Well thank you. Thank you for coming. Thank you for saying yes to God who called you to this Bosco conference. It's a great joy for me to be with you. Last year was my first Bosco conference. I went to Franciscan for my Masters in Theology and it was such a gift to be a part of this university community. And one of the greatest things I learned by coming to this university was how important the role of the Holy Spirit was in my prayer life. You might think every Catholic, every sister already knows that, okay. But I needed the time I was here to go way deeper in my understanding of how important it is to openly call upon the Holy Spirit to guide me. Jesus said many times, I'm going to the Father.  But when I go, I'm going to send you the Spirit and the Spirit will lead you to all truth. So I want to start this talk with the most fundamental truth that God loves you. I know, I know we've all heard it, but somebody told me St. John Paul II wrote it somewhere, but I haven't seen it yet. He said the longest journey is from here to here. We all know it, you know. I mean we can say to our students, the people we serve, the people we minister to, God loves you and we doubt it. There's a reason you doubt it by the way and we're going to talk about that, okay. But let's just start from that place. God loves you. If you think of the person who loves you the most, does that person try to make it hard for you? Does that person try to trick you so that you can't figure out what they want? Are they always playing games? I'm not talking about the person you wish had loved you or who should have loved you, but the person who does love you. See, God isn't playing a game with you. There's someone who is, okay. He's called the father of lies by Jesus, okay. And the father of love wants you to have a beautiful life, not without struggle, because even a good parent knows you can't rid your children's lives from all struggle. What can you do? You can be with them in the struggle. And the best news ever is that God didn't just leave us in the struggle. He knows it's a struggle because he had a great plan and it got messed up. If you don't know that, go back to the Catechism, right? He had a great plan for us. But someone who likes to mislead us and trick us was right from the beginning in the picture, right? God had a beautiful plan and he still has a beautiful plan. And actually the plan is more beautiful. Easter vigilantly pray, oh happy fault, oh necessary sin of Adam, that merited for us so great a redeemer.  It's mind blowing, but that's our God.  He sent Jesus his son to pour himself out. You know, sometimes I think in Christianity we get a little confused that it's just the enormity of suffering that was our redemption. It's not the enormity of suffering.  He will to make a world where we were free. And every choice we make for the good, there is a suffering, okay? But our suffering, suffering came into the world through the disorder of sin, okay? But it wasn't just because Jesus suffered so much, he did, but it was because he loved to the end. And his love is the reason we have every hope. Everything that is dark, everything that is heavy in our lives, our experiences is redeemed. There is nothing that is not redeemed. It's a very fancy theological concept in the Fathers of the Church, but what is not assumed is not redeemed, okay? And what it means is everything you experience has been drawn into the heart of God. And now it has meaning.  This is the good news. And the Holy Spirit longs to lead us to that truth, to the truth that you are loved unconditionally, infinitely, perfectly, above and beyond your imagining. There is a way to walk in that love. There is freedom in that love. There is grace and healing in that love. And the Holy Spirit wants you to know that. So in John 15, Jesus says to the apostles, and this was at the last supper, right? He says, as the Father loves me, so I also love you. Later in that same talk, he says, when the Advocate comes, this is the Holy Spirit, when the Advocate comes, whom I will send you from the Father, the Spirit of truth that proceeds from the Father, he will testify to me. When the Holy Spirit is at work in our lives and our minds and our hearts, he will testify to Jesus, who is the Word of the Father. This whole kind of topic, we're going to be unpacking to Sermon of Spirits, is to know whose voice are you hearing.  Years ago, something happened in my life, and I was in one flourishing and dynamic apostolate. And I thought the Lord was going to keep me there a long time. And it felt so wonderful. It was so consoling. People were coming to the Lord. There was great things happening. And I got a call that I was leaving. I was leaving, going somewhere completely different. I was being transferred to somewhere I didn't even know the language. And everything that I thought was the dynamic gift of the Lord in my life, because I was mistaken about what's the dynamic gift of my Lord in my life, felt like was being taken away. For two full years, I cried every day. Because I felt like what I thought was the way I could love and serve the Lord was ripped away from me. And during that time, I had the blessing of an amazing spiritual helper who was immersed in the principles of discernment. And I kept saying, I don't know what I did, but somehow I must have failed. I must have failed. And you know what I'm talking about.  And guess what the evil one does with that? Just like it's a straight line. I failed in this task. So I'm a failure. I mean, it went to the core of my being. It was like, I didn't do this well. It's being taken away from me. I failed as a sister. I failed as a speaker. I failed as an evangelist. I am a failure. If any of that sounds a little familiar, the priest said to me, whose voice do you think that is? He said, sister, is that the voice of your bridegroom? Is that the voice of Jesus? He said, I want you to go in the chapel and sit in the presence of the blessed sacrament. You tell me, whose voice is that? I love the interaction when Jesus says to his followers, who do you say that I am? I think you could have an entire prayer life out of that question, spoken both ways. What I mean is, we need to say in our prayer, who is Jesus to us? Is Jesus the one who accuses us? Is Jesus the one who puts us down? No. Jesus is the father's love revealed to us. But flip it around. Jesus, who do you say that I am? Because we got a lot of voices coming at us, and we can hear a lot of wrong messages. I think it's one of the plagues of the moment we're living in, that there are thoughts of lies about who we are. We see it in ourselves. We see it in the people we love and serve. We see it in our family members. Think about it. Think about how many ways we are incorrectly defined. Even when we meet somebody, who are you? I teach, so it's usually like, where do you go to school? What degree program are you on? My IT high school seniors. What are you going to major in? Go into our daughter. What's your job? We start to define ourselves with our work or our tasks or our titles or our pay scale. And so no wonder when things fall apart on the outside level, we think we have failed. We think we are worthless. That is not true. That is not true. So a lot of times when we think of discernment, we think about it as, and it is, what does God want me to do? But first, who does God say that you are? It's, remember, if you were here last night and heard Bishop Cousins, relationship, identity, mission. What's first? Relationship. This whole retreat track of the Bosco Conference is about forming your interior life. Now there's wonderful tracks in the Bosco Conference about how to get practical tools, how to do the things we do in handing on the faith. But you are first and foremost who you are. And if you believe lies at the level of who you are, the devil can completely mislead you in terms of what's your mission. We got to start with who we are. And who are you? The beloved of God. The one he desires to be with him forever. The one he wants to fill with beautiful graces and blessings. A voice that tells you something other than that is not true. Now that's why the apostles and the evangelists when they were writing the scriptures said to us some pretty important things. They said, you're going to hear things in your soul about who you are, about what you should do, where you should head. St. John wrote in the first letter of John, chapter four, that you should test the spirits to see whether they belong to God. When you hear those inner things about yourself, about your ministry, about your life, where is that coming from? I find it's amazing as you just pause and ask that question, nine times out of ten, if not ten, you know if it's not of the Lord. If you know his heart, my sheep hear my voice, my sheep know my voice. If you know him, you can tell something's not from him.  It's not like you can say, well, therefore, I know that's not from him. So, okay, I don't, it's not going to affect me. We're very, we're very hard-wired to be affected by the way we think. It's going to take a little more than that, right? We're not just robots, you can flip it on and off like a switch. But at least if you can know, that's not the voice of the Lord. You can begin the process of saying, I do not accept what is not God's version of me. You know? And that's why pondering the Lord crucified is so important. Why do Catholics put crucifixes like everywhere? I love the sand on me on the cross, right? Because it's the living Christ. And it's the living Christ looking at you. Okay? And he's saying, I love you.  Can you stay on that in that looking at him better yet, looking at him in the Blessed Sacrament? He's like, you're my child. I poured out everything for you. I want you to be with me wherever I am.  Am I going to tell you there's no hope for you? Never, never. And if we learn how to hear the right voice in us, when we go to our family members, our friends, if you know the truth about yourself, here's a cool thing, you know the truth about other people. I teach high schoolers. I'm not surprised when they're involved in lots of things that are sorrow to the heart of those who love them because they're struggling. And if I know myself in the Lord, I know the people I serve in the Lord. Do I look at them and just see their failures, the things they do wrong, whatever? Nothing is surprising to me about the human experience. If you live long enough, nothing's surprising to you about the human experience. But what I see is someone who's deeply loved by God, someone he wants to be with him forever, someone he wants to lift that burden off of them. What was this all about? He does not want you to carry all those burdens. He wants you to give it to him. Give him your burdens, give him your fears. There is nothing, there is nothing Jesus cannot take. He just wants you. He just wants you. Now, just learning how to hear the voice of the Lord isn't the easiest thing because he doesn't communicate with us in the way that we would like. I mean, people are like, wouldn't it be great if God could just text you, right? Well, he has text to do. It's called the Bible, okay? It's just really long. It's like this handout. Anyway, and I mean, you do have God's word in some way, and God does speak if we're listening. He speaks through the circumstances of our lives, okay?  If you're asking him to show you, he will. But you have to listen. You have to catch it. You have to notice the way he's working in your life. And that's what the tools I'm going to walk with you today through are kind of helpful for. So when St. Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians about the gifts of the Holy Spirit, he talked about the fact that there are many different spiritual gifts that are all from the same Spirit of God, which means they're all gifts of love. They're all something given to build up the body of Christ. Now, it could be a whole other talk to talk about the charismatic gift of discernment of spirits, okay?  In spiritual theology, charismatic gifts are gifts given to individuals in the church, not about their own holiness, but about building up the body of Christ. That's technically, like, the way theologians over the centuries have unpacked the idea of charismatic gifts. Now, this is important. They're not a measure of whether you're holy or not. Sometimes people who are first experiencing the beautiful gifts of the charismatic renewal will be like, I didn't receive the gift of tongues or I didn't receive the gift of intercessory prayer in the way that other people get. I can't heal other people. And you're like, I remember once a really good man who was a family friend of ours and he was out of parish where there was a beautiful style of charismatic prayer, but there was a kind of misunderstanding in some people that the charismatic gifts were somehow a measure of whether you were holy or not. And he was a great man. And he was crying one day to me saying, I can't speak in tongues, so I guess I'm just not good like other people. And I said, look at him and I said, charismatic gifts are not about your personal holiness. I said, you could be walking with the Lord really faithfully and you might not have any of the visible charismatic gifts. I said, they're given for the building up of the body of the church. And he's like, oh, and I said, just pray, just serve, just walk in the way of the Lord and don't worry. And if the Lord wants you to have that gift, that gift will come and it will be for the sake of building up his body. That's one way of looking at charismatic, I mean, at the concept of discernment of spirits, but there's another that we might call the ordinary gift of discern the spirits. I'm not going to spend the whole talk on the charismatic gift because if you've got it, you've got it. And you don't need to learn about it. The Lord will pour it out, right? But we all need the regular ordinary form of discernment of spirits because it's learning how do I hear the voice of the Lord and that we all need, right? That is about our personal holiness. It's wonderful if you have the gift of discernment of spirits as a charism. But what does Jesus say to everyone, not just to his disciples, not just to those given a special charism, in Matthew 7? So this is part of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus says to him, now he's saying in terms of false prophets and actually discernment of spirits in the early church as a charism was linked to the idea of discerning who's a real prophet from who's a false prophet. Because just like in any age, in the early church, there were people coming, claiming to speak on behalf of the Lord who were not of the Lord. So the Lord gave an outpouring of discernment of spirits principally to test who's a real prophet and who's a false prophet. Okay? So I mean, still in the church, God can give that gift, right? Because some of the messages that are coming at us that are claiming to be the Word of God, some are authentic and some are not. But speaking to all his followers, he said, beware of false prophets. And I think we can translate this into the concept of discernment of spirits. Beware of any falseness. And how will you know something that's true from something that's false? We're living in a big moment of discernment. I mean, just think about where you get your information. Where do you get it? How much do you know it's true? Even at the natural level? Well, Jesus said, you'll know something by its fruits. Okay? And then Paul, reflecting on the teachings of Jesus Christ, writes in Galatians 5 about what are the fruits of the flesh? Nothing. In the scriptures, there's several places, especially in John's writings, where it says, what is not coming to us from God? And they talk about the devil, the flesh, and the world. That can get a little confusing. And in times it's led to heresies in the church. Okay? The devil is kind of obvious. And we'll talk a lot about him because Ignatius of Loyola writes a lot about him. Okay? But the flesh doesn't mean that our bodies are evil. In the Bible, when they use the term the flesh as a source of distraction from truth, it means the instincts of our natural selves apart from the grace of God. Okay? So it can be simple. Like, you feel like God is asking you to go to Mass and you're so tired you just don't do it. Okay? I'm not talking about habitual tiredness in which case you do need to sleep. We'll talk about that. Okay? But it can get tricky. The flesh, we all know this. We all know that sometimes in our natural selves, we can want something that's not ordered to our supernatural destiny. Right? That's the struggle of the flesh. The struggle of the world. Again, the world has more than one meaning in the scriptures. God so loved the world that he gave his only son that we should all be saved. Right? That's the world in the positive sense. Us, the world. Okay? But the world in the sense of what can mislead us from the Lord is we could say it in terms of what's worldly. You know? I mean, with a lot of good people. And, you know, Father Benedict Grishel, I remember years ago hearing him speak at the Defending the Faith Conference at Stephenville. God rest his soul. One of the founders of the CFRs if you're not familiar. Father Benedict Grishel was just a very straight shooter about truth. You know? And he was saying, people get surprised when there's worldliness in the church.  And he said, there's no cloister wall so high that the devil can't get in because he's in your heart. Okay? So every time we believe worldly lies, no one's immune from this. No one. You know? When we start worrying about what everybody thinks, what people are gonna say if I post that? What people are gonna do if I have this, if I make a choice, I teach high schoolers. One of the worldly things, how much money are you gonna make if you pursue that major? You know? People who want to go into pastoral ministry, you know. You aren't gonna have prestige and money, right? Okay? And their family's like, what are you gonna do with that degree? I don't know. Something like convert the world, help convert the world. Anyway. You know, worldly measures are always at our door. Even within ministry, worldliness creeps in. That person has more people using their resource than mine. You can recognize it because it starts getting competitive. The things in the body of Christ are not competitive. They're collaborative because they're coming from the communion of the Trinity, right? So the devil, the flesh of the world, those terms can be understood in more than one way. But when they're a distraction from God, what are the fruits they will bear? Saint Paul wrote this 2,000 years ago and it could have been written today. The works of the flesh, devil flesh world, are obvious, he writes in Galatians 5. Immorality, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, rivalry, jealousy, outburst of fury, acts of selfishness, dissension, factions, always against, always against. Occasions of envy, drinking bouts, orgies and the like. Whoa. All kinds of problems. In other words, what divides? What breaks unity? What turns in on self and away from communion with God and communion with others? My friends, this, alive and well in the church, I say to people, if you're spending more time fighting about the liturgy than praying, something's wrong. If you're telling too many, if you're labeling your brothers and sisters in the church, who they follow, what ideology, what they're up to, that's not the spirit of the Lord. That's not the spirit of the Lord. What is the fruit of the spirit? This is a great, I could stop the talk after this quote because if you just use this list, you got discernment principles. When something is of the Lord, what's the fruit of it? Joy, love, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Wow. Sounds good, doesn't it? That's the fruit of the spirit. That's the fruit of the spirit. Now, sometimes when you're doing the work of the Lord, there is some kind of tension that emerges because sometimes it's just a little static, right? But ultimately, if we're following the voice of the Lord, we should see these fruits. This doesn't mean the absence of conflict. It doesn't mean the absence of conflict, but it means peace within that, generosity and love within that. When Jesus spoke the truth, this is what it led to, even in the midst of the agony in the garden where Jesus experienced profound sorrow and suffering, he still had peace. Why?  There's a bedrock of peace. So, why it gets tricky is there's that admixture, right? There's the static, the pushback that comes from doing the will of the Lord, that can come at the level of the devil, the flesh or the world. But there's that abiding peace. There's that stable focus on the Lord. A priest friend of mine who was just one of the transforming elements of God's will in my life, he said to me, Sister Mary Madeline, keep your eyes on Jesus. That's it. Keep your eyes on Jesus.   Gently turn back to Jesus. And we have the great gift of the sacrament of reconciliation, right? So I will tell you something I find a little funny is that when I was given this topic, discernment of spirits to talk about, I was telling one of my friends that I was talking about this and she actually said to me, you're going to talk about that. And I said, yeah. And she said, isn't that a Jesuit thing? Factions, factions. Anyway, and I said, discernment of spirits is a Christian thing. And it's like, actually, one time somebody who belongs to a great religious community apologized to me because she was giving a talk on the rosary at a conference and I was like, I don't own the rosary. It's true the Dominican order. I said, has the charge to teach people about the rosary. But I'm like, I want everyone to spread the news about the rosary. So discernment of spirits is not for a certain elite, not for a certain clique, not for a certain spirituality. It's basic Christian living, which is why I started with a scripture. Okay. It's right there in sacred scripture that we have to test the spirits that will know by their fruits. Okay. The process was beautifully elaborated upon and especially by St. Ignatius of Loyola that we'll get to in a minute. But this is for us all. So I wanted to make sure it was clear where I'm coming from scripturally, but also in the patristic era, one day I teach all different theology classes. And one of the things that strikes me as everything good in the contemporary church was already there in the beginning. The church fathers back in the first few centuries talked about discernment of spirits. They talked about spiritual childhood. The things that are in the great saints of this time were already in there. And actually that's a sign of their validity, right? Because it comes from scripture. It comes from God. It comes from truth. Okay. So in the patristic era, there were just a couple of basic principles that discernment was central. You were supposed to really weigh as something from the Lord or not that God is all truth and goodness and wants to show us truth, but that evil spirits deceive and lie. The fathers of the church, especially the desert monks, you ever read John Cashin at the conferences of the desert fathers? They're hardcore. They're great. Okay. Give them the teenage boys. Okay. People who want to know about like spiritual combat. This is not light stuff. Okay. When you read it, oh my gosh, Saint Athanasius is it who wrote the story of Saint Anthony of the desert? Yeah. Give that to your guy, your guys group. Okay. It's awesome. What is it that's going to make you able to discover in the fathers of church humility? They write all the time. If you're proud, if you're sure you know what's up, you're ready for the fall. You have to humbly submit yourself. So how did you humbly submit yourself all the way through the church's tradition? Obviously scripture. The Lord is never going to contradict himself. Anything that's coming to you is an interior inspiration that is against the word of God is not of God. Easy test. Okay. The teachings of the church, the church is the body of Christ. I know that in the modern world we have a real and the younger, especially a real problem with authority and structures. It's important to actually help people realize individual members of the church are not given the gift of infallibility. Okay. But the church in her stable teaching, it is guaranteed by the spirit of God that we cannot be misled when we follow it. You know, when I was a teenager, I was struggling like most teens do with understanding some of the church's teaching. I was like, ah, that can't be true. That can't be true. I don't know whatever. But I wanted to understand. I just didn't. Okay. And I was taught by a really great sister. And she said to me, it was all about this humility. She said, okay.  And she said, it's important that you understand the answers to your questions. It's important that you don't just ignore your questions. I just want you to think for a minute that you're very important and real 17 years of life experience and your reflection on that. And 2000 years of the martyrs, the popes, the saints, the guidance of the Holy Spirit. And just think about that. You know, and I was like, I mean, even a 17, I could say, there's a little more weight on one side than the other. I was like, okay. But then she said something to be super important. She said, but even if you can recognize that the wisdom of the church is that much more in the scale of balance, your questions still important. And you have to continue to keep studying the issue to know why the church teaches what she teaches. But then it's not just study. This woman was a great Dominican. She said, you must pray because the barrier to the truth might not be in your mind. It might be in your heart. Actually, I found that was almost always the case. I could understand what the church thought. But when I studied and prayed, submitted to the church, tried to be humble, not there yet, I was able to see the wisdom. And actually, the longer I live, when I say to my students, I don't teach you things just because somebody tells me this is what I have to teach, I teach you because I believe in 100%. Everything in my life experiences told me this is true. And the early church fathers also said, you do need a holy guide. Even the people who lived out in the desert had spiritual guides. Now, I want to say something about this because, yes, Ignatius of Loyola will point this out. And thanks be to God, many people are being trained to be spiritual directors, but it doesn't have to be formally a spiritual director. I love to talk about spiritual friendship. If you have a real friend who's on the journey to the Lord, it's someone you can share with your ideas of what the Lord is doing in you. You can also work with that part. It's not like somebody said to me, can I only do this with a certified director? And I'm like, I don't think so. Because when people get in crisis, they're like, I live somewhere, the parish priest is too busy, I don't know where to find someone who can do spiritual direction. And then people get all lost. And I'm like, pray, talk to someone you consider genuinely seeking the Lord and keep, you know, I mean, if it's really big and you need help, keep looking for a spiritual director. But if the Lord isn't sending you someone, he's not going to abandon you. The point of the holy guide is when you say out loud to another person, what's inside you, it looks different. You know what I'm talking about. You're so sure this is an inspiration to the Holy Spirit.  And the second you say it to someone outside of you, they're like, excuse me, you're falling apart at the seams and you think you need one more ministry. Like the person outside of you is like, I don't think so. Okay. And so sometimes if you have a wise guide, even if it's at the level of friendship, externalizing what you're discerning can be a kind of reflection on truth. And if you have the blessing of a regular spiritual director, the blessing of a confessor who has the capacity to also direct a bit, I think that's a great gift. But the Lord isn't going to abandon you if you don't have that official capacity person. And then purification by penance, that if we're not living a penitential life, now that's not extraordinary. And sometimes when we read in the history of the church, we're like, the saints did these extraordinarily huge things. Am I not going to know God's will because I'm not doing these extraordinary huge things. Okay. When I was a young sister, I would read Lives of the Saints because, you know, they're inspiring. And every time I was kind of like, overly zealous in the wrong way. Anyway, and I would read them and not necessarily very prudent. I was 18 when I entered the convent. And so I remember I'd be like, I want to do that penance because that saint became so holy. So I'd go to the sister in charge. And I'd be like, sister, because we have, you know, religious appearance. I said, can I like do whatever the penance was? And she looked at me and she said, how's your monastic silence? Now, in case you can't tell, I'm a talker. I was like, not so good. And she said, sister, when you enter religious life, you have a rule in, and you have guidelines of how to live religious life. She said, when you're keeping everything in the ruling constitutions perfectly, come back and ask me about more penance. And now this is what I would say is, start with accepting God's will in your day-to-day life. That's the first penance of all of us. Start with accepting without complaining, without resistance, what God allows to come to you. And when the church invites us to do voluntary penance for it, such as in the seasons of Len, it's to literally strengthen your muscle. It's not because God needs us to give up whatever, and even discernment of spirits should be used in how you do penance. I was always told in community life, if the thing you choose to do for penance is making you a great penance to other people, stop doing it. And it's true. I mean, I've never been tempted to give up coffee because if I do, the rest of the community is going to suffer horribly. Anyway, I was like, no, no, no. That's not what the Lord wants me to give up. Okay. So, and I think in the modern world, a lot of our fasting is going to take a really different form. You read the medieval saints, their fasting went with what was happening in them and at their time. I'm just going to say this. Almost every human being right now, media fast is the number one fast I would recommend. Disciplining your use of media. Some of you may already do it, in which case it's not. But I find for most people today, the biggest distractor, misleader, and waste of time is the way we use media. Okay. And if you were to actually discern what is the Lord's fast, he's asking you from that, that would be a great starting point. But I'll tell you when I'm discerning penance to do, even like say the Latin season, I don't just say, oh, wow, here's what I'm going to do for the Lord. I ask him, what would actually make me closer to you? The goal is not the thing, is not the fast. It's what's actually going to bring me closer to you. That's why I think the media fast is so important. And we'll talk about it in relation to good discernment of spirits, because I think it's one of the areas where we need really good discernment right now. Now, later in the tradition, lots of people come in and write on discernment of spirits. And I wanted to just mention, there's an old classic book, Spiritual Theology by a Dominican, Father Jordan Naumann. And he makes a couple of distinctions that I think this is always what Dominicans do, make distinctions, I think that are helpful. And then I want to spend the rest of the time looking at Ignatius of Loyola and the Jesuit tradition. Okay. One thing that that Father Jordan said is, there's the spirit of the individual that's already in us by nature. By nature, you have an inborn temperament and you have a character shaped by the things around you. So when you're discerning, your discernment might not look just like the discernment of someone next to you. For example, some of us tend to go to extremes in one direction and others may go to extremes in another direction. I'm going to take some of them really basic and not about sin or evil, just like a normal thing. Think about your communication style. Some people are much more inclined to speak. Some people are much more inclined to listen. When I was in religious formation, because we spend a lot of time in community together, sister said, it's not the same for everybody. Some of you need to go out of yourselves by saying more. Some of you need to go out of yourselves by saying less. And it's not a matter of like, there's one magic answer. It's like your inborn temperament is going to give you certain struggles and certain strengths. So knowing yourself is part of discernment, right? What for me is like the way I'm like more naturally inclined to go and what's going to be the kind of thing that's going to be a little tricky for me. Some of you are more inclined not to get involved. Some of you are more inclined to Martha Mary, right? To get very involved. And where is the Lord calling you in that? So there's one level of discernment. That's why it can be beneficial to have someone who knows you well to do discernment with. Because they're not just seeing you as like a statistic, they're seeing you as you. Given your life circumstances, your personality, your journey, how is the Lord likely working in you? Extrinsic spirits are what discernment of spirits is also about. How is something coming to us from God or from evil spirits? And that's what we're going to unpack in a great detail. Then as I mentioned earlier, there's a difference between infused discernment of spirits, which is a charismatic grace given for the building up of the body of the church, which is not the rest of the stock, versus what you could call a quiet discernment of spirits. What is this? It is a learned art. You can actually learn principles. That's why it's worth talking about and worth reading books about is you can learn principles of how to do this. To use criteria to discover whether an interior movement is coming to you from God or not God. What do you do to gain this art, prayer for sure, study, experience, and Father Jordan writes, the removal of obstacles. If you're willing to let go of your self-sufficiency, your attachment to your way of seeing things, your subjectivity, and your rashness or haste wanting to do everything quickly and know it right away, that those obstacles, if you can remove them, that's one of the roles of penance, right, is to remove those obstacles of self-reliance and too much haste in trying to know the will of God. Remember, the spirit of the Lord, the fruits are one of the fruits of patience. Sometimes we want the answers to everything right away. Somebody told me once, God gives three different answers to things you ask of him. Yes, no, you're not ready to know yet. I get the third an awful lot. And actually patience is a beautiful sign of the spirit. Many people have a beautiful insight that is from the Lord about something good that he wants for his church, but very often it's not then. Sometimes we have to wait. We have to wait the grace of God and we try to rush things and we think God isn't hearing us because we don't get a result. He is listening, he is listening. But he knows some things wouldn't be good for us at a certain moment. And when every choice we make immediately bears fruit, it's really dangerous. When I mentioned that I was in that stage in that place in my life where I was so abundantly fruitful, my spiritual guide said to me, you're in the most dangerous place possible, sister, because right now everything's soaring. Doesn't mean it's bad and you don't have to feel bad about it, but be careful because it will easily become about you and not about the Lord. And for the Lord, it's all about the relationship. For the Lord, it's all about the relationship. If the work is getting in the way of the relationship, he might remove it.  It's a lie. For God, it's all about the relationship. If this is going to lead you to him, if it's not going to lead you to him, if you're starting to think the church depends on you, the Lord works in certain ways. And so Father Omen, really building on what Saint Paul says in Galatians 5, talks about what are the signs of the Holy Spirit versus the signs of the evil spirit. So even before you get into Ignatius as steps, there's already these signs. So I'm just going to kind of quickly scroll that. You have them on the handout if you didn't get the handout, make sure you get it. But when something's truthful, when it's kind of has gravity not in the sense it's all serious, but it's not frivolous. It's not useless. It leads you to enlightenment, docility, discretion, and prudence, which means you're not going to unreasonable extremes. Humility, peace, confidence in God, flexibility of will is a great sign of whether you're walking in the Lord. When we get too stubborn about something where our own attachments getting in there, he says it's one of the most sure signs that you're losing listening to the right voice. Patience and suffering, self abnegation in the sense of willingness to do penance or to sacrifice, simplicity. Ignatius will bring this out even more, so I'm just going to mention it here and we'll unpack it a little more. When God speaks, he's simple. If things are getting way too complicated, it's usually a sign that it's not from God, actually. I said usually. Liberty of spirit and detachment. If you have really you're just saying this plan, this thing is of the Lord, I can be very open-handed about it, very open-hearted about it. If I start clinging to it, I only want it my way. I must be like this. Nobody else can be part of it. Good sign you're on the wrong track. Things of the Lord are very inclusive. Things of the Lord are very like, I want other people to be part of the fruitfulness of this. Desire to imitate Christ and disinterested love. A love that is for the sake of the good of the other and not just about myself. Now, what's from evil, falsity, morbid curiosity, wanting to know things beyond what God reveals, confusion, distress, obstinacy, indiscretion, restlessness. I can actually restlessness as I can tell. When I'm so anxious about something that I'm doing, it's usually a sign that something's gotten in that's wrong. It doesn't mean the whole thing's wrong, but somehow my intention's gotten a little off. Spirit of pride, vanity, false humility, discouragement and despair to the biggest signs of the evil one, disobedience, hardness of heart, impatience and suffering, stubborn kind of resentment, uncontrolled passions and sensuality, hypocrisy. I mean, this is not a fun list. And excessive attachment to sensible consolation, lack of devotion to Jesus and Mary. The evil one is not going to lead you to Jesus and Mary. But the spirit of the Lord will. Legalism and fanatical zeal. That that was interesting that he said, when somebody becomes so zealous that they think they're the reformer of all things, that's usually a sign that you're on the wrong track. I often think like when you see problems in the church, the church has had problems from its founding. Because the Lord didn't stay on this earth to lead it. He stayed present to us in the Eucharist, but he appointed Peter. There have always been problems in the church. Look at the apostles. But you can tell if something's of God, by the way a person responds, and if you want to know the best way to deal with struggles in the church, I say, look at Mary. There is no one who knew the weaknesses of the apostles better than our lady. She saw. She stood at the foot of the cross and saw all but one didn't even stand there. Thank God for John. But what did she do? Can you imagine Mary going up to all the other holy women saying, can you believe these guys? Like we need to get them out. We need to take over the church. I'd be a, I mean, Mary would have been a way better pope, right? You know, no, factions, you know who they're from. What does she do? She stood firm by her son. She went with the apostles in the upper room. She prayed for the coming of the spirit to anoint them in their weakness and make them the men of God they were meant to be. This is the Holy Spirit's work. Mary's a great, you know, all the popes have told us in the recent history. If you want to know what discipleship looks like, look at Mary. Okay. She knew the weakness of the church. She prayed and waited for the spirit to come and anoint these people. If we pray wherever you are in your parish, pray for your parish priest, pray for your bishop, pray for the pope. Why does the church do that in every single Eucharistic prayer? Because the spirit of the Lord is a spirit of peace and unity, not a spirit of factions. It's a sure sign of which spirit you're working with. I just say it. You ponder it in your own prayer. Now, one final note before I go right into Ignatius is it's more important to know is something of God and not of God than to take a lot of time to figure out the things that are not of God, where are they coming from? Is it the devil, the flesh of the world? It's a little confusing sometimes. So just know it's of God or not of God and go with what's of God. Okay. Now, if you want to know really well how to unpack the principles of the sermon of spirit from St. Ignatius of Loyola, you probably already know this, but Father Timothy Gallagher's books and his podcasts are excellent. Okay. So what I've included here is really just a summary of what it says about the sermon of spirits coming mostly from that. Also, Dan Burke has a great book on the sermon of spirits and spiritual warfare. So the names of Father Gallagher's books are here on the handout. I want to say something about the first set of rules. If you've never learned these before, you're going to need more time than what I'm going to give it today. And you really need to go to the books and or the podcasts, okay, to unpack it. I do want to take at least a few minutes though to do something that more people don't know about, which is the second set of rules, but I'll say more about that in a minute. If you are familiar with Ignatius of Loyola and the discernment of spirits, it came out of a specific experience in Ignatius's life. It's not a new principle, but he lived it. You know, he was a kind of worldly guy. And he loved to read things that stirred his worldly visions. It's not, you know, but when he would read them, he would get all kinds of enjoyment out of reading them, but afterwards, he would feel very kind of heavy, dark. When he got injured and the only books that were accessible to him were holy writings, the lives of the saints, the scriptures, he would read them and he would engage in them. He must have a very vivid imagination. He would engage in them. And then afterwards, he would feel lightness and peace and joy. And this was where a discernment of spirits as his like guiding kind of principle in some ways for the spiritual life came from. He was like, wait a minute. Why do I enjoy both in the moment, but afterwards, it's so different.  All right? I choose what I read and what I listen to and buy with the fruits of it. Most news media does not help my soul. Most news media makes me negative, tense, fearful, and angry. I read enough to know what I need to pray for, but I stop after that. And certain things I don't need any details about. I'm not talking about we're hiding from the world. I'm talking about we need to recognize conversations, friends. When I was a teenager, my mom didn't ever hear the term discernment of spirits. But one day, she said to me something really powerful. I never forgot it. She said, when you're around that group of friends, when you come away, you're very light, joyful, happy. When you're around that group of friends, I don't recognize you. There's something negative, critical, hostile in your spirit. And I was like, whoa. And my mother said to me, I was a teenager. She said, who's the real you? That was the beginning of really a conversion of my life. Because I started to realize the people I surround myself with, the conversations I have, the things I read and look at, I mean, I didn't know the terminology, but it was the sermon of spirits. I was like, do I want to be negative, tense and critical? No. Do I want to be trusting in the Lord, confident in Him? A peace with myself and with other people? Yes. That's the sermon of spirits. Okay. So what Ignatius wrote was a series of rules of how different spirits work in us and around us that we can apply. Now, you don't have to memorize all these rules, but they have very interesting concepts within them. But there's three basic steps that we all have to follow if we're going to do discernment. The first is just become aware. Awareness. Ignatius was like, I never noticed before that when I read this stuff, I had this dark, heavy feeling afterwards. When I read this, I had this lightness and joy. Wow. So he became aware. Then step two, understand. Why am I having different experiences? Where is this coming from? Well, go back to Galatians five. The things of God, the things of the Spirit have a certain beauty to them, a certain goodness to them, right? The things of darkness don't. Oh, okay. Understanding. Dissern what's from God, what's from not. That's what the rules of discernment are all about. Then thirdly, take action. We have to take action. When my mother said that to me about my friends, I had to take action. I didn't just amputate the friends that I wasn't so my best self with, but I gently started spending more and more time with the people that I was my better self with. I started to realize that we were real friends and that I could pray for those that I wasn't strong enough to be a good friend to them. I said that to the teens I teach. I said, it's not about condemning and judging people wrongly, but you have to know your own strengths and weaknesses for real. And if you're not strong enough to be your best self in the company of certain people, it is mercy and love to spend less time with them and maybe no time, but pray for them. Do not speak ill of them, do not treat them badly, but you have to know yourself. You can't just walk into a situation you're not strong enough to stay true to the Lord. It's humility. Humility is truth. Truth about yourself before the Lord. That's not condemnation. That's humility. Awareness, understanding, action. Ignatius wrote 14 rules of how to discern what is at the Lord and what is not at the Lord by using certain principles. These are the ones that almost every book about discernment of spirits talks about these 14, because for anyone who's just trying to do basic day-to-day discernment and especially for those who are newer in their conversion experience, this is where they need to focus. Because there is another set, but that set is really for people who are what you would call like the season disciple. The person who's been walking with the Lord a long time is not in the stage of basic purification from serious sin. And so that's not something we judge about somebody else. That's something they have to kind, unless you're walking with someone as a director, you don't use the second set, you use the first. Okay? So the first set of rules are basically in a nutshell, observations in rule one and two about how the spirits work in us. And there's an interesting pattern in Ignatius notes that if you're in a pattern of sin and you're kind of like committed to the sin, the evil one will keep presenting you pleasures that will feel good and you'll just, that'll feel good. Whereas when the good spirit is kind of prodding the person to conversion, at first that's going to feel uncomfortable, right? So if somebody's struggling with something and they're still in the like really battling a serious pattern of sin, they're going to feel the good things as kind of confronting, but that's the way it works. Whereas if you're already kind of past initial conversion, it's the opposite. That the spirit of goodness, you'll feel a lot of consolation and gentleness about that. And the things of evil will kind of prick you. But that's why it's hard like, because you'll meet somebody and they're like, I'm perfectly happy, like in a pattern that's self-destructive or whatever. You're like, and that's why praying for their conversion, loving them, accompanying them and recognizing that their discernment process is going to be pretty hard until they're out of that pattern. That's rules one and two. Rules three and four are about, what's the difference between consolation and desolation? Consolation is when you have this like movement of being in flame with love. I think you have a lot of consolations at a Steubenville conference, right? You hear a beautiful truth, you meet an amazing person, you're part of praise and worship, and you just, you have that consolation of, wow, like it's good to be the Lord's, it's good to love. That's consolation. And it's a joy that leads to some things. It doesn't exclude sorrow, but the kind of sorrow that comes from consolation is sorrow for sin, sorrow for anything that keeps you away from the Lord. And it's mostly a joy that attracts you to the things of God. It's consoling. Sometimes this happens in nature, it's beautiful. It happens in a human encounter. It's this uplift of the spirit, a consolation. Desolation is a kind of darkness and disturbance of the soul, a movement to low and earthly things, a disquiet of the soul, lack of confidence, a decrease in your faith, hope, and love. It's a certain sadness about things of the Lord. Okay. And it's interesting because I want to say something about desolation and why it can be helpful to have a spiritual guide. Desolation is hard to distinguish from things of the mind and the body, right? I mean, we're one. And we talk about the things, the separate things, but if someone, if someone you know and love is seriously walking with the Lord, but they're experiencing this kind of heaviness, you might just start with physical and emotional desolation. Because if a person is very tired and or sick, they might feel a physical desolation. And it may not be anything you have to discern any deeper than just you need rest, you need recovery, and a space of healing. That can be a cause of desolation. Okay. But it's physical desolation, emotional desolation, someone who's distressed or has unhealed kind of personal traumas. It's it can mean they need a kind of beyond the spiritual discernment of spirits help processing that emotional experience. Psychological healing, right? Spiritual desolation is different. Okay. But they're all interconnected. So when I was a young sister, we had studied about the dark night of the soul. And I thought I was going through it at a stage where my superior looked at me and she was like, how much sleep are you getting? And I thought it's either some spiritual thing or it's some emotional thing. And I don't know what's going on. And because I was like, I don't know what's going on prayer doesn't give me any joy. Like being in community is heavy. It's awful. And she was just like, try sleeping eight hours a night for a full week. Now she just was a wise woman. And I did it. And I felt like a new person. And I was like, that's just physical desolation. But a lot of young people are in physical desolation. Most of the students I teach, if they're normally okay, and they're suddenly hit a slump, I say, will you go to bed for eight hours a night for one week? And what's amazing is you start to see that, whoa, physical desolation is easier to heal than other things. And once you know you could feel better, even if you don't do it, you know you could feel better, right? We all know we could feel better if we got more sleep, right? Okay, it's just a matter of choosing it. But so desolation, we're going to talk more about then what does he do in rules five to nine is guidelines for responding to desolation and knowing its causes. Here is one of the most important things that Ignatius said. When you are in desolation, even if you don't know whether it's more for your physical, emotional or spiritual, do not change your good resolutions. I remember stage when I was going through all kinds of stuff, and I talked to a family marriage counselor. And he said, never make a decision about your vocation when you're in desolation. Even a decision about a ministry or job, don't make it when you're in desolation. This is a principle of good spiritual guidance. Because when you're in desolation, all seems not good. He's like, if you're really meant to make a change in your life, you will feel equally in consolation that you need to make a change as in desolation. So whatever your spiritual program is, Ignatius says, and it's great advice, persevere in your prayer, persevere in your good resolutions, persevere in whatever moment you're in in your vocational discernment, because desolation is no place where you want to make decisions. Instead, he said, even though you'll feel like stopping praying because you're not getting any spiritual consolation from it, keep your commitment to pray. Keep your commitment to pray. Prayer is not about what we feel. I know you know that. But keep your commitment to prayer, meditation, examination and penance. Do not give those up in desolation. He says, and put certain truths before you when you're in desolation. Write it and put it on the place where you get dressed in the morning. Look at it. Truth. What do you need to remember that the Lord is with you, that His grace is with you? Be patient. Now, if it is a spiritual desolation, the ninth rule tells you what could be the cause of spiritual desolation. And this is why sometimes you need a guide to help you walk through this. It could be that you're just not keeping faithful to your spiritual exercise. If you stop praying, you will go into desolation. It could be that you are being faithful to everything and that God is actually testing, not in the negative sense, testing to show you, to reveal, will you follow Him even when He's not giving you consolation? Do you love the Lord more than the gifts of the Lord? You know, every love, human and divine, there's a stage that's very fulfilling at the emotional level, at the felt experience.  Do you still love? Do you still trust in the darkness? That could be what the Lord's doing. That's why you don't give up your prayer. Don't give up your spiritual exercises. Like, keep staying with the Lord. Or it could be that He needs you to realize that the consolation is His gift. He needs you to detach you from it. If you think, because I'm faithful to doing my holy hour, faithful going to Mass, faithful doing, that's why I get consoled. It's like a rewards-earned kind of theory.  Okay. Then how do we respond in consolation? When things are great, when you feel wonderful, when the Lord is like so present to you, He says, that's the moment to like fortify yourself, strengthen yourself. You know, don't just sail on the good feeling, right? Say, I'm going to remain faithful and remember the darkness is going to come again and fortify yourself, strengthen yourself. Those Mount Tabor moments are awesome, but don't like just coast on that. Say, okay, it's going to get hard again. You're going to leave a Stephenville conference and go back in the trenches. It's going to get hard again. What did I learn in the moment of consolation that shows me how to live in the trenches, right? Then I need to pray that even a few minutes in front of the Blessed Sacrament changes something in me. That going to confession is a lifeline, right? Like, those things you learn in the consolation moments keep them strong for the desolation and to be humbly thankful to the God when you are receiving consolation. No, it's not something you deserve or earn. It's just a beautiful gift of God. So you can enjoy it. You can say, I love me. Of course we love to be in the stage of consolation, but don't cling to it too tightly and be ready for the fact that it may be taken away. Now, rules 12 through 14, the last set of these rules is what Ignatius says, how do you recognize and resist the deceptions of the devil? He says that evil attacks those who do not fight it.  The more you cower, the more fear he becomes. What do you do? You stand up to him. Say, that's a lie. I don't believe that. Jesus. You know, one of the quickest ways to get rid of anything that's not of the Lord, call on the names of Jesus and Mary. He can't stand it. Okay? And call on the saints. I mean, just, you have so much freedom to reject a lie as soon as you recognize it, which is why you need to be aware. When you start recognizing something that's not of the Lord, you say, that is not of the Lord. I say, that is not the voice of my shepherd. And when you say it, you just deflate the devil and his tricks and his lies. 13th rule is really important. He says the devil, he uses this interesting, this is right from Ignatius, that he's like, what does he use this phrase? It's a strange phrase, but I think it's interesting. He's like a false lover. I was like, what? He wants you to keep secret the things he says and does to you. And this is why, it's like, it's funny, like, we get really ashamed and we get really afraid of bringing certain things into the light. And that keeps you at the mercy of the evil one in the confessional with a spiritual guide, with a spiritual friend you trust.  And sometimes it takes seconds to expose a lie, you know? And all those things that you're like, oh, I don't want to talk to this other person about this because it's hard and all that's going to happen. The devil likes you to keep everything kind of hidden because he works in darkness. But discern well who is a good and wise person. Now, I do not think posting your inner life on social media is a good idea. Putting all the information about your inner life out there is not so smart. But within the confessional, within a holy spiritual friendship and or direction, you can entrust what's going on.  So self knowledge is really big. Know what are your natural weaknesses because the devil always plays the same tricks. He's not that creative. Okay, he's counter creative. He's destructive. Okay, but he'll play to your weaknesses. That's why when we go to confession, we kind of are like a broken record is because he knows how to play to your weaknesses. So Ignatius says, pray for help in your particular weaknesses. We're not supposed to so be self examining to like always beat ourselves down. But we're trying to recognize in humble truthful self knowledge, where do I need strength and ask it of the Lord. And whatever are the penances we are doing in our in our life, direct them towards the healing of your weaknesses. Not that we heal ourselves because the Lord alone heals us. But we cooperate with the grace of God. Now in my last couple minutes, because we're almost done, I want to say a word about what are called the second set of rules, almost every book on spiritual discernment will go through the 14 rules I just shared with you. And Father Timothy Galliard is a wonderful thing. He gives lots of examples of how each one works, so that the narrative helps you understand the principle. Okay. There is a second set. And I was I was wondering whether I should say it because if you're too early in the stages of your conversion, the second set can get very confusing. But I got encouragement from a lot of people who said, look, a lot of people at the Bosco Conference are ready for the second set. You may already know them. I actually, I was coming to give this talk and one of my sisters in community said, I'm really wrestling with the second set, not the first. And I said, what, there's another set? And I was like, whoa, okay, I had to go back and revisit this myself. And if you want to know more about these, they're in not the book called discernment of spirits by Father Timothy Galliard, it's on the handout, but the one called spiritual consolation. Now, if you're new to conversion and or you're working with people who are just trying to get the basic conversion, like patterns of evil out there, like this is not for them. Okay, you have my permission to leave for these five minutes if you don't want to hear it because it can confuse the beginner. When you are seasoned, when you're the like habitual disciple, it doesn't mean you never sin, but you're not in the initial struggle against serious sin in your life. And you're literally a faithful, you're trying to walk with the Lord regularly. There's another kind of like challenge because the devil can falsify consolation. That's the principle. I'm not going to go through every one of the eight, but here's the thing. The devil can make something look appealing to you and draw you to it at the level of your inspirations and emotions to distract you from God's real will for you. And that's what the second set is about. How do you know? Ignatius says if you have a consolation without cause, you're just walking in the street and suddenly boom, a huge grace. Mother Teresa on the train to her retreat, nothing she's really doing. And suddenly the inspiration comes from the missionaries of charity. Well, okay, he says consolation without proceeding cause is always from God, but it's very hard to discern whether how to proceed in cause. But most consolations we experience are what he calls consolation with a prior cause. And what does that mean? You're reading, you're meditating and something comes to you. And it feels so gentle and so good. And you're like, wow, maybe the Lord wants that for me. He used the example of the cure of ours, St. John Vieny. John Vieny was an incredibly prayerful man.  He's like a parish priest. People are coming from all over the world to go to him for confession.  And it felt so right. This is what Ignatius is talking about. He says, sometimes the devil will falsify a consolation in order to mislead you into a good thing that is not God's will for you. How in the world do you figure that one out?  Sometimes you're not going to know it at the beginning. You're like, this feels like a gift of the Lord. It's a good thing. It's drawing my heart. It's wonderful. So you follow it. A prayer routine you add to your schedule. A ministry you take on. It has all the signs of the Lord. Beginning was great. Keep discerning. Middle, it's growing. It's taking, you know, but what if it starts to suddenly other primary commitments in your vocation and your life start falling apart? It stops bearing fruit. It's causing all this tension. You have to keep discerning that because he's like, something can seem like it's of the Lord, but it can actually distract you from the good of the Lord. Okay. And you know it by continual discernment. I love teaching the faith and speaking to people, but there was a time in my vocation where I was on the road so much, I was teaching and doing speaking, and I was getting so physically exhausted. And my sisters in community kept saying to me, this is true. Every time I was in community, the first thing a sister would say to me is, we never see you. I sensed a great sadness on their part. I sensed a desolation arising in my heart that I was like, wait a minute, I'm a sister before I'm on the road apostle. Now, does that mean that what I did in prior to that feeling was wrong? No. I hope not. I hope not. Okay. But the Lord was starting to show me something's wrong in the primary commitments of your life. And that doesn't mean it's evil, but it's maybe the good the Lord didn't want for you. Now, other principle to notice, he says, good angels touch the soul sweetly and gently, like water falling on a sponge, whereas evil spirits fall like water on stone. They're a bit noisy. They're a bit distressing. They're a bit like high power. There are times when I'm praying and I'm like, I need to go join this other community.  I mean, I'm not as good as John Vieny, but how many times I'm like, I need to be a cloistered nun because that's where the action is. But it comes with such vehemence. It comes with such like, and usually it's a reaction to a hard thing in the apostolate. It's usually actually just, I don't want to deal with how hard things are in the actual location I have. And that's why discernment is patient and slow. It's patient and it's with another. You know, anything that involves big picture discernment should always involve a process and be slow. Okay. And you keep looking at it. When I go back to my story of like, when the sister started saying all that to me, I just took it to prayer. I said, Jesus, I'm doing this for you. But if this is not a view, please show me. And he's like, I'm showing you. You're getting burnt out. You're not having good relationships in community. And so I was, I went to my, in our life, we have obedience. This is very helpful. Anyway, but I went to my spirit. You can go to your spouse. You can go to your colleagues. You can go to your friend, the person who you know and trust. And I went in to talk to mother and I was like, about to say to her, I really think the Lord is asking me to step back from this for a little while. And before I said it, she looked at me and said, how would you feel about taking a year off from public speaking? And I said, how would I feel? I'm like, mother, that's what I was coming to ask you about anyway. And I was like, boy, Lord, sometimes he's so, so, so kind of merciful in the way he reveals it, right? Well, he's always kind of merciful, but he let me get it, right? But, but you see what I mean, like, if you're in the early stages of conversion, you use basic principles of discernment. But when you're a seasoned disciple, be careful, because the devil isn't going to come after a good person with some big horrific evil, because you would recognize it, right? You would recognize and be like, that's not of the, you know, you already know that. But when you're a seasoned disciple of the Lord, he can distract you with the good that was not God's will for you. But my friends in Christ do not be afraid, because you can hear that and it can be terrifying. You're like, how would I know if anything's from God or not? This is why you need to be humble. It's not always sinful, right? That you would just miss discern, right? Or you would discern what he wanted you to begin, but what he wants you to now let go. Go back to Galatians 5, the fruits of the spirit. In this, I want you to know God wants to reveal his will to you. He's not playing hide and seek and hard to get. If something's complicated and complex, that's often a sign that it's not of the Lord. He works in simplicity. And one prayer I just want to share with you as we close is, it's very simple, but the Lord gave it to me because there's a lot of discernment in life. And it was, Lord, open every door you want open and close every door you want closed. So often, we're like, how do I know? Does he want me to do that, that, that? Give him permission. Use whatever words you sense in your prayer. But I just say it to him, Lord, open every door you want open and close every door you want closed. And ever since I've started praying that, I have a lot of peace. Not only about the yeses, I have total peace about the no. And I didn't use to. I used to think that no was my personal failure. That was not of the Lord. Do not be afraid. God is infinitely good. He loves you. He's powerful. He does want you to know his will. These principles are just like signposts to help you know what God wants for you. And sometimes when you talk about spiritual discernment, people get nervous because they're afraid. And while the devil, you should be afraid of the devil in a wholesome way. But always, if I'm going to talk to people about evil, I end with the good. The good is so much greater. So my final word to you is from Romans 8. What then shall we say?  If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own son, but handed him over for us all. How will he also not give us everything else along with him? The greatest gift is him. And everything else we need to get to him. He will give it to us. What will separate us from the love of Christ? Will anguish, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, the sword? No. In all these things, we are more than conquerors. We conquer overwhelmingly through him who loved us. For I am convinced, and I say it to you, I would not say it to you if I didn't believe it. It's God's word, but I believe it. I am convinced that nothing can separate us from the love of Christ. Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, depth, or any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Thank you.


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