You're listening to Catholic Sprouts, the daily podcast for Catholic kids that strives to plant seeds of faith.

Hey there, Sprouts. Today is Tuesday, January 8th, 2018. This week on the Catholic Sprouts

podcast, we are talking about holiness. We're talking about what should hopefully be your

number one goal during this year, and that is to grow in holiness and to become more like God and less

attached to sin. Yesterday we talked about what it might mean to become more like God, and we

talked about how God is love, God is mercy, and God is faithful.

Today we are going to talk about how we earn salvation and how we make ourselves holy.

Well, the truth is that we cannot earn holiness and we have absolutely no power to make ourselves holy.

And I know that might be a little bit of a disappointing thing to hear.

We don't like to feel powerless, and we don't like to feel like we don't have control

over the goals that we want to achieve. But becoming holy is not like

getting an A in a class or winning a race. It is completely different. Holiness depends so much more on

God and so much less on ourselves. In fact, that is a key aspect of holiness.

Holiness means allowing God to act and to stop trying to do everything ourselves.

Now, here are some things that we can count on. Number one, God's love for us

is guaranteed. Although we can't necessarily earn holiness, we also don't have to earn God's love.

He loves us right where we are exactly as we are. No matter what we have done or what we might do in the future, God's love is a guarantee. Certainly we can sin and put things between God and us but that's things that we do and every time that

we are sorry and approach God with a repentful heart he is eager he is happy to take down those

barriers and restore full loving relationship with us.

So although holiness and the change of our heart depends on God,

we can always bask in His love.

Now there's a couple of images of God from the Gospels that are truly beautiful and help us understand His love for us and his desire for us to be like him.

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