 Hi, I'm Deacon Ralph Poya. One of the questions that's happening in the church today is, everybody wants to know, what is a disciple of Jesus Christ? Frankly, most people tend to align or define what a disciple is based on membership in a church, and that's so far from the truth. I would say, I mean there's a lot of ways that you can define a disciple, but I would limit the definition to six key areas. The first area would be obviously being activated or sharing in the life of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit actually indwells your heart and you begin to live and follow the Lord Jesus Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. So having Him there and then beginning to empower you and activate His life in you through the supernatural manifestations of the Holy Spirit, the gifts of the Spirit, 1 Corinthians chapter 12, and also the natural manifestations of the Holy Spirit, Galatians chapter 5. So that would be the first one. The second one is realizing that you're united to God not just by yourself, it's not just me and God, but it's me, God, and the church. We're united into an entire community of believers. So therefore we're called to enter into the sacramental life of the church. So we have the Holy Spirit, we're also united with the church and other individuals where we share faith with one another. The third one element of a disciple of Christ is that we begin a journey of pursuing virtue in our lives, the theological virtues and the cardinal virtues. If you want to know what those are, look them up. But seriously, the virtues of life, things that are good habits in terms of following God and they're the elements that enable us to become holy as we activate our lives through the Holy Spirit. And of course in that journey becomes the fourth level and that is overcoming sin because I suspect that most of you are like me and we're just a bunch of sinners and we're used to living in rebellion against God. And so becoming holy is a whole process of overcoming our sinful desires and actually desiring wanting to become good and holy. The third critical piece is sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ, being able to lead someone else or being able to evangelize, that would be the appropriate word, to lead other people to encounter the risen Christ. Every disciple should know how to lead other individuals into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and how to activate the Holy Spirit in their lives. And of course last but not least is a disciple of Jesus Christ is self-replicating. We're called to replicate ourselves and other people. So that means we need to know how to train other people to become mature disciples of Jesus Christ. We need to literally walk the journey with them, help them to see what it's like, help them to learn how to grow in virtue, to learn to develop a prayer life, to learn to study the scriptures, all of these great basic fundamentals, how to learn how to do the mass and to actually engage the mass so that we celebrate wholeheartedly. Being a disciple of Jesus Christ is much more than being a member of the church and I hope you will become one soon.