 Well, thank you once again for being a part of this. Just so you know that this is a two-part seminar. In the first time, this first time together, I just really want to help explain the Holy Spirit and what he truly wants to do in our lives. Because for most people, the Holy Spirit remains the great unknown. We get God, the Father who created us. We see Jesus very clearly on the cross what His sacrificial love. But what do we know about the abiding love of the Holy Spirit? And we just celebrated Trinity Sunday. And when we say the glory be, we say glory be to the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. And that's not a hierarchy. That's just the sequence that we use. They are equal. Each one, another person of the Trinity. They're not different. They are one and unique. It's a mystery that we embrace. But for the fullness of our life as a Catholic to take root and really take off, we need the power of the Holy Spirit. And this is why I think these sessions are so important. Let me ask you a question. How many people are here on our campus for the first time? Awesome. First time at this conference? How many people have been to this conference before? Awesome. Now, how many people are like, yeah, I got, I received baptism in the Holy Spirit. I love the Holy Spirit. I'm on fire for the Holy Spirit. I'm ready to go raise your hand. Cool. And how many people are like, I've had that experience. I need a top off, God. I'm a tank, the tank's running a little dry. How many people are here for like, yeah, I want more? How many people here have never received baptism in the Holy Spirit? And when I say that, you don't even know what I'm talking about. You're like, what? Baptism in the what? I thought I was baptized as a baby. What are you talking about? Baptism in the Holy Spirit. You sure you're Catholic? Sounds like a Protestant thing, you know? It's just a little bit of a question. It's just a little sketchy. You know what I mean? I think sometimes that could be the reaction when we see people actually expressing their love for God with their whole bodies in prayer, right? Because we're like Catholics. We're like they're frozen chosen. We're just like, okay, God, I love you so much. I have so much joy in my heart. Maybe I should tell my face. You know, I mean, we don't talk about our faith. We don't talk about what Jesus is doing in our lives. We have this great treasure that the Bible says it's kept in earthen vessels. But that doesn't mean that our faces have to be locked in like this frown. And I hope one of the things that I've seen as I've been looking at it is a lot of joy amongst everyone here. Like how many people are here like for the first time? This is like the first large event you've really done since COVID. I know there's some people who came down from Canada whose restrictions lasted a lot longer. So like this is our first time back at campus that's COVID. And they're like so excited just to be in a room with other people who are praising God. And it's just like, it's like Catholic Disneyland. This is so awesome. And yet as I also walked around the room last night and watched, there was a lot of people who were sitting there kind of, what is this all about? What is going on in this room? Like they're like, do I raise? No, I don't raise my hands. I've never done that before. Raise my hands to praise God. No, okay. So maybe I'll just like a little bit in front of me. Okay, that's, that doesn't hurt. Okay, I can do this. But I think, you know, what Deacon Bob Rice said last night when he was teaching us about worship and leading us in there, he says like worship is a response. Let me tell you something about the Christian life. Everything is a response. St. John alludes to this in his first epistle when he says, we love because God first loved us. It is not so much what we do for the Lord that matters, but what we receive and what we accept. That's what truly changes us. Everything else is a response to that. If we're not going to let God be generous and pour out a lot of stuff and receive it, we're going to lack the ability to in turn be generous and pour ourselves out as a gift. It'll affect the way we go to mass. The ultimate end of receiving Eucharist is that we would become Eucharist, that we would be blessed broken and given to the world as a blessing. That's when, that's when you know you've really received the Eucharist well is when you walk away from mass and it says, go and announce the good news. You're like, yeah, I'm ready to go. Let's do this rather than, okay. All right. We'll see you next week. Like you get excited about the idea of giving yourself over to God, but it's the Holy Spirit that makes everything we believe as Catholics real for us today as real as it was for St. Peter, for St. John, for St. Paul, who had such mystical encounters, all the saints throughout all the generations who've had these mystical, spirit-filled encounters with the Lord. That stuff has not ended. God wants to do that for each one of us today. So when we say what is life in the Spirit, who made that expression up? Life in the Spirit. How can we never talk about it? How can we never hear about this in my church? How come I've been going to Catholics to church all my life and no one's ever said, have you been baptized in the Spirit? How is your life in the Spirit? Because once again, sometimes we get so focused on the wrong thing. But if you ask me what life in the Spirit is, I'll go straight to the Catechism. It says in Article 1699, Life in the Spirit fulfills the vocation of man. This life is made up of divine charity, which is love for God, and human solidarity, which is love of neighbor. It is graciously offered as salvation. So what is life in the Spirit? It is us participating in the life of God, the life of the Trinity. And our Trinity, it exists as an exchange of love. The Father has taken everything He is, all the goodness that is in the Father, and He pours it into the Son. And the Son, out of love for His Father, takes all that the Father has given Him and pours it back. And there's this exchange of love between God the Father and Jesus the Son, and it becomes this whirlwind of giving. And it becomes so powerful, this whirlwind, it becomes the third person of the Trinity. This love between the God and the Father is the Holy Spirit, much like in the same way many of us have given ourselves completely to our spouses. Everything we are, we've given to our spouse. And in that sacred union, a third person came into existence. This is why marriage is sacred. This is why, you know, fatherhood and motherhood and childbearing are some of the most sacred, beautiful things we can engage in, because we become like an icon of the life of God, where we give ourselves to one another and new life comes forth. But that's how God exists in heaven. Life in the Spirit is our invitation to step into that whirlwind and get caught up in the love of God. It begins in baptism, but it certainly doesn't end there. Let me read just four passages from the, you know, from the catechism once again. How many people own a catechism of the Catholic Church? Good. If you don't, I want to encourage you to go to the bookstore and buy one. It might cost you 40, 50 bucks, but you will not find a better book next to the Bible to have, to reference and read. And if you haven't, if you don't, I hope you're taking advantage of the catechism in the year that Father Michael Schmitz is doing right now, because there is so much wisdom and so much goodness in that book. This is what it talks about baptism and the grace that we receive. It says grace is favor, the free and undeserved help that God gives us to respond, where there's that word again, to respond to his call to become children of God. So wait, in baptism, you became a child of God by the Holy Spirit, adopted, but this grace asks us to respond to this call. Like the sacraments are not magic. It's not like the priest sprinkled you with water, waved a magic wand and boom, everything that you needed to be to fully understand what it means to be a child of God became real. It was poured into you, but it has to be unleashed. It has to be stirred up. It has to be realized. It's like chocolate milk. When you first pour the chocolate syrup, and I don't know, do people still do this? Make chocolate milk at home? I mean, I haven't had a glass of chocolate milk in years, and I used to drink it by the gallons as a kid. My mom would buy that big 64 ounce jug of Hershey's syrup, and I would pour a big tall glass and I would pour it, and it would all sink right to the bottom and it would just sit there until you got the spoon and you started stirring it up. Then it changed the milk. See, that's what happens to most of us in baptism. God pours all this grace into our hearts and it just sinks to the bottom and it never changes us because we've never of our own choice asked God to stir up that gift that we received in baptism. And we'll talk more about that in the next section, but in this, it says, it goes on to say in the next article, it says, by baptism the Christian participates in the grace of Christ. He receives the life of the Spirit who breathes charity into him and who forms the church. So the first act of life in the Spirit is to have God's love breathed into you. That's the first gift. If you would say, what's the ultimate end, the ultimate gift that life in the Spirit brings us, it's a deep rich knowledge of God's personal intimate love for you. For you. A love that, if you were the only person that Jesus needed to die for, he would have gone through all of that just for you, that he sees you, he knows you, and he cares about you. The things that, that Deacon Rice was talking about in his homily. It goes on to say, the vocation to eternal life is supernatural. The vocation to eternal life is supernatural. It depends entirely on God's gratuitous initiative. For he alone can reveal and give himself. Once again, we stand before God with nothing. When we say, blessed are the poor in spirit. What does that mean? It means that we can all stand before God and can be completely at peace knowing that we have nothing that God needs. That he doesn't look at you and says, I need you so badly. You have so much to offer. He looks at you and he says, while you were dead in your sins and you had nothing to offer me, I died for you because I want you. Do you know how wanted you are by God? Not to do anything first, just so that you can be one with him. Just so that you can taste and see for yourself how loved you are by God. That is the ultimate end of our Christian faith. That's when it's come to completion. When we've absorbed and integrated and swallowed and consumed so much of the love of God that we're consumed by it and transformed by it. From the inside out, this is why St. Paul says, if anyone is one is in Christ, he's a new creation. When we enter into this relationship with Jesus and it's his love being revealed to us, it changes us. And it says this call. It's supernatural, which means it's above our natural abilities. It's something that you don't possess within yourself. You can't do this. I mean, if you were sitting in the room last night and said, okay, God, I can do this. I can come to know you're alive. I feel like I can do this, God. I can do this. And you weren't getting anywhere. I would say flip the script and just say, God, I can't do this. But you can do it for me. Show me your love. I'm going to stop trying to earn it. I'm going to stop thinking about whether or not I deserve it because the answer is no. But I'm just going to receive it because that's what you will. That's what you want for me. And it's the Holy Spirit. It says in Romans 5.5, hope does not disappoint because the love of the Father has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit who's been given to us. The Spirit is life. It makes your life rich. And once again, life in the Spirit fulfills the vocation of man. Why? Because your call is to belong to God and live in his love. Period. And when we choose to do that, when we make that our highest goal, our highest priority, our lives are transformed by that love. It says in the Catechism, once again, Article 260, says the ultimate end of the whole divine economy is the entry of God's creatures into perfect unity of the blessed Trinity. The ultimate end of everything that exists. And when they talk about the divine economy, that's just a fancy word the church made up to describe all that God's ever done in his pursuit of us since we fell in the garden. From creating us to the fall to all the covenants in the Old Testament to in the fullness of time sending his only begotten Son, everything that God has done. And most importantly, the work that he did on the day of Pentecost pouring his spirit upon us in a new and dramatic way. Everything has become given to us that we become one with the Trinity. And that means one with joy, perfect joy. We become one with this gift of perfect love. And it says, and I said this, you know, like this is it's graciously offered as survey as salvation, which means God, because he loves you so much, will never force this on you. There is a door in your heart. The only handle on that door is on the inside. God would love to be able to open the door of the heart for you and enter in. But he says in revelations, chapter three, verse 16, I stand at the door and I knock. If anyone opens up, I will enter in and I will dine with him. I will have intimacy with him. I will share this meal and what you will dine upon is my love. You will feast upon who I am. God can only knock so long before we finally say, okay, God, I'm letting you in. And maybe last night, maybe you've not had that moment of complete surrender where you've opened the door of your heart. But as Father Dave was leading us in prayer last night, maybe you started to open it a crack. Maybe you didn't quite get it open, but you're like, I need to move on this. We're going to go into prayer tonight. We'll have another opportunity this afternoon to continue to open that door because you know what, as often as we open the door to God, we can shut it again. We can hide from God. We can try to keep God at a distance. Our relationship with God is not like one where, here we are and we're just taking off like a rocket and we'll just keep going to new heights. It's a roller coaster. It's a merry-go-round. It is, sometimes you feel like it's just spinning down the toilet. I mean, it's real. Read the Psalms. You know, like in one Psalm, you know, David is saying, oh Lord, I look upon you in your sanctuary and I delight in you for your love is better than life. In the next one, he's writing, God, where are you? I feel like worms are eating my bones and my throat is dry and crusty and I cry out to you and you're not hearing me. That doesn't sound like somebody who had a relationship with God that didn't have its ups and downs, highs and lows. And yet, in the Bible, David is described as a man after God's own heart. Having a relationship with Jesus is hard. In fact, I would say having a relationship with Jesus without the Holy Spirit is impossible, impossible to really become all that we're created to be. This is why this conference is called Power and Purpose. The Holy Spirit's given to us that we would have the power to know the love of God. St. Paul references this in the first chapter of Ephesians. He says to the people at the church in Ephesus, I pray that God grants you the power to comprehend the love of God. Wait, we can't comprehend it on our own earthly? No, because it's supernatural. It's above our human ability. But through the gift of the Holy Spirit, we have supernatural ability to comprehend the supernatural love of God, this perfect love of God. And that's why he sent the Holy Spirit. This is why Jesus refers to him in the Gospel of John during his last supper discourse as the Advocate. What's literally in the Greek is ad vu katus. I mean, that's Latin, ad vu katus, which means the one who's called to your side. So the Holy Spirit's called to walk with us, to guide us, which means we're walking alongside the Holy Spirit and he's saying, okay, go here, go there. It says this. This is John 14.16. If you love me, you will keep my commandments. I will ask the Father and he will give you another advocate to be with you always. Another advocate. I love that. Who's our first advocate? Jesus himself. I'm gonna get, but I'm gonna call down and Father's gonna send another advocate. So imagine wherever you've walked in your life, you've never taken a step in your life where Jesus wasn't to your right and the Holy Spirit wasn't to your left, surrounding you, having your front backside up, down completely. We're not always aware of it because if we're negligent, if we're not praying, if we're not asking, you know, I mean, you can be right next to somebody and not even be aware that they're there. You know, we've experienced this on the human level. How much more so can that be true for us on the spiritual level? But what does an advocate do? Oftentimes we call lawyers advocates. A lawyer is someone who defends you, who's someone who offers you counsel, someone who is sworn to always act for your good and for your benefit, even when you're guilty. Right? Every lawyer says, I will work, even though, despite how I feel about my client, I will work their case to their benefit. So even when we're guilty and deserve condemnation, the Holy Spirit will defend us, counsel us, and lead us to a place of repentance and back into communion with God. He never gives up on us. So often we give up on ourselves first. God doesn't tire in showing us mercy. We get tired of asking for it because we think after we've asked for the same forgiveness, for the same sin for a thousand times that God at some point, God is like, I'm done. I can no longer love you and forgive this sin because forget it. You're not even sorry anymore. And that's not true. That's the lies we tell ourselves because we stop believing in the goodness of God. We stop believing that God is really as good as he says he is. But when we look at the Bible and we see Lamentations 3 and the Father says, the steadfast love of the Lord never changes. His mercy never comes to an end. It is new every morning. Great is the faithfulness of God. His mercy is new every morning. You can never exhaust the mercy of God. So God knows that we are weak. He knew the apostles were weak. This is why he said, I mean, he was looking at these guys, these 12 guys, he was teaching them, he was showing them that he was this miraculous miracle worker, the Son of God. He revealed himself to them and what did they do? They fought about who was the greatest. Peter denies them three times. One of them portrays him under death. He knows without the Holy Spirit we don't have the capacity to serve him. That's why he said, go make disciples of all nations. But wait until your clothes with the power from on high. Because without that, the first thing ain't going to happen. Never, not a chance. So he goes on to say, Jesus goes on to say, 10 verses later says this advocate, the Holy Spirit that the Father will send in my name. He will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you. He will teach us everything, everything. So when Jesus says the Holy Spirit will teach us everything, what won't the Holy Spirit teach us? Nothing. He'll teach us everything. And I say this because oftentimes we want the Holy Spirit or God to solve our problems. And the Holy Spirit wants to teach us and guide us and equip us to overcome. This is why Jesus never promised us an easy life. But what he promised us was the Holy Spirit, which would be better than any challenge, any struggle you might face in your life. Life in the Spirit is about developing a deep interior life with the Holy Spirit who wants to be your own personal spiritual trainer. He wants to get us in shape to be saints. He wants to teach us the disciplines that we need to do, the prayer, the fasting, the almsgiving. These things that the church has given us, the Holy Spirit wants to show you how to use the equipment. Because oftentimes we get the tools and we don't know what to do with them. All right, you're fasting. What am I supposed to fast for? The Holy Spirit will teach you that. Oh, I'm supposed to love somebody? How am I going to? The Holy Spirit will teach you how to love that person in your life that annoys the bejesus out of you. Let me tell you, he will. The Holy Spirit will excite your heart and get you to stand up, throw your hands in the air and say, Praise the Lord, He will also teach you how to keep your stupid mouth shut when what you want to say is not going to be helpful to the person you're saying it to. He does both. The Holy Spirit will help you not to hit the send button on an email that's not worded well. He will help you stop hitting the post that comment when y'all are doing quarantine and calling someone, how can you believe that? You idiot. Okay, Holy Spirit, thank you. Like he will teach us these things. That's what charity is. The gift of the Spirit, one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit is gentleness. Gentleness is not being a wimp. It is having control over your strength and the Holy Spirit can teach you that. He doesn't emasculate us men. He empowers us to use our masculine identity to build his kingdom and to lay down our lives for our spouses, for our families, and for our community. I think so many times we think that the first thing that the Holy Spirit or God wants to do for us as men is neuter us and makes these wimpy things because every time the world displays a Christian in television and movies, he is exactly that. And so we've been brainwashed into thinking that this is what God wants. But God wants us as men to be able to rise up and lead and in the same way lay down our lives and serve. And he wants to do the same thing for all you ladies as well to teach you everything that you need to know. When I talk about the Holy Spirit teaching us to love, I mean, I would once again encourage each one of you to go buy a catechism or go look online for an online catechism and go to paragraph 221, 221 and just sit with it. This is what it says. St. John goes even further when he affirms that God is love. God's very being is love by sending his only Son and the Spirit of Love and the fullness of time. God has revealed his innermost secret. God himself is an eternal exchange of love. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And he has destined us to share in that exchange. That's what life in the Spirit is. It is being caught up in the whirlwind that is God and God's love. And when you're in that whirlwind, the Holy Spirit can teach you everything. How to forgive, how to serve, how to pray, how to stay pure, how to stop visiting those websites that you know you look at. Oops, he went there. Yeah, I went there. He'll teach us how to be pure in an impure world. And if we submit ourselves to his grace and his power, he'll set us free from anything. That's what the Holy Spirit wants to do. Why does he want to set you free from a sin so that you have more capacity to receive and share his love? Because all that sin does is wound you and cut you off in the life of God. This is, we don't pursue purity for the sake of being prudish. Hello, God created sex in all of his glory. It's a beautiful experience because that's the way God made it. But all that the world has done is perverted it, made it all about us in the reckless and selfish pursuit of that pleasure apart from the sacrificial love that should define that relationship in the first place. And this is why the world is so broken. But the Holy Spirit, whatever's off-kilter in our life, out of focus, not right, the Holy Spirit can fix that. You ever wonder how, man, I wish I could make a good confession? How many struggle like, I really wish I could make a really good confession and just be done with my sin. I do. And I pray every time I go to confession, Holy Spirit teach me how to make a good confession because I don't know. It's not my natural capacity to know how to do these things because that's supernatural. Remember, the call to this is above our nature. But the Holy Spirit can take us there. He is awesome. As you might have guessed by now, I kind of think the Holy Spirit is neat. He's a big deal in my life. I love the Holy Spirit. I love what he's done for me. I'm excited for what he wants to do for you. And I also love the ocean. Does anyone love the ocean? I was a youth minister in North Carolina for four years. And I lived in Winston-Salem, which is about four hours from the beach, two hours from that mountain. They have four distinct seasons. It is, in my opinion, the perfect place to live. And when I retire, I hope someday to be living in the great state of North Carolina again. My son, John Paul, was born there. But I remember the first family vacation we took to the beach and just standing on the beach. Now, I love the ocean. I don't necessarily love the beach. I'm not a big fan of sand. And I'm not a big fan of sunburn. And I don't know if you can tell, but I'm a pretty pasty white guy. So I don't tan until I burn. So when I go to the beach, and I learned the hard way that if you have SPF 25 and you put on four layers, you don't get SPF 100. And it's not a pleasant experience to get burned on the first day and have to walk around like this for the next three. But I love the beach. And I mean, I love the ocean. How much of the Earth's surface is covered by oceans? Does anyone know? 70%. That's equal to 140 million square miles of ocean. Can you imagine 140 million square miles? That's the Earth. You know, like, I don't know why we called it Earth. We should have called it, we live on planet water. It's 70% covered by water, only a little bit of its Earth comparatively. I mean, like, okay, but okay, Earth winds out. The deepest point of the ocean is the Mariana Trench. And it is just shy of seven feet deep. Can you imagine diving into the deep end of your pool and it was seven miles deep? You can keep going and going and going and going. The only problem is once you get down to about 2,000 feet, the pressure, the water pressure is like lying on a tarmac and having 50 jumbo jets stacked on your chest. You wouldn't survive. Right now in the ocean, scientists have named and classified 1.5 million different species of life. Did you know that? There's over 1.5 million different sea creatures that we've identified. Do you know that some scientists estimate there's another 50 million to discover? Yeah. How little we know. That's because more than 90% of these creatures live below the abyss. That's the area two miles and deeper. 90% of all ocean life is that deep. And we're still figuring out how it weighs how to get down there to discover. But there's this website I go to every couple of weeks and it shows you all the latest creatures and they have stuff every couple of weeks. They have another weird looking alien type crab thing that they found. Oh yeah, this one we found on a volcano at the bottom of this trench and blah, blah, blah. And it looks like something out of a sci-fi movie that would come bursting out of your chest. You know, like, okay, that's going to eat me. And also, did you know that floating around in small particular form right now in the ocean are 20 million tons of gold? So if you're sitting there thinking like, I don't really have a retirement plan, but I have a lot of time. Maybe I should go down to the ocean with a sieve and just, I mean, it might take you a few years. I don't know. Who wouldn't recommend it, I guess. So we have all this wonderful thing, all these wonderful things happening in the ocean. Guess how much of the ocean we've actually explored? Anyone want to guess? 10%, 10%. And I share all this because I think this is the perfect analogy for the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is this deep, wide, expansive person who's full of life, but you have to go deep to find that life. You can't become an ocean, you can't become an expert on the ocean by going to the beach and sticking your toe in the water and saying, oh, now I know what the ocean's all about. I get it. The only way you could become an expert on the ocean is if you go out and then go down, diving deep into the ocean. The ocean is a deep, expansive, mysterious body of water that is teeming with life. Much of it has yet to be discovered, and it's teeming with treasure, and it has the ability to sustain all the other life on planet Earth. With the food that comes out of the ocean, all life on Earth could be sustained. That's the Holy Spirit. He's deep, expansive, mysterious, teeming with life for you. He wants to give you that abundant life that Jesus promised, and so much of it's yet to be discovered, and it has the ability to sustain you, to give you life, to give you strength because the Holy Spirit is a life-giving lover and a life-loving giver. That's the Holy Spirit. That's what he wants to do. And one of the best, if not the very best choice you could make in your life is to open your heart wide to the power of the Holy Spirit because God wants to make everything that Jesus promised, that Jesus came to teach, that the saints have experienced. He wants to make it real for you. He doesn't want you to be lying in bed worried. Is God really there? Does God really care? He wants you to go to bed with peace and confidence that all of it is in his hands, and that no matter what happens in your life, he'll be there for you, and it will be good because he will be there in the midst. Even in the midst of the storm, right? As St. Peter learned, as Father Dave talked about last night, even in the midst of the storm, God is there and God is good. So we need to go deeper. We need to let the Spirit teach us lead us in power and send us on mission. But here's the thing. Some of the things that have changed in my life since the last Power and Purpose Conference is, by God's providence, I was accepted into formation to the Permanent Diaconate for the Diocese of Steubenville. And one of the first things that was affirmed for me is something I knew, but the way it hit me, well, I get a whole new way during one of my formation sessions when they said, mission always flows out of your identity. If you don't know who you are, you won't be able to fulfill the mission that God has for you. And this is why the first thing that the Holy Spirit wants to do is confirm for each one of you that you're a beloved child of God. And I would say if that's all that happens, this weekend for you is that you go home knowing that you're loved by God, that you're a child of God. Do you know what that puts you in this pursuit of holiness and the pursuit of Satanism? It puts you on the starting blocks. And it gives you a shot of either steroids or some sort of upper drug that makes you run super fast. It's going to launch you into a deeper relationship with Jesus Christ because once you know who you are and who you belong to, you become an unstoppable force for good. And then it's just a matter, okay, God, where are you aiming me? Now, I've got this spiritual energy like I've never had before. Where are you aiming me so I can go and do your will? But believe me, the fulfillment of life in the Spirit is we get rooted in Christ, we know who we are, and then we're sent on mission. We start to do what God needs us to do. Jesus alluded to this in John 15 once again, this is read the last few chapters of the Gospel of John over and over and over again because Jesus saved his best for last. These were like, these are my final instructions before I leave you guys. I'm going to tell you what you need to do. Abide in me and abide in my love. Be one as the Father and I are. He said so many profound, beautiful things in the Gospel of John, his last supper discourse. And one of the things he said, he says, when the advocate comes, whom I will send you from the Father, the Spirit of Truth, that proceeds from the Father, he will testify to me and you must testify because you've been with me from the beginning. He didn't say to the apostles, you know, you might have to give a testimony or you might want to share about me with other people. He said, you must, you must. He didn't mince his words. He didn't give us wiggle room. If we are going to belong to God and get caught up in that whirlwind of love, then what we need to be doing is inviting as many other people as we can to step in with us. Because life and the Spirit, like I said, it's not just about divine love. It's about human solidarity. It's about us having love for one another. That in imitation of Jesus, we would lay down our lives and go find somebody who needs the love of Jesus and share it with them. We won't be able to do that unless the Holy Spirit's active in our life because we will always hit that moment of, I'm too scared to do it. I don't know what to say. I don't believe that if I share it, it's going to be good for me or them. We let doubt, fear, and all the other things stop us and then the Holy Spirit can teach us, like, don't go there. Let me tell you what it really is. You have the words of everlasting life. The apostles came to realize these things. Peter, who denied Jesus three times, went on to say, look, you can't stop me from talking about Jesus. Well, we'll beat you. Go ahead. We'll lock you in jail. Fine. And Jesus himself said, look, when you were young, you went where you wanted. But what's waiting for you, Peter, is they're going to take you somewhere you don't want to go? Do you love me? And Peter was all in. He's like, Lord, you know I love you. And when it came time for Peter to be crucified, rather than being crucified in imitation of Jesus, he said, please crucify me upside down because I'm not worthy to die in the same manner as my Lord. That's when he was truly the rock. Because I'd imagine when Jesus was still alive, right? Peter, you're going to be my rock, okay? And all he did from that moment on until Pentecost was crumble over and over. He must have felt like Jesus is mocking me because he says I'm a rock, but I feel like dirt. But when the Holy Spirit came upon Peter, he became the rock. It says in the Catechism, once again, article 737, the Spirit prepares men and goes out with them with his grace. The Spirit manifests the risen Lord to them. He will make the risen Lord real to you as you go out. And not only will he make the risen Lord real to you, he will make the risen Lord real to other people. Mary had this experience and Deacon Burke shared about this morning. She goes to serve, all right? She just was told by the angel, you're going to be the mother of God. You're full of grace. And she's like, okay, I got it. Thank you. I'm the handmaid of the Lord. I'm going to go serve my cousin. Thank you for your praise, but I'm not into that. I'm going to go serve because that's Mary. Doesn't seek praise, doesn't seek position, doesn't seek power, seeks to serve. So she goes and as soon as she greets Elizabeth, all she says is hello. And the baby starts jumping up and down. Imagine you've been so full of the Holy Spirit that all you had to do is to say to somebody, hello, and they could detect the power of God coming from you. And it's being manifested in their soul. That's how the Spirit wants to prepare you. That's the gift that the Spirit wants to give you. That's the gift the Spirit wants to give each one of us. The Catechism goes on to say, so that she can fulfill her mission, the Holy Spirit bestows upon the church of various hierarchy and charismatic gifts. And in this way directs her. It goes on to say, whether these gifts are extraordinary or simple and humble, charisms are graces of the Holy Spirit which directly or indirectly benefit the church, ordered as they are to her building up to the good of man into the needs of the world. Charisms are to be accepted with gratitude. Charisms, what do we mean by that? If you go to 1 Corinthians and you go through like chapters 10, 11, and 12, St. Paul talks about the spiritual gifts, the charisms, the personal manifestations that are for the building up of us, which are the special anointings is the grace of conversion, the grace of true repentance. God healing you, restoring what might have been damaged by your sin or the sin of somebody else in your life so that you can be whole, happy and holy and holy gods. He wants to give you the gift of faith. Yes, we can't even believe without the Holy Spirit, without his power at work. Faith is a gift. The ability to stand up and step forward in God's name is a gift. The gift of holiness, because we all have two universal calls. We're all called to holiness and we're all called to love. And that is not the stuff of wimps. We need to be courageous, sold out, but more than important, we need the Holy Spirit because he will be the one who will convince us, convict us and convert us. His work in us will accomplish God's desire for us to be the saints that we are called to be. But there are other extraordinary manifestations of God's grace and goodness. One is one that was manifested on the day of Pentecost, where the apostles were speaking in tongues. And this is where people are like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we're speaking in tongues. You know, I mean, like, that's just kind of weird. I don't do that. We see that it's a biblical gift. St. Paul says, I wish you all had this gift to pray in tongues. As he says, when we are finding ourselves weak and pray, the Spirit intercedes for us, the gift of tongues is the Holy Spirit interceding through us, offering up prayers in an angelic language. And we don't necessarily even need to know what the Holy Spirit is saying when we receive this gift. Now, I've had too many people say, well, this is the sign that the Holy Spirit is really working in your life, is that you speak in tongues. And I'm like, no. The sign that the Holy Spirit is really working in your life is you're loving like Jesus loves and you're pursuing holiness. This is an extraordinary gift, but I think it's one that more people should be given. When I first received this gift, I thought, okay, I'm at this prayer meeting and people are praising God out loud and we're saying, we love you Jesus, holy is your name. And then some people were praying in tongues. And, you know, and it seemed weird. But when I received the gift, I realized that 80% of the time when I'm speaking in tongues, there's nobody else around. I'm wanting to enter into the depth, depth of the Holy Trinity. And this prayer is like a prayer of surrender and the Spirit just prays through me. And I'm able to be led by the Spirit deep into the heart of God. It aids my contemplation. So if God wants to give you the gift of tongues, don't feel like he's giving it to you so that you're going to be the only person at your church next Sunday standing up after communion and starting speaking in tongues really loud. That's not appropriate use of the gift. And it doesn't control you. You never lose your will. But it is a prayer that when you yield, it becomes manifested and it draws you into the presence of God. But it's not even the most important gift. Right now, your church is people who have the gift of being able to lead other people into the presence of God with music. They need people who, through a dynamic witness of holiness and love, can teach the faith to the next generation, not as a passing on of doctrine, but as a formation into a life that is truly reflective of the gospel values where we are all choosing to follow Jesus. Our church needs administrators who are gifted at organizing. We need people who have leadership, leadership and evangelization, people who have the gift of mercy and compassion. There are people in our office. And Mark will tell you, we have people who are anointed with the gift of hospitality. They may know how to make everything special. They may know how people, places, events. They know how to make everyone feel welcomed and loved. And that is a gift that I don't have. And I marvel at that gift because they're beautiful the way they execute and use that gift for God's glory. But there are prophetic words and things that God is calling us to say. Just I'll talk about more of these in the next session. But there's also healing. Like I don't have a permanent gift of healing. Like I don't have like, I don't host healing services, but I have prayed with too many people too many times where God has actually healed them to say the gift of healing is not real. The gift of healing is absolutely real. Because Jesus said to his apostles, what I do, you're going to do an even greater to give people freedom from spiritual bondage. These things are necessary, needed in our church today. God wants to give these gifts to people because we're struggling without them. We have too many people who are literally dying to know the love of Jesus to find freedom in Jesus. When did God change? I mean, will you read the Acts of the Apostles? This is how the church was built. The apostles went forth in the name of Jesus and they didn't just say, Jesus is Lord. They showed that Jesus was Lord by showing his authority over illness, over evil spirits need to understand that we live in a time where we can't run from God wanting to do an extraordinary, miraculous manifestation of his love and grace because it's absolutely needed. Each one of us in our own simple, humble way need to let the Lord look down upon us and say, I choose you because you're lowly. I choose you because you're broken. I choose you because you bring nothing to the equation, but in your nothingness, I can be your everything. All I ask is that you open your heart to my grace, that you choose to accept and receive my love, that you choose to accept and receive the fullness of my Holy Spirit into your soul so that I can animate you, strengthen you, empower you, and send you forth to do miracles. And when we do that, that's exactly what happens. So now we're going to close and Mary's going to lead us in Come Holy Ghost. And when we come back in half an hour, I'm going to share more testimony about how God has done this in my life, and then we're going to be praying for the Holy Spirit to fill us. And if you've never prayed for baptism in the Holy Spirit, we're going to be praying for that. And probably what might happen when you walk up the door is the evil man might be like, you need to run. You don't want that. Nothing but good is going to happen in the next session. God is going to show up and he's going to pour his love into your heart in a new way, maybe for the first time in a powerful way. So come back and let's let God love us. Amen.