I have 2 good neighbors that are devout Catholics. I talk to them often, have been to dinner with them. They need the love of Christ...
I couldn't possibly agree with you more. But as I study the Gospels of Christ, and think on his words, his actions and his feelings, there is not one time that He shrank from telling those who were deceived by the Religion of their day the truth of that false religion.
He usually did it gently at first, but even then not always, witness the cleansing of the Temple, and He usually did it with kindness and love at first. But I notice that as those whom He had kindly and repeatedly corrected continued to come to him and try to accuse bear false witness against Him, He could be quite caustic, especially toward religious leaders (such as yourself) calling them vipers and so on.
All this is written for our instruction, as you know we are told, thus to use the argument of the love of Christ indiscriminatly is, to me, a red flag. I do not say that you do this, but I do wonder about it.
Christ's love, seen in the scriptures, and felt really in the soul is the most wonderful and precious of all blessings, being a foretaste of heaven, but I can also say that I have at times been most aware of His love when it came in the form of chastisment from a loving Friend, which I sorely needed. Love takes on more forms than sweetness and light for fallen and fallible creatures, and especially when those creatures are in open rebellion.
So, would it not be better, I ask, to gently and lovingly tell your devout Roman Catholic friends about the words of the Holy Spirit in Deuteronomy that forbid images of Christ, images that rob them of a true conception in their minds and HEARTS, for the mind is the portal to the heart, and any fact or truth left to dwell alone in the mind without the love and feeling of the heart is dead logic.
I argue that you do your Catholic friends no favors by depriving them of this most precious of truths. And to do so in the name of Love, while this may be your genuine belief, is in my opinion a delusion.
The scriptures speak of "the love of God shed abroad in the heart by the Holy Spirit", Romans 5:5. That is the love of Christ that I want my Catholic friends to know about, and I have several and they are wonderful people. But unless they turn from their idols to the living God, I fear that they may never know the love of Christ that is spoken of in the scriptures.
