the last nail in the coffin of my addiction to porn, this will be my last story because we're wrapping up. The last, the day that I experienced that I was, it was in the midst of experiencing a vision with the Lord after an 11 year battle of my pornography. And every day I prayed, Lord, you're all powerful. You could heal me today. So every day I asked for healing and I never got it for 11 years. I learned later why. I'll tell you that later. But I'm sitting there in that moment and I'm in this vision and the Lord takes me through this entire vision. And then he speaks truth to me because basically what he did is he appeared to me in this vision in the basement and walked me into that bedroom where I encountered a relative visiting that weekend and Jesus sat with me on the bed and he spoke truth to me right there. Ralph, I want you to know that what happened here was not your fault. You were just a kid. You were just playing army in the basement. I know because I was here. This is not your fault. In the moment Jesus said that, chains started falling off. Different kind of chains than what Deacon Harold was talking about. We're talking about bondage chains. Like fear, shame, self-hatred, filth, disgust, self-loathing, all of these different chains dropping off and any last vestiges of a desire to do porn were totally taken away. Within three days of that event, the enemy started attacking because you know, anytime you gain victory, what do they try to do? Regain territory. You know what I'm talking about, right? Within three days. Now I'm sitting there thinking, well, because by this point in my public ministry, I was sharing because the Lord commanded me to. I was sharing people. I was addicted to porn before I was healed. I was sharing with them that I told you if I was in rebellion, there's a good possibility I could be going back to that. And I was just standing out in front of people and letting them know that. But now I'm like in prayer and just like thinking what's my testimony supposed to be done? And then all of a sudden I hear, well, you can't tell anybody you're healed. I mean, what happens if you fall? I mean, how insidious is that? You can't tell anybody because if you fall, then your testimony means nothing. And in that moment, they gave me a choice. And with my powerful free will, I could have either taken that on and said, oh, that's somebody queued me in saying, okay, Deegan, this is time for you to shut up. It's time. But in that moment, all of a sudden I had a choice. Do I receive that word spoken into me and therefore keep it quiet? Or do I proclaim what Jesus Christ has just done in my life? And that's when I went out and started to do it. Because the more I started to do it, the more it was easier for me to spiritually see when the enemy was now coming around me trying to get me to hook me back in because they're always trying. Always. Because they hate our guts. But we know that three things remain. Faith, verb and noun. Hope and love. They remain as long as the gates open. So that's the key. We need that spirit moving through us nonstop. It's got to be a constant flow. It's the only way we will be transformed. It's the only way we experience the faith, faith, hope and love. It's only way people will receive from us what they need so that they know the way to follow. Amen? Name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Lord Jesus, in this downtime before the next workshop, I pray that you give us an opportunity to go out into the sun and just have a clearing of our minds so that we can be rejuvenated. Lord, quicken our hearts because we can get tired in this afternoon time. And we might drink from you richly. And Lord, I pray that whatever seeds that you planted within us this day, that you know we saw, that you would grow those seeds. We ask all these things in Jesus' name. Amen. God bless you guys. Thanks for coming.