Podcast

The Holy Spirit is at the heart of everything we’ve talked about so far in this True Transformation series. It’s the Holy Spirit who gives us the strength to fast, the desire to pray, and every grace that flows from the Sacraments. And yet, when we decide we want to make a change and seek to be transformed by God, we so often try to take it all on ourselves, and we can become self-reliant. Jesus didn’t want that for us; He told us He’d send the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, to give us the power and peace that we need — if we let Him.

Join John and Victor as they talk about the ways in which the Holy Spirit has ushered true transformation into their lives, and how you can do the same.

Learn more about our pilgrimage to Greece & Turkey

Transcript coming soon!

Over the last few episodes John and Victor have been discussing the habits we need to build, and the gifts of the Church we need to engage in to find true, lasting transformation in our lives. This week we turn our attention to the most effective way to receive God’s grace in our lives: the Sacraments.  The Sacraments are an outward sign of God’s grace and they are crucial to maintaining the transformation we desire.  They are gifts that Jesus died for us to receive. They are available to us each and everyday. The question is, do we make ourselves available to them?

Grab a seat in the pew with John and Victor as they dive into the Sacraments, discuss how they have provided sustained transformation in both of their lives, and how they have the power to do the same for you.

Learn more about our pilgrimage to Greece & Turkey

Transcript coming soon!

We are in the midst of a series about True Transformation, and we kicked it all off last week talking about fasting. While fasting is one of the great gifts of the Church that can help us to elicit change, it’s never going to reach its potential unless it is yoked with a solid prayer life. They are two sides of the same coin. Whenever you see fasting in the scriptures, prayer is not far behind. One allows the other to bear lasting fruit.

The problem for so many of us, though, is that we don’t have a meaningful prayer life. Sure, we go to church and we check the boxes, praying while at Mass or before meals, but so many of us just haven’t made establishing and growing our prayer life a regular priority. It’s just the truth. If we want to become the men that God calls us to be, then we have to build an intimate relationship with Christ through prayer. Listen in this week as John shares about the importance of building a powerful life of prayer and the effect it can have on sustaining lasting change.

Learn more about our pilgrimage to Greece & Turkey

Episode Transcript:

Well, welcome back to the pew, everybody. I am your host, John Edwards, and I’m excited to be bringing you another episode of Just a Guy in the Pew here in this new year. I hope your 2025 is off to a great start as we progress through these first few weeks of January and of the new year. I hope you’ve had a chance to listen to some of our last episodes and start to implement some of the things that we’ve been talking about.

Right? We’ve been talking about how to take the desires that we all have, right? We desire to be the men we’re called, to be, the husbands we want to be, the fathers, we want to be the sons and the brothers we want to be. We all want to be better. And we know that there’s a chance in our life for us to be able to do that. But we can’t just desire it. We have to take action. We have to pair our desires with God’s and then form a plan, take action to make those desires become a reality.

And so that’s what I want to talk about today. We started this new series last week in the first week of January, called True Transformation. That’s what we want to help you with. It’s not just fleeting change for a few weeks here in January, and then you’re back to your old ways or back to the things that you’ve tried to be rid of, but how to actually help you establish true transformation in your life.

So we started last week, the first week of January, with fasting, this incredible gift from the church, where if you know what the impediments and the obstacles are that are keeping you from being the man you want to be and the person that Christ created you to be, then you need to take steps to remove those things. And what better way than to use the gift of fasting and abstinence that the church teaches so bravely and boldly and amazingly about, right?

If we know there’s problems in our life, we have to be rid of them. How do you get rid of them? You choose to fast. I don’t want this in my life anymore, so I’m fasting. Fasting is different than just giving something up. It’s actually taking those things, those things you’re getting rid of, and you’re tying those desires through Prayer into our Lord, right? Into a request to our Lord to give you the strength and grace necessary to leave those things behind and be find lasting change in your life.

So that’s what we’re going to be talking about this week. That fasting is by itself is not fully what it needs to be. It always, when the saints talk about it, when scriptures talk about it, when the catechism talks about it, it’s always linked to prayer, right? It’s always linked to a life of prayer. And so that’s where we’re going to go in this second part of this series on True transformation is growing your prayer life.

Right? Building and sustaining and continue to grow a prayer life. Now, some of you may have an amazing prayer life right now. You may be in a spot where you’re just experiencing so many graces from the Lord and growing in that relationship. There may be some of you that are such a high level that you’re just blown away by where you are in your relationship with Christ, in your prayer life and where it’s gone. But there’s also a lot of you that are probably in a place that aren’t praying like you should be. They’re struggling in your prayer life that don’t know how to grow it.

No matter where you are, a growing prayer life is a necessity in your life, whether you’re at step one or step 70. Right. We always need to be growing in our relationship with the Lord and growing in that conduit that allows us to better understand who he is so he can better inform us of who we are. And so that’s what we’re going to be talking about this week in this episode.

Unfortunately, Victor’s not going to be able to join me this week. He had some plans with his family, so he’s not able to be here. I’m going to tackle this by myself, but I assure you I’ll put some thought prayer into it. I’ve looked at some great thoughts from some saints and people that have gone before us and prepared for this episode because I know prayer is such an important topic.

Before we jump into it, though, I just want to remind everybody of a couple things. One, if you haven’t signed up for our pilgrimage to go to Greece and Turkey and walk in the footsteps of St. Paul, you still have time to do it. We have some spots left. We are only taking 50, right? We’re taking one bus, so we’re going to the thing’s going to fill up quickly. It’s already started to every time I go in there. We have more and more people signed up.

Folks, it’s going to be an amazing trip. We’re going to go over to this beautiful part of the world to walk in the footsteps of St. Paul, to see where he preached, to visit the churches and communities where he wrote letters, to visit the churches of Revelation, to see the site where John wrote the grotto, where John wrote Revelation on Patmos in his exile there. And we’re also going to see where Mary spent her last days on this earth, the house that she lived in in her final days.

Folks, it’s going to be a beautiful trip, not only with stuff like that, but also we’re going to have a four day cruise where you’re going to get to experience the beauty of the Aegean Sea and the Greek isles. You’re going to be immersed in the culture with food and drink and everything else. It’s going to be an awesome time. And I can promise you this, folks, if you travel with me, you’re going to feel seen, loved and heard. I can promise you that. I’m going to spend time with you. You’re going to get to spend time with our spiritual director, Father James Clark. You’re going to meet wonderful people from around the world that travel with us a bunch. You’re going to create lasting friendships and most importantly, you’re going to grow in your faith.

So if you haven’t signed up to go with us yet, you can do so by going to justagoutonthepew.com, clicking the Events Book Me and Pilgrimage page, going down one below the calendar, clicking right there. You can download the brochure, you can sign up. It’s going to be an amazing trip. Don’t miss out on this Register today through justaguyanthepew.com or just Google John Edwards Greece in Turkey. It will take you to select international tours and cruises, our wonderful partners. And you can register to join us there. But folks, do it quickly because we’re going to fill up fast.

Next thing I want to say is just invite any of you who have not yet who have not become partners in the pew to consider becoming partners in the pew. All that means is you’re helping support us financially to grow this ministry and to continue to meet the demand of our work and the places that God wants us to go and grow in this ministry. Some people give annually, some people give monthly, some people, some people give every once in a while. But all of you who have given are partners in the pew. We could not do this work without you. You are the lifeblood of this ministry and what allows us to continue to grow and to continue to keep doing what God wants us to do.

So for those of you who have not considered joining us as partner in the pews, please consider it. You can do it by going to justaguyonthe pew.com, there’s donate buttons everywhere. You can sign up there. It doesn’t matter the amount. We have people that give five bucks all the way up to $250 a month and beyond. Whatever you can do is what you can do. And all of it will be greatly appreciated. But all of it is a necessity to continue to reach Man We have people in our groups whose lives are being changed in these parishes where we’ve launched groups, and also people that are listening to the show that write in all the time and talk about how their lives have been changed by this work and the grace that God is pouring into this ministry.

So folks, help us continue to do that. Become a partner at the pew today@justagayonthpew.com finally folks, we have openings here in 2025. It’s filling up quickly, but we do have some spots in the summer and in the fall. So if you’re interested in having us come to your parish and help you launch a vibrant, life changing ministry to men. You want us to be part of a leadership summit or a men’s conference? Go to JustGuyInThePhew.com, click any of the links there on the homepage, fill out the form and we’ll be in contact with you again. You can do all that and anything you want to do with just a guy in the pew at just a guy in the pew.com.

So as I said folks, we started off last week in this, this new year talking about true transformation and the first step of that. And in my opinion, the first step you have to do is really just start to fast, right? We covered that last week, how to get those things out of your life. But along with your fasting comes prayer. They’re really not a step one and two. They’re a step A and B or side by side, A and A, whatever you want to call it. Big A, lowercase A, whatever it may be.

But we started talking about that and the next thing we need to do is talk about prayer. And Fulton Sheen, he talks about that a lot in his writings and his teachings and in his talks. And one of the things that I found that he said to kick Us off here. As he says, fasting detaches you from this world. Prayer reattaches you to the next world. This is why they go hand in hand. This is why it’s important.

While we use fasting to detach ourselves from the things of the world that are holding us back, holding us down, those places that have become impediments or obstacles or roadblocks to Christ entering further into our life, we use fasting to detach that. But we use prayer to reattach to the next world, right? To realign our vision to the next world so we can forget about these things, count them all as rubbish as St Paul says, and turn our eyes towards heaven and the men that we want to be in the life that we want to lead while we’re here on Earth, and certainly that we want to lead when we get to heaven.

So that’s what Archbishop Fulton Sheen starts us off with today. He starts to talk about those things, that this is what reattaches us. And our prayer life is really what sustains the transformations that we make, right? Like these changes in our life. You’re not able to sustain them without prayer. I can tell you that firsthand. People always ask me, john, how have you managed to quit doing cocaine in your life, to stay away from that for eight years? How have you managed to quit binge drinking? How have you managed to stay away from porn in your life? The way that you were so addicted before, right? How do you get out of that stuff?

It’s fasting, it’s prayer, it’s the sacraments. But at the middle of all that is prayer, right? It’s constant asking for God’s grace and for his mercy in my life, for him to help me continue to desire him in a greater way, so that the desire for him allows me to understand what I’m really here for. To further and faster. Click. And I can continue on this path of becoming the man that he set me out to be when he created me. That’s what prayer does for us.

But let’s be honest, many of us, we don’t pray like we should, right? Like, we don’t. We don’t like. Prayer is often an afterthought in our life. Like, sure, we’re going to church and we’re checking the boxes and we’re doing all those things and, and we’re praying while we’re there. We’re going along with the prayers of the church at mass or things that we’re involved in. But how often are we actually Taking a real stake in our lives at building out a prayer life.

Like folks, it is irreplaceable. It is the most important thing in our life that we could do besides receiving the Eucharist is prayer is constant prayer in our life. And so I think if we’re honest, so many of us, a lot of us that are going to church and we’re involved in all kind of Catholic activities, if if we’re being honest with ourselves and we really look at where our prayer life is, it’s probably nowhere near where it should be. I know mine is nowhere where it should be.

Oftentimes when I find myself struggling in my life, it’s because I’ve focused so much on the aspects of ministry or other parts of my life that my life starts to get out of sorts. And I wonder why. And every single time I look back, it’s because my prayer life has suffered. It’s because my prayer life has become a passing. Hey, good morning, Jesus. Thanks for this day. Bless me and bless everybody and thank you for everything you do for me. And I move on. Or it’s become just, oh, Jesus, in the moment, I need you right Like I need something right now. Can you show up and be that genie in a bottle and give me one of my wishes and then I’ll go back to everything being fine and I’ll pray to you when I can remember.

Like, oftentimes that’s where a lot of us wind up. We don’t pray as much as we ought to and we don’t have a real prayer life. And why is that? Like, why is it, why do we find ourselves and so many of us do? I mean, I talk to even spiritual giants, people that I really look at as like, man, these people are so far along in the spiritual life. It’s not even crazy, it’s uncanny. And even those people when, when I talk to them in our personal relationships, they’re like, man, I struggle in my prayer life. I’m struggling to continue to do the things I need to do.

It’s not just people that are out there every day on the street. It’s people like us that are evangelizing every day. We all have this in common and this is why we have to be so attentive to it and we have to safeguard this prayer in our life. Like we have to build up our prayer life because you are going to have no hope of sustaining any real change in your life without it.

So why don’t we have it? You know, I thought about this and I thought about reasons people have given me over the last year and years prior and the reasons people have sent in and their email to me when I ask them, well, what’s going on in your life? When they start to talk about the difficulties they’re facing. What kind of prayer life do you have? Most of the time it’s non existent or it’s few and far between or it’s just like in the middle of the things we do as Catholics. Right. Its just turned into repetitive stuff that we do at the dinner table, before meals or at mass. And it’s not a living, breathing, amazing relationship with Christ that your prayer life can be.

So I looked at some of these and I wanted to talk about them today because some of them may ring familiar with you. They do with me, I can tell you that much. One of the first ones is we just don’t make time for it. It’s not a priority in our life. For a lot of us, life is going good. It seems to be. Everything’s going our way. So what do we need prayer for? If we’re not asking for something or we’re not in a bad situation, or we just simply get caught up in life and we forget what a priority it needs to be in our life, but we aren’t making time for it and we don’t make time for things those falter.

Just like if you don’t make time in your life for your wife, that relationship is going to falter, it’s going to erode, it’s going to start to pull apart and to fall apart, right? Any relationship in your life takes that time. And that’s certainly what prayer is, a way to grow in our relationship with Christ, if we’re not pouring into that, then our relationship with the Lord starts to grow apart too. It starts to falter and starts to fade. And so if we’re not making time for that in our life, then it’s not a real priority.

And that’s just something we have to meet. Like sometimes, you know, we can hear things like that and we’re like, well, then that’s not. I don’t like the way that makes me feel. Well, the truth hurts, right? Like, I mean the reason it doesn’t feel good is because honestly, if we’re being honest with ourselves, it’s probably the truth. I’m not making a priority in my life. I know I should be and I’m not. So therefore I’m irritated by this and I don’t want to hear it.

That’s where a lot of us are. But we have to get past that, right? That immaturity. We have to start moving past those things and know, you know what? I don’t care how it makes me feel. This is the truth of my life. And it’s something I need to address. And so I’m going to do that through the grace and mercy of our Lord to become the man that God’s called me to be.

You know, I’ve mentioned it sort of already, but the next thing that people say a lot is we just do it when we need something, right? Like when things in my life aren’t going well, I’m fine when everything, I’m running through the tulips and everything’s going well and there’s money in the bank and the job’s going well and my family’s all healthy. But when those things happen that happen in life, that’s when we hit our knees again and we start asking for the, you know, please, please, please, please. And there’s nothing wrong with that. We need to invoke Christ and the saints and Mary and Joseph and everybody, the community of saints when we have difficulties in our life. But that can’t be the only time we pray. That can’t be the only time we pray. It can’t be. I mean, we can’t treat God, like I said before in Jesus, like a genie in the bottle that we just pull out whenever we need something, because it’s never going to be the prayer life we need to have. And quite honestly, we’re not going to have the relationship with Christ and our Father that we need to have to even be able to ask those things and expect them to be answered, if you want to know the truth.

The next thing I hear a lot of is we don’t think it’s necessary outside of mass or other things like just going to mass on Sunday, just praying before meals, praying when I go to whatever Catholic thing I do, that, that, that checks off the prayer box for me each and every day. But we shouldn’t just be praying every couple times a week. We should be the goal of our life should be in constant prayer, constant communion with the Lord. No matter if we’re driving or, or doing something for work, God should always be at the forefront of our minds.

Right? And I know that’s a lofty goal for some of you that may not be near it, and it certainly is for me too. But the thing is, you don’t take your prayer life like like, like trying to eat a whole piece. You eat it a slice at a time. You take off little bites and you start to be able to grow, right? Just like you can’t go and lift 400 pounds the first time you ever get on a bench press. You have to start small and start working your way up. That’s where patience and these things come in, these virtues. But this is the goal of our life, is to grow in our prayer life. And so we have to be praying and taking time and setting time alone with the Lord outside of mass and outside of these things like praying before meals and things like that, we have to build time for him in our lives.

You know, we, we, we feel like it’s a burden sometimes, right? We can feel like it’s, it’s. Gosh. I mean, I just want to say, like, more of a burden than it is a gift, more than it is an opportunity for grace. We can feel like it’s a burden. And honestly, again, if we want to drop a true bomb, probably feels like a burden to a lot of us because we feel inadequate at it. We haven’t spent the time. We need to really sit down and be silent and to listen to the Lord so often. So much of Our prayer is just spouting off whatever we need or whatever’s going on. And while the Lord certainly wants that and wants to hear that, we also have to make time to listen to Him.

And because of the way that some of us, we don’t even know how to pray. Scripture talks about, like, we don’t know how to pray like we ought. And. And so we feel like, man, what am I doing? I’m fumbling through this, and I just feel so inadequate that we just stop. And it feels like a burden. So we just don’t do it right. Sometimes we run from hard things, but prayer doesn’t have to be difficult. We have to kind of reorient the way we look at prayer. And that’s what I hope that we’re going to be doing today.

We also feel like it’s an obligation instead of a choice, right? I feel like I’m made to do this. Like I’m not going to get to heaven if I don’t pray or if I’m going to say that I’m a Christian, then I have to pray at least some. And we look at it as an obligation instead of a choice. It goes right along with the burden piece. But our prayer life should be something we desire. It should be a choice. Like, the first thing I want to do in the morning is to wake up and acknowledge that there’s a God and I’m not Him, and that everything I have in my life I owe to him, right? Is something that’s a grace that’s given to me, and then I should pay homage to that each and every day and thank him at the utmost for sending his only Son and giving his life for mine.

Like, we should be praying thanks for that each and every day, but also for praying for him to come further in our life, for us to experience the Holy Spirit in a greater way. But again, if it feels like an obligation and not a choice, then it’s going to be something we run from. It’s going to be something that we run from.

So let’s talk about what prayer should be. What is prayer? There’s a couple things I could talk about here. I mean, I’ve got some notes from the catechism in section 2559, paragraph 2559. The catechism tells us that prayer is the raising of one’s mind and heart to God. That’s what it is. It’s taking your mind away from the things of the world and raising it above the temporal into the spiritual, right into the things that are beyond us. It’s just seeking the Lord in our lives and taking a moment to tell him and to show him how important he is to us. Right? To honor him with our time, with our presence. We should be the ones that are honored by Him. But it’s also to show how important he is to us and to raise our mind and our heart out of this world. God knows we need to get our head out of the things of this world, onto the things that are good and beautiful and pure, the things that bring us joy and peace. So that’s what prayer is. At its base is the raising of one’s mind and heart to God.

Saint Therese of Lisieux, she talks about prayer this way. She says, for me, prayer is a surge of the heart. It is a simple look turned towards heaven. It is a cry of recognition and of love, embracing both trial and joy. Something you do in good times and in bad. For her, it’s a surge of the heart. It’s a simple look towards heaven. I love the way that sounds. It doesn’t have to be complicated. It doesn’t have to be a burden. It’s a simple glance to heaven, remembering there is a God and remembering that he is your Father and remembering that he loves you.

This is where prayer becomes simple instead of a burden. Because just like you go and speak to your dad, hopefully you don’t have to go and practice and receive sight and be nervous about things you’re going to say to your dad in casual conversation with him. You shouldn’t feel that way in prayer either. God knows the trappings and the inner workings of your heart. He knows what’s going on with you before you ever come to Him. And as a good father, he wants to listen to them and he waits for you.

So often we get fumbled up and feeling like we got to sound like Shakespeare, you know? And how art Thou, my God, who are the greatest of thee, and my flesh seeks Thy flesh? And stop putting those burdens on yourself. Just talk to God like He’s your Father. That’s what he wants. That’s what he waits for. And this is what St. Teresa of Lisu is saying to us. It’s like. It’s a simple glance. It’s a simple glance towards heaven, right? A simple look towards heaven. It is a cry of recognition and of love that we recognize him and he most certainly recognizes us.

This is what prayer is supposed to be. It’s not an obligation, it’s a gift. It’s a gift from our Lord. It’s a way to communicate with him on a deeper level each and every day, to feel his presence and to sit there and to feel this conduit of his grace and mercy and hope in our lives each and every day. It’s about building and growing a relationship with him. That’s at its utmost what prayer is. It’s about a relationship, right? And just like I was saying earlier in the episode, if you don’t pour time into your lives the relationships you want, then it’s not really a relationship, it’s an acquaintance. It’s somebody you know but not at a deeper level. Prayer is an opportunity to get from our Lord to grow in knowledge and relationship with Him. That’s what it is.

And Catechism tells us the same thing. It talks about this and as it continues in paragraph 2559 it says humility is the foundation of prayer only when we humbly acknowledge that we do not know how to pray as we ought. Quoting Revelation. Romans 8:26. There, are we ready to receive freely the gift of prayer? Right? This is what prayer is. It’s the gift of prayer. It’s a relationship from a loving God. And so, just like I talked about, when we pray, we’re acknowledging there’s a God and we aren’t Him. That’s humility. And that’s the call of the Christian life is to humility. And so when we pray, we’re humbly taking ourselves before the Lord and saying, like, I need you, right? And I don’t know how to pray. I need you to help me with it. Because I want to spend time with you. I desire to have a deeper and greater relationship with you in my life. That’s what prayer is. It’s a cry from our souls to God.

Mother Teresa talked about it. It’s quoted there too further on the catechism. But in Mother Teresa she talks about it this way. She says, for me, prayer is a surge of the heart. It is a simple look. No, sorry, that’s St. Teresa. Excuse me for that. Mother Teresa says, prayer enlarges the heart until it is capable of containing God’s gift of himself. As I said, folks, I got a lot of notes here, so bear with me. I’m really. You can tell I’m jacked up about this and sometimes reading the wrong things.

But Mother Teresa says prayer enlarges the heart until it is capable of containing God’s gift of himself. The catechism in paragraph 2565 goes on to say, the life of prayer is the habit of being in the presence of the thrice holy God and in communion with Him. That’s what prayer is. It’s communion with God. And think about how amazing that is. The God of the universe would desire more than anything else in his heart to spend time with you, for you to commune with him and for him to commune with you. That should be awe inspiring, right? That alone should give us the desire to want to sit down right now and to enter into prayer with God. But we have to look at it as a gift, not an obligation or a burden. We have to make time for it in our life. We have to do it outside of when we just need things. We have to seek this and desire it with our whole life. Because without this relationship, we have nothing.

You know that Victor and I, if you’ve listened to this show for any time at all, have talked end on end and again and again about how the point of the Christian life is to grow in our knowledge and Relationship with Christ. That’s what it is. So that he could take us to His Father. That is the purpose of the spiritual life is to grow in our knowledge and relationship with Christ. So that we can become the people that he wants us to be, the saints that we’re called to become. That doesn’t happen at all without prayer. At all. Without prayer.

And Jesus, he tells us this himself. This is what he tells us in John 15, 1:10, right? This is the whole abiding together thing. This is where Jesus is employing to you. Just how important abiding in him is. And how do we abide in him? Through prayer. Through prayer. That’s how we stay attached to the vine. Jesus tells us that. He says this. I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine dresser. Every branch of mine that bears no fruit, he takes away. And every branch that does bear fruit does not bear fruit. He prune. Or bears fruit, he prunes. Let me start over. Cause again, I’m moving too fast. I apologize.

I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. Every branch of mine that bears no fruit, he takes away. And every branch that does bear fruit, he prunes that it may bear more fruit. You are already made clean by the word which I have spoken to you. Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit. For from apart from me you can do nothing. If a man does not abide in me, he is cast forth as a branch and withers. And the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire and burned. If you abide in Me and My words abide in you. Ask whatever you will, and it shall be done for you. By this my Father is glorified that you bear much fruit. And so prove to be my disciples. As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. Abide in my love. If you keep My commandments, you will abide in my love. Just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in his love.

How do we stay in the center of all of that? How do we stay in this wonderful relationship with Christ? By abiding in him. By abiding in him. By praying constantly in our lives. By growing in our prayer life. That’s the conduit. He is the branch. And it’s through prayer. That’s where the SAP through the branch is poured into us where we receive what we need to go out and, and be the people that we’re called to be. This is Christ Himself telling you how vitally important it is to stay in prayer, to stay in relationship with Him. Certainly he did that when he walked the earth. How many times did he go away and he was in prayer with His Father. He went away to pray. He went away to constantly stay in communion with the Father and in his will.

That’s what prayer does for us. That’s how we can change when we take those desires in prayer. Lord, I want to put down the porn. I want to put down the drinking. I want to put down the drugs. I want to quit being angry. I want to quit. Quit being unforgiving. I want to quit talking to my wife in this way. I want to quit these things that are holding me back from you. You give them to him in prayer, and then you receive the grace necessary to get those things out of your life. That’s what prayer is. It’s an opportunity to express, Express your gratitude for the times that he’s given you what you need to be able to get rid of the things in your life that are holding you back. Gratitude for the times where He’s. He’s left you in places where, where you’ve had to go through things and suffer. Like, it’s this opportunity to stay and abide in that and let that grace flow through this channel of prayer. This is what it is. This is what it is.

Without that relationship, we have nothing. Your transformation can’t take place and certainly can’t be maintained without prayer, without staying attached to the vine. Right? This is what Christ is calling us to. The Bible implores us to pray this as well too. I mean, to pray as well too. It talks about in many different places. I mean, one, it says be joyful in Romans 12:12. Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, and faithful in prayer, folks.

Again, the times that people get away from their spiritual life, when they fall into these holes and they start progressing away from the spiritual life and away from Christ, is when we let this conduit break, where we get away from the branch, where we start to just wither and die. But because we quit feeding ourselves with that SAP and those branches through the prayer that we need to be having, the prayer life that we need to have with Christ, this is where we get away from that. You have to be faithful in prayer. St. Paul says in Romans 12:12.

He says in Romans 8:26. Likewise, the spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know what to pray for as we ought. But the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groaning too deep for words. Right again. How many times do we feel inadequate? Do we feel it’s a burden? Do we, like, I don’t know how to do it and I feel stupid doing it, so I’m not going to do it. Stop thinking it’s you. Call on the Holy Spirit. Ask him for the words to say. Ask him to express the groanings of your heart. As St. Paul says there in Romans 8. 26, Quit putting the pressure on yourself and use the gift that you received in your baptism and that you were doubled down on your confirmation. And let the Spirit of God that resides within you speak for you to him to express their desires. Trust in that. Stop trusting in yourself and trust in the promises of God that you would have an advocate, and that advocate abides within you to speak to the rest of the Trinity, right to God and to Jesus.

For you. Don’t ever doubt that what Christ has told you about the gifts he’s given you. My prayer life went to another level when I stopped looking at, like, something I had to create, something I had to build, something I had to fumble through, something I had to sound great at so I. I wouldn’t feel inadequate in a room full of other people that were great prayers. If they’re great prayers, it just means that they’ve surrendered and that they’ve been in communion with God and they found a love language that he likes to hear, that they like to give Him. So it’s time for you to find yours. Stop worrying and comparing. Let the Spirit speak through you. However the Spirit wants to speak through you uniquely.

This is the things that Scripture tells us. Sorry, I’m stuttering. Because I want to make sure that, like, you’re feeling the passion I have for this and this that, the angst I have for myself and the times that I let this go away and I let this stop being important in my life. And for all of you out there that have written in so many times that struggle, and for those of you that have hit dead places in the road where you don’t even feel Christ and your prayer life is dulled. Like, just remember these things and go back to them.

For some reason in the faith, we feel like we graduate past steps and we don’t ever have to look back at the things that we’ve learned. Sometimes it’s going back to the basics that gets us right back in the game. That gets us to where we need to go. If you talk to any athlete or anybody, like Tom Brady or Michael Jordan, the people that were successful, Larry Bird, anybody else you can think of, Michael Phelps, any of those people, they will tell you it was going back to the basics and doing the small things again and again and again, that gave them the ability to be great. That’s what gives us the ability to be great in our spiritual life. It’s not to progress and forget, but to remember to reach back and to utilize the tools that we’ve learned along the way to continue to move forward in the spiritual life again.

St. Paul tells us in 1st Thessalonians 5, 17, pray without ceasing. Like Paul is saying, like, prayer is just as important as breath, right? Like prayer is just as important as the breath you take. Pray without ceasing. Breathe without ceasing or you’re going to die. Pray without ceasing or you’re going to find yourself away from the Lord. That doesn’t mean that every moment of your life, you have to give up your job and all those things and go be a monk somewhere. It just means to grow in that relationship with Christ so that everything you look at is through these goggles of Christianity, these spiritual goggles, where everything, the good, the bad and the ugly are God. Right? You could find God in all of it. And through finding God in those things are opportunities to commune with him and to thank him and invite him deeper into your life, to invite him into the sorrows and the struggles, to thank him for the. For the good, for the bad, for the ugly, to just walk with them in your day each and every day. This is what helps us keep transformed in our lives.

Here’s some of the mistakes we make too, though. Like sometimes we. We go, you know what? Prayer is hard. So I’m just going to dive into theology, right? I’m going to fill my head with all the knowledge of the faith. But again, without prayer, what good is it? Right? Without the grace that comes through the prayer and the knowledge that comes through the relationship, it’s always going to be head knowledge. Until that moves to our heart, it’s just sitting there in our head, right? Like theology. Knowledge of theology and a theological background is certainly a great thing to have, but. But it has to be prepared with a prayer life.

Same thing with service. If I’m just out there doing things, but I’m not staying in prayer with the Lord, then it’s not what it should be. All of those things need to be rooted in prayer and the relationship with Christ that it bears through prayer. That’s the goal. That’s what gives these things that we do and the knowledge that we obtain, the power that it needs to have to change the lives of others, to change our lives and to make an impact in the world, right?

Fulton Sheen says the same thing here. He says neither theological knowledge nor social action alone is enough to keep us in love with Christ unless both are preceded by a personal encounter with him. Theological insights are gained not only from between two covers of a book, but from two bent knees before an altar. The holy hour becomes like an oxygen tank to revive the breath of the Holy Spirit in the midst of the foul and fetid atmosphere of the world. He’s telling you, one of the greatest minds of the church, Archbishop Fulton Sheen, who will be a saint one day, that social action, theological knowledge about itself is not enough to keep us in love with Christ. We have to have that encounter.

And that encounter comes through the sacraments and through the life of prayer. This is how we grow, this is how we stay how we keep true transformation or transformation true, how we sustain it. It’s certainly how I’ve done it in my life. Every time I get away from my prayer life and I have the blessings of a spiritual director to remind me of that, I run back to it. No matter how bad I feel, no matter how I don’t feel like I want to pray, no matter the dryness, the aridity, any of those things, I have come to the point in my life where I know I have no chance in this life to be the people, the person that the world needs me to be. My family needs me to be. More importantly, Christ needs me to be. Without staying tapped into Jesus Christ through prayer. 

Everything that this ministry does that I have been able to do to help people has come through the grace, through my prayer life, through my relationship and my knowledge of Jesus. It’s all him. Anybody who tells you any different is not telling you the truth. Everything good in all of us comes through Christ. But that can’t be possible if we’re not growing in our prayer life.

So if you want that true transformation, if you want the things in your life, if you’ve identified these desires of your heart, these places, these obstacles, these places that have been difficult for you, these things that are keeping you from Christ, if you’ve identified those and you really want to be rid of them in 2025, then it starts now. Like, it starts with growing in your prayer life by choosing to fast, but strengthening your will through that relationship and the grace and the mercy that flows through, through that relationship with Christ, right? That prayer life is paramount. It’s not enough to just want it. You have to start actively going and doing it.

So how do we do that? As always, we don’t want to just preach here and just give you no way to do it. So for those of you that need a reminder, for those of you who are looking to start, this is what I would tell you. Make room for it in your life.

Step one. Everything else in your life is scheduled, right? Everything. You schedule doctor’s appointments. You schedule in your working hours from 8 to 5 or whatever your job requires. You schedule the things for the kids. You schedule times for dinners and lunches and breakfasts and snack times. You schedule time for working out. You schedule time to watch television. You schedule time to go on dates, hopefully with your wife. You schedule everything else in your life. Why not schedule the most important thing? Lord, I’m going to give you 10 minutes in the morning. I’m going to give you 10 minutes at lunch. I’m going to give you five minutes in the evening. Whatever it is and whatever you’re being called to in your heart, schedule it. Stop wishing for it, stop desiring it, just leaving it only as a desire. Start putting a plan in place. Use your phone and put it in there as a calendar reminder and set the time in your day, each and every life to get a reminder to pray. Start there, schedule it and make room for it in your life. Make it a priority.

Number two, start realistically. So many people go, I’m going to pray. And then they try to dive their whole life into prayer and they get frustrated and they stop, right? Just like everything else. It’s like, I’m going to go to the gym, and I’m going to work out harder than I ever have. And you haven’t touched weights in 20 years. You’re going to be so sore and not able to move that you’re going to be sick to your stomach and you’re going to give it up immediately. Same thing can happen in your prayer. When we go in and go, I’m going to get every book on prayer that’s in the church. I’m going to pray for hours on end. If you can sustain that, great. But most people, if you start off going 100 miles an hour, you’re going to quit just as fast.

So start realistically. Set aside realistic time for where you are in your life and where you are in your relationship with Christ. If you’re not praying at all, give him five minutes and then increase that. The more regularity you have, the more experience you get, the more comfortable you become with prayer. Then expand it a little bit and a little bit and a little bit. Before you know it, you’ll be praying 30 minutes a day, an hour a day. You’ll be going for a holy hour, an hour a day, or a couple of times a week. That’s between you and God. But you need to start realistically and don’t fail because you tried to bite off more than you could chew.

3. Use the prayers of the church if you need to get started. Like, if you don’t know where to get started, then pray the rosary, right? Pray the surrender novena. Pray just simple prayers. The Our Father, right? That’s not a simple prayer. It’s the greatest prayer. But it’s something that’s easily found and easily prayed. Glory be one Hail Mary. Start off somewhere. Just open the lines of communication, and as you get more and more comfortable, then go away from those prayers if you’re feeling called to.

And start to speak in an everyday way with God, just like he’s your Father. And speak to him like you would your earthly father, you know, in a reverent and prayerful way. Come in humility again. In the Catechism we read 2559, it said, humility is the foundation of prayer. Only when we humbly acknowledge that do we know. I’m sorry, let me start that over again. Humility is the foundation of prayer. Only when we humbly acknowledge that we do not know how to pray as we ought are we ready to receive freely the gift of prayer.

So go humbly. Don’t go with your pride. If you’re nervous and awkward and you feel weird about it. Then tell the Lord. Lord, in humility. I’m awkward, I’m nervous, and I don’t know what I’m doing. Please bear with me. Come to him in humility. And it says here, you will receive the gift of prayer, right? So just go in humility and let your pride go. Don’t let it be an impediment to grow in your relationship with Christ. Fight the awkwardness. God is your Father. You don’t have to impress him. He just wants to spend time with you. Don’t put pressure on yourself to sound a certain way or to think. You have to pray a perfect prayer.

Just go before him humbly, as I just mentioned, and then six. Remember, it’s the Holy Spirit that prays, right? Romans 8:26. It says, likewise, the Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know what to pray for as we ought. But the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groaning too deep for words. Let the Spirit do the heavy lifting. Just be willing. Make an after the will to go and take some time and trust the Spirit’s going to give you what to say and the ability to say it. Build up your time as you grow along. Remember, start with small steps. Build it as you grow. Go accustomed to prayer and as your relationship with Christ grows and finally get to the point where you seek him in every moment of the day. Right? Everything good, bad, and ugly. Remember God and all of it. That’s, that’s the goal, to get to a place and to move through these different stages of prayer life.

If you want to know more about those stages, check out a couple episodes we’ve done with Matthew Leonard. You know, he’s been on our channel a couple times. He is a spiritual guru when it comes to prayer. He would tell you he’s not, but he most certainly is. There’s two episodes in there where he talks about the different types of prayer and how to get to these different stages. If you’re at a place where you want to go deeper, go to our YouTube channel or go to our podcast page, any of our places. Search for Matthew Leonard and us, and you’ll find those episodes.

But folks, you have to start somewhere if you want true transformation. If you know the things that need to be out of your life, then do something about it. Start to fast, start to remove those things, and then start to add prayer alongside that. Fasting to grow in your prayer life so that you can have the strength to stay away from those things and start moving their direction to become the person that God wants you to be so folks, a little bit longer than I was expecting being by myself.

But hey, there was a lot here and I just felt impelled to share it with you. So folks, thanks for listening as always. Please, before you leave this video or before you turn off the podcast, go and hit like and subscribe. Hit those buttons. It helps us get this out more into the world. You can use it to evangelize other people. Share the channel with folks. Thank you for being here. Thank you for those that give and thank you for those who just are here listening and want to be better. I’m so grateful for each and every one of you. Let’s take this to prayer.

In the name of the Father and of the Son is the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Heavenly Father, prayer is such an essential part of our life. Unfortunately, it falls by the wayside so easily because we just haven’t made it a priority. Other things have stepped into its place. We move further away from it and by proxy we move further away from you. Lord, we need to abide in you. You are the vine and we are the branches. We need that SAP that flows through prayer. Lord, help us no matter where we are in our prayer life today, to come humbly before you and to surrender, to admit that we just need you right? That we need your help and your grace, your mercy, your love and your hope to help us move past the obstacles in our life so we can become the men that we’re called to be. Lord, meet us in those moments of prayer. Give us the strength, the courage to continue to seek you out in our lives each and every day and help us to truly transform through growing in our life of prayer.

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

New Year New Changes Right?

That is the hope of most people at the start of a New Year. Often times we find ourselves giving up hope before we begin. We all know the obstacles and impediments that fill our hearts and keep us from becoming the men that Christ calls us to be. So why do we so often fail? The lack of action. True transformation calls for a plan. It can’t just be about desire. When desires meet action true transformation becomes a reality.

Listen in this week as John and Victor start a series on True Transformation and focus on one of the gifts of the Church that can help: Fasting. If we are going to be rid of the things that keep us from Christ we must be willing to make an act of the will to choose the better part. Grab a seat as the guys discuss fasting as one of the most powerful ways to find lasting transformation in your life.

Learn more about our pilgrimage to Greece & Turkey

Episode Transcript:

Welcome back to the pew, everybody. I’m your host, John Edwards, and here across the table from me, as always, is my co-hosted cohort, Victor Adams. 

John, a new year has shown up and that’s additional for our, what is it, seven years now? Man, I lost count. I think we started this in. Yeah, I think it’s 2018 or something. We have to go back and look. Or people that followed it long enough could probably Google it and see. But yeah, it’s been seven or eight years, right.

I think I remember when we were first starting this, we’re like, you know, we’re like, by what show? 20? We’re like, I don’t know what we going to talk about after this. That’s right. Yeah. I remember as we were coming to the end of that bag of sins, right, that we had the first 50 episodes or whatever, and we were getting through it pretty good. And a lot of them were the same thing, right? Like ten of them were confession and five were drinking too much and others were work stress. And we started going, oh, man, oh man, what are we going to do next?

And Deacon Jeff used to actually tell us when we were recording back then in his studio over at what used to be St. Louis. It’s now over at St. Anne’s but he used to tell us, Look, I’ve got 500 episodes. Don’t worry about it. God will give you something to talk about. And, man, he was right. I mean, we’re here on, I think this is number 311 or 312. You know, something like that. So, so Lord does provide.

And I’m looking forward to another year of doing this with you, man. I mean, 2025 here, here we come. And I know it’s that time of year where people start to look for, okay, what am I going to do differently in my life? And you know, we, we kind of always have this hope that as the calendar turns, our habits will turn, our lives will change, wisdom will finally show up.

Yeah, that’s. Yeah, right. Like something magical will happen. Lord, will I be smart this year? Yeah, yeah. It’s like when I was doing drugs a lot, it was just like, okay, well, you know, married, I’ll stop. And I didn’t. And Jacob was born. Oh, I’m going to be dad now. I’ll stop And I didn’t. It’s. We always kind of wait for life to happen to us, right? And then, and then, you know, it never really does. Like you. You just kind of. Life doesn’t change you, you change yourselves. And that’s the call of the Christian life. So I know we’re going to talk about that today.

Before we get started, I just wanted to say a couple things. One, thank you again to everybody that gave donation donations. Not donuts or donations, donations there at the end of the end of the year. You know, we really had a successful campaign through I Give Catholic and there at the end of the year. So thank you to all you that gave.

For those of you that have become new donors, we had a lot of those. Thank you for that. Becoming monthly partners in the pew. That’s going to help us continue to move forward. So thank you for your. Yes. And folks, any of you out there that have been on the fence about it you know, every bit of that of your donations goes to help us continue to help families and men to find healing and restoration and to build these places and parishes across the country.

So if you’re interested in joining us as a partner of the pew, that means somebody who gives to us on a monthly basis, you can do so by going to justaguyonthepugew.com There’s a donate button on the side of the screen and in the top, so you can check that.

Also want to remind everybody that we do have the pilgrimage coming up to Greece and Turkey with Father James Clark. It does include a four night or four day gnc cruise. You’re going to go to Mykonos and all these different islands. You’re going to go to Greece and Turkey. You’re going to see all the places over there where Paul preached and where he taught. And you’re going to see the seven churches of Revelation, the house where Mary lived throughout her last days, and also on Patmos, the grotto where St. John wrote Revelation.

So there’s a lot to do there. It’s going to be amazing. Not only the culture and the food of Greece and some of the mythology and all that stuff too, but it’s going to be a great time to grow and your faith and in relationships and make friendships with people from all over the country and around the world. So, folks, we have a few spots left open. It is filling up fast. So join us. You can do that. If you want to go to Greece and Turkey with us, you can do that by heading over to justagoutonthepew.com clicking our events, bookme and pilgrimage page, you’ll see that in the top menu, click that, scroll down past the calendar, and right there you can download the brochure. You can register right there and everything. But the trip is filling up fast. So if you want to go with us please go ahead and register as soon as possible so you can ensure your spot.

Finally, I just want to say, folks, a lot of people have emailed in lately asking if we have open dates. And yes, we do. We have a few in May, a couple in June and July, and then the latter half of the year, September through the end of the year, we have some spots there too. But with my work with the JP2 Healing center, we’re also doing events there too. So our calendar does tend to fill up fast. So if you want to start a men’s group or you have something you want us to come and be a part of related to men’s ministry or to your parish, we’d be glad to do that. Reach out as soon as you can through our website at Just a Guy in the Pew. Com. Click any of those, find out more tabs on the page, fill out the form, schedule a call with me and we can figure out how we can help you. But just want to let people know we do have some open dates if you desire to bring us in.

So, Victor, that’s all I wanted to say there. Thanks folks for listening to that. Now we’re going to jump into our topic and we were, you know, started to get into a second ago just talking about change and the desires people have. And I know I have things in my life that over this period of really since my last event with the JPD Healing center of the Year was November 14th and 16th, that was our last ministry speaking event. Like, there’s been things in my life that I was really looking forward to. You know, like I wanted to rest at the end of the year. I wanted to really pour into my family since I’m going a lot of weekends of the year.

And one of our The employee we had, Derek, you know, he decided to go on another ministry. And so I’ve actually spent a lot of the last three weeks a little stressed with things, just trying that. We had applicants come in and find the time to really engage people and interview people. Have you narrowed it down yet? Yeah, actually I did. I hired someone, a lovely lady from out in Nebraska. She’s worked with the John Paul, the Healing second healing center before. Shes had a lot of ministry experience, so we had a lot of great applicants. Thank you to all of you that applied.

You know, that. Just a lot of prayer and discernment in my usual mode of operandi. Modus of operandi or whatever is, oh, gosh, I lost somebody. I just need a warm body. Like, I don’t care if you’re a serial killer. You’re hired, you know? And so I really wanted to be more prayerful and spend a lot of time praying, discerning, interviewing people, all that. So we did and I was able to, you know, interview everybody, give everybody equal amounts of time to hear their hearts, to get to know them a little bit. And then, you know, the Lord led me to the right person, I feel for the job.

So we did that. But in the midst of that, like, through some of the stress, Jacob breaking his arm, like, all that different stuff we had going on then the regular kind of rushing around of everything. Christmas was family house, family events. Yes, yeah, yeah. Like, all that kind of stuff. Angel’s getting ready to go on a retreat that’s a week long. There’s a lot of stuff going on. You know, like, I sometimes turn to things when I’m stressed out. Whether it’s, you know, just being angry and moody or something, you know, or. Or maybe to too many libations or whatever.

I started thinking about all that and then started thinking about our last episode. Right. We talked about a lot of things during Advent and letting the Lord into our hearts and all of that. Christmas has come, and now we’re, you know, we’re moving into. Into 20, 25. But the last episode we did that came out last week was really on what do you desire? And these desires of your heart, like that one. Your desires are put there by God, like, you know, your holy desires, even our distorted desires have a good and holy desire below them.

And then we talked about, like, after that, like, what it means. Okay. So if you kind of realize what your desires are, and you sit down and write those down, and you look at what God’s desires really are, a lot of times those are going to match up. You could form a plan, but then to enact that plan, it requires you to take action. And so as I was thinking further about that and just praying in my own life and my own situations I started looking at, like, I want to help people.

Like, the one thing people want to know Is like, I don’t want to just be preached at. Like, what do I need to apply to my life? Like, how do I do it? And I think that’s one thing we’ve always tried to concentrate on this show with, is not just to say, hey, you need to be better and good luck with that, but to give people steps to actually achieving what they want to do in their life.

And I would say that, like, you know, if we want true transformation, and this is what this next couple of episodes are going to be about, is true transformation in our life, which we’re all usually looking to do at the beginning of a new year it doesn’t always stick, but hopefully we can put these principles into place that help us to prolong that and to keep it going and make real change and true transformation in our life.

We have to start really looking at what we want. And like I said last time we talked about, we have to take action alongside God’s grace. If you’re talking about desires, our number one desire should be to be a saint. When you’re a Christian, when you give your life to Christ, there’s a way that you feel you’re called to live. There’s something that, that when that has made you turn away or at least begin to turn away from the world and say, I don’t want this anymore. I want this.

So what that this is is I want to be with God forever in heaven. If that means that’s what I want, then technically what that means is I want sanctity, I want to be a saint. Now that doesn’t mean you wait till you die and then you’re a saint. It’s a way that you live now that prepares you to become a saint. You know, as you, as you pass, whether it’s through purgatory or whether you’ve lived a saintly life and you get straight to heaven, I don’t know. I mean, that’s for each and every one of us to, and the Lord to sort out.

But the thing is, like, when you talk about everything else, well, I really desire this. I desire this. I desire to better myself. Whether it’s health wise or the way I behave or the type person that I am, that all still falls under that one desire. Like, I want to be good, I want to be holy, I want to be virtuous. I want to be whatever something in my heart tells me I should be, which is more. Our hearts are always telling us we’re supposed to be more than we are. There’s something that’s intuitive inside that tells us that.

So that may seem very impossible to a lot of people. It certainly did for me for a very long time. And sometimes it still does. When I’m in the middle of my own mistakes and my own brokenness and all those things, sainthood seems like a very distant thing. Impossible, distant a pipe dream. But it really isn’t. And the church, in her wisdom, gives us a lot of ways to start achieving this. They are not easy. That’s why the Christian life, when you’re truly living, it is not something that’s easy, that you can set on autopilot, and it just happens to you. It’s something that’s very difficult.

So I want to talk about that today. And just a little bit like, how at the start of this new year, do we change? And what actions do I take? And I think there’s a couple things we have to realize in that as we get started here and we get started talking about, you know, how to implement real change in your life.

Well, yeah, and kind of what you’re referring to is like adapting to a new self, a new perception of the self that I’ve always wanted to be, but for some reason I was incapable of, or thought I was incapable of. Wherefore like, well, I know I should stop doing this. I know I should be more active in my prayer life. I know I should read more. I know I should study more. But there’s something that holds us back from really plugging that in.

Well, we may do it for like a week or two, you know, and be intent on that. But then all of a sudden, it’s like we just find ourselves pulled back. Like, anything going, you know, working out or whatever else. You know, there’s always this motivation that I need to improve myself. I need to improve not just yourself, but internal self as well as external self. And we’re going to talk about that. I know, later. But the thing is, we all struggle with it. We’re all human. We’re all in the midst of the world and the sufferings that come from living in the world. But we do have the ability, with the help of the Holy Spirit, to live rightly.

Sure. And that’s really the thing that I want to talk about today. We have to realize a couple of things. We’re talking about being a saint versus living in the world, that they want two different things. Right. The call of the world is really the world of flesh and devil. I should say is to self indulgence. Right? We live in a world that says, like, get what you want when you want, live the way you want to, do whatever you want to do to yourself, to others, to your body. The world tells you to treat your body like an environment. Amusement park and all these things. And that’s not the call of Christ.

The call of Christ in the life of virtue actually call us not to self indulgence, but to self denial, to tempering our desires, this virtue of temperance, to choosing what is good for us and what is not and what we’re going to partake in and what is not. And really the way that You come to do that is by fasting.

And it’s so funny, Victor. I love to read and stuff like that too. And it’s been difficult lately because I’m writing a book and, and there’s deadlines with that. So a lot of times when I want to read, I’m like, well, I need to be spending that time writing, not reading. Because there are things that, you know, I’ve made a commitment to do to get this out in a certain time for publishing and all that. And a lot of times I’ll get in a book and I’ll start reading it and then I’ll put it down and I’ll start another one. And I’ve got like, probably 10 books in my room right now that are halfway read.

So as I was in this period and stuff here around Christmas and between Thanksgiving and Christmas with the stuff I described earlier I just was like, man, I really feel like I need to read something. And of course I’m always in scripture, but sometimes it’s great to hear insights from the people that have gone before us and priests and monks or deacons or sisters or just insightful lay people, gifted lay people, all that stuff.

So I started this book a while back called how to find God and discover your true self in the process. For those watching at home, it looks like this. It’s hard to find. It’s a handbook for Christians and it’s written by Dom Hubert van Zeller, which, which was a monk. But you can call St. Paul’s Bookstore. In Memphis maybe, yeah, she might be able to get it. I think I had to get it off of some, like, weird website with very hard to find books.

So it’s originally put out by Sophia Institute Press. But Dom Hubert van zeller lived from 1905 to 1984, wrote books on spirituality and prayer that offered straightforward advice to people seeking to love and serve God.

So I started reading this and he’s got a lot of language of the 30s and 40s. So sometimes you have to stop and go, like, what does all that mean? Like, he’s speaking in a way that, like, I have to get out a dictionary and like, figure out what some words mean that just aren’t in the English language often anymore.

But I started to pick this up and it’s so funny how God can lead us to the things we need at certain times. Because I was like, well, I’ll start reading this at the doctor one day with Jacob while he was in there getting his arm looked at and stuff. And and I was just like, wow. He started to talk about purifying oneself and really making the changes in your life that you want. And he talked about, he started talking about penance and fasting.

And so that’s what, like, I thought in this first series of true transformation we’re going to talk about over the next couple weeks that we needed to talk about was fasting. Some people may say, like, well, why not prayer? Like, prayer should be the first thing. Well, a lot of times I assume that people are praying. Now, obviously a lot of people aren’t praying, but generally people have some sort of prayer in their life. And we’re certainly going to talk about prayer in another episode and how to live a more prayerful life and how to have more of an impactful prayer life.

But I just thought fasting is something that’s harder for people to do. And so he begins to talk about this. The way that we start to move away from self indulgence in the world and towards self denial is a great gift of the church is fasting. And we hear about it in scripture in the Old Testament. Like, they’ll say, go and pray and fast and then return to me. You know, Jesus talks about the only way that some things can be cast out is through prayer and fasting. When the disciples fail to be able to cast out a demon in someone that like, they had so many times before and they go to Jesus and he says, some things can only be cast out by prayer and fasting.

So as we start to look at this type this time of year and the things in our life, we’re all looking for change. And we all know like, really what it is that the Lord is wanting for us to get rid of in our life or to get control of in our life. I certainly know the things that I’ve told my wife and my children. I realize some of these things are distractions, some of these things are a crutch, and I want to get rid of them.

And I think that’s why the Lord led me to this portion of this guy’s book, is because it was all about fasting. And so, you know, fasting is the way to begin to say no to the desire of the flesh and the ways of the world. If there are things that you’re trying to change, your weight, your selfishness, your anger, your addictions then fasting is a way to do it. It’s a way to start this journey towards sanctity.

And so Dom humor Van Zeller. I’ve got some quotes here from the book. And what I was reading, what he starts to talk about is that sanctity is not penance. And again, he’s talking about fasting here. When he talks about penance, says sanctity or sainthood, if you will, is not penance and penance. Fasting is not sanctity. But sanctity seeks to express its spirit in penance, and penance seeks to find its fulfillment in sanctity.

So what he’s saying here really is like, okay, they’re not the same things. But sainthood seeks to express itself in the spirit of penance. So, like, I’m choosing to not live in ways anymore that call me away from this life of virtue and this life of Christ. And penance or fasting seeks to find its fulfillment in sanctity. So how do I live out the life of a saint? By choosing the good and not the bad? Or choosing the way of the Lord and not the ways of the world?

So he talks about how these go hand in hand. That if our desires of our heart and what we talked about in the last episode are summed up in I want to be a saint. I want to be the man that God calls me to be for my family, for the world, for the church, for those, you know, for Christ chiefly. Then what I’m saying is I want to be a saint. And a big portion of becoming a saint is learning to deny oneself and to live in the way that we’re called to, which is very hard in the world.

But, you know, when you see this this is the problem. So many of us never try to deny ourselves. We kind of have, like we said with the hedging the bets episode. We try to kind of walk in both worlds and have our cake and eat it too. And what happens is we wind up letting our desires and our passions and our flesh control us versus us, controlling us. We don’t subdue our will. We let our passion subdue us.

And this is where we get in trouble. This is why we have so many people that are on opioids and drugs and alcohol and addicted to Porn and can’t get out of repetitive anger and unforgiveness and all these things is because we have slowly and gradually made choices that draw us closer into the world and what the world, the flesh, and the devil is asking of us. And we don’t realize, like, it’s not just like, you see an oncoming car, you jerked a wheel and you’re three lanes over and out of the way. It’s not a move that’s that quick. It’s a slow digression away from the direction we want to go.

When we start choosing the world and we start to become self indulgent again, where we start to look to self again. And the entire Christian life is a call to look outward at other people. Yes, we have to do that inner work that you were mentioning a minute ago, but we also have to realize that, like, Christ came as a gift and that we’re called to be a gift to the world. And we can’t do that when we’re. So we’re indulging in things all the time because those things feed our selfish nature and they pull us away from what matters to Christ and to other people.

So this is why fasting is one of the best ways to kind of do this, but it’s also very difficult for men.

[Victor] Yeah, you talked about self indulgence. Had a flashback, because self indulgence can be on both sides. You know, I mentioned this to you before, like, when I was 20, you know, and people know I had a major back surgery. And it kind of clarified my life, my role of, you know, being more in depth through my faith journey.

But. And I’m from Pensacola, Florida, if anyone knows. In the mid-90s, there’s a thing called Brownsville Revival for people in the first assembly of God. I wasn’t a member of the church, but my friend was. He said, come. Come and watch this. So it was worship revival. Yeah, revival. It was like worship music revival. I mean, it was like, man, it was like going to rock concert.

So. And, you know, and. And of course, I was Presbyterian, and, you know, I was baptized and I went through confirmation. But, you know, the way that they said is, like, if you never had Jesus, accept your life, you’re not saved again. You know what I’m like, gosh, am I saved again? I don’t know.

You know, so the whole thought of, like I’m not safe. So I, you know, did the altar thing and all stuff. So what happened is the self indulgency went the other way for me because I was more getting my fix in the worship music, you know, getting up there singing all that stuff, you know, raising my hand, watching people fall out and, you know, place their hands on stuff.

And it got the point where I became enmeshed in the sense of like, well, I’m going to do. I want to do everything better than everybody else. Like a competition. If someone’s going to fast, I want to fast better. Yeah. If someone’s going to sing, I’m going to sing louder, you know. And it got to the point where I became almost a fanatic, John.

To where I wasn’t like, being warm to other people. I was being like kind of like that, that Pharisee to that tax, tax collector, saying at least God, thank you for allowing me to be who I am and not someone like that guy. Yeah. Who just came in here and he’s, he doesn’t, he’s not feeling the spirit, you know. Sure. Thank you for letting me, you know.

So, like going there, I got my, my fix. I wasn’t there for, for God anymore. I was there to, to feel good about myself and to feel some righteousness. Sure. You know, saying I am deserving of everything, you know. Yeah.

And I got to the point where I started like, even being critical with my family, you know, like, I broke my CDs and I just disassociated myself with a lot of people that were decent people, you know, because they weren’t. Yeah. They weren’t like the way that I was going to be.

And I realized I hurt a lot of people. So what I did is that, you know, in wisdom, you know, I realized out of my early 20s that that’s not the right way to live either. You know, you don’t go to mass to feel better about yourself. You go to mass to ask God to reveal himself to you more. Yeah, right.

To what more can I do? Live in mercy, Live in love, Live in hope, Live in charity. And I wasn’t living in any of those things. I wasn’t charitable to anybody. I wasn’t kind to anybody because I was very very rough on people.

[John] Sitting on a seat of judgment.

[Victor] Yeah. Very judgmental. I was very judgmental. And I realized that that is, I became sick in itself too. Because I went too far. Self indulgence this way. And because I was over here, I’m like, well, I’m doing better. Yeah. But I wasn’t sure.

[John] Well and that’s a good point. I mean, it can Go either way. I mean, extremes are extremes. And you know, I would say it both ways to people. When you talk about fasting, you’re not talking about throwing out everything. I mean, we still have to live in the world, right?

[Victor] Well, it’s not competition because I was doing like, I was competitive fasting, like, God, I’m going to do, I’m going to six days for what? It wasn’t for him, it was for me. Sure.

[John] Well and that’s like I’m saying, like we don’t like the extremes can be extreme either way. Right. And so you’re not. This isn’t about. I’m going to throw out everything in the world. We have to live in the world. And the call of Christians is to go into the world.

But as I was saying, like, when you fast, what you’re doing is you’re training your will to be able to subdue the passions that may be coming to you from the world. Right. Like, okay, when I get in the world, I can operate in it because I’ve trained myself to be able to say no to things. And what once may have been huge temptations or I may have gone down some crazy rabbit trail. I can enter into these places because I have fasted and I’ve seen the light in my life and I don’t need those things the way that I thought I did before.

Now that’s very different than saying like standing in the, in the seat of judgment and you’re just pushing people away because you’re perfect and they’re not. Right. Like, you don’t go all the way to where like everything in the world is evil and you’re the only thing that’s not.

[Victor] Yeah, that’s a good point to make.

[John] It’s is, is this is just about what are the things in my life. Like I really want this true transformation. I really know in my heart, like, I know the things that are keeping me from the next step on the journey towards sainthood. So how do I start to take those steps? And fasting is certainly why it’s certainly important to doing that.

The thing is, like, the reason so many men don’t do it is because we don’t like to deny ourselves.

[Victor] It’s fasting with purpose. Right?

[John] Right. We give into our wants and our desires. We want something, we buy it. We’re really stressed. We self medicate. Like, we feel like we have all the answers ourself and we don’t need anything else because we can just find whatever we need in the moment.

And so we start to look to these things of the world for comfort and for. For meaning and for serving a purpose that only Christ should serve in our life. Right? The things that we look for in the world, we’re actually looking for Christ is what happens.

So fasting allows us to reject those things and to really pull back and understand where we’ve allowed control to go in our lives. Because really a lot of things that we struggle with and that that self indulgence is really. We’ve allowed things of the world, the flesh and the devil, to control us, and we don’t realize it.

And I remember there was a guy I was friends with, I think it was back when I worked at Napa. He was an older man, he was probably in his 50s at the time. And I was smoking back then. I was in the midst of drinking and doing drugs and all that stuff. And I smoked all the time.

And I remember he was working in one of the stores I worked in. And he used to give me stuff all the time. He’d be like, if you wouldn’t spend all that money on beer, you’d be a millionaire one day. Or if you wouldn’t spend all that money, you’d spend it on cigarettes. And he’s like, those things are bad for you.

And I was like, well, how do you know Mr. So and so? And he’s like, because I smoked for 30 years or whatever, some long period of time like that. I said, oh, yeah, well, I’d quit, but it’s. Every time I try to, it’s hard. And he goes, yeah, it was hard for me too.

And I said, well, what, what made you quit? How did you quit? And he said, you know, I used to live up north, John. And he said man, I was. I remember one day, it was in the midst of a dead cold winter. He’s like, it was almost negative temperatures. It was in the single digits.

And he said, and I was sitting in my office and I was jonesing for a cigarette like I did all the time because I smoke like a chimney. And he said. So I finally just gave in and said, I’m gonna go outside. And like I had so many times in the past freezing my tail off to just go and spend three minutes hot boxing a cigarette until I got the urge again.

And he said, so I go, you know, put on my coat, take the trouble, go through the office, go downstairs, go down the elevator, go outside to this smoking section or area. And he said, and I’m freezing. Like, as soon as I open the door, the winter hits me in the face. I’m Like, God, it’s already col.

And he says, I’m sitting there fumbling with this cigarette and this lighter. I’m so cold, I can’t even hold my hand still enough to light it. And he said, I finally get it lit and I breathe in that and all of a sudden like I felt just like like that’s what I was looking for, that’s what I needed in that first puff of that cigarette.

And he said, and then I started to sit there and just, I was more and more cold, I was more and more shaky, I was more and more freezing. And he said, and I started to notice that there were tons of people that were walking in and out of the building, getting out of the cold, not subjecting themselves to this stuff.

And I finally, in that moment, it hit me and I thought, what am I doing? Like, what am I doing? I’m letting this little bitty, you know, 4 inch, 5 inch thing control my life. Like, it is freezing cold out here. No one in their right mind wants to spend any time out here other than what they have to getting to and fro.

But here I am coming down, you know, whatever, because this was in an old job. He had like eight floors of an office building. Taking the time to get my coat on, going down, getting out of the building to stand here, to hot box a cigarette so I can obtain some feeling that I need and then run back inside just to do it again 30 minutes from now.

And he said, but I watched all these other people going in and out of this building and they didn’t have this problem. They weren’t sitting out here freezing their tear off like an idiot in a snowstorm, like just to have this fixed.

And they started to realize, like, I had let my passions and other things control me in my decisions and the way I live my life. And that’s what happens is like Victor, when we don’t subject our worldly desires and the desires of our flesh to our will, we wind up being subject to them, right? We wind up being subject to them and our passions wind up controlling us. And that’s where so many of us are in our life right now, that’s where so many men are in particular, is that we kind of sit down sometime and go, how did I get here? Like, how did I even get here? 

And it’s because we have let go of the restraint control in our lives. Like we have given into the things of the world and we no longer fight back, we no longer take a stand. It’s just become modus Operandi. And you become a creature of habit. It’s like, why those nights when you just. You open a beer and it’s like a Tuesday or something, you’re like, why am I drinking right now? I’m at home by myself. Like, why am I. Why do I need this? And the fact is, we don’t. But we’ve allowed our minds and our bodies to believe that we have because we’ve simply gotten, like, lax, out of control. 

And he talks about that in the book. He’s like, what are three reasons we really don’t fast? And the first one he says is like, well, we wind up thinking that our fasting needs to be an interior disposition and not an exterior one. I don’t need any outside fasting because I just need to fast interiorly about things. So that’s why some guys go, I don’t need that other stuff because you don’t know what I’m doing inside and what I’m holding myself accountable to entire inside. Well, yeah, but if you’re. If. If everything’s still translating into bad behaviors and habits that are not helping you become a saint or helping you become a better man and dragging you down, then your interior fasting is not really doing anything right. 

So we need both. He makes that point. And the second thing he talks about is, like, some guys, they. They say, well, you know, well, life’s hard enough as it is. Living’s hard enough, right? Like, living’s hard enough. Like, why do I need to make it harder on myself? Like, God gave us alcohol. He turned water into wine. Not the other way around, the old Protestant joke and all that stuff. But, like, God gave us all these things. Why can’t I use it? Well, yeah, like anything else. God gave them to you for you to express temperance in, not to overindulge and to self indulge and to turn into a problem in your life, which I’ve certainly experienced in my own. 

So guys go like, well, life’s hard enough as it is. Why put more restraints on myself? That’s just going to make me be more angry and more. More you know, irritable and more this and more that. Well, yeah, it probably will in the beginning. But again, that’s the battle of subduing your will and not letting your will control you. And then the third thing is, like, his. The point he makes in the book is basically like, my life will become boring and meaningless, and I’ll never have fun and I’ll never have any of this stuff if I start to make all these decisions like I want to change my health and the way I look, so I got to lose weight, but then I can’t eat what I want anymore. And what good is life if I can’t have a chocolate bar when I want, or a bucket of fried chicken or whatever it is, or what’s life going to be like if I can’t drink when I want to, or smoke or watch porn or whatever it is? And so this is the call for true transformation is we have to start going like, dude, your life is never going to be what it’s supposed to be when you do all those things. And so he has a lot to say about these things too. 

But I want, I want to just kind of talk about. What we’re saying here is that like fasting is really an act of the will. And what happens when we become self indulgent is we basically handed our will over to the world, the flesh and the devil, and said, you tell me what’s good for me, you tell me what I need and you be in control. And when you’re living that way, you don’t give control over the proper authority in your life, who is Christ? And you wind up in these places where some of us may be, as we enter in this new year of like wanting this change, God is again putting that desire there. How do we start to achieve it through fasting?

Well you know the story you said about your co worker back in the day, Napa, you know, I think that’s a true realization for all of us. When we find ourselves doing something, we know it’s unhealthy and we go, why am I doing this? You know, And I think all of us say that all the time. We’re thinking that all the time. But we may not put the right course of actions into stopping it. You know, it took for him like a blizzard, you know, realize like, this is crazy, I could kill myself. Yeah, Frostbite I hear, because I want a cigarette. You know, but when it’s a nice summer day, you’re like you don’t think about it, you know. Yeah, but but kind of what you’re talking about is like, you know, when, when we subdue, subdue those things that are not healthy for us and we ask God to become part of that battle for us to, to reclaim our lives for, for living in his will. Its going to be difficult. You know, there’s going to be trials and tribulations and there’s going to Be suffering that’s going to be involved. 

But the thing is, you said there will be a joy that comes from that. You know the joy of like wow, I feel different. I feel like the stress, the worriness, all stuff, it’s not as in front of me as it is, you know, as it was before then. You know, stress is. Pressure is a realistic reality for all of us. Sure. But when you live in God’s will, it’s kind of like eh it comes, it comes and goes in various degrees and you realize that it’s not that moment of feeling isn’t for eternity. It’s just a moment. It’s there, it’ll disappear and it’ll be something else you gotta work towards. But when we live in our own will, we’re gonna really live in a sickness of ourselves. Sure. And self indulgency of any kind isn’t a healthy place to live. Whether it’s self righteousness or whether it’s depravity. Yeah. You know, and I think not to say that there’s a middle way. What I’m saying is that, that God is the way, you know, living Christ like is the way loving, you know, being merciful, being kind charitable. I mean that, that’s the way that, that fasting will reveal all those, those, those virtues to you. Yeah.

And that’s what I mean at the end of the day, like I said, like you’re saying what you’re really looking for is God. Like if you’re stressed, go to God, don’t go to the bottle. Yeah. You know, if you’re stressed, go to God, don’t go to porn, don’t go to whatever else you’re doing. Because all those are self medications that you’ve trained yourself to be involved in. Because of whatever you’re feeling in the moment. It doesn’t fix anything. Yeah. Whether I’m bored, angry, stressed, lazy, tired, like we look for something. 

And a lot of times like still in my life where I catch myself like maybe indulging in alcohol more than I should. A lot of times if I’m really honest with myself, I’m bored. And I’m bored. And there’s plenty of things to do besides picking up a beer or whatever. Like go read a book, go spend time with your family. You get in this mindset where it’s like if I don’t have this, then what is my life going to be? And that’s where the devil wants you to go. I mean it talks about in the book Dom Hubert van Zeller also says some things in the book about really, in particular about the devil. He says in here it is in the interest of the devil to present the relative harm so as to cramp the soul’s pursuit of the absolute good. So when you begin to think about fasting, it’s like, oh man, I’m denying myself and I’m not letting my house. And that just sounds painful and that sounds troublesome and I’m not going to be able to do it. And that’s why, because he’s saying it is in the interest of the devil, he’s presenting to you the harm you’re going to do to yourself so that you cramp or cut off your own soul’s pursuit of what is better for you. That’s what he’s saying there. And in fact this is the purpose of fasting. 

He goes on to say, by denying himself the satisfaction of physical appetites and by imposing a measure of hardship upon himself, a man trains his senses so that they are more ready to respond to the obedience placed over them by the will. This means that when the whole man sense and spirit is called upon to meet a crisis, he will not be greatly distracted by the rebellion of the flesh. He will be used to subduing it. That’s the whole purpose we’re talking about this, this episode. That’s for fasting. The devil’s going to tell you it’s too hard and you give in. What he’s saying is when we learn and we start to make ourselves fast from these things, we’re imposing hardships on ourselves. Not for pointlessness, right? Not to just prove I can do it. Right.

A lot of people will say, like I did exodus 90s to see if I could go 30 or 90 days or whatever without drinking or without watching TV. And Exodus 90 is a great thing and it’s helped a lot of people because it helps them to impose fasting. But the reason you do it is because you desire to get rid of things in your life that have you shackled and chained and aren’t making you the man you want to be. In fact are hindering you from being the man you want to be. You want to be rid of those. Not so you can get some medal at the end of your life or at the end of a 90 day period or whatever it may be and beat your chest and say, look what I was able to do. And then you go right back to your behaviors. What good is that? You spend 90 days basically at that point, torturing yourself just to go back to the same things. The point of fasting should be, I have a desire in my heart to be better. And there’s things in my life that aren’t allowing me to be better. I need to remove them.

And God in his grace and the church in their knowledge has pointed to fasting, that there aren’t things just to white knuckle it and grip it to see if I can do it and see if I’m a man. But they’ve given me these tools to show me that I can break free from these chains. I’ve allowed myself to be shackled to by the grace of God and by the desire of my own heart. But I have to shore up my will. And that’s what he’s saying that this means. When the whole man sense and spirit is called upon to meet a crisis, he will not be greatly distracted by the rebellion of the flesh. He will be used to subduing it.

That’s what it means to invite these voluntary fastings upon yourself is so that you train your senses so that you’re more ready to respond in obedience to your will. Inst. Obedience to the world. And so that’s what started to mean so much to me, is I was like, man, I really have some things I’ve let myself slip into here in the last portion of the year. And I give myself all excuses. Well, I travel all the time, and that’s why I’ve gained weight and my health isn’t what it is because airport junk food and on the move and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. No, I still have the ability to make choices. Or I’m really stressed out. And that’s why I’ve indulged in more whiskey or a few more beers than I normally do. Well that’s just an excuse. Like God was there the whole time waiting for me to go and speak to him about my stresses. So What we have to do is realize that it is an act of the will.

And so I want to address just quickly the last couple parts here about fasting and what people think. So that last point in particular that he made in the book about if I fast, then my life’s going to become boring and mundane, like it’s going to have no meaning. And I can’t have fun anymore. I can’t have joy. And that’s not true. You could still go out in the world. I know plenty of people that have quit drinking, and they’re still out at parties and things like that with people because they’ve learned that drinking isn’t the point. The social aspect and the friendships and the relationships are.

So there’s all kind of ways that you can get out there and do those things. But he talks about here actually the opposite of what people think most fasting is. They think it’s voluntary punishment of yourself and a life of boringness and all that stuff. But he says this. The man who fasts and gives up his luxuries is not condemning himself to a life of boredom and frustration. He is freeing himself of much that would otherwise tie him down. By renouncing the amusements of the world, a man enlarges his capacity for enjoyment. Just as unhappiness does not come from the lack of material things, but from the superfluity of material things, so happiness is not threatened by self denial so much as by self indulgence.

So what he’s saying is like, the devil tries to convince us, and that’s what he was saying earlier about. He’s presenting the harm it will cause ourselves to deny ourselves. Like, how horrible it would be not to get what we want is what the devil tries to show us. But he’s saying, in actuality, he said, you’re not condemning yourself to a life of boredom and freedom or frustration. You’re actually freeing yourself from so many things that are tying you down that you don’t even understand. Like, why do I continue to be angry and stressed out at my kids? Well, you’re drinking every night, and while you may feel used to that, your body feels horrible. You’ve gotten used to feeling horrible. And so what you think is normal is you’re not normal at all, right? And so your anger and your frustrations, all these are coming out on people.

So things that you’re choosing to do that may seem normal and needed in your life are chaining you down. He’s saying this actually frees you. And so this idea that, like, I need the amusements of the world to be happy, he’s saying, no, it’s actually by denying yourselves the amusement of the world that you start to break those chains and you start to realize that unhappiness comes from an overabundance of all this stuff that you’ve allowed yourself to partake in instead of denying of self, right? So the self indulgence leads to really unhappiness in the end, and self denial is what allows us to go. Like, I don’t need all these things. My happiness, my joy is found in the Lord.

So the very last thing I want to kind of read here quote wise, is from St. Leo the Great. That backs that up, he says. Backs up Don Hubert van Zeller’s thoughts in this book. He says, what can be more efficacious than fasting? By its observance, we are able to draw abstinence arise. To draw abstinence arise. Sorry, I got to start over. I’m reading too fast. What St. Leo says is, what can be more efficacious than fasting? By its Observance, we were able to draw abstinence arising in pure ideas, reasoned desires, right minded counsels by means of voluntarily imposed hardships. The desires of the body are restrained and the virtues of the spirit are renewed. There’s been so many times in my life, Victor, where I’ve allowed myself to kind of indulge in the things of the world. And I’m sitting here wondering why, man, why can I not come up with what the Lord wants to do on a podcast? Why am I struggling to get a talk together? Why do I find it hard to pray and to go to adoration, to Mass right now? And really what that’s pointing to is I have allowed all these other things in the world. I’m not fasting from those things. I’ve really allowed myself to overindulge in them and it numbs my senses to the voice of God in my life. 

And so what Saint Leo is saying here is that actual fasting allows you to draw near to God, to resist the devil, to rise above the persuasions of evil, and to find yourself again with pure ideas and reason, desires and right mounted counsels. And you’re finding yourself the virtues of the spirit renewed, which are numbed when you’re overindulging in things. So that’s what this episode’s about today. Like, if you want real change in your life, implement fasting. Start to look at the things in your life and start to go, you know what, I don’t need this, I’m going to start to fast from it. It doesn’t mean that you throw yourself completely into like, I’m never going to drink again or whatever. If that’s a problem, a real problem in your life and certainly you need to look at that. Or I’m never going to, you know, watch television again. Like you know, again, look at the severity of the problem in your life and find the equal answers for it or the equal solutions. 

But like, what you have to realize is there are going to be some people in your life that come to you. There may be so called friends in your life, like, hey man, what did you give up drinking? Like, we can’t fun anymore. Like you, like we all we do is drink and smoke cigars or do whatever and now we can’t have fun anymore. Like it’s awkward with you being there without you partaking in all this stuff, which is really a sign of their own guilt and their own need to change, but they’re not willing to do it so they put it on you for Making them feel uncomfortable. But what’s happening there is like, you’re starting to change and you’re going to feel that. And a great insight that Don Hubert Van Zeller said there too, at the end of his book was like, the disciples realized at some point that fasting and prayer was a life that we’re called to, and that some people tried to tell them, oh, you don’t need to fast, just pray. And what they started to understand was that the call of worldly prudence, like, actually urged a greater caution was all too often the call to come down from the cross altogether. Right? 

So that first invitation of I’ll just give yourself a break is actually the pulling of a nail to free a hand. And then eventually, as you pull the other nails to come completely off of the cross, that the Lord calls us to the cross of the difficult life of living as a Christian. So fasting is a need in our life. You want true transformation, then begin to say, these are problems in my life. I don’t want these problems anymore. So I’m going to start choosing to do something. Like, I’m going to make an active choice to do something different, and that choice is fasting. 

So, Victor, like the ways that we do that is start to look at our life. What is it that’s a problem? How can I stop engaging in that? How do I start if it’s slowly that’s needed? How do I bite a piece instead of trying to eat the whole cake at once? And how do I move forward in getting things out of my life that are keeping me from Christ? We’re going to talk about prayers. We move forward in this series. We’re going to talk about embracing the suffering. We’re going to talk about some other important things.

But the first thing you can do right now, in my opinion, if you really want to start 2025 and get rid of things in your life is, is to choose to subdue your will, to say, you know what? Those things in the world, the flesh and the devil, are not in control of me anymore. I am in control of my own life. And whatever I’m struggling with, I’ll surrender to Christ and I’ll offer up to him through this fasting.

And I totally agree with you on that perspective because when you fast, you fast for the right reason. You fast for you pray and you fast. You say, God, reveal the change that I’m seeking within myself, that can only come from you. Dont be like, fast to see how long I can fast. That’s not a competition who’s holier than the other person because again, that’s the way I went and that wasn’t a healthy way either. But to totally ignore fasting altogether is also. You’re losing an amazing gift that can be given to you when you really remove yourself from something that, that will, that has been an impediment for you a long time for spiritual growth. You know, seek that out right now. Think about what is it that, that that’s really my impediment for me that’s in my life that, that I know is something that’s keep me from being like more in depth in my spiritual life. What is that? You know, and, you know, and, and, and seek that out. Seek that with prayer and say, God, I, I need you, your guidance, you know, like allow in this process of fasting. Because I don’t, a lot of people don’t know how to fast or what that entails, you know, so. Yeah, and you can find more about it. I mean there’s all kind of spiritual writings on fasting. The catechism talks about it. Obviously you have, you know, the Google machine. You can figure out all that stuff. 

But I’m not just talking about fasting from food. I’m talking about fasting from the things in your life that are causing problems. You know, we’re talking about true transformation. There’s a difference between transformation and change. Sometimes change is only momentary. Transformation is something that lasts. Right? And that’s what we’re looking for in our life and our spiritual journey is not these fleeting moments of wishy washy and back and forth and hokey pokey spiritual life. It’s I want to be different. I’m going to be different. How do I do that? It’s by taking back control of my will, cutting out self indulgence in my life and starting to look at denying of self and things like that.

So folks, this has been a long episode. I know, longer than usual. It’s about 47 minutes. But this is a big subject and it’s a big, you know, thing that we’re trying to do in our lives right now and who we’re trying to invite you to as well. You know, this is the time of year where people often fail because they don’t have a real plan. They just say, I’m going to do this. And they throw something together. It gets hard and they quit. You can go to the Lord and like he said in Mark 9:29 to the disciples. Some things can only be driven out by prayer and fasting.

So if you’re praying, great, continue to do that and go deeper with the Lord in that. But add fasting and start to step away from the things in your life that are causing you trouble and struggle in your family, the life and in the world.

So, folks, thank you for this time. Again, you can follow, like and subscribe us by anything that you’re on, whether it’s Spotify, Apple YouTube, all of that. Please think about leaving us some reviews. Those help us get this mission in this ministry out to other people. Again, if you’re looking to bring us in or something, you can do all that at just scout in the pew. So let’s take this desire to truly transform Victor into fast to prayer and ask the Lord to help us with it.

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Heavenly Father, the world, the flesh and the devil offer us so much distraction and so many things that we think will make us happy. So many of us have tried again and again those things that they offer and come up empty each time. Lord, help us to break the cycle in our habits that keep us returning to a well that will never, ever be full, a well that never offers us anything, that will help us truly transform. Help us turn our desires to you. Help us look at the things in our lives that are keeping us from you, and make an amendment and a decision right now in our lives to fast and to turn away from those things that are causing us to be away from you. Or the goal of our life is sainthood and the way that we reach there. One of the ways is through fasting. So help us through your grace and your mercy, to decide what needs to be out of our life to fast from those things so that we can be forever in heaven with you as a saint among saints.

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.