So you are saying then that you are not saved...You do not have the Holy Spirit dwelling within you...And you don't have a clue where you'll end up until you get there...Correct???
Hmm, it appears that your whole trailer park is waiting with bated breath for my reply.
Saying that you have the Holy Spirit within you is not enough. Being baptized is not enough. Wandering around waving your hands in the air proclaiming that you are saved and posturing like the Pharisees in front of the church isn’t enough.
Actually read your Bible instead of pounding it. It quite clearly states that sheep will be separated from the goats on the right hand versus the left hand. And the judgement of separation will be deeds - judged by God Almighty, not by any human being, and by the rules of God Almighty, not any human being - after your death and not before.
This notion of saving one’s soul before death would be amusing on a juvenile level, worthy of National Lampoon type snickers, if it wasn’t so deadly serious and imperilling of your immortal soul. Even St. Peter professed Faith and Hope - the hope of eternal salvation, but not the certainty since the Judgement does not belong to him, but rather to Him.
I have asked many here within the reference of these passages how they think that they’ll fare when faced with placement with either the sheep or the goats. I either get stuffy silence or aggrieved anger. If you don’t feed the least of His children when they’re hungry, or clothe them, or comfort them, etc. then you will be thrown into the everlasting lake of fire created for satan and his angels.
Hopping around like a crazed ape waving a baptismal certificate doesn’t get you a pass in life. But it’s too easy and too dear to the hearts of the arrogant and the lazy. And that has been the real attraction of the Protestant Reformation and the Devil-led splitting of the Church that has gone on since then.
You go ahead and wave your hall pass when you stand in front of the Lamb of God. It’d be amusing if it weren’t so tragic.
I think this has been addressed on numerous previous threads, but I’ll encapsulate the Catholic position on this again for you.
Catholics do not believe in “once saved, always saved” models. We believe that it is certainly possible to lose one’s salvation right up to the moment of death. This only makes sense, since life itself is a trial. Indeed, we believe that the fundamentally unjust and/or sinful actions that good Christians are often subjected to demonstrate that fact, and that the temptations - to which we all are subject - to give in to, or compromise with, those injustices and sins are best explained by the fact that we are here, in large measure, to overcome such obstacles for - ultimately - the glory of God. So, from our POV, it is much easier to explain the trials and hardships Christians must endure for decades after embracing Christ in this fashion than it is to say that a 20-year-old (for instance) “gets saved” and then has to endure decades of hardship and injustice anyway. We say: “To what purpose?” Not only does his inevitable subsequent sin seem to run counter to his predetermined salvation, but we wonder why his salvation isn’t immediately followed by entry into Heaven, since there is no real purpose to further earthly struggles.
Alright, then, so what is the Catholic take on salvation? Well, while we don’t believe in “absolute assurance” of salvation, we do believe in “moral assurance.” For sake of illustration, I’ll use myself as an example. At the moment, I believe that I am in a state of grace, having recently been to confession and having no subsequent mortal sins to account for (to the best of my knowledge). If I were to die right now, or at least without having committed any further mortal sins, I am pretty sure that I will spend my eternity in Heaven. HOWEVER! I am 49-years-old, in reasonably good health. I could easily live another 20, 30, maybe 40 years. While I can pray for strength and grace to overcome the trials that await me, I have no absolute certainty that I will not succumb to at least some of them. From an everday observation-level, my committing future sins seems pretty inevitable. And so it is with everyone in the normal sphere of things. Saint Paul was right about that in Romans 3:23!
The point to trials is to overcome them and grow in holiness and Christian witness in the process. We grope and stumble our way through life, gradually overcoming our sinful inclinations (primarily) through the graces imparted to us through the Sacraments, particularly Confession and the Eucharist. But we are not robots or automatons; we can resist those graces if we insist on such foolhardiness, and persist in our sins. If those sins are “mortal” (1John 5:16-17 makes such a distinction) then Heaven will not be our reward if we die in such a state. The choice is ours to cooperate with God’s grace or not.
Ultimately, we believe, this common-sense observation of the practical ramifications of the world God set us in better answers our purpose for being here than declaring that people can be once and always saved even in the midst of ongoing sin and pointless earthly trials. We believe the ordinary means of forgiveness for sin can be found in John 20:22-23, and that, taking the point of Matthew 18:22 to heart, the forgiveness in John 20 can be sought multiple times, provided we are sorry for our sins.
Given that outlook, shared throughout *all* of the Christian Era by *all* churches (Catholic and Orthodox) that can trace an unbroken connection to the Apostles, then, no, we don’t believe we can definitively state where we’ll end up if we plan on living very long. And we believe with equal vigor that you can’t, either