While the church offers a “get out jail free card” to all “penitent sinners” via last rites absolution, wicked men will continue to find a self-justification for their sinful behaviour and there will be no change.
A glaring example is the report in The Times of forty monks and teachers who have been accused of sexually abusing boys at a leading Roman Catholic school in the UK, which allegedly became a “honeypot” for offenders.
If preachers and teachers do not focus on Christ’s call to live a transformed life, but instead focus on the need for daily confession, my (limited) experience has been that such preachers and teachers are more likely to have something to confess, possibly a regular sin that they are not prepared to abandon.
I remember hearing a pentacostal preacher many years ago talking about his terrible sinful young life, when he would go to piano bars. To a young man in Australia, this seemed a bizarre confession. It all came clearer later, when the famous preacher’s pecadilos were revealed and he was defrocked.
There is no “get out jail free card” in my Bible. Rather: “If we deliberately go on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no further sacrifice for sins remains, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and raging fire that will consume all adversaries.” This applies irrespective of whether last rites are administered or not.
