Editor's Note: I've got a piece I'm finishing on the psycho-babble of the Hawaiian shirt-wearing preacher Rick Warren, author of the mega-bestseller, "The Purpose-Driven Life," and will have it posted very soon. In meantime, here's a short response to all the pope mania:

 

It's very interesting to note that the middle verse of the entire King James Bible, Psalms 118:8, reads, "It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man." There are 14 words in the verse and "the Lord" is at the center.

At the center of Catholicism is an elaborate religious system of man-made rituals, tradition and ceremony.

 

When you trust in Jesus Christ as your Savior God literally takes up residence inside of you and your body becomes the temple of the Holy Spirit. We carry God around with us in our own skin and have intimate, personal communion with Him. God isn't worshipped in a building or through a particular type of service.

 

I Timothy 2:5 says, "For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus."

There is no person, "Holy Father" or "Mother Mary," who acts as an intermediary between God and man or has an elevated status or special pipeline with God.

"It's Christ in you that's the issue and that means you don't need buildings, ceremonies, bellhops or bus boys as go-betweens between you and God because there is this intimate personal relationship you have with God through Jesus Christ that is an internal thing inside of you," says my pastor, Richard Jordan of Shorewood Bible Church in Chicago (www.graceimpact.org) in an audio study on his website.

"That's why it's His Word that's the issue. David said 'thy Word have I hid in my heart.' (Psalms 119:11) The only objective external thing that you can do is to take His Word—the written Word of God—and then store that in your inner man. The Word is written by the Spirit of God. Jesus said 'the words that I speak unto you they are spirit and they are life.' The Spirit of God that wrote the Word of God is the Spirit of God that indwells you and gives life to your spirit. That's why Paul says the Word of God works effectually in you that believe.

"We don't need all this religion and that's what Paul's telling Timothy and the saints at Ephesus. He's saying, 'You and I are the church of the living God—we're the house of God."

 

There was another church in Ephesus, the Church of Diana, that had a great big temple with a steeple on top and ornate icons and confession booths and priests that went around. There were prayer wheels, prayer beads, shrines, etc.

 

Acts 19 presents an account of how churchgoers from this Diana-worshipping congregation reacted to Paul getting people saved and having them abandon their pagan rituals and philosophies because they understood their liberty from religion through faith in Jesus Christ.

"These people turned on the Apostle Paul and tried to kill him and ran him out of town because he was hurting their business," explains Jordan. "He was hurting the business of their religion."

 

In my files I have a 2002 story from The Washington Post in which Pope John Paul II, in a letter from Vatican City, stressed the need for Roman Catholics to confess their sins but said some "habitual" sinners could never be forgiven.

He obviously didn't subscribe to the Bible's assurance of eternal security through faith in Jesus Christ dying on the cross to pay for all of a person's sins—past, present and future. The pope's letter did not identify the unforgivable sinners, but theological experts, according to the Post article, said he was referring to gay men, lesbians and divorced Catholics who remarry.

"It is clear that penitents living in a habitual state of serious sin and who do not intend to change their situation cannot validly receive absolution," the pope wrote in the apostolic letter to bishops around the world.

The letter didn't say what should be done with priests who sin and made no reference to the sexual abuse scandal among U.S. priests, but the pope was clear in his belief that priests in the U.S. scandal "could be forgiven," according to the Post.