The Power of the Holy Spirit

Fr. Bob Bedard

~The Power of the Holy Spirit~

by Father Bob Bedard, CC


Back in March of 1975, the Lord gave me a very special gift. It was a gift of personal prayer. It changed my life.

As a boy, as an adolescent, as a young man, I was very lazy. The dirtiest four letter word in the English language for me was “work”.. I never had to be coaxed to take it easy. One of my father’s favourite maxims – “Anything worth doing, is worth doing well” - was a continual challenge, I found, a challenge I became very skilled at ducking.

Ordination changed that. From being a dedicated drone, I galvanized into action. Although not ever being a fast mover, I became very purposeful. The job that had to be done got done. Although never a whirl wind, I became a very dedicated grinder. Maybe the early lessons from my dad had begun to sink in.

Quickly enough, my reputation grew as a very dependable guy. As I moved from parish ministry to the task of establishing, with the help of a few young priests a new high school from scratch. I began to take on the tasks that nobody else seemed interested in taking on. That is how I got into basketball. I took on the coach’s job with the juniors because nobody else would do it. I took over the program of Canadian History when a need in that department became clearly evident. I became principal at 32 and rector a year later. I took on the grade XIII Religion program as well. All of the above jobs needed some shoring up when I when I stepped in, as well large portions of just plain hard work.

I guess I had become a prime example of somebody who was caught up in the heresy of works. Anything could be accomplished by human effort, aided and abetted, of course, by the grace of God.

It took my assignment as pastor of St. Mary’s for the Lord to begin teaching me just what the blend should be between human effort and the Holy Spirit. His clear word to me was that HE Himself not only had all the plans for the parish, but also that the Holy Spirit would do almost all of the work. That successfully disabused me once and for all about the works heresy. With the growth of the CCs and the growth of the parish itself, I couldn’t handle everything myself anyway. It was in desperation, more than anything else, that prompted me to turn everything over to the Lord.

I was simply to surrender all the control buttons to the Lord, take my orders from Him and carry them out while He remained in the control room sending out the messages. I wound up simply running a message centre, receiving and sending out His instructions and appointing ministry folks to carry out His wishes. It’s an amazing system. Since it works beautifully, I recommend it to absolutely everybody.

I should have known. Earlier, I feel the Lord had revealed to me that the Holy Spirit is the One who gets things done. He has the power to accomplish things, anything in fact. Not only difficult things, but impossible things as well. There is no need whatever for us to quail before difficult assignments from Him.

The power of the Holy Spirit is precisely what the Church needs in our day. My contention has been that the power (or grace?) of the Holy Spirit admits of degrees. In that way I maintain it took a greater measure of power for God to bring Mary Magdalen to conversion than it did to raise Lazarus from the dead. In fact, a conversion of a person from no faith at all to a lively relationship with the Lord wherein he falls madly in love with God requires a greater degree of grace than just about any thing else.

*The Holy Spirit is not worn out. He has not retired. He is ready to swing into action if only we will give the invitation. The age of the Holy Spirit, heralded regularly by the popes of our day, is still on the go. Take heart, O Catholic people.  The victory is in sight.
Ask the Holy Spirit  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXnY-dcAR1g&feature=player_embedded

The Lord's Dynamic Fr. Bedard  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbqN-faH5lU