Your prayers are heard. A person in mortal sin needs to pray more than a good person. Your good works have no merit.
All prayers are heard if they are sincere, however they are not as fruitful as the prayers from a person in grace. As the Bible says, “The prayers of a righteous man, avails much”. The closer an individual is to God, the more powerful their prayers are.
Yes, your prayers are always heard, so when you are in a state of mortal sin try to make an act of perfect contrition and pray zealously for the graces you need to stop sinning and to become holier. God bless you.
Mortal sin takes merit out of good works. Venial sin does nothing to the merit of good works.Good works always have merit, that’s why they are called “good” works.
We treat God like we’re lab rats and we have to run our every thought and decision through the process to find out whether it gives a reward or not.
Doing good works is it’s own reward… heaven is in our hearts so that’s the heavenly reward. If you get an ego reward too then that’s a nice consolation but it can interfere or even prevent a blessing.
It feels like God runs a pinball machine and we’re the balls, and if we go down the penalty then we just have to go all the way down the gutter and not make any points with the bumpers along the way. And feel terrible at all the lose points as we helplessly watch the ball drain down and our arms are limp and can’t stop or even slow it because they’ve been disconnected from the buttons. Like Mary had to watch as they forced her Son to go down the drain even though he never actually missed a point shot or tipped the machine, we have to watch our lives go down the drain until we can get to confession and reset the ball. Actually that way of looking at it almost makes it seem interesting.
If I sin right now and have a chance to do good works five minutes from now, my sin has zero bearing on the decision. And if it’s a good thing, then I don’t care whether I have God’s point system down but that at that moment – that instant where I decide to do the good work – I’m doing something for the Lord, for the love of Him and myself and neighbor.
So if I commit a mortal sin today and don’t get to confession until tomorrow, then there is no reason as far as God is concerned, whether I do any good works or not?
When you are in mortal sin your soul is dead. Dead people can not perform good works.
Ok so then anybody in a state of mortal sin is basically a walking zombie who can do no good until they are formally released from that state through the sacrament of confession?
ewtn.com/vexperts/showmessage_print.asp?number=370419&language=enOk so then anybody in a state of mortal sin is basically a walking zombie who can do no good until they are formally released from that state through the sacrament of confession?
Don’t feed the hungry because for you it isn’t a Good Work? Don’t pay back evil with kindness because to a dead person it doesn’t matter?
What about accepting a gift from a person in a state of mortal sin? If I do that, does the gift lose its meaning? Does it cease being a gift?
I just want to know how far it goes. It sounds like I shouldn’t really care whether I help an old lady across the street or push her in front of the bus, if I have mortally sinned. None of it is value; I can only assume a dead person can’t do evil any more than good.
I know. As long as I’ve sinned mortally anyway, I might as well check off the list of evil things I wouldn’t have done while I’m alive. Save it up so if I close down once I can quickly get it all done as walking dead.
I don’t. I’m trying to clarify whether I should have one if I were to understand all these complexities.
No but you can’t hope for an eternal reward (not that that should be your only incentive, I saw your point there) and if you think about wouldn’t God be more pleased with works done in the state of grace if He is willing to give an eternal reward instead of a temporal reward?I don’t. I’m trying to clarify whether I should have one if I were to understand all these complexities.
Yes, that was almost my point.
I did not say that it gives a person the excuse to do bad things just because they are not in the state of grace. Mortal sin just takes out the merit of good works until they return toYes, that was almost my point.
My point is that no matter what my current temporal situation vis-à-vis my “state of grace,” there should be only one different in how I behave based on whether I’ve mortally sinned – and that is I should be aware of when the next confession is available and have a plan to get there.
Other than that, if I do things that are helpful or harmful to others, that is still good or bad, respectively. It’s not like I’m in some state of limbo where everything I do doesn’t matter to God or to anyone else.
If all I’m doing is chasing a point system we have supposed God goes by in making His “final determinations” which we claim to have no foreknowledge of and therefore that says something about the confidence we place in our own models and ability to know how we are doing when measured against them. And we have great fear and consternation about how we measure up to these imaginary forumulae. And we say God gave us the power to bind and loose but with all that binding and loosing the Church has not rung in on any souls other than ordained saints and Mary and a couple others on whether they even made it to heaven.
In industry we call this the “throw it over the wall” mentality. We do all this stuff in the hope it is good for our immortal soul, with the Church right there with us. Until we die in which case the Church says “sorry but you’re on your own now. But we’ll pray for you.” So what are our chances given we’ve lived a chaste life? Some saints have written about how few of us are going to make it. Do we really go to Church knowing that the vast majority of us are likely to burn in hell?
We believe the most important accomplishment in life is one that we will never have any way to know how that decision will go in our particular case, so we chase whatever we think is speaking for God – including the idea that Good Works done in a “state of sin” which BTW I think mystically that implies a whole lot more than the time between when we actually discover a sin and the time it is formally dealt with in the confessional. But we know that really isn’t what matters to God because we have all sorts of explanations like what if you don’t get to confession but planned to, and then died? So we say “yes don’t worry about THAT particular thing because there is this escape clause in God’s paperwork.” But the stuff that doesn’t fit the formula, like whether you have avoided mortal sin there is still no way to know whether God sees you as a saint or like He saw those authorities at the time who followed all the rules as far as anybody knows, whitewashed tombs “which appear beautiful on the outside, but inside are full of dead men’s bones and every kind of filth.” There just isn’t any way to know.
The result? Learn to live for Jesus, listen to Him, and enter the kingdom that is available to us while we are still alive – besides that clearly takes up our purgatory time and this is documented by the doctors of the Church and is called the “Dark Night of the Soul” which is a beautiful thing to undergo except to the people watching it and trying to explain it like a bunch of behaviorists explaining how mice run through a maze. What they see as confusion and anguish is really – to use Jesus and Paul’s metaphor – the labor pains for a new creature. When people need real spiritual food and medicine, we give pablum and a cliche formula that says they should pray more and go to confession more, and accept their “dryness” because saints have it too – like the universal Windex of the soul. We associate “dark night” with depression and feelings of detachment, but it isn’t that at all except to the most fearful.
Ultimately, when theology gets to the point where I am told that regardless of ANY circumstance, if I have a chance to do good and it doesn’t matter to God whether I do it or not, then that theology needs some straightening out IMO.
Because I don’t worship a God who puts people in time-out and cancels their good works and probably doesn’t care whether I go to hell. That’s the kind of God that is failing in the school systems, because they developed their policies based on behavior of lab rats, pigeons, and monkeys – which bear close resemblance to the reward/response behavior of autistic and other low performing children, but fail miserably when applied to accelerated students who actually want to learn.
Either that or he’s not really the Behavior Modification King, who frightens entire civilizations into submissive behavior, with the threat that during this life if they do not only do the right things but have the exact right thoughts and beliefs while doing them, nothing else in their lives will matter because they are but a maggot which will be burned to a crisp and fry for all eternity.
The point of the teaching is not that you should go into despair and stop doing good things.
Yes, but can you also see how this teaching can be misinterpreted by some people? Especially by people who can only consider the letter of the law, where everything must be either black or white. I’m not trying to argue with you, I think we are in agreement. I just think that for some people, dwelling on this particular teaching can lead to unnecessary mental anguish, when it should it should lead to reconciliation.
Yes, I see the point you make.