Everyone’s a Calvinist in the end.

Watching Jay get humbled this Saturday will be a great birthday gift. Thank you @Acts17David

Honor Mary by imitating her faith. I do so by praying to God alone 😌

It’s videos like this that make me look forward to the new earth. We can all look at this and say, “Wow, how beautiful is this? A father loving his son and sharing in the joys of nature and music.” I can’t help but think of what Jesus says in Matthew 7:11. Even we, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to our children. How much more will our Heavenly Father give good gifts to His children? It is good to enjoy the beauties of this world here and now, but know that this is only a glimpse of what our Heavenly Father has in store for us.

If you hold to Nicaea II, then Paul’s anathema in Galatians applies to you.

It is a dishonor to Mary to elevate her as the Papists and Orthodox have done. The saints are most honored when we direct our attention to Christ, for all the saints are found in Him, not having a righteousness of their own, but that which comes through faith in Christ.

Paul doesn’t mention Mary once.

Why is gratifying oneself to pornography sinful? I think it helps to consider what God designed sexual pleasure to accomplish. God designed sexual pleasure to be experienced within marriage, strengthening the bond between husband and wife through an expression of mutual, self-giving love. Interestingly, even outside religious circles, psychological research has found associations between pornography use and increased anxiety, depression, and psychological distress. From a Christian perspective, this shouldn’t surprise us. Pornography takes sexual pleasure intended to be shared between husband and wife and turns it into an experience centered on oneself. An image becomes the focus of sexual gratification, but there is no mutual intimacy, no shared affection, and no spouse receiving that love. The experience is a distortion of intimacy, and it cannot fulfill the purpose for which God designed intimacy. Something intended to be an expression of self-giving love has become an act of self-serving gratification. Now consider Christian charity. God commands us to love one another, honor one another, bear one another’s burdens, and imitate the faith of those who have gone before us. These commands are intended to produce genuine love, service, and fellowship within the body of Christ. And this is where I see a parallel with icon veneration. Those who venerate icons understand their gestures of affection and reverence toward an image as expressions of love and honor toward the person depicted. But just as an image cannot participate in the mutual intimacy of marriage, an image cannot itself receive our love, affection, or service. The question, then, is whether performing devotional gestures toward that image actually communicates love to the person represented, or whether it merely creates the appearance of expressing love without accomplishing what Christian charity was intended to accomplish. I believe Scripture gives us a much clearer way to honor the saints: by remembering their faith, imitating their example, and loving the brothers and sisters Christ has placed before us. The parallel is not that sexual pleasure and Christian charity are the same thing, but that both can be distorted when an image takes the place of genuine human connection. Gratifying oneself to pornography perverts God-ordained intimacy. I would argue that icon veneration can likewise pervert God-ordained Christian charity. In both cases, the appearance, experience, or imitation of love should not be confused with the fulfillment of its purpose.

The status of the deuterocanonical books was disputed WITHIN Rome even up until the Council of Trent. To claim that the Reformers simply “removed books” from a universally settled canon is a claim made either out of historical ignorance or blatant dishonesty.

You’re not a Christian if you disagree with the Bible.

They can’t defend icon veneration on its own merits, so they’ll shift the conversation to the canon of Scripture or some other unrelated topic. Anything to distract from the fact that icon veneration itself is indefensible from a biblical Christian perspective.

Icon veneration is such a joke. Nothing Christian about it.

No one who loves practicing idolatry will willingly admit that what they’re doing is idolatry. Redefine “worship.” Redefine “idol.” Redefine the accusatory language, and all is well in their idolatrous system. 🤫

Stop conflating a rejection of icon veneration with a rejection of art or photography altogether. Seriously. You’re attacking a straw man. And as a side note, one could argue that photography doesn’t fit as neatly into the biblical criticism of man-made images. Paul criticized images fashioned by the “art and imagination of man” (Acts 17:29). A photograph, however, is not merely a product of human imagination. It is captured light. An actual moment in time recorded onto a physical medium.

Not all Protestants are Christian, but all genuine Christians eventually become Protestant.

If someone were worshipping a statue of me, I’d want it destroyed. How much more would Mary, the mother of our Lord, want idols made in her name destroyed?

Same goes for icon desecration. Some of y’all think that because I’m against icon veneration, that somehow means I LOVE the idea of destroying icons. I think both icon veneration and icon desecration are inherently foolish and self-centered. Neither act actually loves or harms the person depicted. Both are ultimately performed for the satisfaction of the person doing them. No one is being gratified in either act but SELF.

If I make a statue of you and then burn it, did I actually hurt you? Did you suffer any burns? No? Then stop trying to convince the world that the love you show to a statue somehow transfers to the person it depicts. We have a name for that here in Louisiana. It’s called Voodoo.