Just wondering what everyone’s thoughts are on this topic. It is often discussed as an ideal of virtue - to achieve self control/self mastery. But what exactly does this mean?
First, one needs to rely on God, not oneself, to attain virtue. (That will avoid pride, which you ask about later, also, we can attain much higher levels of virtue with His help.)
Is sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice, pleasing in God’s sight, or are sacrifices/fasting/self control of sorts unnecessary.
Sacrifice *for the sake of Christ *is what is pleasing to God, so, first, we offer up our sacrifices, whether we have chosen them or they have just come to us. I just say a little prayer when they come: All for Thee, Dear Jesus, Who hast suffered so much for me.
Also, any acts of sacrifice or suffering can be accepted as penetential. When we go to Confession, the eternal effects of sin are lifted–we won’t go to Hell because of them. Bit the temporal effects remain, and these are taken care of in this life or the next. It’s like a kid breaking a neighbor’s window: the neighbor forgives the child, bit the window is still in need of repair. The parents may help the child with that (Christ’s help to us) and require the child to pay them back one way or another. Say it costs $50 to fix the window; the parents pay that and require the child to rake leaves every Saturday for a few weeks.
Our sacrifices and prayers are like the raking of leaves. Any lack of leaf-raking is taken care of in Purgatory, where it’s much more painful.
Noooo, He allows us to be able to do things here to reduce time in painful Purgatory–and our work here can be applied either to ourselves or to those in Purgatory.
Of course we should try to keep the 10 commandments - that does seem like a bottom line, but what about other sorts of self control.
Keeping the Ten Commandments, well, first, to do it well requires quite a lot of virtue because there’s more involved than would first appear. For example, gossiping ruins someone’s good name, and this is a form of murder.
Are we examples of virtue and spiritual might if we subject ourselves to temptation so we can prove how self controlled we are?
For some vices, exposure is helpful because it gives us “practice,” one example would be impatience. However, for other vices *avoidance *is extremely strongly recommended; one of these latter is lust.
Will this gain us points in Heaven?
This is probably one of those things that is too particularized to say.
Or is this truly a source of pride?
As I said above, if we do it through God’s help, we will (hopefully!) not be tempted to pride.
Most of what I wrote here about Confession, I learned from the Baltimore Catechism and Radio Replies. The rest I got from Spiritual Combat by Dom Scupoli. These are all avaliable online. let me know if you’d like links.
