In the sermon titled 'The Pope is Antichrist-why we are Protestant,' Robert Bosley addresses the Protestant perspective on the Roman Catholic Church, emphasizing the divisions that exist between the two. He begins by highlighting the five solas of the Reformation—Sola Scriptura, Sola Gratia, Sola Fide, Solus Christus, and Soli Deo Gloria—as the core doctrines that separate Protestants from the Roman Church. Bosley criticizes the papacy, detailing its historical development and claiming it as blasphemous, as it assumes authority and titles that belong only to God. He further critiques the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, describing it as a blasphemous counterfeit of the Lord's Supper, and argues against the Roman view of justification, which he sees as a denial of justification by faith alone. The sermon underscores the importance of Sola Scriptura, asserting that the Roman rejection of it is the foundation of their theological errors. Bosley concludes by encouraging the congregation to hold fast to the Reformed faith, rooted in scripture, while urging them to evangelize Catholics who he believes are lost within an apostate church.

All right. Good afternoon, church. If you would take out your Bibles and open up to the book of Colossians, Chapter 1. I, we're going to take a break if you didn't see the email today. We're going to be taking a break from the parables and we're going to consider How we ought to view the Roman Catholic Church You've been living under a rock you might not be aware but the previous pope died recently and a new one was just elected.

And I thought it would be useful, and I texted the elders and asked them their thoughts and They said, yeah, please go ahead and do this. So I thought it would be useful for us to consider the things that divide us from the Roman Catholic Church. And I wanna begin reading Colossians and then we'll pray and we'll get into this, examining a couple significant issues. But Colossians chapter one, beginning in verse, wait a minute, da da da da da. This is why you write down where you want to go first.

Colossians 1.15. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers, All things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things. And in him all things consist.

And he is the head of the body, the church, who is the beginning, the first born from the dead, that in all things he may have the preeminence. Let's pray. Father, we come to you this afternoon in the name of your Son, the one to whom you have given all things, the one that you made the head of the church, so that he may be preeminent in everything. Help us Lord as we consider these very serious issues this afternoon. Help us Lord to see clearly the truth of your word and help us to think carefully about these things and May you be glorified in all of it in Christ's name So I texted Josh at like nine o'clock or something last night, hey can we do one of these songs for the afternoon session and cause a minor crisis with Mrs.

McLeod and all of this. But I wanted us to sing, I had a list of a couple songs, and this is honestly, I think my favorite one out of the ones that I had suggested. Why are we a Reformed church? What does it even mean to be Reformed? Well, this song, if you're at all familiar with it, is a song based on what are called the five solas of the Reformation.

What are these? You've Sola Scriptura, Sola Gratia, Sola Fide, Solus Christus, Soli Deo Gloria. According to scripture alone we are saved by grace alone or saved by faith alone through grace alone by Christ alone for the glory of God alone. Now these five doctrines, these five solas are at the core of what separates us from the Roman Church. Now, they didn't use those words during the Reformation in those early years, but that's how it's come down to us today and condensed down.

Now we could just look at each one of those and that might be useful to do at some point in the future but I only have 30 minutes and so I want to dial in on really three points of division between us and Rome. And primarily I'm gonna spend the majority of my time talking about the first two. Before I do that, I do want to read something else. You probably don't have this with you so you can't turn to it most likely but a copy of the Baptist Confession. I love the Second London Baptist Confession.

It's a glorious document. I recommend everyone have a copy. But I want to read part of what our confession says in chapter 26 which is regarding the church. Chapter 26 of the church paragraph 4. The Lord Jesus Christ is the head of the Church, in whom, by the appointment of the Father, all power for the calling, institution, order, or government of the Church is invested in a supreme and sovereign manner.

Neither can the Pope of Rome in any sense behead thereof. But is that Antichrist, that man of sin and son of perdition that exalts himself in the church against Christ and all that is called God, whom the Lord shall destroy with the brightness of his coming." It's safe to say that our Baptist forefathers did not think very highly of the pope or the Roman system. Now, sadly, this view is not unique to the Baptist. You read the Westminster, almost identical, if not word for word. Same with the Congregationalists.

This was the Protestant perspective. Now, today, this previously ubiquitous understanding of Rome among Protestants has fallen out of favor as being too narrow-minded, too closed off and just frankly downright mean. But the proposals of so many today, evangelicals, Protestants, that we should have unity with Rome and accommodate her doctrines, it cannot be accepted. We cannot have peace with Rome. Yes, the Reformation began 500 years ago and many people will say the Reformation is over, but I would disagree the Reformation is not over.

It continues because as I hope to make plain this afternoon, and there's so much more that I could go into, the division is not less today. It is worse. Rome has deteriorated even further. It has removed itself even more from the truth than in the days of Martin Luther and John Calvin. We are not closer.

We are farther apart than we have ever been. And so we cannot say peace with Rome. We cannot say the Reformation is over. At the same time, I don't want us to simply be anti-Catholic or anti-Roman out of mere tradition or worse ignorance. Rather I want us to see that there is a reason for our disagreements.

There is a reason it's not simply we don't like the way they do things, it's that they've rejected the truth. I want us to understand that. And so I felt with the election of the new so-called pope this week, I felt it important to take our afternoon to examine a few of these massive fault lines that separate us from the Roman Church. And when I say Roman Church, I don't mean it in the same sense that our pastor used the phrase Roman Church this morning. He was talking about the actual church that Paul was writing to in Rome.

When I say the Roman church, I'm talking about the institution that has now Leo the 14th at its head. I don't like to call it the Catholic Church because we are Catholic. Catholic simply means universal, kata halas, according to the whole, the entirety. All Christians are Catholic in that sense. Rome has set itself up as the supreme entity that governs all churches, in a sense, apostatized and abandoned the truth.

So I don't like calling them Catholic, they're not Catholic, they're Roman or perhaps Papist, but I might slip out the word Catholic once or twice, please forgive me. But I want us to understand these divisions are not mere taste or preference. These are real issues of vital importance. And I want us to be able to affirm what I just read from our confession of faith. Now we can debate, is he that anti-Christ or an anti-Christ?

Well, we can talk about that another time, but I want us to understand that there is nothing less than the gospel itself as at stake when we examine this issue. So I want us to look at three major points of division where I believe Rome is not only an error, but commits blasphemy. Blasphemous errors on the part of Rome. First, the papacy. Second, the mass.

And third, the denial of justification by faith alone. And as I said earlier, I'm actually going to be focusing primarily on the first two. Now of those three, really the most important is the denial of the justification by faith alone, which we'll look at. But I'm not going to focus as much on that because I think most of us probably have a pretty good handle on that. These other two issues, the papacy and the mass, are not examined as often, and so I thought it would be helpful to drill down into these in particular this afternoon.

First, the papacy. Now the the new pope has taken the pontifical name Leo XIV. And interestingly, he's the first American to become the head of the Roman Church. And when his name was announced, I thought that was very interesting, Pope Leo XIV. Now obviously there were 13 other popes before him that took the name Leo.

There are a few that are actually very consequential throughout church history. The very first pope called Pope Leo, Pope Leo the First, he's also known as Pope Leo the Great. And he personally, this is actually a really fascinating story, he personally met with Attila the Hun in 452 A.D. And in a face-to-face conversation with the barbarian leader convinced him to turn his armies around and leave Italy. And we have no idea what he said.

It was a private meeting and they leave and Attila's like, all right, we're out. It's kind of cool. It's kind of a cool story. No idea what he said. Now he's called Pope Leo I, but when we say that, we can look at what he did and say that was awesome.

That was really cool that he did that. And he also actually wrote interesting things that were often true. When we read someone being the Pope in those early centuries, don't think in your mind immediately the papal system as it exists today. It did not exist. Just because he has the title Pope does not mean it was the same as it is today.

In the mid-400s, the papacy was in its infancy at best. And really, in my estimation, from my own reading and study, I would agree with those who say that the idea of the Pope as it exists today didn't even really begin to take shape until the 600s after Gregory the Great who Gregory the Great interesting he was Bishop of Rome Pope Gregory but even while he was Bishop of Rome, he asserted that anyone who took the title universal bishop is a precursor to Antichrist and a follower of Lucifer. Interesting tidbit. But it's not really until you get to the 10th or 11th century that the papacy really comes to full fruition as we understand it today in a sense, even then it's changed. And it really reached its full flower under another Leo, Leo the 14th, or sorry, Leo the 9th.

Under Leo the 9th, The papacy expanded and the church at Rome claimed far greater authority than it had up to that point. He had served himself as the head of the entire church, not just the Western church, and he wrote an official letter excommunicating the bishop or the patriarch of Constantinople in 1054. Now, he actually died before the letter reached Constantinople, but they didn't know that. And the bishop of Constantinople responded by excommunicating him and the Western Church. And so we end up in 1054, one of the most important dates of church history, the official, what's called the Great Schism between the East and the Western Churches.

And this was, this happened in Leo IX was instrumental in this formal split between what became Eastern Orthodoxy and the Roman Church in 1054. And nearly 500 years later, there's another Leo, Leo 10th, who after permitting and encouraging the sales of indulgences in 1521 excommunicated Martin Luther who protested said indulgences in his 95 theses and thus Pope Leo the 10th formalized the divide that became the Protestant Reformation. I only hope and pray that this Leo also sees a schism like this under his rule. I pray that God destroys the Roman Church. So a little bit of background there, but how did the papacy develop?

I touched on it briefly, but there's more to it. Now the word pope comes to us from Latin and it basically just means father. You know that that's the term that they use for their bishops, their priests, father. And this was used in the early church quite prolifically. Many bishops were called Pope, not just the Bishop of Rome.

In fact, the Bishop of Rome was one of the least frequently called Pope in the early writings. And we know from the earliest documents of church history that there was no single bishop in Rome at the very beginning of the church. For instance, 1st Clement, one of the earliest non-New Testament books, it's written from the elders at Rome to the church at Corinth, rebuking them because they just didn't get the message, apparently, enough with Paul. There's nothing in 1st Clement or anything else in those first couple centuries of an all-powerful, what's called the monarchial episcopate or a king-like bishop. There's nothing like that in the first several centuries of Christian history.

It takes until the late 200s you begin to see it and it very quickly spreads. So by the mid 300s, it is pretty much the dominant view. But It's clearly not in the New Testament and it's not in that first generation or two of church fathers. Now the Council of Nicaea, again a very vitally important date for church history, Hopefully everyone should know when the Council of Nicaea was. I'm gonna start quizzing kids about it, I think.

But the Council of Nicaea, 325 AD, spoke actually, primarily it spoke to the issue of Arianism, this claim by Arius the bishop that Jesus was a creation and not God but it also in the canons of Nicaea spoke to the issue the authority and the extent of the power of bishops. Canon or rule number six from the Nicene Council says that the Bishop of Rome is equal to, not supreme, over the bishops of Alexandria and Antioch. They're equal. They rule over their surrounding areas because by this time that idea of a monarchial bishop has developed but they rule over their areas immediately surrounding them they have no authority over other bishops over other major bishops that is and consider really it should be obvious when we consider the whole issue surrounding Nicaea, obviously there's no single pope over the whole church, because why even have the council then? It makes no sense if there is some all-powerful pope in charge of everything for the people to say, well, we've got this guy saying Jesus is actually a creature, why don't we go and ask the infallible vicar of Christ what he thinks about it?

Of course, that didn't happen. They gathered some 300 bishops together to examine the issue and eventually excommunicate areas. And interestingly, the Bishop of Rome didn't even go to the Council of Nicaea. He sent a couple delegates and had very little actually to do with the Council. And then after the Council, because Councils in history actually do very little, they accomplish very little, after the Council of Nicaea, Arianism exploded.

It flourished to the point where even the Bishop of Rome was a semi-Aryan shortly after the Council of Nicaea. But then, so the Council of Nicaea says that the Bishop of Rome has equal authority compared to the Bishop of Antioch, Bishop of Alexandria. There is no supreme pontiff in Rome. That's simply a farce. When you hear 2, 000 years of unchanged tradition in church history, it is absolute historical nonsense.

It's not true, they're lying. The Council of Chalcedon in its 28th canon reaffirmed Nicaea stating that the Bishop of Constantinople should also be given the same authority as the Bishop of Rome since both Constantinople and Rome are royal cities or seats of imperial power. You will look in vain for anything like the modern affirmations regarding the Bishop of Rome as a supreme leader of all Christendom until you really get to about the 700s. And even then there was debate. There was a lot of arguing back and forth.

But in the late 700s, a document surfaces that tells the story and recounts how the Emperor Constantine the Great in the 300s granted to the Bishop of Rome the rights and privileges of the Emperor, that he granted to the Bishop of Rome, the city of Rome itself and the surrounding countryside. He gave him all Italy and even the entirety of the Western Empire, and gave him the authority to rule as universal bishop. This document is called the Donation of Constantine. And of course, it's a fraud. Constantine didn't write it, Constantine didn't do this.

It appeared in the 700s, 400 years after Constantine was dead. It's a forgery. And they've actually known it's a forgery since at least the late Middle Ages. And even Rome today admits it's a forgery. The donation of Constantine is almost singularly what Rome built its foundation on regarding the papacy.

But it was a forgery. The foundation was removed. Now the papacy is just hanging in midair. There's nothing to support it. And yet this document was used as a bludgeon against kings and emperors for centuries to beat Rome into submission to the Bishop of Rome.

Because that document not only recounts the supposed donation by Constantine to the bishop, recounts the donation of Constantine that he supposedly gave to the bishop, but also recounts the curses that God will bring on any who dare contradict him, of course. And so we go from a bishop in Rome in the 500 saying that anyone who claims the title universal bishop is demonic to 600 years later, the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV, or sorry, Henry, yeah, Henry IV kneeling in the snow for three days as penance to the Pope because he dared appoint bishops that the Pope didn't like. Almost singularly because of this document. So again, this whole idea of, we've seen it in the news, if you watch the news, the coverage of the election of the new pope at all, the pundits and the people being interviewed. Two thousand years of unchanging church tradition and history is blah blah blah blah blah whatever.

It's just simply a farce. Even the election of the Pope has changed. For about the first thousand years the Bishop of Rome, like every other bishop, was elected by the Church. The bishops were elected by their people. But as part of the power grab in Rome, they created what is now known as the College of Cardinals, and so that the cardinals elect the Bishop of Rome, as we saw this week.

Now why is this office blasphemous? Why does the confession have such harsh language that the pope is not just a silly idea or an extra biblical office but rather the antichrist That has raised itself up in opposition to Christ Well because as I read in Colossians there is only one head of the church There is only one head of the church, Jesus Christ. He is the head of the body, the church who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things, he, Jesus, might have the preeminence. He is supreme. No pastor, bishop, whatever term you want to give, any mere mortal, none of them are supreme over the church.

Only Christ is. So this office of the papacy and really the whole magisterial system that it goes along with it assumes an authority that is not its to take. And with this assumed authority it also claims titles that are appropriate only to God. Consider what the Pope is often called, Holy Father. The only Holy Father is God the Father.

And that title is actually lifted straight from John's Gospel. The only time those words appear in one title, Holy Father, appears in John's Gospel in John chapter 17 where Jesus says, Holy Father, keep them through your name, those whom you've given me. The only Holy Father is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Another title that the Pope goes by, the Vicar of Christ. Now, vicar comes from the word vicarious which means substitute or in a technical sense a deputy who acts on another's behalf.

But who is the deputy or a substitute in a sense who operates on behalf of Christ? It's no man, it's the Holy Spirit. Jesus said he would send another comforter, another one like him. That's the vicar of Christ, the Spirit of God working in his church. Again John recounts Jesus' words, when he, the Spirit of truth has come, He will guide you into all truth.

He will glorify me for He has taken what is mine and will declare it to you." It's the role of the Spirit, not of a bishop. And also, not just the Pope, but any priest in the Roman system, but also the Pope because he is supposedly a priest are called an alter Christus Latin another Christ Another Christ Because in their theology by virtue of the priestly authority this the priest is an intercessor between God and the people. And so he acts as Christ and offers sacrifice on their behalf in the mass, which we'll talk about in a second. Yet there's only one intercessor for the people of God in the New Covenant. It's Christ.

1 Timothy 2.5, there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus. Another term for another Christ in Greek would be Antichristos, Antichrist. That's what antichrist actually means. It means instead of or another Christ. It doesn't mean opposed to, which we think of when we see anti.

It means in place of. It is truly an antichrist office. It is blasphemous. These titles, these prerogatives, these claims of supposed authority wielded by the Bishop of Rome, they're all a farce. It is blasphemous to the triune God and far beyond the scriptural bounds of any ecclesiastical authority.

We see nothing about this anywhere in all of scripture. It is a complete, blasphemous invention by man. That's the papacy, the mass, or the or oftentimes they'll use the term Eucharist. I actually like the term Eucharist. It's a beautiful word.

It comes from Greek Eucharist, I give thanks. And that word Eucharist is used throughout church history to describe the Lord's Supper because that's part of the first thing Jesus does. He takes the bread, he takes the cup, he gives thanks for them. And it's a reminder of what God has done and so we ought to be thankful as Christ thanked God. So I don't have a problem with the term Eucharist itself, it's a beautiful word, it's a useful term, but what Rome means by it is the problem or the mass.

Now there is a tendency today as in all these things of trying to downplay the differences between Rome and Protestants on the issue of the Lord's Supper, just like everything else. And this is somewhat complicated because among Protestants there was a very wide range of views about the Lord's Supper. On the one hand, you've got the nearly Catholic view held by some extraordinarily traditional Lutherans and Anglicans to an almost dismissive bare memorial view held by most evangelicals. And even among the Reformed, there are various nuances, but I think we can safely summarize the Reform view as what's called spiritual presence and that is that Christ is present with his people in a spiritual non-physical but unique way when they partake in the ordinance of the Supper. Because the Spirit uses it to sanctify the participants and to point them to Christ.

Not by virtue of the bread and wine itself, but because of what they point to, the object of our faith, Christ. And so for us, It is a memorial, but it's not merely a memorial. It is also a means of grace, not because of anything in the elements themselves, but because of God working in it through faith in the elect. But for Rome, Christ is present in the supper, in the mass, not through a spiritual presence, but through physical presence. Using Aristotelian categories of accidents and substances, so accidents and substances, the accident is, we'll say, how you perceive something.

The externals, what it looks like, what it smells like, tastes like, feels like, things like that, whereas The substance is the inner reality that you may not be able to perceive. Using these categories, the Roman Catholic Church teaches a doctrine known as transubstantiation. That is that when the priest says the words of consecration, haucas corpus maem, which fun fact that's most likely where the phrase Hocus Pocus comes from, people making fun of the words of consecration by the Roman Catholics. When the priest says, this is my body, in Latin, well, there's even an argument about that among them today, but when the words of consecration are said, supposedly the bread and wine are transformed literally into the body and blood of Jesus, even though their external appearance remains unchanged. So in the Roman Mass, they're thinking what they teach you is that you are literally eating Jesus.

Completely abusing, misunderstanding Jesus' language in John 6, 1 Corinthians 11, all these things, the institution of the Supper, a complete abuse of those passages. And because the elements become the literal body and blood of Jesus, the mass is not merely, it's not a memorial, it's not a representation of what Jesus did, it is a re-presentation of what Jesus did. And they actually emphasize that in the catechism that is not a representation is a re-presentation of it and what do we mean by that? The Roman Church teaches that the mass is a sacrifice that takes away your sins because when the priest says the words of consecration, he calls Jesus down from heaven and offers his sacrifice again on the table. That the once bloody sacrifice on the cross is done again in an unbloody manner.

And this is part of the reason why the priests are called an alter Christus, another Christ, Because in Roman teaching, the priest has such great authority that he is able to call Christ down from heaven and re-offer his sacrifice in the mass. In the words of one Roman Catholic apologist, and this is a little bit of an extended quote but listen to this this is what they teach quote the priest brings Christ down from heaven and renders him present on our altar as the eternal victim for the sins of man, not once but a thousand times. The priest speaks and lo, Christ the eternal and omnipotent God bows his head in humble obedience to the priest's command. I get sick to my stomach reading that. And enraged.

Back to the quote, of what sublime dignity is the office of the Christian priest who is thus privileged to act as ambassador and vice regent of Christ on earth. He continues the essential ministry of Christ. He teaches the faithful with the authority of Christ. He pardons the penitent sinner with the power of Christ. He offers up again the same sacrifices of adoration and atonement, which Christ offered on Calvary.

No wonder that the name which spiritual writers are especially fond of applying to the priest is that of Alter Christus, for the priest is and should be another Christ." That is horrifying blasphemy. And this idea of transubstantiation, that's why you have these comical stories that come to us from the Middle Ages of, for instance, bees building a hive around a piece of consecrated hosts, a piece of the bread, and the bees build a hive and the bees begin worshiping the host. Or why later on, eventually, the Roman Church denied the wine to the congregation? Because you're passing, or it was most often a single cup and it would be passed from person to person. And you've got these rough European farmers who just grab something, gulp it and pass it on.

They're spilling the blood of God all over the floor. And what are we going to do? The wine's been spilled, we can't let the mice come and so the priest gets down and licks the wine off the floor because it's the blood of God. Which is why our confession later on says that that's ridiculous. It actually calls that it is an abuse to withhold the cup from the people.

Because that was still happening in the time of the Reformation. Our confession in chapter 30 on the Lord's Supper paragraph 2 says, In this ordinance Christ is not offered up to his father, nor any real sacrifice made at all for the remission of sins for the quick and the dead, but only a memorial of that one offering up of himself by himself on the cross once for all, and a spiritual oblation of all possible praise unto God for the same, so that the popish sacrifice of the mass, as they call it, is most abominable, injurious to Christ's own sacrifice, the alone propitiation for all the sins of the elect. It is a blasphemous idea that Christ's once and for all sacrifice must be done over and over and over again. And on top of this, in official Roman doctrine, you can partake of Christ physically hundreds and hundreds of times. You literally eat and drink the body and blood of the Son of God and still die in your sins and be lost.

Because though it's a perpetuity sacrifice, it actually takes away sins. That's what they're saying. You take the mass, your sins are taken away. But then you go out and you commit a mortal sin, you destroy the grace of justification. And though you may have participated in the mass hundreds of times throughout your life, if you die having committed a mortal sin and never confessed it to a priest you are lost.

So it's a perpetuity sacrifice that doesn't save. That is why this doctrine is so damning. There's no assurance at all of forgiveness. It blasphemy claims to re-offer Christ in an unbloody manner, but without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins. It's an unbloody sacrifice, but without the shedding of blood, there's no forgiveness of sins.

So even the whole idea in itself is inconsistent, But it never actually saves those who partake for sure. So far from being simply another way to celebrate the Lord's Supper, it's not simply a matter of taste or preference or minutia. It's not that. It is a blasphemous counterfeit. Christ is blasphemed.

God is mocked and the people are deceived. So don't fall for the canard that it's simply another way of doing what we just did a little while ago. It's a totally different institution with a totally different purpose and contrary to all of scripture about Christ's work and the ordinances he's given his church. Now quickly, I wanna touch on justification. I think I'm already past my time.

Please be patient with me. I wanna hit this really quickly. The third major fault line, the denial of justification by faith alone. The doctrine of justification is the cornerstone of the Christian Church. How is a man made right with God?

As Luther said, that is the article in which the church rises and falls. How is someone made right with God? Is it faith alone or is it faith plus something else? The scriptures teach and we believe that justification is by faith alone in Christ alone. That is the only means by which we can have this forgiveness of sins.

And that was the main part of the debate that launched the Reformation. How is a man made right with God? And Luther was excommunicated over it when he said it is by faith alone. And then the Council of Trent met from 1545 to 1563. I wish Trent was here.

I like making fun of him for this. Poking him for having the name Trent. But the Council of Trent met from 1545 to 1563. This was the Roman Catholic response to the Reformation. And this council, in response to the Protestant Reformation, formally anathematized the Protestant perspective of justification by faith alone.

Anathema. Anathema. May God damn you if you believe this. That's what anathema means. The Council of Trent affirmed that grace and faith are necessary.

The very first canon of session six of the Council of Trent says if anyone says that they can be justified apart from faith let them be anathema and we're like okay off to a good start and so but while they affirm that grace and faith were necessary they denied they were sufficient rather it affirmed really was a semi-palagian view that grace is necessary but that grace must be earned through your cooperation with God through good works and the preparation of your own soul through the Roman sacramental system. And so, session six, the Council of Trends, the session that dealt with justification, rule Nine, if anyone saith that by faith alone the impious is justified in such a way as to mean that nothing else is required to cooperate in order to obtain the grace of justification and that it is not in any way necessary that he be prepared and disposed by the movement of his own will and when they say disposed by the movement of their own will or prepared they don't mean you think rightly, repent of your sins, they mean go to the sacraments. That's what they mean understand that by.

If anyone believes that by faith alone the impious is justified, let him be aathema. Let him be damned. Canon 11. If anyone sayeth that men are justified either by the sole imputation of the justice or the righteousness of Christ or by the sole remission of sins to the exclusion of the grace and the charity which is poured forth in their hearts by the Holy Ghost and is inherent in them. Again understand the language they're using.

They're talking about an infusion of grace through the sacramental system. You have to receive these things that God changes you and infuses righteousness into you. If anyone says that men are justified to the exclusion of these things or even that the grace whereby we are justified is only the favor of God, let him be anathema. If anyone else say if anyone says that justifying faith is nothing else but confidence in divine mercy, which remits sins for Christ's sake, or that this confidence alone is that whereby we are justified, let him be anathema. If you say your hope is only Christ, you're anathema.

That's what that canon is saying. Or canon 24, if anyone says that this justification received is not preserved and increased before God through good works, but that said works are merely fruits and signs of justification obtained and not a cause of the increase thereof, let him be anathema." Rome has anathematized the gospel itself in this council. There is no gospel here. It blasphemes God by rejecting His Word and the only sufficient work to save sinners, the cross of Christ. Now there are so many other issues we could look at.

All of this ultimately springs from a rejection of the authority of Scripture alone. That is really the foundation. Why do we believe in Sola Scriptura? Because this chains us to what we can and cannot believe. If this is your standard, you will not come up with all these things.

And so the Roman rejection of Sola Scriptura is really the fountainhead of all these errors. Year and a half ago I did a session on Sola Scriptura. If you want more information, maybe listen to that. That might be helpful. There are other issues, not just a rejection of Sola Scriptura, but an addition to scripture.

They have a larger Bible than we have. They add the Deuterocanonical works and yes they added them. I'm sick to death of hearing Catholics say Luther took books out of the Bible. It simply didn't happen. The Mariolatry of the Roman Church and veneration of other saints.

I'm astonished at some of the things I read among Roman Catholics when it comes to the issue of who Mary is and the saints. I know I annoy some people by saying we ought to call Mary a theotokos because that's not any issue about Mary That's because the one that she carried was truly God But once you go beyond calling Mary the bearer of God and start leaving her co-redeemer We just label her an intercessor, a co-redeemer and a co-mediator. It's utter blasphemy. So all of this to say, and as I said, there's so much more ground we could cover. I want us to remember why we are what we are.

Why we are and what it means that we are a Reformed Church. Reformed according to the Word of God. And understand that God. And understand that this division is not over. And it still matters.

Roman Catholics, members of the Roman Church, are there some that are saved? Probably because justification by faith alone is true. But it would be in spite of what they're taught. But as a whole, it is an apostate church. It is an apostate group.

And they shouldn't be considered Christians of another stripe. They should be considered lost that we should evangelize. Because they have no saving gospel. They have no assurance of salvation. They have a system that does everything it can to hide the truth under layers and layers of deception, dishonesty, and man-made tradition.

So hold fast to what you have. Hold fast to the Word of God. Hold fast to your Reformed faith, not because it's Reformed, but because it is scriptural. Let's pray. Our Father we thank you for your Word.

We thank you that you have spoken authoritatively. May we rest in your sufficient word and help us Lord to examine ourselves, examine our own hearts and our own works and traditions to see where we have possibly departed from Scripture. And help us Lord to seek to order everything according to your Word and not man-made tradition so we can honor and glorify you as you desire. And Lord, we pray that you would save many who are under the bondage of the Roman system, that you would shine the light of the gospel on those who are in darkness, even while they think they follow you. God, may you be merciful and bring them to yourself.

In Jesus' name, amen. We are dismissed.