. I fail to understand how the insufficient prayers of man can aid in the purification of anyone's sins.
If my sins are all cleansed by believing in Christ, then why am I still sinning [and offending Him]? Believe me, I’d love to be like an RC saint [not that they were sin-free, but they were very good people], and sometimes I can imitate one for about twelve seconds, if I’m at Mass and not looking at anyone but God...
As saints go straight to heaven; the rest of us putrid peeps [like myself] do our stint in purgatory, and we pray like mad it’s not much more than a few centuries [of earth time]...
Getting to heaven is not easy! Work and toil and suffer and pray and fast and pray some more. And then, maybe .....
“I fail to understand how the insufficient prayers of man can aid in the purification of anyone’s sins.”
It is not the prayers of man that purify the sins, it is the Holy Spirit, Jesus and Our Father in us that purifies the sins.
My Father is in me and I am in Him. The same is true for Jesus as He is in Our Father and Our Father is in Him. It is thorough our communing with Christ in us that Our Father that is in Christ is also in us. That is why Jesus is my savior as He brought Our Father to me.
The reason that prayer and meditation are critically important is that they are the methods that we utilize to tune our own consciousness to the levels where we can perceive Jesus and be one with Him. (This is actually the “raised up” of rapture) Just as you hear the difference between a bass, baritone or tenor, I feel the change in a person’s consciousness when they pray. It’s as though Jesus is on one channel and we are on a much lower channel, unable to hear each other, until either we pray and raise ourselves up or He, through the Holy Spirit reaches down to us.
I recently discovered an interesting physical attribute of prayer. In order to raise the frequency of our consciousness it must be focused upward and not horizontally. If we pray while we are angry at someone, or someone is angry at us, the horizontal connection diminishes our ability to move vertically. This is why resolving our conflict with others or forgiving others is important prior to our own prayer or worship. This is why the model prayer includes forgiving others as a pre-requisite to receiving forgiveness from God.
Freedom is critically important in order to have prayer work as otherwise we do not have our own free will or authority to change levels if we have surrendered it to another human being.