Saturday, December 24, 2011
Faith v. Works - Who is a Real Christian
I feel that there are no guarantees. The reason for the JUDGMENT is to be judged, so no one bypasses the judgment and there you shall answer for every idle word which passes from your lips. Grace and Works are an inseparable mystery. The judgment of God is a mystery to humans. And "God will not be mocked" by which I mean to say that you cannot have God over a barrel with a basket full of cherry-picked verses. The FOOLISH virgins did not have enough oil. Everything is fraught with danger since there are no guarantees BUT there is greater danger in relying totally upon faith. Better to err on the side of works than on faith. I was just looking the other day at that passage "I will have mercy upon whom I shall have mercy." Its like the laborers in the vineyard; some work from sunrise til sunset and others work only at the last hour, they all receive the same wage, the same penny, but they all WORKED. Do you imagine that those Roman Catholics whom you suggest are not Christians will be turned away at the judgment and told "you depended upon works and did not realize that everything is faith" ? With what measure you measure out unto others so shall it be measured unto you. So if you judge your Roman Catholic neighbor as un-Christian then perhaps the same will be measured out to you at the judgment and you will hear "I never knew you; go to the outer darkness" - As I explained to you, those "words of God" did not get written down and finalized until more than a century, and there were no verse numbers so the Apostles would not understand your verse references. In fact there were no lower case letters or spaces between words. Yet somehow, in the absence of written scripture there was a Church which was guided by tradition. It is that tradition that produced the Bible and not the Bible which produced tradition. And 2Peter 3:16 describes YOU as one of those with a weak foundation who twists and distorts passages to your own destruction. Go and visit St. Catherine's in Sinai Egypt to see Christians who have lived in an unchanging tradition since apostolic times.
