#677 It Starts With Your Heart--And An Encounter With the Living God! Jack Speaks to Young People

If your heart feels restless and the world feels loud, you’re not broken—you’re being called. We dive into the ache beneath anxiety and distraction and show how that desire is the starting line of a meaningful life. First the heart stirs, then the culture collides with it, and finally the Gospel speaks into both with clarity and love. That simple sequence changes how you see yourself, your choices, and your future.

We explore the sensus fidelium—the instinct for truth alive in Gen Z and millennials who are waking up to the limits of “do whatever feels good.” Through the lens of natural law and lived experience, we unpack why normalization of disorder leaves people numb, and how the search for reality can become a source of courage. The story of the rich young man brings this home: you can keep the rules and still miss the invitation. Joy begins when desire meets a Person, not just a concept.

Ready to choose between accident and purpose? Lean in and let this conversation reframe freedom as the power to love the good. If this resonates, share it with a friend, subscribe for more, and leave a review telling us where you sense the truth tugging you next.

Here are the links to Jack's Substack and  X https://x.com/JP2Renewal

Contact me: info@jp2renew.org

Listen Here, JJ Carroll with Jack: How Our Government and NGOs Facilitated the Largest Child Sex Trafficking Operation In History!

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Gen Z Focus
• 2:48 Introducing The Claymore Battle Plan
• 5:28 Sensus Fidelium And Inner Stirring
• 9:20 Natural Law And The Search For Truth
• 13:40 Interior And Exterior Battles Meet The Gospel
• 18:20 Cultural Breakdown And Harm To Children
• 24:30 Handbook Act Eight: It Starts With Your Heart
• 29:40 The Rich Young Man And Desire

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Happy Friday. Welcome everyone. I especially want to welcome the young people who I'm meeting. I'm very excited when I'm working with young people, especially the young men that we're finding. We're calling it Gen Z, even though the group that we're talking about is a little older. Gen Z is, let's call it somewhere around 14 to 27 years old. They're waking up and they're saying, hey, what's going on? We're searching for the truth. What is this crazy chaotic world? And it's wonderful to have the answers for them, to be able to work with them. There's nothing more gratifying to me. And so we have Claymore, Claymore Militus Christi, Soldiers for Christ. Claymore is a three-step battle plan for regaining the human heart and understanding the confusion that's going on, understanding marriage and the family, the evils that we're seeing, and then going out to restore the culture and the nation. I just want to remind you, or at least tell you, I haven't done that so much in the past, but I'm getting close to finishing the Claymore Battle Plan Handbook. And I've actually done writing it. So we're just looking to get it formatted and then get it published. So we're getting pretty close. And so I'm looking for, I should say the John Paul II Renewal Center is looking for, uh, a hundred young men across the country. And when I say Gen Z, we go a little bit older. So we're going to about 17, 18 years old up into mid-30s. Those are the guys that we're working with right now. Very, like I said, very, very exciting. They sense something's going on. It's called the census fidelium. Census fidelium is that sense, that instinct, that tuition that we have, that something is going on. What is going on in the world? And it's something that so many of you are waking up because you've been brought into that this is just normal, but your heart's telling you something different. You're feeling the anxiety. Some of you talk about depression, these addictions and things that you're you're suffering with. And so we're opening all that up so that so that your heart and what you're experiencing on the interior, and this we'll be talking about today, of your heart itself and what you're experiencing inside. And then you go out into the world and you're old enough now that you're going out into the world and you're sensing this exterior battle that's going on and you're trying to make sense of it. So this is where we come in because this is where the gospel always comes in. So we'll be talking about that today. Very, very exciting. I will put up behind me uh the right here, the Claymore battle plan. You'll see the book cover, the new book cover. It looks very, very cool. And if you're not, if you're just listening to the audio, I'll see if I can find a link there that uh I may or may not be able to get it to you. But anyways, uh the link to the book cover. It's very, very exciting. So again, email me. You can text me if you're on the audio platforms. You can text or email me info at jp2renew.org, jpthenumbertwo renew.org. And in that, just say, hey, I want to be a leader. I want to, once that handbook comes out, I want to be one of those hundred men across the country that's going to join you, and we're gonna we're gonna show you how to how to start this because it's a discipleship program. It's very, very exciting. So I always talk straight to you, right? And I've always done that when I talk to young people. And people, older people, say to me all the time, Jack, don't talk to young people about the spiritual battles that they're finding themselves in, because some of them they're just exploring or come into the church. We don't want to scare them away. They're just learning, they're not ready for all that. But what I find is the opposite. You guys are coming into the church because the Holy Spirit is moving your heart. Again, what we would call the census, sensus fidalium. The census fidalium, again, is this Latin term. It's the instinct or intuition that that lay people, religious people too, but lay people have on the matters of faith and morals. It's a discernment of the heart, it's a movement of the heart for divine truth, is what it is. What is the truth of things? How should I live? I see the world around me disintegrating, the culture in decline, the confusion, the chaos. We see, say, in Portland, Oregon, and New York City now, where we could be near to electing a self-described socialist, which is just the modern application of neo-Marxism, which is an atheistic secular culture. God out, build the city of man in without God. You tell me, Jack, I hear all these individual opinions floating around, right? You say to me, I hear this noise or that noise. You know, how do I make sense of it? I I sense something's wrong. I have this intuition again, this instinct tells me there has to be something more, that Latin term, this instinct or intuition. But here's what you have to understand. When you see that battle taking place and you m you you you sense this in your heart, it's God. God is moving your heart, God who has always been there. This is so very exciting when young men and women too, you know. I always say young men and the and the women and the family and the people that that love them. So for most of the so-called modern man who's actually thrown God out, and he's searching for something that you'll never find in this in this world, in the finite world, rejected actually the natural law. Let's just say, let's take, let's take God and move him out for a second. We have the natural law. The natural law is that moral law that's written in the human heart. This is that place where you discern the truth. What is the truth of things? The ability to do this is built into all of us by God Himself by design. It's not more information. This sense that you're feeling is the very DNA of the God who created you, who put in your heart the search for the truth. We call this reason, intellect. The reason intellect is always what is the truth of things, the reality? This flows right through our bodies and souls. This is the natural law. This is what people that don't even know Jesus Christ have this within them. They sense that something's going around. We're meeting them all the time. This is God within you. And here's the here's the point I want to make today, because this is so exciting when I meet with young people. John Paul II would talk about these three things that meet in the human heart. Again, it's that interior experience of your heart, the discernment going on, that there has to be something more that's built into our DNA. And remember, that's the Holy Spirit of God moving within you. If God wasn't moving within you, vibrating your heart in essence, you wouldn't experience this. Pause for a second to think about the awe and wonder of this. Your search starts because God is telling you to go out and search for the truth. It's amazing. Then, number two, so that's the interior movement. Number two is the exterior. You know, you're gone out into the world and you see the visible world around you. And so you have this movement of the heart that meets this confusion and battle of good and evil that you're seeing going around the world. And you're trying to make sense of this. There's so many of you anxious, depressed, addicted to certain things. And that's where the culture wants you to be addicted to this, addicted to that. And then we get to number three. Here's the gospel. And this is when the gospel is hurt. It meets that interior movement of your heart that's opening up, and perhaps you began to pray, questioning this. God, do you exist? And if you exist, I want to know that you're there. And your heart is moved. How is it moved? Because you have this experience inside. You see the experience outside, you're trying to make sense of it, and boom, the gospel comes in there, and you go, ooh, wait, wait, wait. Let me hear that. And you experience the truth and you know it. You know something is there and you move toward it. This is that aha movement. You move toward the heart. Let's just let me give you an example, not that you need it, of the insanity you're experiencing. Two things I'll say about this for modern man. And this, you may or may not know this because you grew up, like I said, you've normalized this fall, this crazy uh fall of man into sin. Well, we've always experienced sin, but this is one of the first times in history we've just normalized it. You guys think it's normal. This is the way the culture wants you to think. This you have to know is the first time in human history that man, mankind, man and woman, have turned away from the religious aspect of their hearts that's built into their very DNA. Even the people, if you read the early Christians, and the early Christians would say pagans, and even in the Old Testament, same thing. And they found those pagans. St. Paul writes about this a lot. They were religious people in that they worshiped. They may have made their own totem poles, uh, their own idols, you know, silver and gold. You hear this in scripture, or nature, such as the sun god, etc. But they would always worship something that's interior movement of the heart. Now, they didn't know Jesus Christ like we do, but they've still had this. So, my point being, this is in us. And all through human history, you're going to see this barbaric nature of human sacrifice in these pagan civilizations. And they especially sacrifice babies and infants on the altar to appease the gods and to bring gifts into their lives, right? Or the pushback on evil, or maybe there's a drought, and they would sacrifice babies. And we've seen it say that before throughout history. Never before, though, has man killed as many children and child sacrifice as today. We've even codified abortion into law that gives us the right to murder our own children. Think about that for a minute. This barbaric nature of who we have become. We call ourselves progressive modern man, and we're we're we're amazingly evil in all of this. Barbaric, insanely barbaric. And let's talk about this insanity. You know, recent what you you saw with the Biden administration facilitated the sex trafficking of 350,000 children right across their open border. And when I say facilitated, they opened up their border and worked with NGOs, non-government agencies, even religious agencies that allowed and facilitated that sex trafficking of children across the border who came by with no parents. Go back some months ago, and I'll I'll dig it up for you and if I remember and put it in the show notes. My interview with J.J. Kierrell, and that was a powerful interview. You'll hear this story. He was a he was a border supervisor during the Biden administration. He experienced all this, and he continues to work to find those children, rescue them, but most of them, as he already said he said in the podcast, are already dead. Or he even said, and this is a good Catholic man, or perhaps we should pray that they're dead, Jack, for the brutality and the violence that they're enduring is indescribable and horrifying. Beyond that, even, think about the transing of children undergoing this illusion, told a lie, that a little boy can become a girl, a little girl can become a boy just by wishing it. The insanity of this gender movement, trans and queer and of course big pharma, satanic as it is, are pushing puberty blockers on them, which contain lupron that was used to castrate men accused of rape in prisons. Yet we give it to our children. You can't make this stuff up. Not only that, but we're taking a knife to children, cutting off their healthy body parts of boys and girls, cutting off the healthy breasts of young teenage girls. It's like a Frankenstein horror movie. We create this faux. This foe penises faux means, you know, fake, fake penises from their own bodies. They want to form these fake penises on these poor little girls. They take the skin off their thighs and forearms and they mutilate their female sexual organs, turning them from the inside to the outside, and then stitching up that gaping injury, sewing on these non-functional appendages that they shape and they think they look like a penis. But it's never going to produce children. It's an illusion. It's a lie. We've rendered them sterile in that process. Isn't that what Satan would want if he's after the destruction of human beings? You know, most of the evil that you'll see out in the world are men and women that are cooperating with this evil, with Satan himself. You see it in all kinds of things. Young boys are castrated and have their testicles and penises sliced off and cut an opening inside them to be like a faux vagina, and your body's always trying to heal that wound. Do you realize that? That that little boy must continually dilate it every day, sticking something in there to open it up all the time. This is a battle against your own body. It causes infections. Many of them describe the six, sick odor that's coming out, you know, the insanity of all this. And you're told this is normal. Nothing to see here. Today, I'm gonna bring you the good news. This is from Act 8 from the Claymore Handbook that I again I finished writing. I'll put the cover up behind me here. Next step I have to do again is to get it formatted and published. And in my own census, fidadium, the sense, this intuition of the evil that's going on, the sense of faith and morals, I'm experiencing an urgency in that to get that book to you, that handbook to you. Again, I call these uh acts because they're shorter than normal chapters in a book. And there's 52 of them because you guys asked me to do one for each week of the year so we can disciple each other and have a get on a sense of laying this whole foundation of everything that we're searching for in one place. So, you know, one a week, you can read the whole book at once, of course, but when you're sharing it with other people, sometimes it's easier just one a week, boom, boom, boom, because we want to keep it going, keep it going, keep it going, supported again by our podcasts and our the articles and stuff that we're writing. And so each one has QA, so you can discuss these things with your friends. And this is what we're looking for those hundred leaders to do to start this in their own parishes or communities. So I'm gonna I'm gonna link the actual act today that I'm going to be referencing, and I'm gonna put it, uh, I put it up on my substack on an X so you can actually review it, print it out. You'll actually have chapter or Act Eight from the book, and you'll get a sense of this. So Act Eight, and this is the beauty of this, it starts with your heart is the title. An Encounter with the Living God. Matthew 19, verse 22. The young man goes away sorrowful, for he had many great possessions. Brothers, let's let's get to the core of it all. It starts with your heart. It's where everything starts and where the real battle of your life plays out. This has always been like this. When I came back into the church after a 20-year absence, I decided to make a study of the catechism of the Catholic Church, this big book about everything Catholic. So I grabbed a pad of paper and a pen. I was serious, I was ready to take notes on morality, ethics, etc. I opened it up and I put my pen down. I was surprised. It began with desire. I was astonished. How had I missed this before? Part one, section one, chapter one begins with desire. No lesson in morality, no talk about sin, no talk about how Christ came to save us. All those things are true and they would all be addressed in due time. But first, this is a book about desire. The desire for God is written in the human heart. It's in our DNA. It does not begin with information that can be Googled. It begins with your human heart. The desire for God, the catechism says, is written in the human heart because man is created by God and for God. We could say by love and for love. And God never ceases to draw man to himself. That's that sensus fidelium that we're talking about, this intuition that you're feeling, this uh this instinct even. Well, that's because God put it there. Only in this union and communion of love with God will you find the truth and the happiness that we never stop looking for and searching for. And God never stopped searching for you. So I continued to read that catechism, and it says, in many ways throughout history down to the present day, men, and again, men and women had given expression to their quest for God in their religious beliefs and behavior all through history, in their prayers, their sacrifices, their rituals, meditations, and so on. These forms of religious expression are so universal that one may call man, mankind, a religious being. We are religious beings. Saint Augustine, who would become, he would live in the late third and into the fourth century. He would become a bishop and a doctor of the church. Well, when he was a young man, he was a worldly man in his youth, who set out from his home to make a name for himself. He became a womanizer who never did marry the mother of his son, his only son, by the way. One day, upon hearing the preaching of Saint Ambrose in this city, he was drawn to the words of the gospel, or more accurately to the word, the person of Jesus Christ. His heart was so moved that he wrote this now famous phrase, You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you. In the gospel, the evangelists Matthew, Mark, and Luke all record the story of a young man he was seeking, approach Jesus, and he says this, Good teacher, good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life? He senses this in his heart. Jesus replies with a question, Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. Then he goes on. You know the commandments. Do not kill, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not bear false witnesses, do not defraud people, honor your father and mother. With these words, Jesus reminds this young man, this questioner, of some of the main commandments of the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments. But the conversation does not end here. Remember, this story is about the human heart. For the young man declares, Teacher, all these things I have observed since my youth. Then, writes the evangelist, Jesus looked upon him and loved him and said to him, You lack one thing. Go sell what you have, give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven, and then come follow me. Once again, Jesus does not impose, this is so important, he doesn't judge the young man, he does not share an opinion, he doesn't share a worldview, propaganda, and ideology. Jesus knows something at the level of the young man's heart. He says, What do you seek? Come and see. Come and see what? Come and see. Follow me. At this point, though, the atmosphere of the meeting between the young man and Jesus changes. The evangelists all right that at that saying the young man's countenance fell and he went away sorrowful, for he had many great possessions. Ooh, that's a gut punch, right? Jesus looked at him with love, saw his heart, invited him into this bigger story that we've been talking about today, but the guy couldn't let go. Isn't that what happens today when you look around the culture? We can't let go of our phones and social media and our addictions. Ooh, Jesus is calling into something more. This is what you're sensing. This is why it's so exciting to work with you. John Paul pushes you to meditate on Christ's words to the young man. Do you not recognize the battle going on in the young man's heart? He has many great possessions, yet he hears an echo. This is the echo in all of our hearts in the depths of his heart for what? For something more. This meeting between Jesus and the young man has a universal and a timeless character. And each one of you is potentially the one he's speaking to. You say, What is the meaning and purpose of my life? I will not possess the treasure of youth much longer. You know, before you know it, sometimes we think, well, I'll be young forever. You're not going to be young forever. You have a little tiny window. What is the truth of things? How should I live? Is it to have the latest phone to get a car, to find a career, to get to college, make a lot of money? Is that all there is? Is that enough? In my early 20s, I was introduced to Carl Jung, the founder of Psychoanalysis, along with Sigmund Freud in Psychology 101 in college. I was attracted to Carl Jung. Over time, I collected a number of his books. One of them, Modern Man in Search of His Soul, stood out for me. Now, now he's he wasn't Christian. He was kind of an agnostic, I would say, but he's searching. And in it, he he he's looking back on his life. I think he was 72, 73, looking back on his life, on his practice. And he's trying to figure out whoever came to me and who was ever actually really healed by me. And he says, he comes to this conclusion. He goes, however far-fetched it may sound, experience shows that many neuroses are caused by the fact that people blind themselves to their own religious promptings because of a childless passion for rational enlightenment. Rational enlightenment essence. Throw God out. We're going to build the city of man. The psychologists of today, he says, ought to realize that once and for all, that we're no longer dealing with just questions of dogma and creed. This isn't just rules, regulations, things written down. He says, this is so important, right? The religious attitude is an element in psychic life whose importance can hardly be overstated. And it is precisely for the religious outlook that that sense that we've been talking about of historical continuity is indispensable all through history. We're religious people and we're pulling this down to us. All of a sudden, boom, we threw this out. Modern man threw this out, and we lost the sense of our religious this awe and wonder. What is the truth? You know, what is good, what is true, what is beautiful. And he says this historic continuity then makes us like cut flowers. You know, we're searching, we're searching. And in your youth, you, you know, you you blossom for just a little while, and then boom, because you're not rooted in anything, there's no roots, there's no, there's no fertilizer, huh? There's no, there's no sun, there's no nutrients coming in. And so we begin to die. And this is what our life is like. So he goes on, among all my patients in the second half of their life, that is to say, over 35, all the people that have come to me that are in, that are 35 years and older, there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them that came to me fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers. And he said, not one of my patients has really been healed who did not regain his religious outlook. He went on addressing disorders, etc. He said, There is nothing that could free us from this bond of brokenness except the opposite urge of life, the spirit, the capital S, the spirit. It's not the children of the flesh, the children of the world, but the children of God, he said, who know freedom. What an insight, huh? From somebody that he was surprised himself. But the world screaming the opposite to you. Forget about God, the church, and the Bible. You're just a random collision of atoms and a meaningless universe. So do whatever feels good. That's the lie of moral relativism. And it's killing you. Forty percent of you are too depressed to function properly. Thirty percent of teen girls have considered suicide. Porn's got nearly every guy trapped. Why? Because there's something that does not function well in a world without meaning and purpose, the human heart. Ba boom, baboon. So where do you come from? You have to decide that either one of these two statements are true. You're an accident of history, and therefore completely at liberty to do whatever you please with your life, indulge it, trash it, end it even. First, if the statement's true, you're an accident of history, your life is ultimately meaningless. Or, number two, you're a created being. And if that's the case, you've been created for a purpose. If you've not opened your heart and mind to this fundamental question of our existence, you'll never have peace. You'll always be searching. You'll always have a void that will never be filled. Psychologist Dr. Gerald May, he wrote this incredible book, Addiction and Grace. It's in one of my favorite books of all time. And he begins this book, first chapter. So he's a psychiatrist, psychiatrist, MD psychiatrist. And it's been 20 years, and he's getting frustrated himself because just like Carl Jung, he hasn't been able to help those people as much as he wanted to, because they've discovered it's a religious outlook on life. So he writes this. After 20 years of listening to the yearning of people's hearts, I am convinced that all human beings have an inborn desire for God. Whether we are consciously religious or not, this desire is our deepest longing and our most precious treasure. It gives us meaning. Some of us have repressed this desire, burying it beneath so many other interests, interests, like that young man in the gospel, that we're completely unaware of it. Or we may experience it in different ways as a longing for wholeness, completion, or fulfillment. Isn't that what you're feeling? You you have this longing again for wholeness, completion, fulfillment. What is the truth? How should I live? Regardless, though, he said, of how we describe it, it's a longing for love. It's a longing for and a hunger to love, to be loved, and then move closer to the source of love to God Himself. This yearning is the essence of the human spirit, it's the origin of our highest hopes and our most noble dreams.

unknown: 26:34

Wow.

SPEAKER_00: 26:35

The human heart senses this, this desire for an encounter. This is why you're here. This is why I love to work with you. I know this myself, because we all have this. There's something more than this world has to offer. It's a hunger that at its core is to love and be loved and move closer to the source of love, God Himself. This is not just about learning more information. It's about that story that resides in our very DNA. Pope Benedict XVI shared this. He said, the widespread idea which continues to exist is that Christianity is about laws and things to do or not do, which one has to keep and hence is something toilsome. It's burdensome, that one is freer without that burden. This is what the Enlightenment, let's just throw this burden off and let's go out into the world without God. So I want to make clear, he said, that being carried by a great love and a revelation is not a burden. It's freeing, it's like having wings, he said. Being Christian, he said, is not an ethical choice or a lofty philosophical idea. It's an encounter with an event. It's an encounter with a person, Jesus Christ, which gives life a new horizon, right? A new way to look at the world and a decisive direction for your life. This is exactly what the gospels show as the beginning of Christianity, an encounter with the person of Jesus Christ, albeit in different forms. On this point, Pope Benedict XVI said, all the gospels agree. What you're seeking, what you're looking for, and God Himself is seeking and looking for you. You have that aha moment that I described. Then someone came to him in the young man who the evangelists do not name. We can recognize every person who consciously or not approaches Christ the Redeemer of Man and questions him about morality. For the young man, the question is not so much about rules to be followed. He said, Remember, I have done those since my youth, but about the full meaning of life. This is in fact the aspiration at the heart of every human decision and action, the quiet searching and interior prompting, which sets freedom in motion. I am free. Free to do what? License to use people, to grasp, to take, or freedom to open up my heart and seek the truth of things. This question is ultimately appeal to the absolute good which attracts us and beckons us. It's the echo in our hearts of a call from God who is the origin and goal of man's life. Jesus says, Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good, and he means what? God. What good must I do to have eternal life can only be found by turning one's mind and heart to the one who is good. No one is good but God alone. It says in Mark 10, Luke, Matthew. Only God can answer the question about what is good because he is the good itself. To talk about the good, in fact, ultimately means to turn toward God, the fullness of goodness. Jesus shows that the young man's question is a religious question, and that the goodness that attracts and at the same time obliges man has its source in God. It is indeed God Himself. Who thirsts for you. Thanks for being with me today. This is so beautiful. Stay in touch with your heart. Look out in the world. Don't be afraid to see what is the truth of things. And then you listen to the gospel. You bring the gospel in. This is the journey that we're doing together. I will again I'm going to put this in my sub stack. I will put it on X. And so attached to that will be these. I always put three or four discussion questions in at the end and discuss that with somebody. You know, grab a beer or coffee or whatever. You know, uh, make sure you're 21, right? Uh so don't say, hey, Jack said grab a beer. I'm 17 years old. I didn't say that out. Anyways, hey, discuss it with somebody and let me know if you're one of those leaders that say, hey, uh, when this handbook comes out, uh, Jack, get me a copy of that handbook. Uh let's talk together and let's start a chapter in your parish. Uh, let's start together, let's plant these seeds. We need to reach out to one another. So many people are questioning things. It's a very exciting time to be alive as human beings, in spite of whatever may come. Again, that's the Claymore sword behind me. We know this is a battle. Pick up the Claymore sword. Join us on these podcasts, and also read these articles and know that this handbook is coming. God bless you. Great to be with you all. Say a prayer for me. I'll say one for you. Bye bye.