Wrong, Mark. That is NOT what the Scripture verse said. If we DENY Him, He will deny us. If we are unfaithful, He remains faithful.
2 Timothy 2:11 The saying is trustworthy, for: If we have died with him, we will also live with him; 12 if we endure, we will also reign with him; if we deny him, he also will deny us; 13 if we are faithless, he remains faithful— for he cannot deny himself.
And there is a huge difference between being unfaithful and denying Him. We can be unfaithful when we fall into sin, but that is not outright denying Him. It's a difference Catholics don't seem to recognize.
I'm glad that I don't serve a God who is so capricious as to award salvation based on performance to humans He knows are so fallible. Knowing that I am His child and secure in that position makes me want to serve and obey Him out of gratitude, not fear of the consequences, as I did when I was a Catholic.
And here we are once again. I quote Jesus to you and you riposte with snippets of Paul.
However, the key here is in verse 12: If we endure, we will also live with Him. The corollary is that if we do not endure, we will not live with Him ie: we will lose our salvation. God is always faithful. To us. But if we refuse Him, then we take it upon ourselves to perish.
You see, Paul is supposed to reflect Jesus, who is the Light of the World. Paul is not the successor of Christ, as so many here make him out to be. Paul was a bishop of the Church and its greatest evangelizer. But he is a creation of God, not vice versa.
When you decided that Catholicism didn't have the right feeling for you, didn't sit well with your digestion and didn't suit your wardrobe, and went shopping for your own personal God, what characteristics were most important for you? What were the standards that the God that you chose had to have? What God did you create?
