Reformation Sunday Morning

Turn with me, please, to Galatians chapter 2. Paul's epistle to the

Galatians chapter 2. We will look at this text as the foundation for our exhortation today.

A study, of course, that will be focused upon consideration of what

God has done in protecting the gospel of Jesus Christ. Galatians chapter 2.

Let's ask the Lord's blessing upon our time. Indeed, our gracious Heavenly Father, we ask that you would be with us now during this hour, that we would hear and understand.

You would once again cause us to focus our attention upon what is most important.

Lord, that we would see and understand what you have done, that we would be appreciative of the great blessing of the protection and preservation of the gospel down through the ages.

Help us to see that we stand in a long line, that we do not stand alone. Help us to love the gospel even more.

We pray in Christ's name. There are few books that are more politically incorrect today than Paul's epistle to the

Galatians. He functions on a basis that today is considered to be backwards.

And in fact, in the minds of many to be hateful. That is, he speaks of the truth of the gospel.

And he contrasts that against that which is opposed to the gospel. He even uses the term false gospels.

False brothers. Gospels that are not really another. In other words, he is dealing with absolute truth and therefore absolute error.

And we live in a day where the only absolute truth is that there is no absolute truth.

And anyone who claims to know absolute truth is considered to be, well, let's face it, by many of our fellow citizens, dangerous.

They look at those who, for example, are Muslims. And there are believing

Muslims out there. I was watching a video of one. He is a radical, as the world would put it.

But what he really is is just simply really a believing Muslim. And he was very straightforwardly confessing the fact that he believes that Sharia law is

God's law and therefore it's a good thing to bring people under God's law.

And that whatever you need to do to do that, that's what's good for the people. And people look at that and they hear that and they hear absolute categories.

And then when they hear us speaking of God's law, God's truth, God's wrath, they automatically connect the two together.

Well, there are connections, but there are also fundamental differences, especially in the how part.

But you see, our society is not one where thinking to that level and recognizing differences on a foundational level is really something that people want to do.

They instead hear absolute language and therefore they don't want to have anything to do with that.

But here in Galatians chapter 2, we are introduced to a controversy in the early church.

And I want to briefly look at this text and then make some application in light of the fact that today is, of course,

October 31st. And of course, I don't mean that anyone in this room is wearing costumes today.

We're not going to have a fall festival this evening. I cannot imagine what would happen if we ever walked in here and saw

Pastor Fry in a costume. But October 31st is not for us some kind of celebration of dark supernatural forces.

Instead, it's a celebration, really, of a freedom from dark supernatural forces.

That is, October 31st, 1517, the traditional beginning of the

Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther and the 95 Theses. Now, prior to this morning, on Wednesday evening and then in Sunday school,

I tried to give a lot of historical background to what took place at that time. I'm not going to repeat that this morning, obviously.

But I want to make application in light of this text to what took place so long ago.

So here in Galatians chapter 2, then after an interval of 14 years, I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas taking

Titus along also. It was because of Revelation that I went up and I submitted to them the gospel which

I preached among the Gentiles, but I did so in private to those who were of reputation for fear that I might be running or had run in vain.

Not even Titus, who was with me, though he was a Greek, was compelled to be circumcised. But it was because of the false brethren secretly brought in who had sneaked in to spy out our liberty, which we have in Christ Jesus, in order to bring us into bondage.

But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

Listen to those words once again. Verses 4 and 5. But it was because of the false brethren secretly brought in who had sneaked in to spy out our liberty, which we have in Christ Jesus, in order to bring us into bondage.

But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

There are your key words. There are the things that we want to look at briefly this moment.

Notice the first description. It says of these men that they were pseudodelfoi, false brethren.

You know the term pseudo. You've heard of a pseudonym, a false name. Well, a pseudodelfoi, you've heard

Adelphos, Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, ha ha ha. Adelphos brother, they are false brothers.

What's a false brother? I wrote a book a number of years ago called,

Is the Mormon My Brother? And the reason we called it that is we wanted to address the movement to try to wipe out all distinctions and say, well, you know, you can believe that God was once a man and lived on another planet.

And you can believe that Jesus is the spirit brother of Lucifer and in New Revelations. And that God's a polygamist and He has many, many wives in heaven.

And He begets spirit babies. And you can believe all of that stuff and still be a Christian.

Doesn't really matter. There's no way of defining what a Christian is. That's what would be required if we were going to allow

Mormonism, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints to be called a Christian faith or a person who practices that religion to be called our brother.

Certain famous people on Fox News had not yet risen to prominence when I wrote that particular book, but it has application even to this day.

Is the Mormon my brother? Even when he acts like it and weeps when saying that he is?

That's a question. The answer to the book was obviously no. You cannot believe that God is an exalted man from another planet and be a

Christian. Fundamental to the Christian faith is the worship of the one true God. That one's pretty easy to answer, let's be honest, even though there are people today who struggle with that one.

But it seems in our day that when it comes to the Gospel, we can't answer this question very clearly.

But they could in the days of the apostles. You see, someone who would be a false brother would be someone who wants to be known as my brother.

This wouldn't be in reference to somebody who clearly identifies me as a false teacher or as someone outside of their religion.

These were not Muslims who had snuck into the fellowship because a

Muslim wouldn't call me brother in the first place. Wouldn't even be seeking to identify me in that way.

Instead, these are people who had been secretly brought in. They had evil motives.

They pretended to be something that they were not. They would say, hey, brother.

And they'd shake your hand and they'd attend your fellowship meals and they'd say all the right words. But they were false brothers who had been secretly brought in and they had snuck in.

Heretics rarely walk in with lighted signs announcing their presence. Hi, I'm a heretic.

They had snuck in for a purpose to spy out the liberty which we have in Christ Jesus.

This tells us something about where these guys were coming from. They wanted to control people. They wanted to have religious authority and power that the revelation of Jesus Christ gave to no one, let alone to them.

They wanted to have power over other people. They wanted to exercise dominion over other people.

So they were spying out the liberty which we have in Christ Jesus. Why? In order to bring us into bondage.

You see, there can't be true liberty in man -made religion.

Because man always has to make up the rules so that the ruling party has control over other people.

And that control gives them what they want. You see, in the

Christian faith, we have revelation from God, we have law, we have guidance, we have all these things.

But you see, it comes from God. I don't get to edit it. I don't get to change it. And if it doesn't give me the kind of religious authority over the people that I want, well then,

I'm just going to have to go someplace else because I'm not going to be able to find that within true Christianity.

But these men wanted to bring the believers into bondage. And so they had snuck in.

They had made false profession. But thankfully, thankfully the apostles, the apostles had discernment.

The apostles were not infected by post -modernism. Because you see, the term discernment means to be able to discern the true nature of something.

To discern differences. There's another word that's very similar to discernment.

It's called discrimination. You see, today, you can't have discrimination.

But what does discrimination mean? What does the real word mean? It means being able to make choices between two or three options.

To make judgments. Now today, it's just simply a negative term.

It means that without using the faculties of your mind, you make prejudicial judgments.

You discriminate. But the term itself is actually a positive term.

And every single one of us discriminates every single day. And we have to.

Sometimes that discrimination takes place at the dinner table. The breakfast table.

We all have different tastes. And there are certain things that people eat for breakfast that I will never eat for breakfast.

I remember the first time I went to London. And my good brother Roger Brazier, pastor of the

Edmonton Baptist Church, I had flown all night.

And you know, you're tired when you get there and you've got all sorts of jet lag and all that kind of stuff. And so I said, man,

I'd love to have some breakfast. I'm hungry. What would you like? I'd love some bacon and eggs.

I'd like to have a real breakfast. So he took me to this place. And I sit down and he gets the food and he puts it down in front of me.

Do you know what they eat in England? Do you know what an English breakfast is like there?

What bacon and eggs is? It's ham with the very same kind of beans that we have with hot dogs.

And it's all runny. And they think that's breakfast. And I was like, oh, man,

I'm on a foreign mission field already. I can tell. And I was in England for crying out loud. I discriminate against English breakfasts.

And you know what? I'm proud to say it. And I will always discriminate. I don't know what

I'm going to get starting tomorrow in Lima, Peru. I don't know. I may come back a size smaller than I am now.

And that's going to be a little scary. But we do discrimination. We make decisions between different things.

We have to. When you get in your car today, you're going to discriminate at the corner as to whether you're going to go with that car coming or not.

It's just simply making of decisions. And I think that's what we're going to do. The Apostles discriminated.

I mean, they made a choice. These are false brethren. They made a choice. They discerned what they were about.

They made a decision. These are false brethren. And they're seeking to bring us into bondage. And we will discriminate against them.

Because, you see, they had the proper motivation.

They had the proper priority. I truly believe in our day, the last portion of verse 5 needs to be elevated to the same status that the great five solas had at the time of the

Reformation. Soli Deo Gloria, the glory of God alone.

No intermediaries, no Marian saints. The glory goes to God alone, period.

The formal principle of the Reformation. Sola Scriptura, Scripture, the sole and fallible rule of faith.

Solus Christus, Christ alone. Christ, the center of the Gospel. Sola Gratia, grace alone.

Sola Fide, by faith alone. The great five solas. They have served us well.

They need to continue to serve us well. But I think that these last few words of verse 5, we need to come up with a sola for them.

Sola Gospel maybe. Why? Because we live in a day where so many people who would not identify themselves as being enemies of the

Reformers. They stand in Protestant churches. They stand in Protestant pulpits.

But they don't believe that the truth of the Gospel either continues to exist or is discernible enough to be passionate about.

There are many today who are promoting what I call the mere Christianity movement.

Where we have a boiled down, shrunken down, shaved down Christianity that basically is something about the

Trinity. Though we can be vague on that. And it's about Jesus.

And we definitely want to talk about the cross and resurrection. Though we don't want to get real specific as to why that's important.

Because the one thing that this mere Christianity movement will not allow is that the

Gospel is definitional to the Christian faith. They're all around us.

They've got big names. And they're not celebrating today. They're not celebrating today.

In fact, they have the temerity to say that really today needs to be a day of sober mourning.

For while we might appreciate some of the insights brought to us by men like Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli and Martin Bucer and John Calvin and Theodore Beza and the like.

In reality, what we should be mourning is the great divorce. The great schism that rents

Christendom apart. In fact,

I stand here and I wonder. In evangelical churches, whatever that means today.

I wonder how many today are talking about Reformation Sunday in comparison to Halloween.

What percentage do you think? And beyond that, those that are talking at all about Reformation Sunday, I wonder how many look back upon it with thanksgiving for the mercy of God or look back upon it going, well, it was sort of necessary at the time, but it's no longer necessary today.

Why would someone believe that? Why would someone come to that conclusion? The only way you can come to that conclusion is if you conclude that the last phrase of verse 5, the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

That you can so water down that gospel. That you can so spread that gospel out.

That as long as you talk about Jesus and say something about heaven and hell, well, that's good enough to be the gospel.

That's not what Galatians says. Because Paul in this very chapter is going to go on to say to Peter, Peter, the apostle

Peter, follower of Jesus Peter, mount of transfiguration Peter.

He's going to say that Peter, by merely withdrawing table fellowship from the

Gentiles in the presence of Jews, being

Jewish amongst his Jewish brethren, and therefore acting Jewish, and therefore not sitting at table with the

Gentiles, because that's not something Jews would do. That Peter by doing that was not what?

Walking straight in accordance with the truth of the gospel.

Ever thought about that phrase walking straight? It's pretty easy for us today to think about that.

How many times have you seen cops? They've got somebody and they're doing this number and they're trying to make them walk a straight line and you've got a certain amount of alcohol in your system and you just can't do that anymore.

Walking straight in accordance with the truth of the gospel. Ortho podeo, to walk a straight line.

And what Paul says to Peter publicly in front of everybody is you are not walking straight in accordance with the truth of the gospel.

He says, Peter, you're compromising the gospel. What was Peter doing? By his actions,

Peter was saying, there's something more than mere faith in Jesus Christ that makes you right with God.

Now, if you had given Peter a theological test, he wouldn't have said that, but by his actions, he was leading people to that conclusion.

What the Judaizers that Paul fights against here in Galatians 2, what they added to the gospel was in comparison to what most false religions added to the gospel today, nothing.

And yet, Paul saw that the very truth of the gospel was at stake. That's why he began this letter in chapter 1 with those strong words, if anyone preaches to you a gospel other than the one that we preached to you, let him be anathema under the curse of God.

There is no Christianity without the gospel. You can have all sorts of pomp and circumstance.

You can have all sorts of discussion about Jesus, but if you don't have the gospel, you don't have the

Christian faith. Jesus said, anyone who is ashamed of me and my gospel,

I will be ashamed of them. He didn't say of all the accoutrements that you can add on.

The gospel. Paul says, we didn't put up with them for even an hour, so the truth of the gospel will remain with you.

I do not believe that God's people have ever been without the truth of the gospel.

But I also don't believe that everyone has ever called themselves a Christian, really was a Christian.

And especially in history, there was a period of time when something grand and momentous took place.

In the year 313, Emperor Constantine allowed

Christianity to exist. Declared it to be a religio lithita, a lithit religion.

That ended centuries of persecution. And the last 50 years of that persecution had been the most desperate and difficult of times for the church.

It had been the most severe in those last 50 -60 years of that time period.

With the allowance of Christianity as a lithit religion, over a period of time, especially with Constantine's own embracing of Christianity, the faith began to become what we would call secularized.

It became a part of the society. And by about 380, it became the official religion of the

Roman Empire. Once the Christian faith ceased being something where a call of repentance goes out, a repentance from sin, a turning from sin, embracing of Christ, a distinct break from one kind of life, a turning from sin and debauchery and rebellion to God.

Once it became something that, well, everybody does it. You are simply born into it.

It's sort of genetic. It's cultural. There was a massive change in what was called the church, a persecuted church.

Well, you really got to actually believe something to be willing to be persecuted. But once everybody's doing it, things change.

And over the centuries, that kind of system based upon a genetic passing on of the faith took on all sorts of traditions of men.

The gospel that calls for holiness, the gospel that calls for repentance, the gospel that exalts the finished work of Christ and destroys the pride of men.

That's not really what mankind's looking for. And over time, you had the development of a sacramental system.

Now, today, Rome has seven sacraments. Even Roman Catholic historians admit they all weren't there from the start.

They developed over time. When you look at modern Roman Catholicism, history tells us there were no sacramental priests in the early church.

There was nobody you went to for confession privately. In fact, penance is only allowed once in the early church.

One time you're allowed to have penance. And it wasn't by going before someone who called himself father.

That was something that developed hundreds of years down the road. And Roman Catholic historians, the honest ones, will admit that this is the case.

But the sacramental system, whether it's Protestant or, let's face it, there are non -Roman

Catholics that have sacramental systems as well. The sacramental system came in to allow the activities of man to control the flow of the grace of God.

That's what a sacrament is. It is a mechanism whereby mankind controls the flow of the grace of God.

And once a system like that begins to develop, it's never going to simplify itself.

It's always going to become more and more complicated. And that's, of course, what took place.

Until finally, after the medieval period and the development of such dogmas as purgatory, and then the concept of merit and the treasury of merit, so that saints become people, not all the believers in Jesus Christ, but only those that live a particular kind of life and have more merit than they need to enter into the presence of God, to wipe away the temporal punishment of their sins.

So now you've got saints who go directly into the presence of God, and their extra merit goes into their treasury of merit.

And Mary had all sorts of extra merit. That goes into the treasury of merit. And Jesus only had to shed a few drops of blood to atone for the whole world, but since He bled copiously, there's all this extra merit from Him.

So all this goes into the treasury of merit. And the church, by the power of the keys, controls this treasury of merit and can dole out merit to us poor sinners.

And that's what's called an indulgence. And no matter what the initial motivations were, it didn't take long until somebody got the idea, well, you know, you can get an indulgence for an act of charity.

And what would the act of charity be? The giving of money. And all of a sudden, a new, as we say in today's lingo, revenue stream was opened.

And I've been in Rome, and I have stood in St. Peter's Basilica, and I've seen the gold and the marble and the extravagance, and I know where that money came from.

It came from poor people all across Europe who, because of the false doctrine of purgatory, thought their loved ones were suffering horribly, and they would give their last penny to relieve their suffering, as anyone would if you really thought that was true.

And it was in this context, then, that a Dominican monk by the name of Johann Tetzel came into Saxony.

Initially, the Germans had wanted to keep this out, because let's face it, on any level, I mean, the

Council of Trent got rid of selling indulgences. Even the Council of Trent thought, man, this thing looks really bad.

And they had been kept out of Germany. But then economics got in the way.

And the Archbishop of Mainz, to buy his position as Archbishop, the

Archbishop had to take out a loan. And he borrowed 30 ,000 ducats.

Now, I have no earthly idea what 30 ,000 ducats translates into in modern dollars, but it sounds like a lot to me.

And he borrowed 30 ,000 ducats from the German banking family, the

Fuggers. How would you like to be at your bank? I bank with the

Fuggers. That's where we got the money. Well, now he was the Archbishop. He had to come up with some way of paying this off.

And the best way he found was to allow Johann Tetzel to come into the area under his control in Saxony.

And he says, I'll tell you what, I'll let you come in, I'll let you sell your indulgences for a price.

It was a straight percentage thing. I get a certain percentage of what you sell.

Now, we sit back today and we go, man, that's bad. Selling God's grace and splitting up the profits to pay for buying offices in the church.

Yeah, it was a pretty corrupt time. Well, the story is told that right at the same time,

Martin Luther is struggling. He's struggling with the concept of the righteousness of God.

He's studying these same words that we can study today. And he runs across this phrase, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith in Romans 1 .17.

He doesn't like that. Because he's afraid of the righteousness of God.

He was trained. He started training as a lawyer. And he's very focused upon the wrath of God.

And he fears the wrath of God. Everybody in that day did for the simple reason that everyone saw death every single day.

We hide death in our society. We don't talk about it. But you couldn't hide it in that day.

There was plague. There was disease. A woman would have to have ten live births to get one child through to maturity in most places.

And so, thinking about the wrath of God, thinking about heaven and hell, thinking about eternity, everybody thought about these things.

Here was Luther, and Luther was a good monk. He observed all the rules of his order.

He fasted and prayed and attended mass and went to confession and did dependences.

But he got no peace. Because he knew even when he did all these things, weren't even those actions tinged with pride?

Tinged with selfishness? He recognized that if God's justice is really

God's justice, not grating on a curve, he'd read those texts about the holiness of God and he was crushed by them.

Right at this same time, in the providence of God, he was made to begin lecturing, teaching through the book of Romans.

He's reading the Greek New Testament. He's already started. There have been cracks of light that have started to come into his understanding.

He has because he has obtained a copy of Erasmus' Greek New Testament first published in 1516.

He has been able to compare the Latin Vulgate, the text of the church, with the

Greek New Testament, the original. And one thing has already struck him.

What's he doing to try to get peace with God? Well, the Latin Vulgate says, punitentiam agitate, do penance.

And so he does penance. He'd sleep, not on a bed, but on the stone floor in Germany without a blanket.

It gets cold in Germany. You don't sleep well that way. He was doing penance.

He was harming his body so as to show penance toward God.

But then he looks at the Greek New Testament, the original, what Paul actually wrote, what Mark actually wrote, or Matthew actually wrote.

It doesn't say punitentiam agitate, do penance. It says metanoiate, repent, change mind, be going and thinking this way, turning of the heart and mind this way.

That's not the same thing as doing penance. Light begins to break in.

But then every movie that you can watch, and a rather major movie about Luther came out a few years ago, tries to, in its own dramatic way, picture that experience in the castle tower, not the

Vartburg, but in his study in Wittenberg, when all of a sudden,

Luther sees what Paul was saying. He sees the truth of the

Gospel is that the righteousness of God, in no way compromising

His holiness, the righteousness of God is something that is imputed to us by faith.

It's not a standard we try to strive to reach to try to make it to heaven.

It's a standard that one has already lived in our place, our substitute, and therefore, when we come to Him, we come with an empty hand.

We offer nothing, no indulgences, no sacraments, no penances, no

Our Fathers and Hail Marys can possibly purchase that righteousness of God.

It comes by faith, and by faith alone, it is imputed to me. That is why he used, or at least is said to have used, the illustration of the dunghill.

This wasn't all he taught on the subject. He's often misrepresented at this point, but it made the one point, and it's one of the most famous illustrations attributed to Luther anyways.

If you lived in Germany at that time, it was a very agricultural place outside of the cities, and the cities would be relatively small in comparison to what we would view as a city today.

I mean, we can start way out on the 60 on that end and drive for an hour and a half in Phoenix before we get to the other end of the city, and people back then wouldn't have called it a city, they would have called it a monster.

But anybody then in Germany or Spain or anyplace else would have known that certain times of the year you would prepare for planting, and you would need to fertilize your soil.

And so what you do at the end of the time period of harvest is you would pile up the dung from your farm animals, and that wouldn't be an overly pretty thing.

If any of you have ever been on farms and you may have seen, you've had to muck out stalls and things like that, and it's smelly, messy business.

But you'd pile it up so that in the spring you could spread it out and fertilize your land as you would put your seed in.

And then the first, on a warm fall day it would smell and there'd be flies and it would be repulsive.

But then that first snowfall comes. Now this is where we disconnect. We live in Phoenix.

But, and my daughter I think was 10 or 11 or 12 or 13, I forget how old she was before she even saw the stuff, but some of you have been in places where this amazing thing happens in the fall and winter.

Stuff falls out of the sky and it's white and it collects on things and it's called snow. And of course

I grew up back there and I remember that first snowfall. It's not like the spring snow.

You know where you've already got piles of it and it's brown and dirty. The first snowfall is so beautiful because there's no tracks.

It's just so even. It's the stuff of picture postcards. And that first snowfall comes and it covers that dung hill.

You can no longer see it. You can no longer smell it. It's no longer repulsive.

It's just a pile out in the field and there's many of them. This beautiful white covering.

He said that's what the righteousness of Christ is like. It covers us. You see to understand that illustration, you need to understand what

Rome was saying. The reason anyone goes to heaven is because you're already pleasing to God. And so for Rome, grace is infused into you.

And instead of being a pile of dung, grace is infused and you become a pile of gold. And therefore the pile of gold goes to heaven because it's pleasing to God.

God likes gold, therefore it goes to heaven. The problem is you can never know with infallible certainty whether you've done everything to remain a pile of gold.

Because if you sin, if you commit a mortal sin, guess what happens? Pile of dung again.

And Rome's never defined exactly what the mortal sins are. There's some priests who tell you they know, but they don't.

So if you commit a mortal sin, boom, pile of dung. Got to go to the priest, get absolution, pile of gold.

But now you have temporal punishments of sin on your soul, which means now there's flecks of dung on the gold.

A little bit here, a little bit there. And if you commit non -mortal sins, more dung appears on the face of the gold.

That's why you end up in purgatory, to burn off the dung. If you're a pile of gold and you die, but you don't necessarily know whether you are or not.

The point of Luther's illustration was that Christ's righteousness doesn't change the pile of dung.

That's sanctification. Justification and sanctification intimately connected, both are the purpose of God.

He whom God justifies, He will sanctify. But if you don't make the distinction between the two, you end up with a work salvation system whereby my actions,

I determine whether I'm a pile of gold or a pile of dung, whether I'm going to have to be cleansed, whatever it might be.

Luther's point was Christ's righteousness is imputed to us and our acceptance with God is based upon His perfect righteousness, not mine.

Those whom He justifies, He will then sanctify. But my sanctification does not add to the righteousness of Christ as my standing before God.

Sadly, that massively important distinction is lost on many today.

On both sides of the Tiber River, it is lost on many today. Partly because we just don't care about these things.

We don't think about judgment. We don't think about the inevitability of standing before an absolutely holy

God and asking ourselves the question, in what will

I be robed? What will I bring before an absolutely holy

God? Many today say, well, I'll say

I did my best. Really, you did? Don't lie to me. Not a one of us ever has done our best.

Not one, other than Jesus. You want proof of that?

C .S. Lewis was right about this anyways. He wasn't right about a number of things, but he was right about this. Now we can update it.

Let's say we implanted a miniature MP3 recorder in your chest.

It only turned on every time you made moral judgments about somebody else. And at the end of your life, that was the standard by which you were judged.

Anybody go into heaven? People today just don't think about that.

We amuse ourselves out of having to think about judgment and the life hereafter.

We watch the television, the movie screen. However we do it, just get our thoughts away from this.

And that's why the issues and matters of eternal import that moved the men at the time of the

Reformation to us seem distant today.

But you see, once the Holy Spirit of God begins to move in someone's heart and bring conviction of sin, the answer to the question what must

I do to be saved, all of a sudden becomes the most important question that can ever be answered.

On October 31, 1517, a process began whereby all the centuries of accrued tradition and error began not in one day, but began to be scraped away.

The result was the freedom that you have to sit here this day.

The freedom you have to possess and read the Scriptures. And most importantly, the freedom you have to believe in a

Savior who died once for all and by His death perfected all those for whom

He died. He does not have to be rendered present on an altar over and over and over and over again.

One time, perfect work, perfect righteousness, yours by faith alone.

Only that empty hand of faith can save. If you put anything in it, it will no longer fit into the hand of grace.

That was the message. And on that day when Luther nailed those theses, he had no earthly idea.

No possible way of knowing what God was going to do with what He was doing that day.

But thanks be to God, our God is sovereign over history.

And He wove together all those threads, the

Greek New Testament, printing, the degradation of the church in that day.

All these things came together that one day and silently, quietly, the light began to shine.

And we are the recipients of that great blessing. Let us thank

God for what He has done. Indeed, our

Heavenly Father, we do thank You for the Gospel. We thank You for the

Apostle Paul who so long ago said that we did not put up with them for even an hour so that the truth of the

Gospel might remain with you. We are thankful that the truth of the

Gospel remains with us to this day. And we thank You that that Gospel shows us our inabilities and Christ's abilities.

That Gospel tells us that we cannot save ourselves. We cannot add the work of Christ.

We cannot take that beautiful, seamless robe of His righteousness and try to put a patch on that has ours.

It must be all Christ or none of Christ. He will not be a co -Savior.

We thank You that we have a perfect Savior. Lord, we would pray that as we rejoice in Your providence this day,

Lord, that if there be any here that have not yet bowed that knee, extended that empty hand of faith, clung solely to Christ, that today would be the day of salvation.

Show Yourself powerful. Draw Your people unto Yourself. We pray in Christ's name.