Reconciliation Repentance Reality Rescue Excerpts from the Book The “R” Father by Mark Heart Chapters 10 – 13

“Forgive Us Our Trespasses” Reconciliation

“As We Forgive Those Who Trespass against Us” Repentance

“Lead Us Not into Temptation” Reality

“Deliver Us from Evil” Rescue

I can justify almost any sin I commit.

In our modern culture, many have been infected with the thinking that we humans are the gods, so we can decide for ourselves what is right and wrong.

God did not give Adam and Eve the right to decide what was good or evil. God gave them the right to choose between good and evil. What is evil is not up for speculation, debate, discernment or conjecture.

The priest, sitting in persona Christi capitas (in the person of Christ the head”) says, “I absolve you.” …The priest is offering himself to God for service. The sinner is offering himself to God for mercy and grace.

We must come face-to-face with our sin and His grace

Reconciliation is an intimate exchange of death and life. God replaces our death with His life – in the most personal of ways.

Confession doesn’t just erase sin; it replaces sin with God’s divine life and power.

We bring our guilt, shame, sin and contrition to be transformed within the confessional.

Don’t walk. Run. Reconcile yourself. If your sin feels “too big,” then your vision of God is too small.

the better you will become at protecting this state of grace that you are in. The more honest you can be with yourself, asking God for his grace to help and looking to his Church for answers,

The Act of Contrition…is a vital reminder to us for our need to be more proactive and vigilant in protecting our state of grace.

We must offer forgiveness and mercy to all our brothers and sisters. In Our Lord’s Prayer, Jesus is showing us that to become like God, we can’t just stop at having our sins forgiven.

We need to repent of our smallness and see God’s greatness.

We often lose sight of in the process of repentance... Our sins are not private.

Sins affect our ability to love and receive love properly

We fulfill our baptismal promises to live a new life in Christ, as long as we are willing to seek and offer forgiveness to anyone we have been hurt by or sinned against.

Forgiving of others is a movement motivated by authentic repentance.

Repentance doesn’t just require humility; it requires courage.

We aren’t measured by how well we love those who love us. We are measured by how well we love those who don’t love us

God’s forgiveness knows no limits… unconditional, and his mercy, if sought through repentance, is freely given to anyone.

Pray with humility and remember that you are the only sinner whose behavior you can control. This is the heart of repentance.

This doesn’t mean that God tempts us. It’s a translational thing. This petition actually translates (from the Greek) to “do not allow us to enter into temptation.”

You acknowledge that you need God’s help to overcome those temptations and His protection from the realities of sin and evil.

The reality of the situation is that evil is very much alive. Temptations do not come from God.

God is standing at the juncture where the two roads diverge, pointing us down the often rocky, challenging path that leads to heaven, not the wide and easy path that leads to hell.

Ask the Lord to really open your eyes and heart to see not only your sins but the root of those sins – where they come from.

Discernment reveals how grace and sin are at work, and how the situation either leads us close to God or further away from him.

There is no third option, for indifference also leads us down the devil’s path, just at a slower pace.

In this petition, we are acknowledging the reality of evil. But even more, we are relying on the Holy Spirit’s eternal presence to guide and protect us along each step of our daily faith walk.

Jesus is trying to rescue us from misguided thinking. He knows well the realities of temptation.

The devil is merely an angel, and for this reason, God assigns each of us an angel of our own, to aid us on our journey. Jesus is the eternal Son of God, the second Person of the Trinity; Jesus Christ is God himself.

Angels are an integral part of God’s rescue efforts, a primary way in which he is constantly delivering us from evil.

It has been said that there are over four thousand promises in the Bible. And what is the one thing that God’s promises all have in common? They all have the same goal: your salvation (1 Peter 1:9)

“I think, Lord, that we’re all afraid of the werewolves – not afraid of being destroyed by one – afraid of being one.” Rich Mullins

In asking for God’s deliverance from sin, we’re also asking for his deliverance from our natural, fleshly inclination to sin.

Christ uses his Church to rescue me from myself, and he does the same for you.

The grace offered through the sacraments helps us to subdue our sinful inclinations – to keep the werewolf caged Grace, in turn, empowers virtue. until such time as that sinful nature is gone for good.

The greatest ally we can have in this deliverance from evil is a person so “full of grace” that she is the perfection of virtue: the Blessed Mother

Mary’s entire life was a living, breathing articulation of the Lord’s Prayer.

While the Hail Mary is an utterly Scriptural Prayer, a closer examination of Scripture reveals that the term “full of grace” had never been uttered before in the Old Testament.

Mary walked with Christ during his life, suffering, and death.

The Rosary is not merely some beads of prayer or a chain of hope – it is a weapon of grace.

The perfect mother, she’ll walk with us too, helping to “deliver us from evil” as she delivers our prayers to her son.