Become Who You Are
What’s the meaning and purpose of my life? What is my true identity? Why were we created male and female? How do I find happiness, joy and peace? How do I find love that lasts, forever? These are the timeless questions of the human heart. Join Jack Rigert and his guests for lively insights, reading the signs of our times through the lens of Catholic Teaching and the insights of Saint John Paul ll to guide us.
Saint Catherine of Siena said "Become who you are and you would set the world on fire".
Become Who You Are
#597 The Claymore Battle Plan: "On Morality, Conscience, and the Fall of Man" plus Trumps Speech and more!
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The first Friday in Lent! This episode dives into the ongoing battle for the soul of our society amid growing cultural turmoil. We discuss the Claymore Battle Plan and its implications for reclaiming life-affirming values.
- Examining the essence of spiritual warfare in contemporary society
- The significance of the Claymore Battle Plan for personal and communal renewal
- Addressing the pressing issues surrounding culture and morality
- The role of temptation as an invitation to growth and deeper faith
- Understanding the urgency of scripture in navigating moral complexities
- Exploring the unity of love, truth, and justice in our interactions
- Encouraging active participation in reclaiming territories for Christ
- The spiritual journey of young people in a fragmented culture
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Happy First Friday in Lent. I hope you're doing well. Welcome to Claymore. This is part of the Become who you Are podcast, a production of the John Paul II Renewal Center. I'm Jack Riggert, your host. Claymore is exciting, a lot of good things happening. So again, I hope you guys have downloaded the Claymore Battle Plan. Miletus Christi, claymore is that big Claymore sword? Huh, you've heard me already. Go back and listen to the earlier ones because I have to keep moving forward a little bit.
Speaker 1:Soldiers for Christ, this really contains the whole battle plan for your spiritual formation and to understand the big story that we're in. And so, just quickly, I just want to outline this whole battle plan. For those of you who are new, let me get my glasses on here. The key scripture here you then my son, be strong in the grace that is in jesus christ and what you have heard from me before many witnesses, and trust the faithful men who will be able to teach others also. Take your share of suffering as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. That's 2 Timothy, chapter 2 from St Paul.
Speaker 1:What we're seeing, of course, is we've seen a breakdown in the cultures in Western civilization, in the human heart, marriage and the families coming apart. But then we see something in young men, especially Gen Z and a little bit older than that too. So you know, all the way from high school through the early thirties. So we want to be there. We're doing a lot more talks. If you need us to come to your parish, if you want me to come to your parish, you know, just email. We didn't get a lot of emails this week so I'm figuring you guys are settling into this, but we'd like to continue to communicate with you, bring up questions that might come in.
Speaker 1:The purpose of this, then. The purpose of this whole Claymore story is this is building up and this is in your battle plan. This is on page six in your battle plan, the summary Purpose. The movement is for courageous young men and women too, if they want to join. But this is really focused on men who are committed to seeking and sharing the truth, building a brotherhood rooted in all that's true, good and beautiful, especially the beauty of love. So, if you can be on this journey, remember in the battle plan there's that spiritual formation that we talk about a lot.
Speaker 1:This is more of the doctrinal, the whole story every Friday that we're going to bring out and continue to walk into that and we have a reality check here. We're born in a world at war. We don't realize it. The enemy, satan, seeks the destruction of humanity and over the past decades the enemy has gained significant ground. This is a spiritual battle that begins in the human heart.
Speaker 1:This is the restlessness that so many young people that we're talking to today feel, but they're turning it around. It's amazing to me, it's toxic, as this got. It's almost like at the abyss right now. It's not there yet, but getting close to the abyss and young people are waking up and saying something's wrong. Young people are naturally idealistic, but they've been indoctrinated so much, brainwashed so much, that it's exciting for me to see young people step up and exciting to be part of that journey with you guys.
Speaker 1:So there's a call to action, a call to Miletus Christi, and it aims at reclaiming territory for Christ. And this is reclaiming territory for all of us. Right by what? By building a culture of life, liberty and love through this three-step plan. So this battle plan, this three steps, restore the dignity of the human person, restore your heart, my heart. We gotta be able to do that, understand the dignity of each human being, and that means you have to be pro-life, you have to be for young people, you have to be for the baby in the womb. You have to defend the marriage and the family. There's no way any civilization can uphold itself without being the Imago Dei. And again, we've unpacked this already.
Speaker 1:So go back and listen to some of those early ones. Defend marriage and the family will link directly to Christ and the church, right. And then we have the number three we have to be engaged in social, political activism. You have to go out. Jesus always said go out, take that heart of yours, take that heart that's seeking what's true, good and beautiful. Receive this grace from God. Make sure we build up our domestic home, our marriages, our families, be pro-life and love your neighbor, all that kind of things. But then we got to go out and bring this into the culture, bring this goodness into the culture, get rid of that deep state. I want to talk a little bit about that deep state a little bit. So hey, review this. If you have any questions or if you just want me to uncrack it a little bit more, feel free.
Speaker 1:Today we're going to be talking about morality and conscience and this fall of man, to see how we got to where we're at. But I want to start out. Hopefully you've seen the Trump speech. This was this Tuesday, so Ash Wednesday was yesterday. As I'm recording this. It'll come out on Friday, of course, but today is Thursday as I'm recording this, ash Wednesday, so I have my ashes. They came off already. Hopefully you got yours. The night before was Trump's speech. It's excellent. Here's what I want you to keep in mind when we're talking about morality, conscience this first Friday in Lent, the fall of man, to understand our fall and where we're at right now in the story, and how to get out of this and create a better life for ourselves, our families. If you know, if you fall in love, you know how do you build that up right. So we're asking all those questions.
Speaker 1:This is not a Democrat or a Republican battle when Trump was giving the speech. It's not about left to right. This is a populist counter-revolution to put all these things that I just talked about back into the culture. See, we got it from the top. Now this is a window of opportunity, just like Trump said and I believe it's true that God saved him from that assassination attempt to make America great again. He's just a man, he's not Jesus Christ, so we have to be able to influence these decisions. He's bringing a lot of good people in, but they're politicians and they're businessmen and they're not going to be perfect, they're all, but they're bringing prayer back in. We're back on a journey.
Speaker 1:When God gives us a window like that, we have to take it, and I'm going to read you a little bit from scripture in just a little while, from today, from today, and I'll unpack this. That's why part of that spiritual formation for you is reading scripture every day. If you got to read, just follow the hollow app there, or the Magnificat. That hollow map, I think for young men and women is even better because it's going to give you reminders, some bells and whistles on there. It really helps you out a little bit. So read that scripture every day.
Speaker 1:So important and because that's our story. You know we think, oh, that was a long time ago or whatever. No, each generation comes in and we all stand at that tree of the knowledge of good and evil. You know, each generation needs to know. It's your turn to play out that storyline and we're heading someplace. We're heading to eternity. That's what Ash Wednesday was all about. Right, that you are made from the clay, god breathes into us ruah and you receive this grace the spirit, right, reason, intellect, free will. When those things are taken, when God is taken out, these things crumble, and this is what I want to talk just briefly about right now.
Speaker 1:When you saw President Trump give that speech, remember again, this is a populist movement. We're bringing God back in. We're bringing, then, what's true, good and beautiful, the logos, back in the wisdom of God, back into our own hearts and then back out into here. That's what happened. This just got sucked out. God got sucked out, and everything starts to come in Marriage and the family gets attacked, because that's the Imago Dei, link directly to God and Christ and the church. This is the foundation. Remember the triangle Marriage and the family. Christ and the church holds this up. Then the beauty and power of this love story goes into the culture and we design. America is unique and we're designed on that to be a moral and religious people. As John Adams and Madison said, if you don't have moral and religious people, people of virtue, this republic will never hold, and we see that happening right now.
Speaker 1:So, again, the battle plan is what Satan doesn't have, his own clay, and you see, this many-headed hydra that got into our government made the government way too big. We got this deep state. And what is the deep state really? Ultimately, it's the individual human hearts that are grasping and taking God out. And you see what happens when these individual human beings at all these different levels. That's why you say, well, I don't get it. There's just so many people out there. The evil's coming in from all over. It is it's individual human hearts that get put into these different positions. The only way to take this down now is to reduce the size of this deep state. It's just, evil is embedded in there, and that's what we're trying to do there. But it's also about reducing taxes. They're extorting money from us, ruining the middle class, the working poor it's amazing. And they're just wasting it. And you could see that.
Speaker 1:Go watch Trump's speech if you didn't already. So we've got a lot there. And then in the audience, you've got these women and Democrats. Again, it's not about Democrats, but it is the Democratic Party. That is the party of death, promoting abortion, lbgtq, gender ideologies, twisting and distortion of marriage got out right and then distort public education. Take the taxes, take it for myself, spend it on anything. You know it's amazing evil out there.
Speaker 1:And what they sat there in these pink? They wore these pink outfits because they said Trump is against women. I mean, does anybody believe this hypocrisy anymore? These are total propagandists for the deep state, you know, for anti-God, anti-family, anti-everything that makes things true, good and beautiful. And they have the audacity it's just up to the hypocrite. But it's a joke now, and these are our brothers and sisters, so we got to keep them in prayer. But at the end of the day, does anybody believe these people anymore? Total propagandists that are looking for money, power and they'll do anything. So here's Trump talking about protecting women in sports. Right, that men got to stay out of their locker room. Men got to. You know, these are men. They can't be playing in women's sports. That's why we have women's sports and these people are against it. And they're sitting there in their pink outfit. Abortion Well, how many young people women too are getting killed in there? Trans ideologies, telling a young girl that she could have her breasts removed and go on, these puberty blockers, and one thing after another, this depraved way to live, this darkness. And then they put pink on to stand for women. And it's good. They do that because you can look out in the audience there and young women are looking at them and saying yeah, yeah, really right. So again, let me go on here.
Speaker 1:I wanted to read you just the passage from today just to show you how important this is when we talk about reading scripture every day. This is from Deuteronomy, chapter 30, verses 15 through 20. This is kind of explained this. So this is Moses who led his people out of slavery. And again, you think about these things. This is in the book of Exodus, thousands of years before Jesus came into the story. And what is God doing? He's taking. When I say Jesus came into the story, I mean incarnation takes on a body and comes into the story. Jesus was always in the story. Right, we get that. So you know what I mean. So what happens is God's people are in slavery in Egypt. He's pulled them out of slavery. Slavery is an old story. It didn't start here in slavery in Egypt. He's pulled them out of slavery. Slavery's an old story. It didn't start here in the United States.
Speaker 1:Again, you have to get your mind around these things. So when people talk about CRT and all this baloney in schools and stuff, we say, hey, have you ever read Exodus? Anyways, moses said to his people today I have listened to this and this is exactly what Trump was talking about here and again, he's not a perfect person. We're not going to agree with everything he says I don't want to go there right now but in general, he's given us a window. Now we have to fill it in. We have to fill in the story right Today.
Speaker 1:I have set before you life and prosperity, death and doom. If you obey the commandments of the Lord, your God, which I enjoin on you today, loving him and walking in his ways and keeping his commandments, statues and decrees, you will live and grow numerous, and the Lord, your God, will bless you in the land you are entering to occupy. If, however, you turn away your hearts and will not listen and are led astray and adore and serve other gods money, power, sex I tell you now that you will certainly perish. You will not have a long life on the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and occupy. This is the United States too. We were given this promised land. So I call heaven and earth today to witness against you.
Speaker 1:I have set before you life and death. This is it life and death, the culture of life or the culture of death, the blessing or the curse? How do we live? Do we get a blessing on our lives, a blessing on our country, or do we get the curse? Europe is gonna get the curse. I'll talk about that in a minute. Choose life.
Speaker 1:He says then that you and your descendants may live by loving the Lord, your God, heeding his voice, holding fast to him, for that will mean life for you, a long life for you, to live on the land, on the land that the Lord swore he would give to your fathers, abraham, isaac and Jacob. It's amazing, huh, it's amazing. So we're fighting the same story. You know, each generation again needs to hear the story, and you guys didn't all hear the story. That's why Claymore is here. That's why we're helping you do this. This is our battle. This is our time to come in.
Speaker 1:And don't forget when we're doing good things in the world, we are working out our own salvation. When we do good things, we become good. I am good, or like those. Look, I don't want to judge all of them and throw them all under the bus, but it's a pro-death platform. That's obvious. Right? We can say that because it's obvious we're not judging every single human heart there. But when they fall for this hypocrisy, when they push these death things on us, I mean, how else are we supposed to judge them? So we get to this talk today, or this session today.
Speaker 1:Let me grab a little coffee here. We want to talk about the bigger story, morality and conscience, the fall of man. I just will add this that when you're looking at that spiritual formation right First thing in the morning, before you look at that phone, you're going to drop your knees, you open up your heart. Huh, let it be done to me according to your word, you're asking God, you're kneeling with our blessed mother. Her fiat brings God and she's impregnated with God. We want to be impregnated with Jesus Christ, with those graces right, so that our graces fill our body, a body and a soul.
Speaker 1:Those women, again, that I was just describing in pink, and the men holding up these childish signs Did you see this? These are like little kids. Their brains have turned to mush or they just think everybody's just going to fall for this propaganda. We're over it. You know Too much evil out there right now. So you fall to your knees, you open up your heart and then remember temptation's not a sin.
Speaker 1:So the temptations come, they're an invitation to prayer. Let Jesus come in and purify those and then remember temptation's not a sin. So the temptations come, they're an invitation to prayer. Let Jesus come in and purify those and then, finally, you become a person of love so you have a body and a soul.
Speaker 1:Without this, the default position is sin and death. That's what the ashes show you. We came from this ruah and we're going to go back to ashes, but the soul goes on and we get a glorified body. We will have a body in heaven. You know, at the last, at the second coming of Christ, he's going to restore our body. You saw this in the transfiguration, when Jesus has a glorified body right and just go out and love the next person you see.
Speaker 1:So this is very, very important. In order to do that, our body and soul has to be filled with grace. So this is the divine mercy right. That's divine mercy picture. Right there, that divine mercy picture, sister Faustina, jesus gets hit with the lance in the heart as he's hanging on the cross. Blood and water come out. Water is baptism and confession. The blood is the blood that's going to nourish you. He gives us this in the Eucharist. So confession and the Mass are so important for you guys to be.
Speaker 1:So the last thing I'll just tell you right now what I do on Wednesdays and Fridays I started yesterday and I feel great is just water and black coffee on Wednesdays and Fridays, nothing else and coffee till about noon or so. I keep sipping it a little bit, love it. I'll have another sip Today's, thursday, though. I can eat today. That's easy for me. Wednesdays and Fridays makes you feel good.
Speaker 1:You get rid of the toxins in your body, but you do whatever you want, but fasting the reason I bring it up is very, very important. See a body and a soul right now. We take our God out and so we're not informed with this grace, and so our body falls into materialism and lust and selfishness. And so we're embodied spirits. We are supposed to be a sacramental sign bringing God's life and love into the world. If we don't do that, it doesn't get in, and then the vacuum gets filled of evil. That's what you've seen. That's what the difference is right now, with President Trump bringing good people in, that the top level right is no more going to be pushing evil down on us, but they're going to be fighting. We have to fight too, wherever we're at. He cannot do this alone. It takes millions and millions of lives. The good news is, again, we work out our salvation when we do that.
Speaker 1:So prayer and fasting. So what I do is, when I'm fasting, my body right, my flesh is coming united with my soul, because I'm not worried about I'm going to drink, I'm going to eat, I'm going to do this or whatever. Everything's being orientated to God, and so body and soul are being united and I'm open to grace. So body, soul plus grace gives me the potential for human flourishing, potential for human freedom not to be enslaved by any kind of these habits and stuff. Right, it's so beautiful. And then how do I do it? I have to act. I have to act. I have to be the good in the world. So body, soul plus grace gives me the potential to be free, potential to flourish. Now I have to take that into my family, right From my own heart. I received it. Now I have to be that in the world. All right, you got it. Email me if you have any questions.
Speaker 1:So I want to talk about morality and conscience and the fall of man. We all stand, like I said, at that tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So take a deep breath, place yourself in this story. You didn't create the universe, you didn't create the big story that you came into, but there was a moment in time that each of us were exploded onto the stage called life. And it's not to make it all up as we go, it's to figure out what is this plan? Gravity's already there, planets are already there, everything's moving already, everything's set up for us. We know this story.
Speaker 1:Again, go back and even on earlier this week I unpacked this in more depth, the politics of it, with Tom Hampson. So, if you want to go in a little bit more, talk about this a little bit more, talk about this a little bit more. Get a little bit more understanding of our country and how it was founded. Earlier this week with Tom Hampson, or also earlier in this week with Linda Piper talking about the song of songs and the human heart. Right, the ache for love. So that ache for love, how we live this out just go listen to those podcasts. That's why we do those supplemental podcasts earlier in the week. Right, it all comes together. It all comes together.
Speaker 1:I know it's time consuming and stuff, but at the end of the day this is Lent now. So let's put down the phone so much, let's get into the story more. So you come into the story. And in the beginning there was no sin, right? So now we're going to come into the serpent more. So you come into the story. And in the beginning there was no sin, right? So now we're going to come into the serpent. So we stand at the tree and Eve is tempted, but the serpent said to the woman you certainly will not die. No, god knows well that the moment you eat of that fruit your eyes will be open and you will be like God, who knows what is good and can decide what is evil. So you know what is good and evil, you can decide. You can decide. That's what those ladies in the pink are doing.
Speaker 1:Nope, throw out the commandments, throw out God, and we'll choose. If that child lives or dies in my womb, we'll choose to take this poor, confused little girl in puberty or early adolescence and we'll choose to affirm her in her confusion and put her on puberty blockers and cut off her breasts. I mean, this is a sickness. And so this sickness infiltrated our whole country, our whole country was coming down. This gives us a chance now. It gives you a chance to live out your life, to get married, possibly have families, whatever your plan. You gives you a chance to live out your life, to get married, possibly have families, whatever your plan. You know God's plan is for your life, but for right now we're opening our hearts to God's plan. We're standing at the tree. I find more and more people who once called themselves atheists or agnostics now in your generation, sensing the weight of sin. Now in your generation, sensing the weight of sin, evil, death in the world, but also within them. Right, these restless hearts that we've been talking about and the sense of evil, mysterium and equitatus, the mystery of evil all around us.
Speaker 1:Russell Brand you probably know Russell Brand. He wrote a great book on recovery, freedom and addictions, based on AA's 12-step program. He said I was addicted to everything. It's really a good book if you're struggling with porn or alcohol or whatever addictions to get out of. He began his book this way here, in our glistening citadel of limitless reflecting screens, he's talking about these phones where we're on all day long.
Speaker 1:Right, he said we live on the outside of that larger story. Instead of coming into the story, getting in a place, we got to make it up ourselves and so outside the story, outside of our hearts, are not connected to anything right? So we're anxious, we're nervous, we're depressed. We should be, we're getting blown around by the spirits of the age. Here that restlessness leads you to god, so he says. Today we may awaken and instantly and unthinkingly reach for the phone. This is why the three-step program we do right in the morning don't look at that phone before you go to your knees, it's glowing, he says reaches our eyes before the light of dawn. Its bulletins dart into our minds for even a moment of acknowledgement of this unbending and unending fact you are going to die, he goes on.
Speaker 1:You and your children and everyone you love is hurtling toward the boneyard. I know, you know, he says, we all know it, because it yields so few likes on social media. We purr on in blinkering compliance, filling our days with temporary fixes A Starbucks here, an Amazon purchase there, a half-hearted flirt, a few minutes watching a reel of porn, any glinting twitch of pleasure releasing a rush of dopamine like a silvery stitch on a cadaver to hold you and tide you over, and you're probably too clever to repose in god or go pick up some dusty book. He's talking about the bible that has been outlawed in schools, where poetry creaks you are told with a loathing for women, that you're told that that book has a hatred of trans people. Or someone perhaps taught CRT and I'm throwing this in unquote now that the main you know and that melatonin in people's skin is the cause of hatred in the world. What a bunch of baloney. Right? It's the human heart that causes sin, not the color of my skin, right? Or that you may be a systemic racist on the day you were born for some obscure reason, right? So maybe if science and quantum physics could come up with some force or web or string or something that tethers the mystery to something solid, something measurable, you'd think again. But until then there's nothing but an empty grave, a blank tombstone and chisel poised waiting for you. So what's the story, right? So no one's going to blame you.
Speaker 1:Russell Brand said if you perch on a carousel of destructive relationships, unfulfilling work, whirling around, never holding still, never truly looking within, never really going home or thinking about where we're going. But because I had the gift of desperation, he said, because I effed up my life so royally. I had no option but to go to seek and accept help. The young man comes to Jesus what must I do to inherit eternal life? He asked Jesus. Well, jesus said you know the commandments. It will be repeated because the commandments formed. John Paul said the commandments form the covenant between God and humanity. So he comes up, he says to Jesus what must I do to inherit eternal life? And Jesus said you know the commandments. Did you do the commandments? And why are they important? Because, again, they form that covenant.
Speaker 1:If we kill, if we don't honor our parents, if we lie, steal, cheat, all these things of the deep state that we're talking about, they all start in the individual human heart. That's why we got to get washed and we got to go to confession. We got to get rid of that stuff so that we can come back into union, body and soul, filled with grace once again. This is the covenant. Covenant is like a marriage. God doesn't want just a light relationship. I'm the God and you're the creature. He brings us into an intimacy with him. It's almost too good to be true, but that's the logic of our faith. Jesus came into a world, took on our body to unite himself to us. He gives us this even in the Eucharist, all through time. There's power there.
Speaker 1:So the commandments determine the essential basis of behavior, john Paul said. They decide the moral value of human acts and remain an organic relationship with man's meaning, men and women's vocation to eternal life, which the establishment of God's kingdom in people and among people. When we think of taking our nation back, this is about taking our nation back for God to establishing heaven on earth. Right, this is beginning of going into eternal life. Eternity doesn't mean tomorrow, eternity means forever. We are eternal beings. If we reject this, this is our little window of opportunity and time to work out our eternal life. We're here to do that, to do good At the same time.
Speaker 1:John Paul said this code of morality is written in another form, the natural law, inscribed in the moral conscience of humanity and written on our hearts. We know this. This is why we're restless. It's good to be restless while you're searching, because God is calling you into himself in such a way that those that do not know the commandments, in other words the law revealed by God, are still a law unto themselves. St Paul would say, even if you don't know the Ten Commandments themselves. It's written into the human heart. You know right from wrong. Thus St Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, and he immediately adds this after he says that they show that what the law requires, the Ten Commandments, is already written in their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness to this, we know in our restlessness that something is wrong. Unfortunately, man would fall from grace. Enter the tempter.
Speaker 1:The mysterium in equitatis, the mystery of evil, comes in through Satan. Right, it's a Latin phrase, mysterium and equitatus, which literally means the mystery of evil, and this is what happens in our heart. Right, we stand before that tree. It's very powerful. If those people, right, that are pushing abortion and all this trans stuff and sucking all the money that they can and putting it in their own pockets, starting wars all over, as much human destruction as possible, that's coming from Satan. But they allow that they don't realize that that's a powerful movement, satan trying to get into the human heart. We have to make a choice here. Right, we know this already Now.
Speaker 1:The serpent was the most cunning of all the animals that the Lord God had made, smarter than me, smarter than you. The serpent said to the woman did God really tell you not to eat from any of the trees in the garden. The woman answered the serpent we may eat from the fruit of the trees in the garden. It's only from the fruit from the tree in the middle of the garden that God said. You shall not eat of it or even touch it, lest you die. But the serpent said to the woman you certainly will not die. God knows well that the moment you eat of it your eyes will be open and you will be like gods who know what is good and evil.
Speaker 1:Again, I repeat part of that. We all stand at the tree and God says you can have everything, but you can't change the truth. You can't change the plan. I give you all this as a gift, but you can't call evil good and good evil. You cannot tell me that an abortion, killing a child, is good, and that's what we've done and that's the law of the land. That's why, when Trump was here in his first term, he moved Roe versus Wade, that stain on our whole country, back to the states. That was a big movement. That was a big movement. Now it's our battle in our individual states to get that changed, that we just don't take human life. No, that's the fifth commandment thou shalt not kill. I'm sorry, I get that we've all been lied to but it's not true.
Speaker 1:It's important to pause and consider that Satan doesn't have his own clay. He can only twist, distort and seek to destroy what God created good. Nothing is more important than Satan than to destroy humanity, the image and likeness of God. He does this directly in many ways to violence and war, greed, as seen in that push of the COVID vaccines. Remember that, you know. In that push of the COVID vaccines, remember that you know everybody's got to get vaccinated with an experimental mRNA vaccine that wasn't even tested. And what happened? We got pushed. A lot of people lost their jobs or couldn't, you know, had to take the jab in order to go to work or whatever. The military was forcing this, this evil permeate. That's why this deep state's got to get twisted and distorted out of here. And also our human hearts have to, and we have to be with the claymore sword. We have to battle for what's true, good and beautiful.
Speaker 1:Just look at Europe right now. I will make a prediction that Europe is falling very, very quickly. I said this on early podcasts many, many years ago that the decline was rapidly happening and that was going to happen here in the United States if we kept on this trajectory, if Kamala Harris and Joe Biden were still in power, that means the World Economic Forum would be in power, the world elites would be in power. You know, kamala Harris didn't have the intelligence to run a country, and neither did Joe Biden, and so, at the end of the day, the ruler of the world, satan, was ruling the world, and he still has the power and principalities here. When Jesus came in, he was crucified and gave up his life. You saw, the powers of the world came right after him, and they came after all of us. This is Miletus Christi soldiers for Christ.
Speaker 1:It's a battle, huh, between good and evil, but we know it. It's important what we're talking about here, because when you see the evil around us, you know it, and so nothing more effectively destroys human life than the attack on the most innocent and defenseless among us, though children. This is what you're seeing the huge attack, marriage and the family and the children. Children again on abortion, transing them, the education system that's ruining their hearts, stealing their innocence, and we have to help them too, as soon as you get on a solid footing, if you got younger brothers and sisters. You can help out in youth ministry and stuff. We need to do this. And the act that brought them together, the marriage act between a man and a woman, that's being distorted and twisted. Marriage is meaningless. You've got the surrogacy. It's sickness to take this baby, but I better not go off track too much with that.
Speaker 1:Listen to some of the other podcasts. Jesus comes to reset us and he's going to take us back to the beginning right here, before sin came into the world. So in Matthew 19, verses 3 through eight, jesus won't limit his answer to the Pharisees, this line of questioning on divorcing their wives, and he points out that it's the hardness of hearts. So they ask him about divorce. Right, and he says it's the hardness of hearts that Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not. So he orders them and us in a sense, to pass beyond the boundary. John Paul said that runs between the first situation and the fall in the very beginning, before sin and death. And now we have the fall.
Speaker 1:John Paul says Christ came into the world to lift us up again, that we can't recover our original innocence, but we have to know the story that we came into. You can't divorce your wives for any cause. He said. It's indissolubility because it represents Trinitarian love in the world and God will not walk away from you. This means that although man has lost his primeval innocence from the very beginning, before sin, the force to overcome evil has been restored.
Speaker 1:Jesus came into the world not for sin management but for power. So when the young man in the gospel seeks out Christ, he says what must I do to inherit eternal life? Once again, jesus won't limit himself. He doesn't stop at the commandments. Even in this conversation with the young man, jesus always proposes that we go deeper, to the level of the heart. The story started before sin. Christ comes in to overpower your sin in your heart, to lead you to your destiny right. This is not a rule story. The rules are only guidelines. The 10 commandments are guidelines on this narrow road that Jesus says I am the way, the truth and the life.
Speaker 1:And we discover that the larger story is a love story. All the things that I brought up right could sound negative. It's not negative. The real story is a love story the God who loves you, who wants to fill your heart with love, love in the truth, the goodness, the beauty of love, and then we bring this out into the world. It's up to us to do that. Most of the evil that you see out, there are people that are cooperating with Satan, with evil, and then they bring evil into the world. When I do evil, I become evil, I am evil and this is my eternal destiny. This is not good, but we're feeling it right here. If you look at the faces of that Democratic audience there, they look I mean, they look demonic. Just look at it again. You know, look at those. You know. No life, just like that life is drained out of them. They're angry, mad, vitriol, hatred. It's really something right.
Speaker 1:In the Sermon on the Mount, jesus presses the whole crowd to go deeper. He said this, you have heard it said you should not commit adultery. It's one of the 10 commandments. But I say to you go deeper. Whoever even looks at a woman with lust or in a reductive way has already committed adultery with her in his heart. See, jesus says not only shouldn't you cheat on your wife, he says you have to get to your heart. You have to take that claymore sword to your heart. Just like Jesus got hit with the lance, blood and water came out.
Speaker 1:So this is why number two, when we go to our knees in the morning, is temptation's not a sin. You're going to get tempted, especially when you try to come back into God's grace, come back into the church, battle this stuff. Temptation's not a sin. You got to open up those temptations and that's what Jesus is saying here. But if you look and you'd start to lust after that woman in your heart and this is a battle, this is the biggest battle that a man can do, and this battle will go on, and don't forget that. It will lessen as time goes on.
Speaker 1:But that little ooh, yeah. See, the difference is, when I see a woman, I see the beauty of a woman. I'm not gonna bury that and I'm not gonna indulge Right away. I open it and say thank you, jesus, for the beauty of that woman. But I don't look at her like body parts. I look at her with this body and a soul infused with God. I look at her as God does right, and in order to do that I have to open myself up to grace, right.
Speaker 1:So the romantic challenge is to true love. I'm going to go on a little bit long here because I want to connect this to your heart. You know the good thing about a podcast you can always go listen to part of it later on. Right In the beginning, god created man in his image, in the divine image. He created them, male and female. He created them. This is from Genesis 1, before sin. See, the truth presents the creation of man as a special gift from the creator, containing not only the foundation and the source of the essential dignity of a human being, man and woman in the created world, but also the beginning of the call to both of them to share in the intimate life of God himself. In the beginning, god flips the cell for remember from the earlier ones Trinitarian love. He flips it into the garden. He creates this male and female open to life to be a tiny reflection of Trinitarian love. So while meditating on these words, I remember some years ago I had been at my desk writing for a long time and stretching my legs and I went downstairs to say hi to my wife.
Speaker 1:She said hello and she pointed to the television screen where Jennifer Lopez was describing her documentary on the Super Bowl halftime show. So there was a documentary a couple of years before that a couple of years ago, I don't remember. At halftime she was pole dancing. This is a middle-aged woman in her 40s, she looks good, but she's pole dancing in front of the whole world, and so she had a documentary that came out, kind of explaining that, I guess, and she spoke. A clip of her opening act came on, which, in essence, she was doing a theatrical pole dance for the single largest audience on earth. I saw parts of that documentary. I was busy and I said, honey, I'm going to go back upstairs and I wondered what would impel a fabulously rich and famous middle-aged woman to expose her body and act like that. What impels them? I have everything, I have all the money, I have all the fame, and yet something propels her to do a pole dance to make herself feel good.
Speaker 1:See, this is when we're disconnected from God, from God's plan, and, at the end of the day, what will the viewers, millions of viewers around the world what are they thinking? Does a show like that change the way men look? At the end of the day, what will the viewers, millions of viewers around the world what are they thinking? Does a show like that change the way men look at the women in their lives? You know, here, it's Jesus telling us. If you even lust after a woman right in your heart, you've committed adultery. But yet, look, this is the image. These are the temptations that Satan puts out all the time. This is a battle, isn't it? But when I see them, I don't feel sorry for myself and my own battle. I feel sorry for that woman.
Speaker 1:I think Jennifer Lopez has been married what? Maybe four times already in her young life. Just a disaster in her personal life. If you don't connect your personal life, marriage and the family to Christ and the church, it's just a good example, and I bring it up again and not to berate Jennifer Lopez. We pray for her, right, she's our sister in Christ, but I don't want to see her as an object, even though she's putting it out there. You know what if her parents, what if her children see in all that stuff?
Speaker 1:Right, we have that Me Too movement that we had just a few years ago, where women were all black to the Academy Awards and stuff and they were protesting against men, right, that lost their hearts and were using them as objects. But what did they do? They wore all black and they exposed their bodies again. I mean, they hardly wore anything. I remember some of them wearing nothing. They didn't get the paradox that I'm wearing black to protest, which they had all the right to and they should. These men are disgusting some of them, but yet they went with no clothes on again. Look at me, look at me, look at me as an object again. So the world has normalized the fall. This is a paradox we miss, while women rightly demand equality in the workplace and join the Me Too movement, and one of the most famous women in the world does a pole dance.
Speaker 1:In the beginning it was not so. Bishop Sheen stated this. He said if you want to understand why Christians and Catholics right, why we get it. You know people that are actual Christians, not a Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi or Dick Durbin here, that call themselves Catholic and try to kill as many children as they can in abortion and these trans ideologies. But he said this only people who live by faith really know what's happening in the world. The great masses without faith are unconscious of the destructive processes going on because they've lost the vision of the heights from which they've fallen.
Speaker 1:Jesus enters into this concrete and historical situation of men and women, a situation which is weighed down by all of us by original sin. We inherited the sin. It's not all our faults. The battle that we're in. Don't be down on yourself. Open yourself up. Say, hey, I'm a warrior, now I'm coming into the story. I didn't create the sin, I didn't bring all this evil in, but I don't want to bring it into my own heart. I reject all of that and I want to bring the good back in. I unite myself with Christ. I'm a soldier of Christ because I need him. I need his grace redemption because we're fighting a battle that's much bigger than ourselves.
Speaker 1:One of the ways in which this inheritance is expressed is habitual discrimination against women. You've seen this through history. Men have to step up to the plate and see our sisters and uphold them. See, in the beginning we didn't have this sin. We were complimentary, made for each other. But on the other hand, you know, hand, remember Jesus, when that woman in the episode in the gospel it's John, chapter 8, a woman caught in adultery. And Jesus said to her right, they're all going to stone her. And he says no, no, no, let those without sin pick up the first stone. Hey, you guys sin too. You're both culpable of that. But then he said to her I'm not going to condemn you, but then go and sin no more. This is the difference we tell our poor brothers and sisters that are caught up with same-sex attractions and all this stuff. Hey, god calls you back into the story, but then go and sin no more. The truth is valid for the whole human race.
Speaker 1:The attitude of Jesus in this verse that I just said John 8, is significant. This is one of the few instances in which his power, the power of truth, is so clearly manifested with regard to human consciousness. When Jesus says that, go read that. John 8, verses 3 to 11. Jesus is calm, he's collected, he's thoughtful, as in the conversation with the Pharisees in Matthew 19 I read earlier. He says in the beginning it was not so right. It's because of the hardness of your hearts that Moses allowed divorce. But I say in the beginning it was not so. Don't accept the fall. Don't accept the fall, don't accept the fall.
Speaker 1:Jesus is aware, right of being in the beginning. He understands the beginning before sin, when we were created, male and female, and the woman was entrusted to the man with her feminine distinctiveness and with her potential. For what? For motherhood. For motherhood, the man was also entrusted by the creator to the woman. They were entrusted to each other as persons made in the image and likeness of God. This entrusting is a test of love, spousal love In order to become sincere love to one another. Each of them must feel responsible for the gift. The test is meant for both of them, male and female, from the beginning. See, it's not about the woman is wrong, the man is wrong.
Speaker 1:This is what happened in the beginning. When sin came into the world. They hid from God. And God says Adam, where are you, eve, where are you? And he's calling to them. And he said why are you hiding? Why did you put loincloths on? Something happened there. Lust came into the situation and right away the blame game started. Adam says it's the woman who you put here with me. He blames God and the woman. The woman blames the serpent, right, evil. And so, at the end of the day, jesus says no, we got to stop the blame game. He says I will take it on. I will take sin and death on. I will take all of that on and let the creature himself kill me.
Speaker 1:Deicide, it's the most disgusting thing in the world. We kill the creator, but he willingly does that, and then he rises from the dead. He takes on all of our human flesh. In a sense, he connects it to divinity. He offers it to the father. He kills sin and death within us. If we say yes to him, that's what that blood and water, right, that's what that blood and water are offering us right now. Oops, that way. Water again, confession, baptism. The blood of Christ is the Eucharist, right?
Speaker 1:So, as I start to wind down here, right, the human body in its masculinity and femininity has almost lost the power, john Paul said, of expressing this love in the world. But we can regain that because it's not given up to us. It's about the human heart. Our human heart has to be united to the heart of Christ and then shared with our brothers and sisters. You know, right now, today, when you get up off your knees, remember number three in the morning go love the next person. You see Our concupiscence. This dragging us down is part of who we are. Even with grace, we feel this desire to have more, to grasp for more in our flesh, to use somebody as an object, the pornography, et cetera. This is dragging us down. Dragging us down. That's why the battlefield of the human heart, and what's the main thing? It's number three.
Speaker 1:It's pride, concupiscence, the eyes and concupiscence of the flesh. So the eyes meaning, ooh, we see the world around us, I want the car, I want this, I want that. It's not that all things are bad, but they got to be put in perspective. Material items are not bad. I have a house, right, I've got some pictures, I've got my sword, I've got my office. So we need certain things, but not to put them first.
Speaker 1:And then the lust and selfishness. That's why fasting is so important, because fasting, I'm giving up all those other things on Wednesdays and Fridays and Lent. It resets my mind, resets my heart, right, and then walks away from that pride of life. How can these women again, and these men you know sitting there when Trump was talking about these so many beautiful young people and how he was defending them, et cetera go watch that clip of Trump. And they didn't clap, they didn't care, they didn't want to celebrate anything, they're just. I mean, they've given themselves over to evil. And again, we can pray for them. That's what we're called to do, but at the end of the day, you could see, when you choose, when you allow evil to come into your heart, when you choose to grasp for money, for power, when you use people as objects.
Speaker 1:And the third one is pride, pride of life. How could my point was going to be? How could this little speck me, you, everybody how could this little speck think that I can control all this thing? I can be like God, who can decide what is good and what is evil? This is the pride I mean. If you really think about it, I am going to be dust someday, and who knows how much longer I'm going to go back to being dust. And I have the pride of life to say no, I'm going to decide all this stuff. This is amazing and this is how we bring evil in. This is what Jesus is saying.
Speaker 1:Keep your eye on eternity and bring it into your heart today, this eternal love story, and then become the person of love. That's how you become happy. You love story and then become the person of love. That's how you become happy. You have the identity. Your identity is a beloved child of God. Your meaning and purpose is to be filled with divine life and love and then bring it into the world. You're created, male and female, as a sign of Trinitarian love in the world.
Speaker 1:All civilizations are built on marriage and the family. Take that away or take God away, they're going to fall. And that's what you're seeing in Europe right now. You're seeing, you just mark my words. They've taken God out. They've internally inside the country, they've led all kinds of immigrants in that do not have the same Christian values. And why? Because the British people have rejected God Many, many years ago. They became anti-Christian.
Speaker 1:We were doing that in our country, here, until we finally woke up again and, by the grace of God, we started praying. It was the prayer that's turning back to God, just like I read in that first reading. We turn back to God with a lot of us, and this is what we're calling all of us to do, all of you listening today, to turn our hearts back to God. This is the adventure. Remember three core things about a man the adventure it's going to be a battle. The battle starts on the battlefield of the human heart.
Speaker 1:And then beauty, beauty. You go out and see the beauty of nature. Little bee beauty, little you know. Small bee beauty bringing you into big bee beauty, god himself. Allow your heart to soar. Nothing, nothing, nothing is going to do that.
Speaker 1:Like a woman, though for a man right. Ooh, the beauty of her right. Allow God to take you to soar and say I see that woman, thank you for the beauty of that woman and I don't want to lust and take after her. I don't see her as body parts, I see her as a body and a soul filled with love. The mystery right, the mysterium pietatis, the mystery of God himself, the mystery of Jesus Christ, his passion, death and resurrection and ascension into heaven, giving himself for us, the mystery of good and essence. That overcomes the mystery, mysterium equitatis, the mystery of evil, and it does it in our own hearts. Jesus didn't come for sin management, he came with power. What must I do to inherit eternal life? We ask Jesus. He says come and see, come with me, come and see. Hey, god bless you. Thank you guys.
Speaker 1:I was gonna read you something from Bill W, who started AA, and and maybe I'll I'll do that in between, I'll do, I'll do an interim one during the week because it's such a beautiful story. Bill did the same thing. He fell on his knees, he accepted christ and it changed his whole life. I'll tell you that story as an interim. So watch for an interim one next week. Hey, god bless you, good to be with you. Talk to you again soon. Email me or text me if you need something. Bye.