How the Gifts of the Holy Spirit Empower Our Adventure of Faith
Do you know the Gifts of the Holy Spirit and how they’re active in your life?
God has created you for love. He wants you to be his child and his friend – to have a deep, intimate, loving relationship with him. But this relationship is going to be a real relationship – one where both parties are active in each other’s life.
Now we stop and ask ourselves – how can we be active in God’s life? He tells us Himself, “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:9).
The answer, of course, is only through grace. But most people stop there. What exactly is grace? What does it do to empower us to participate in God’s divine life? Grace is God’s gift of his very presence in our souls. It makes us temples of the Holy Spirit and it gives us a new nature. God gives us through grace a share in His divine nature. He empowers us to share in His life and to have a real relationship with him.
The Gifts of the Holy Spirit are part of that grace. God gives us these seven gifts of grace at baptism and he fully activates them in us in our Confirmation. These gifts are vitally important for living a fully Catholic life. So it is vitally important for us to know what they are, to know what they do for us, and to know how to cooperate with them and activate them in our lives. Do you know the seven Gifts? Do you know which ones are most active in your life? Do you understand how they empower you?
How the Gifts of the Holy Spirit Empower Us
1. The Holy Spirit perfects our natural gifts. They make us more of what God created us to be. They enlighten the intellect and they strengthen the will toward the good. The intellect and the will are the two most important spiritual “faculties” of human nature. So when the Holy Spirit strengthens these two faculties, he makes us more human. But he doesn’t stop there.
2. The Gifts of the Holy Spirit nurture and perfect the divine nature that sanctifying grace instills in our soul. They give us supernatural faculties that help us to know God more intimately and to love him more deeply.
3. They equip us to participate in God’s divine life through our participation in His mission. Because they both enrich our natural abilities and instill within us supernatural abilities that could only be the work of God through us, the Gifts truly represent our unity with God and our participation in his divine life. They empower our office, our vocation and our mission.
Your Challenge
While the Holy Spirit gave us all seven Gifts at our baptism, He especially activates 2-3 of them that are especially important to our mission. How much do you know about the Gifts of the Holy Spirit? Were you taught about them in your Confirmation Class? Have you ever studied them? Most importantly, have you identified which of the Gifts the Holy Spirit has empowered in your life and how to cooperate with them?
Brought to you by Jeffrey S. Arrowood at From the Abbey, dedicated to helping you rediscover the JOY of learning and living your faith so you can grow in intimacy with God.