James White: Is The Reformation Over?

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If you'll turn with me, please, to Paul's epistle to the churches of Galatia, Galatians chapter 1.

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I am going to attempt, anyways, to be brief this evening. We have a congregational meeting.

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We've already talked about some real important things, and so we're getting started a little bit on the late side, so I will seek to be brief this evening in doing the introduction to this series, but that does not mean that what we're talking about is any less important, just that we will be concise as possible.

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First book that I published, called The Fatal Flaw, no one expected when

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I wrote my first book that it would be on any of this subject other than Mormonism. That's what we had been focused on for so long, but back in the late 1980s,

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I was pressed to begin studying the subject of Roman Catholicism and interacting with Roman Catholics.

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Believe it or not, that was before the Internet, and we had something back then called Phytonet. It was a bulletin board system, and there was the

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Open Bible Echo, and other places like that where I encountered Roman Catholics and began to seek to speak with them and to understand where they were coming from, having been raised as pretty much an independent

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Fundamentalist Baptist, I only had a very negative understanding of Roman Catholicism.

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My primary objections were focused upon the Pope and Mary and guys in robes and the strangeness of Roman Catholic worship from my perspective, and from a

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Fundamentalist background, that also meant I threw them together with the Lutherans and everybody else that just looked different from us.

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That's not a good reason, and in fact, I'll be honest with you, I think the vast majority of quote -unquote

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Protestants today are Protestants of taste rather than conviction.

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Protestants of taste rather than conviction. In other words, most Protestants today do not know the official teachings of Roman Catholicism, and I will stop just for a moment to say, and that has become a bit of a problem for Rome itself, given the current

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Pope and the current crisis, and it really is a crisis taking place within the

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Roman Catholic faith. There are questions about what Rome actually teaches. It's not that it's difficult to know the official dogma of Rome, but there's really good question as to whether the current

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Pope of Rome believes the official dogma of Rome. So there is that, and that will come up in the course of our studies over and over again, and that's one of the reasons we're doing this, is that there are many

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Roman Catholics recognizing that their system is broken, and they will either double down on it or start asking the question, maybe we took a wrong step someplace, and we need to be prepared to give answers when questions are asked.

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But most Protestants, and that's such a vague term today, in fact, most people don't even know where that term came from.

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If you think that Protestant came from people protesting the teachings of Rome, I hate to tell you that's not true.

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That term Protestant came from a diet of the

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Holy Roman Empire where there was a clause in what we would call the constitution of that political entity that allowed a minority of electors to protest the action of the majority of electors in the

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Holy Roman Empire. And the name Protestant came out of the fact that after having been given religious freedom initially, that religious freedom was taken back by the emperor, the head of the

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Holy Roman Empire, and the minority of electors invoked that clause to protest the removal of their religious freedom.

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That's where it came from. So it unfortunately isn't an overly descriptive term.

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When we're talking about non -Roman Catholics, that would include Eastern Orthodox.

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That's a whole completely other world. The Orthodox are not just popeless

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Catholics. That's not true. That's not where they're coming from. It's a different religious belief, and there are lots of people that are being attracted to that and to Roman Catholicism.

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And of course, in what is called Protestantism today, those of us who believe that this is the inspired

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Word of God, which all Protestants initially did believe, would be a small minority now.

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And so there's all sorts of different perspectives out there. We especially know that we're involved in apologetics.

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We're aware of these things. But the fact is that most people who are not

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Roman Catholics and not Eastern Orthodox have very little sound knowledge of the dogmatic teachings of the

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Roman Catholic Church, and one of the main reasons is most Roman Catholics don't either. And hence we often talk past each other.

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And I want to ask a question. How many of you here today are former

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Roman Catholics? I'd say that's about a third, between 25 % and 30%.

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Now those of you who raised your hands, be honest now. How many of you would say you had a solid, full understanding of and you lived the faith, you were going to confession, you were going to Mass, you understood what

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Roman Catholicism really taught? How many of you would say that described you? Yeah, not even a sixth of those who raised their hands before.

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And so you will talk to all sorts of folks. You will talk to people who listen to Catholic answers and who are prepared to throw some fairly challenging arguments against you.

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But then you'll talk to people who've been raised within the Roman Catholic Church and they are nominal Catholics.

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They really don't know what is being taught. They don't know really what they're supposed to believe.

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And so it can be a real challenge to find out where they're coming from and to filter out the terminological differences that immediately arise when

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Roman Catholics and believing evangelicals begin to speak. But before we delve into that,

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I want to look briefly again, this is going to be concise, we could spend the entire sermon on it, but I want to look at the texts on the bulletin,

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Galatians chapter 1. Because after we talk about everything, and this can be a very confusing topic, we can be talking about the

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Pope and we can be talking about indulgences and purgatory and all the different Marian dogmas and claims of papal supremacy.

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There's just so much. It can be very confusing. But when you get through all of that stuff, the thesis of the book that Jeff chose to use as our title,

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The Roman Catholic Controversy, the thesis of that book that I wrote almost 30 years ago now is just this simple.

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The gospel taught officially by the Roman Catholic Church does not give peace.

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The gospel of the scriptures does. That's what it all boils down to.

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It's an issue of what the gospel is. Does that mean all that other stuff isn't important, the prayers to Mary and all that?

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No, they're important, but the key issue is what is the gospel?

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And as you'll see when we get to this section, it'll be a few months from now, I would imagine, who is the blessed man?

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Romans chapter 4 verse 8, who is the blessed man to whom the Lord will not impute sin?

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Rome answers that question fundamentally differently than we do.

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And that changes how a person has a relationship to God. That's the issue.

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Everything else gets in the way. Everything else is something you've got to jump over. But it's about the gospel.

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Now, I know many Roman Catholics. I have debated pretty much all of the leading

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Roman Catholic apologists over the years. And I can tell you that very often we will approach societal issues in the exact same way.

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I'll listen to them and we'll be going right along, yep, yep, yep, yep. And then all of a sudden they hang a hard left when we've been going right along in agreement all the way because now it's, well, what do we do about it?

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Well, we need to pray to Mary. We need to dedicate the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. And those of you that have been outside the abortion clinics, you know that the way we approach that is very different than the way the

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Roman Catholics approach that. And it all comes back to the gospel.

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It all comes back to what the gospel is. So very quickly, Galatians chapter 1,

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I marvel, verse 6, that you are so quickly deserting him who called you by the grace of Christ for a different gospel, which is really not another, only there are some who are disturbing you and want to distort, to twist the gospel of Christ.

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But even if we or an angel from heaven should proclaim to you a gospel contrary to the gospel we have proclaimed to you, let him be anathema, let him be accursed.

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As we have said before, so I say again now, if any man is proclaiming to you a gospel contrary to what you received, let him be anathema, accursed.

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Now, a few important things. When he says you are deserting him who called you by the grace of Christ for a different gospel, which is really not another, he uses two different Greek terms.

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He is saying they are presenting a gospel to you, but it's really not another gospel of the same kind, it is another gospel of a different kind.

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They may use the term good news, they may use the same phraseology, but it's not another.

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Instead, they are disturbing you and want to distort the gospel of Christ.

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Notice he says they do not, it doesn't say they want to deny the gospel of Christ. They want to distort, to twist, and that term could describe, for example, you may have had the experience,

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I think most of us have, of having a lock that gets rather tough and hard.

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I've got a door on the back of my house and during the monsoon, the wood expands and it gets really, really hard and eventually

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I just know what's going to happen. I'm going to break a key off in that thing. But till then, there have been times

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I've had to push so hard that the key ends up becoming just a little bit twisted. You can tell.

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It's just a little bit distorted. And eventually that distortion gets to the point where it will no longer operate the lock.

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That's what's in view here. They want to distort, not to deny. Here's the problem we have to keep in mind.

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Look at chapter 2, verse 4. He's talking about,

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Paul's talking about Titus, who is with me, though he was a Greek. He was, though he was a

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Greek, he was not compelled to be circumcised. Why? But this was because of the false brothers secretly brought in who had sneaked in to spy out our freedom, which we have in Christ Jesus, in order to enslave us.

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But we did not yield in subjection them for even a moment so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

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See, here's the situation they were facing. This letter is written to the churches in Galatia.

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This is to be read in front of the churches. And that means Paul knows that when this epistle is read in those churches, the very men he's talking about are going to be sitting in the congregation.

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They may have even been amongst the leadership. Paul knows that this will be an ecclesiastical hand grenade going off in the middle of the congregation.

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He knows this. But he has to do it. And notice how he describes it.

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False brethren, pseudedelphoi, pseudedelphoi, false brothers secretly brought in who had snuck in, they sneaked in to spy out our freedom, which we have in Christ Jesus, in order to enslave us.

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Strong words. The only stronger language I know in the New Testament is in Matthew chapter 23 than what you have in Galatians.

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Because by the end of this chapter in talking about those who would have you to be circumcised, you have to enter the old covenant before you can be part of the new covenant,

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Paul's literally going to say, I wish they'd go all the way and just cut it off. That's what he's going to say.

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So this is strong language. And you can see why. We did not yield and subjection them for even a moment.

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Why? So that the truth of the gospel remain with you. That's how important Paul believed this was.

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To compromise on this, to give in on this, truth of the gospel is gone. Truth of the gospel is gone.

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And so here's the problem. These people are in the church. They're not dancing in the back door wearing clown suits.

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We do have that happening in various churches today, but that's not what they were doing. They're dressed like us.

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They use our language. I remember there's a great 1960s

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World War II movie, The Battle of the Bulge. And one of the things the

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Germans did is they had people dressed as American soldiers who could speak perfect English.

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And by the way, most of the Germans I know can speak perfect English. And they got them infiltrated in to turn signs and mess everything up and keep bridges from being blown and they almost turned the tide.

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When the people are dressed like you, wearing your uniform, speaking your language, they're hard to pick out.

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And that's what these men were. They were a pseudo Delphoi, but they claimed to be

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Adelphoi brothers. And that's what can make this so difficult. That can be what makes this so challenging.

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One of the things, one of the problems that we face in this situation, I've been warning about this for years.

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As our culture secularizes, we are pushed into a narrower and narrower spectrum of our culture and our society.

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And that means we are being pushed closer and closer together with Roman Catholics.

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And those of us who are believing evangelicals will naturally begin to speak the gospel to the believing

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Roman Catholic and will say, I already know the gospel. But we are going to be put closer and closer together.

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And here is the temptation. The temptation is going to be as we are pushed tighter and tighter into a smaller and smaller area and more pressure is being put upon us and fewer and fewer opportunities for us to even have jobs and employment and everything else.

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Here's the danger. Can't we all just get along? Are these doctrinal differences really all that important?

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That's the danger. That's the danger. And believe me,

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I understand the other side. I understand people who are so absolutely focused upon every little doctrinal dot and crossing every

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T and dotting every I that they can't get along with anybody.

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So there has to be a balance. But here, Paul says, the issue is the truth of the gospel.

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And since Rome cannot tell you who the blessed man of Romans 4a it is, since the gospel of Rome cannot give you peace, we cannot just simply say, all right, let's just all get together.

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We'd make for a larger political voting block if we all just put our differences aside.

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It can't be done. It can't be done. The cost is that if, according to verse 5, but we did not yield in subjection to them for even a moment.

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So if we do yield in subjection to them for even a moment, what is the cost? The truth of the gospel will no longer be with you.

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And for us, that should be the most important, precious thing that the truth of the gospel.

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Because that's the only power that can change hearts and minds, is the truth of the gospel.

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And so the question then is, okay, all right, here you have an inspired apostle.

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He's right into the churches in Galatia. There are men who have gone into those churches and they have said, all right, what you need to do is you need to be circumcised and you need to keep the law of Moses.

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You need to enter into the old covenant and then you can go from the old covenant into the new covenant. That's what they're telling all the

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Gentiles they have to do. So they are adding to faith in Christ.

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That's why Paul can say, having begun in the Spirit are you now being made perfect by the flesh by doing these other things?

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So they added one thing that you had to do. So here's the question. Does Rome fall under that condemnation?

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Now again, I recognize that today there is an ambiguity.

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That's one of the reasons we're doing this series. If you are not up to speed on this, there have been over the past 10 years, the pontificate of Francis, there has been a fundamental shift.

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Most people outside the church don't notice it. Many people inside the church don't notice it. But the reality is

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Francis has been working to fundamentally change the direction of the

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Roman Catholic Church, especially in who his successor is going to be. He's even changing how that's going to be chosen.

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He has packed the College of Cardinals, which is where the Pope normally comes from, with his own acolytes.

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He is a southern hemisphere liberation theologian, wild -eyed socialist, anti -capitalist type of person, totally unlike his predecessor.

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I mean, if you want to see differences, wow. Totally unlike his predecessor. And one of the changes that he has made is that he has altered the universal

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Catholic catechism and declared that capital punishment is always sinful in all situations.

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The 1592 Catechism of the Council of Trent had said that capital punishment is given by God to the state for certain serious crimes, but it's necessary.

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And that's obviously the case. And that had been the view of the Roman Catholic Church. And the Roman Catholic Church, of course, was involved.

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Of course, they would say that the secular arm was doing that, the state arm was doing that, but was involved in the condemnation of all sorts of people to death by fire for many hundreds of years.

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In fact, I would say, and I think I could demonstrate this clearly, I would say that Pope Francis and a man by the name of Fernandez, Cardinal Fernandez, who only a few months later was made the head of the

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Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. That may not mean anything to you, but that's the modern phrase for what used to be known as the

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Inquisition. So he is the chief guy for the determination of doctrine in the

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Roman Catholic Church, Fernandez. Newly in that position. That's where Ratzinger, who was the previous pope, that's where he had served for quite some time.

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Francis and Fernandez, without any question, for hundreds of years in Roman Catholic history, would have been undoubtedly burned at the stake.

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No question. None. They would have been burned at the stake. 1580? 1590?

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Oh, yeah. They would have been burned at the stake. You better believe it. They would have been toast. And yet they're in charge now.

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What does that mean? It means a lot, especially when we talk about Sola Scriptura. It's one thing for us to defend the sufficiency of Scripture.

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Rome is asserting the necessity of the infallible church. Well, how do you define an infallible church when the current leader of that church would have been burned by that same church 500 years ago?

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What's infallible about that? How do you even know? Good question. Good question.

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But these men and what they believe is causing tremendous confusion amongst

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Roman Catholics. You may recall shortly after Francis became pope, this young boy asked him a question.

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He said, my daddy was an atheist. He died as an atheist, but he had us children baptized.

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Is he going to go to hell? And Francis said, no, because he had you baptized.

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Now, that's not what Rome has taught for hundreds and hundreds of years. And that's not an official statement.

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That's the thing, is that Roman Catholics go, well, yeah, I know. Soon after he became pope, he's on the airplane, and somebody asks him about homosexuality, and he goes, who am

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I to judge? And the whole church goes, I thought that was your position.

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That's your job, like, you know. Who am I to judge? Well, that's not an official statement. That is one of the problems with papal infallibility.

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You never know when the pope's speaking infallibly. Maybe 100 years later, we'll figure out, yeah, that was true.

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Yeah, that wasn't. But you can't know during his lifetime. I can give you all sorts of examples from Pope Honorius onward of how that ended up working out.

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But the point is that there is right now a synod taking place.

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I'm not sure if you're aware of this. A synod on synodality. Sort of a strange way of doing things.

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And it met recently, and the conservative bishops that were there all came out saying the same thing.

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We were made to sit there. We were not allowed to respond, and we were made to sit there and listen to lectures about how we need to be inclusive and accepting of LGBTQ Christians.

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And this is going on right now, and you've probably heard that right before Christmas, the

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Vatican came out with a statement. Fiducia supplicans is what it's called.

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It came from Fernandez, and it cracks the door open just a little bit.

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It didn't kick it wide open. There were some headlines that were excessively wild and crazy, but they're doing exactly what was done in every mainline denomination within Protestantism.

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The United Methodist Church, PCUSA, ELCA, all of them, United Church of Christ, they all went through the same thing.

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You start with little opening of the door. And what they did is they said, even though only a year and a half earlier, the same organization, this

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Dicastery, the Inquisition, had said there cannot be any blessing offered to those who are in these irregular relationships, specifically homosexual relationships.

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Less than two years later, now the door has been cracked open.

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And the main thing is, you just can't do it so it brings about confusion, so it can't look like a wedding.

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What? What? And believe me, all the conservative

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Roman Catholics are going, what, right along with me. In fact, what's interesting is, all of Africa, all of the cardinals, all of the cardinals in charge in Africa have told

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Rome to stick its collective head in a bucket of ice. They have said, we're not doing this.

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There is a schism taking place right now. And we might go, yay, cardinals in Africa.

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Well, okay. But what does that mean? Their system doesn't allow that.

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You can't do that. You can't tell the bishop of Rome to stick his head in a bucket of ice. He's the infallible vicar of Christ.

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Ever since the first Vatican Council in the 1870s proclaimed him to be the infallible teacher of the church, established in that position by the authority of God, you can't, as a cardinal, go, nope, we're not doing what you said we can do.

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It doesn't work that way. So what's going to happen? I don't know. But the next pope, in all probability, will be to the left of Francis.

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And he gets to put everybody in the positions of authority. He has put pro -choice people on the pro -life committees in the

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Vatican. So what's going to happen?

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I don't know. I don't know. But I know one thing.

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We need to be prepared. When someone comes to us and says, you know, I've been taught this stuff my entire life, and I'm starting to realize it doesn't work.

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Right. Let's look at what the gospel is. Let's look at what it really is. Not the traditions.

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Not what you've been taught by your priest. Because there are no priests in the

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New Testament. We're all priests in one sense, but there is no sacramental priesthood in the

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New Testament. See the debate I did with Mitch Pacwa on that particular subject if you want to go deeper into that.

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But here's what the Bible says. Here's what can give you true peace with God. So we are going to be facing that challenge.

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How do we know what Rome teaches? And I will try, and I and Jeff together will try to say, this is the official dogma as it has been understood at least up until recently.

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And then go from there. Because again, it's going to depend on what kind of Roman Catholic you're talking to.

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Are you talking to someone who is nominally Catholic? I mean, we've got a lot of nominal Catholics in the Valley. Cultural Catholics.

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Or are we talking about someone who really does know what they believe? That makes all the difference in the world.

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But it is appropriate right now in light of the not just controversy, but the fundamental scandal that is taking place in Rome.

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With even the possibility, I could certainly see, 2024 is going to be a pretty wild year on all sorts of levels.

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But I could see, in this year, I could see Francis resigning. His predecessor did.

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Hadn't been done for like 800 years, but his predecessor did. I could see him resigning just to make sure that the successor that is chosen is going to continue the direction that he has been working on for the past 10 years and before that within the

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Roman Catholic hierarchy. Which includes, for example, appointing people to the papal biblical commission who are wildly on the left.

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I'll give you just one example. Back in 93, World Youth Day was in Denver.

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Me and Rich Pierce went up there. I did seven and a half hours of debate with Jerry Matitick on the papacy over two nights.

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Passed out thousands of tracts and stuff like that. There was a debate that took place while I was debating

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Jerry Matitick. Carl Keating and Patrick Madrid of Catholic Answers debated two fundamentalists on solo scriptura.

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One of the questions that they asked the fundamentalists was, how do you even know that Matthew wrote

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Matthew? Now the fundamentalist response was not the best response in the world.

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They said, well right here in my King James Bible it says the gospel according to Matthew. That's not really a good answer, but that was the best they could come up with.

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Here's what's interesting. Every member of the papal biblical commission, you're assigned for a five year period.

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And then you can be reassigned. So since Francis has been pope for 10 years, that means everybody on the papal biblical commission was either put there by him or they were there before and he wants to keep them there and so he reassigned them.

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I don't think a one of them believes that Matthew wrote Matthew. And they've published it.

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Their commentaries say it. In fact, Pope Francis wrote the forward to the new

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Jerome one volume Bible commentary for the 21st century. You read that thing.

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None of them believe that Matthew wrote Matthew. And that book has the pope's forward and what's called the nihil abstatin imprimatur, which used to be a guarantee that this book contains no doctrinal error.

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So in 93, the Roman Catholics are challenging the fundamentalists. How do you know

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Matthew wrote Matthew? And by 2024, they don't know that Matthew wrote Matthew. Now, the fact of the matter is that Roman Catholic scholarship has always been way to the left of Roman Catholic apologists.

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But it is ironic that now the pope himself would be very clearly in that camp of having a rather leftist liberal view of scripture because South America is just that way within Roman Catholicism.

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So it is time to be discussing these things. And hopefully I already made it very clear to you that everything else we talk about, as important as it is, is meant to get us to right here, the gospel.

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How do you have peace with God? Who is the blessed man of Romans 4 .8? Rome can't answer that question.

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If you want to see how that works, go on YouTube. Not right now. Go on YouTube.

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Look up James White, Peter Stravinskis. Stravinskis, spelled like it sounds. Debate in 2001 on purgatory.

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And I asked him, who is the blessed man of Romans 4 .8 to whom the

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Lord will not impute sin? You see, in Roman Catholic theology of the gospel, there is no non -imputation of sin.

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If you commit a venial sin, it is imputed to you and you have to be punished for it, either in this life, life thereafter, purgatory.

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If you commit a mortal sin, you lose the grace of justification, you become the enemy of God, you have to be re -justified.

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If you die in that state, you'll go to hell. No purgatory for you. There is no non -imputation of sin.

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Our understanding, the biblical understanding, Paul's understanding, our sins imputed to Christ, His righteousness imputed to us, that's not a part of Roman Catholic teaching.

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They don't have a finished work of Christ. The mass is an ongoing, perpetuatory sacrifice that perfects no one.

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There are fundamental gospel issues. And to be honest with you,

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I don't know where Francis would fall on a lot of these things. I don't even know that if he would accept the historic

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Roman Catholic views on these things. He's that far out there. But to get there, in most situations, what are the issues we have to get around?

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Well, to a person who reads apologetics materials, like Catholic Answers and things like that, they're going to attack

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Sola Scriptura. For a trained Roman Catholic apologist, Sola Scriptura is the same thing as the

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Trinity is for a Jehovah's Witness. A Jehovah's Witness is always going to attack you on the

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Trinity. That's what they think their strong suit is. A trained Roman Catholic is going to attack you on Sola Scriptura.

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So I believe we have worked out that two weeks from now, you'll be doing Sola Scriptura, right?

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Jeff says yes. Now the problem is, and I will be defending

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Sola Scriptura in a few weeks in Houston against a Catholic Answers apologist, Trent Horn.

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We are often on the defensive there, but the reality is, Rome is making a positive claim,

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Sola Ecclesia, the infallible authority of the Church. They don't want to have to defend that.

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And I can't get a single Roman Catholic apologist right now, today, to defend the assertion

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Pope Francis is the infallible vicar of Christ on earth today. When I tried to get

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Tim Staples to debate me on that in Sydney, Australia a few years ago, backed out, wouldn't do it.

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They don't want to. They don't know what to do with Francis. But they are making a claim.

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And so there is a claim of authority. So next week, I will lay out for you the

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Roman Catholic claims on the papacy, the texts that they use, and why they do not carry water.

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That's what we'll look at next week. And then the week after that, Jeff will give you the positive presentation of the sufficiency of Scripture.

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Scripture is theanoustos, it's God -breathed, it is ontologically different than anything else, it is superior to tradition, it is to be used to judge tradition.

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Am I ruining all your points? Okay, never mind. So that's what we'll do two weeks from now.

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But we need to deal with the authority issue first. Then what?

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Well, let's be honest. We need to talk about the gospel.

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We need to talk about how you're justified. We need to talk about the state of grace. We need to talk about the role of sacraments.

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What is sacramental forgiveness? What is penance? What is a priest? If you're given things you have to do by the priest to work off the temporal punishments of sin, what if you don't do all of them?

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How does that lead to purgatory? What is purgatory? Who is it for? What are indulgences?

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Oh, indulgences were back in the Reformation. They got rid of all that. No, they didn't. Just a few years ago

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Pope Francis gave a plenary indulgence to people who would visit certain cathedrals around the world.

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Indulgences are still very much a part of the Roman Catholic sacramental system.

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And there are Bible verses that they will attempt to use to substantiate these things, which are actually beliefs that developed hundreds and sometimes a thousand years after the time of the apostles.

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But we need to understand what that's all about. But then especially in our part of the world, one of the most difficult barriers to overcome is the emotional and sometimes cultural connection to Catholicism as a whole, to saints in general, and to Mary in particular.

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Marian devotion is absolutely central to a believing

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Roman Catholic experience. I wrote a book in 1998,

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I think, called Mary Another Redeemer? Because there was a great deal of speculation at that point that John Paul, for the year 2000, was going to proclaim the final

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Marian dogma. You may know that two of the last three major dogmatic definitions by the

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Roman Catholic Church have been about Mary. The Immaculate Conception in 1853 and the bodily assumption of Mary in 1950.

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But there is a belief that's been taught by popes for over 150 years that Mary is co -redemptrix and co -mediatrix with Christ.

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That means co -redeemer and co -mediator. I was just using the

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Latin phrases there in the feminine form. The popes have taught that as doctrine.

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That's different than defining it as dogma. And so there was speculation that that was going to happen.

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So I wrote that book. It didn't happen, but it lays out what the arguments are, what popes have taught about certain things.

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And it was a very difficult book for me to write because I had to read books such as The Glories of Mary by Alphonsus de

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Liguri, a doctor of the Roman Catholic Church. It's gone through over 900 editions.

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And if you want, I don't recommend it to you, but if you want to see the depth of the

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Marian devotion of mainline Roman Catholics, read that book.

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Read that book. Well, my little book is a whole lot easier to read. Liguri is that thick, but read that book and you'll see.

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So we will have to deal with Mary. And the fact that most of us who are not foreign

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Roman Catholics we don't know much about Mary. And we don't have a very well formed understanding of the historical discussion of Mary's role down through church history.

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So we will need to be discussing those aspects as well. So those are the things that we need to be able to move out of the way to get to the key issue.

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Because hopefully your desire is not to win online debates with Roman Catholics.

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Hopefully your desire is to proclaim to Roman Catholics how they can have true peace with God.

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Hopefully your heart breaks when you see people on their knees rocking back and forth, lighting candles, fingering a rosary, knowing that when they get up they will not have any grounds in the teachings of Rome to believe that they still now have peace with God.

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Let me answer one other question before we close. I don't want you to be confused.

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And I want you to hear where I'm coming from here because this is one of the most common questions that is asked of me.

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People always say, oh, so you just think all Roman Catholics are going to hell. I believe everyone who is in Christ Jesus will receive eternal life and go to heaven in an undeserved gracious act of God.

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The question is, does the Roman Catholic gospel place you in union with Christ?

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That's got to be the real question. I don't believe that everyone goes to heaven from the pews of Reformed Baptist Church.

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And that means I do believe that there are Roman Catholics who know the

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Savior. But it is in spite of the teachings of the

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Roman Church, not because of the teachings of the Roman Church. Well, how could that happen?

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I know people, have conversations with people. And I know that even though there are some differences in our

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Bibles, honestly, the apocryphal books, even Rome doesn't use them for almost any meaningful theology so it's not that big of a deal.

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But there are many Roman Catholics that have Bibles and they read them.

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And I happen to believe the Spirit of God can use the Word of God. And I've encountered people, and it amazed me, but they've read the

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Scriptures and what happens is what they hear from the priest, what they hear, they sort of re -translate into what they're reading in Scripture.

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It makes them heretical Roman Catholics. But praise God for heretical Roman Catholics.

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That's what Luther was. Heretical Roman Catholics. So I like to have hope that there are those simple -faithed people who have a

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Bible and they're reading it and they're believing it. I want to believe that.

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But here's the issue. They will know Christ only in spite of, not because of, the teachings of the

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Roman Catholic Church. That's why I have to evangelize them. That's why I have to respond to the claims of Rome.

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It's out of love. Now, when I first started, I didn't know many

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Roman Catholics. And so I can't say that, oh, yeah, I had all the proper motivations.

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It was more of a, this is, here I stand, I can do no other type thing. Now that I've met, it's the same situation with Mormons and others.

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Once you meet these people, if your heart doesn't become involved, if you don't have sincere desire to see them come to know the truth, why are you doing what you're doing?

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That must be our motivation. That must be our motivation.

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Now my hope, obviously, along the way, is that you will grow in your understanding.

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I can't tell you how many former Calvinists I've dialogued with who are

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Roman Catholics today. And I always look at them and I ask the same question.

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And we'll close with this. How could you, and this sort of takes us into the supper, actually, how could you, if we were to use apology as an example, how could you walk down that aisle and receive the supper week after week and by so doing proclaim your utter dependence upon the finished work of Christ?

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You're saying to the whole world, my sin has been imputed to my sin bearer.

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His righteousness has been imputed to me. That's the only way I have peace with God.

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I cannot add to the broken body and shed blood, once for all, given upon Calvary.

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A Reformed person, that is your peace. If I'm ever on my deathbed, which

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I will be, Luke says rather soon, when

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I'm on my deathbed, and I experienced this. We lost one of the elders at PRBC when

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I was there. Older man, obviously. We talked to him the day he died and we specifically said, what are you trusting in?

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What is the source of your peace? The imputed righteousness of Christ. I am trusting what he did for me.

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No Roman Catholic can say that. They can't. Their sacramental system absolutely precludes it.

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Absolutely precludes it. Calls it the sin of presumption. And so as we learn to speak to others,

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I hope and pray our appreciation, our passion for the gospel will be deepened and grounded.

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Not so we can win a debate on Facebook, but so we can be used as an instrument for the

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Spirit of God to win his people to his truth. That's our calling.

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Let's pray together. Indeed, our gracious Heavenly Father, we pray for opportunity after opportunity to speak the truth to all those around us, the

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Lord today, to speak to those who have been given a mere shadow of the reality.

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May you help us to communicate that every single believer in Christ is the blessed man, the blessed woman of Romans chapter 4.

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We're blessed because our sins are not imputed to us, they've been imputed to our Savior and our place.

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Hence, we can enjoy that peace having been justified by faith. We ask for opportunity.

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Prepare our hearts not only for the truth but also for the grace of God. May we always do so in grace and love. We thank you for this opportunity we have and we pray in Christ's name.