Sincerity Is Not Enough!

“If you ‘sincerely’ drink poison… it will kill you.

If you sincerely believe a lie, you will suffer the consequences.

You must not only be sincere…   you must be right.”                      

   - Charles Spurgeon

         When I was twenty-seven, my father died. I spent a great deal of time with two fervently religious women, each of whom I dearly loved, after his death, as I worked through my grief. 

One was my godmother: a practicing Catholic, she spent a week every summer in a convent in north Idaho and was as devout as any person I know. With my own mother’s death three decades past in my timeline, my godmother has been the closest parent I’ve had for the majority of my life. Her daughters are my sisters in every meaningful (non-biological) sense of the world, and I’m proud to be part of their family. She was (and is) kind, loving, gentle, God-fearing, and as “deserving” of grace as any person I’ve ever known.

The other was the woman I’d been dating just prior to his death: a devoted Latter-Day Saint, she and I had just spent many, many days in conversation and prayer trying to make our different religious beliefs coincide enough to commit our lives to each other with clear consciences. Alas, as much as we truly loved each other, we saw that those differences were too great, so we stopped dating. Then my father died two weeks later, and she came back to me and said, “For as long as you need me to get through this, I am yours” – one of the most loving gestures anyone has ever done for me. She and I really never saw much of each other again: she started dating a gentleman of her own faith soon after, and was married two years later, while I moved to Idaho the following summer and lost touch with her family. Like my godmother, she was an amazingly kind, loving, gentle, God-fearing, “deserving” of grace person beyond almost everyone I’ve ever known.

And according to each of their particular faiths, the other one is going to Hell when she dies.

And according to mine, they both are.

How do we justify this in our minds?  Do we rail against God for “condemning good people to Hell”? Do we argue semantics with the Bible, looking for the loophole to show that works are more important that faith?

Or do we return to Scripture, hat in hand, as we must always do when we have questions or doubts, and read what God’s Word tells us?

“There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God. All have turned away; they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.”                - Romans 3:10-12

We are all sinners. We all deserve Hell.

And the only reason – the only reason – that anyone is saved from the fate we have earned as Adam’s progeny, is that God sent His only son to die on a Roman torture device to pay our Hell-bound penance for us, presuming – here’s the catch! – presuming that we followed Him as our Lord and Savior, as spelled out in Scripture. 

“I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.”   - Jesus Christ, as quoted in John 14:6

But, my ladyfriend and my godmother would both say they follow Christ as Lord! They both fervently believe in the teachings of their church, and the basic tenet of Christianity that “if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Romans 10:9). 

Isn’t that enough?

Yes… and that’s their difficulty. To accept Jesus as your Lord means that you have to follow His teachings. Where do we find those teachings? In the Bible. Nowhere else.

 

The greatest victory Satan ever won (post-garden of Eden category) was the corruption of the Holy See in the Dark Ages, the unholy papal line whose corruption exceeded any civilian dynasty ever imagined. The Catholic Church was the only game in town for Christians for over a millennium, and its priorities were best spelled out in the doctrine of Papal Infallibility, essentially declaring that the Pope was God. [I applaud the movement of the current form of the Catholic Church, which is earnestly trying to undo the wrongs of fifteen centuries – but it’s slow work, and the damage has been done.] The second most important human being who ever lived, in my humble opinion, wasn’t Moses or Abraham or David or Solomon. It was Martin Luther, who by nailing those 95 treatises on the door of the Wittenburg church on October 31, 1517 (now known as Reformation Day), freed the entire Christian people of the enslavement of the Catholic Church. [That’s an entirely different vignette, however. Let’s not get distracted…]

Similarly, the “third testaments” of religions like the Latter-Day Saints blatantly violate such Scriptures as Galatians 1:8-9 (“But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, he is to be accursed! As we have said before, so I say again now, if any man is preaching to you a gospel contrary to what you received, he is to be accursed!”) and Revelation 22:18-19 (“I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues which are written in this book; and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his part from the tree of life and from the holy city, which are written in this book”). Like the vast list of procedures and requirements written by men in the Catholic age for its believers, the poor LDS faithful have been saddled with entire books’ worth of non-Scriptural beliefs and procedures that serve only to cloud God’s Word and Christ’s requirements. 

I hope and pray that in His infinite Wisdom and Love, the Almighty Father will be able to see through those barriers that humans have built within all of our various Christian sects, and save as many of us poor, wretched souls that have somehow managed to truly follow HIS Word, despite all of the extraneous noise that the Adversary has kept His believers swimming in for almost two thousand years.

And I desperately hope and pray that my ladyfriend and godmother are two of them.