Jeffress is not anti-Catholic. He wants Catholics to be saved. He cares about their eternal disposition, even if they do not.
The wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. One has paid for our sin. We can receive forgiveness by accepting God’s finished work on the cross as payment in full.
However, men insist on earning their own salvation. What they fail to realize is that they are already disqualified — they have broken the law and are guilty of all. (James 2:10). All men must repent of dead works (acts of obedience to the Law) and place their faith in God alone to save them. (Hebrews 6:1) But this is a stumbling block for many.
And concern for my soul is a rather endearing trait.
What is unacceptable is libel, moral defamation and outright historic fabrication. That's what I see in Jeffress' quoted remarks.
If Jeffress wants to rethink, repent and retract, I will gladly rejoice and reconcile!
Then we can talk about sincere doctrinal differences and not his fevered misconceptions, which just demonstrate that he doesn't know jack chick about Catholicism.
Which itself is enough to earn one the title of "anti-Catholic." Seeing as Catholic distinctives are manifestly absent from the inspired record of what the NT church believed (just where is the practice of praying to created being in Heaven, etc.?) , and too contrary to it, then the Holy Spirit can be saic to be "anti-Catholic."
You seem like an honest fellow (or lady sorry don’t know which) so I would like to comment on this issue of “earning one’s salvation”.
First, I don’t know if you were saying that that is what the Catholic Church teaches, but if you were, then please let me try to explain how this is not the case.
The Church does teach that good works are required for salvation (unless one repents at the end of a sinful life of course like the Good Thief but that’s another subject really). But assuming one comes to have faith in Christ while one still has life left on this earth to lead, then yes, good works are required for his salvation. The Church also teaches though that our good works are not what save us, by themselves or more precisely She teaches that we can’t earn our way into Heaven by doing good works.
So how can this be, one may ask, isn’t it a contradiction to say on one hand Catholics don’t earn their own salvation by doing good works but also to say good works are required for salvation? Which is it, are they required for salvation or are they not?
They are required for salvation because, as the Church strictly teaches, by doing good works and not bad works (sinful works) one cooperates with the saving grace of God. She teaches, in other words, that the good works we do are only possible for us to do because God helps us do them by His Grace.
Let me conclude by putting this concept a third way, which may be of help to you and/or others: when we sin, that’s by definition a “bad work”. Sin, or bad works separate us from God, all because of the Original Sin (and the stain it left on all souls called “Concupiscence”, which makes us more prone to sin than do good things). The opposite of sin is “good work”, or work that does not separate us from God and indeed does the opposite, they draw us closer to God. Examples of such would be prayer (“pray unceasingly”) or visiting the sick and caring for the poor (“when you have done these things you have done them to Me”). These things draw us closer to God.
Now, we are human beings living in a temporal existence. We only have so much time in the day to do things. We all find time to sin (“all have fallen short”), so the problem is that we spend time sinning, drawing us away from God, and not doing good things that draw us closer.
This is where the concept of “good works are required for salvation” comes in as part of Catholic teaching. It’s not that the good works in of themselves save us, it’s that when we cooperate with God by accepting His Grace first, that we are then able to do good works instead of bad works. And thus, since we have only so much time during the day, if we spend more (ideally all but whoever does that since again we all sin) time daily doing good works instead of bad, then we slowly over time become transformed into what God intends which is for us to be an image of Him, of Christ on Earth. Not that we become literally God of course, but that the good works limit and eventually, ideally, eliminate the time we can spend sinning. (again done with His help, because without His help we’d, at most, only rarely want to do them)
This is how they are “required” for salvation yet still aren’t somehow work done in expectation of a reward. Put quite simply they are done to save us from our fallen tendency to sin. Of course that’s not always successful, for anyone from the Pope to any Saint in history to anyone. We all eventually fall. But that’s what Confession is for, to set us right again so we try the next time and the next and the next. Always trying, with God’s help, to avoid sin, but not just avoid it by sitting around doing nothing because that would be impossible. It’s always impossible to just stop sinning. You have to find something else to do with your time or else your fallen tendency is to sin. “Idle hands are the devil’s playground” is not just a cutesy euphemism.
Hopefully this helps. I’m sure this will engender a response from all the usual anti-Catholic (doctrine) folks on FR (and there are some of those kinds of “nutters” here too, to use a word another FReeper used upthread.). I don’t care about that though and won’t be responding to any of their vile. Hopefully though this has helped you because you seem like an honestly ignorant person (and I don’t use that term “ignorant” pejoratively.). It’s a spiritual work of mercy to inform the ignorant after all.