Posted on 04/29/2013 4:18:02 AM PDT by markomalley
The Confessional is not a ‘dry cleaners’ where our sins are automatically washed away and Jesus is not waiting there to ‘beat us up’, but to forgive us with the tenderness of a father for our sins. Moreover, being ashamed of our sins is not only natural, it’s a virtue that helps prepare us for God's forgiveness. This was the central message of Pope Francis’ homily Monday morning during Mass celebrated with staff from the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (APSA) and religious present in Casa Santa Marta. Emer McCarthy reports:
Commenting on the First Letter of St. John, which states " God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all," Francis Pope pointed out that "we all have darkness in our lives," moments "where everything, even our consciousness, is in the dark”, but this - he pointed out - does not mean we walk in darkness:
"Walking in darkness means being overly pleased with ourselves, believing that we do not need salvation. That is darkness! When we continue on this road of darkness, it is not easy to turn back. Therefore, John continues, because this way of thinking made him reflect: 'If we say we are without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us'. Look to your sins, to our sins, we are all sinners, all of us ... This is the starting point. But if we confess our sins, He is faithful, He is so just He forgives us our sins, cleansing us from all unrighteousness…The Lord who is so good, so faithful, so just that He forgives. "
"When the Lord forgives us, He does justice" - continued the Pope - first to himself, "because He came to save and forgive", welcoming us with the tenderness of a Father for his children: "The Lord is tender towards those who fear, to those who come to Him "and with tenderness," He always understand us”. He wants to gift us the peace that only He gives. " "This is what happens in the Sacrament of Reconciliation" even though "many times we think that going to confession is like going to the dry cleaner" to clean the dirt from our clothes:
"But Jesus in the confessional is not a dry cleaner: it is an encounter with Jesus, but with this Jesus who waits for us, who waits for us just as we are. “But, Lord, look ... this is how I am”, we are often ashamed to tell the truth: 'I did this, I thought this'. But shame is a true Christian virtue, and even human ... the ability to be ashamed: I do not know if there is a similar saying in Italian, but in our country to those who are never ashamed are called “sin vergüenza’: this means ‘the unashamed ', because they are people who do not have the ability to be ashamed and to be ashamed is a virtue of the humble, of the man and the woman who are humble. "
Pope Francis continued: “ we must have trust, because when we sin we have an advocate with the Father, "Jesus Christ the righteous." And He "supports us before the Father" and defends us in front of our weaknesses. But you need to stand in front of the Lord "with our truth of sinners", "with confidence, even with joy, without masquerading... We must never masquerade before God." And shame is a virtue: "blessed shame." "This is the virtue that Jesus asks of us: humility and meekness".
"Humility and meekness are like the frame of a Christian life. A Christian must always be so, humble and meek. And Jesus waits for us to forgive us. We can ask Him a question: Is going to confession like to a torture session? No! It is going to praise God, because I, a sinner , have been saved by Him. And is He waiting for me to beat me? No, with tenderness to forgive me. And if tomorrow I do the same? Go again, and go and go and go .... He always waits for us. This tenderness of the Lord, this humility, this meekness .... "
This confidence, concluded Pope Francis "gives us room to breathe." "The Lord give us this grace, the courage to always go to Him with the truth, because the truth is light and not the darkness of half-truths or lies before God. It give us this grace! So be it. "
AKA Another gospel.
Indeed.
The most important response to the article is recognizing guilt is sinful.
Those who seek to distract us from fellowship with God through simple faith in Him and confession directly through Christ of any and all sins, frequently seek to substitute our attention to their worldly system.
A religion expert might seek a sinner to come worship him instead of worshiping God. They will dwell on how shameful the sinner should become and then obey their every direction on how to find God through faith in anything except Christ alone.
Well stated. No need for shame in Christ.
On this we are in total agreement. However, the Church never taught that works, those religious laws required from Judaism, do not save. It has always taught that works proceed from faith.
Cheers
To be fair I've had plenty of christians who are not RCs give me a blank look over the same verse.
I think we are supposed to do the "work of God" because it will lead us into His rest...."For he that is entered into his rest, he also hath ceased from his own works, as God did from his." (Hebrews 4:10)
People seem not to grasp that believing is actual work,hard work,work that will churn you up inside and make you run to Jesus Christ,in fear of God and our own dark selves! It seems to pit the heart against the mind.It's what we believe deep in our spirit that counts..."For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness..." (Romans 10:10) The deep belief that determines largely how we think.
Since..."The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?" (Jeremiah 17:9)... it stands to reason that the heart would rather bend the mind to think on it's own terms than let a two edged sword come hacking and slashing it's way through the wickedness and deceit.So the heart will cloak itself with all sorts of goodliness to assuage the mind and let itself remain in place.It does not want to decrease.
The payoff is that we do not "cease from our own works" because that same heart is still there using the mind to justify itself and in the end all we'll get out of that is fear and death.That's why it's work,you are fighting that which is within you....that's why Paul says... "Let us labour therefore to enter into that rest, lest any man fall after the same example of unbelief" (...lest any fall because they are not doing the work of God?)
and Peter... Wherefore the rather, brethren, give diligence to make your calling and election sure: for if ye do these things, ye shall never fall" (2 Peter 1:10)So there in black and white God is giving a guarantee that "if you do these things" you will never fall.The "work of God" is obviously important to say the least and it's a wonder it's not shouted from the rooftops.
God works on us from the inside out.Deep inside,deeper than we can know,beneath the baggage in our hearts and the clutter in our minds and let's us know from the start..."These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God; that ye may know that ye have eternal life, and that ye may believe on the name of the Son of God" (1 John 5:13) and knowing that will give your heart and mind the end-game around which the accuser has no 'way'.1 John 5:13 is like a bomb going off in the human heart and the accuser will do anything to try and smother it and that anything will most certainly involve our own carnal thinking led by that same deceitful heart.It's not presuming it's the ONLY WAY.
What else can we do but stand empty handed and say "Lord I believe,help thou my unbelief"
Anyhoo that's some of my thoughts on John 6:29 had many a night whilst my "sleep departed from me"
Grace and peace to you all.
1 John 2:2 And he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.
1 John 4:10 Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
Hebrews 2:17 Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.
Romans 3:24 and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 25 whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former
Yes. What terrible bondage.
Yes, and these often require adherence to rites and rituals of passage which many do.. but have little understanding of why they are doing so....except it's the thing to do to “belong”.
With those I have worked with and among the “why” question often escapes them....or is a canned delivery from something memorized. When taken further to enlarge on that they soon get flustered.
"They zealously affect you, but not well; yea, they would exclude you, that ye might affect them" (Galations 4:17)
To "one another" doesn't obviously mean a church officer, though that is the way Catholicism likes to interpret it. Confessing our weaknesses, failings, even our sins when we have sinned against someone is part of the fellowship of Christians as well as doing what is right when we offend another person. When a member of a local church was guilty of grave sin and was cast out of the fellowship, as Paul commended the Corinthian church to do, then a public confession and appropriate signs of repentance were a necessary part of rejoining the fellowship. There is NO evidence from Scripture of a priestly role for the Body of Christ outside of the one we all are given to offer sacrifices of praise to the ONE who has redeemed us through His grace. Only God can forgive sins, as Jesus said as well as the Old Testament prophets.
John 20:23 has Jesus telling the Apostles, "If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you hold them bound, they are held bound." That verse only makes sense in the context of an actual confession of sin to officers of the church. How can they know what to forgive without being told?
Again, this is a Catholic Church interpretation that was not believed by the first Christians. Another way to see this passage could be:
Why would you think that the same John had forgotten that verse -- which he wrote! -- when he wrote his Epistle? That is the context in which to understand "If we confess our sins ..."
John wrote as he was led of the Holy Spirit. It wasn't a matter of him forgetting what he said previously, but what he wrote was what God spoke through him. Confession of personal sin through auricular confession to a priest was not something the early church knew or practiced. It ties back to the doctrine of the Atonement and our justification by faith apart from works. The following link gives an historical background to the development of this practice and the doctrines that came about http://www.christiantruth.com/articles/penancehistory.html:
At the close of the twelfth century a complete change was made in the doctrine of penance. The theory of the early Church, elaborated by Tertullian and other Church fathers, was that penance is efficient to remove sins committed after baptism, and that it consisted in certain penetential exercises such as prayer and alms. The first elements added by the medieval system were that confession to the priest and absolution by the priest are necessary conditions for pardon. Peter the Lombard did not make mediation of the priest a requirement, but declared that confession to God was sufficient. In his time, he says, there was no agreement on three aspects of penance: first, whether contrition for sin was not all that was necessary for its remission; second, whether confession to the priest was essential; and third, whether confession to a layman was insufficient. The opinions handed down from the Fathers, he asserts, were diverse, if not antagonistic.
Alexander of Hales marks a new era in the history of the doctrine. He was the first of the Schoolmen to answer clearly all these questions, and to him more than any other single theologian does the Catholic Church owe its doctrine of penance...Beginning with Alexander of Hales, the Schoolmen vindicate the positions that confession, to be efficacious, must be made to the priest, and that absolution by the priest is an essential condition of the sinner’s pardon. Bonaventura, after devoting much time to the question, ‘Whether it is sufficient to confess our sins to God,’ answered it in the negative. At greater length than Peter the Lombard had done, he quoted the Fathers to show that there was no unanimity among them on the question (Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1910), Volume 5, pp.731-732, 735-737).
The Council of Trent makes the comment that from the very beginning the Church had practiced secret confession to a priest and it anathematizes anyone who denies this. But such an assertion is simply unsupportable by the historical evidence. Once again the Roman Church makes dogmatic assertions which, like so many of its teaching on Tradition, the papacy and Mary, can find no historical support.
It is quite obvious from these statements and the evidence that has been presented that confession and penance for many centuries in the Church was very different from the sacrament which the Council of Trent dogmatically asserts is binding on all believers and necessary for salvation. Its assertion that the form of the sacrament which it officially sanctioned had been the universal practice of the Church from the very beginning is totally false. It was not until the beginning of the eighth century that private confession began to displace the public form and it did not become a universal practice until the Middle Ages.
Such is the history of the development of the Roman Catholic sacrament of penance and confession in its teaching on forgiveness of sins. And closely aligned with this development is also the development of the Church’s teachings on indulgences and purgatory. From these quotes it is very apparent that major changes eventually take place in the overall teaching and practice of penance. It obviously continued to be consistently practiced and became inculcated in the Church to such a degree that, in the Middle Ages, it developed into a very regulated affair in which certain punishments were prescribed for specific sins. These were written down in penitential books which document for us the penitential practice of the Church beginning at about the seventh century.
It is inescapable that what the Catholic Church teaches concerning justification, repentance, confession, penance and expiation of sin today was NOT what the early, Apostolic church understood or practiced nor what had been taught to them by the Apostles through Divinely-inspired Scriptures.
You forgot the “angry god” part.
Where do you get the idea that those are sins? Got a chapter and verse for them?
Or is it more tradition to make up as sins things God never called sin?
I rejoice that we can agree on some things!
But, I DO disagree with you on the last part of your sentence. I've heard many Catholics state the same thing, "that works do not save" and "we are saved by God's grace", but then the qualifiers come into play. Like one you just gave - works means the religious laws of Judaism. But "works" in Scripture means ALL things done by man's efforts. Though, we may use the same words and terms, examined closely, we don't mean the same things.
For example, the gospel according to Rome (infused vs. imputed righteousness) consists of justification that is a process dependent upon the works and merits of the individual, the sacraments as a means of salvation, the full embracing of all the Roman Catholic teaching such as papal infallibility and jurisdiction and the Marian doctrines of the immaculate conception and assumption. Unless one believes these things and submits to them there is no justification or salvation.
Vatican I states that it is necessary for salvation that everyone not only believe all that is revealed in scripture but also everything which is defined and proposed by the Church as having been divinely revealed. To reject anything taught by the Roman Catholic Church is to reject saving faith and to forfeit justification and eternal life:
We can look at some of the statements the came out of Catholic councils to more fully understand just how far apart we are in understanding what saving faith really means. For example, The Council of Trent made these statements:
Canon XXXII. If any one saith, that the good works of one that is justified...does not truly merit increase of grace, eternal life, and the attainment of that eternal life— if so be, however, that he depart in grace,—and also an increase of glory: let him be anathema (The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, in Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1919 ed.), Decree on Justification, Chapters V, VI, VII, X, XIV, XV, XVI).
It's plain to see that Catholicism teaches man’s works are necessary in addition to the work of Jesus Christ for maintaining a state of justification before God and for meriting eternal life. Catholics can say they believe they are not saved by works, but, in truth, that is far from what their church teaches.
Thanks for your prayers and words of encouragement, metmom.
Sure it does because of this....
Romans 4
What then shall we say was gained by Abraham, our forefather according to the flesh? 2 For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. 3 For what does the Scripture say? “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.” 4 Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift but as his due. 5 And to the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness, 6 just as David also speaks of the blessing of the one to whom God counts righteousness apart from works:
7 “Blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven, and whose sins are covered; 8 blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin.”
9 Is this blessing then only for the circumcised, or also for the uncircumcised? For we say that faith was counted to Abraham as righteousness. 10 How then was it counted to him? Was it before or after he had been circumcised? It was not after, but before he was circumcised. 11 He received the sign of circumcision as a seal of the righteousness that he had by faith while he was still uncircumcised. The purpose was to make him the father of all who believe without being circumcised, so that righteousness would be counted to them as well, 12 and to make him the father of the circumcised who are not merely circumcised but who also walk in the footsteps of the faith that our father Abraham had before he was circumcised.
13 For the promise to Abraham and his offspring that he would be heir of the world did not come through the law but through the righteousness of faith. 14 For if it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. 15 For the law brings wrath, but where there is no law there is no transgression.
16 That is why it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his offspring—not only to the adherent of the law but also to the one who shares the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all, 17 as it is written, “I have made you the father of many nations”—in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. 18 In hope he believed against hope, that he should become the father of many nations, as he had been told, “So shall your offspring be.”
19 He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead (since he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah's womb. 20 No unbelief made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, 21 fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. 22 That is why his faith was “counted to him as righteousness.” 23 But the words “it was counted to him” were not written for his sake alone, 24 but for ours also. It will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, 25 who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification.
Thanks for your prayers, married21.
Do you attend daily Mass. You will find the kind and caring Catholics there. I know over a 100.
They would all come and help me if I needed them and gave them a call.
My Catholic Church is my home away from home.
I am on the west coast and your name makes it sound like you are in Illinois. I would come and pray with your grandfather in an instant if I could.
Have you sat down with him and prayed a Rosary?
It’s on the Daily Readings thread EVERY day. Copy it off and follow it.
It is NOT.
The Catholic church teaches that you must be baptized. But that isn't enough, because you have to live a certain way and do certain works, and enough of them. But even that isn't enough because then you need to go to confession and then communion, you know, the *must eat His flesh and drink His blood to have life in you*.
But even that's not enough. There's always more hoops to jump through and most goalposts moved.
And if you die with some kind of venial sin in your life, you get an extended stint in purgatory.But if it's a MORTAL sin, it's hell for you buddy.
No Catholic ever has the assurance that they are going to heaven, they expect to find out when they get there.
No, the Catholic church even pronounces anathemas from the Council of Trent against those who believe in justification by faith alone.
Check your church laws that were established at Trent.
Canon 9. If anyone says that the sinner is justified by faith alone, meaning that nothing else is required to cooperate in order to obtain the grace of justification, and that it is not in any way necessary that he be prepared and disposed by the action of his own will, let him be anathema.
A couple more laws that you might want to consider:
Canon 19. If anyone says that nothing besides faith is commanded in the Gospel, that other things are indifferent, neither commanded nor forbidden, but free; or that the ten commandments in no way pertain to Christians, let him be anathema.
Canon 24. If anyone says that the justice received is not preserved and also not increased before God through good works, but that those works are merely the fruits and signs of justification obtained, but not the cause of its increase, let him be anathema.
Canon 27. If anyone says that there is no mortal sin except that of unbelief, or that grace once received is not lost through any other sin however grievous and enormous except by that of unbelief, let him be anathema.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.