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The Conversion of a Catholic Priest Vincent O'Shaughnessy From Dead Religion To New Life In Christ! As a very small boy I remember rolling out of bed to my knees each morning to say my prayers. We began with the Morning Offering, which my mother taught me, together with the Our Father and Hail Mary. I still remember the Morning Offering going like this: "Oh Jesus, through the most pure heart of Mary. . .etc." To me this meant that to get to Jesus I had to go through Mary. I had no other way to Jesus. I also have...

Morning and Evening Charles H. Spurgeon March 3, 2015 Morning Reading I have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction. —Isaiah 48:10 Comfort thyself, tried believer, with this thought: God saith, "I have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction." Does not the word come like a soft shower, assuaging the fury of the flame? Yea, is it not an asbestos armour, against which the heat hath no power? Let affliction come-God has chosen me. Poverty, thou mayst stride in at my door, but God is in the house already, and He has chosen me. Sickness, thou mayst intrude, but...

I grew up in a loving family who attended the Catholic Church regularly. Not just my immediate family, mind you(!) - but my entire family (aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, etc.) was Catholic! I was a regular participant and played the organ at church and also was a leader in the "folk choir" for most of my teenage years. In short - I was as "Catholic" as they come! I never doubted my faith because I was told to just believe everything the Church taught me without question. The Pope was supreme in his authority, and the priests and nuns were...

NEW HAVEN, Conn. (RNS) The collected works of Jonathan Edwards, the 18th-century preacher and one of America’s most famous theologians, are now available for download thanks to Logos Bible Software. But for those who don’t want to cough up $1,289.95 to purchase them, there’s good news: The Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale Divinity School lets you view them online for free. The colonial preacher was instrumental in America’s Great Awakening and is known for fiery sermons such as “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” The 26-volume collection, “The Works of Jonathan Edwards,” comprises more than 10,000 sermons, articles...

The First Presbyterian Church of Boulder is asking its congregation to vote on whether to end affiliation with the Presbyterian Church (USA), in favor of a California-based evangelical Presbyterian association that defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman. The First Presbyterian Church of Boulder, 1820 15th St., well known for a large-scale feed of Boulder's homeless population every Thanksgiving, had originally been scheduled to take a vote of its congregation Feb. 22, but that was postponed due to weather. And although absentee voting has been ongoing, the bulk of the balloting is now scheduled for its...

The New Testament is clear about the nature of saving faith. “For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Law” (Romans 3:28). “A man is not justified by the works of the Law but through faith in Christ Jesus . . . since by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified” (Galatians 2:16). “But when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared, He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing...

The claim that justification comes sola fide was central to the debates of the Reformation. When the matter of sola fide is raised, however, attention tends to focus on the first of these words: alone. We remember that the reformers taught that justification is by faith alone while Roman Catholics countered that justification is by faith and good works. Thus, it may seem, both sides affirmed the importance of faith, but disagreed simply on whether anything had to be added to faith in order to secure justification. This is true in a sense-both sides did speak of the necessity of...

Now I will relate how You set me free from a craving for sexual gratification which fettered me like a tight-drawn chain, and from my enslavement to worldly affairs: I will confess to Your name, O Lord, my helper and my redeemer.[1]Last week we looked at Augustine’s famous maxim that the human soul is restless until it finds its rest and satisfaction in the Triune God. This week, I want to look at Augustine’s own account of coming to that saving rest.While he had been sitting under the Gospel preaching of Ambrose of Milan, Augustine of Hippo had the occasion...

6 But the righteousness based on faith speaks as follows:“ DO not say in your heart, ‘ Who will ascend into heaven? ’ (that is, to bring Christ down), 7 or ‘ Who will descend into the abyss? ’ (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead).” 8 But what does it say? “ The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart”—that is, the word of faith which we are preaching, 9 that if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead,...

Thomas Hobbes said “The Papacy is not other than the Ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof”. History has borne out this statement. The question of “authority” is at the heart of every discussion between Protestants and Roman Catholics since the time of the Reformation, and yet the Church of Rome (“Roman Catholicism”) bases all of its claims to authority upon “apostolic succession” … the notion that there was an unbroken succession of “successors” from the time of the Apostles till now. Bryan Cross has said “The Church always had the concept of apostolic succession.”,...

The Foolishness of the Cross INTRODUCTION (1 Cor. 1:18-25) I have had the pleasure of preaching the gospel open-air two times per month for about six years. Every time I preach to a group of God-hating sinners and hear their heckling, I am reminded of just how scandalous they think the gospel really is. Many have told me outright how foolish it is to think that a crucified Jewish man from ancient Palestine was the very incarnation of God Almighty and that by having faith in His death, burial, and resurrection, you can have eternal life. Yes indeed, repentance and...

"in purgatory the souls of those 'who died in the charity of God and truly repentant, but who had not made satisfaction with adequate penance for their sins and omissions,' are cleansed after death with punishments designed to purge away their debt." - Second Vatican Council, "Sacred Liturgy", "Apostolic Constitution on the Revision of Indulgences", no. 3 "For Christ also died for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, in order that He might bring us to God" - 1 Peter 3:18 The Roman Catholic Church teaches that Christians may have to suffer in Purgatory before going to...

It was a well-nigh universal trope of Reformation rhetoric that the Reformers were the catholics who had to defend orthodoxy and catholicity against the sectarianism of the Roman church. Luther disputed the Catholic claim that obedience to Rome was the definition of catholicity, and disputed it on the basis of the universal testimony of the church (Unitive Protestantism, 65). Calvin defended the Reformers against the charge that they were schismatics: “Verily the wolves complain against the lambs” (quoted, 73). The 1559 French Confession distinguished the true church from “all other sects who call themselves the church” (quoted, 80), a thinly...

“The Lord our Righteousness.” — Jeremiah 23:6. It will always give a Christian the greatest calm, quiet, ease, and peace, to think of the perfect righteousness of Christ. How often are the saints of God downcast and sad! I do not think they ought to be. I do not think they would be if they could always see their perfection in Christ. There are some who are always talking about corruption, and the depravity of the heart, and the innate evil of the soul. This is quite true, but why not go a little further, and remember that we are...

The Kootenai County Republican County Republican Central Committee last night rejected a resolution to declare Idaho a "Christian state" – a proposed resolution that had drawn national ridicule, including comparisons to ISIS. The S-R’s D.F. Oliveria reports in his “Huckleberries Online” blog that the resolution offered by Precinct Committeeman Hans Neumann was opposed by more than two-thirds of the Central Committee. Precinct Committeeman Bjorn Handeen offered a motion not to consider the resolution at all, and it carried overwhelmingly. The meeting attracted a standing-room-only crowd.

The words of Jesus in Matthew 7:21-23 are often quoted, but commonly misapplied. In this familiar passage our Lord declared, "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?' Then I will tell them plainly, 'I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!'" Unfortunately, this passage is often presented to genuine believers...

Ever since Eve encountered Satan’s barrage of doubt and denial (Gen. 3:1-7), mankind has continued to question God’s Word. Unfortunately, Eve had little or no help in sorting through her intellectual obstacles to full faith in God’s self-disclosure (Gen. 2:16,17). Now the Scripture certainly has more than enough content to be interrogated, considering that it’s comprised of 66 books, 1,189 chapters, 31,173 verses, and 774,746 words. When you open your English translation to read or study, you might have asked in the past or are currently asking, “How can I be sure this is the pure and true Word of...

Godly sorrow produces repentance leading to salvation… —2 Corinthians 7:10 Conviction of sin is best described in the words:My sins, my sins, my Savior, How sad on Thee they fall.Conviction of sin is one of the most uncommon things that ever happens to a person. It is the beginning of an understanding of God. Jesus Christ said that when the Holy Spirit came He would convict people of sin (see John 16:8). And when the Holy Spirit stirs a person’s conscience and brings him into the presence of God, it is not that person’s relationship with others that bothers him...

 “[Mankind] is under condemnation: ‘As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one: there is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one’ (Rom. 3:10-12). Man is not on trial; he is a culprit under sentence. No pleading will avail; no excuses will be accepted. The present issue between God and the sinner is, will man bow to God’s righteous verdict?This is where the Gospel meets us. It comes to us as to...

“The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.” – 1 Timothy 1:15 Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield (1851-1921) “Christ Jesus came to save sinners.Not, then, merely to prepare salvation for them; to open to them a pathway to salvation; to remove the obstacles in the way of their salvation; to proclaim as a teacher a way of salvation; to introduce as a ruler conditions of life in which clean living becomes for the first time possible; to bring motives to holy action to bear upon us;...