What besets you my friend?

Dear brother perhaps it is your RC background, this is common with many I’ve known with that background. It’s also common for some like myself that have come out of a modern evangelical background which is in principle the same – that is the treadmill of works perfection. “why is it, for many of us, that we continually struggle in the same area over and over again? Is our confession not real? Is God not listening to us? Are we harboring some unknown and unrepentant sin that is preventing God from blessing us so that we can have victory over our sinful tendencies?” That’s the common lingo if you will. It will spiritually exhaust one. I do feel the reality of your post, truly, I’ve been there personally and return there from time to time. The answer ironically and paradoxically does not exist in action over “just words”, truly. I know that sounds counter intuitive but thus is the Gospel. The answer lay in stopping, doing nothing and hearing “you are forgiven” (in the ever present, not just yesterday, but today and tomorrow). The only thing that truly holds us back, and we all battle it minute to minute is really and truly accepting the free gift of the Gospel. We affirm it in confessions and words but “getting it into the blood” so to speak is a life long battle. It’s hearing the “hilarity of the Gospel”…a “you mean that’s it, it’s that easy”. Never forget that man will misuse the law of God to hold free grace away from himself, that’s natural man’s abuse of the law. He, the natural man calls it “seeking God” and on the surface it looks like it, but it is really running from Him.

When we pray for grace we often, like I’ve done a thousand times, expect that at some prized hour or moment that some power (a wrong view of grace) will some how enter into us and “boom” we will have this ‘strength’ to over come our corruptions. Then when God seems to beseech us with more weakness toward our sins, less strength and not more, more struggle and not less, seemingly pursuing us even into hell – it should dawn on us that THIS is the way He answers prayer for more grace! Not a cure from our ills but a giving and showing over to our ills, an increase in our sins we so struggle with, so that we SEE our need deeper and deeper, REAL sinners and not just pretend sinners. This is the paradoxical answer to the prayer for more grace. See how that works and its wonderful reality, who can indeed know His ways! We ask for grace, thinking “power”. We get not what we ask for which is a “power” to subdue our sins that would only inflame the false saint within us and make us run from God thinking we pursue him (e.g. the Pharisees); RATHER we get more sin and struggles therein. And what does that do? It makes us look ALL THE MORE to Christ alone, the Cross. AND THAT is the more grace, not some power at some fine moment from the sky, but a greater look at our nastiness so that we cry out like the tax collector as a REAL sinner “Lord have mercy on me a sinner (today and really a sinner)”. More grace is therefore given as the KING’s disposition toward a sinner, a “for Christ sake I forgive you, yes again and again and again and by the way Christ did it all…there’s nothing for you TO DO, that’s what I’m saving you from Egypt.” That’s why the “right answer” does not exist in doing but in hearing and receiving, both passive dead body actions.

Below is an excerpt from “Let God Be God”, a GREAT book. This describes albeit an evangelical version of it the struggles I went through myself to the point of utter despair I was so much on the works treadmill. Evangelicalism is for all intensive purposes equivalent to RCC, just different treadmills but the principles are the exact same.

I hope this finds you well!!!

Your brother in total sufficient imputed righteousness of Christ alone,

Larry

“Nor was Luther helped by the Church’s unfailing panacea, the Sacrament of Penance. His sin, he was taught, could be forgiven and his standing with God assured, if in perfect penitence (contrition), marked by a whole-hearted love toward God and a hatred of evil, he made confession of his mortal sins and received absolution from a priest. Indeed, even if he could not show such a perfect penitence, the Sacrament itself would make up what was lacking to the imperfect penitence (attrition) inspired by fear. But none of this contended Luther. He did not find his fearful penitence transformed into the penitence of love, no matter how often he went to confession; and he dared not rely upon mere ‘attrition’. For strongly as the Nominalists could assert the power of Divine grace in the Sacrament, Occam and Biel had insisted upon the necessity of a contrition based on pure and selfless love for God, which a man could and should produce ex naturalibus suis; and Luther took them seriously. According to Holl, the term attrition does not occur in his writings before 1517, and afterwards it is named only to be criticized. Contritio was Luther’s word, since contrition was what God required; but he failed to attain the contrition he sought.

When I was a monk (he tells us) I was wont to shrive myself with great devotion, and to reckon up all my sins (yet being always very contrite before); and I returned to confession very often, and thoroughly performed the penance that was enjoined unto me: yet for all this my conscience could never be fully certified, but was always in doubt, and said: this or that hast thou not done rightly: thou wast not contrite and sorrowful enough; this sin thou didst omit in thy confession, etc.

It was in vain that his confessor reminded him of the authority of the Church and bade him obediently cast away his anxieties as superfluous. How could he be sure his penitence was sufficient even for that? Who could exactly distinguish between mortal and venial sins? It is hardly surprising that Luther could find no lasting peace, and that ‘penitence’ became a ‘bitter word’ to his ears.

To add to his disquiet, another possibility occurred to Luther, which drove him quite to despair. The Occamist theology of the via moderna contained a great antimony. It not only asserted without reserve man’s freedom of will, by which he could do whatever he willed to do, but it also asserted in the most unqualified manner divine predestination. God’s will was unconditioned and His power absolute. By an act of sheer ‘arbitrary’ might He had brought this world into being rather than another; He had arbitrarily determined what should be counted good or evil and had given His law; He had arbitrarily decreed certain means of salvation and just as arbitrarily predestined some to be saved and others not. This God, this irresponsible almighty Will, whose mere whim, as it seemed, had elected one section of mankind to salvation and the other to damnation-for He could have willed both that and all things else quite differently-raised a new question, the most terrifying of all, for Luther. He was endeavoring with all his might to fulfill God’s commandments; and his teachers assured him that he could do so, if only he seriously willed it. Did his failure, then, mean that he did not seriously will it? If he did not, was it that he could not, that he had not the power to will it? And if so, must that not be due to God’s decree, and was it not a sign that he was numbered among the eternally lost? More than once, he tells us, this thought drove him into the very abyss of despair, and he wished he had never been born. It is true that late medieval Nominalism had devised means for drawing the sting from its doctrine of predestination, just as from its doctrine of contrition; but Luther was as incapable of compromise in the one as the other. At times, he says, he felt the very torments of hell, which neither tongue can tell nor pen describe.”

End Quote, “Let God Be God!”, Phillip S. Watson, pgs 17 & 18