On Confession

On Vigilance and Fortitude

“>On Vigilance and Fortitude   

St. Gabriel, Bishop of ImeretiBishop Gabriel (Kikodze) was born November 15, 1825, in the village of Bachvi, in the western Georgian district of Ozurgeti in Guria. His father was the priest Maxime Kikodze.

“>St. Gabriel of Imereti was a nineteenth-century Holy Hierarch of the Georgian Orthodox Church. He generously distributed alms to widows, orphans, and all in need; he clothed the naked and buried beggars, having mercy upon the least of the brethren. St. Gabriel was born on November 15, 1825, and reposed in the Lord on January 25, 1896.

Photo: ipatievsky-monastery.ru     

Cleansing the Heart and Mind Through RepentanceThe most perfect and greatest thing a man can desire and achieve is drawing near to God and abiding in solitude with Him.

“>Repentance and ConfessionNo one goes to a physician to boast about his health. He goes in order to reveal to him the place on his health that is rotten.”>Confession is one of the seven Sacraments established by our Lord Jesus Christ whereby the faithful receive invisible support and the grace of the Holy Spirit to strengthen and save their souls. In Confession, the penitent remembers his every sin, sincerely tells the priest about them, and receives forgiveness of sins from him. As we know, the Savior gave His disciples the right to bind and loose; then the Apostles handed this right on to their disciples. And to our day, priests have the right to do this.

In the Sacrament of Baptism, man is born spiritually, cleansed and united with God. If he could have preserved that purity and grace he received in Baptism, he wouldn’t need repentance and Confession. But since this is unattainable for those living on earth, we have but one means of preserving ourselves in innocence and reconciliation with our Heavenly Father: repentance and Confession. Therefore, the Holy Fathers call repentance a second Baptism.

Confession requires serious Preparing for ConfessionNow tell me: Is Confession profitable or needful? Certainly it is profitable and even essential; because, just as it is impossible to cleanse a vessel without ridding it of all uncleanness, so it is impossible to purge your soul of sins without confession.

“>preparation. It’s not enough simply to remember and list the sins we’ve committed. The main thing is to clarify and understand our inner state, that is, to investigate the causes of our sins. After all, every sin in our heart has its origins, developing from one of our shortcomings or evil inclinations. Some fall into sin out of fervor, others out of ambition, others out of avarice, and so on. And just as farmers try to pull up weeds from the roots, because if you only cut off the stems they grow back and destroy the harvest, so you should try to purify your heart well and with good zeal and to uproot every sin from it. If you don’t examine yourself well and don’t communicate your spiritual state to your priest as fully as possible, it will be hard for him to heal you. Sin is to the soul what disease is to the body. Just as a doctor can’t cure a disease if he doesn’t know its cause, so a spiritual father can’t deliver you from sin if you don’t tell him about the causes that give rise to sin.

The best sign that our fasting and labors haven’t been in vain, that they benefited us, is the feeling of contempt for the sin we repented of in Confession. Repentance and Communion should have two goals: The first is to repent of the sins we’ve committed and receive forgiveness from the Lord; the second, and most important, is to become a better person and to not sin and anger God. Remember, if in approaching the chalice, your heart doesn’t have a firm resolution and desire to hate and abandon your sins and bad habits, and therefore, you approach the great Sacrament of Communion carelessly, then you fall into an even greater sin, becoming a debtor to the Flesh and Blood of Christ. The Lord will forgive us only if He sees that we sincerely and wholeheartedly regret our sins, no matter how small they may be.

Communion is the source of life only for those who worthily prepare for it, while for the unworthy and evil, it turns into a punishing fire. We prepare for Communion, first of all, by fasting, but fasting by itself is insufficient if it’s not accompanied by care for spiritual purification and the acquisition of virtues. Therefore, fasting is useful and beneficial only if it gives us a sense of sorrow, mourning, and regret for the sin we’ve committed.

Christians also prepare for Communion with prayers—both those read at home and those they hear at Liturgy in church. However, it often happens that Christians only superficially fulfill all these rules. But prayers are read in Church to arouse regret, fear of God, and hatred for sin in the Christian’s heart, and to kill everything sinful in us and revive the virtues. Don’t expect that your fasting, long prayers, and numerous prostrations will be accepted by the Lord and accounted to you if during all that you can’t overcome the evil in yourself, if you don’t kill the worm of sin that eats away at your heart. If you’re not spiritually renewed, then neither prayer, nor Confession will save you. True Confession is when a man, convicted by his conscience, first impartially condemns his unworthiness and sinfulness in his heart, and then, sincerely overcome by the desire to be delivered from them, repents to his spiritual father. Sin is like a thorn stuck in your body: Until you remove it, the wound won’t heal. And if a person doesn’t repent of all his sins in Confession, they remain in his heart to his detriment.

The main thing in Confession is that the grace of the Holy Spirit is at work there. Thus, without Confession and forgiveness of sins by a spiritual father, a man won’t be given salvation. The Holy Fathers call repentance and Confession a second Baptism, because we lose the connection with the Lord that we receive in Baptism due to our sins, and in sincere Confession, the Holy Spirit mystically restores this broken connection.

To be continued…