Healing Through Forgiveness WKS

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
The last one, I want to be praying for healing tonight.
Lord Jesus, anoint us, empower us, and grant to us once again, new and fresh, the gift of your Holy Spirit. Be glorified Lord, be glorified. Be glorified in us, be glorified through us. Amen. Okay. You're all up for one more. You've been absorbing a lot, and I recognize that, and also what people really want, really, really want, is the prayer for healing, which we'll end with, and we'll have the talk, we'll have Eucharistic adoration, and then anointing and blessing for everyone here individually. Okay. Now, if you can remember this morning, if you can remember back that far, I think, but which is always my focus is, first of all, what the Spirit does. It's all about the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit never comes from self. It comes to glorify Jesus. And the first gift of the Spirit really is to bring forth Jesus, to exalt Jesus, glorify Jesus, exalt, lift him high, and then everything comes from Jesus. The gifts of the Spirit, the power of the Spirit, the healing that comes from the Spirit, it's from Jesus. And the church really lifts up Jesus. The point and purpose of the church is to proclaim Jesus Christ.
John Paul wrote an encyclical called Evangelization, Missio Redemptoris, and in it, he says, what's the real purpose of the church? What's the job of the church, the mission of the church, the Missio Redemptoris? What's the mission? And at the beginning, he toys with things. Well, the mission of the church is to help people. Good point. He said, but a lot of people help people. What about feeding the poor? Good thing to do, but that's not the mission of the church. Well, what about unity for the nations? This is a good thing, but that's not the ultimate, the purpose, that's not it, that's not the center, that's the fruit that comes from it. But what is the church supposed to do? Educate people. Good idea. About what? And he kept bringing things out, and he would say, yeah, that's a wonderful thing to do, but that's not the center. What is the core, the heart, the one purpose of the church from which everything else will flow is proclaim Jesus Christ. And you proclaim Jesus Christ, and then everything will follow from that. If you don't proclaim Jesus Christ, you can do all kinds of stuff. You can have education and feeding poor, and reconciliation of the nations and stuff, and it becomes lots of pieces of stuff, and we become social workers, and psychology workers, and everything else. But it's Jesus that does the work, and that's the important thing. The gifts of the Spirit, the gifts of the Spirit do what we can't do.
And we would pray for healing, and then nobody prays over you or who they are can heal a hangnail. They can't do it. Jesus does it in the power of the Spirit and uses people to do it. So we need the Holy Spirit. The Spirit brings forth Jesus, and Jesus brings forth all the gifts of the Spirit. Now, Jesus, let's go back to Jesus. Jesus brings forth the Father. Nobody knew God, and I mean this. I don't care how you look at it, what angle you come at it from, but nobody knew God until Jesus came. You knew about God, you knew things, you knew spiritual thoughts, you knew pieces, people got it wrong, people got half of it right, people got it totally wrong. Jesus brings the Father, because only Jesus knew the Father, and Jesus reveals the Father. So Jesus says, if you see me, you see the Father. The Father is me, and I'm in the Father. So you want to find out who the Father is, and you see Jesus, because he's the revelation of the Father's glory, the revelation of the Father's love, the revelation of the Father's mercy. So what does Jesus tell us about the Father? So we're looking at the Father through Jesus. What do we see?
We see mercy and love and forgiveness. That's who he is, it's what he is, but it's who he is. The Father is love. Wasn't that Pope Benedict's first encyclical? God is love. You can say God's creator, God's powerful, God's full of wrath and anger, but God is love. And that's what Jesus reveals. So later in John's epistles, John will emphasize that God is love, and if you know what love is, you know God, and if you don't know love, you don't know God. No matter how much you know, if you don't know love, you don't know God. Mercy and forgiveness, the love of the Father. That's embodied in Jesus. It's incarnate in him. That's what he manifests. So look at Jesus, you find the Father, you find the Father, you find mercy. Look at Jesus, you find mercy. What does Jesus come to do? What was his work on earth? Revealing the Father was to forgive sin.