Confess your sins...
(c)Mary TV 2013
J.M.J
March 13, 2014
Dear Family of Mary!
"Dear children! In this time of renunciation, prayer and penance, I call you anew: go and confess your sins so that grace may open your hearts, and permit it to change you. Convert little children, open yourselves to God and to His plan for each of you. Thank you for having responded to my call." (February 25, 2009)
During
Lent we are called to repentance. We are preparing for the graces of
Easter, and we need to "clean house"! As Our Lady says in this message,
we need to confess our sins. When we go to confession, we approach Jesus
in the person of the priest, and lay before Him all our sins, so that
we can receive His great mercy and forgiveness. This humble act opens
our hearts to the action of that mercy, and we are changed.
We
may struggle before we go to confession, out of fear or shame or doubt.
We may twist and turn, trying to summon up the courage to enter the
confessional. But once we are there, the rest is easy really. The priest
takes over and guides us through our confession, almost doing
everything for us. Isn't it that way with God! All he asks is for us to
be willing to confess, be willing to repent, and He sweeps us off our
feet with His great love, and does it for us!
Here
is something to think about from Fr. Alfred Wilson's book "Pardon and
Peace". In terms of confessing our sins, we need to realize that they
are not "news" to God!!
God's
knowledge of our faults is independent of our knowledge or ignorance of
them. Whether we know them or not, God knows them always. It is
childish to presume that new knowledge of our faults on our part implies
new knowledge on God's part; yet that is what we often do presume
unconsciously. We are prone to imagine that new knowledge of our faults,
which has made us seem very objectionable to ourselves, has suddenly
made us very objectionable to God. Why should it? Those faults have been
as clear as daylight to Him all along. Before we discovered our faults,
we believed and trusted in His goodness (or thought we did!); there is
absolutely no reason why we should cease to trust Him now. The only
change on God's side (if one can speak of change in God) is that he
recognizes that we are now less of liars than we were, and so loves us
more because we are becoming more honest.
Such
childish mistakes show that we have seldom looked out of the windows of
our soul at the sky of God's immensity, and, in consequence unwittingly
apply to God's immense, limitless love the span-measure of our own very
limited love, and become guilty of some childish fallacies and
non-sequiturs.
Here
is a specimen of our logic. The unconscious assumption is that God's
love is on a par with our own and that because finite love is upset,
therefore infinite love must be upset. It would be far more logical to
argue that because a baby cannot lift a fifty-pound weight, therefore
the strongest man could not lift it.
We
must try to realize the practical implications of the fact that God's
love is infinitely greater than our own. We must also try to appreciate
the practical implications of the Incarnation and Redemption. That
fault, which has suddenly upset us, was foreseen by Jesus and, instead
of being embittered by it, He actually made atonement for it in advance.
Such is our faith. By childish worry about our fault, we are implicitly
saying; "But surely, he didn't really know how bad it is?" Let us not
imply by our conduct that we think that our Savior did not know what He
was doing when He redeemed us! Let us not fix limits to the limitless
mercy and goodness of God. If we are to face our faults with
tranquility, we must dig deep and real foundations for our hope. (Fr.
Alfred Wilson, C.P. "Pardon and Peace" from Chapter VI)
"Convert little children, open yourselves to God and to His plan for each of you." God's
plan is so good we can't imagine it! But we must let Him into our
hearts, we must let Him love us, even in our sinfulness, so that we can
be changed. This is the time to let Him in, the time to receive His
mercy and love and be changed!
In Jesus, Mary and Joseph!
Cathy Nolan
©Mary TV 2014
"Medjugorje is the spiritual center of the world!"
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