I was baptized as an infant into the Roman Catholic Church. According to Catholic teaching, at the time of my baptism I received what the church referred to as sanctifying “grace”, which resulted in me, as an infant, being born again, restored to spiritual life that was lost due to Adam’s sin, justified – freed from the condemnation of that sin, and adopted as one of God’s beloved children.
I was raised by my grandmother to be a good Catholic. We went to Mass each Sunday, a service which essentially centered around the preparation for and receiving of Holy Communion, the commemoration of Jesus’ saving work symbolized by a ritual wherein bread and wine consecrated by the priest, supernaturally became the real body and blood of Christ, which was subsequently ingested by the congregants. We were diligent in attending Mass on holy days of obligation, prayed the Rosary to Jesus’ mother Mary, and also prayed to the canonized “saints “as prescribed by the church. I attended weekly Catechism from the first grade until about the sixth grade. This was required to prepare me for the sacraments of Penance, Holy Communion and Confirmation, which were seen by the church as means of grace that would assist me in maintaining, building upon or restoring the “graces” that I had received in baptism that had made me right with God. I made my First Communion at age eight, wherein I was brought to understand the meaning of the ritual and qualified from that point on to participate. At age ten, I participated in the sacrament of Confirmation, wherein I was supposedly endowed with the Holy Spirit, empowered to live the Christian life.
Prior to recieving these two sacraments, at age seven I was required to participate in the sacrament of penance, as age seven was considered by the church to be the age of accountability, in which God would begin holding me accountable for my sins.
In the sacrament of penance, it was required that I confess all of my sins to a catholic priest, make an act of contrition – a sincere expression of sorrow for my sins and of my resolve to not commit them anymore, upon which the priest would absolve me of my confessed sins. He would then prescribe acts of penance for me to do, typically prayers or good deeds that would help make up for my sins and prove my contrition was sincere. Upon doing all of this I was assured my sins were forgiven, until the next time.
In my case there were many, even innumerable next times, particularly as an adolescent when it seemed like I took up official residence in the church’s confessional booth. Even though I was assured that the priest could not see or identify me in the booth, I concluded he could recognize me by my voice. So, I would change my tenor and accent in speaking each time, so he would not assume it was the same person coming so often to confess the same damnable sins.
My great fear then was that I would die with an unconfessed mortal sin on my soul. The church taught two tiers of sin, mortal and venial. Mortal sin, as defined by the church, caused God to withdraw all that the sanctifying grace of baptism had provided. Essentially, it resulted in you being unadopted, becoming unregenerate and brought back under God’s condemnation, resulting in going directly to Hell upon your death, unless the sin was confessed and forgiven by a priest. Once confessed and forgiven, you are restored again to the benefits of sanctifying grace. This cycle could occur innumerable times throughout one’s life as a Catholic.
I was never quite sure what exactly mortal sins were. I was sure murder was, but at one time I was taught that missing Mass and eating meat on Friday were included. Venial sins, lessor offenses in the eyes of the church, could result in a few hundred years of suffering in purgatory, depending on the good works or suffering you had done to make up for those sins while in this world. Upon completion of your sentence, you then got to go to Heaven.
Now, to be quite honest, none of this was good news to me, which is what the term gospel represents in the Bible (Romans 1:16-17). In fact, any religion that required me to do something to make myself right with God would not be good news as I would never know if I had done enough or done it right.
And then one day I came to know and understand the true gospel, the gospel of the grace of God (Acts 20:24) (2 Timothy 1:9), in which I learned from the Bible and from Godly men preaching from the Bible, that true salvation was all of grace– a free gift – a gift received by faith alone in the person and work of God the Son, Jesus Christ alone, who as a man, through HIs sinless life, sacrificial/substitutionary death and miraculous resurrection accomplished everything necessary to rescue sinful men and women from the Hell we all deserve and to qualify and make us fit for Heaven, which no sinful man or woman could ever deserve. The Bible reveals that when I put my faith in Jesus as my Lord and Saviour, God grants me spiritual life, forgives all of my sins (past and future), declares me to be righteous, gives me a new heart with new affections, longings and desires that are centered on Him, adopts me as His beloved child and sustains me in that relationship with Him forever, having granted me the gift of eternal life, wherein I will be immediately welcomed into His presence in Heaven at my death (Romans 6:23). And what makes our salvation all of grace is that the faith required to receive this grace, is also a gift. (You can shout Halleluiah!! here, as I know my dear brother Harry Adams will upon reading this.)
In Ephesians 2:8-9, it is revealed that, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for (not by) good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.”
In Titus 3:4-7 we are told, “But when the kindness and the love of God our Savior toward man appeared, not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us, through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior, that having been justified by His grace we should become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.”
In Philippians 1:6 we are promised by God, through the Apostle Paul, that we can be confident of this, “that He (God) who (by grace) has begun a good work in you will be faithful to complete it until the day of Jesus Christ.”
And most importantly, we are assured Romans 8:39 that once we have been justified by grace, through faith, nothing, no “nothing shall be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
More on this magnificent, marvelous, majestic, miraculous GOSPEL of GRACE in my next post. In the interim, click on this link to help you worship God for His Grace that is Greater than All of Our Sin.
Grace and Peace ×
Praise God✝️Amen❣️