 I'm so blessed to be able to be here with you this evening because of everything that God is doing, but also because it is bedtime at my house and I am here with you. So when I would think about, you know, having children and I would think about rocking them and reading them stories and these sweet like goodnight and all these wonderful things, I had no idea. I had no idea what bedtime was going to be like. I've learned as the comedian Jim Gaffigan says, bedtime at our house is more like a hostage negotiation but in reverse. So we're like, whatever you need, just stay in. Do not come out, chopper to Cuba. Sure, it's yours, just don't come out, please just stay in there. So I am super excited to get to be here with you this evening and I have been given the task to talk tonight about claiming our divine inheritance. We've been talking about this all weekend about our divine inheritance and tonight we're gonna talk about claiming it and specifically, we're going to be talking about what that inheritance is as the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. The indwelling of the Holy Spirit and so in preparation for tonight, I started reading a book by Father Cantamalissa that's called Sober Intoxication of the Spirit and when I say reading in my house, I have four small children so what that really means is like five minutes at a time till someone's playing in the toilet so I really didn't get all that far to be honest. But the part that I did get through really explaining this phrase really just jumped off the page to me and made my heart come alive and as I was thinking about this and thinking about this concept, I was thinking about the first time that I experienced something like this, the sober intoxication of the Spirit and this was when I was probably about 18 years old and I'm originally from Colorado. I was at home in my parish, a daily mass and it was towards the end of mass I had gone up and I was an extraordinary minister of Holy Communion. Well, after communion, we have to consume whatever is left in the cup of the precious blood so I finished off my cup, I go back to the sacristy and there's this little old lady who's standing in the sacristy and she's just looking in her cup and kind of looking around and looking and I'm like, are you okay? She's like, well, there's kind of a lot in there and I was like, oh, I'll drink it for you, okay? And she's like, really? You really will? I'm like, yeah, sure. So I take it and I finish off the precious blood. Now, God, it was very good to me in grace that preceded me, I think, in my teenage years so I felt very strongly that I was not going to have my first drink until I was 21. So, but you know, this doesn't count, of course, and so after mass, this was some of my friends, we go over to my youth minister's office and I'm sitting in his office and we're talking and I'm like, I feel really weird. What is this feeling that I'm having? We're talking and I'm looking, I remember looking at this picture on his wall and how it was like moving a little bit and I was like, I feel good, but it's weird. I don't understand. So I started explaining it to him and he's asking me some questions. I'm like, you know, I was just that mass, blah, blah, blah. We put two and two together. I'm like, oh, oh my gosh, oh my goodness. So then my friends drove me home so that was my first experience of maybe not so much sober intoxication of the spirit but of understanding what this phrase, what this phrase looks like, right? And this idea of sober intoxication, it's something that I had only heard about recently but that the saints and the bishops have been talking about for hundreds of years. I want to share with you this great quote from St. Augustine where he's talking about this. He says, the Holy Spirit has come to abide in you. Do not make him withdraw. Do not exclude him from your heart in any way. He is a good guest. He found you empty and he filled you. He found you hungry and he satisfied you. He found you thirsty and he intoxicated you. May he truly intoxicate you. The apostle said, do not be drunk with wine which leads to debauchery. Then as if to clarify what we should be intoxicated with, he adds, but be filled with the spirit. Addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with all of your heart. Doesn't a person who rejoices in the Lord and sings to him exuberantly seem like a person who is drunk? I like that kind of intoxication. The spirit of God is both a drink and light. And I love this quote, I love this concept and maybe it's because for the past two years I've been either pregnant or nursing and I really miss Margaritas but there's something about this lately that has really just made my heart come alive that I love. And Saint Augustine, he goes on in one of his Easter homilies where he's talking about this concept and he's talking about on the Pentecostal the apostles experienced the Holy Spirit and then they go forth and they burst forth out of that upper room and how then the people, when they see the joy and the way that the apostles are asking they start asking, are they drunk but it's only nine o'clock in the morning? What's wrong with these people? And so Saint Augustine goes so far as to say actually, yes they were, actually yes they were but it was this sober intoxication of the spirit. And so when we look at these words we look at the word sober and what does that mean? It means being whole, being healthy, bearing pure and prudent but above all what it means is being fully obedient. Above all what it means is obedience but when we think about the word obedience especially in this concept of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit when we think about this idea of obedience what it really requires is intoxication. That when we talk about intoxication we talk about drunkenness we usually think of it in this really negative way but this is a redeemed version of the word because what happens in this moment when someone is intoxicated they're not thinking about what's practical they're not thinking about what's logical or what the consequences are gonna be they're moving in the moment. And so what does it mean for us to be fully obedient? To be fully intoxicated by the Holy Spirit? What does that look like in our lives? To move without wondering about the consequences but to let him take control? To have freedom in full obedience and so here is my question for you tonight the defining question I think for our evening it is not how much of the Holy Spirit do you have? It is how much of you does the Holy Spirit have? How much of you does the Holy Spirit have? And Mary brought up some beautiful things I think for us to consider tonight when we start asking there's these areas of our life that we are blocking off that we have not given control over in our lives and we start asking ourselves what are these areas and what are these reasons? And for many of us we think about why can I not receive like a child? Why can I not receive my inheritance? And really when we talk about inheritance we have to think about these familial ties that's what an inheritance is, right? And I know for me in my life when I think about this concept of inheritance it mostly brings up a lot of wounds for me. And I kind of tend to think of like being a child of God as maybe like this kind of cheesy kind of an idea because I know that really at the depth of where I am with that concept it comes up a lot of different memories for me in my life. And now my story really I think my faith story began basically when I was you when I was sitting in a seat at a Steubenville conference and I would tell you today that every single part of my life the man that I married, the existence of my children what I do for a living, every part of my life was absolutely changed and affected because of an experience that I had at a Steubenville conference. That it's incredible that the Lord how he has worked in a full circle but for me when I was a teenager I had this absolutely life changing baptism in the spirit kind of a moment being able to be before the Lord in the Eucharist and for the first time in my life a really understanding, really, really understanding God loves you and what that means so fully it changed everything, changed everything for me. Well a few years later on my senior year of high school my dad left my mom a note one morning and it said that he didn't love her anymore and that he was leaving our family and it seemed like it kind of was a shock was a surprise to us but there had been we'd always had a hard time there was a lot of tension, a lot of anger a lot of yelling in our house and so but when it all kind of came to a head like when this was really actually happening there was never this kind of sit-down conversation where my parents told my brother and I or anything like that it was actually just screaming fits over and over again the police showing up at our house because of noises that neighbors had heard and things like that it was my dad leaving and coming back and leaving and coming back over the course of two years and every single time feeling like everything is gonna be okay only so that we could all be ripped to shreds again. It was the darkest, most difficult thing that I had ever experienced in my entire life and as a teenager who had been so immersed in an incredible youth ministry experience incredibly youth ministry program I knew exactly where to go right like I knew to go to the Lord to bring him all of these things bring him all of these wounds and I poured myself out I poured myself out at the feet of the Lord and I would pray a nine day novena and on the 10th day I would start a new one and over and over and over again I was begging I was begging the Lord and the verse that I kept bringing to the Lord was from the book of Matthew and I kept saying to him which one of you would hand his son a stone when he asked for a loaf of bread or a snake when he asked for a fish if you then who are wicked know how to give good gifts to your children how much more your heavenly Father give good gifts to those who ask him and I was begging God to come into my home and to make us whole again and after so much of this after so many months over and over and over again my heart started to harden and I remember one night specifically telling the Lord like okay I'm still in all right I'm gonna be at Daily Mass and I'm gonna go to adoration and I'm gonna pray my prayers every single night and I'm gonna love you and I'm gonna serve you but I am not gonna pray about this anymore. I'm not gonna ask you about this anymore and I remember going to confession to our parish priest and telling him about my struggles and I said I'm asking the Lord I feel like I'm asking him for these loaves of bread and instead he's throwing rocks at me I feel like he's not even handing me rocks it's like things just continue to get worse and they continue to get worse and worse and worse and so as my parents' divorce progressed and then finally reached its point of the end of their marriage and the legal proceeding is what my dad decided to do was emancipate me as his child which he did not do for my younger brother and so basically what that meant legally was that he's no longer responsible for me as his child it's basically the opposite of an adoption the opposite of an inheritance right and so in my prayer continuing every night on my knees in front of the Lord and offering him my heart and all of these things but withholding this portion of the biggest thing that was happening in my life it was one night I was in prayer and I just had this image like the Lord was showing me that here's my father and it was as if he had this umbrella that was over top of him and God was showing me like Katie I am hearing you I am hearing you all of the grace that you are asking for all of the mercy and all of the love I am pouring it out in a flood over your father and even more so yeah I want it more than you do I want his conversion I want things to go back to normal I want love and healing and all of these things in your life I want it more than you and I'm giving more than what you're asking for but it's like he is standing there with this umbrella over him and not letting any of it touch him and what I learned that night which brought me so much peace was two things and one was that I couldn't stop praying for my father because if at any moment that umbrella came down or there was any crack that was making him available I wanted that deluge of grace and love and mercy to be there and to be available to him in that moment but the second thing that I learned was that I had to look in my own life and I had to ask what are the areas of my life where I am blocking what God wants to do within me what are the areas in my life where I am the one who is holding up this umbrella who is not allowing God to be active within my life the question I had to ask myself that night was not how much of the Holy Spirit do you have but how much of you does the Holy Spirit have and I think as we talk about this Mary talked about this also briefly this morning about this concept of being able to receive as a child and I think that for most of us in our adult lives we don't know how to do this that from the time that we were very young we have been learning how to earn rather than how to receive and from a very young age we learned how to receive affirmation and affection from our parents my youngest is 10 months old and whenever he waves everybody in our house goes crazy as three bigger sisters and he understands that reaction that we have when he does something good right as we get bigger we earn grades and we earn playing time eventually we earn affection and attention from the opposite sex and then of course we earn within our daily lives within our jobs and things like that right and I think that for a lot of us even though those are all good things those are all fine you know but the reality is that for a lot of us we are more comfortable earning than we are receiving that for most of us we would rather be employees than be sons and daughters of the Lord because what it does for us in those kind of circumstances is it gives us a little bit of this feeling of being in control that we're not really comfortable with letting God do all the work but that we want to be able to contribute and we want to be able to be a part of what God is doing and more so that we want to be able to grasp on to some level of control in our lives and that's the scary thing when we start talking about things like sober intoxication when we start talking about the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and we don't have to pretend like this isn't a scary concept to lose control, to lose our inhibitions and to let someone else be at the wheel but really in the Old Testament in Proverbs it says that the beginning of all wisdom is fear the beginning of all wisdom is fear of the Lord and the question is where are we gonna place that fear? We don't have to be ashamed to wrestle with this concept of who God is and what he wants to do within us because God is both lion and he is also lamb I learned this from my friend, Father Dave Pavanka that God is lion and he is also and he is lamb but really what we would prefer to focus on is the lamb part, you know because lambs are not scary there's nothing intimidating about a lamb and yes, like the lamb of God he brings peace in our lives and that's really important but our God, he is also a lion and he is also a fire and when we think about those kind of images we think about being at the mercy of a lion or at the mercy of a five alarm fire those things make us anxious and our first reaction is to get them under control because what fires and lions do is they consume they consume everything in their path and control isn't an option and for some of us who are here in this room saying those words is almost physically painful I'm kind of choking on them as they're coming out of my mouth like control is not an option and if we want to really be able to find out what God has in our life we really wanna be able to find out the zindwelling of the Holy Spirit of what God has in store for us tonight that's what we have to let go of because the God that wants to enter into this room tonight the God that wants to change everything for us he is untameable he is uncontainable he is uncontrollable but paradoxically that God is also available he is accessible and his presence is attainable and I wanna talk tonight about this presence about this presence of the Lord and as I was praying through this talk and really that's kind of all they gave me was like this title and what direction to kind of go and I'm like you could go anywhere with this right and as I was praying through this talk what kept coming back to me of this idea of this indwelling of the Holy Spirit was specifically this idea of presence of God being present to us and you know the amazing thing about God's presence is that it's something that we long for from the very depths of our heart but amazingly is what God longs for in the very depths of his heart that we have this shared longing that we share with the Lord of a desire to be in the presence of one another and so in the early Jewish tradition the Jewish teachers had a word for this and it was Shekinah, the Hebrew word that was specifically talking about God's presence among his people and they would talk about these different times in the Old Testament when God was present with his people as the Shekinah glory and when we look at the Old Testament from the very, very beginning the very, very first pages of Genesis we see that plan A was that God's people were going to live in this garden that they were going to be in the presence of God that God was there, everything was great everything was fine and when the fall happens out of many of these sin and there's all of these different consequences but the worst one was that they were no longer in the presence of God and what we find for the whole rest of the Old Testament is an entire story all about God's people feeling this urgency to come back into the presence of God wanting to be back within his very presence looking for the Shekinah and so generations and generations pass and the Lord is speaking to his people through the prophets and time goes on well what's really, really particular about when we get to the period of Moses is that here we have these people who for hundreds of years have been only having access to the Lord as he speaks to his prophets and the prophets will bring the God's message and mission to his people but here we have God's people in captivity and Moses is going and he is calling for them to be released, right? And so we all know this story but what is really unique about this is as the people come out of slavery as they are leaving Egypt that there is this cloud that is going before them and this should jump out at us because this is the first time in all of these years that God's presence is suddenly there made public to his people and they refer to this in the tradition as the Shekinah cloud that God called his people out of slavery not just so that they could be free but specifically out of slavery so that they could be in his presence he was calling them unto himself and as they went and they were crossing the Red Sea this cloud, this presence of God this pillar cloud was behind them and shielded them from the Egyptian people as they crossed through the Red Sea and this cloud would then therefore go before God's people and as Moses would go and he would speak with the Lord on Mount Sinai and the cloud would descend on the mountain and there was thunder and there was lightning and it was darkness and the people were terrified but they knew that their God was there he was there with them and he wanted them to have access to who he was and so as Moses goes up and he receives the covenant and he receives the Ten Commandments and the Lord gives him this very specific instruction of what to do and so God tells him how to make this Ark of the Covenant this box that they would keep the word of the Lord within and the directions and the instructions that the Lord gives them it's this box that is made out of wood but it is lined with gold and on top there is this lid and over top of it is these statues of these angels as you can see here and what the Lord promises is that he and his Shekinah glory that he will be seated in this space that is in between the angels and the lid of this box and that this is going to be called the mercy seat and he asked specifically that Moses will build this elaborate tent that has all of these different parts all these different portions and veils and all these things to hold God's presence there so that he could be with his people and this tent was called the Tabernacle tent so what we see here and why this is so important is that again God's people have been starving for his presence for all of these different generations and the God who cannot be bound by anything has decided that he is going to bind himself to his people that he's going to bind himself to this tent and make himself accessible so that he can be with his chosen and so as they build the Tabernacle and they bring the Ark of the Covenant and it says in the book of Exodus that the cloud covered the tent of meeting and the glory of the Lord filled the Tabernacle so much so that Moses could not enter the tent of meeting because the cloud settled down upon it and the glory of the Lord filled the Tabernacle and whatever the Lord rose from the Tabernacle the Israelites would set out on their journey but if it did not lift they would not go forward only when it lifted did they go forward and the cloud of the Lord was over the Tabernacle by day and fire in the cloud by night in the sight of the whole house of Israel and all the stages of their journey this is kind of a terrifying type of an image when I think about it this glory cloud, this shekinah cloud that is filled with fire at night and goes before them and this cloud by day and as time goes on and God's people are able to bring this Tabernacle tent with them as they journey and that God is there and he is with them and of course eventually they're given this the king David who has this desire within his heart to build this great temple for the Lord and his son Solomon does so and Solomon wants to build this dwelling place for the Lord and here we have the biggest difference that God is no longer portable that this presence of the shekinah cloud will no longer go anywhere but that there is one place and one place only on earth that is going to be the taste of Eden where people are able to be that much closer to the Lord and so as they build the temple they build this big infrastructure and on the outside it's called the outer courts and anybody can enter into the outer courts and then on the inside of that is another courtyard and inside there just the men are able to go and then inside there is another court and this is where the priests are able to go and the priests would bring in the sacrifices that they would offer and inside of there was the inner courts which was the holy place and then inside of that was what was called the holy of holies and the holy of holies was where the ark of the covenant was going to dwell the presence of God and it was covered by a veil so Solomon as he built this elaborate temple for the Lord to dwell for him to be there and the high priest would enter was going to be able to enter into the holy of holies only one time a year and as he did he would bring the blood offering of the sacrifices within the temple that he would offer it in front of the presence of the Lord and they would actually tie a rope around his waist so that they could pull him out if he died in the presence of the Lord so that no one would have to go in and get him that this was this incredibly powerful moment that was so sacred that no one else would be able to go and enter into this place to be able to be in the presence of the Lord except for once a year to offer this sacrifices for the sins of the people hoping for God's forgiveness and so as Solomon builds this temple and here they are they have it all ready and they're bringing the ark of the covenant and they're bringing it to the temple ready to consecrate it to the Lord and says King Solomon and the entire community of Israel they gathered for the occasion before the ark they sacrificed sheep and oxen too many too many to number or count the priests brought the ark of the covenant to the Lord in its place the inner sanctuary of the house the holy of holies beneath the wings of the cherubim and when the priests left the holy place the cloud filled the house of the Lord so that the priests could no longer minister because of the cloud since the glory of the Lord had filled the house of the Lord and so the Lord comes and he dwells within the tabernacle that has been built for him he comes and he dwells within the temple that has been built in his honor and Solomon comes and he prays before the intercourse and he says is God indeed to dwell on earth if heavens and the highest heavens cannot continue how much less this house which I have built regard kindly the prayer and petition of your servant Lord my God and listen to the cry of supplication which I your servant utter before you this day may your eyes be open night and day towards this house the place of which you have said my name shall be there listen to the prayer of your servant makes towards this place listen to the position of your servant and of your people of Israel which they offer and then Solomon goes on and on and on and on and on for another chapter and a half and what he's doing in this moment is he is begging the Lord to keep his presence with his people and he's saying Lord if we do this if we make this mistake then please hear us and stay with us if we make this mistake show us your mercy hear us hear our cries please stay with us the mistakes that we will make and so after all of this this promise that God makes to Solomon says the Lord says to him I have heard the petition which you have offered in my presence I have consecrated this house which you have built and I have set my name there forever and my eyes and my heart shall be there always that God desires to be close to his people and that his eyes and his heart will be there always so what about us? What about us thousands of years later and thousands of miles away in a field house in Steubenville, Ohio what about us? In St. Augustine what he says is that the New Testament it is hidden in the old and that the Old Testament is unveiled in the new and what this means is that the whole Old Testament what God is doing is he's preparing his people that upon the fall they weren't ready they weren't ready in their sinfulness and that they didn't have a savior and over the course of all these generations he's getting them ready getting them ready for something greater and coming closer and closer to them and unveiling a little bit more and a little bit more but what we know is that he is leading up to something bigger that he's leading up to something greater something greater than clouds and fire something greater than tents and arcs and tabernacles and temples that God is looking for something more this is all a preparation a preparation for the gift the fulfillment of everything that he has been ready for at this time and so my friends tonight we are talking about claiming the divine inheritance we're talking about the indwelling of the Holy Spirit the Hebrew word for indwelling shekaina it's you that what God has been preparing his people for for all of this time wanting his presence to be known to come closer what he has been looking for and leading up to the fulfillment is you and we can look to the scriptures and we can see that it says that we are a temple of the Holy Spirit in 1 Corinthians 619 that we are joined together as a church and we grow into a temple of the Lord Ephesians 2, 21 in Jesus we are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit that's Ephesians 2, 22 my friends it's you eleven years ago I was pregnant with my first child and it was actually the very first time since I was a freshman in high school that I was going to miss the Steubenville youth conference I was a youth minister I worked at conferences as when I was in college and then I was a youth minister out of college for many years and my child was due I was thirty eight weeks pregnant when my teens were about to go to the Steubenville South Conference and I was so sad I watched the conference the whole weekend on the computer on the live stream I met them when they got home from the bus and a few days later I woke up in the middle of the night and I was feeling a little strange and I got up and I was thinking I don't know what's going on turns out I had a baby a few hours later so I was in labor but I woke up that night and I was thinking okay well if I'm not going to go to work in the morning there's a couple loose ends I want to tie up so it was the middle of the night it's totally quiet and I decided that I was going to send an email to all of my teens who had just gone to the youth conference just offering them a little bit of my heart and what I hoped for them as they came home and so one thing that I was really as I was praying for them and praying about was to write one thing that really struck me is I was thinking about you know this baby that I was carrying and I was thinking about the fact that a few weeks into my pregnancy you know I was pregnant with this human being and I had an eternal soul a heartbeat that was living inside of me right that was going to change my entire life change the lives of other people as she was when she was born and that she would affect and for several weeks after I was pregnant with her this was all happening inside of my body but I didn't know it didn't make any difference in my life whatsoever it didn't change the things I was talking about the thinking about the plans that I was making the decisions that I was making in any given day it changed nothing about my life whatsoever but the fact that I didn't know that that was happening inside of me didn't make it any less true and what I shared with them and what I want to share with you tonight is that the God of the universe who can make the blind see and the deaf hear who can bring the dead back to life could have chosen anywhere as his dwelling place but by virtue of your baptism he has chosen your heart that this is where the Lord of the universe wants to make his dwelling and why would he do this? Because it's your inheritance because it's your inheritance because you are his child and in the New Testament we hear a lot several times about how we are the adopted sons and daughters of God and this kind of always bothered me a little bit like why are we adopted sons and daughters? Like can I just be an actual daughter of God? And I was reading this article recently about this concept and about why God would speak this way why the New Testament would speak of us in this kind of a way and this is because of the time that the New Testament was being written in Roman law the laws said that if you had a child and you didn't want that child for any reason they had a disability or you wanted a boy instead of a girl or whatever it was you didn't have to even give a reason you could give that child away you could give them up and the Roman law at that time there was no consequence for that whatsoever however, if you decided that you were going to adopt a child you knew exactly what it was that you were getting so you had no excuses there was no way for you to ever be able to sever your ties to that child that this child would always be yours would always be a part of you be a part of your family and additionally what would happen in Roman law when someone was adopted is that this person became legally a new person that the old person didn't exist anymore if they had debts then they didn't have to be paid because that person didn't exist anymore that this person became totally a part of the family and had every single right that a biological child would have that this is our inheritance this is what God wants to bring us into and the scripture says second Corinthians six it says I will be a father to you and you shall be sons and daughters to me says the Lord Almighty Galatians four six as proof that you are children God sent the spirit of his son into our hearts crying out Abba father Galatians four seven you are no longer a slave but a child and if a child then also an heir through God first John three two beloved we are now God's children what we shall be has not yet been revealed we do not know we do know that when it is revealed we shall be like him for we shall see him as he is and my favorite I want to share a verse or a quote from the catechism this is article four hundred and sixty and it's quoting Saint Irenaeus and Saint Athanasius it says the word became flesh to make us partakers in the divine nature for this is why the word became man and the son of God became the son of man so that man by entering into communion with the word and thus receiving divine sonship might become a son of God for the son of God became man so that we might become God the only begotten son of God wanting to make a shares in his divinity assumed our nature so that he made man might make men gods now read this and I think is this a Mormon conference what are we doing the first time that I read that I was like I need to get this really right because I don't want to be communicated on the stupid bill stage so I mean this is crazy right like God became man so that we might become God's what does this mean now I'll give you the image of the sun right this analogy of the sun and when we look up into the sky and we look at the sun we aren't actually seeing the sun alright the sun is 100 million miles away it's really far away we don't see the actual sun what we see are the rays of the sun which carry the characteristics of the sun it's light and it's heat and it's warmth here to the earth and that we experience the sun by looking at the sun and we can't really tell where the sun stops and the rays of the sun start right this is what the saints did that when people looked at them that they were blinded by sunlight this is our call this is who we are meant to be that we are so called into so much union with the Lord that people experience God when they meet us and how we can ask you know how can this be true this is true all of this can only be true but because in order for us to receive an inheritance someone has to die that in order for an inheritance to mean anything that someone has to die and as bishops see I'm shared last night that our debt has been paid St. Paul he talks for a long time in Hebrews exactly about this about if there is a will if there is an inheritance that a death has to take place first and he says that when Christ came as the high priest and the good things that came to be he passed through the tabernacle that was not made by hands not belonging to this creation and he entered into the sanctuary not with the blood of goats and calves but with his own blood Christ did not enter into a sanctuary made by hands a copy of the true one but into heaven itself so that he can prepare he can appear before God on our behalf God sent the perfect sacrifice he sent his very presence in order that we could receive the presence of the Spirit within us when we look at the Gospels at the very first chapters of several of the Gospels and we look at the beginning of the Gospel of John and it says the word became flesh the word became flesh and made his dwelling among us the word that they use here for dwell literally is translated as made a tabernacle that these things should jump off the page to us that this is Shekinah language that when we look in Luke and it talks about when the Holy Spirit came and he overshadowed Mary that the word that they use there for overshadow is the exact same word that they talked about when the glory cloud of the Lord the Shekinah cloud came and overshadowed the tabernacle and the verse that I read in Exodus is the exact same word that they use when they talked about the Shekinah cloud filling the temple with his presence that Jesus is here that God's glory is here and I wanna talk just for a moment about this desire that we have for the Holy Spirit to come and dwell in us and so I think we have to talk about the one who did it perfectly the one who experienced it perfectly that the Blessed Mother had this indwelling this physical indwelling of the Son but that she also had this physical and spiritual indwelling of the Holy Spirit and she did so so perfectly and that she had exactly what we want that she's most famous for one of her guesses but that her yes was one in a million that every breath that she took every word that she said, every action that she did was a yes to the Holy Spirit so much so that theologians have talked about how she was animated by the Holy Spirit now Maximilian Colby he struggled a lot with this idea with this concept how Mary, when she appeared to St. Bernadette and Lords she said, she appeared and she said I am the Immaculate Conception St. Maximilian Colby she struggled with this and he went back and forth and his findings actually became one of the most powerful theological contributions to Mariology because what he discovered as he was praying through this and struggling with it was the Holy Spirit is actually the uncreated Immaculate Conception so how can Mary say I am the Immaculate Conception? Well, what happened within her was that she became so defined by what God had done in her that she even took on those characteristics and that she didn't have any divine nature whatsoever but that she started defining herself by what God had done in her life when I got married I stopped being Katie Lockwood and I started becoming Katie Hartfield it didn't change who I was but it said something about what I was going to what had happened in my life and who I was gonna be and I think that the question for us tonight that we need to ask therefore is how do we define ourselves? Do we define ourselves by what God has done in us? How do we see ourselves this night as we are about to be in the presence of the Lord as we're about to ask for the Holy Spirit to be here we ask not how much of the Holy Spirit do you have but how much of you does the Holy Spirit have? As we ask this tonight and we bring this into prayer I wanna come back to that verse from Matthew where it says which one of you would hand to son of stone when he asked for a loaf of bread or a snake when he asked for a fish if then you who are wicked know how to give good gifts to your children how much more will your heavenly father give good gifts to those who ask him my friends what Jesus is talking about here and his good gifts is the Holy Spirit it's not about changing our lives it's not about changing the lives of our children or the people who are around us right it's about allowing the Lord to invade us about allowing the Spirit to well up within us so that prayer stops being something that we do but something that happens inside of us and I wanna invite you tonight I wanna invite you tonight to pull down that umbrella I wanna invite you tonight to allow that lion and that fire to consume pull on that Spirit tonight and allow him to do what he wants to do in this place, in this room that the shekinah glory will fall and that we will be able to be in his presence just as we were created to be so we're gonna enter into a time of worship enter into a time of allowing that Spirit to well up within us to stop thinking about what's happening around us or what we're feeling or what's going on but to only focus on shekinah to only focus on God's presence here with us tonight so I'd like to invite you to open your hands surrender to the Lord as we enter into this time of worship