Jesus promised His disciples that He would give them the Holy Spirit, who would teach them, lead them, and guide them on their way to heaven. He promised too that the Holy Spirit would give them the grace they would need to stay close to Jesus and help build His Church. On Pentecost Sunday the same Peter who had denied knowing Jesus just fifty days earlier told the crowd, “The promise is made to you and to your children and to all those far off” (Acts 2:39). This means the promise is for you. Jesus has given you the Holy Spirit, just as He did for the apostles. Jesus didn’t promise us the Spirit just because He wanted to be generous. He made this promise because He knows we need the Holy Spirit in our lives. We need His power to heal the memories of our past hurts. We need His reassurance of God’s mercy when we have sinned. We need His peace when we are ensnared in difficult situations. We need His refreshing love when life gets hard and we need Him to remind us of God’s generosity when life is easy. In short, Jesus promised to give us the Spirit because He knew that we couldn’t follow Him without this precious gift.