Are you making an effort to live your life more in accordance with God’s plan for you? Don’t worry, there are still two weeks left. We call these last two weeks “Passiontide”. Try to make a firm purpose of amendment from all things sinful, especially mortal sins. Just try for the next two weeks.
In His passion and death, Christ took the punishment on himself of all the personal sins committed since the beginning of time and all future sins until the end of time. Yeah. Next time you are watching The Passion of The Christ (which you should absolutely do next week), think about that little factoid. What you are seeing throughout that movie is Christ literally suffering through the reparation due for every sin committed by every human in all time. This is how God chose to redeem sinful man. It is truly awesome and troubling at the same time.
Many of the worst sins are things which are accepted or even encouraged/celebrated by our pagan, borderline satanic, culture:
Pornography, or any activity that objectifies women. By the way, this category includes not only hardcore porn, but any images that we choose to look at for the purpose of sexual arousal. If you look at swimsuit models and you’re not shopping for a swimsuit, then you’re looking at porn. It may not rise to the level of mortal sin that regular porn certainly is, but it is looking at women with the wrong intention.
Masturbation.
Homosexual acts.
Abortion.
Blasphemy (taking the Lord’s name in vain).
Avarice (obsession with money or material goods).
Pride (“putting yourself first”; “learning to love yourself”, and similar such nonsense.
Now again, what do all of these grave sins have in common? Society/our culture/GenPop not only accepts all these things as “normal”, but in fact embraces and promotes them as GOOD. That’s how messed up our world is. Because men put their own will before God’s. In a future post, I will explain how this evil has existed even before man was created.
Becoming a disciple does not require you to believe you are capable of completely turning away from sin. In fact, no one is capable of that (except our Lord, who had two Natures, both human and divine, and Mary, who was created without the stain of Original Sin).
But discipleship does require that you desire to TRY. Nobody who takes the first step to walk with Christ knows how it is going to work. Pray for God’s grace to work toward His Divine Will in your soul. We can do NOTHING on our own merit; only through grace.
Examine your conscience.
Develop a contrite heart.
Make a firm purpose of amendment.
Go to Confession.
Go to Mass on Sundays.
Holy Passiontide to you all.