"But when the Spirit of truth comes, He will lead you to the complete truth since He will not be speaking as from Himself, but will say only what He has learned".
The Acts of the Apostles reveal St. Paul as the great evangelizer at work. We have a lot to learn from St. Paul about evangelization. What made him so talented in this way?
It is from the fact that he knew about the process of conversion from two levels, and as a result, he knew how to approach this issue with the people he encountered. He had the wisdom that came from the Holy Spirit. So what are these two levels of conversion?
The first is that he had an intellectual understanding of conversion that leads to belief and faith. The second is that he had an actual personal experience of the conversion process itself.
By way of illustration, before I had the experience of falling in love, I certainly had an intellectual understanding of this phenomena. Why? Because many told me about it as best they could, and I could see the effects it had on others who fell in love. But the real teacher for me, as well as for most of us, is the actual experience of falling in love. It was then that we realized that we are dealing with something that cannot be adequately expressed in words. This is how it is to have an experience of the Holy Spirit.
There is an interesting story about St. Ignatius of Loyola that also illustrates the point. St. Ignatius was a great intellectual. After all, he wrote the St. Ignatius Spiritual Exercises. But at one point in his life, he writes:
"While sitting by the river Cordoner in Spain, and occupied in prayer, my eyes of understanding began to be opened. Though I did not see any visions, I was enlightened with such clear understanding of many things concerning the spiritual and matters of faith that everything seemed new." He went on to explain that what he experienced was with such clarity that all he had learned through the previous sixty years of his life, if added all together, would not be as much as he had received at that one time. St. Ignatius now understood from the deep level of personal experience.
When St. Paul spoke to the Greeks in Athens, he knew that at first, he would have to appeal to their intellectual understanding, and he did this skillfully. He caught their attention. They loved this level of understanding because it appealed to their intellect. They were use to it. They loved pondering profound thought. But at the mention of Jesus' rising from the dead, we read that some of them burst out in laughter. Others said: "I think we'll have to hear that again". Paul was speaking beyond their intellectual understanding of such things; things that can only be understood from the deeper personal level of faith experience.
Paul was a man who never gave up. He would persist until many, perhaps not all, would come to this deeper level of understanding. If our evangelization is to work, this is what we must do as well, particularly in relation to those who are not engaged in church.
Jesus said: "But when the Spirit of truth comes, He will lead you to the complete truth since He will not be speaking as from Himself, but will say only what He has learned". When we know and live these words, not only from an intellectual level, but from an experiential level, then we are evangelizers of the truth of who Jesus is. This is our personal call; to share with others the good news of what we ourselves have received.
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