Salvation

Message to me (part 1/2):
Although mortal sins are much worse than venial sins, they still can not keep you away from Jesus once you've truly accepted him as our Lord and Savior. Even if you, as a true Christian, killed someone and then died right after and never asked forgiveness, no where in the bible does Jesus say that you then no longer come to Him for judgement when you die. You will surely be judged for it by Christ during that judgment day but I still don't believe you have to go to purgatory and rely on the prayers of humans to get you to Jesus. Once you are saved, you are saved, period.

My response:
I think we are saying the same thing in different ways again. I agree that if you accept Christ you will be saved, even though I believe commiting a mortal sin condemns yourself because you are rejecting Christ. The only way those two wouldn't reconcile with themselves was if there was a Christian who wanted to sin. That's like God creating something that he couldn't lift; God can create anything, but he can also lift anything, so how could he create something he couldn't lift? The two parts of those statements contradict each other. Christians don't want to sin, but do so because of our human weakness. For example, Peter lied, which was serious and which he knew was wrong, but did so without thinking out of fear, so that would be considered venial and not mortal. On the other hand, Paul planned on killing Stephen, which is serious and which he did so freely, but he didn't understand that it was wrong at the time, so that too would have been considered venial and not mortal.

No matter what kind of sin it is, we all go to Christ for judgement. One of my favorite links is: http://www.olrl.org/snt_docs/fewness.shtml , which among other things retells some of the stories of those who saw Heaven and that thousands of people were before the tribunal of God and from there they were either saved and sent to Heaven or Purgatory, or they damned themselves to Hell.

This brings Purgatory up again, which I would consider being saved because you are not condemned to Hell, you are being prepared for Heaven. Of course, if you don't believe in Purgatory, you would believe that if you aren't damned to Hell, then you go straight to Heaven. I don't have any better words to explain my reasoning, but mathematically, both would be true. After death, we talk in terms of eternity. Mathematically it would be called infinity. Those that do not believe in Purgatory would say you spend zero time there because it doesn't exist. Those that do believe in Purgatory would say you could spend x time there, where x is greater than 0 but less than infinity. Interestingly (to a math teacher, at least) 0 divided by infinity equals 0 and x divided by infinity also equals 0. So both schools of thought ultimately mean the same thing, they just put it differently.