Father Randy Koenigsknecht
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Discover what God truly desires for your life in this powerful reflection on faith, fear, and transformation. Learn how God calls us to cast out fear, encounter His presence, and step into a deeper, Spirit-filled life. Be inspired to pray boldly, listen for His voice, and live with expectant faith right where you are.
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The same as in, you know, upper 70s, lovely Mediterranean sun to the 30s and gray skies of Michigan. It’s good to be home. It really is.
So I have an important question for you. What does God want for you? What does he want to do for you? Where’s his heart at when he thinks of you and he looks at you? Quite often, we can approach God with, well, God, I want this, I want that, XYZ, you know, do this thing for me, help me with this problem. All good things.
Good prayer. Don’t get me wrong. But what is God’s heart? What does he desire for you? I think there’s three things that we see kind of playing out in the gospel.
There’s three things that God wants for us. The first is God wants to cast out fear. The second is that he wants to be with us.
And the third is God wants us to do the things that he does, to do what he did. So first, if he wants to cast out fear, what are we afraid of? There’s many things. I don’t think it’s without reason that one of the most common phrases in scripture is do not be afraid.
In the gospel today, he says, do not let your hearts be troubled. You have faith in God, have faith also in me. Many things that we fear.
I think there’s just common worldly fears that we have, you know, losing a job, a loved one, a family member, a home, you know, there’s fears of what will other people think of me. There’s fears that come from, you know, our own sinfulness, the lies that we take in. You know, if people saw me, they wouldn’t really love me.
I need to earn God’s love. All that sort of stuff, despair. I’ll never be free.
I’ll always be stuck where I’m at. There’s no healing possible for me. There’s nothing greater out there for me.
And I think most powerfully is a fear of God, is a fear of what is God going to ask of me? If I commit here, my life’s going to have to change. It can’t look the same. What’s he going to take? Will I get anything back? Will it be worth it? And that fear, that can be paralyzing, you know, because we can easily just mistake, and mistake, I think, you know, basic comforts or a lack of pain as peace, as joy.
You know, I see many people in the world, what do they do? They’ve got, well, I’ve got a good family. I’ve got a good house, stable income. You know, maybe they pray every now and again or come to church sometimes.
And they think that that is the best life. They’ve got it. They’ve made it.
They’ve got true peace and joy. But that’s shallow. There’s a degree of comfort there for sure.
But man, it cannot compare to what God has for us. The true peace, the true joy, the true life that we were made for when we push past that fear and we reach out to him. So as Father Chaz mentioned, this past, you know, week and a half, I’ve been in a town called Medjugorje.
Medjugorje, who knows how to actually say it? People would say it different ways in the same sentence. It was crazy. So I don’t say it consistently either because of that.
How many of you guys have heard of that place, Medjugorje? All right, this crowd, I think, wins out of all the masses. Most people have heard of it. So Medjugorje is a very small town, maybe 2,000 people, in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
It’s on the, very close to the coast, just across from Italy by Croatia. And Medjugorje is a special place because in 1981, when it was still Yugoslavia under communist rule, Mary appeared to six children there and continued to appear to them each day, and down even to this day. And she had a message for them.
And I think her message is simply summed up in one of the days, and back in June 1983, she said this, I have come to tell the world that God exists. Happiness and fullness of life are only found in God. Only in God can we find true joy from which true peace arises.
And that’s what I saw happening there. I saw people who were pushing past their fear, all these fears of God, uncertainty. There’s many people I met who, you know, were varying degrees of commitment.
Some were all in. You know, they’ve been believing, following the Lord for a long time. Others were unsure.
They were looking for God. They needed something to break through and happen in their life. And what did they find? In that place, when they reached out to God with expectant face, when they pushed past fear, and they were willing to surrender their lives over to Him, they found Him.
They were with God, that second desire of God’s heart for us, to be with Him. They began to hear His voice. They encountered His presence in a way they never had before.
You know, I did a little polling of my group and minor conversation with them. You know, there’s about 28 of us in total on this pilgrimage. You know, among there’s several thousand people there besides us, of course.
But, you know, asking some of them, like, have you ever heard God speak to you? Most of them said no. They hadn’t. And so, this is the place to do that, Medjugorje.
So, what do I tell them? All right, I want you to pray boldly. If this is what God wants, He wants to be with you, He wants to speak to you, it’s not supposed to be an uncommon experience that we would hear God’s voice. Ask for that.
Make that prayer. God, I want to hear your voice. I want to hear you speaking to me.
Surrender them to your fears. Give those over to Him. Lord, I’m afraid of what you’re going to take.
Lord, I don’t think I have enough to give. Lord, I don’t think I’m good enough. Tell Him that.
Ask Him to speak to you. And when they did, checking in with us as the days went on, what did I see? I saw people who encountered the living God, who heard the Lord speaking to them clearly for the first time, people who were set on fire, who were changed, because they were willing to ask with expectant faith. You know, when God speaks to us, it’s not normally a booming voice coming down from the heavens, but it’s that thought that comes to your head that brings peace, brings joy, brings life.
It stirs, it touches us. It’s an image that comes to mind that, you know, just reminds us of God. It’s the Lord speaking to us through it.
It’s a passage of Scripture coming into our hearts that just burns within us all these ways. And that’s what God wants for each one of us. And that’s why I saw it happening not just in my group, but in all the other pilgrims who were there.
I mean, I heard confessions from, I’m pretty sure, every major English-speaking country in the world. It was awesome. You know, but time and time again, they were looking with expectant faith.
God, please meet me here. I want to know you. I want to be changed.
I’m willing to give my life over. And he did. And they began to walk with him who is the way, the truth, and the life.
And we’re never the same. As much as I would say you should go to Medjugorje, and I hope you do. I hope you put that on your bucket list and put it higher up than you think you should, because it’s awesome.
What happened there can happen here just as well. What’s the difference in my mind? Yes, it’s a special place. Yes, Mary appears, and her presence is very powerful.
But the difference between most people here and most people over there is they were actually looking to meet someone. When they came to Mass, when they went to pray, they expected that God would speak to them. They expected that when they asked him to do something for them, when they asked to hear his voice, that he would respond.
There was real faith. And, of course, God responds then. But there’s no reason why that can’t happen right here in Jackson, why we can’t come before the Lord, bringing him our hearts, asking boldly and simply for him to speak to us, to break through into our lives, that he can’t do that.
And then when he does, what happens? We begin to do the things that he does. We are empowered. So we can teach, we can share what God has done for us with other people.
We can love them. And I think we can also do, and I know we can do, more of the supernatural things. We begin to live a supernatural way of life.
And I saw that, too, taking place. One of the days we prayed for the Holy Spirit, we prayed for that outpouring, that people would encounter him, hear God’s voice, all that stuff, and they began to. But then we also took time and we prayed that people would be healed.
And we prayed over them for physical healing. And during that time, it was the best numbers of healings in my life that I’ve seen. It was probably about 60% to 70% of the people were healed.
Just personally praying over people for healing, as Jesus does. That’s what he asks us to do. You will do the same things that I do and greater.
I saw a woman with bone spurs in her feet, struggling to walk, able to walk freely. There’s another woman in our group. She had a lot of lower back pain, and she had shooting numbness going down one of her legs, causing great trouble.
There’s a lot of walking in Medjugorje, so it makes it uncomfortable. And so she comes up, she asks, can we pray for healing for this? I say, yes, we do. So she tells me all about it, and sometimes when that happens, what I know is that people’s legs, one leg can be longer than the other, or shorter, vice versa.
And so I had her put her feet up, and sure enough, one foot was about a quarter inch, eighth inch or so, further out than the other, walking imbalanced. And so we pray. Lord, I ask you to heal them.
In the name of Jesus, be healed. And she was. Her legs are now the same length.
She’s walking freely without pain, without numbness. One of my favorite pictures I have from this pilgrimage is I asked her a couple days later, you know, how are you doing? Was it just like the excitement of the moment, or are you really healed? And I have a picture of her jumping around in front of a beautiful church, because of what God has done for her. And that’s what’s possible.
That’s what God wants to do for each one of us. He wants to cast out the fear in our lives so that we can turn our lives over to Him, so that He can be with us, that we can know and encounter Him powerfully in our prayer, that we would know His voice, we’d know what it sounds like when He speaks to us, what it’s like when He looks at us, what His gaze feels like, that we’d know and encounter those things. And then we can go out, and we can do the very same things that He does.
Be that healing, be that supernatural signs, or be that just loving your neighbor as He did, showing them mercy, caring for them, raising them up with His love, with His heart. That is what’s possible for us. There is so much more that we can have than where we’ve been living.
You know, I was a priest. Doing good stuff, and yet I found more there because I gave more of my heart over to the Lord. I asked for more.
Be bold. Pray with expectant faith that God is going to show up right here in Jackson, because He still does. You know, toward the end of the trip, it was like, well, do I want more time there? Yes, of course I do.
It’s a beautiful place. How could I not? But at the same time, the spirit that I found there is a spirit that still is with me right now, that nothing has to change from my time there to here, because God is the same, and our mother is here as well, especially this month of May as we call on her to teach us, to help us to pray. So be bold in calling out to the Lord.
I promise that He will answer. Be persistent in listening. Take those times of silence, and you will hear God, and He will transform you and those around you.
Amen.
(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)