Why We Need to Evangelize Roman Catholics

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Next Thursday evening on Long Island, I mentioned last evening I will be debating a Roman Catholic apologist on the subject, can a non -Christian enter into heaven?
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It is not a debate about children who die in infancy. It is not a debate about those who are mentally incapacitated.
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It is a debate about sections 841 and 1260 of the Catholic Catechism, which are primarily simply restatements of material from Vatican II, which in essence state that Muslims who follow the dictates of their conscience and follow the will of God as it is understood to them are a part of the plan of salvation and that any person in any religion whatsoever who follows the truth and follows the will of God so far as it has been revealed to them can inherit eternal life and it may be assumed that such a person, had they known of the necessity of baptism, would have desired to be baptized.
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And so my opponent will be defending that perspective, I will of course be denying that perspective and presenting the thesis that God saves not only in Christ alone but he does not save in ignorance of Christ those who continue in an idolatrous system of worship.
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Now you might say it's an odd subject to be debating, especially since only a few years ago I was debating a
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Roman Catholic apologist on Long Island on the doctrine of justification and during the course of that debate he indicated that there are many who are sons of God today who will be in hell.
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And so he was saying that you can be a Roman Catholic today and you can know the necessity of Roman Catholic baptism and a belief in the
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Roman Catholic Church and then apostatize from that and end up in hell.
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I find it very odd that we have one Roman Catholic apologist basically saying that you can go to hell as a
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Roman Catholic so it's probably better just to be a Muslim. I'm going to point out that rather odd contrast on Thursday evening.
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How do we and why should we evangelize Roman Catholics? Especially given the fact that in this neck of the woods you have all sorts of folks who are cultural or nominal
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Roman Catholics. They might go to church twice a year. They go on Christmas and on Easter and they are what they are because that's just what you are when you're in our family and they don't have any strong attachment to Roman Catholic theology.
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In point of fact, you may know more about Roman Catholic theology than they know about Roman Catholic theology and they really don't understand why you're so exercised about this subject in the first place.
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So you have nominal Catholics, then you do have your believing Catholics. You have your old time traditionalist
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Catholics who I personally find it much more easy to talk to because they're not postmodernists.
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They actually believe that what they believe is right and what I believe is wrong and I find it easier to talk to someone who believes they're right and I'm wrong than to talk to someone who doesn't know what right or wrong is in the first place.
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Very difficult to find a common ground of discussion at that particular point in time. But then you also have the modern believing and yet somewhat modernist or liberal
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Catholic who takes seriously, and this would involve I think the vast majority of the clergy, the vast majority of priests and nuns you might encounter, though I can't find them anymore.
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If I saw a dozen priests or nuns in the entire hour and a half, two hours,
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I was in Vatican City three weeks ago, I would be surprised. Traveling through Italy, seminaries closed, churches boarded up, it was just incredible.
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Just absolutely incredible. But the vast majority of Roman Catholic clergy in the world and certainly in the
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United States and Western cultures are going to be very left wing unless you're talking about Father O 'Reilly who's 147 years old and there are still a few of them running around.
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The vast majority of the younger ones are very, very liberal in their theology and are nigh unto universalists, which is why they look at you as if you're somewhat of a foaming nutcase when you start talking to them about the necessity of believing the truth about Christ.
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It's sort of like, don't you understand? We're all going to get there. Let's just all get along as we're on our road.
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We're going to be there with the Hindus or we're going to be there with the Buddhists and all's going to be wonderful and isn't it going to be great and grand and glorious and so on and so forth.
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And so when we talk about evangelizing Roman Catholics, we sort of have to define what kind of Roman Catholics we're talking about.
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And so today I'd like to primarily focus upon those who've been raised within the church, may or may not have a great knowledge of Roman Catholic theology, but they've at least been exposed to the concepts of penance and the things that are involved in auricular confession and the sacraments of the church.
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They have some knowledge, at least, of the fact that they believe something different about the Lord's Supper, as we would call it, than they would call it in regards to the mass.
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And so with that in mind, why do we need to evangelize Roman Catholics? I am convinced that Rome's gospel, and again,
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I stop for just, you know, I get through what, three words and I stop. Rome's gospel as it has been defined historically, now, that was fairly easy to define up until Vatican II.
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Vatican II reiterates everything that Trent said. Vatican II, in some way, shape, or form, reiterates all the historical beliefs.
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There's more sections on indulgences in the Catholic catechism than there are in justification.
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The doctrine of indulgences is reiterated and believed by Rome. Why, if you can get to heaven in other ways,
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I don't know. I find it a mass of contradiction, and I'm not the only one who finds it to be a mass of contradiction, and mass might be a pun there, but it's difficult to see.
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But Rome's gospel, as it was laid out for people who know what it is, and we, you may or may not fall into that category, it's going to be one of the questions
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I'm going to be asking my opponent. They have this wonderful concept of invincible ignorance, and I don't know if I'm invincibly ignorant or not.
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I don't think I am. I think I know something about what they believe, and their claims, and so on and so forth.
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I'm going to ask if I would fall into that category. But if we know that Rome claims to be the true church, and if we know the necessity of baptism, then we wouldn't fall into that context, and therefore we would need to follow this gospel.
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It seems, though, that that gospel is more difficult for Roman Catholics to follow than it is for a
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Muslim to follow their particular perspective, and you all end up in the same place anyways. So I really don't fall in that. But anyways,
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Rome's gospel, which would include the mass, which would include purgatory, which would include priestly confession, and the concept of merit, and growth, and justification, and being baptized to become justified, and the confusion of justification and sanctification, all those things that historically mark what the
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Roman Catholic Church has taught, while looking like Christ's message, that is, it uses the
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Bible, it uses those words and that terminology, lacks the truth that gives life and peace.
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I am convinced that that is the case, and that is why I evangelize Roman Catholics.
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Why does Rome's gospel not bring peace to the soul? Well, Rome's doctrine of baptism.
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Baptism is called the labor of regeneration. The labor of regeneration is the means of regeneration, is the means by which one is brought into the state of grace.
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And of course, since that is done to the infant, then you have the state of grace of being justified before God, being something that is accomplished sacramentally, rather than the biblical belief that regeneration is the work of the
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Spirit of God, causing a person to be born again, to have faith in Jesus Christ, repentance of sin, et cetera, et cetera.
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That doctrine of baptism, then, leads to the conclusion that obviously a person can be baptized who ends up in hell.
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A person can be baptized and enter into the state of justification, but it's very painfully obvious that not every baptized
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Roman Catholic baby grows up and embraces Christ and lives a vibrant, holy life. Many do not, and therefore, the idea must therefore follow, that you can enter into the state of grace, but not remain in the state of grace.
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You can commit a mortal sin that destroys the state of grace, and you then become the enemy of God. Hence, you have the idea of being in the state of grace, then out of the state of grace, then back into the state of grace, through the sacramental process of penance and confession, so on and so forth, back and forth, back and forth, becomes a possibility.
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And if your relationship with Christ is based upon your fulfilling all of those sacramental duties, and following the church's lead on those things, that is not a firm basis for a relationship with anyone, let alone a relationship with God that does not bring peace.
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Rome's doctrine of justification, very closely related to that, this idea that justification and sanctification are, in essence, the same thing.
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You can grow in justification. This brings us back to what we talked about last night. What does it mean to be just before God?
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Why does any of us have peace with God today? What is the nature of the righteousness that is ours?
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Is it something that we can grow in? Is it something that... And I'm not talking about growing in grace, which is a biblical phrase, growing in the grace life, the life that is marked by grace and knowledge of the
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Lord Jesus Christ. They talk about growing in justification, that is, becoming more just.
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Well, if justification and sanctification are the same thing, you can see why they believe that. We can talk about the fact that we have grown in our sanctification, in the sense that as the
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Spirit of God enlightens our minds and as we are exposed to the Word of God, that we can come to understand certain attitudes and actions that, as a new believer, we didn't even realize that this would be displeasing in God's sight.
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But as we become a more mature believer, we see the Lordship of Christ operating in all aspects of our lives, including our thought life and our speech and our tongue, and you grow in sanctification in the sense of my personal experience of holiness.
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Now, there is, of course, a biblical category of sanctification that is not like this. We have been sanctified.
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We have been set apart. But the concept of progressive sanctification, experiencing that growth in grace, is something we can understand.
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But when you take justification and sanctification, squish them together and make them the same thing, that's when you end up with a major distortion of the gospel message, and that's what happens in Roman Catholic theology.
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Her doctrine of justification, how you enter into it by baptism, how you grow in justification, how it is not the imputed righteousness of Christ by which you stand, but it is instead
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Christ's death that makes it possible for you to have the grace to then merit eternal life by the good works you do in a state of grace.
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Only those good works which are done in a state of grace are meritorious in God's sight. And so the whole doctrine of justification provides you with no basis for peace because of the fact that you can commit a mortal sin tomorrow or tonight or today and immediately become the enemy of God.
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You are then under the wrath of God. That is not a position of peace. Rome's doctrine of the mass, the very central aspect of worship in Roman Catholic theology, the current
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Pope, Benedict XVI, has clearly stated that the Eucharist is the heart and soul of Christian worship, is the heart and soul of the
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Christian faith. And what he means by that is not merely the observation, but the doctrine that Christ is physically present through the doctrine of transubstantiation with his people, that this is a propitiatory sacrifice.
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It is not merely memorial or representational in its nature. It is a propitiatory sacrifice, and it is the center of Roman Catholic worship and the
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Roman Catholic theology. The problem is you can approach that mass 10 ,000 times in your life and still die as the enemy of God.
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You can approach that mass over and over and over again and still end up in purgatory upon your death to undergo sadaspatio before you enter into the presence of God.
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And so how does that give peace if it cannot perfect? And that is one of my major arguments against the doctrine of the mass, is that it cannot be the same sacrifice as Calvary because the sacrifice of Calvary perfects those for whom it is made,
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Hebrews chapter 10, verses 10 through 14. And so Rome's doctrine of the mass takes away the finished work of Christ and therefore does not leave you with a basis for peace.
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Rome's doctrine of purgatory. As I just mentioned, you can go to mass over and over again. You're not perfected. You have temporal punishment for sin still left on your soul.
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Oh, by the way, that's the picture from my backyard just in case you wanted one from Phoenix. It's not that bad.
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People who have never been there actually think that a desert always looks like that. It doesn't.
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Ours is rocky, hard, lots of cactus, and stuff like that. So actually now it's just golf courses and swimming pools in Phoenix, but that's a whole other issue.
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A sad issue, but a whole other issue. Rome's doctrine of purgatory. People think Vatican II got rid of purgatory.
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No, it didn't, nor could it in any meaningful fashion and still be Rome. The doctrine of purgatory is still there just as the doctrine of indulgences are still very much there.
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Obviously, purgatory has been given a tremendous facelift. If any of you are maybe Roman Catholics who were converted many, many years ago, you had one of those old time
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Father Calarni priests. I'm seeing a bunch of you going, oh yeah, man, let me tell you.
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And Mother Angelica, man, she whacked me across the ... Okay, I don't need to hear about getting hit with the ruler when you're in Catholic school.
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But you know, some of the folks I'm talking about, the old time Catholics that purgatory was a big thing.
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And certainly historically from the 14th century to just 50 years ago, it was a very, very central aspect of the experience of the
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Roman Catholic people to be concerned about the experience of purgatory after death. That's how you were made to feel that those penances you were assigned by the priest upon your confession were something you should be doing because those penances are allegedly designed to remove the temporal punishment for those sins.
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If you don't do them, if you don't have the proper attitude in so doing them, then those temporal punishments remain upon your soul.
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And when you die, you need to be cleansed of those temporal punishments. Nothing unholy enters into the presence of God. And since you don't have the imputed righteousness of Christ to claim as your own, then you need to be cleansed before you enter into the presence of God.
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If you'd like to hear a fascinating ... I felt it was, of all the debates I've done with Roman Catholics, there's been about 36 of those so far, the debate that I did a few years ago on Long Island with Father Peter Stravinskas on the subject of purgatory is extremely worth observing, watching on DVD in a church setting or listening to it on MP3.
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Few debates illustrated the real difference between the Roman Catholic understanding of grace and the biblical doctrine of justification than that particular debate.
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It truly was an amazing encounter, and I would recommend that to you.
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Rome's doctrine of purgatory stays there. It makes it very clear that when you eventually do enter into the presence of God, you will enter into the presence of God due to the grace of Christ, the grace of Mary, the grace of the saints, and your own sufferings in purgatory.
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Your suffering in purgatory is not, despite some modern Roman Catholic apologists' attempt to say this, it has never been taught by the
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Roman Catholic Church, is actually the application of the merits of Christ to you. It is a self -cleansing, and you know the old -style idea very clearly was that purgatory was a place where time exists and where you suffer for a period of time.
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The whole concept of indulgences and getting people out of purgatory demanded that concept.
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You have the promise for those who would wear the scapular, for example, that Mary would descend into purgatory on the
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Saturday after your death and release you from purgatory. Well, if you've got Saturday in purgatory, that sounds like time to me.
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But the modern, facelifted version of purgatory has gotten rid of time. It's almost an instantaneous thing.
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As one Roman Catholic I was debating online said, it's where God loves the hell out of you.
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That's what purgatory is. It's where God, was it loves or hugs, one of the two, either hugs the hell out of you or loves the hell out of you.
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But the point was, that's where you're purified. It might just take place like that, and poof, you're in the presence of God, but etc.,
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etc. The doctrine of purgatory destroys the foundation of peace. As I've mentioned, and this was one of my earlier
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PowerPoints, which is why the colors stink, I've learned since then. I have another one. I think I may, yeah, this is one of the first ones
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I did. If you ever start doing PowerPoint, do not do what I did in this presentation.
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I did all the bad things that beginning PowerPoint people do by just having fixed it.
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Wrong colors, too many backgrounds, and you'll notice every single one, the text appears in a different way.
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That's fun at first. In fact, the really annoying ones are where you can have a typewriter sound when each letter appears.
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Oh, that's terrible. Who designed that at Microsoft? They should be shot, hung, whatever it is. It's just a terrible thing.
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I didn't use the sounds part, but there's another one here where each letter appears like, oh, please, good grief, what was
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I doing? Anyway, I have grown in my PowerPoint sanctification since this particular point in time, grown a great deal.
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Most Roman Catholics in the United States are nominal, or cultural Catholics, as I point out, little knowledge of the intricacies of Roman Catholic theology, but still, if the person with whom you're speaking is a lifelong
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Catholic, if they've been exposed to Catholic family members, so on and so forth, the concept of merit and works is most probably deeply ingrained in their thinking.
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It's the whole idea of going to the priest and doing the penances and the prayers and just talking with grandma, and grandma is certainly old enough to remember the old time
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Roman Catholicism, will communicate these concepts rather clearly to this individual, and hence you have to keep that in mind as you are speaking to them, that they understand what you're saying within their context, not vice versa.
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You must know why you accept the Holy Scriptures to be the sole, infallible, sufficient rule of the faith of the
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Christian church. You must be able to explain why it is that the Gospel message is to be defined only by what
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God has revealed in Scripture. You must understand, trust, and love the truth that all Scripture is God -breathed. This is certainly the case when you're dealing with a
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Roman Catholic who is a believing Roman Catholic, and in fact, a believing Roman Catholic who desires to defend their faith.
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And there's plenty of them around, and obviously I encounter them fairly regularly myself. And this is true, it was interesting, in 1993, the
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Pope came to Denver, and I did a seven -and -a -half -hour debate over two nights with Jerry Matitix on the subject of the papacy, and then a few months later,
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I did a little trip where I went over to San Diego, and I debated Patrick Madrid of Catholic Answers on Sola Scriptura, and then
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I got in my car and drove from San Diego, not back to Phoenix, but up to Salt Lake City, and there in Salt Lake City I did a radio program with two
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Brigham Young University professors on the subject of my book, Letters to a Mormon Elder, in studio,
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Mormon attorney is the host, two BYU PhDs, myself taking calls in Salt Lake City, talk about stacking the deck.
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And it was fascinating to me that the approach that the two professors took was almost identical in substance to what
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I had just debated on Sola Scriptura against a Roman Catholic apologist. That is, their whole approach was, how do you know that the
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Bible is inspired, how do you know that the Bible is inerrant, aren't there contradictions in the Bible, how can you have the
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Bible defining all of these things? The Mormons were attacking that to make room for the
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Mormon scriptures, Book of Mormon, Dr. Conrad Spurrier Price. Patrick Madrid was attacking that to make room for the traditions of the
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Roman Catholic Church, and to put me in a position, either one of them, of being dependent upon their ultimate religious authority for my belief in the
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Bible. They both approached it, in essence, in the exact same way, for completely different purposes.
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And so in almost any apologetic encounter today, it doesn't matter whether you're talking about the agnostic, whether you're talking about the humanist, or whether it's a religious encounter, fundamental to all of it would be, in fact,
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I saw someone walking in, I think you had scripture alone with you, did you put it in your car or something?
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It's in your bag? I was just thinking that's probably the closest one I could find. I wrote a book, the last book that I put out from Bethany House is entitled
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Scripture Alone, and the whole reason that I did it is to provide this type of foundation that you need, a broad range of knowledge of what the scriptures are.
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Why don't you hold that up for folks there? Scripture Alone, I'm not sure if there are any left back there, but I deal with the canon of scripture, inspiration, authority, the
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Apocrypha, tradition, the Gnostic Gospels, a wide range of things, and it just seems to me that almost any believer today, if we are going to open our mouths in our culture, you need to know what's in that book.
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You need to have a foundation as to why you believe the Bible to be true, because most of the people we're talking to,
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Roman Catholic or otherwise, are walking through the checkout line at the grocery store where you have all those scholarly journals right next to the gum and stuff, you know, and the leading news magazines of our day, and right next to Elvis found in Memphis again, you have stuff like Bible scholars discover that Jesus never said he was returning, so he isn't, or Bible scholars discover new
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New Testament book, and we look at that and that has about as much influence on us as the
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Elvis story does, but for a lot of other folks, when you start talking about Bible scholars, they don't have any discernment, they don't care who we're talking about here, and it seems to them there's all sorts of stuff about the
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Bible that's pretty odd and pretty strange, and why do you believe it to be the truth, and so on and so forth, so this is a truth that is true
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I think in any context whatsoever. Pretty picture, we'll all go to sleep watching this one.
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The key issue in dealing with Roman Catholics on any level is the issue of peace.
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When I wrote the Roman Catholic controversy a number of years ago, the thesis that I had in that book was when you talk about the
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Gospel, the central aspect that you focus is the issue of peace, the
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Hebrew term Shalom, in 1990, 1991,
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January of 1991, right as Desert Storm was taking place, I debated Father Mitchell Pacwa twice over the course of about five days, and the largest
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Roman Catholic Church in El Cajon, San Diego, in the San Diego area, and it was quite an honor to get to defend the all -sufficiency of the sacrifice of Christ while standing in front of the high altar of the largest
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Roman Catholic Church in San Diego. But in the debate on justification, this became the central concept.
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Father Pacwa and I have debated five times now, and in fact if you want to hear the best debates on a debate level,
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I would say they are the ones with Mitch Pacwa. I respect him more than almost anyone else
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I've debated simply because he doesn't engage in ad hominem, he doesn't dodge the subject, he doesn't play games.
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When you listen to a debate with Mitch Pacwa on we've done justification, the mass, sola scriptura, the papacy, and the priesthood, a lot of Ps in that,
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I wonder if we could Pacwa and the Ps, we could come up with some way of doing all those. When you listen to those, you will hear a debate on that subject and that subject only.
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Who's doing the debating won't really be the issue. And so I can highly recommend them to you.
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In the debate on justification, Mitch Pacwa is fluent in 12 languages. And he's fluent in Hebrew.
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And I pointed out to him that the term in Romans 5 .1 we're going to look at here, shalom, peace, is a very rich term and he agreed with that.
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And then I asked him, I really forced upon him the question, how can you say you have peace with God when you believe you can become the enemy of God before you go to bed this evening?
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There is no peace in Israel right now. When everyone's running around armed, and everybody in Israel is armed.
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That's why, interestingly enough, in Massachusetts, it's odd to point this out, but there's almost no personal crime in Israel.
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You know why? Everybody's packing. You don't break into somebody's home when even the 12 -year -old's got an
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Uzi, okay? You just don't do that. That's dumb. You know? Click, click. All right.
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So there's almost no personal crime there. In fact, I'm going to be going over to Israel in the summer of next year, Lord willing, to teach for a month.
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And the people I'm going to be staying with, the church that's going to be having me there, when they came over to Dallas, they would not let their teenagers go out at night in Dallas because it wasn't safe enough to go out in Dallas at night from their perspective in comparison to being in Israel.
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And mainly because they had to leave their guns at home. So odd, odd situation they're in over there.
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There's no peace there. If you have to be constantly, if you've got armies on your borders with loaded guns on alert 24 -7, that's not peace.
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Why isn't that peace? There may not be any shooting, but shalom is a wellness of relationship.
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It's a positive term, not just a lack of a negative term. And that doesn't exist in Israel right now because they're in a constant state of possible war.
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And as I said to Mitch Pacwa, you're in a constant state of possible, possible war.
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If your relationship with God is such that by your actions, you can destroy it and be an enemy of God by tonight, that's the same situation you have in Israel.
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That's not shalom. And he understood what I was, what I was saying, the passage, here's one of these, you know, it's pretty with the font and stuff.
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Just don't do that. Okay. When you start doing PowerPoint, just, okay, do it once, get it over with, and then never let anybody see it again.
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All right. Romans 5 .1, therefore, having been, past tense, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our
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Lord Jesus Christ. We look back upon our justification. Those of you who were here last night might be going, yeah, that's one of those passages we talked about last night.
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When N .T. Wright says justification is primarily a future thing, we look at Paul and Paul concludes his whole discussion about justification,
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Romans 3 .20 to the end of chapter four. What does he conclude? Therefore having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our
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Lord Jesus Christ. His conclusion is not let's hope that someday we have peace with God when we are justified in the future down the road.
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That's not what Paul says. The first, having been justified, now, is, who's doing
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Greek? Church history, hermeneutics, eschatology,
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I don't see, elementary Greek, okay, Scott. Where's Scott? Got your
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Greek text, Scott? Oh. Who has his?
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All of a sudden, everyone's denying having Greek text. Isn't that an amazing thing? I've had that happen many times, especially when
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I have former students in the audience. You don't want to be one of my former students. You really, no. If I know you're one of my former students, you leave, don't even carry a
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Bible, just never show up to anything I'm ever doing again. Because I like to ask questions, like I used to teach church history, and there were certain dates that you knew you had to know on the final.
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You had to know, what year was the Council of Nicaea? AD 325.
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You knew you had to do, you know that. So if you've ever taken church history from me, you just, you can't forget it. If I run into you at a funeral,
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I'm going to ask you, after the funeral's over, when was the Council of Nicaea? And you better know, or I'm going to be very, very disappointed.
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And I can do big puppy dog eyes, look very disappointed, and make you really, really, really, really mad. And so, I remember once we were driving to Disneyland, this was before the
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Southern Baptist said you can't do that. And we were in a van.
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I had taught one man, and then he had taught a good friend of mine,
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Greek. So this is a second generation student. And so, I popped open my
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Greek text, and I handed it to, and I left my paper Greek text at the motel.
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But I can always do that, because I have my palm. No, I do not get paid by anyone who does that.
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I opened it up to Romans 5 .1, and I showed him the participle found here,
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Nicaea thentes. And I said, parse it. And that man has never been the same since that particular experience.
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I mean, to his death, he will always remember absolutely freezing in front of his own professor and his professor's professor on the way to Disneyland.
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It ruined his weekend, and he has a twitch now, and it's just a terrible thing.
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Actually, he's a very, very good friend of mine, so if he ever listens to this, Warren, I'm sorry that I told. Well, the worst thing was, and you'll appreciate this.
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The worst thing was, we went over to Disneyland, then we went to John MacArthur's church, and I spoke in Phil Johnson's Grace Life class.
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I gave the presentation I'm going to give in the next hour, when, oops, I'm out of time anyways. And Phil Johnson, Phil Johnson gets up, and my friend
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Simon, this is Warren we did this to, my friend Simon had told Phil about it. And in front of the whole group, now you've got to realize, at John MacArthur's church, their
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Sunday schools are four times bigger than my entire church, okay? And so there's like 400 people in this room, and Phil Johnson in front of them all calls
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Warren out by name, saying, I understand you have some problems with Greek, oh, ow, man, talk about warping someone, please don't do that to your students, okay?
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Take a lesson from me, they'll love you forever if you don't treat them that way. But those who are experts in the field will verify for me that when you look at the grammar of the text,
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Paul is clearly identifying not only that justification is something that has already been an experience in our lives, but that it is because of that, this is a condition that has been fulfilled, this is the state that we are in, and because this is the state that we are in right now, we have as a present possession, peace with God.
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Now, there's a textual variant there that I've addressed in a number of books, we won't get into that right now, but it's rather relevant to the point that is here.
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Having been justified, it is something we look back upon, not something we're striving to fulfill, not something that we're hoping for in the future, it is something the believer can look back upon and recognize as the experience that he has had by faith in Jesus Christ.
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It is by faith, it is not by anything else that we can do, I'm gonna emphasize that in just a moment when we look at Romans 4, and I'm gonna have to, oh, good grief.
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And finally, peace, as I mentioned, true shalom, wellness or wholeness of relationship.
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Now I'm just going to, I have another half hour on this, and there's just no way
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I can sneak it in. So I'm just going to do a brief presentation on this, and, you know,
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I really should actually walk far enough that direction to see which books are out there, it might be a good idea.
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But I've addressed these issues rather fully in a book called The God Who Justifies, from Bethany House Publishers, it sort of goes with the
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Scripture Alone book there, it's except a hardback, okay, there's a hardback out there, and obviously go into much more depth on these particular issues.
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The first eight chapters of The God Who Justifies have been identified by one
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Presbyterian pastor friend of mine as a very elongated sermon, and he's right, and they are fairly passionate chapters.
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Then starting with chapter 9, from there on it gets a little bit, shall we say, thick for some people, it is exegetical in nature at that point, but I would encourage you to take a look at it, there it is, notice the color thing, see you've got the black and the red, and that one's the black and the blue, and they're supposed to sit next to each other on the shelf and look pretty and stuff, but actually
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I had a big fight to get the right title for that book, for Scripture Alone. What was the first title they wanted to do?
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I wanted Scripture Alone from the start. The first one they came back with, how about What the
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Bible Really Means? Oh, it was terrible, they came up with about three, and I kept going, and they finally said, how about Scripture Alone?
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Fairly easy. I don't like getting into the titling stuff, but on that one I put my foot down and said, come on people, that's not even close.
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Anyway, so I'm going to get through Romans 4, 4 through 5, direct you to The God Who Justifies, you can try to rip off his copy if you're cheap, or whatever it is, why he's not looking, whatever you want to do, but then we need to move on to Sola Scriptura because that's another really important topic as well.
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If I'm forced to go to a single passage, if I'm on a train and I know
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I've only got a certain amount of time before the next stop and I might be losing this person, and that's an illustration
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I couldn't have used a whole lot before I started going to places like England and Italy, but now all of a sudden,
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I like trains, trains are cool, they don't do this number, you know, when you go through, well they do in London in the
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Tube, ever ridden the Tube in London? Any of you? Good grief, I thought it was a Disneyland ride, that was incredible,
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I was used to the subway in New York, it was nice and smooth and stuff like that, you get to London, you get off and you're just feeling like, oh, it's terrible,
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I guess it was all the bombing in World War II or something, it's just they haven't bothered fixing it, it's just incredible. Anything goes wrong in there, by the way, you're dead,
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I mean, there's no place to go, have you ever noticed? The train's this far from the wall, anything happens in there, just, that's it, anyhow, you're on the train, you're talking with somebody, you don't have a whole lot of time,
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I'm sort of random today, aren't I? Lack of sleep gets to you eventually, you don't have a lot of time, you want to go to one place, where do you get that in the
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Bible? I would go to Romans chapter 4, verses 4 through 5, why? Because you can make direct application to where the person is in their life, almost anywhere in the world, because almost in any culture, people work for pay, they do work to receive something back, and that's the illustration that Paul uses here, he says now to the one who works, he's talking about Genesis 15, 6, he's talking about Abraham, he's talking about how
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Abraham believed in God, it was credited to him as righteousness, and now he's giving us the interpretation of Genesis 15, 6, the inspired apostolic interpretation of Genesis 15, 6, now to the one who works, his wage is not credited as a favor, but as what is due, so what he's saying is, when you go to work, you put out labor, and in that labor, you are expecting to receive something back, and your wage, and that's the standard
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Greek term, misthos, that is used in secular documents for a standard wage, for your, you go to work for one day, you receive one day's misthos, wage, and so what he's saying is, you work, the wage is not, and that term credited is the term from which we get, legitimi, imputation, it is not imputed to you, it's not deposited to your account, it is not rendered to you, credited to you, as a favor, and literally, that's according to grace, as a gift,
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I mean, if your boss thinks that your paycheck is a gift, you're not going to be there very long, you know what
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I mean, I mean, your boss should think you're worth a whole lot more than you really are, right, you know, if he thinks he's giving you a gift, and he hands you your paycheck, that's not a good thing, and that's what
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Paul's saying, it's not credited as a gift, it's not credited as a favor, but as what is due or owed, and again, he uses a common
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Greek term here that refers to a debt, when you work for your boss, when you have a contract, and you go to work, and you're supposed to put in your 40, ha, ha, ha, hours a week, we all know what a joke that is, right, and you're to be paid
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X amount of money, you put in your hours, if your boss doesn't pay you, you can sue them, you can get that money, it's owed to you, remember
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James, the book of James, talk about the rich, do not withhold wages from the laborer,
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God's going to get you if you do, God's concerned about things of justice, so on and so forth, and so Paul's using a standard illustration from life, when you do something with the expectation of receiving something in return, that's not grace, that's just what's owed to you, then he contrasts that, and I, this is, you know, last night
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I mentioned the thing when someone says, what does that say in the Greek, what it says in the English, but sometimes the way it says it in the
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Greek is illustrative and is enlightening, and if you compare the first few words of verse 4 with the first few words of verse 5, you see that Paul is doing a direct contrast here, he says, to the one not working, and so it's the exact same words, exact same word, you just put the word not in there, and so what he's saying is the exact opposite attitude of verse 4, but to the one who does not work, but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, here's the contrast, saving faith does not have the idea that by my doing something,
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I'm going to bring about this result, I'm going, I'm putting God in the position of being debtor to me, now think about almost any of man's religions, even, even the most nuanced presentation of Rome, well, the sacraments are gifts of grace, see
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God has graciously made the sacraments available to us, well that's nice, but the fact remains you have to do these certain things, you work the system to gain the graces, do you not?
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Yes, and so by doing those sacraments, are you not gaining some kind of grace by doing so in the state of grace?
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Well, of course, that's the whole point, and so Paul is saying the exact opposite of that, the attitude of the person going to work is the exact opposite of the person who comes to God in faith for justification, he says to the one who does not work, but opposite of that, believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is credited as righteousness, and so while the work is credited as what is due, faith is never due anything because faith has no merit in and of itself, and it's that kind of empty hand of faith that brings the righteousness of God, and by the way, just in passing when it says but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is credited as righteousness,
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Joseph Smith so completely misunderstood God's grace in Mormonism that he negated that phrase and made it but believes in him who does not justify the ungodly, he had no concept of grace, he totally changed
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John 644 as well in his own quote -unquote translation of the Bible, he did not understand the concept of grace at all, and that remains the case with with the
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Mormon Church today, so I would ask for your prayers next
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Thursday evening for the debate, I think being able to contrast next
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Thursday evening's debate, I really pray that it'll be very clear, not that there'll be, you know, that he will, you know,
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I don't pray that my opponent will get up in the closing statement and go, he's right, I repent, you know,
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I realize that's that's not going to be what's what's going to be going on, what
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I want is a clear, clear presentation where the people who walk out of there know exactly what two very different sides just said and how they defended their position, a debate that basically puts the people to sleep or does not make one side clear, the other side has to waste a lot of their time trying to clarify the other side's position, that's what
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I'm hoping to avoid, and I think we'll be able to avoid that on Thursday night, but especially taking that and then contrasting that with the debates on justification, where you have all this complexity, you know, hopefully the result will be the
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Roman Catholic looks at that and goes, now wait a minute, if all this stuff is true, it'd be a whole lot easier for me to be an ignorant pagan, just to be a good, noble, ignorant pagan, than to be a
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Roman Catholic, I've got, I might end up in hell, at least he's got a shot, you know, I mean, and hopefully it'll cause them to think about that and realize, wow, something's got to be amiss here, something's got to be missing in this type of a situation, so a little bit fast, but hopefully