The voice of the Holy Spirit, the battle with the flesh, and the call to let God define what is right
By Fr Michael Payyapilly VC
Someone came to me during the retreat and asked a very sincere question: should we pray more to the Holy Spirit, more to Jesus, or more to the Father? We can easily begin thinking about the Trinity in very human terms, as though we must divide our attention equally so that no one is offended. But that is not how we understand the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. They are three Persons, yet one God. When I worship the Holy Spirit, I am not moving away from the Father and the Son; when I worship the Son, I am not leaving the Father and the Spirit behind.
I used a family in the retreat as a simple example. Rudolph and Maya Mendoza and their children are distinct people with different personalities, ages and ways of doing things, but they belong to one family. Years ago, when I was parish priest in Doveton, some very good food used to arrive from their home. Sometimes one person brought it, sometimes another, but I did not need to ask whether this particular meal belonged more to one member of the family than another. It came from the family. The analogy is limited, of course, because the mystery of the Trinity is far greater, but it helps us move away from this idea that giving attention to one divine Person somehow takes something away from the others.
Jesus says in John 16 that when the Spirit of Truth comes, He will guide us into all the truth. He will not speak on His own, but He will speak what He hears. The mandate is the same. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are at work in us for the same destination: that we may be prepared for redemption, for the kingdom of God, for eternal life. That is why prayer in the Spirit is not an optional corner of Christian life. The Spirit leads our prayer, teaches us to understand the voice of the Lord and prepares us for where we are going.
There is another side to this, however. If the Spirit is speaking, I must be willing to listen.
Do Not Quench the Spirit
Saint Paul writes in Ephesians, “Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption” (Ephesians 4:30). I keep returning to those last words: for the day of redemption. The Spirit is not working in us simply to make today’s life a little more comfortable. We are being prepared for the kingdom. Then in 1 Thessalonians we hear the very short command, “Do not quench the Spirit” (1 Thessalonians 5:19).
What does it mean to quench the Spirit? I understand it as quietening His voice, turning a deaf ear to the One who is speaking. Parents know the irritation of calling a child from another room and receiving no response. You call once, twice, three times. The neighbours may be able to hear you, but somehow your own children cannot. Finally comes the famous sentence: “How many times have I told you?” We laugh because it is familiar, but there is something serious in it for us. The Spirit is speaking, correcting, prompting and leading, and I can keep refusing to hear.
One reason we do this is that the me becomes very important. When the self becomes the centre, everything begins to be interpreted around me: what I feel, what I want, what has hurt me, what I think is fair, what I believe I deserve. Then it becomes increasingly difficult to hear a voice that challenges me. Saint Paul speaks of the Spirit of power, love and self-discipline, and when we read his description of love in 1 Corinthians 13, we are hearing about a love that cannot survive if the self remains on the throne. Love is patient, kind, not envious or boastful, and it does not insist on its own way. That requires a death to self.
The Cross is the greatest sign of forgiveness and the greatest sign of love precisely because Christ gives Himself. If I am to live as a Christian, I cannot make self-preservation and self-satisfaction the rule by which everything else is measured. The Holy Spirit can mould what has to change in me only when I stop treating myself as the final point of reference.
I see something of this even in the temptations of Jesus. Satan repeatedly begins with the words, “If you are the Son of God.” He questions identity, and we know how sensitive we can become when someone questions ours. During the COVID lockdowns, when I was parish priest in Doveton, some young people came and started playing basketball where it was not permitted. I had just finished exercising and was putting something into the garbage bin when I told them they had to leave. They looked at me and said, “Who are you to tell us?” My ego was hurt. I went inside, washed, put on my clerical collar and came back: “I am the priest here.” What the incident revealed was how quickly my ego reacted when my identity was questioned. I wanted them to know who I was, and I wanted that identity recognised.
Satan’s temptations are directed towards the self in a deeper way. Turn the stone into bread and satisfy yourself. Take the kingdoms without going through the Cross. Throw yourself down and let the angels prevent your body from suffering. Again and again comes the suggestion: satisfy yourself, avoid sacrifice, make the self the centre. Jesus refuses that path.
When the Self Becomes God
The same pattern appears in Genesis. Satan tells Eve that if she eats the fruit her eyes will be opened and she will become like God, knowing good and evil. We often ask what was wrong with knowing good and evil. Surely it is good to know the difference. But the temptation goes further: you can decide good and evil for yourself. You do not need God to define it. You become your own god.
That is a subtle dethronement of God. Satan does not even need to sit on God’s throne himself if he can persuade me to sit there. God is displaced, and I become the authority who decides what is right and what is wrong. This is why the language of “my life, my choice, you live your life and I will live mine” can become spiritually dangerous when it means that there are no moral boundaries outside myself. The question is no longer, “Lord, what is true?” It becomes, “What do I want to be true?”
The prodigal son gives us another picture. Before he squanders the property, he first leaves the father’s house. Why? He wants to be free of accountability. When I was young, my father, who is an accountant, would sometimes send me to the shops. Accountants have this very annoying habit: everything has to be accounted for. If it was his money, I could understand giving him an account. What irritated me was when he gave me money for my birthday and still wanted to know what I did with it. In my mind it was simple: you gave it to me, now it is mine; let me do what I want. At times I bought things he had told me not to buy, and then I did not want to give an account.
The younger son takes what comes from the father and goes away from the father. He wants to become his own king. He does not want to answer to anyone. That is where the danger lies. A person led by the Spirit cannot be his own god, because he is allowing the Spirit to tell him what is right, what needs to change and where he must go. The self, however, wants its own voice to be final.
Saint Paul says in Romans 8 that those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, while those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. The word flesh can make us think only of a narrow set of bodily sins, but in this sermon I want us to see the self much more widely. I am hurt. I am discriminated against. I am not cared for. I need to defend myself. I need to comfort myself. I keep repeating these things until I have created a new moral boundary in which I feel comfortable. The Spirit may be telling me that my thinking is wrong, but my voice becomes louder than the voice of the Holy Spirit.
That is how we can justify anger, resentment or decisions that wound relationships. My own reasoning keeps confirming me. I no longer ask the Spirit to define the boundary because the boundary has already been moved to where I want it.
The Flesh Creates Its Own Boundaries
Galatians 5 says, “Live by the Spirit … and do not gratify the desires of the flesh,” because what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit. There is a real opposition. What the Spirit desires will sometimes challenge what my flesh desires, and if I have become obsessed with the self, I begin cutting off anything that challenges me. Even correction from another person becomes intolerable: “Who are you to tell me? You do not know what I am going through. You do not know my life.” The challenge is removed so that the self can remain undisturbed.
I remember very clearly the difference my first retreat made to me when I was at university. Before that retreat, the way I understood relationships, including friendships with women, was influenced by fleshly desire. Afterwards, I began seeing those relationships differently because, for me, everything had to pass through the Holy Spirit. The people had not suddenly changed. What changed was the light in which I saw them.
This matters enormously in marriage and in ordinary relationships. You may have lived with your husband or wife for twenty-five, thirty or fifty years. The excitement of the early years may not be there. Your spouse may not listen the way you wish, may not be funny, may not dress or look as you would prefer. Then someone at work listens to you, makes you laugh, pays attention to you and seems so much more interesting. If the measuring mark becomes simply what makes the flesh feel satisfied, the moral boundary begins to move. Conversations that once would have been recognised as dangerous are now explained away because they feel good. I am no longer asking what the Spirit desires; I am asking what satisfies me.
This is why what appears to be freedom can become slavery. A person says, “I am free. I can take drugs if I want.” The more he exercises that so-called freedom, the more he becomes a slave to the very thing through which he was trying to prove his freedom. The same can happen with pornography. “I am an adult; I can do what I want.” Once, twice, three times, and gradually the person discovers that the freedom he was defending has begun to control him. Saint Paul speaks of slavery to sin because this is exactly the irony: I insist on freedom from God’s boundary and become enslaved by the desire that replaced it.
We hear the language of freedom very early. A young person waits to turn eighteen because then, supposedly, no one can tell me what to do. I can decide whether I go to church. I can decide what I watch, what I drink, how I live. But Christian freedom is not simply the absence of anyone telling me “no”. If my choices are increasingly governed by a desire I cannot resist, I may be calling myself free at precisely the moment I am becoming less free. The Spirit challenges the desire because He is trying to keep me from becoming its slave.
The Spirit, on the other hand, is preparing me for the kingdom. Fleshly desire is concerned with what satisfies me now. So the question of happiness becomes important. Where do I want my happiness? If my happiness is directed towards the kingdom of God, what I choose will carry the flavour of God. If I seek happiness only in the world, what I choose will carry the flavour of the world.
I remember growing up with Indian television when there was national television and a programme called Chitrahaar, half an hour of film songs. There was a time when a kiss in a film might be suggested by showing two flowers touching. Later the flowers disappeared and the kiss itself was shown. Clothing changed, standards changed, and when something came on television that embarrassed me because my parents were sitting there, I would get up and walk away. Not because I was such a holy boy; I simply did not want to sit there with my parents watching it. After some time, what had made us uncomfortable became normal and we sat through it. Moral boundaries can move gradually enough that we barely notice the movement.
This is where I also ask us to examine contemporary moral questions, including abortion and the Catholic understanding of marriage. God did not change, and His word did not change, so when my moral boundary changes I should at least ask why. I can tell myself that education has enlightened me and that an older Christian boundary belonged to an ancient time, but Romans 1 gives a serious warning about becoming futile in our thinking while “claiming to be wise” and exchanging the truth about God for a lie. Education, social acceptance and majority opinion do not settle the Christian question. I still have to ask: Holy Spirit, what do You say about this? Jesus, what do You say?
The majority did not determine the truth when Jesus walked the earth, and it does not determine truth now. This is especially difficult because no one enjoys being in the minority or feeling rejected. We can become scared to speak, scared to look different, and gradually allow a world that does not acknowledge God to define the boundaries by which we live. I can remain outwardly Catholic and yet begin receiving my moral definitions from somewhere else. That is why I must keep returning to the Spirit of Truth.
In Love with the Creator or the Created?
Romans 1 uses a powerful phrase: people “worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator.” It reaches beyond one particular moral issue. It asks where our love has finally settled. We can become so this-worldly that even the thought of death becomes disturbing. Earlier generations of Christians prayed for a good and holy death because death was understood within the journey towards eternal life. We often pray only for more life here: life, life, life. We are afraid even to speak the word death.
I remember arriving in Toronto on Ash Wednesday and helping a priest distribute ashes. I was saying the traditional words, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Some people looked rather disturbed. Afterwards I asked the priest about it, and he asked me what I had been saying. When I told him, he said, “No, Father, here we say, ‘Be blessed.’” I have often remembered that because it shows how uncomfortable we can become when Christianity reminds us directly that this world is not our final home.
Our King is in heaven, but we can fall so deeply in love with the created world that we do not want to leave it. Think of a young couple in courtship. They love simply being with each other. Sometimes they can sit together for hours saying what, to everyone else, may sound like utter nonsense, but they do not care. They enjoy the presence of the person they love. Are we in love with our Creator like that, or have we fallen in love with what He created?
It is like a parent giving a child a long-awaited mobile phone. The child is delighted, hugs the parent and cannot believe the gift has finally arrived. Then for the next two weeks the child hardly looks at the parent because all attention has gone into the phone. The gift has become more important than the giver. God created the world and gave it to us, and we can do exactly the same thing: fall in love with the gift and forget the One who gave it.
I once saw something almost comical at a retreat centre in India. A mother asked me to get her son out of his room and bring him to the retreat hall. He would not come because he was playing games. I went to the room expecting some big, difficult young man. After a lot of knocking the door opened slowly and this little fellow, perhaps seven or eight years old, looked out and said, “What?” I told him he had to come to the hall. “My wish,” he replied. His mother told me he even beat her when she tried to intervene. She had now brought the priest, apparently, to get beaten up as well. The humour of the situation does not remove the point: a gift, a game, a created thing can become so dominant that the person who gave, loved and cared for us disappears from view.
Let the Spirit Mould You
Galatians does not allow us to treat the works of the flesh as though only the dramatic sins matter. Saint Paul names fornication, impurity and licentiousness, but he also names enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy and drunkenness. We can easily condemn one part of the list and quietly excuse the part that describes us.
I love the Litany of Humility. It is a personal favourite because I require a lot of it. “From the desire of being loved … extolled … honoured … praised … preferred … consulted … approved, deliver me, Jesus. From the fear of being humiliated … despised … rebuked … calumniated … forgotten … ridiculed … wronged … suspected, deliver me, Jesus.” When I listen to that prayer, I hear one great request underneath it: Lord, just deliver me from the self.
It is when the self becomes so important that jealousy and strife begin to grow. A quarrel with my brother can be justified for years. A faction can be created inside a family, perhaps between a son and his mother, between husband and wife, between in-laws, and I can always produce reasons why my behaviour is understandable. Yet Galatians calls factions and quarrels works of the flesh. Christian discipleship does not permit me to rename them simply because my hurt is real.
This is also why examination of conscience and Confession cannot be limited to the sins we already recognise as serious. If I am creating divisions in a family, feeding jealousy, keeping a quarrel alive or placing one relative against another, I need to let the Word name that behaviour rather than letting my grievance rename it for me. Saint Paul warns that the works of the flesh do not prepare us to inherit the kingdom of God. The Spirit is trying to mould us for that kingdom, and I can resist that moulding even while continuing to pray and attend retreats.
We worship Jesus of the Cross, and Jesus of the Cross is Jesus of forgiveness. If I am of the Spirit, I must allow myself to be moulded from quarrelling towards love, from jealousy towards understanding, from self-justification towards truth. That is part of what it means not to quench the Spirit. His voice is not merely there to comfort me; it is there to correct and transform me for the kingdom.
I remember a woman who used to come very regularly to retreats when I was in the retreat centre in Mumbai. We had retreats every week, and she seemed to be there almost every week or every second week. Each time she came she said the same thing: “Father, I have no peace at all.” I would pray for her and she would return. Still no peace. Eventually I sat down and listened more carefully. She was not at peace with her husband, not at peace with her in-laws, not at peace with her siblings. Everyone was against her, and her prayer was always that they should change. They needed the retreat.
All the change was required somewhere else. Her own position was continually justified. We can do the same thing with anger, family divisions and decisions that have wounded people. We become very clear about why everyone else needs correction while remaining almost unable to ask whether the Spirit is correcting us.
So the prayer must become much simpler and much more dangerous to the ego: “Holy Spirit, You tell me. This is my opinion, but You tell me what is right and what is wrong.” There will always be a battle between flesh and Spirit. We should not imagine that one retreat removes it permanently. But we must not become people of the flesh. We are called to become people of the Spirit, because the Spirit is preparing us for eternal life.
Saint Paul says in Romans 8, “To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.” We are terribly afraid of physical death, but we should also be afraid of spiritual death, of an eternity without union with God. The mind set on the flesh becomes hostile to God because it does not want to submit to His law. The mind set on the Spirit learns to receive truth even when truth corrects what I desire.
At the end of this teaching, that is the grace I want us to ask for. There are areas in all our lives where the flesh may have overtaken the Spirit, sometimes without us noticing it: anger, hatred, jealousy, strife, bitterness, impurity, arrogance, pride, the need to defend ourselves, the need to have our own way. Lord, give us a thirst to hear the Holy Spirit. Open the eyes that have been closed. I thought I could see; now show me what is right and what is wrong. Let me recognise the correction You are giving me through the voice of the Spirit.
If we want to hear Him, begin with two very simple things: acknowledge His presence, and desire Him to speak. I can know that I received the Holy Spirit and still go through the day without consciously turning to Him. But when I begin acknowledging that presence, I also begin giving Him an opportunity to interrupt my conclusions, my excuses and the moral boundaries I have built around myself. Desire the Spirit to speak. The Spirit is not silent. The question is whether I want His voice to become clearer than my own.
Adapted and edited from a talk delivered by Fr Michael Payyapilly VC during Divine Australia’s “Powered by the Holy Spirit” Live-In Retreat, held at Belgrave Heights Convention Centre, Belgrave Heights, Victoria, on 19 July 2025 (Session Two).