How To Heap Up - Merits

  • Thread starter Thread starter Seagull
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Is this what you’re referring to, @Seagull? :

“But when the righteous turn away from their righteousness and commit iniquity and do the same abominable things that the wicked do, shall they live? None of the righteous deeds that they have done shall be remembered; for the treachery of which they are guilty and the sin they have committed, they shall die.” - Ezekiel 18:24
 
Avoid sin, pray and live in the service of others and the merits will naturally follow
 
Exactly. Live your life this way and do not try to keep a scorecard.
 
I may be wrong about this approach, but the word repent, comes from a Greek term that means to turn away. So, as long as we have turned away from sin, then we might be, or should be ok.

We have to confess any sins we can remember, and avoid sinning in the future. We also have to keep the two primary commandments of loving God and our neighbor.
 
TrenchantWretch said:
And how can I know if my sins are mortal or venial? Are you beginning to see the problem?
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I still do not see where the problem is. If you ignore the amount of your debt, seek to pay as much as you can, if in the end you paid more, as God being just and liberal, he will repay you the surplus a hundredfold. If you have less pay in the end, you can hope that God in His mercy will send you to Purgatory to pay what was left to pay.
if you do not know if a sin is mortal or venial, assume it is mortal, and make perfect contrition before you confess.
 
Here is the issue: the Church dangles the carrot of merit in front of the faces of the laity, but it is always out of reach, and one cannot be sure after a lifetime of reaching, one will ever grasp it.

I would rather not waste any more of your time - I’ll resume despairing silently, rather than noisily.
 
TrenchantWretch said:
Here is the issue: the Church dangles the carrot of merit in front of the faces of the laity, but it is always out of reach, and one cannot be sure after a lifetime of reaching, one will ever grasp it.
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I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength
It’s impossible with men, but with God everything is possible

the Christian must hope that Jesus will give him the effective grace of holiness, it is at the base of this hope that he always seeks to do good works, as perfectly as possible, because he believes that God has given him grace for that
 
I’m currently reading Faustina’s Diary. There was a bit that I remembered that went something along the lines of— we never get back our time, so make sure you use it well for when you have to account for it.

There was another good little bit–
Toward the end of my novitiate, a confessor told me: “Go through life doing good, so that I could write on its pages, ‘She spent her life doing good.’ May God bring this about in you.”

Another time the confessor said to me, “Comport yourself before God like the widow in the Gospel; although the coin she dropped into the box was of little value, it counted far more before God than all the big offerings of others.”
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I don’t think any of us want to take a peek at God’s accounting books. 🙂 But if we remember that we can’t do good in and of ourselves, because all good comes from God— and we make the effort to do what we can with what we’ve been given— we hope that God will treat us like a little kid who’s so proud to buy Mommy a Christmas present with Daddy’s money. 😉
 
I’m about halfway thru the last (of 5 or 6) volume of homilies by St. John Chrysostom. He is really big on works and on heaping up merits, and that has really turned me off on the subject. Part of my morning prayer is that the Lord would take any merits that I earn during the day and spread them where they’re really needed.

D
 
I’m not accustomed for being rewarded for doing the right thing in this life (quite the opposite), and I don’t really expect any reward in Heaven. What the heck would I do with a crown or a title or “treasure?” The only possible thing that could interest me would be the ability to dispense grace to other people who are hurting. But frankly, I don’t think that I’m going to Heaven. And while I trust that the saints intercede for me, I don’t trust that God actually does anything he wasn’t going to do anyway, so it seems kind of pointless to play out some farce of asking him.

But as you say, the problem is with me. Let’s talk no more and let my errors fade into silence.
 
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