Can It Be Just This Simple?

1 JN  3: 7-10

Children, let no one deceive you. 
The person who acts in righteousness is righteous, just as he is righteous. 
Whoever sins belongs to the Devil,
because the Devil has sinned from the beginning. 

Indeed, the Son of God was revealed to destroy the works of the Devil. 
No one who is begotten by God commits sin
because God's seed remains in him;
he cannot sin because he is begotten by God. 
In this way, the children of God and the children of the Devil are made plain;
no one who fails to act in righteousness belongs to God, nor anyone who does not love his brother.

How many books do you think have been written on Christian theology and how to live the life Christ wants us to live?  A million books perhaps? More?  I don't know the answer and I guess that it is a good thing that there are that many books for us to choose from. If we didn't have them, just think of all the authors who would have starved to death because no one would pay them for their work.  Michael the Lesser has never made more than a couple of dollars for all of the writing he has done, but, he writes because he enjoys the challenge of smithing words together to express his thoughts so there is my recompense.  But seriously, can we boil down the Christian life from that huge number of books and crystalize it into John's simple teaching that you are a Christian if you act with righteousness and you are not one if you do not act thusly?  

The more I read the Bible, the more I find that the blueprint on how to live a Christian life is there to be found by those who seek.  Couple that with the wisdom of Sacred Tradition that the Church brings us to fill in the blanks that Scripture leaves and there is no reason why any civilized person needs to live in ignorance of the Truth.  

Why is the Bible alone (Sola Scriptura) not enough?  Our Protestant brothers and sisters live in ignorance because they believe that the Bible alone contains absolutely everything that is needed to be saved.  They are in a sense correct because the Bible has most of the Christian life covered, but not all of it.  Protestants do not realize that they are relying on Sacred Tradition every time that they read the New Testament.  It was the Catholic Church, at a time when there was no other church, decided what books were to be included and which books were not.  So, we have the Gospel of John included as sacred writ but the Gospel of Thomas was found to be a fraud and not included.  Sola Scriptura fails because if everything is to be found in the Bible, then there must be a passage that explicitly teaches that Bible alone is sufficient.  Try as you might, you will not find such a passage.

It is said that you will know good and evil from the fruits that they produce.  Sola Scriptura is a weed that has sprung up and because it allows for no authority to interpret the passages for the reader, more than thirty-thousand denominations have grown like weeds that sully God's garden. Catholics can believe in what the Church teaches because Jesus Himself said that the gates of hell would never prevail against her.  Martin Luther, when he sowed the seeds of separation started the Protestant Tradition of divide and divide again in direct disobedience to the desires of Jesus voiced at the Last Supper. 

Please understand, I am NOT condemning my Protestant brothers and sisters for many if not all, live lives where Christ is the center and charity is the rule and God will NOT forsake them for He loves all that call upon the name of Jesus. They will be welcome in heaven because they profess the name of Jesus and follow Him carrying their crosses just as we Catholics do.  I just pity them for they do not have within their denomination the whole truth of salvation.  They miss the Sacraments and I fear that they will be hard-pressed to say why they have not taken part in eating the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus in the Eucharist. 

The broad strokes of Christian life can be found in the Bible but the help, the occasion of Grace that Jesus provides His followers in the Sacraments can only be found in the place where Peter is.  Where there is Peter, there is the Church. 

The Poor Souls in Purgatory need your prayers today.  Please remember them as you go through your day.  Pray for those that you know that have died. True, they might already be in heaven but what if they are not?  Your prayer will not be wasted, it will go to someone who is in great need of it.  Please always remember: As they are, someday you may be.