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- We get beat up, we fail, we think
gee God, I'm trying to be a good husband,
I'm trying to be a good father.
I'm trying to do well at work
and I really feel like I'm getting about a D
in all these things, right?
And we get tired and we get frustrated.
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- This world is a battle ground between heaven and hell
between good and evil
and so we need to put on as Scripture says,
the full armor of God.
and part of that includes these incredibly
powerful channels of grace called the Sacraments.
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All the Sacraments are gifts from Jesus
that are powerhouses of grace
that Jesus gives us to fortify us
in the spiritual battle.
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- Grace finally, is nothing less than God
sharing his own life and love
in and through the Incarnation.
Catholic doctrine has this good axium,
gratia praesupponit et perficit naturam,
grace presupposes and perfects nature.
God want to share a new gift
which goes beyond nature.
That gift is grace.
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- A sacrament is an outward sign of an inward grace
instituted by Christ to give grace.
So we use bread, wine, water, tangible things
that with the power of the sacrament
it points to something deeper.
It points to grace that God wants to give us
and grace is something that we can't touch
it's unmerited but it's the divine life
that God wants to give to us.
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- There's so many things men will go to
when they're having trouble in their marriages.
They'll go talk to friends,
they'll go talk to a counselor, perhaps.
The greatest balm that could happen in a marriage
is for a man and woman to kneel before Christ
having confessed their sins and to receive the Eucharist.
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- A lot of people wonder, how do I revitalize my marriage?
Your marriage is also a source of unbelievable grace,
so you need to unlock the super abundant graces
the gallons, upon gallons of graces available
in your own marriage.
How do you do that?
Get to confession, get to the Eucharist,
stay in the state of grace
and your own marriage becomes a pipeline
of supernatural grace.
So the sacraments are some of the most powerful,
spiritual tools that we have.
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- The goal of our moral life is to know the good
and to choose the good, to do good acts, to build virtue.
That's what grace does, it illumines the mind
that we know the good
and it strengthens our will
so that we can choose the good
and so the goal of the spiritual life
is to live a life of grace,
through the power of the sacraments
and through developing virtue.
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- I think often men struggle with this fear of inadequacy.
This fear that they're not good enough.
I've failed, I don't deserve his love
or because I've failed,
I don't deserve his forgiveness, right?
I struggled with that a lot.
I'm gonna get big and strong and powerful
and so that nobody ever thinks less of me
but that's not gonna fix it ultimately.
The best way to get grace is the sacraments.
I think especially the sacraments of confession
and communion
because we can consistently go back to those.
You're taking Christ into your body.
It's going to help you carry that cross.
Every time I went back to confession, you know,
I would hear from the priest, your sins have been forgiven.
So I think for men, in particular,
it's a sacrament of grit, if you will.
It's a way in which,
no matter how many times you have to confess
the same thing over and over,
you just keep going, keep going, keep going
and the Church Triumphant and the saints
and the angels are all cheering us on.
I know I will fail by myself
but my life's not about me,
my life is about bringing Christ to the world.
The sacraments are gifts from God to imbue his grace.
The Church offers these to the people of God
to strengthen and embolden them to live the Christian life.
Men are called to fight.
You've got my two year old boy, you know,
running up to his 11 year old brother
and trying to beat him up,
'cause that's just part of our, kind of, warrior spirit.
What the sacraments do is invite you
into the spiritual warfare that Christ accomplished
on the cross
and so especially whenever we're dealing with struggles
like fear of failure, fear of inadequacy,
a lot of that tends to kinda go by the wayside
when you have a very clear expectation
of here's the fight you're supposed to be in.
So the sacraments call you into that battle,
baptized as an infant, confession and first communion.
Now as a confirmed adult you're now a warrior in the battle.
Strength training has been a part of my life now
for a long time, body building to power lifting
and it's taught me a lot about
being able to put in the effort into something
and from that you get results
which spills right into your spiritual life.
It's actually a vital thing for a father to
take his kids and his entire family
with him to these sacraments.
If you think about the family as the domestic church
you're leading them as the king.
You're being the prophet of good news
by saying this is where the truth can be found
and you're being the priest by sacrificially
offering of your time and your love to them
and bringing them to where they can find these sacraments.
I would definitely challenge men to study more
about the theology and the practice of the Mass.
Some of the smallest, little things in the Mass
have huge meaning but at the minimum it's once a week
and it can become very repetitive.
We know when we're suppose to stand.
We know when we're suppose to kneel.
If you want to get stronger, you want to get bigger muscles
what are the things that are gonna be
unbelievably repetitive?
Your lifting and your eating, right?
The two things that are eventually
going to get very dry, very quickly.
Not every workout's going to feel amazing.
Not every workout's you're gonna end up leaving
feeling like you accomplished anything,
but you keep doing it, you keep going
you keep repeating it over and over again
because the desired goal is the outcome of it
and the desired outcome of going to Mass
and the desired outcome of receiving all of these sacraments
is to become a saint.
So just to recognize that sometimes
repetition is actually a good thing.
If we want to be the best fathers we can be
what better way than by taking Christ into your body
and so it wakes you up to the reality
of what kind of life are you living to represent that?
But it also wakes you up to the reality
that Christ wants to invite you into his life so much
that he wants you to imitate him perfectly
and Christ is the perfection of masculinity
and what better place than your own home
to actually go and be a representative of the love of God,
which is ultimately what a father is.
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So a sacramental vision of the world
is to see everything through the lens of God
to see things not just for their surface level
but things that are much deeper
and what attributes of God does this thing represent
and it should guide our entire day.
It should guide the fact that we are now
literally representations of Jesus Christ in the world.
How are you going to do that?
You know, how are you going to live up to that calling?
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- Sin separates us from grace.
Sin separates us from God
and the sacrament of reconciliation brings us back
into grace with the Holy Trinity.
- The sacrament of reconciliation is beautiful.
I tell the kids at our camps
that when you go to the sacrament of reconciliation
it's not a guilt trip,
it's not where you take your dump truck of sin
and you dump it and say, okay, God, thanks
but it's actually bathing in the love of Jesus.
You're confessing your heart to almighty God
and saying, I'm sorry, and Jesus is, in reply,
is saying, I love you.
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- To think of confession as a field hospital
when you're out in the battle, the spiritual battle
that confession is the place where you go in to be
healed of the wounds of sin.
So that's why the Church says it's essential,
you can't just make confession optional.
- Be honest about what you've done.
Own up to it as a man and take the medicine
'cause God wants you to be restored
more than you want to be restored.
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- A man needs to bring his children to Mass
so they can receive the graces
of being in the presence of our Lord and King.
You step back from the Mass, the basic flow is this,
you're leaving the spiritual combat, the battlefield
you're entering into the fortress of your King,
hallowed ground, you go through a process
where you are received in,
you hear the history of the faith
and then ultimately
heaven opens up
and you meet Jesus Christ in the Eucharist
that pinnacle of the Mass
and then it winds down, you're given your marching orders
and you go back out into the spiritual combat.
- When a family worships together it draws them together.
It helps heal the inevitable little frictions
and spats and other things that happen.
So the Eucharist is a key for the whole Church
but especially for the domestic church that's the family.
- The Eucharist is how God feeds his people
and he's saying, I'm giving you the spiritual
and physical sustenance to sustain you for life.
This is all you need.
That's how we were made in Christ,
that's how we're connected to the power source.
- Every time we celebrate the Mass
and Jesus' offering of thanksgiving to the Father
and his self donation, we realize the path to manhood
it is two stages.
The first stage of manhood is self mastery,
learning temperance and self control
but that's not enough, you can become successful
in this world by self mastery
but the divine call, what makes us go beyond
natural virtue to supernatural virtue
is where we take that self mastery
and now we can make self donation.
We can make a gift of ourselves to others
and Jesus Christ, he is modeling what the
self discipline of giving himself in his passion
and then the self donation of giving himself
in that passion and in the Eucharist
and he becomes the absolute model of manhood in the Mass
by showing us that manhood is made for sacrifice
and heroism that makes a self donation for love of the other