Catholic lay evangelist Stella Davis in her book, Spiritual Warfare, made the point that in her deliverance ministry, many of the people asking for deliverance from demonic influences usually had one thing in common — they had unconfessed or unrepented sins in their lives. The evil influences ceased the moment that they obeyed her instructions to actually confess these buried and hidden sins in the Sacrament of Reconciliation first and began to live lives of ongoing repentance and conversion back to God.
It is not difficult to see why this is the case. Sin does not only rupture our relationship with God. It also consequently prevents us from perceiving and receiving the many signal graces that God offers. Though God continues to invite and move us to repentance, our unrepented sins prevent us from receiving the insight, power, and protection that God is offering us to resist and repel the forces of darkness in our lives. Failing to repent or confess these sins, we lack strength to resist and we find ourselves hopelessly susceptible to further demonic influences.
When St. Peter and the Eleven had proclaimed Christ after Pentecost and explained the presence of the Holy Spirit, the crowd had expectantly asked in response, “What are we to do, my brothers?” The first step was individual repentance if they were ever going to experience the Holy Spirit, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” God has promised us all the gift of the Spirit and Christ has paid the price for the Spirit. The very first step for us to have this Spirit is to repent from our past sins and to constantly return to the grace of our baptism.
Jesus describes His mission in these beautiful words, “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.” He is our Shepherd, and with Him, “there is nothing that we shall lack.” (Ps 23:1) Though we usually easily focus on what He is asking us to give up for His sake, He has not come to take what is ours but to give us what is His alone to give. We must recognize His voice if we are going to receive what He is offering us, “The sheep follow Him, because they recognize His voice.”
But if we have unrepented sins in our lives, we cannot hear or recognize His voice as He “calls us by name.” Blinded by our unconfessed sins, we cannot sense the love behind His voice as He calls us, we cannot follow Him with that confident trust that He is leading us to “life-giving waters,”(Ps 23:2) and, most importantly, we cannot distinguish His voice from the voice of the “thieves” who come only to “kill, steal and destroy.” This explains why we easily abandon Him and unknowingly open ourselves instead to the devil, the one whom Jesus called “a murderer from the very beginning and who has nothing to do with the truth.” (Jn 8:44)
Despite all our sinfulness and failures in the Church, Christ still calls every single one of us to repentance and conversion through His Church. St. Paul puts it this way, “We are ambassadors of Christ, God making this appeal through us. We beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled with God. For our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2Cor 5:20-21)
The Church remains an instrument in and through which Christ makes present the love of the Father, calls straying humanity to repentance, and makes His necessary graces present through the Church’s sacraments. We do not call others to repentance based on our personal righteousness or sinlessness.
On this week after Good Shepherd Sunday, we reflect on the sadness and disconcertedness in the Church when members of the Church’s hierarchy today ignore their grave obligation to exhort us all to conversion but choose rather to dispense us from the demands of constant repentance from our sins. One sad example is Bishop Georg Bätzing of Limburg, Germany, who recently called for a complete overhauling of the Church’s teaching on homosexuality. He basically rejected the Church’s perennial scriptural teaching of the disordered nature of every homosexual act because, in his words, “This is something that many people no longer want or can understand.”
The arrogance and blindness in such a statement ignores the reality that it is Christ who calls each of us to repentance through the Church. The Church is an instrument and ambassador of the Good Shepherd first and foremost and, like Jesus, we too must say, “My teaching is not mine, but His who sent me.” (Jn 7:16) The Church is not an ambassador of the society and it is definitely not an ambassador of nature or the environment! The message of conversion which the Church bears is Christ’s eternal summons addressed to every single person, no matter their race, sexual orientation or gender.
But this battle of ongoing conversion cannot be initiated on an ecclesial level but on a personal level. St. Peter explained that the call for repentance is directed to “every single one of you.”
People often ask me when and how I sensed a call to be a Catholic priest and religious. I cannot give an exact moment but I know that I perceived the gift of my priestly and religious vocation as I began to take seriously God’s call to personal repentance. The moment I responded to divine grace to turn away from those places, persons and things that led me to sin, I started sensing that God was calling me to more than a deep personal conversion but to also participate in the salvation of other souls through the priesthood in the Catholic Church. I strongly believe that I would not perceive or receive this gift of priesthood if I had chosen to hold on to my sinful past and pretend that I did not have sins or that it was okay to have them. I also cannot hold on to this gift today if I ever think that I am done with conversion to the Lord.
As many of us are still under lockdown because of this COVID-19 virus, let us use the ample time we have now to examine ourselves on the reasons we try to keep unrepented and unconfessed sins in our lives. Maybe there is trauma involved or deep shame and guilt. We may not even remember them because we have buried them so long ago. Maybe we justified them as something that everybody else is doing. We can take the following steps:
First, let us be courageous in facing these sins and owning them and our responsibility for them. Jesus knows us well with our sins, failures, strengths, good desires, and fears; and yet, He lovingly “calls us by name and leads us out.” He calls us to leave our places of comfort and safety and to follow Him and the first step in response is our sincere repentance for all our sins. Holding on to our sins only keeps us from journeying to a place where Christ wants to bless, heal, and transform us.
Secondly, we invoke the Holy Spirit and beg Him to show us the sins that we cannot see or do not even want to see. The Spirit is the one who convicts us of our sins, “When He (Holy Spirit) comes, He will convince the world of sin.”(Jn 16:8) We also beg Him to show us the root sins in our lives, that is those sinful actions and tendencies that lead to our repeated sins.
Thirdly, bring these sins to the cross and unite it to the body of Christ. St. Peter reminds us that “He (Christ) bore our sins in His body on the cross, so that, free from sin, we might live for righteousness.” He bore all our sins on that immaculate body that He received from His immaculate mother, Mary, so that we do not have to hide them in our being. By surrendering these sins, we can then receive His amazing gifts – “freedom from sin,” “righteousness,” and “healing.”
These three steps will help us prepare for a worthy and fruitful celebration of the sacrament of Reconciliation when the opportunity arises. The moment we let the mercy of God wash us clean of these sins and set us free from any bondage, our hearts will be open to perceive and to receive the abundant unfathomable gifts that the Good Shepherd never ceases to offer to us, especially the peace, joy and hope of His Holy Spirit.
Glory to Jesus!!! Honor to Mary!!!
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Image by katalin csák from Pixabay
