Churches in Saratoga

“Now that's all true. And there's one person that Jesus assures to heaven that really challenges the dynamic of Roman Catholic theology that we've been talking about today and it's the thief on the cross. While Jesus is dying on the cross unjustly, a thief who has been rightly punished asks him to simply remember him when he comes into his kingdom. And Jesus, in that moment, assures him that on that day, they would be together in paradise. And now think about that with what we just talked about. He's not had baptism or communion. There's been no confession to a priest, no penance, never received last rites, never gave a dollar, never became a member, never read a single page of the bible. All this man did was turn his head to Jesus and say, remember me when you come into your kingdom. And Jesus doesn't say, well, like, eventually. He doesn't say, like, there's some hoops that you needed to jump through, and I'll figure out a way for you to do that in eternity, but you gotta be able to no. No. He says, today, today, you will be with me in eternity.”

“Justification is the idea that you are made right with God legally, that when God sees you, he actually sees Jesus in your place. For Protestant Christians, and I would argue the plain text reading of the scriptures, that's the mark of salvation. Sanctification is the increasing obedience to god practically in our everyday life. That your and my regular, kind of habits and relationship with god looks like our standing with god more and more. God is drawing us to himself. And then glorification is the one day, someday reality with god in eternity without a broken world, without sin holding us back. And so for us, we would understand it that way. Non Catholic Christians, they would hold to the theology that salvation is achieved at justification, just like the thief on the cross experiences.”

“That's not Roman Catholicism's fault. That's that's a temptation that all of us have, not just about how we drive, but how we live. We're in a room full of people at a church that preaches grace alone every single week, but we can still slip. In our flesh, in our humanity, in our brokenness, we can still drift. You skipped your quiet time three days in a row, and and now you feel like you're behind with God. You had a good week, and you feel like God is a little more pleased with you. You had a bad week, and you can't bring yourself to even pray. If you're not careful, you measure your standing with God based on your performance on any given day or week. There's no visible religious toll like within Roman Catholicism, but you still live with them. They're just invisible, like the transponder debit. You feel this underlying, quiet, automatic, almost humming sense that God is running a tab on your account that you hope is going to work out in the end.”

“One of the questions that we keep coming back to in this series over and over again is whether or not a specific faith group or someone that you know that adheres to that faith system is going to heaven. And I've already shared this before on a multiple on multiple occasions, but, I don't have the expertise of judging the individual eternal state of anyone. That's God's job. But what I have regularly shown you is that the good news of Jesus, the gospel, is this idea of salvation that is the most inclusive, exclusive faith of all time. That what biblical Christianity communicates is that salvation is by grace, God's undeserved favor, through faith, this idea that I trust in what I can't see. I believe that Jesus is who he says he is, did what he did, and is now capable of interceding with me and God in Christ alone. It's not earned but given, trusting in Jesus who died and rose again to reconcile us to God. That's available to everybody. Whether someone calls themselves Catholic or Protestant, this is the core message of the Bible.”

“Now, the easiest way to show the difference between the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant movement is actually to contrast what are called the five solas, the five theological distinctives that marked the Protestant Reformation. Sola just means alone, and there are five together. And together, they show us the sort of clearest theological distinctions. The first one is this idea of scripture alone, sola scriptura. And under the Protestant view, the Bible is our final authority, that actually church and tradition sit underneath, subservient to the Bible itself. We let it stand above all of it. Now, Roman Catholicism would say that scripture and church tradition, they actually stand side by side and that the church is the one that tells you how both work together even when there's apparent contradiction.”

“A great question, as you think about this in your own life and maybe have a conversation with someone who's Catholic in your life this week, is this I think this question can be really helpful, which is, How do you personally connect with Jesus? How do you personally connect with Jesus? Not through others, not through religious practices, not through saints of old, but the direct and personal connection to the one who died to provide a way back. And that's such a big contrast from this sort of set of systems and rules and things we have to adhere to to make it on our own. That's what Jesus offers.”

“``I still think about father Michael, the man who unlocked a chapel for a kid who'd grow up to preach this, and he never needed to win. And the honest ache that I carry for father Michael and people like him is that I don't know how he'd answer the question that I asked you today, But I'd wanna tell him that the debt was paid, not like mostly paid. Jesus didn't just give us, like, an option to think about an installment plan. Like, he actually paid all of it. The bond of my brokenness and my sin and the bondage that it represented, it was retired two thousand years ago on a hill outside Jerusalem. That a dying man said one word, and that word meant paid in full. And then he sat down because the work is done. All the tollbooths can come down.”

“At the Council of Trent, which is the Roman Catholics' response to the Reformation that happened hundreds of years ago, it said two things at the time that continued to be a part of Roman Catholic theology. One is that salvation is not by faith alone. And two is that it is not once for all time. In other words, from a faith perspective within Roman Catholicism, the tollbooths never coming. You receive grace, and then you can lose it. You can receive it again, and then you can lose it again.”

“All of us bring assumptions or presuppositions to our study of faith. For some of you, it's the family that you grew up in that you're trying to emulate. For some of you, it's the family of origin you're trying to get as far away from as you can. Or maybe you read your faith through the pastor that you trust or the podcast that you subscribe to or the notes in the study section of your Bible. And all of this, believe it or not, even the translation is making some judgments, and that's okay. Because our faith is rooted in some tradition. We just need to be more intentional about what tradition we are rooting to. We should not be trying to make this up all on our own every generation.”

“Now, the the second one is this idea of grace alone. Inside of Protestantism, grace is what we experience from God, undeserved favor from start to finish. It's never not that. But within Roman Catholicism, grace is absolutely what begins your faith with God. But works are how you continue and corroborate with the grace of God in order to keep it and fulfill it for all of eternity. That leads to the next idea of faith alone. Inside of Protestantism, we are made right by faith, trusting in what we can't always see, believing that Jesus is who he says he is, offers what he says he offers, and gives you and me new life. Inside of Roman Catholicism, faith is central. It's incredibly, incredibly important. But it isn't enough by itself.”