With all due respect.....none of that matters. All that matters is a personal relationship with God through His Son, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
All else are trappings of man; utterly worthless. Only God and His Son matter.
"God and his Son"? Interesting formulation. Regardless, Jesus Christ founded a church, gave his apostles authority to teach in that church until the end of time, and promised that the gates of hell would not prevail again it. That's not a "trapping of man'" but a promise from God. It's in your Bible.
so God wasted all that time coming to earth, establishing a church, appointing apostles, dying on the cross so that each of us could do things our own way??? I want to honor God this way....you want to do it that way...and our neighbor wants to pray the way he insists is the only way to do so...on his head, and how about Fred down the street...he insists that the proper way to honor God is to never enter a church and pay homage at the local abortion clinic......please
With all due respect.....none of that matters. All that matters is a personal relationship with God through His Son, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
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I agree that that is what matters most. I won’t agree that that is ALL that matters. What we do, what we achieve, and how we treat our fellow man matters too. Tradition, history, behavior, architecture, art, scholarship, all matter: what we do in our stewardship of this God-given life matters. These aren’t “trappings”, they are evidence of our talents we have been given. Some of humanity’s greatest achievements have been from our own expressions of God’s grace. Michelangelo spent four years of his life expressing his immense faith on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and we are all richer for it. That is no small matter, and it matters.