Doing Many Good Deeds In Repentance for a Sinful Life

In the Torah there are 613 Mitzvot. Most christians do not know any of these because they stopped with the ten commandments and many feel that only the golden rule is necessary. One of the Mitzvot is Tzedakah...this is giving to the poor. This is a Commandment. It will not take your sin away. The High Holidays are coming up at the end of Sept. and the beginning of October. During this time Jews must make amends in order to be sealed into the Book of Life. If you have sinned against a person, you must go to that person and ask forgiveness of that person and make monetary reparations if that is appropriate. If they do not forgive you, you must go back two more times. If they still do not forgive you it is still no longer your sin as long as you do not owe them any more money or anything earthly. If you have sinned against G'd, then during Yom Kippur You must pray for forgiveness and to be sealed in the Book of Life. Doing good works will not work off your sins. You must ask for forgiveness. Italian mafias are usually catholic...catholics are used to buying indulgences for their soul...I guess they will see how that works out when they get to the other side won't they?

Repentance is important. Every religion has its rules in order to repent.

no, good deeds won't cut it. you need to have a personal relationship with God to be forgiven of your sins.

To God the important thing is repentance. A person has to stop doing the bad thing/s they are doing and turn around. God is a God truth and doesn't give that much importance to doing good deeds compared to being obedient. The Bible says that "to obey is better than a sacrifice".

It has been taught that only our ACCEPTANCE of Jesus Christ as our saviour can save us from eternal damnation. Thus, no matter how many good deeds a man had done..his salvation is still not guaranteed.

I think the only way to get back into God's good graces is to repent. There isn't some scale that outweighs good and bad. 'Cos then you have to ask yourself, How many good deeds must one do to get into heaven. And how many extra good ones we have to do to counter balance the scales. Which none of us have been able to verify. It's not about the "score" of one's life. If it was, the criminal hanging on the cross next to Jesus wouldn't be able to go to Heaven. This discussion brings up a lot of other questions when you ask things like this. How good is good enough to get in Heaven? If criminals are allowed to just repent then bad people are allowed into Heaven. (When I say bad people, I'm mainly talking about rapists and murderers, etc..) Does this sound like the right kind of Heaven to you or what you were taught?

It doesn't matter how good you are, if you do not believe and you do not ask for forgiveness, you will not be forgiven. Charitable acts are done by man to man, and while God asks us to be charitable toward each other and to care for the poor, he never promises that those things will gain favor, much less forgiveness. Short answer to your question: No. It doesn't work like that.

Everything you do in life will return to you in time to teach you what your choices and actions really mean. So it doesn't matter what your actions are. If you choose evil, it will return regardless of how many good choices you make. Why??? If you really understood the evil, you could never choose to do it. Until you have learned this lesson, it returns to teach. Let's all make it easy on ourselves. Make great choices!!

How we justify our deeds here is the most important one and beyond our life, everything is beyond prediction. There are so many faith and belief associated with every one's religion and all are indifferent as well. If we do good, and we have already defined a set of things which are almost universally accepted one with goods and bad things. If something hurts anyone, it belongs to a bad where as some good thing for me can be interpreted by others as bad also. So, depend on the context the goodness of things also may change. Eg. killing in all respect is considered as bad and if a person kill someone, it is considered as the extreme sinful or as per the existing law of the nation, he may attract severe punishments as well. At the same time, as killing is a cruel deed and we (human beings) kill millions of living being like animal for food and such that. If just killing is a sinful deed, we should not kill anything which has life. In short, for our convenient life, we have made the laws applicable to our well being and existence. Some are still considered as great one if we do without the knowledge or anyone or bad things we do confidently. Hence, for me, there is nothing is so good or nothing so bad as well. I think the way what I feel good and do things what I feel good and at the same time harmless to others. A model life what I fell and the experience what I gained from the life so far given certain conclusions and this is what really guiding me for the rest of life. Thank-s

We cannot do many good deeds to counter act the sinful life that we live. What God wants for us to do is to ask His forgiveness, repent from that sin and turn away from it by never doing it again. This is one of the mistakes that we often commit as people to think that by doing good deeds we create balance between those bad things that we have done to counter act it with our good deeds.

In my opinion God forgives those people who only asked God's forgiveness. But if you are doing bad things like killing people and then after that you are doing charitable acts I think that's good but the the question is "did you ever asked God for forgiveness of your sins?".