Truth of the Spirit with Patti Brunner explores the joy of confession in Confession & Reconciliation Heaven Will Throw a Party! Episode 168 helps you to approach the Sacrament of Reconciliation with anticipation of the underlying result of deepening your relationship with Jesus through repentance and absolution. To listen and watch or read the script, please continue reading below.
Audio link:
Armor of God and the Breastplate of Righteousness episode link: www.PatriarchMinistries.com/17
If you have ever gotten into an argument with someone you love, you probably recognize that at some point you realize that an apology clears the air. Sometimes we can be stubborn in our opinion but when we look at the fullness of truth we realize that what we said or did offended or hurt the person we love. Perhaps thinking of ourselves kept us from making good choices. I have noticed that in marriage making up after a disagreement can be sweeter and form a deeper relationship. It clears the air, so to speak, of issues that have festered within us. Through the Church the Lord has abundant grace in storage for you. Ask and you will receive. And my favorite Sacrament to ask for grace is the Sacrament of Reconciliation.
Welcome to Truth of the Spirit. I’m your host, Patti Brunner. Today we will answer the question, “Why do I have to go to confession?” with another question, “Why do I get to go to confession?” After we receive the righteousness of Christ in Baptism, the Sacrament of Reconciliation helps us to maintain His holiness in our lives. Our podcast today is Confession & Reconciliation Heaven Will Throw a Party!
I have a friend who has some questions about the Sacrament of Reconciliation, also known as Confession. She just doesn’t like it. I told her I LOVE the Sacrament of Reconciliation. This sacrament could be a real stumbling block to those who do not recognize its beauty and healing nature. Perhaps as a convert to Catholicism, my friend doesn’t understand why she cannot go straight to Jesus for forgiveness or why to go to confession when there is no serious sin. Truth of the Spirit realizes that there may be many who also question this, even long term Catholics.
The Gospel of Luke Chapter 15 shares that Jesus told this parable to the people: “ 4 “What man among you having a hundred sheep and losing one of them would not leave the ninety-nine in the desert and go after the lost one until he finds it? 5 And when he does find it, he sets it on his shoulders with great joy 6 and, upon his arrival home, he calls together his friends and neighbors and says to them, ‘Rejoice with me because I have found my lost sheep.’” I tell you, Jesus says, “7I tell you in just the same way there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous people who have no need of repentance.”
Did you ever think about that as you walk into church and get in line for confession? That all of heaven is getting ready to throw a party and celebrate your return to Christ’s holiness?
Have you received your invitation? The Lord has children sitting out in the desert waiting to be set free. The Lord has others that are in the pit and do not know it. He gives us a lantern to share that we may see both where we are and how to follow the path set for us by Jesus. Consider this episode your personal invitation.
The realization of where you are spiritually is difficult for most to grasp. Either we have become blinded by sin, and think we are much better off than we really are—or else we are so aware of our sin that we do not see God’s image within us and thus are not hope-filled and thus do not come to be cleansed. But when we do, “The joy is mine! says the Lord.” There is more rejoicing over one sinner returned to the fold than a hundred who stay the course, for what was lost is found. Think about this: The Lord’s joy is not complete until He holds you in His arms. Welcoming you home again!
Have you ever pondered why all of heaven would rejoice over just one sinner? Some people think they have private sin that doesn’t hurt anyone else, but when we come to understand the Body of Christ, we begin to understand how our sin affects others and how others’ sin affects us. Sin damages the body of Christ. Just as when I have a splinter in my finger, we’ll call that a venial splinter, the pain and infection can affect other parts of the body. And a broken leg, like a more serious sin, well now, that’s a bit bigger problem to the body isn’t it! It has trouble getting around! When we go to God the Father with repentance in our heart, He will pull out the splinter and provide the grace for the infection to heal. He will repair your brokenness, just as a carpenter repairs a broken or wobbly chair. God’s grace heals all wounds; His grace heals all damages of the world. That is why He sent His son, Jesus, that he might bring healing and conquer death and pain and destruction.
Mortal sin is like a tourniquet that prevents life giving grace from penetrating the damaged area, grace that could restore it to health. How much more difficult it is for healing to take place. Just as a tourniquet around a broken leg that is left in place too long in the physical can cause a deadening and loss of an appendage so too will unrepentant sinners eventually be cut and lost. It is not God’s will for us to be lost. He provides the Sacrament of Reconciliation that removes the tourniquet of sin and the healing grace that brings restoration of every part of His body. No wonder all of heaven rejoices!
It is our free will choice to ‘Ask and receive’; it is also our free will choice to reject God by sin. God has given free will to His people. This means He will not force His love or His Grace upon you. He will show it to you. He will bring before you those who have accepted it so that they might witness to you. He will share His heavenly nourishment with you that you might be strengthened for the battle against darkness, but the choice is yours.
Next, let’s look at the question about why we ask a priest for forgiveness. In the Sacrament of Reconciliation we are required to admit our sins to an ordained priest who is then bound in secrecy not to share our sins with others. Catechism of the Catholic Church Paragraph 1456 reminds us, “Confession to a priest is an essential part of the sacrament of Penance….”
Know this; be informed of how God has made this gift available to you. It is so easy to let God forgive you. But you must die to self. You must be humble before man and admit your failings and need of sanctification. It is then that God’s Glory will transform your heart with His light. And it is then that you are one with God without the barriers of sin. And the man who we humble ourselves before is the priest of God who in the Sacrament of Reconciliation is the ‘persona of Christ’—just like during the Consecration of the Mass!
You must be humble before the priest of God, admit your failings and your need of sanctification.
By confessing in private to a priest we are publicly admitting our sinfulness to a representative of the Church. God has given a royal priesthood to His nation of priests. When priests are ordained, God sets aside trustworthy servants. God charges them with duty and with Grace. God wants His anointing of them to bless us as His love and grace passes through His priests to us.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church Paragraph 987 says “In the forgiveness of sins, both priests and sacraments are instruments which our Lord Jesus Christ, the only author and liberal giver of salvation, wills to use in order to efface our sins and give us the grace of justification.”
Catechism Paragraph 1441 says, quoting the Gospel of Mark, “Only God forgives sins [Mark 2:7] Since he is the Son of God, Jesus says of himself, The Son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins” and exercises this divine power: “Your sins are forgiven.”[Mark 2:5, 10; Luke 7:48] Further, by virtue of his divine authority he gives this power to men to exercise in his name.”
Jesus gives his priests the authority to forgive sins.
Catechism Paragraph 1485 says, “On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, Jesus showed himself to his apostles. “He breathed on them, and said to them: ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained'” [John 20:19, 22-23]
This breathing of the Holy Spirit upon these men is the ordination of the apostles to become God’s priests.
I haven’t told you why I love the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Certainly it is a source of sanctifying grace. And I can use all the grace I can get. It is a source of accountability. It forces me to examine my life to see where I have gone off track in following Christ. It is so easy to slip into a rut of doing things my own way without comprehending how my actions affect those around me. I always pray for the Lord to help me to examine my recent life to show me my weaknesses and sin. This really helps me. In so many ways! Sometimes the Lord provides someone else’s suggested examination list for preparation. Sometimes the Lord lets me be irritated with someone else’s actions to point out that I have the same sin. Sometimes recognition of my sin is immediate and I have an urgency in my heart to confess. If I find I am confessing the same sin repeatedly, I can realize that there is a deeper root of my problem and as I approach Reconciliation with that deeper root, it solves the issue. Everything I just said is true, but the main reason I love this Sacrament is the healing. It heals my soul. It heals my relationship with God. It heals my mind. After a good confession I know that I know that Jesus has forgiven me for what I did that has offended the Body of Christ. I know that my repentance and the absolution of the priest cleanses that sin from my soul. My sorrow for adding to the suffering of Christ on the cross is replaced by the joy of heaven.
My husband and I mark our calendar to make sure we receive the Sacrament of Reconciliation at least once a month. The problem with going longer than that is that we can’t think of any sins! There is something about the accumulation of small things that blind the eye to sin.
Both sacraments of Baptism and Reconciliation deliver the righteousness of Christ to us. Baptism remains always. It cannot be taken from us. The enemy longs for you to deny and reject Baptism–the only way it can be penetrated. To say “God loves me and so it doesn’t matter what I do or say” shows not reliance on God but a testing of God’s gift of free will. Satan hates free will. He hates that man can choose to follow God, despite knowing that he will still suffer at times in this world.
In my previous talk about the Armor of God and the Breastplate of Righteousness, PatriarchMinistries.com/17, I shared that Reconciliation “polishes” the Breastplate of Righteousness and removes the filth of sin that accumulates so that it does not become so burdened with sin that you want to remove it because of its heaviness. Caked with personal sin and bitterness it seems to be the problem instead of the solution. Have you ever felt “lighter” after a good reconciliation?
Wearing the Breastplate of Christ’s Righteousness guards your heart. Certainly truth protects too but the main truth is this: God loves you. And God shows you His love through relationship. The breastplate protects you from the lies of Satan. “To thine own self be true”, an inspired line of Shakespeare in a time when man chose to listen to him instead of God’s voice, reminds you that if you take in the voice of the evil one and make it as your own you can lose your soul as you remove your heart and give it away to the false gods of death and destruction. The breastplate of Christ’s righteousness, which has defeated death, is always available 24/7. The Lord guards you. Remain in His love.
Praise also ‘shines’ the breastplate and repels the enemy with the Light of Christ. Like the ancient army of Israel who reflected the sun to blind their enemy, finding God’s glory in every situation reflects the Son of God and thus repels the prince of darkness and all his cohorts that roam the earth seeking the ruin of souls.
Here are a couple of questions for you: Does God forgive sins? Do you believe God can forgive your sins? I believe. During the Creed, the confession of faith, you say regularly “I believe in the forgiveness of sin”. If you go to Sunday Mass you confirm it with your voices. As we say the Our Father we pray, “Forgive us our trespasses”. We all give a witness to the belief that God forgives sin each time we turn to his Sacrament of Reconciliation. We also give witness when we say the Apostle’s Creed. Do you seek the face of Jesus at the sacrament of Reconciliation?
At reconciliation Jesus gives himself to us through sin conquered by the Cross. Believing is a sign of receiving the gift of faith.
You know your weaknesses. What you may not know is your strength in the Lord, in God. God is aware of our tendencies of weakness and He has not left us to our own resources to overcome them. God has abundant grace in storage for you. Ask and you will receive. Confess, and you will be forgiven. Through His Holy Spirit He has led the Church to teach the logistics of how to go to Confession, how often, and how to examine our conscience and ways to discern if a sin is mortal.
Discernment is necessary because the evil one lies to your heart – he justifies your sin to you, he intellectualizes it and rationalizes it because he wants it to remain in your heart. But, God wants you to be cleansed of sin and all its effects. Heaven is without effect of any sin – there is no death, no illness, no criticism, no heartaches. God’s kingdom is joy and peace and He will give you His Kingdom now. There is a longing to share it with you. In the bible in the First Letter of John [1John 1:8] he tells it: ‘If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” If we confess our sins, He who is faithful and just will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Cleansing of your soul, of your heart, is partly a “mind trip”. As you become aware of the darkness, that is in you and that tempts you, and that flows from the sin in those around you, a choice must be made to change. It is this response that opens the heavens to you. God’s grace will sanctify you as you accept it.
Why do we confess our sins? It is the public admission of our repentance. Scripture shows the reason and the purpose of repenting your sins is to fulfill the covenant of God’s people. You must obey His commands. When you do not, when you turn away from the Lord as your God, through sin, you break or damage the relationship promised in covenant. The Good News is that part of that covenant is that the Lord will accept your repentance in compassion. He will not hold His wrath against you but the Lord forgives freely all who repent in their hearts and He gives the grace to those who resolve to sin no more.
This covenant of forgiveness is originally listed in the Old Testament in Jeremiah Chapter 31 [31:33]. It is so important that Paul quotes it word for word in his letter to the Hebrews, Chapter 8. (8:7-12) Paul reminds us that Jesus came to us as the new covenant. He writes, “If that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no place for a second one. But God, finding fault with (the people) (them), says…’for they broke my covenant and I grew weary of them, (says the Lord), But this is the covenant I will make …I will place my laws in their minds and I will write them upon their hearts; I will be their God and they shall be my people…I will forgive their evildoing, and their sins I will remember no more.”
The result of repentance and reconciliation is the deepening or re-establishment of your relationship with God. Awareness of sin also brings an understanding of what is good. The more deeply we people get to know the Lord, the more deeply we understand the need for obedience. The glory of God falls on those that love as God loves who keep His commands in their hearts with all their mind and being.
There is a story of a man who chose to go to confession after being away from the Church for twenty years. Instead of a priest, Jesus was there. The man decided to come clean and he listed his sins, year by year. He was in the reconciliation room for about two hours. He repented with all his heart, said his Act of Contrition and Jesus absolved him of his sins. The man was in the middle of carrying out his penance when he remembered something else. He went back into the confessional and said, you remember that sin I did when I was 20? And Jesus looked at him and said “no”. The man said, “what about the sin I committed when I was 25?” and Jesus said, “No, I have forgotten all your sins.” God the Father makes that same promise to us, if we repent.
God will forgive every act if the people repent. God will mend every split from Him – if the people will repent. He will calm all their fears if they will soften their hearts and allow His grace to penetrate. The Lord wants you to make more room for His Holy Spirit in your heart. He has provided his priests so you can unload all the trash and be washed clean in his Sacrament of Reconciliation. God wants to cleanse the hearts of all people, now!
Our catechism teaches us that “the New Law is called a law of love because it makes us act out of the love infused by the Holy Spirit, rather than from fear, and a law of grace, because it confers the strength of grace to act, by means of faith and the sacraments” CCC #1972[i] That’s Catechism #1972.
If you have forgotten how to go to confession let me share with you the logistics. They are quite simple. The hard part is deciding to go and then going!
In the ordinary Rite of the Sacrament of Reconciliation, the ritual proceeds as follows: the priest greets the penitent; (that’s you!) they pray together (perhaps the Sign of the Cross) and, if there is time, a passage of scripture is read; the penitent confesses his sins, (you ‘gotta’ do it, ‘gotta’ publicly tell the priest what you’ve done wrong—even if it is in private!) and the priest offers encouragement and advice. (Oh! The Holy Spirit usually touches the Priest, and gives him just the right words to say!) And the penitent expresses his sorrow, using a suitable formula; absolution is then given.
Ok, let me go over that again. You go in. Greet the Priest. Pray with the Priest. If there is time, scripture may be read. You confess your sins. The priest offers encouragement and advice. You express your sorrow. And absolution is given. Pretty simple isn’t it?
After this Rite of the Sacrament of Reconciliation the priest usually gives a penance to be carried out after the penitent leaves the confessional. Often it is good to share with the confessor how long it has been since your last confession to help him to counsel you. The priest can also help you if you forget what you are supposed to do. Remember that the priest is in the person of Christ who loves that you have come forward in repentance.
To help you to express your sorrow the priest may ask you to say an Act of Contrition. A common Act of Contrition goes like this: “Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee, and I detest all my sins because of Thy just punishments; but most of all because they have offended thee, my God, who art all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve, with the help of Thy grace, to sin no more and to avoid the near occasion of sin. Amen.”
And you can write out your prayer, you can write out your sins, carry them in with you, there’s no problem with that. If you need help, ask the priest for help. Because, when he gives you that absolution and you walk out, the celebration of heaven begins. Party time!
You’ve been listening to Truth of the Spirit and the episode Confession & Reconciliation –Heaven Will Throw a Party! You can find the link to this episode at PatriarchMinistries.com/168.
Then come back for more. With the Holy Spirit there’s always more! Amen.
[i] Catechism of the Catholic Church # 1972 “the New Law is called a law of love because it makes us act out of the love infused by the Holy Spirit, rather than from fear, and a law of grace, because it confers the strength of grace to act, by means of faith and the sacraments”
