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From ‘peaceful angel’, sin can take us quickly to ‘agitated demon’, a most perilous place. Unconfessed, ‘marinating’ sins, can become the ground for further assent to greater evil and can bring in a matter of days the internal sound of Hell’s insanity of possession. Mortal sin is deadly serious, and unrelieved, causes the sinner to lose the discernment between good and evil, and incapable of fleeing from danger.
As long as we walk on this earth, also ever goes conversion. Those of us long entangled in addiction, compulsions and involuntary vices, are in recurring need of deliverance from the virus flaring within. We need the Doctor, Jesus, Who is also the Medicine, found only in the sacraments of the One Holy Church.
The afflicted is the soul. It falls here, there, needing to rise, again, and confess…
Falls seem a mere repetition of the same ancient thing. The Devil works both ends: he tries to cause every fall and then make every fall seem exactly the same so that we persecute ourselves for the mad illusion of unchanging stupidity.
This is a thinking error, as we also know, in time, that, belonging ever to Christ, allowing His grace to work in us again and again, we are being ever subtly transformed.
Sin is grave and consequential, but so is the grace of forgiveness, and our rising again in faith, and going on. Little by little we gain ground on the old problem, waged by the Lord, for us, in us. The Lord alone can bring good even from sin.
There is a sequence of increasingly deeper recoveries: from each fall, from foundational wounds, from unclean spirits, from unholy desires, from habituated weakness, from distorted flesh, from original sin.
In our blindness we may find a variety of reasons to rationalize “inevitable” sin. But one by one, the Holy Spirit, through multifarious stratagems of grace, is exposing each as a baseless lie for what are comfortable and familiar, but ultimately errors of discernment.
At the very first trace of temptation, have we remembered these words given to Servant of God Luisa Piccarreta, speaking them boldly:
“I do not want to offend God, even at the cost of my life. I do not want to consent to any temptation of Satan.
By doing this, we will not waste time in thinking about whether we have consented or not to temptation, because the mere memory of the protest will already give calm and if the devil tries to disturb us further, we will be able to answer that if we had the intention of offending God, we would not have protested the opposite. “
The sword of God’s word in our own voice!
We need to vigilantly keep the phantasm of unholy desire out of our mind and heart. We need to rebuke and renounce the unclean spirits of destruction, in the Name of Jesus, at first sight. This is simple, but completely dependent upon looking toward the Lord always and promptly.
Jesus says:
“Do not afflict yourself so much; know that I will never allow them to tempt you beyond your strengths. If I allow this it is for your good. I never put souls in battles so that they may perish; first I measure their strengths, I give them My Grace, and then I put them in. And if some souls fall, it is because they do not remain united to Me by means of prayer ; no longer feeling the sensitivity of My Love, they go begging for love from creatures, while I alone can satiate the human heart. They do not let themselves be guided by the sure path of obedience, believing more in their own judgment, than in those who guide them in My Place. So, what is the wonder if they fall?
Therefore, what I recommend to you is prayer. Even if you should suffer pains of death, you must never neglect that which you are used to doing [pray]; even more, the more you see yourself in the abyss, the more you will invoke the help of the One who can free you. Still more, I want you to place yourself, blindly, in the hands of the confessor, without examining what is being said to you. You will be surrounded by darkness, and will be like one who has no eyes, and who needs a hand to guide him. The eye for you will be the voice of the confessor, which like light, will clear the darkness from you; the hand will be obedience, which will be your guide and support to make you reach a safe harbor.
The last thing I recommend to you is courage. I want you to enter the battle with intrepidity. The thing that an opposing army fears the most is to see courage, strength, the way in which one confronts the most dangerous fights, without fearing anything. So the demons are; there is nothing they fear more than a courageous soul who, all cleaving to Me with a strong spirit, goes into their midst – not to be wounded, but with the firm resolve to wound them and to exterminate them. The demons are left frightened, terrified, and would rather flee; but they cannot, because they are bound by My Will, and they are forced to stay, to their greater torment. Therefore do not fear them, for they can do nothing to you without My Will. And then, when I see that you can no longer resist and are about to fail, if you are faithful to Me, I will come immediately, I will put everyone to flight, and I will give you Grace and Strength. Courage then, courage.”
The words spoken here to the Servant of God Luisa Piccarreta, reveal the triple instruction of God to save us from sin.
Look at Jesus, not at our own heads, thoughts, phantasms, and frail unclean hearts. Pray! without ceasing!! “Who prays will be saved; who doesn’t will be damned.” Prayer is the center of life. Courage, remember and take courage; instead of being victims of demons, turn the tables on them with the power of Christ; speak holy desire, speak forth the security that is ours by faith.
Through these perfect instructions of Jesus, we are brought back to what Jesus said in response to his apostles failing to cast out demons. Jesus said they only come out through prayer and fasting.
Pray then, pray. This is the eternal message of the St Michael Prayer Group. Pray pray pray!!! Even when you don’t want to… even when you can’t... Is the essentiality of prayer firmly clear yet?!
Father of all purity , cover our minds, memories, imaginations and the depths of our hearts with the precious blood of Your Son, blot out every lurk of lust and phantasm of regression and ruin. Conform us to natural law, release us from the hellish lies of perversion and intoxication. Fill our hearts with holy desire and rid them of unholy desire. Heal us deeply O God. Remember Your mercy. We beg in the name of Jesus. Amen.