If you believe in Jesus Christ and have asked Him to come into your life and forgive your sins then you are saved!
No, you are justified, not saved.
Otherwise Paul would have been a fool to write:
run as to win the prize, and Christ, our Lord, would not have said:
not all who call me Lord will enter the Kingdom, but only those who do my Father’s will. Also, Christ would have been doing something quite irrational when, after teaching us to pray
forgive us our sins, He came back after His glorious resurrection to the Apostles (and
only to them) and the very first thing He did was to give them the Holy Spirit and tell them: “
as the Father had sent me, so I send you. Whosoever sins you forgive, they are forgiven. Whosoever sins you retain, they are retained”.
Sure, Luther had an easy time calling the epistle of James an “epistle of straw”, but it is still in the Holy Bible and it still says: “
Don’t you know, vain man, that faith apart from works is dead? Show me your faith without works, and I shall show you my faith from my works.” Sola fide is such a poor and fallacious heresy, that it has been repeatedly disproved from Scripture and from common sense for the past 500 years, and only ignorance of the refusals can justify that some still accept it as sound.
You may be right in some aspects. But I can’t imagine living with the fear of not going to heaven because you haven’t made it to confession in a while. I do understand that it is freeing to admit your sins to someone but I also know that most of us are guilty of some pretty bad things that we would never admit to anyone other than Jesus!
Only the priests were allowed to enter and then would come out and absolve the people of their sins. When this curtains was torn in two, God was saying it is finished! Jesus was the final mediator between us and God. We can now go directly to Him to repent.
Well, this shows a lack of understanding of the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Because, see, the priest, by virtue of Holy Orders, act in the person of Christ the Head, therefore it is to Jesus Christ himself that we confess, and it is Jesus Christ whom says: “I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit”. For only God can absolve sins, and there are no individual priests, but
one High Priest forever, and a holy people who by baptism share in the royal, priestly, and prophetic office of Christ - however, the priestly office is further divided into the ordinary and the ministerial, for not all of the disciples were apostles, and only the apostles laid their hands on those disciples who would succeed them.
It is the same priest, Christ Jesus, whose sacred person his minister truly represents. Now the minister, by reason of the sacerdotal consecration which he has received, is truly made like to the high priest and possesses the authority to act in the power and place of the person of Christ himself.
Through the ordained ministry, especially that of bishops and priests, the presence of Christ as head of the Church is made visible in the midst of the community of believers. In the beautiful expression of St. Ignatius of Antioch, the bishop is typos tou Patros: he is like the living image of God the Father.
Maybe my view is a bit small but the Catholics that I know have always laughed when discussing confession because they have never told the priest their “real” sins.
A Catholic who has gone to the Sacrament of Reconciliation and willfully omitted or refrained from confessing a mortal sin commits a grave sin of sacrilege which, if carried over for a long time, may bring over an ipso facto excommunication, as far as I know.
@aidanbradypop You are very welcome. I tend to sound a bit harsh. However, in the spirit of true ecumenism, I am absolutely tolerant of the people, and absolutely intolerant of the erroneous aspects of the doctrine. I don’t claim to speak the truth, but I have the duty to point out the error, that he who truly loves Christ may follow His will, and not the will of the men who crafted the errors, and may perhaps return to full communion with the Church created by divine will and not by work of human hands.
Maybe my view is a bit small but the Catholics that I know have always laughed when discussing confession because they have never told the priest their “real” sins.
