Instead, "the fire that rekindles the gift is the Holy Spirit, the giver of gifts."
He quoted St. Paul again, who says, "do not be ashamed then of testifying to our Lord, but take your share of suffering for the Gospel in the power of God."
"Paul asks Timothy to bear witness to the Gospel, to suffer for the Gospel, in a word, to live for the Gospel," he said. "To preach the Gospel is to live as an offering, to bear witness to the end, to become all things to all people (cf. 1 Cor 9:22), to love even to the point of martyrdom."
Praising especially those martyrs who died in the Amazon, he said, "for them, and with them, let us journey together."
After Mass, Pope Francis led a traditional Marian prayer, the Angelus, from a window in the apostolic palace overlooking St. Peter's Square.
He reflected on the day's Gospel passage, which contains the apostles' request to Jesus to "increase our faith."
"A beautiful prayer, which we must pray a lot during the day," the pope commented.
He explained that in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus gives his disciples two images of faith: the mustard seed and the willing servant.
Jesus "wants to make it understood that faith, even if small, can have the strength to uproot even a mulberry tree; and then to transplant it into the sea, which is something even more unlikely," Francis explained, with reference to Jesus' words in the Gospel passage.
"But nothing is impossible for those who have faith," the pope continued, "because they do not rely on their own strength, but on God, who can do everything."
He said the faith of a mustard seed is a faith that is humble in its acceptance of its own littleness and need for God, abandoning itself to him with complete trust.
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"It is faith that gives us the ability to look with hope at the alternating vicissitudes of life, which helps us to accept defeats and suffering, in the awareness that evil never has, will never have the last word," he stated.
The measure of this kind of faith is service, having the "attitude of availability of the servant," he continued.
"This attitude towards God is also reflected in the way of behaving in community: it is reflected in the joy of being at the service of one another, finding in this its own reward and not in the recognitions and the gains that can be derived from it."
Hannah Brockhaus is Catholic News Agency's senior Rome correspondent. She grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, and has a degree in English from Truman State University in Missouri.