Sin and repentance

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Sin and repentance

People often don’t look into their own heart, their own conscience, their inner self. Not only because they do not have an appropriate guide, which in Christianity is called a spiritual director, a spiritual companion, but also because they are afraid to look there. Because in the heart you can see what a person really is. You can see the whole truth about us. It is also about the fact that we are weak, that our life is fragile, that man is sinful. We commit sins, iniquities that evil affects not only others, of which we willingly remind them in our complaints, in criticisms, polemics, in anger or various types of aggression that we can show towards others, but we are also sinful. As the saying goes today, “everyone has their skeletons in closet.” Everyone has their sins. Therefore, people are often afraid to look inside, especially since and when there are many unhealed wounds that others have inflicted on us, when we find there an old sin with which we do not know what to do, when we have a lot of remorse there that they don’t let us sleep at night – people are afraid to see their own interior. Because he is not at all sure if he can handle what he finds there. That is why we run away from silence, we do not want silence, we are afraid of this silence. We don’t know what to do with it. Today, however, if we want to face ourselves in a Christian way and enter our heart, we must ask God for it. We Christians are not more courageous than others, nor are we less sinful. Christians are people like everyone else, although they try to live the Gospel, in our heart also accumulate iniquities, bad thoughts, bad facts from the past, which we cannot forgive ourselves. And therefore, when a Christian embarks on this journey inward, he must necessarily invite God to this practice. Because the Christian God is our beloved Father, who knows so well what is inside us. And because He is a loving Father, because He loves us more than we love ourselves, only in His merciful gaze can we look at our own heart, we can look “under the carpet” of our life, we can go where we do not want to go. It is very important to enter the heart in the loving gaze of our Father. Every examination of conscience – because the examination of conscience is looking at oneself from the inside – every examination of conscience should be conducted before our loving Father. This is a very important thing. Only when we know that this God does not want to hurt us will we have – sometimes very slowly – the courage to admit to ourselves what we have done. If we do it before God, this is what we do in His face, in His gaze. So this is an examination of conscience. The interesting thing is that we do this examination of conscience before God, because no one else is able to help us do it. Moreover, we confess our sins to God because no one else will take them from us. The truth is, we cannot get rid of these sins on our own. We can only hide them. The deeper we hide them, the more – because we are one – the more problems we have, the more difficult it is to show our true face, the more insincere we live on this earth. No one but God can deliver us from these sins. Nobody will take evil from us. People will gladly take money from us, but not evil. It is very important to actually confess your sins to God. How to Examine Conscience? The invoice, like any other invoice, should have at least two sections. Usually these are revenues and expenses. Just like in economy. In our case, revenues are good things that we managed to do during the day. It is worth considering: what have I done good today? What positive things have happened to me today? Is there any good in my life? Or maybe someone did something good to me? Especially if he did it selflessly. Or maybe I managed to do something good today, as I decided yesterday? If we look around our day, when, for example, we do an examination of conscience in the evening, it is worth choosing, noting these good points, these gems, we would say, those pearls hidden in our everyday life, which are simply good facts. These are the facts. These are not opinions, hypotheses … What was good. Why is it worth doing? It is worth doing this because, in fact, good comes from God. Only God is good. As we remember when Jesus met a rich young man, a passage from the Gospel that we read often throughout the year, when Christ met a rich young man, and a rich young man came to Him, asked Him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to gain eternal life?” Jesus, before answering this question, says to him, answering properly with the question: “Why are you calling me good? … Only God is good. ” And this statement of Jesus shows us that, in fact, all good comes from God. Satan cannot make it. At most, it is the evil that he gives or serves us to wrap the good in colored paper. In fact, however, only God can do good. Even when we do something good or someone does something good to us, in fact, apparently God must have touched a string of our soul, as in this wonderful harp, and only for this reason we did something selflessly good for another human being. And that is why searching for these little facts of goodness, kindness, cordiality, help, service, even breaking yourself towards other people, going beyond our negative emotions and so on and so on … – all this is a trace of God’s action in our lives. These are the traces of God’s presence in our lives. Besides, we often sing in church: “Where love for one another and goodness, THERE is where you will find the living God.” Therefore, let us not seek Him in heaven, because God is not in heaven. I once said this in a sermon, causing consternation, and then explained that essentially heaven is where God is, not that God is in heaven. Therefore, wherever there are traces of goodness, they are evidence that God is working in my life. And what do you have to do with it? Why should we search for it? We are simply to enjoy it sincerely. These are actually little proofs of God’s existence. Our, personal. Events, not hypotheses, but events, facts through which God allows us to discover himself. And you have to be happy with them: “God, how good it is that You are in my life. How great it is that I can feel you – because these are little proofs of your presence ”. Imagine what happens in a person who ends his day this way and sees so much good in his life. He sees God’s action. Then, even in difficult moments, it will not be so easy and so willing to say that God is not seen, He is not there. Only he will know well that God does so much good every day. And only when we are pleased with the facts that we have distinguished in our lives, only then should we thank God. This is the first column of the examination of conscience. But in economics there is always a second section as well, namely expenditures. And these expenses are just our bad deeds. First of all, you should deal with your own bad deeds and facts. The fact that I said something wrong to someone, that I slandered someone, that I did not stop my negative thoughts towards them, that I judged them in my conscience, that I did not work, that I indulged in lewd thoughts … As the Ten Commandments tell us, and above all the commandment of love, because neglect in good often is also simply an act of evil. It is a sin. And it is precisely these minor sins that happen to us that we should recognize and acknowledge. If there are any serious shortcomings, if we are talking about grave sins, we should go to Christ as soon as possible for confession, confess them in the sacrament of penance and reconciliation. However, it is very important before we do this and it is also important in our daily examination of conscience to admit guilt to God, but also to ourselves. Say what we say every Sunday or at every Mass: “Through MY fault, MY fault, MY most gravious fault.” It doesn’t make our complexes worse. It will not deepen our guilt, which is sometimes morbid. It just shows up when we don’t want to admit our sin. On the other hand, when we daily realize the fragility of our lives, that we are unfit for the Kingdom of Heaven, when we say this before God who loves us, then Christ heals these wounds. When we confess our sins, Christ takes them away so that we can really be free so that we can enjoy the lightness of this life. Needless to say, a Christian is a man who is a sinner. We are sinners before confession, during confession, and right after confession, we are still sinners. Sinners to whom sin has been forgiven, but sinners. And this makes man learn the whole truth about himself, that man really sees how much he needs God. Because alone, with his own strength, he can neither heal this world, nor make himself happy, nor bring joy to his loved ones. Because it is precisely this weakness of sin that is constantly in him and dominates him. Therefore, confessing sins is actually a supernatural therapy for us. Not only from the human side. You can’t even reduce confession to the point that I just feel better. Sometimes we don’t feel better right away because we cannot forgive ourselves our sins right away. However, it is important to make an examination of conscience every day, to first bring out those good things that are traces of the grace that is in us, traces of God’s action, the presence of God. Enjoy them and then say thanks. And here, in the case of sins, they have to be admitted. You have to cry over them sometimes, you have to piss yourself off sometimes – but not because of perfectionism, that is, I have proved weak in my own eyes again, no – because we are to do it in front of God’s eyes. We are to be pissed off at ourselves to start working on ourselves, to make some good resolution for the next day, to make such a cyclical, comprehensive, persistent, slow effort, as we sometimes call it in the spiritual life – a certain discipline to put on an internal no one has to know and thus come out of our sins. Try not to commit them – as much as possible on our part. And God wants to bless us in this. And when we recognize these points of evil, these black pearls of our life, we present them to God so that God may make them truly white pearls again, so that God will simply forgive us. And in those places where they appeared, If we assume that evil is the lack of good, at this point Christ fills these gaps with His mercy and makes us anew his children. We never stop being these children as long as we want to give God what weighs us down, what hurts us, what we are ashamed of, what we fear … Only Christ can do this to us. And it is all happening in this spiritual interior. Whether it is through examination of conscience or through confession – examination of conscience is part of these five conditions for the sacrament of penance and reconciliation – or through penance, about which we will soon have a chance to talk. In this way, man gets to know his own interior. Because your own interior is, above all, the truth about yourself. This truth that touches the very root of our existence. The interior is not only the magnificence of our possibilities and desires, but it is also the place where man meets God in truth, in profound truth, in total truth. And that is why you must never hide your sins from yourself, you must not pretend that they do not exist, because then this place will not be healed. And that’s where some gangrene starts, some cancer that cuts through our whole life and can absolutely bring it down to very bad consequences. Therefore, I encourage everyone to shape their interior through the examination of conscience and to do it always in front of our loving God.

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