Good morning, everyone. We are delighted this morning to welcome Tavio Colombaro. Some of you have had the opportunity to meet he and his wife, Heidi, and their two children. I guess Tyler and I had a long call. We were delighted to have lunch together. We had invited Ottavio to come and bring the ministry of the word in a couple of weeks, which he was excited to do. And in God's providence, Tyler is feeling very badly. And so pray for him and pray that the Lord keeps the rest of his family healthy. So we are delighted to have you today to come and tell us his testimony and then he's going to be preaching from the book of Ezra. Ottavio was born in Italy and his background is Roman Catholicism. And in this very class, we've had a number of sessions about that, about what they believe. And I know that you're going to talk about how the Lord saved you in that context. The Lord saved Ottavio. in 2011 after growing up in a very strong Roman Catholic household. He has a doctorate in historical theology from the Free University of Amsterdam and a master's of divinity in theology from Puritan Reform Theological Seminary. So, Tavio is very well trained in the things of God. You have a rich ministerial background He's taught and gone to a number of churches in a number of countries, not only in the U.S., but also around the world. He is married to his wife, Heidi. Oh, look, my name. Let me get that back. Two children and one on the way, which we're praying about as well. They live in Spring Hill, Tennessee, and they started visiting with us I don't know, earlier this year, we appreciate you driving all that way and being among us and we welcome you today. So let me pray and we will look forward to Tavio speaking. Father God, we are grateful once again to be able to gather together as a people of God at this time and this place. Lord, we are dependent We are dependent upon your Holy Spirit to work in our hearts, in our ears, in our thoughts, so that the things here are eternally changed and ordered and that you would receive glory. So we pray that you would pour out your spirit on us and on all your churches where they are gathering around the world today. Lord, we thank you for our brother Tyler. We pray that you would heal him and that you would keep Shanti and the children well and that you would restore him even this day. Lord, this is the day you have made. May we rejoice and may we be glad in it. And may your church be built up here today. In your name, Jesus, we pray. Amen. Welcome, brother. Well, good morning, everyone. It's a privilege for me to be here with you. As our brother was saying, you guys went through the description of Roman Catholicism. And so I thought to give you kind of a practical example of how those different beliefs that we talked about, those different viewpoints of Roman Catholicism actually work in practice. And so I thought in order to do that, I will give you this morning my personal testimony of how I came to know the Lord Jesus Christ. So I was born in Italy, born and raised there. Rome, my dad is from Rome. Our hometown is actually two hours north of Rome. If you're familiar with St. Francis of Assisi, Assisi is a town that is 10 minutes drive from my hometown. So you're right there in the middle of Italy, right at the heart of Italy. You have saints like St. Francis of Assisi or St. Benedict of Nursia was born in that same region. So it's the birthplace of a lot of Catholic movements. I am the fourth of five children. Both of my parents were very devout, are currently very devout Roman Catholics. In fact, my aunt, my mom's sister, she is a nun in a very strong movement to the Virgin Mary. And ever since my childhood, I always believed in God, always went to Mass. My mom would go to Mass every, almost every day. And I was grown up in a very strong Catholic influence. I never doubted the existence of God. I never questioned the teachings that I heard from Roman Catholicism. Growing up, I went through all the different sacraments, starting with confession, going to, you know, all the way to confirmation, all the sacraments that we were supposed to embrace, going through the catechism of the Catholic Church. And after that, I kept being very Catholic. In fact, I was part of six different movements of the Catholic Church. One of them was charismatic Catholics, and so they would speak in tongues, but they would keep all the beliefs proper Roman Catholicism, such praying to the Virgin Mary and the saints. I was part of movements of Catholic intellectuals and philosophy and things like that. I was part of also Catholic missions. I went to Catholic mission fields, both in Western Africa, through monasteries and through my aunt, essentially doing a lot of good works. And then South America, Brazil, I went with a movement that is called Don Bosco Salesiani, which is very strong in education and kind of everywhere they go into the world, they do a lot of missions. And I was in the monastery, I was very much doing all these good works. I thought, if I do more, then I can earn God's favor, and I can one day resemble the holy man that I read, whether it's Santa Teresa d'Avila, or Mother Teresa, or Saint John of the Cross, all these books, Saint Francis of Salis, or all these saints. And as I grew up, I left my hometown to go to Rome to study, And there I started to, God was placing people in my walk who were actually bringing me a different story, Protestants. I was taught very badly of Protestants. I hated Martin Luther. All that I heard was that this man was a schismatic man, a bad man who attacked the one through church. And here on campus in the University of Rome, come a bunch of evangelicals dressed in white robes and starting to share their thoughts to students. And I went to them and says, what are you doing here? We are Catholics. The Vatican is just a few miles from here. We don't need you to come here and give us these weird thoughts and heresies. And the guy had compassion on me and he says, can I pray for you? So he took me aside. I was like, well, OK, if he wants to pray, let him pray. And so he prayed for me that God would open my eyes. And I was like, why is he praying for me? This is a strange thing to do in the middle of the road. He's not even doing the sign of the cross and any of that. So that was one example. Although I was Catholic, I started to have a relationship with a girl on campus who was studying with me. And she was actually atheist or very nominal Catholic. So that tells you that with all of my zeal, I was very much hypocritical. So I would go with my cousin, who today, for example, works for the Vatican Press on the Vatican, and we would go to the Pope, Benedict, to shake his hand because he was meeting all the Catholic students of Rome. And I was so excited about it. But then through the week, I was a hypocrite. I had sex before marriage. I essentially got drunk a few times. just had a good time on campus with the students. But then if a student will go and attack the Pope, I will get so mad. He says, you don't know what you're talking about. And so I felt it was my duty to defend the Catholic Church. After that, I went to North Italy, finished my bachelor degree, went to North Italy in Turin, where my ex-girlfriend was from. And I was living in a monastery, literally. So I would Do all the stuff that the monks were doing but then go to school and still live with this girlfriend And our relationship came to uh kind of a breaking point We were arguing a lot. I was as I said living a hypocritical life going to confession to the priest Almost every week. I would go to the priest Confessing my sin and then The following days I kept going back to sin. I was slave of that sin. I said the prayer I tried to do penance, but I couldn't get rid of sin. This relationship came to a breaking point. I said, you know, I need to leave this relationship. This woman is not even Catholic. And as I say, I felt called to the priesthood. This had happened before, but this time I felt like I was called to the priesthood. So what I did, I started to go to five different priests. in the city of Turin, trying to discern the will of God for my life. I wanted to leave university. I actually took all my possessions and like St. Francis, I said, I'm going to give all these possessions to the poor. So I went to the downtown and I found a poor man on the streets and I gave him my jacket or some of the other things, a violin that I had, I gave to another poor guy and I felt Lord, help me to understand what to do. And I thought, I'm going to go to Jerusalem as a pilgrim, and this somehow is going to show me the will of God. But I was still talking with these priests, and none of these priests was able to give me any direction. One of them, a Franciscan priest, would read to me some spiritual thoughts of St. Francis. Another one would give me a Jesuit book on how to find the will of God. And I was in the monastery going through all the activity that the monks were doing, going to the cell, praying in front of this icon of Jesus, and see this face, angry face, and praying the rosary, praying the rosary, like fasting, and going back to my room feeling angry because I couldn't have any peace. with all those things that I was doing. And I says, God, I am sacrificing everything for you, but where are you? So with that crisis, I finally decided, OK, I'm going to go back to the life I knew with my ex-girlfriend, which was reaching out to me. And so I went back to a life of sin, went back to university, continued my study. And for the coming year, I just thought, you know, I don't know. I don't know what the Lord is calling me to. I'll just keep going where I'm going. I will still, you know, try to find the will of God until God brought to the monastery an evangelical guy. And this guy was from Albania. He was not Italian. And he was actually starting to talk with me about the Bible. And so I thought, you know, here comes another heretic. Let me try to write down every point, every objection that he's got. And I handed under his door all of my answers to his objections. And I had this little pocket New Testament Bible that I would reach out to him and started to look into it. And he took it and says, oh, this is a Gideon Bible. And I says, Gideon Bible? What does that mean? Oh, it's actually a Protestant group. I have received somebody at Rome gave it to me outside of the university. And so I thought, am I holding a Protestant Bible in my hand? So I took that Bible and I threw it on the trash because I thought their translation is corrupt. It's like a Jehovah's Witness translation. It's demonic. And I'm just going to stick with the Catholic Bible here. And so we started to have a back and forth. We actually became roommates. I had so many discussions with him and I was so zealous that we had, you know, I went to the website of the Dominicans trying to find an answer to his arguments over the perpetual virginity of Mary. I went through different websites of Catholic faith trying to find answers to the papal infallibility. And every time he would quote a scripture and I would say, I don't know what to say with that. It says to him, you know, you won the battle, but you're not going to win the war. I'm going to prove you wrong. And so I said, there's no way I can solve this if I don't go to the Bible. And so I took the Catholic Bible and said, I'm going to just start reading it. And my goal, my intention originally was, I'm going to start reading the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. Now, the Catholic Bible, as you heard weeks ago, has also seven extra books. And I read the whole thing. And I said, I'm going to just read it from Genesis to Revelation. I'm going to prove him wrong. I'm going to prove him that the Catholic church is the only true church and that he is a heretic. and that's gonna solve everything. And so that was my, the way that I went to the Bible. I want you to know, growing up, we never read the Bible as a whole. A few times, you know, the priest on mass will read you selected portions of scripture throughout the liturgical calendar throughout the year. A few times I would pick and cherry pick, you know, I'm gonna open page so and so. All right, this is interesting. But it was a book that was distant from my life. It felt like, you know, written thousands of years earlier, and I read lots of books, okay? Lots of books. And so that was my beginning of reading Scripture. But as I started reading the Scripture, I was completely surprised of two things. The first one is Scripture was not an old and boring book, as I had been thinking throughout. It was fascinating. And secondly, That book started to convict me of sin. As I read the Old Testament, I started to see so many discrepancy with the things that I was supposed to believe as dogmas, as a Catholic. And God kept sending people as I was in this process. I was working in Turin as a promoter on the streets, and my boss was actually a Baptist. And he started telling me, things in my ears like, I know you Catholics are supposed to believe that Mary was without sin conceived. Now as a Catholic, you have to realize that although you're very zealous, you don't even know all the points and nits and grids of what you're supposed to believe until you meet a Protestant like that. And he says, really, that's what I'm supposed, I thought it was the virginity of Mary. No, this is actually the sinlessness of Mary. And so I was like, where's in the Bible? And I couldn't find it. And then my roommate, you know, Started to see a change in me from being angry at him and coming like A shotgun at him like you're a heretic. I started to ask like Honest questions. This is hey, I was reading about solomon. I was reading about this. You know, what do you think? God was beginning to work on that but ultimately My my ex-girlfriend who saw this by this time I had finished to read the entire bible and I had started all over And I started a highlight with different colors and things. I came to mid psalms and she's like, you're getting brainwashed. You're getting brainwashed with this attachment to the Bible. Like what's happening with you? And she's like, one morning she woke up. She's like, you know, I don't love you anymore. It's over between us. And I was like, what? And so I was broken, broken, heartbroken. And so I came out of her house. and I was reading Psalm 18 and that's a prayer of David that he's crying out to the Lord and the next line he saved me and At that night in the monastery. I was in tears looking on the ceiling and I I said Lord, I know you can save me And the next day I go to my Roommate and I said, you know, my life is falling apart. I don't know what to do. I I am broken. And he says, you know, we're going to have a conference in South Italy this Christmas break. Would you like to come to this conference? And I says, you know, yes. Now, I would have never said that before were it not that I was in a state of complete brokenness. I didn't say anything to my family. I told them I'm going to a Catholic retreat. I'll be back after January 1st. And I went to that conference feeling extremely awkward. What am I doing here? I go to the reception. It's like, you know, what is she going to think that I'm in the midst of all these heretics? And it's like, what am I doing? And surrounded by this, lots of, you know, missionaries, Americans. And it's like, now you have to know that there was one pastor in that conference that months earlier I had gone to their ministry outreach intern. And he had said something from the parables of the four seeds, asking us, which seed are you? To which I was convicted because I said, I'm not the good seed. But then afterward, I went to him and says, if you continue, if you say something against the Catholic church, I'm going to call priests to come and get you. You be careful what you say against the Catholic church. And so I saw his face and I says, sir, I'm sorry for how I behaved that time that I told you. And he's like, you know, it's good to to change opinion So I went through that conference and every night there was preachers that were preaching the gospel clearly particularly there was an evangelist from spain and he he shared one night that We are sinners and that there's no good works that we can do to earn god's favor and he says that the only solution for our problem of sin is through Jesus Christ, who came and died on the cross. And that death was the payment for our sins. In the cross, the wrath of God was poured out upon the Son to completely pay the punishment for all of our sins. And all that is required of us is to Turn from our sin and trust my faith in this perfect and complete sacrifice of christ And I was like, I never heard any of that As a catholic. Yes, we said on sunday lamb of god who takes away the sins of the world, but it never clicked to me and so he Did what we you know, we might disagree with but he said is there anyone in the room who would like to? receive christ For the previous nights, God had like, I was stricken with sickness, like my stomach, I couldn't eat. And I was broken. One of their workshop was going through Job. I was really at the end of myself and all my pride was gone. I said, I have to do this. I don't care anymore what people are going to think. I am desperate. And so I raised my hand and he prayed. And after that, I went to him. And I said, I need to talk to you for what you said. You said that we can be saved by just believing in Christ. I mean, I'm trying to make sense of this. And so he walked with me through the Gospel of John, starting from the earlier chapters to the later chapters, showing me that over and over, John says, if you believe, you have, present tense, eternal life. And he also shared that promise that no one will snatch them from the Father's hand. No one will snatch them. There's no way. And as a Catholic, I thought, this is prideful. But then I thought, look, this is from the Bible. If the Bible says this, it must be so. So I was kind of still perplexed. I went back home. from that meeting and I thought, you know, this is going to be like one of those Catholic retreats where we go up the mountain, you have a nice spiritual experience and then you go back to your life and everything is going to turn out normal. Instead, what started to happen is that every morning I was waking up with this joy. Every night I was going to bed with this joy, this that I never felt. It's like, you know, let's wait another week, maybe it's going to pass. And, you know, you wait another week and that joy was still there and you wait another week and that joy was still there. until finally I realized maybe what the pastor said at the conference is true. I have received Jesus Christ and now I'm saved. And so I started to share things with my people around me and my friends. I kept going to the Catholic church. I didn't say anything to my parents yet until I started to attend a Bible study of a brethren church in my hometown and also later a Baptist church. It came to a point after a few months that I kept going to the mass, but the Holy Spirit was convincing me of what the priest was saying as something that was wrong. When he would say, you know, let's pray to the Virgin Mary, and I was like, no. My dad, before like a time, there was a time we went to the mass and they asked us to kiss the baby Jesus. And I said, dad, I'm not going there. And he thought I was getting Muslim. What's happening to you? I didn't say anything until finally one night I had to say, Dad, I'm not coming to Mass this Sunday. I am leaving the Catholic Church. I have found Jesus Christ. My dad was furious. He said, you have the devil inside of you. And he took my Bible, which was Catholic Bible. He threw it on the trash and he says, you have to leave this house. And I said, Dad, don't ask me to choose between you and Jesus. This is real. I have found Jesus Christ. Now, it didn't kick me out of the house, thankfully, but the first year of my conversion was very hard. I had to hide my Thompson chain reverence Bible that the guy who led me to Christ told me about. And I said, I'm going to have that. And so I bought it, but I thankfully went to the mailman before my parents and I was hiding it in the closet. And I was reading and reading and looking at all these Bible verses. And I was actually writing what later became a book, kind of my conversion that I was able to publish. And it talks about all the Catholic beliefs compared with the scripture. My mom was furious. She came inside the room one day and she shut down the computer. It says, what are you doing here? I don't want to see any Protestant Bibles here. I don't want to see any Protestant thing in our house. It says, mom, if I was here watching pornography, Uh months ago, you would not have entered the room and now that i'm investigating the bible you get mad And so it was very hard until I The the guy led me to christ talked to one of his pastors about me this guy came to christ and you know, he himself was shocked like You would have asked him, you know before it's like he would never come to christ And and now he goes to the pastors. Well, let's see and so the pastor one one day wants to have a Skype call with me and we start talking. And he challenged me, he's like, would you like to come here to Milan, North Italy, to plant a church? And I says, well, I don't know. So I went to visit him, saw the work. It was a very small work. We were meeting in a hotel. And that's what the occasion, by the way, where he told me, challenged me, you know, what the Bible says, when you come to Christ, you have to get baptized. And so the guy who led me to Christ came from Turin and he baptized me in the bath of the apartment of my future mentor. And after that, I came back home and I said, you know, I'm going to pray about this. I told my dad, Dad, I got baptized. He's like silence in the car as he's driving from the train station. He says, you were baptized when you were a baby. What are you talking about? I said, no, I met Christ. And I do this step of obedience now and I get baptized. So after, I would say like a month or two, my grandma died, which was the only reason I could stay in Rome. I had finished my post-degree program and I says, I need to, I need to go. Also because things in the house were getting very heated. One morning, essentially the entire family, I don't know why it was against me. Like they were super angry. Both my siblings my parents they were simply thinking that I was getting nuts I was taking drugs talking about always about Jesus always about Jesus always about Jesus and here I was I went to a library to find some peace and I Yeah, I knew it was time to move on. So I took a suitcase I had a few hundred bucks on my card and I took the train and I just went to Milan And for the next years, three years, four years, I lived at the house of my mentor. He and his wife, he was from New Jersey, but he was called as a missionary to Italy and he himself grew up Catholic. And I started to be mentored by him. I started to be involved in the church. I essentially preached once a month. I was involved in evangelism and things started also to, he mentored me also to try to you know, forgive my family for all the things that had happened. One time, the entire church, we were a small church plant, but we went to my hometown and we served my family. They have a big farm with olive trees and we started to olive harvest. And they were surprised to see the love of Christ. I told my parents I forgave them for what they did. And they're still Catholic to this day, but much has changed since then. They are far more open. They don't think of me as a weird Jehovah's Witness anymore. They see the work of God in my life. They came actually to hear me preach many times. And yeah, I'm still praying for their salvation. None of them, none of my siblings, none of my parents or my extended family, none of them has embraced Christ yet. But there's some progress as I talk with my mom about what grace actually is, try to connect it with Augustine or things like that. And after that, then I, yeah, went to seminary. I felt the need of theological training. So I went first to the Netherlands, the Theological Seminary, and then I was able to win a scholarship to go to a more reformed, because you have to know the guy who led me to Christ was himself a Calvinist. So I think it wasn't too much of a struggle for me to understand that the Bible is clear about predestination. I didn't have any Armenian season, like, this is it. You know, even some Catholic theologians would speak about predestination, like Thomas Aquinas. So I was like, okay, that's it. So that led me then to West Michigan, where I met my wonderful wife. And she has a different story. grew up in a reformed world, actually. And yeah, after that, after seminary, I was able to serve in different churches, Baptist church, Reformed Baptist church. I was tempted for a season to actually become Presbyterian, were it not for the issue of baptism that really stopped me from going that route. Yeah, I don't see any doing anything else in my life but serving the Lord. I have been thankful to see him lead us through the Christian life, which is very much like Pilgrim Progress. And yeah, this is kind of my story. I wanted to leave actually the remaining time for opening to the floor if there were questions or observation or anything I talked about stirred up your curiosity. Anyone has thoughts on observation? Anything that you would like? Yes. Yeah Yeah, so This is very fresh to me because now at work, I have a co-worker who grew up in the Church of Christ, which is all over the place in Tennessee, right? And you're kind of the issue there. He then becomes Catholic with all of his family. And it's usually kind of a nominal, you know, Church of Christ background that you just go into church. It's very much traditional. It's very much... there seems to be a vacuum of the understanding of scripture that then opens the door to, especially among fundamentalist circles, which have grown up with, you know, just 70 years of history. And then you go to a Catholic church and like, wow, this is such a, this looks so historical, this looks so, you know, they got so many, you know, so much history. It's like, it becomes fascinating, right? And so he's now in that one year in Catholicism from a very, I would say, nominal, superficial understanding of scripture. And you can just see it as you speak with them. I think that's where the challenge needs to begin. It's, does he grasp the scripture? Like, this is a matter of, With him and I suspect with your friends. I wouldn't necessarily go, you know in a rabbit trail Because that's the temptation and we're gonna talk about progress. We're gonna talk about This and that although it's important. I want to say if it wasn't for those even Conflictual Conversations that I had with the guy who led me to Christ I wouldn't had been led to a journey or struggle to find an answer but at the same time The we need to stick to the main divide and the main divide here is an issue of authority What really led me in the process to that copernican revolution we could say here I am reading the scripture And I want to say it's a process. So december I go I find christ in the coming months. I'm still reading the bible, but I thought i'm gonna still be catholic I'm gonna still be catholic And then you come to almost the end. I was coming almost to the end of the Old Testament. And kind of a light bulb switches on me. And the light bulb is this. I've been reading this book, the Bible, by now for, it's through the healing and the word of Christ. That's how it happens. The scripture is clear. And I've been reading it. I've been reading it. And I've been in love with this book. I've been fed by this book like no other book on earth. And there's this source of authority that my church, the Catholic church, recognizes. But the problem is, here you have this other source of authority, which is the magisterium teaching of the church, the tradition that has been handed down, and most of all, the way in which the church interprets the scripture. So that my mom will go to the confessional and speak to a priest, and the priest will say, you know, it's dangerous to read the Bible. what your son is doing is something dangerous, because it leads open to brainwash somehow in the Scripture. No, it's like, here you have all these traditions, and here you have the Scripture, and both of them are supposed to come from one source, God, both of them. But what do you do when they contradict? What do you do when the Bible is saying, hey, and the tradition that I've held here, see, I didn't leave the Catholic Church because of the corruption of the church or of the things that are happening within, you know, I was ready to defend it to death. No, the issue here is, where is the truth? Is this source of authority colliding with this source of authority? And I'm supposed to hold them both. And if it comes to a point that I am more and more persuaded that the authority of Scripture is really consistent, whereas all these dogmas that I'm supposed to believe. In fact, the Catholic catechism teaches that if you deny these dogmas, then you are a heretic, you are getting outside of the realm of what is supposed to be the truth. Then what do I do? And you go, you ask questions, you see that there's no until, you know, obviously the work of the Spirit as to, it's not enough to have the Word, you know, the Holy Spirit has to lead you into all the truth. But it's a process. I don't deny that it's not just a moment, but there is that kind of light bulb. I was walking in my hometown after I finished the Old Testament at that time. And I was saying, I've been lied all my life. I've been deceived. I've been deceived by the church that I taught to be the true mother church. They have led me into a different gospel. You know, the matter of justification is the number one difference that we must never put aside. Are we either justified by faith alone through Christ alone or somehow Yes, they can speak of grace, but there's some works added. And according to the New Testament, your answer to that question, it's crucial for your salvation. So that when the Council of Trent comes along and declares anathema upon those who say you're justified by faith alone, anathema, that's what they do, they are essentially taking Galatians, where it says another gospel, let him be anathema, but then you go to Galatians 2, and it speaks about no one shall be justified by the works of the law. So who is anathema here? Are they anathematizing the gospel? That's what they're doing. And that's kind of my answer on that. Hope that helps. Any other questions, thoughts, observations? Yes. through a sinless life and infected deification of Mary today. Is that derived from anything other than the, I guess I would term it, extra Bibles or extra books of the Bible? Is that derived from any part of the Bible? the Holy Scripture as opposed to those books. Because my understanding is that as these books came into existence, that they were initially somewhat rejected by the Catholic Church. And then as the secession of those books no i think you're right in terms of like the apocrypha right when it comes to mary we can only go to the new testament and the new testament apocrypha are agreed by both Catholics and Protestants that they are not inspired. Anything that talks about, you know, the gospel of Thomas or whatever, that might give you hints to the earlier life of Jesus or Mary. I don't think there's anything at all, even in those sources that could support the doctrine of Immaculate Conception. And I want to say the doctrine of Immaculate Conception is a very late development of the, within the Catholic Church. So that you come to 1860s, the first Vatican Council is where it officially was declared as a dogma. Pope Leo XIII saying that she was conceived without sin by her own parents to preserve her from, yeah, essentially sin, sinlessness. That is very recent. Within Catholicism, this is, you know, it's a whole narrative that nobody knows about it. But within Catholicism, this doctrine was actually condemned all the way to late Middle Ages. So that the Dominicans, for example, were, you know, a Catholic order denied this doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. And they were Orthodox Catholics. They considered it as something erroneous that has no support in the scripture. And this is their own people. So it's a very late development. And so what happens through the centuries, and I have a whole chapter in my book that talks about this, is you have, as you said, a kind of a gradual introduction of tradition. So the first step would be when early, late antiquity, you know, and this is something I think as Protestants we would agree, is calling Mary the mother of God. Okay, that's the first step. There is a sense in which she is, but the early church was clear in saying that doesn't mean that she gives birth to divinity or anything like that. And there was disagreement, you know, over the cautiousness that this title applied to Mary would give, which gives birth to a kind of a stream of thought than historians. I'm not going to go into it, but essentially they see problems with the use of that title. when that title is used to mean something else, as you said, some aspect of the divine within Mary. Because if you say that, then you start to have say, okay, she's the mother of God. And then, you know, you wait a few more centuries and you have the development of this kind of higher view of Mary that through the century starts to parallel every title that you give to Jesus Christ to Mary, you know, Eve, the new Adam, the new Eve, and uh I can go on and on and essentially what you have created is as you said a kind of a distortion of the deification process of mary and so Yeah, it's nothing in the scripture in the scripture The few references of mary It's you know born of a woman She calls god my savior in the magnificat. What does she needs to be saved if she's sinless? and And that continues even after the 1800s, because then you come to 1950s. Well, the next step is to say that she was ascended into heaven, just like Christ did. She couldn't just die. She had to ascend to heaven. And this is a doctrine that is only 60 or 70 years old. And it's never ending. But you know, Virgin Mary is very important to the devotional Catholics. It was very important for me. Be careful as you interact. Catholics get very offended when you touch her. But ultimately, the issue is try to bring them to the scripture. And by bringing them to the scripture, let them see, you know, I mean, the silence of the scripture on Mary for me screamed very loud. It's like, I give all this devotion to her all the day. And where is she? It's like all this she's saying, you know, do what he says, do what my son says, you know, She doesn't want attention to herself. Anyway, we ran out of time. If you have further questions, please come afterwards. I'll be glad to talk to you. Let me pray for us. God, we thank you for this morning. We pray indeed that Lord, you will help us as we witness to our friends. And indeed, as we as our brother was saying, you know, we grieve about how many among the Protestants are now getting attracted to Catholicism. They're fascinated by all the different elements of a liturgy or history or whatever, Lord, and they are forgetting to look at the issues that still here, 500 years from the Reformation, still divide us, still are the core of our beliefs about how are we justified, how are we made righteous through faith in Christ. We pray God now that You will be glorified this morning as we gather together for the worship and for the hearing of your word. And God, that you will be present among us and that you will grant us, Lord, to have the strength that comes from you and through your spirit. In Jesus' name, I pray. Amen. Thank you, everyone.