>>Can't you just feel it,
the conflict is becoming apparent in our culture?
It reminds me of those words of John Paul II:
"We're now living in the final confrontation between the Gospel
and the anti-Gospel; between the Church and the anti-Church;
between Christ and the Antichrist."
And if we don't choose to know God's word,
to believe God's word, to follow God's word,
we're going to be a sitting duck for all kinds of confusion,
all kinds of disorder.
Those are really important choices
that people have to make.
>>And these choices are difficult.
Who am I going to marry?
What kind of life am I going to live?
How am I going to raise my kids?
What am I going to do with my time,
my talent, and my treasure?
And I have to make a choice today.
Jesus says to each one of us,
"I came that you might have life and have it to the full."
The question is: Do we want it?
>>Welcome to The Choices We Face.
You know Peter Herbeck so well, he's our co-host, and he's the
Director of Missions for Renewal Ministries, and he was
speaking at a conference in Canada recently.
Peter, tell us a little about
the conference and what's going on.
>>It was the New Evangelization Summit,
which you spoke at a few years ago,
and it was started by Micky Dopp and his wife
and some others from Canada.
Very passionate- committed to spreading the message of the
New Evangelization, equipping people, and it's not just-
it wasn't a conference just for those who were there,
but it was piped out to 35 different locations across
Canada and the U.S., and it's growing,
it's growing every year.
It's really- his goal is to just keep spreading it out,
and he gets really excellent speakers there.
I know Bishop Baron was a part of it.
He was supposed to be on site,
but he couldn't do it because of-
so you know, they videotaped him and they put it up,
and Sister Miriam James was there.
She's really a powerful, dynamic speaker, so-
going to be at our Gathering this coming year in April-
and so it was a great time, really excellent.
>>Good, okay, well let's take a look at the video,
and then we'll talk about it.
>>Good.
There's a lot that has to go on in here in our hearts
for us to have the courage and the grace
and the power to go forward.
And I think of Jesus so clear in Matthew chapter 6,
as I mentioned last night, don't be anxious about your life.
Really, Jesus?
There's a lot to be anxious about.
What I see happening is like the temperature
is rising in society and the culture.
And it's extremely confusing
where it's going, it's troubling.
And as a result, our anxiety quotient, or level, is rising,
and when that happens people get tense and people get fearful,
and it preoccupies our mind, and we get caught up in what the
culture is doing, which is kind of a frantic anxiety for
more information and more talk, more this,
more that, and before you know it, our days are filled with
the anxiety of the world and constant Trump talk and
everything else that goes on out there.
And we get preoccupied with it, and without even realizing it,
you guys, it steals our peace and our confidence
and it causes us to lose clarity.
Why am I here?
Where am I going?
What's this all about?
Scripture says what?
Cast all your cares upon because He cares for you, Saint Peter.
Okay, you've got real cares and you've got real anxieties,
cast them on Jesus.
But we cast them, and then we reel it back in and we
keep them, and it affects our ability to pray, friends,
which is the ground of all missionary
and evangelistic activity, prayer.
Because then our prayer becomes worrying before the Lord.
It's okay to cast your cares upon Him,
but we have to have the quiet and the intimacy with the Lord,
so that He can quiet our souls and He can teach us who we are,
and He can guide us.
It's absolutely crucial.
I think there's a lot of lip service
paid to prayer, but the fundamental thing that's going
to make you fruitful as an evangelist and as a missionary
is deep, daily prayer.
The missionary as John Paul II said, is first a contemplative.
It's contemplative in action,
and the days ahead, friends, are going to get more intense.
There's no magic bullet to this moment,
there's no great political hero that's going to rise
and clean all this up for us.
We're going to go through very hard times,
and it's purposed by God.
God is permitting it to happen to purify His Church,
and He wants a fearless- a Church that's in love,
a Church that's confident in Him and filled with his Holy Spirit.
Amen?
Going forward.
[audience applauses]
Psalm 27, "The Lord is my light and my salvation,
whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the stronghold of my life of whom shall I be afraid.
When evildoers assail me to devour my flesh,
my adversaries and foes, they will stumble and fall.
Though a host encamp against me,
a host encamp against me, my heart will not fear."
Let me read that again, disciple:
"Though a host encamp against me,
I will not fear, though a war rise against me,
I shall yet be confident."
That's a Christian mind, that's a renewed mind.
I can be confident because I know he's with me always;
I can be confident because I know where my life is going and
if I am meant to die an early death and I'm meant to be mocked
and persecuted; if I'm meant to die or be martyred, so be it.
I'm in the hands of the Lord, whether I live or I die,
I belong to the Lord, right?
[audience applauses]
Ah, but one thing I ask of the Lord in the midst of all the
attacks and all the confusion and all the distractions,
the one thing I ask of the Lord, and this is what I'm seeking
after, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days
of my life to behold the beauty of the Lord
and to inquire in His temple.
The story I told last night about my father,
I can't tell you how many times I've thought about what God
taught me through that whole process about what it means
to be a disciple and to be an evangelist.
Pope John Paul II said every one of us have been given- called
by God to, he called them commissions of a disciple;
prayer, communion, and mission.
These are the essential foundational commissions he said
that we'd been called to, and then Benedict,
Pope Benedict followed up in his time and taught it as well.
So let's go back to the story last night, that little prayer
group in Northern Minnesota, the collection of farmers.
What are they doing together?
They're praying.
Jesus is at the center of their life.
They're following the Spirit, and what does the Spirit do?
He brings them to communion.
So if you're thinking of evangelization,
it's not just sharing a message, it's making disciples,
and it's first asking yourself: Am I a disciple?
And am I cooperating with where the Holy Spirit wants me to go?
Do I even know for sure?
What am I building in my Parish?
Fathers, pastors listening, those working and
leading parishes, you're called to make disciples,
so create places of prayer.
Help people be awakened to that relationship with Christ,
get them praying, get them filled with the Holy Spirit so
that the Spirit can lead them to what?
To concrete expressions of communion where together they
can listen to the Lord, and then they can encourage each other
when the word of the Lord comes forth.
A living, present word in the moment, and they can discern it
and they can act upon it which leads them into mission.
I would love to meet that farmer,
I don't know why I haven't done it yet,
who first in that prayer group said, "You know what,
I just think God talked to me," and he's got that Christness
thing in him going, "Am I making this up?
Is this really God or is this me trying to make something happen?
Should I say something, shouldn't I say something?
No, I'll just sit back and be careful,
and I'll pray for them and offer them to God."
He risked acting on a word that was stirring in him in the
spirit, and he had enough love and courage and humility to come
talk to my sister, and without him knowing it he gave away
what Pope Francis said, he extended a current of grace.
A current went out of him,
it was a current of faith, hope, and love.
It was the power of the Spirit,
it was the anointing of his Baptism and his Confirmation,
and it went from his heart to her heart.
And I'm telling you at that kitchen table in
the Herbeck house in New Ulm, Minnesota,
it went from to her to us, and it began to change us.
That man's not a scholar, that man's not a great intellectual,
but what did Saint Paul say in First Corinthians?
"When I came among you,
I came among you with fear and trembling."
And he said the Gospel went forward from him
in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Precisely, he said, so that your faith would not
rest on the wisdom or on my communication to you,
but it would rest on the confirming
power of the Holy Spirit.
And what came into our hearts, a family that was Catholic
our entire lives, had gone to Communion hundreds and hundreds
of times, it wasn't meaningless, I'm not saying that,
but the faith wasn't awakened.
And it was that current of faith,
that act of the Holy Spirit that came alive and came forth from
someone who believed that God was alive and acting in the
moment and wanted us to communicate and speak the name
of Jesus who can free every human heart.
Yes, truth, beauty and goodness is what God made us for,
but truth, beauty and goodness is found in a person,
it's found in Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
There's nothing more beautiful than Jesus- nothing, nothing.
[audience applauses]
And Jesus- it's not just those transcendentals,
which are really, really special and important.
We long for- what we're longing for as the Bishop said
at the end, we're longing for God,
and God has revealed himself in Jesus his Son.
And it's the special mission of the Spirit to communicate to
every human heart the beauty and the majesty of Jesus,
so we can trust that, so let's lean into that.
Let's understand we're cooperating with someone
who's leading us, it's the Spirit.
And let it fill you with confidence,
just throw away the timidity, and every day all the stuff
of why you can't do this; you're not good enough,
you're not smart enough, you're not educated enough,
you're not rich enough, no one will listen to you.
Baloney!
Simple people all over the world, I've met simple people
with big faith who do big things in the Kingdom of God.
>>Now Peter, I felt like- boy, there was a lot
of content in that short segment that we did.
I felt particularly the stuff at the beginning about fear
and anxiety is so relevant, really, honestly.
The whole world is really living
under a fear, under anxiety,
and the only real antidote is divine power, because there
isn't any reason not to be afraid or not to be anxious,
if it's just us.
If it's just the human race trying to solve
its own problems, there's very good reason
for being anxious and fearful, really.
And if this Earth is all we have and what the nations of the
world have, is all we have, there's good reason to be
fearful and anxious, but like Jesus said,
"This faith has overcome the world," and what it overcomes,
it overcomes fear, it overcomes anxiety,
it overcomes feeling, like this is all we have.
It overcomes the fact that if something
doesn't work out here on Earth that's it, it's over.
Faith brings us into a trust of the providence of God
organizing the affairs of the world to bring good out of evil,
and you know so it just puts us into another realm of hope.
>>And it frees us from the slavery to fear.
We've talked about it many times over the years
on the program, Hebrews, chapter 2, verse 14,
it's the devil's strategy to enslave the human race
through fear, the fear of death.
And there's times in history where he really
stirs it up and society starts getting very
destabilized and full of anxiety,
and wars break out, and crime breaks out,
and violence breaks out.
And then everybody today,
we're plugged into it all, all over the world.
You know people through their phones and through computers and
everything every day, everything that's happening around
the world, every bad thing just about gets projected
onto the news, and then we absorb it.
Like it just intensifies the anxiety.
And then here's Jesus in Matthew chapter 6:
"Do not be anxious about anything."
What you're going to eat, what you're going to drink,
what you're going to wear.
Constantly on the news, you better be worried about
what you're going to eat, drink, or wear.
We're going to tell you how you can find
happiness and peace, just follow us,
and so we get manipulated in that
whole thing, and we lose our sense of peace and
we get seduced into following others.
Other voices, right?
Instead of the voice of Christ and resting in Him and being
simple, so Jesus said, "Seek first the Kingdom and His way of
holiness and everything else will be added unto you."
It's all tied into that whole section
where he talks about being anxious, right?
>>Yeah, and I think it's really helpful to write down that
scripture passage if you're having trouble
with anxiety or fear.
Don't be anxious about anything, but with everything
with prayer and supplication, make your needs known to God and
then the peace of Christ will reign in your heart, you know.
And there's other passages like that, too, and of course
John Paul II would frequently say, don't be afraid, you know,
be not afraid, you know, and because the power of Christ
is going to conquer, the power of Christ is going to really
bring a victory for all those who want it,
all those who are willing to join with Him in that victory.
>>Yeah, and I think one of the areas of fear and concern
is people saying, "I'm not enough, I don't have enough,
I don't know enough."
"I don't know enough to make a contribution to the
mission of evangelization," like we're talking about.
And that God really does use everybody.
He uses the simple to do very profound things.
And it's the people living with the Lord,
the bottom line is living with the Lord each day,
having a prayer life, trusting him and having a faith
that says, "You can do anything, Lord, and I'm here,
you used a donkey in the Old Testament,
you can certainly use me," right?
And so because we can kind of get shut down and get
intimidated and just decide to sit in the background and not
get in the game because we look at ourselves
and we judge ourselves as being inadequate.
And it's not about assessing what natural gifts I have
or how impressive I am, it's faith in God.
It's trusting God's message and His Word
and believing in the Spirit.
>>Our willingness to follow the inspirations of the Spirit,
and risk and take a chance.
While you were talking about, you know, the farmer who
shared with your sister the current of grace,
it reminded me of a story that you've told me many times,
I've read it myself about that obscure farmer,
and where was it, Columbia?
>>Columbia, yeah.
>>Yeah, his prayer actually saved the life of somebody who
was in grave danger of death and damnation,
and how it really completely changed her life.
>>That was the kind of- it's an amazing story of Gloria Polo,
and she's a dentist living in Columbia, in Bogota,
and her nephew, who is also a dentist,
and her husband, were walking during a big thunderstorm,
and they were walking in a puddle of water,
and a huge thunderbolt hit.
>>And she was living a very worldly life.
>>Very pagan life.
Yeah, she was going to church on Sunday, but she was into her
body big time, she was into the flesh, just disobeying a lot of
God's commands, you know- in the testimony she talks about it.
But the thunderbolt hit and threw her husband like 50 yards
from the puddle, and she and her nephew were just
being electrified in the pool of water.
He died, and then she ended up- she didn't quite die,
but by the time the EMS people came the water was still
so charged they couldn't do anything with her.
>>Wow.
>>Yeah, so they ended up at a certain point taking her,
she ended up dying twice in the emergency room in the hospital,
and to make a very long story short,
during that time when she died she says she was taken up
into Heaven and met the Lord.
And the Lord greeted her, He put his- He asked her to put her
hands out and said, "What have you brought me, Gloria?"
And she said- and she started thinking about her life.
And then the Lord, it was very clear to her that she had not
lived for Him, and that she stood guilty before the Lord,
and He wasn't happy.
I mean He just- His look, like was enough for her.
And then he took her through the Ten Commandments,
kind of what they were and what they mean.
He also gave her a glimpse of- not Hell itself but
real close to it, and the suffering that's there,
and it really frightened her, and He basically said this
is where you were destined to go.
And the Lord had lifted her up and brought her before Him,
and in this experience she had, and then Jesus said,
"I'm going to send you back, I'm going to give you another chance
and you're going to have an opportunity to tell the
story thousands of times before you come home," right?
And then He said,
"But before you go I'm going to show you what moved my heart,"
essentially is what He was saying, and then she saw,
she said, the city of Bogota at night, or the country of
Colombia, and there were like little flames of light in
different places like candles burning, and there was a
real big one at the foot of Mount Saint Marta.
And she said, "What is this?"
and Jesus said, "These are the people whose
cries came to Heaven on your behalf."
And she said, "Who's the big flame?"
and Jesus like opened it up and showed her it was a simple,
you know, farmer, you know, who is very,
very poor, and he'd go to Mass every day, and the Lord showed
her he went to Mass, and after Mass he came to buy a loaf of
bread on the day after this happened to her, and he brought
it home and he's cutting up the loaf of bread, and then actually
unwraps the newspaper to cut up the bread, and then it turns out
it was the newspaper from that morning, and it had a picture
of her and her nephew in the puddle of water.
And all of the sudden he saw it and he began to cry,
and he said, "Jesus, save my little sister."
Like this is, you know, my sister,
save my little sister, save my little sister, and he said I
promise you I'll walk to a shrine which is at like the
other side of the country to do penance for her
on her behalf to cry out for her.
And Jesus said that his cry came to the throne room of God
and it turned the heart of Jesus,
it moved the heart of Jesus.
It's a mystery, God- the participation of
our prayer in the work of salvation,
it's so dignifying and amazing, but what really hit me, Ralph,
was in this world we are so impressed with power,
with money, you know, with Wall Street, with Hollywood,
with celebrities, like that's where all the action and
all the power is, and the more of that you have
the more powerful you are.
But it's not their cries to Heaven that turned the living
God's heart, it was a simple man who in the world is
completely nondescript, has nothing, unimpressive,
doesn't have a voice in the world,
but the ear of God is turned toward him.
He's humble, he's lowly, he's full of love.
He's like a child of God, and she-
it was overwhelming when I heard the story, you know.
She's told the story now many, many- it's all over YouTube,
you can see it, but it was beautiful,
it was a great lesson.
Who's really mighty?
Who's mighty is the one who's mighty in the Lord.
And this man, he didn't even know it.
He had authority, he had spiritual authority and power
in the Lord because of his holiness and his humility.
Beautiful.
>>Scripture says the prayer of a righteous person is powerful in
its effect, and so Peter and I would really like to encourage
everybody who's listening to this that your prayer can make
a difference, your fasting can make a difference,
your penance can make a difference.
It reminds me very much of what Mary said at Fatima, that prayer
and sacrifice for the conversion of sinners is really important.
Prayers and sacrifices for reparation for sin is
really important, and it can really save people from Hell,
just like the prayer of this humble farmer saved Gloria.
>>And the way- what I was also touched by, Ralph,
is he saw and he read the newspaper,
and he was deeply moved by it.
I mean, how often do we hear of tragedies and things,
they just come constantly, you know, on the news,
and you feel untouched by it almost.
And here he is, a simple guy, and he just starts weeping
and crying out for her suffering.
He knew because the story that she was still alive,
she was hanging on, that kind of thing, and he was praying.
It's a- I don't know, Peter, if when you were growing up they
taught you this, but when we were growing up the nuns taught
us that when you hear a siren or an ambulance or a police car
or fire engine, pray for the person in trouble.
You know, ask God to have mercy on the person who is sick or
dying or in a fire, or in an accident or whatever like that,
and that's a little practice that I try to remember
myself that's really, really kind of easy.
It's a simple way of praying for somebody that there's some alarm
going out for, there's some urgency,
who knows what those prayers may affect.
>>You know, last summer I was driving down Highway 23 near
Ann Arbor, and I came upon an accident that just happened,
people were already there, a very large man was riding
a Harley motorcycle going north, I was going south,
and a car hit him, and it threw him literally like 80 yards into
a ditch and his shirt came off and he's- this big man was
laying there, and doctors from- a doctor who had been in the
traffic jam got out and they were trying to minister to him
and somebody said, "He died," I heard them say he died,
and I just thought about what happens when we die.
You know, it's like his spirit was probably right, you know,
leaving his body right then, you know what I mean?
And when I came up on it, the reason I say it,
when I came up on it I hadn't gotten up to that point yet,
and I just started spontaneously praying, you know?
And who knows what happened at that moment where that
large man was laying there and dying.
He was dying.
He never thought that day this was his last day on Earth,
he's cruising north in the summer on his big Harley,
and somebody didn't see him and knocks him off his motorcycle,
and there he is.
And it's the moment, right there, you know, so...
>>And all of us have to be ready
for that moment ourselves, don't we?
And always have to care about
other people's moments, don't we?
Yeah, that's what you really were focused on in your talk,
evangelization is so important because it really can change the
life of somebody here on this Earth, but also their
eternal destiny, and what's more important than that?
>>Yeah, and it's- we forget that it's God's plan
and God's design to communicate the faith
through the foolishness of what we preach.
And when we hear the word 'preach' we often thing of
people standing up and preaching in public,
or somebody holding up a Bible on a street corner.
You might actually be called to that some time,
but not many people are to do it that way.
But it's communicating through word,
through words and deeds the way the Church talks about,
is witness and proclamation are two things that go
together in the communication of the Gospel.
And it's so important to be able to speak what Jesus is doing in
your own life, but also to speak what you feel like
he's put on your heart for other people.
That Living Word, going back to the story of the farmer who
passed that word, that current of grace onto my sister.
And it wasn't like he was so special,
his heart was just lifted to God,
and he was expecting something from the Lord, he was crying
out on behalf of my family, and we didn't even know him.
He knew my sister, obviously-
He knew my sister, and God spoke.
That's great, I mean I'm so thankful.
It changed the whole course of the history of our family,
and that's not an exaggeration.
>>I know some of the great heroes of the faith nobody knows
about right now, but on the day of judgment it's going to be
really interesting to see who the mighty ones are in God,
nobody you ever heard about,
nobody ever really gave any credit to, you know?
Well, you know, I've written a
booklet called What Happens When I Die?
And we sure need to know what happens when we die,
and we'd like to send this booklet to you
at no cost just for the asking.
I think you'll find it really helpful for you,
go to our website, renewalministries.net,
click on the 'Free Booklet' right there on the homepage,
or call the 800 number that's on the screen,
we'll get it right off to you.
It's also really good to share with other people.
It's one of the things like Peter said,
preaching doesn't mean that we have to
go out on a street corner.
And Pope Francis said that there's an informal preaching
that all of us are called to in the midst of everyday life,
you know, just to be open to opportunities
to share our faith with people.
And also Pope Francis says if it's appropriate at the
end of the conversation, offer to pray for the person,
let Jesus come into the conversation and into
the thing that you've spoken about.
Until next week, make the right choices, choose for Jesus.
>>We all die, but not all deaths are the same.
To die in unrepented sin is a bitter death that will only lead
to the indescribable agony of eternal separation from God.
But to die as a Christian, our sins forgiven,
is to die a very different kind of death,
a death which has now been transformed
into a doorway to Paradise.
I've written a booklet called What Happens When I Die ?
to help you and I end up in Paradise rather than in Hell.
Go to our website, renewalministries.net, and
simply click on the booklet, or call the number on the screen,
and we'll send it right out to you
just for the asking for free.
What a gift we've been given.
We can die in the love of Christ and be with Him forever.
♪
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