You're listening to Catholic Sprouts, the daily podcast about the third gift of the Holy Spirit, this third rung as we climbed the ladder to heaven, and this is

knowledge. Yesterday, we talked about how the gift of knowledge from the Holy Spirit is the ability to

discern things about our faith when we encounter new facts or ideas. Is this true? Does this

fit in with the teaching of God?

Now today, we are going to talk about how the gift of knowledge must first grow out of the

virtue of faith. And with additional knowledge, our faith will grow deeper. Now, I know this is a little bit

complicated, but think of it this way. Faith leads to knowledge, which leads to greater faith.

Now, there are lots of examples of this being the case in the Old Testament. First, let's look at

the story of Joshua in Jericho. So a little bit

of backstory. What happened is that the Israelites ended up in Egypt after a great famine. And we all

know what happened in Egypt. They became slaves. They were there for many generations until Moses came along, and God, through Moses,

led the people to freedom. They crossed the Red Sea, they got the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai,

and then because of disobedience, they wandered in the desert for 40 years. Finally, God brought them to the promised land.

Problem was, is that the promised land was already filled with people. So the Israelites began to

try to take over this land that God had given them, and God commanded to do this as an army.

Problem was, there were cities like Jericho that had these big walls built around them. So they were pretty hard to attack. If you were just a wandering

group of people, how could you ever try to break down a big stone wall and defeat a city.

It seemed impossible.

But Joshua had faith in God.

And remember, that is point number one.

He had faith in God.

So he let God lead.

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