TO WITNESS FOR JESUS, LISTEN TO THE HOLY SPIRIT, NOT YOUR SENSES. (Homily for May 4, 2016. Wednesday of the 6th week of Easter.)


Bible Study: Acts 17, 15 to 18, 1 and John 16, 12 to 15.


The secret key to successfully witnessing for Christ is ability to listen to the Holy Spirit. We are not the ones to preach, we are just instruments in the hands of the Holy Spirit who is himself the chief evangelizer. We cannot even give any credit to ourselves because whatever we say does not belong to us and if souls are converted, it is because we allowed the Holy Spirit speak and move through us.

Hence Jesus says to us this morning: “I have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now, when the Spirit of Truth comes, he will guide you into all the Truth… he will declare to you the things that are to come.” The Holy Spirit tells us not just what we are to say but even the things are will happen in the future. If you are in tune with the Holy Spirit, you will be able to know what will happen even before it happens. This is the gift of prophecy.

We should pray for the Holy Spirit to descend upon us that we too might begin to know things beyond the reach of our mere intellect. And whatever the Holy Spirit reveals to us, it is not simply for our self-aggrandizement but for the salvation of souls and the conversion of hearts to God.

However, the truth is that we live in an age, people are so eager to thrill others that they cannot wait for the Holy Spirit to reveal things to them. They simply tell lies in the name of the Holy Spirit. To lie with the Spirit is to say things you are thinking in your mind as things that are coming from the Holy Spirit. Even when your conscience tells you that what you are saying is far from the truth, you still lie with the Holy Spirit all because you want to be revered by your listeners or because you want to benefit from them.

The story has often been told of a minister who changed his sermon one Sunday morning all because he saw some brand new cars parked in front of his church. He then declared: “The Holy Spirit has ministered to me that someone here today will sow into my life the gift of a brand new car.” He kept on and one and nobody came forward. He became angry and started raining insults on his congregations threatening that if nobody comes forward, he will not continue with the service. He then suddenly closed his eyes and started speaking in tongues continuously. By the time he opened his eyes, he discovered he was the only one left in the church.

The Holy Spirit is the spirit of truth not of lies. Woe betide anyone who lies in the name of the Holy Spirit. Our country today is filled with lots and lots of great liars who have prophesied different things in the name of the Holy Spirit, none of which have come true. Before this new administration came into office, some men of God prophesied that so and so will happen in this country and now that we see the very opposite happening, we can now see that they were not inspired by the Holy Spirit but by their bank alerts. May God help us.

St. Paul’s experience in Athens which we read about in today’s first reading is a classic example of how our mental reasoning can deceive us into assuming we are hearing from the Holy Spirit. He thought that by laying a foundation to an Altar that they themselves had built to the UNKNOWN GOD, he would lead them to know the true God in heaven. But guess what? Out of a multitude of thousands, he ended up converting only a handful of persons.

Lesson: The god that the Athenians served is totally different from the God who created heaven and earth, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. So since Paul decided to preach to them about their own god who they referred to as “unknown”, they couldn’t understand why their unknown god (made by their own hands) could then be capable of rising from the dead. How can a piece of stone rise from the dead? Was the stone alive in the first place? Rubbish…! So they walked away from Paul saying “We shall hear you again.”

Paul learnt this bitter lesson that day. A lesson we sometimes miss in the name of inculturation. The gods our fore-fathers in Africa served is not the same as the God of heaven, their own gods were their own creations and they knew what their gods could do, but the God we serve is the one who created us and we cannot put any limit to what he is capable of doing. Faulty inculturation only leads to syncretism and this is why attempts to convert Africans have not be successful. What we have is people going to church to worship the gods they once served in the bush. That is why we have many church-goers but only few Christians. That is why our streets are littered with churches yet evil in our society is on an unprecedented scale.

Dear friends, let us listen to the Holy Spirit and not to our senses and we will preach and prophecy the truth and nothing but the truth.

Let us pray: Lord Jesus, fill me each day with the Holy Spirit. Amen


God bless you. Good morning. Be Happy. Live Positive. Have Faith. It is well with you.

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