Do Roman Catholics Worship Mary and Other Saints?

Do Roman Catholics worship Mary and other saints? That's just one of the questions we'll be answering on today's edition of Core Christianity. Well, hi, it's Bill Meyer along with Pastor Adriel Sanchez, and this is the radio program where we answer your questions about the Bible and the Christian life every day. Our phone lines are open, and you can always leave a voicemail for us as well. Here's the number. It's 833-THECORE.

That's 1-833-843-2673. You can send us an email as well at questions at corechristianity.com. Love to hear your question, whether it's dealing with the scriptures, whether it's dealing with doctrine, theology, you name it, we'd love to hear from you. Let's go to Linda from Kansas. Linda, what's your question for Adriel? Yes, my question is, I've been a Catholic for 40 some years, and I'm very disturbed by the direction that we are going in the Catholic Church with the Pope blessing same-sex couples, and I'm just very torn. I just don't know which way to turn.

If you could give me some insight, please. Thank you. Hey, Linda. Thank you for calling us, and of course, you know, I'm coming at this from a particular perspective. I'm a Protestant minister, pastor, but I have been keeping an eye on, you know, the recent sort of shifts that we're seeing in the Roman Catholic Church, and, you know, I've read the document that came out related to priests blessing same-sex couples, and it seemed like there was a lot of, well, a lot of words to try to explain or to justify this sort of approach, and, you know, trying to walk a really fine line between, are we blessing, we're not blessing the act per se, but we're blessing them as individuals pursuing, you know, the grace of God in their life and so forth, and I also have a real issue with the whole approach, because I think if you just read the New Testament, if you read the words of the apostles, the way they talk about these kinds of issues, like the apostle Paul, for example, in Romans chapter 1, he seems to stress there the need to call people to repentance, and the problem with not only those who practice sins like homosexuality, but those who give a hearty approval, and in the Old Testament, Linda, one of the problems that God frequently brought up with regard to the prophets, the false prophets, in Israel is that they were unwilling to call people to repentance. They would say, peace, peace, everything's fine, God's not going to judge you, peace, peace, but there was no peace. That's what Jeremiah says, that's what God says through the prophet Jeremiah, and so with you, I'm grieved, because I want the word of God to be faithfully taught, proclaimed, preached, and I think that we can compromise in subtle ways or in very, you know, just clear ways, and there does seem to be a compromise here, and that's why we stress, I stress the importance of being in a church where the word of God is the ultimate authority, not the pope, not even church tradition, but that everything is subject to the infallible rule of faith, the word of the true and the living God, and we all stand in need of its correction. This was one of the great, this is one of the great driving forces behind the Reformation of the 16th century, is we need to go back to the word, because it's easy for us as individuals and even for churches to drift away from the teaching of the Bible, and so my encouragement to you, Linda, would be to dig into the word, the scriptures, to read them, to be comforted by them, to listen to the words of the apostles themselves, and to let those words guide and direct your steps, and to be in a church that focuses on those words, too. May the Lord bless you, and may God keep all of us faithful according to his word. Linda, thanks so much for your call, for listening to Core Christianity. You know, it just breaks my heart. She wants to do the right thing, and she's, you know, traditionally, as she said, a Catholic, and looking at some of the things coming out from the current pope, and just really feeling concerned.

Is this a place she wants to stay? Well, for, you know, and my heart also breaks, because you see this in various traditions, and of course here, Linda, you know, being a Roman Catholic for over 40 years, there's a real close association, attachment there, and so that's just hard, right? You feel like you're leaving behind so much, and especially with individuals. When we put our confidence in a person, in a man, whether that's the pope, or the pastor of your mega church, or the pastor of your small church, you quickly realize, okay, they're not infallible, and they're also, I mean, this person is also a sinner. We need our hope to be in the word of God, in the Lord himself. Now, that's not an excuse for when pastors or popes or leaders fail.

They need to be held accountable according to the word of God, but it just goes back to, again, the importance of scripture as the ultimate authority, and letting the word of God guide us as believers and as the church. And so, yeah, pray for Linda, and just that the Lord would give her direction and guidance and courage to make the right decision. Amen. Thanks for that, Adriel.

Good word. This is Quora Christianity with Pastor Adriel Sanchez. Love to hear from you if you have a question about the Bible or the Christian life. You can call our voicemail 24 hours a day and leave your question there.

833-THECORE is the number. Let's go to Shirley calling in from South Dakota. Shirley, what's your question for Adriel? Hi, Pastor.

Thank you so much for taking my call. I have some concerns about my pastor. I was a deacon in my church for almost eight years.

I recently just stepped down. He has been our pastor now for two years. The first thing is he refuses to speak or to teach or to preach anything about revelations or the end time, and I ask him about that, and he said it was because it would scare people away. He does very soft sermons, and right now he's teaching us out of a book that somebody authored.

That's his sermon. He does bring God into it. He does bring scripture into it, but I have concerns about that, and he's tried to take Baptist out of our name, and our elders refused to let him do that. He's allowing people to sell donuts and things inside the church. Now that goes to the youth ministry, but myself and a lot of other people in our church don't agree with that, and we're concerned about that. It's like he's just gradually trying to make some changes that I'm concerned about, and I have actually gone to other churches thinking that I would leave. That's one reason why I stepped down from being a deacon, because I didn't feel like I could do that and be a deacon and feel this way about my pastor and what's going on, because I love my church. I love the people in my church, and I like this man. He's a very good speaker, but I'm just concerned, and I don't know what to do. I'm to the point that I don't know if I should leave or if I should stay.

I don't know. I feel like things are happening that are drawing us away and are changing away from God. That's what I feel like is happening in my heart. Dear Sister Shirley, let me pray for you and for this church that I can tell you love and have spent, you know, years serving, and let's just ask the Lord for His wisdom and for help. Father, we come before you. Thank you for my sister Shirley. Thank you for her concern and for her love for your church, and not just for your church, Lord Jesus, but also for your Word. And God, we live in a world that is drifting away from your Word and has drifted away from your Word, and if there's anything that we need to be tethered to as your people and as pastors, as ministers of the gospel, it's your Holy Word. And so God, keep us faithful.

Be with my sister Shirley. I pray that you would fill her with your spirit and grant her wisdom, Lord, that in her love for your church she would be able to speak honestly about how she feels, and Lord, that the leadership there, that the pastor there would listen, truly listen, to your servant Shirley and be willing, O Lord, to consider what she has to say. I pray, Lord God, that there would be no sense of division or, you know, tearing away in an unhealthy sense, Lord, in a way that could be or lead to sin, but that in these conversations that there would be charity, that there would be clarity, and ultimately, Lord God, that there would be a passion for your Word, not just in our sister, Lord, but also in this pastor too. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

Again, Shirley, I can just tell, you know, listening to you how hard this is, and I get it a hundred percent. I mean, you fall in love with the church and the people there, and you serve, and you invest, and then you begin to see things that are hard, that are, you know, you begin to wonder, okay, what's happening here? There are changes that are being made. Now, change is not always a bad thing. Sometimes, you know, there can be changes that are made that are, you know, it's neither here nor there.

Maybe I don't prefer, you know, that the furniture is being moved around in this way, but whatever, right? This is not striking at the vitals of what we believe as Christians. Personally, I don't, you know, I don't know exactly what's going on with the sale of donuts in the church. I wouldn't liken that to, you know, Jesus turning over the table of the money changers there in particular.

You know, if they're having a bake sale for the youth group, okay, maybe I'm not as excited about the way they're going about it, but I don't think that that's that big of a deal. But when it comes to the Word of God and a willingness to preach the Word faithfully, if we're tiptoeing around Scripture or if we're afraid of, well, if I talk about that, man, that's going to push people away, that does concern me, and it does concern me to hear about this pastor who has been charged by Almighty God with the call to preach the Word using some other book. I'm just imagining, you know, maybe taking some other book into the pulpit and applying, you know, biblical principles, but using some other book.

We don't need to hear from many of these people, man, on the Lord's day. We don't gather together as the people of God to hear, you know, some insights from this guy who wrote a book or, you know, whatever. We gather to hear the Word of God, to come under the ministry of the Word, to hear the preacher say, thus saith the Lord, and to open up the Scriptures. And I just think of what Paul says in 2 Timothy 4 verse 1, as he's writing to young Timothy, this minister of the Gospel in the church, he says, I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom preach the Word. Be ready in season and out of season, reprove, rebuke, and exhort with complete patience and teaching, for the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myth. As for you, always be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, and fulfill your ministry.

See, Paul saw exactly what we're experiencing today and what was happening in his own day. People are going to want preachers, pastors, who are just going to tickle their ears. And I think the way you put it surely was, you know, sort of soft sermons.

Don't want to drive anyone away, right? Let's tell people what they want to hear, to bring them in, and then maybe they'll follow Jesus. Well, we're called to preach the Word, and we're called to preach the whole counsel of God's Word.

Now, this pastor's been there for two years. I don't think, you know, you could knock him for not wanting to preach through the Book of Revelation. I preached through the Book of Revelation a couple of years ago at our church, and let me just say, I mean, this is a book that I think we need to hear from. This is one of the reasons we created the Revelation Bible study here at Core Christianity. We have a Bible study through the Book of Revelation. But, you know, pastors, you know, preaching through the Word of God on Sunday, I think that's the key. You know, expository preaching. If he hasn't gotten to the Book of Revelation yet, okay, I could get that. If he's just unwilling to go there because he feels like it's too heavy, well, I don't get that. There's a problem there.

That's a red flag. And so, I think you, in humility and in love, and again, I can tell you have this love for the church, addressing your concerns to the pastor and to the leadership, making an appeal, not in a way that's seeking to be divisive, but in a way, you know, it's done out of love, because you love the church, and you're saying, the thing we need more than anything is the Word of God, and I am concerned that we are drifting from that. We're seeking to please man rather than to please God.

And so, I think you make that appeal. And if it becomes clear, surely, the church is just not interested in preaching the Word of God like that. If the focus of the church is, well, we want to sort of, you know, coddle people to Jesus, and that means we're not going to preach about sin. That means we're going to avoid certain books of the Bible. That means we're going to do more self-help and psychology instead of preaching the Word. Then I would say you do need to find a church that is going to faithfully preach the Word, and I know that the really hard thing about that is you just love this church, and you love the people there. And so, I pray that there is a revival, if you will, of focus on Scripture and a love for God's Word, and the sense of, God, no, this is where we need to be.

This is what the people need. They need to hear from the Lord. And if we're not giving them that as pastors, we're not doing our job. May the Lord be with you, Shirley.

Shirley, thanks so much for calling in. We'll be praying for you in the whole situation there in your church. You know, Adriel, this is not an uncommon issue, and it really, it makes me think of when an elder board is looking to call a new pastor, they really need to do their due diligence on what that pastor stands for and what he has planned for that congregation. Yeah, I think that's very, very important, and I mean, Paul gives us the qualifications in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus chapter 1. One of them is the ability to teach, and if, indeed, the pastor, the minister, you know, 1 Timothy 5, is laboring in preaching and in teaching, then, you know, they have to, what are they preaching? What are they teaching? Is it according to God's Word?

And if they're not doing that, then you're totally right, Bill. That's not something that we can be okay with or should stand for as elders, but also as members in the church as well. Well said. This is Core Christianity with Pastor Adriel Sanchez. Chances are there's somebody in your life, maybe somebody you work with, maybe a neighbor or someone you're friends with who is not a Christian, and maybe sometimes you get into conversations with them, and they ask you some hard questions about the Christian faith and why you believe what you believe, and maybe you feel kind of backed into a corner sometimes, you're not sure how to respond. So we've created a resource just for you that will help you in those conversations. Yeah, it's, you know, a helpful resource called Tough Questions Answered, where we dig into a series of the difficult questions that get asked about the Christian faith.

Get a hold of this resource over at corechristianity.com forward slash offers. Talking about things like, doesn't science make religion unnecessary? Why is Christianity so exclusive? What about other religions? Isn't the Bible just a bunch of myths? All those things are addressed in this particular resource. You can find it at corechristianity.com.

Look for Tough Questions Answered. Well, we do get voicemails here at Core Christianity, and here's one that came in from Roger. The Bible says that we shouldn't be worshiping idols, and I know the Catholic churches have a bunch of crosses and idols of the Virgin Mary and Joseph and all the saints. They're all in statues, and people actually worship and praise the Virgin Mary. I think that's what's wrong in the Catholic church.

Thank you. Well, brother. Well, thank you for sharing that, and, you know, I would be in agreement with you that there's one of the issues in Roman Catholicism.

Now, of course, let's be fair. If we're talking to a Roman Catholic, who knows Roman Catholic theology? You say, well, we're not worshiping, right? We're venerating these images. We're paying them respect, and the respect that's paid to this image is, you know, given to the saint, who we love.

You know, just like you have a picture of a loved one, you'll kiss that picture, and it's a sign of respect. It's not worship. Worship, real worship, is only reserved for God, and so they would distinguish between this idea of worship and the idea of venerating an image or an icon or a statue or something like that.

The question is, is that distinction really rooted in Scripture? It seems to me, like, you know, in the history of the Church, especially early on, because venerating images early in the Christian Church was so closely associated with paganism and pagan worship, that the earliest Christians just didn't do that. They had an allergy towards that kind of worship, and so this seems to be one of the things that was sort of slowly crept into the Church, especially as many pagans were coming to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and some of them are bringing, you know, kind of their history, their practices, their ways of worshiping into the Church. It does seem like there's a real issue, there's a real tension there, but at the end of the day, too, it's just looking at what the Scriptures actually teach, and we're commanded in Scripture as a second commandment not to make an image of God, not to bow down to them or worship them, and that's what you see in some churches. You see people, you know, bowing down before images and venerating these images, and so I share your concern. I have other concerns about Roman Catholic theology as well.

I don't think that that means that a person who is Roman Catholic, or claims to be Roman Catholic, can't have or doesn't necessarily have a relationship, a personal relationship, with Jesus Christ. I hope that they do, and that they do trust in Jesus for the forgiveness of sins, but there are doctrines and teachings that I think are contrary to what the Word of God teaches, and so, you know, just as we were talking earlier on the broadcast, this is why it's so important for us to go to the Word, to dig into the Scriptures, and to let the Spirit of God illuminate our hearts and our minds, to be, I mean, just that long conversation I just had, or answer that I gave to Shirley talking about the importance of the preached Word. We need to hear from God.

We desperately need to hear from God, and God has a lot to say to us. He's given us so much in His special revelation that it's a shame, you know, for us to just neglect it, to not focus on it, to not proclaim it loudly and clearly, and so that's what needs to be happening in our churches first and foremost, and as that happens, the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ is built up in a healthy way, in a way that's honoring to the Lord, and people turn to the Lord in faith as the Word of God is clearly proclaimed. So well said, and you know, Adriel, we've talked before about the fact that unfortunately in our culture right now there's a lot of biblical illiteracy, and that really, I think, behooves us, all of us, to really dig into God's Word and also have what we would call a proper hermeneutic or a proper interpretation of the Scriptures, not letting somebody else define that for us.

Yeah, that's right. There are bad ways of interpreting the Bible, and then there's also just the not being willing to test what you hear according to the Scripture. I love that the Bereans in Acts chapter 17 were commended by the apostles, by the disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ, because they received the Word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so.

That's Acts chapter 17 verse 11. God help each of us to examine the Scriptures daily, to test what we hear according to what we find in the Bible. That's our responsibility. That's your responsibility. As a Christian, to search and to know the Scriptures and to be blessed as you do so. Thanks. Let us know how we can be praying for you. And be sure to join us next time as we explore the truth of God's Word together.