"Lent", a season for confession and repentance

Lent is the time of the year when God obligates us to prepare our hearts and to purify our souls so that we are ready to receive our Lord in His glorious coming at Easter. There's no time to delay.

The Bible says, "Behold, now is the acceptable time, behold, now is the day of salvation" (2Cor:6:2)

During this season, every day we should try to make a good examination of our consciousness by asking ourselves these questions.

Is there some sin that I am holding onto?, Is there some habitual sin that is separating my heart from God's loving grace?, Is there something I need to confess?, Am I crucifying our Lord all over again by living in my sins?

To help us to do that, Almighty God has given us the greatness of His mercy in the sacrament of penance.

It has become painfully obvious to us both from personal pastoral experience, that the vast majority of Catholics today, gave up the practice of Sacramental Confession long ago.

This is truly a tragedy. First of all, the Sacrament of Penance is the ordinary means for the forgiveness of mortal sins committed after Baptism. But is also a veritable treasure of graces and temptation.

First and most simply, to repent means to recognize the reality of personal sin in our lives and to turn away from it.

It means putting sin out of our lives and changing our lives according to God's will, even when God's will does not conform to our opinions.

Repenting and having confession means to accept God's word and God's law and to make it our way of life. It means putting faith into action. We are saved by faith working through love.

Salvation is not by faith alone, and it never was. St James wrote ‘faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead' (1James 2:17), Our faith must be a living faith. It can't be inactive.

Pope Pius XII said many times that the great sin of our age is, in fact, the denial of sin. "sin" has become a dirty word that we don't want to mention any more, even from the pulpit. There is only one thing that can separate us from God, and that is mortal sin.

Jesus' first words when he began his pastoral ministry were, "repent, for the Kingdom of heaven is at hand." (MTT. 4:17). Our Lord told the apostles that, in any place where people refused to hear that word and act on it, they were to leave that place and to shake the dust from their feet as a testimony against those people (Mtt.10:14).

Every messenger over sent by God in both Old and New Testaments was sent to preach a message of repentance. No one can be a disciple of Christ, or even claim the name "Christian", unless that person is willing to repent.

Jesus said to His Apostles in the garden of Gethsemane, "The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak" (MTT 26:41). All of us feel the attractive power of sin our lives. All of us have to struggle to control our disordered passions.

There's always the danger that we can give in to temptation and fall into mortal sin in a moment of weakness. Therefore, there's an ongoing need for repentance in our lives.

None of us will ever see the vision of God in Heaven unless we are humble enough to know and to admit that we are sinners in need of God's mercy. There are no exceptions we should never be ashamed or afraid to admit that because the Bible says that "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Rom 3:23).

We are reminded that in this Lenten season, we should take it as an obligation to go for confession, by doing so it is one way of preparing our selves spiritually for the Celebration of Easter and on top of that, having faithfully fulfilled our obligations as true Christians in this Lenten season as one of our most virtue to repent and feel sorry of our follies.