The Power Within

​‘God the Holy Trinity has had three great dealings with the world: God the Father in creating it, God the Son in redeeming it, God the Holy Spirit in bringing to fruition the work of redemption.
 
We are living under the dispensation of God the Holy Ghost. He is the power within us that fights against sin. The yearning after God in prayer, all the soul’s travail as it searches after God, is His secret. Through Him we feel contrition, and triumph over the temptation to despair. Through His grace we make good confessions. It needs a good deal of patience to be a true penitent. We get so tired of falling. It often seems as if we were going back instead of forward, as though it would have been much better if we had never started. But the Holy Spirit gives the strength of true penitence, which will not stay in that state of acquiescence with sin, and helps us to get up again, however many times we fall.
 
We know how hard it is to witness for Christ. St Peter broke down before that test. It is not strange if we find it very hard. Yet if we do witness to Him how happy we feel, and that happiness is the joy of the Holy Ghost. The supreme witness is that of the martyr. Often in life we are faced with a choice. Shall we spare ourselves and live quietly, keeping ourselves free of troubles and toil, or shall we deliberately choose to do that which we know will in the end wear us out and shorten our life? Since the Holy Ghost came at Pentecost the same power is with us that enabled our Lord to set His face as a flint and go up to Jerusalem’.
 
Father Andrew SDC, 1869-1946

Almighty God, who as at this time didst open the way of eternal life to every race and nation by the promised gift of thy Holy Ghost: shed abroad this gift throughout the world by the preaching of the Gospel, that it may reach to the ends of the earth; through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the same Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen. - Divine Worship: The Missal.