 Your last night I had an opportunity to speak to the Bible conference and I spoke on the theme essentially of worldview or of imaginative vision. And I'm not gonna give that talk again tonight, but it is available. But I wanna build on it actually. To put that down into a nutshell, your worldview or imaginative vision is not what you see, it's the lens through which you look. And we don't think a lot about our worldview, but it's built through all sorts of experiences, interactions throughout life. And our faith or lack of faith will deeply impact it. The example I gave last night, Dr. Sree was actually teaching our leaders about worldview and imaginative vision. He said, it's a true story in my life that my eyesight is such that if I take my lenses off, I can't tell if you're a boy or a girl, which is exactly where we are in our culture right now. And so I just wanted to understand and the point that I made there was that the way to shape worldview is we have to become the best storytellers in the world. Our Jewish brothers and sisters and as Catholics and as Christians for millennia, we've been the best storytellers in the world. But in the last hundred years, Madison Avenue and Hollywood have taken over our place. And they're not telling great stories, but they're telling them very, very well. And they're shaping people's lives in such a way that the world they think of doesn't have God at the center of it. And our young people, without ever choosing, just find themselves drifting towards a world that doesn't have God at the center of it. In the first Titanic, the movie Titanic, not the actual shipwreck, in the first Titanic, when the ship was going down, a group of people were praying the rosary. And a couple men walked by and they said, well, we should join them. And one guy says, I'm not Catholic. And the other guy says, doesn't matter now. And so people knew they were gonna die. In the second Titanic, a young couple has sex outside of marriage. That's a different worldview. And I'm not here to talk about worldview, but I wanna make the case that it's really important that we get really great at about knowing and telling our story. But there's another piece, it's the other hand, if you will, of all of this, worldview, imagine a vision and then the gospel of Jesus Christ, the proclamation, the clear proclamation of Jesus Christ. And we as Catholics don't do this very often. And I really want to encourage you along with myself that I think a virtue that we can grow in is becoming the best of the world in sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ. So I'd like to come to this apologetics conference and make an apologetic to make a defense to the importance of the gospel and how we should preach it. Some of the obstacles to it and why it's so important. Let's begin a prayer in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, amen. Lord Jesus Christ, it is your desire to make yourself real to each and every one of us. And not just us here this evening, each and every one of us that you've ever created throughout all of history, everybody on earth right now, everybody who ever lived in the past, everybody who ever will live in the future, you desire yourself to be real for us to encounter you the way that Simon Peter did at the Sea of Galilee, when as a professional fisherman, he had the best catch of fish in his life and quit his job on the same day because he met you. Make yourself real to us, Lord. It is my hope and prayer for everybody here that your presence in life, that personal presence will become more real and more profound during our time together and will continue on in our lives with others. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, amen. All right, so I wanna talk a little bit about Worldview and why it's, excuse me, about evangelization. That was last night's talk. And we'll talk about evangelization, but I wanna talk about a couple of obstacles that come to it. Before I do that though, I wanna make a couple of preliminary, really fundamental, really, really important comments because I'm gonna be skating on some thin ice here tonight. I'm gonna be talking about things that we don't talk about very often. I hope that I'll be very respectful, but we'll get close to where it'll, it would be easy to throw an elbow in. So I just wanna state right now, I wanna absolutely reject any sense of condemnation to anybody. We're gonna talk about people who don't have faith. I wanna make sure you understand it, that I reaffirm. I, my comments have nothing to do with condemning anyone. They're actually the exact opposite. This is an opportunity for everyone. There are people who have no faith who are better people than I am. They're more humble. They have the virtues that Dr. Sree talked about. If they were to receive the gospel, it would be amazing. My dad was a noble pagan for much of his life, a better man than I've ever been able to be, but he wasn't a Christian until I was about 15. And when he became a Christian, wow, lights out, that best natural man became even better. So I'm not here to criticize anybody. I wanna emphasize that God is unbelievably, infinitely merciful. He desires his mercy for every single person. I was at a retreat with Father Spitzer, who many of you know, and I thought he made a great point. He said, sometimes when we think about sin, we think that God is disgusted by us because he's all holy. And we are disgusting because of our sinfulness, but God is not disgusted by us. God is like the father and the prodigal son. The father and the prodigal son is not thinking, I'd like to hug my son, but he hasn't bathed in weeks. He's disgusting. No, he's a dad. He doesn't care about any of that stuff. He sees his son, the dirty clothes, the stench, all of that can be taken care of. All right, my son is coming home. God loves us even on our worst day. He loves us infinitely. The devil is disgusted by us. And don't get those confused. So we're not here to place judgment at all. God did not send his son into the world to judge the world, but to save it. However, I do wanna say something about myself. I drifted away from Christ as a young man, and I lived without him in my life for a number of years. And what I can tell you about myself, I don't know about you and I don't know about the people around the world today, what I know is that I would be desperately, desperately broken and lost without Jesus Christ in my life. And I think that's probably true for others. And so I'd like to use that as the foundation so we're not here to judge anybody, but we're gonna talk about the importance of faith in Jesus Christ. And here's the challenge. The majority of people on earth today do not believe in Jesus Christ. The majority of people on earth at any time in history since Jesus was here have not believed in Jesus Christ. And so how can we have a commitment, a conviction to share the good news of Jesus Christ with people who don't believe without judging them? Well, the first part is we have to have the heart of the father of the prodigal son. I was in Ephesus a couple of weeks ago and I thought it was gonna be the high point of my trip. Ephesus is the home of St. John for a while and the Blessed Virgin Mary, I lived with John there for a while and St. Paul lived there for a while and the city is in ruins. And Christianity has been illegal and unpracticed for centuries. And I found myself very angry. We gotta fix this. The only reason they'll let us here is because we're gonna pay good money to look at what they broke. And for about 30 minutes I was just battling anger and I thought, Lord forgive me. That is not the attitude Paul got here when he came to the shores of Ephesus. He said, here's a whole bunch of people that you died for Lord and I can't wait to let them know. I can't wait to let them know how they have also been included. When I was a young Jewish man, I thought salvation was for the Jews. But Jesus confronted me, converted me and helped me to see that your salvation is for everyone. And I wanna bring your good news to the people of Ephesus and Galatia and Colossae and Thessalonica and Rome, wherever he went. And I didn't have that attitude. And so I asked you in joining me and praying that we could have the attitude of wanting only goodness and blessing. But understanding that goodness and blessing, the best goodness and the best blessing is actually a relationship with Jesus Christ. The Catholic Church is really, really clear that you do not have to be a Christian to be saved. The Catholic Church teaches that it is possible for a person who without faith in Jesus Christ to in their humility cry out to a God they do not know for mercy and that God who is merciful will answer that. The thief on the cross is a good example of that, right? He figured it out at the last minute. But the good thief was saved by turning and asking for mercy in the last moments of his life. I wanna talk to you a little bit about three passages. Actually, well, three passages from scripture and one from the Catechism. The first passage from the scriptures is from John chapter 17. John chapter 17 says this, it's a quote from Jesus Christ, verse three. This is eternal life that they may know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you've sent. As far as I know, that's the only definition of eternal life anywhere in the scriptures. And it happens to be on the tongue of our Lord and Savior. This is eternal life that they may know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you've sent. And I always like to highlight that when we read this, the English language sometimes is very amazing and serves as well and sometimes not so much. And here, the key words are that they may know you, the one true God, so true God and Jesus Christ, but that they may know, I would argue, is the act that's the verb. And our word know can mean different things. Even in Spanish, there are two words for know. Saber to know facts and conocer to be acquainted with people. If this was translated into Spanish, they would use the variation of conocer. Eternal life does not know facts about Jesus. That's important. Facts are very important. I can tell you how tall my wife is, she's about five foot seven. I can tell you how much she weighs, but she'd kill me. Although, she looks great, don't get me wrong, she looks amazing. That trip to Greece we took was really good for her and for me. I'm kidding, I'm totally kidding. I can tell you a lot of things, I can tell you how old she is. But it's not what I know about her, I know her. And when Jesus is saying this is eternal life, it is that you would know God, not know about him, but you would know him. The way that Peter, Simon Peter, met him and began to know him on the day of his greatest catch and then quit his job and went and followed Jesus. In the same way many of the great saints throughout the centuries have. The same way many of you have. But let's be honest, I've fallen in love with my wife more than once. And maybe you've been walking with Christ for years, but my hope and prayer for this weekend is that you would fall in love with him again. Maybe you had a quit your job moment 15, 20 years ago. I hope you have another one this weekend. The cool thing about quit your job moments is you don't have to quit your job. You just have to be willing to. And so, Lord, what do you want from me? I'll go anywhere. And that's the first passage, the second passage is from 1st Timothy, chapter two, verse four, that she begins just to God our Savior in verse three. God our Savior desires that all men come to the saving knowledge of truth, all men. And the third one is Acts chapter four, verse 12. Peter says, there is no other name under heaven by which men may be saved than the name of Jesus. Why do I share these verses with you? Well, the first passage tells us what? What is eternal life? And Jesus answers the question. It's the knowledge of God. The second question answers who? And St. Paul tells us, who does God wanna save? God desires all men to be saved. And the third passage, St. Peter tells us, and how is that done? Only through Jesus. There is no other name. If a person who does not know who God is asks for mercy from their death to a God, they do not know, the only God that exists that can save them is the blessed Trinity. There's no other God. But there's a challenge because I think it's, the challenge has gotten worse in the last hundred years because, you know what, before a hundred years ago, very few people traveled all over the world. And so you kinda knew the people you lived near. And so for Americans, we might have known some Protestants, but we probably didn't know too many Hindus a hundred years ago or Buddhists or Muslims. But with world travel, we began to realize, oh my goodness, a whole lot of people have a whole lot of different ideas about God. And we're tempted to be discouraged by that. And there's a couple of bad answers to that. Religious relativism, well, one religion is as good as another, or a lack of commitment to the person of Jesus who is the only savior of the world. What I'd like to ask the question is, do we think that evangelization is not only a good thing, but a necessary thing? And I actually would argue the answer to that right now for the culture in the church today is probably no. And I'll give you the three reasons why I think it's the case. Although I think it's getting much better. Thanks in a large part to the last three popes, really four popes, Saint Paul VI, Saint John Paul, Pope Benedict and Pope Francis have spoken to a great deal about this. And I'm very grateful to each of them. They have changed my understanding of this. But I also have to confess, I come to this issue having been evangelized as a young adult who had left the church and had left my faith. And so the power of evangelization is very real for me because I know what it's like to live lost and in the dark and dead in sin and then to be spiritually resurrected. Oh my goodness, the gift that the gospel can bring to people is amazing. But as I've worked with focus, as we plan for focus before we ever launched a missionary on a campus, I was working with Scott and Kimberly and Ted was here before he went off to grads to his doctoral studies in Rome. And we were laying the groundwork and working together and I start talking to people about what we're hoping to do. And one of the regular comments I'd hear from Catholics was, is evangelization even Catholic? I mean, I know that's what evangelicals do, but I've never met a Catholic who evangelizes. Which led to two issues that I think have come to the fore since then. I think people are beginning to realize yes, Catholics should evangelize. They're not quite sure what evangelization is. I hope to get there in a few minutes. But I think there are two competing realities that also make it very, very difficult. I wanna speak just briefly about it. I'm not here to talk about them, but we need to know the enemy a little bit. The first one is what's called universalism. It is the belief, you've probably heard this, everybody's going to heaven. Why would you evangelize? Everyone's going to heaven. This is very prominent and growing in the Catholic church and it is not the tradition of the Catholic church. Jesus spoke about hell more than he spoke about heaven. Now the universals will say, well, but he was just trying to scare us. What kind of creep is your God if he's scaring you for no good reason? I mean, I believe one thing to say, don't play in the street because you get hit by a car. Well, that's a real fear. But if everybody's going to heaven, why would Jesus be going, don't go to hell? Walk on the narrow way. It would be crazy. That's not who he is. He's merciful. He's loving. He's trying to protect us from a real danger and offer us the only solution. But it's everywhere. Ralph Martin who works with Mary Healy has done some great work on this and really written your doctoral thesis on this, counteracting the work of universalism. But I would dare say, I think many of you have experienced this in some way or another. I know, I see it all the time. And it's kind of startling and actually becomes kind of illogical because when you say, well, everybody's going to heaven no matter what. And then you look at our culture, our culture looks like it's falling into hell. Why would we think that if we're acting like we're falling into hell, that we're all going to heaven? That's crazy. And to be able to see this, and again, I'm not here to judge. But if there is a heaven and if there is a hell, I think we want to do everything we can to get it right. Here's a conversation that never takes place in hell. One guy walks up in hell to another guy and says, hey, when I was on earth, I used to have a Ferrari. He says, other guy would say, you're on fire. And here's a conversation that never takes place in heaven. Hey, when I was on earth, I used to own a Ferrari because the other guy would say, you can fly. Literally a thousand years from now, nothing else will matter except getting this right. Nothing else will matter. All the awards, thank you, Steve. I do appreciate the word. All the honors, all the money. Thank you, Stephen Voler, for the amazing stipend I'm getting for being here. I was shocked when you told me how big it was. I'm kidding. Boy, am I kidding. No, no, enough. None of those things will matter at all. All that's going to matter is did you get there and did you get as many people there as you could? I got nine kids. I'm not going to be happy. I don't know how God's going to have to figure this out. If all nine don't make it, I don't know how I'm going to be happy in heaven. I'm sure there's an answer for that. He'll explain it when I get there. But from where I sit today, I have no, my kid's not doing well at school or doing well at work or experiencing some temporary setback. I'll sit and cry with them and love them. That's okay, we can endure that. Ted did a great job talking to that. But if you're talking about everlasting loss, that's ultimate failure. And so I want to talk about how do we avoid ultimate failure? Universalism says failure is impossible. The other one is relativism, which says it doesn't really matter what path you're on because all the paths lead to heaven. And that's not the gospel. Jesus said, I am the way, I am the truth. I am the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. Now, is Jesus a liar or is relativism wrong? I'm gonna bet on Jesus being a truth teller. And so to recognize, this is what inspired the apostles. All each of them giving their lives, even say John, they tried to kill him, just didn't work. But they gave their lives to spread the gospel and it grew extraordinarily well in the first few centuries despite the fact that they were being persecuted and killed and it didn't always go well even when they were preaching. Paul was beaten, shipwrecked, stoned. People weren't always receptive. Cause here's the deal, let's go back to my story in Ephesus. Let's say that we go to Ephesus and say, you know what, I'm gonna go here. So let's say we show up in a country that's 99.5% Muslim and we start saying, so we'd like to talk to you about Jesus. It's not gonna go well, but that didn't keep, it wasn't going well for the apostles either. And so to be recognized, I need to spend my life getting to heaven and bringing as many people with me as I can. I'd like to say in response to universalism and to relativism, Pascal has a wager that I'm gonna apply it a different way to evangelization. Pascal says, look, if you're not sure if God exists or not, there's only a couple of options. Either God exists or he doesn't. And you only have a couple of responses. You can either believe in him or not. So let's do a little wager here. If he does exist and you believe in him, you win. If he does believe and you don't believe in him, you lose and you lose everything. If God doesn't exist, it doesn't matter. So act like a believer because it's the only quarter you can win in. And you wanna definitely avoid not believing if he's there. So act like a believer and God will give you faith. But I would say the same thing is true about evangelization. If we don't know if evangelization is necessary or not, why don't we act like it is? Because if we act like it isn't and it is, we will have said no to billions of people and we will lose our own soul. St. Paul said, woe to me if I don't preach the gospel. That was one of the things that struck me when I read St. Paul's document on evangelization. Great one that he wrote back when he was Pope and he said, yes, the gospel is a saving message to those who hear it. But if we don't preach it, we'll be lost. Ooh, okay. So this is an important thing. And if evangelization isn't necessary because all of this is make-believe, we don't lose anything because when you die, it's over. So I wanna highlight the importance of where we sit in the world, the urgency of where we sit in the world. If you look at the world today, there are about 15 million Jewish brothers and sisters. 15 million, there's 535 million Buddhists, 1.2 billion Hindus, 1.9 billion Muslims and 2.3 billion Christians with a total of between seven and eight billion people. Now the good news is 2.3 billion Christians, if each of us just got four or five, we'd be done. We could reach the world. But we've got a bigger problem. A lot of the Christians, as you know, aren't that keyed in on their faith as it is. So we have to do some or allow God to do some internal renewal in us before we'd even be ready to go out. And that's really important. So that's what I'd like to talk to you about for a second. I'd like to talk to you just about, when I talk about the gospel, share the gospel, what are we talking about? It's a deep seated conviction about what I would argue are five things and they're simple. God wants this for everybody so it's not gonna be complicated. But it is important, He wants it for everybody. The first one is that you and I and every person who has ever been created were created out of love. It's amazing to think of the love. C.S. Lewis says this, you will never meet a mere mortal. He goes on and says, everyone you ever meet is either a devastating disaster or an extraordinary God-like person who you'd be tempted to worship if you could see them. I love his conclusion. He says, because of this, we should invest in the people around us and then He says, don't go to work because of this we should play. See the solution here is not to work, it is to love people and when you're with people you love and you're doing what you love, you're playing. He says, it's not frivolous play. But go love people, go love people, enjoy them and then share the gospel. What's the gospel? The gospel, the first point is God loves you. The way the Catechism states it, in the first article of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. I remember being with Cardinal Schoenborn. Cardinal Schoenborn is the Archbishop of Vienna and he invited folks to go serve in Austria and I was sitting with him talking one time and he was the general editor of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the Cardinal speaks Italian and German and I speak English poorly and that's the only language I got. So we were speaking in English obviously because I don't have any others. He probably has seven or eight others and so in English, I said I love that first sentence in the Catechism. God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself in a plan of sheer goodness, freely chose to create man so that he could join, share in his own blessed life. And as I said it, he spoke word for word with me with a big smile on his face and when I finished he said, that paragraph was written by a woman. And I said I think it's the most beautiful sentence I've ever read outside of scripture and he said, ah yes, I said so, which woman? He said, I won't tell you. So I'm still gonna try again. He's getting old, so am I. So maybe he'll tell me before too long. No, we've got, what are we gonna do with these people? So we need to understand they are created just as we were out of love for God, God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself in a plan of sheer goodness. There's no other reason to sheer goodness. The father, the son of the Holy Spirit have no motivation to create, except goodness, because they're perfectly happy already. It's not like one of the three persons said, well I'm kinda getting bored up here, what do you wanna do? Well let's make stuff. That's not what was going on at all. They were like, I can't believe how amazing it is to love you and be loved by you. I know me too. You know, we're all powerful. We could make stuff out of nothing and then we could make some of the stuff persons and we could love them. That's great. That's why you're here. That's why every person who's ever lived here a plan of sheer goodness. We've got to, got to, got to know God's love and his goodness. Or evangelization doesn't make any sense. If you don't have that first principle, it's not good news. Because the second piece is, and we have fallen into sin and are separated by from God. And it's a bigger problem than we think. Some people think about sin. I know there was a point in time in my life where I thought, well, you know, I'm not quite who I ought to be. But with a couple of minor adjustments, I could become who I'm supposed to be. And I kind of like thinking, well, I have a headache and what I need are a couple of ibuprofen. And then you go to the doctor, the doctor says, no, you need brain surgery. Ooh, that's much more serious than I thought. And when God looks at us, he says, you don't have a pain in the chest. You need open heart surgery. I need you to let me open your heart. And I need to pour my life. There's no other solution. The debt of our sin is infinite because we sinned against God and he's infinitely good. That debt's infinite. No amount of repayment can ever fix that. Here's the thing about infinity. Even if you prayed everything you could, not only would you not repay it, you wouldn't even get any closer to repaying it. It's an infinite gap. So you need an infinite person to fix that. Or are you gonna get that? In the womb of the blessed Virgin Mary. The only person who could ever have done this took flesh in the womb of the blessed Virgin Mary, lived with us, taught us, healed us, suffered for us, died for us, rose for us, sent his Holy Spirit for us and wants to pour his Holy Spirit into you. And it's the only, only way. So our sin is infinite and there's only one solution. The solution is Jesus. And here's the peace of the gospel that's not always preached. Here's the peace that I wanna highlight. It's really, really important to see what a big deal this is. It's not just that we're gonna be healed or we're gonna be forgiven. We're super healed and super forgiven. We're also going to be recreated. Recreated in Christ. What a blessing that is to be honored and begin to share in his own life. St. Paul says, we're new creatures. St. John says, we are sons of God, children of God. And what we will become is yet to be known. St. Peter says, we partake in the divine nature. These are crazy. It's almost like the apostles that this has been revealed to are like, I don't know how to explain this to you, but what's going on inside of you is absolutely amazing. You're not just healed and forgiven. You're not just welcome back home. Yes, we're healed. Yes, we're forgiven. Yes, we're welcome back home, but we're actually invited to start to share in God's own divine life. Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus. All of them were created for this, but Buddhism and Hinduism doesn't offer it. Really good people. People who God created because he loves them. People who God wants with him can't get there unless somebody preaches the gospel to them and invites them. How can they search for a God who they've not heard of to recognize this? But at the same time, not only are we called to something great, it's amazing the way it's stated. You know, the Fathers of the Church used this analogy, said, imagine a super hot burning fire and a cold iron beam, and they're sitting on either side of the room and they've got nothing in common with one another. Cold iron beam, burning hot fire, but what if you took the cold iron beam and you laid it into the fire, and you let it sit there for a while? The cold iron beam that does not have the property of fire, it has the property of iron, actually starts to take on the properties of fire. It starts to get hot, and then it starts to glow. Fire produces light. This rod is now producing light. If you take that rod out of the fire and touch it to some, hey, you can start another fire. So that's us with God. We have no capacity to do this, but when we live in Him, we gain the capacity because He begins to live in us by the power of the Holy Spirit and we can go out and share the good news of Jesus Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit, which draws men and women back to their Father. The Father of the prodigal Son, the true Father of the true prodigals who are legion and number, billions on earth. And I think we have to understand that this is a tremendous opportunity. And then the issue there is that there's one last step. We need to respond. And the response is twofold. It's 99.99, it's actually 100% God, and then a little drop of us. God's done everything, but we do need to say, yes, Lord. And we're in an interesting time. When we read the scriptures, we see the world's a little bit different back then because there were no Christians. They were just starting to have Christians. And so the vast majority of people came to the church in one way. There's two ways to come in. Most of them that we read about come in one way. They have faith in Christ and then they're baptized. But for most Catholics, you are baptized and then when you gain the capacity, you begin to believe in Christ. Your faith came later. Now you were given the theological virtue of faith and baptism, but your own 1% the drop that needs to go into the ocean of God's mercy, that I would actually say, yes, I want to follow you. I talk to Catholics all the time and I frequently ask them, so why are you a Catholic? And they'll say, well, my parents were Catholic, which is a great reason that there was a great, but it's not enough because God doesn't have grandchildren. So the fact that your parents were sons and daughters of God still leaves the room for you to become a son or a daughter, not just a grandson or a granddaughter. And how does that happen? Well, if you've been baptized, we encounter the person of Jesus Christ and we give our lives to him. How did Jesus save us? He gave us everything. He made an infinite gift of himself. Now you and I are not infinite, so we can't make an infinite gift, but we can make a complete and total gift. I don't have infinity, Lord, but everything I have is yours. My relationships, my lack of virtue, the virtue, everything that I have, I'm ready to quit my job. Where do you want me to go? And he may say, stay where you are, but thanks, now that we both know everything you have is mine, you can live with me and follow me and to be able to recognize that. The reality of the gospel is so important and I wanna place a sense of urgency on this. I love the statement from St. John Henry Newman. He said, everybody who ever lived still does, somewhere. Everybody who's alive right now will be living somewhere else in 150 years, everybody, and there'll be a whole new world full of people, but they're gonna be living somewhere. Now let's think about this for a second. That's seven to eight billion people. When online, it says that about 54.7 million people die on earth every year. That's 6,000 an hour. I've been talking for two hours, so that's 12th, no, I haven't talked to them. St. Therese, the little flower was sitting in her convent and she's the co-patron of missions and because all she did, she couldn't do anything. She died in her early 20s, very sickly, very weak. She could barely do anything. But she did everything she could with great love for God, begging for souls to be converted. Her image was she was sitting in the convent and she was actually laying down in bed because she couldn't get out of bed and she was looking at snowflakes and she said, Lord, this is like the souls falling into hell. Please Lord, rescue them. And then she'd be given some simple tasks and she couldn't do anything. So it was Therese, why don't you fold the cloth napkins? And from her bed where she couldn't get out, she'd take the first napkin and she'd say, Lord, if you were coming to dinner tonight and this was your napkin, I would want to fold it the best that I could. I want to fold it with great love. While I'm folding it, I want to talk to you, could you please save more souls? Could you please save more souls? Then she put it down and she said, but Lord, if you were coming to dinner tonight and this was your napkin, and she'd fold all the napkins, just loving God and begging God to save souls. And she's the patriot. She's a sense of urgency, this overwhelming urgency that God was so desperately needed by so many people and they were falling into hell. We don't believe in reincarnation. This is a one and done deal for us. People have one life to come to realize that Jesus Christ has come to save them and wants him to come and live in the heart of the Blessed Trinity forever. And most people don't even know it, which would lead me to the conclusion that this generation of Catholics is responsible for this generation of people. We gotta get going. Now, it's not up to us whether they say yes or not to the invitation. We should be as prayed up as filled with sacramental grace and be as loving and as effective as we can be, but it's finally not up to us if they don't say yes. But it is up to us whether they know and most don't even know. We have to rescue them. And sure, there's lots of things to rescue them from in the here and now. There's terrible poverty in the world. People are starving to death. They're dying in thirst. They don't have the medicine they need. People are trapped in slavery, more slaves on earth right now than ever in the history of the world. And they're all waiting for us to rescue them. All of them, waiting desperately, dying by the thousands every hour. Evangelization is the essential work of the church and it's essentially a work of grace. St. Paul VI said this, the church exists in order to evangelize. It's her deepest identity. That's a crazy, the first time I read it, I was like, I'm not even sure that's accurate. What do you mean the church exists in order to evangelize her deepest identity? Wouldn't it be holiness? But he was talking about the church on earth. The church in heaven doesn't need, everybody there's already been evangelized. But the church on earth continues to exist on earth for one reason. If we didn't need to evangelize, he'd take us all home. Our primary work, our identity is to evangelize. That's not my experience of myself or of Catholicism. Let me, let's get my glasses. Where are my glasses? I know, I'm kidding. I did that on purpose. When you get forgetful, it's funny. And you can laugh at people. But there's a more serious form of forgetfulness. If I get a car crash and hit my head, I might have amnesia, which makes for a great movie, the Born Identity, but it's not a good thing. But there's actually a more serious form of forgetfulness called Alzheimer's and it kills people. And I would argue that we as a church have forgotten who we are. We should be existing to evangelize. It should be our deepest identity, but we've stopped evangelizing. We've reduced mission to feeding the hungry, which is really, really important. But if you fed everybody in the world tonight, they'd all be hungry tomorrow. And we should feed them tomorrow again without taking any emphasis off of the corporal works of mercy. We need to place much more emphasis on evangelization. It's not enough to feed the poor Hindus and the poor Muslims and the poor Buddhists. Once they're able to sit and listen and they know that we love them because we went and cared for them and provided the clean water or the clothing or the medicine or whatever. Once they've come to trust us, we should share the good news of Jesus Christ and invite them to embrace Him. There are entire regions where there's no evangelization at all. I'll go back to Ephesus. Ephesus is in Turkey, 99.5% Muslim. But I have a Jesuit priest friend who was telling me a story. The Jesuits have a church, one church in all of Turkey, and there's only a handful in all of Turkey, and this Jesuit church has converts from Islam every year. And I said, well, how's that happening? What are the Jesuits doing? He said, oh, we're not doing anything. The Blessed Virgin Mary is appearing to them by the dozens, and they're just coming to the door to say, we want to embrace Christ. So even God wants this done so much that he keeps sending his mom to do our work. He did the same thing at Guadalupe. The Central America, what we now know as the nation of Mexico or the city of Mexico City, was a culture of death, thousands upon thousands of human sacrifices, a devastating place. And our lady showed up and 10 million people converted to Catholicism over the next 10 to 15 years. There are hundreds of millions, billions of people, but it's not as though we haven't been called. We've actually been commissioned. The last thing that Jesus ever said on earth, after he died on the last of the 40 days, is known as the Great Commission. He says this just before he ascends into heaven, all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit teaching them to observe all that I've commanded and I will be with you until the end of the age. Now I would argue this is the most authoritative statement in the history of the world. You could argue that everything Jesus said was infinitely authoritative and that's not untrue, but Jesus himself highlighted certain things. There were times in his life when he used oath language, when he talks about the Eucharist in John chapter six, he uses oath language, depending on your translation, he'll either say amen, amen, or verily, verily, or truly, truly, you must eat the flesh of the Son of man, but that repeated phrase highlights the importance. Or maybe it could be the setting when he's at the Last Supper and he says this is the chalice, the cup of the new and everlasting covenant. Okay, he's highlighting that. But only once in all the scripture does he say, all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me. He only says it once, it's right here. And then he says, go therefore. Now, we're not Bible scholars, we're Bible students at focus. We work with Bible scholars like Dr. Hahn and others, Dr. Tim Gray and others, but we do think that biblical literacy would be great for all Catholics. And so we teach them basic tools about how to read the scriptures. One of the tools we teach them is that when you see the word therefore in the scriptures, stop, look back and see what it's there for. Cause it just connected two things. What it connects here is all authority and heaven and earth have been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples. It's the most authoritative statement in the history of the world. And I don't think we are doing it as a church and I promise you, I promise, I give you everything I have, which you know, it's like 35 bucks. But if we started to evangelize our church, our culture would come alive. I'll give you a really simple example of the power of evangelization and the impact that it can have. There was a young couple who were very, very devout, evangelical Protestants. And they were also fairly anti-Catholic. And the impact they were gonna have was gonna be amazing. They were gifted, they're talented, they're faithful. And then they had a conversion to faith in Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. And I don't know of a lay person, I'm not sure I know of anybody, maybe John Paul II, but I don't know of any other couple. I don't know of another couple that have had a huge impact than Scott and Kimberly Hawn. Love you guys. When converts come into the church, the church lights up. Because see, we've lived in the church the way that a prince or a princess lives in a castle. We have no idea how lousy it is out there. Our worst day is so much better than their best day. When you allow people to come in the castle, which is the Catholic church, oh my goodness, they're gonna love it. And their joy is gonna be so contagious. And more people wanna come in. The key to the health in this culture, the key to the health in the church, the key to the health in our souls is in evangelization. When we're faithful to that fundamental call to go make disciples, how do you do that? You bring people to the sacraments, baptize them, the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And you teach them, you form them and teach them to observe all that I've commanded you. So I'm gonna leave you with just a simple method of how to do this. If God calls you to China or to Turkey, great. Most of you won't have to leave your home. It's called a little way of evangelization. Three steps. You need to fall so deeply and incredibly in love with Jesus Christ and allow the Holy Spirit to radiate his gifts and his fruits in you. The way we do that is through prayer and the sacraments. No, the way we do that is sacraments in the prayer. Sacraments do more than our prayer, but our prayer is the response. And then we'll start to glow. And then the second thing is just go find a handful of people and start to share the story of what's going on in the life of God. This was last night's talk, but it could be a story of a saint. It could be a story from salvation history from the scriptures. Tell them about David or tell them about how Peter quit his job on the best day of his professional career. And just talk about what does that like and start having spiritual conversations with study the scriptures, discuss the lives of the saints and then invite them and encourage them to imitate you by placing themselves in the fire of divine love and then going out and finding others. And you'll set off an exponential growth. We have been doing this for 25 years in focus. We started with two part-time staff members. And we now, as we said, nearly a thousand full-time missionaries. We've reached hundreds of thousands of people. It's not rocket science. It's actually just what Jesus did. Jesus, when he wanted to change the world, went and found 12 men and went camping for three years. Now, yeah, he worked miracles, but I'll tell you, the big impact that Jesus had in the world and through the world was through those 11 men. In fact, the vast majority of people that he worked miracles for, that he healed, that he taught, were yelling, crucify him, crucify him. But the 11 that he invested his life into and then invited them to do the same, well, they went out and changed the world. It's been my experience that the same recipe works over and over and over again. And so we will just allow God to love us. And if we will then go out and love others and share our stories so that they will do the same, then we'll become who we're meant to be. St. Catherine of Siena said this about you and me. She said, if you are who you were meant to be, you would set the world on fire. So let's become who we're meant to be. I wanna close this in prayer and then I'm gonna ask Bob and the team to lead us in worship. But let's pray, name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen. Lord God, there is a world in desperate, desperate darkness waiting for us to come alive. So we're asking you to renew us, live in us like you haven't lived so long so that we can't say no, we can't even say wait. Call us Lord, send us. They're in our neighborhood, they're in our family. They're in our parish and they're all over the world. So God, we beg you that you would allow the church to become an evangelizing body, your mystical body. We love you and we want people, more people to know you and to love you so that together we can cry out glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit as it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be a world without end. Amen, Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Bob, thank you.