God Uses Luther’s Flawed Pen to Change the World | Matthew 4:17

ThornCrown Covenant Baptist Church

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So, last week, I preached on the

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Protestant Reformation, it's one of my favorite subjects in the history of the church, and it is, there's so many powerful lessons and truths to come out of that movement and from the men who were the trailblazers of the

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Reformation. And I had a special focus on the five solas, and as I was discussing the sermon and stuff with Pastor David, I also kind of, it kind of hit me that some of the, the five solas themselves, which as, if you recall, it's salvation is by God's grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, for the glory of God alone, and based on the ultimate, final, infallible authority of scripture alone, right?

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So these are actually the foundation for biblical evangelism, and because they are a summary of what the

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Bible teaches about the gospel, and about God, man, and salvation, and they are really excellent training for evangelism, especially to Roman Catholics, which is what we have predominantly here in El Paso, but of any other false religion or whatever it may be, because they are literally the foundation of the most important truths that the

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Bible teaches. In fact, knowing and defending or apologizing the five solas and the law and gospel distinction are the keys, they're actually the keys to doing sound biblical evangelism.

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And that's why I would highly encourage everybody to go back and listen to the previous sermon to get a nice little summary of the five solas, and I also, if you look up the sermon notes,

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I put up all this, a lot of scripture references that you can look up, so that you can defend them or apologize them, like the letter of Peter says, that we are to make a defense or an apologetic, that's where we get the word apologetics from, is the defense of the faith.

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And so we can defend our faith in the five solas and the gospel using those verses, those scriptures and the biblical gospel, that is the one gospel and only gospel that saves, according to Galatians 1.

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So there are some really powerful truths here that really are at the foundation of who we are as a church, and what we preach, and what we teach, and what we confess, and what we evangelize, it's the foundation of it is really at the five solas of the

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Reformation and the law and gospel distinction, which we will get into more today in this sermon.

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So that just really called my attention because there's so many, a lot of times the church, the modern church gets caught up in these new methods and ways and innovations and stuff, and that's really, innovation can be a dangerous thing in the church, and I'm all for technology, right, as long as it's not killing you, like these 5G things that cause cancer and stuff, but I'm all for technology,

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I mean I'm a software developer by trade, I don't have anything against necessarily advancing technology for the betterment and dominion of the creation and the betterment of our lives, but in the church we have to be careful with innovation because a lot of this stuff has already been trailblazed and established and well thoroughly thought out and cemented, so to speak in a way, by what the church has handed down to us, the faithful church of old.

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That's why it's such a powerful thing to learn about the five solas and about the law gospel distinction because these are historic truths that the church as a pillar and buttress of the truth has handed down, and which we are wise to take hold of so that we can better and grow in the faith and share our faith with others.

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So this brings me now to one of the stars of the show, so to speak,

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Martin Luther, the man himself, and that's why the sermon title is called,

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God Uses Luther's Flawed Pen to Change the World. The reformation was a reformation of really not just the church, but of the entire world.

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It had massive consequential downstream effects and impacts on the entire world, and we will see why today.

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So Martin Luther was born in 1483, I think actually yesterday, if I recall correctly, or sometime last week, and in the small town of Eisleben in Germany.

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His father, Hans Luther, was ambitious for himself and his family, and he was determined to see

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Martin, his eldest son, the firstborn, become a lawyer. He sent

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Martin to Latin schools in Mansfield and Magdeburg in 1497, where he attended a school operated by a lay group called the

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Brethren of the Common Life in Eisenach in 1498.

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The three schools focused on the medieval trivium, as it's called, of grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

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Luther later compared his education there to purgatory and hell, so you can see how much he enjoyed that.

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I mentioned this before, a couple of years ago as well, that God uses everything, the good, bad, and the ugly.

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He uses everything ultimately for our good, but this is really important because Luther was a man of his age, a man of his time, and he didn't fully ever take the scales off his eyes from certain common places that were accepted in society that we will find out later on led to some big problems and issues in his life, sin in his life later on.

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But that's his basic background, and you can see that their family name was

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Luther, not Luther. Luther actually changed his name later on when the

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Reformation was, right around when he was getting to the point of Reformation. The humanist movement was also very prominent in this time, the growing humanist movement of going back to the sources and Ad Fontes.

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So all of this, there were tidal waves of change that were on the cusp of this very period, and so we will see a lot of that come to light and to fruition in the life of Luther and how

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God used him. Now in 1501, when he was 17, he entered the

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University of Erfurt, which he later described as a beer house and a whorehouse, so he just went from bad to worse apparently.

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But in accordance with his father's wishes, he enrolled in law, but dropped out almost immediately, believing that law represented uncertainty.

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But in Luther's later education, we see that, in fact, even when he was younger, his family, his parents caught on that he was very sharp.

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He had a cogent, very sharp mind. And there's a caveat here, because later on in life,

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Luther somewhat did not diminish the importance of logic in his hermeneutics and theology, and it kind of led him to some contradictions in his theology, but at least at one point in his life, he was very, very sharp and embraced the importance of reason and logic.

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Not that he betrayed it altogether, but he kind of compromised a little bit on that later on. And unbeknownst to Luther, God was, in fact, preparing him for something much, much greater.

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So, on July 2nd, 1505, while Luther was returning to the university on horseback after a trip home, a lightning bolt struck near him during a thunderstorm.

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This is the momentous occasion in Luther's life, where he thought he was going to die. Later, telling his father he was terrified of death and divine judgment, he cried out, help

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Saint Anna, I will become a monk, if you deliver me, in other words.

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He came to view his cry for help as a vow that he could never break. He left university, sold his books, and entered

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Saint Augustine's monastery in Erfurt on 17 July of 1505.

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So this is over 500 years ago. And it's here where we begin to see

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Luther's intense internal struggle to find peace with God. He constantly wrestled with how a wretched sinner like himself could ever hope to be right with a just, holy, and just.

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And no matter how long or how many times he confessed, and sometimes for over six hours on end, to the exhaustion of his confessors, no matter how many days he starved himself, he left himself outside to freeze, flagellated himself.

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That's when you take like a cat -of -nine -tails or a whip and you whip yourself in the back.

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You know, when you recall when I was preaching on the flesh, all of those are devices of Rome that are really ungodly because they do not promote godliness.

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That's not what mortifying the flesh means. It's not asceticism or to the point of hurting yourself.

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Okay, so he was all in. Luther was all in. Luther was an all or nothing kind of guy.

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He was all in. He was all in. Later on, after he became a believer, he would say that if ever a monk was saved by his monkery, it would have been me because he did it all and he went to the above and to the extreme, above and beyond.

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And I started thinking about this, like how long was Luther a monk for? He's actually, we just saw that Luther entered the monastery in 1505, but he was officially excommunicated in 1521 by the

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Pope. So that's 16 years. For 16 years,

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Luther was a monk. That's a long time. All of this took time in his life to realize, to study.

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This took lots of time to prepare. And that's just the period where he became a monk.

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That's not including the time before that. So 16 years and he wrote the thesis in 1517.

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Okay, so that's five years prior to him officially becoming excommunicated. These things took time, right?

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And so Anna, St. Anna, according to the Roman church is a patron saint of miners.

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Luther's dad was a miner by trade and he owned a few mines and that's, he was upset with Luther because he wanted him to become a lawyer to take care of them, their retirement, his parents retirement.

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So, and he thought like, well, you're just going to become a, you know, a beggar, a little mendicant.

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So it's funny because Luther had a conversation with his dad about his decision.

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And he's like, hey, well, you know, I was struck by lightning and almost struck by lightning. So I made a vow to Anna, St.

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Anna, to become a monk so that, because she delivered me.

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And the dad was like, how do you know that wasn't the devil? What about the command to honor your father and mother, right?

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And this is, this is actually really interesting because Hans, his father was onto something that the reformation would really bring to light.

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And it's that the only way you can know if something comes from God is if it comes, if it, if it's in God's word, if it's established and taught in God's word, that's the only way you can know if something comes from God.

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If you see somebody come up to you and give you a vision, or, you know, there's some scary event that happens. The only way you can know that God is directing you to do something is through prayer, the means of grace, and the word of God, rightly understood, right?

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Rightly understood. So powerful stuff. And this is something I've been learning in this amazingly fantastic book.

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It's called Here I Stand, A Life of Martin Luther by Roland Bainton. This is like a classic biography of Martin Luther.

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Highly recommend for you all to get a copy and read it. It's excellent stuff.

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It's even got little woodcuts and pictures of the historic people and characters and events on there.

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It's a great read. Now, there's another scholar, a more ecumenical one, and by ecumenical

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I mean people who think that they're Christian and that we can be friends with Rome, with the

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Church of Rome, with the Roman Catholic Church, even though they preach a false gospel. So that's a false ecumenism.

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But Martin Marty is an ecumenical biography of Luther, and in one of his books on,

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I think it's called 1517, yeah, October 31st, 1517, he wrote that Luther was a scrupulous, almost fanatic confessor.

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His generous main confessor in the Augustinian Monastery did

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Johannes von Staupitz, that was Luther's mentor, one of Luther's mentors, had to hear

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Luther tear himself up spiritually in efforts to clear his record before God. It may be hard for moderns to empathize with someone in a monastery who had available all the sacred hours and devices one needed to confess, because that's all the monks did, right?

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Monks didn't have anything better to do but to do these spiritual exercises.

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That's all they did. And yet Luther was still, for hours on end, confessing his sins on a very regular basis.

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But poor Staupitz heard hour after hour of confessions to the point where he once complained to Luther that he did not have to confess every fart, right?

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So whether or not Luther was mentally unbalanced or whether he was a genius at self -examination, a

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Mozart -level genius at confession, as it were, he certainly was not modeling the life of believing in a gracious God.

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And that much is true. Because Luther at this point did not understand the gospel or the grace of God.

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And so he was repentant of his sin, but it was based on worldly sorrow.

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It was sort of Esau's sorrow, which leads to death. He agonized over it.

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He punished himself for it. He berated himself for it. But he did not have saving repentance.

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That's what in theology is known as saving repentance, not worldly repentance, but saving repentance or godly sorrow, which leads to repentance.

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So this was the crux of the issue. And again, he did not yet understand who he was supposed to turn to.

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He knew he was supposed to turn from his sin, but where does he turn to? Where can he take his sins to?

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Who can he take his sins to? That he did not yet quite understand. Now, scripture tells us in 2

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Corinthians 7, verse 20, if you turn with me there, 2 Corinthians 7, verse 20,

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God speaking through the Apostle Paul says, for godly sorrow, that is in accord with the will of God, that's the key phrase there, in accord with the will of God, produces a repentance without regret, without shame or guilt and with hope.

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It's a regret that leads to hope. It leads to salvation. But worldly sorrow or worldly repentance is the hopeless sorrow of those who do not believe, and that produces death, right?

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So that's where Luther was stuck at this point. He was stuck with worldly sorrow and worldly repentance.

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It was a religious type of repentance that was false. It wasn't according to the will of God, like scripture says, right?

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Now, skeptics, Romanists and secularists have accused Luther of being insane or mentally unstable.

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This, however, is very easily debunked and refuted because far from being a madman,

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Luther had a highly productive life, more productive than probably the people who claimed that he was insane.

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And he had immense contributions in literary output, so much so that he penned over 60 ,000 pages with an ink pen, okay?

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You try writing 60 ,000 pages, right? Even with a computer, we probably don't come anywhere close to that.

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That's enough to fill 102 massive volumes of the famous Weimar edition of Luther's works, collected works, making him the most prolific religious figure in history, as well as the most written about since Christ.

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So we have there very clear... People are just, you know, they try to slander or misrepresent, mischaracterize people of the past, and we have a duty and a biblical obligation to be faithful to the past, right?

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We have an obligation to be faithful and accurate in handling men and women of old, whether they be non -believers or not.

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We have to be truthful. So, this brings us to now the 95

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Theses. Luther was ordained to the priesthood two years later after becoming a monk in 1507.

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He came to reject several teachings and practices of the Roman Catholic Church, and in particular, he disputed the abuse of indulgences, right?

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Luther proposed an academic discussion and debate of the practice and efficacy of indulgences in his 95

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Theses, which he had nailed to the Wittenberg Church doors on October 31st of 1517.

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So, but again, keep in mind, this took time. It wasn't like he just figured it out right away, right?

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This actually brings me to an important lesson in my life. When I was raised a

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Roman Catholic, and when I got saved, I started to look online for resources to find out how do

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I make sense of the Roman Catholic Church? Like, what are they teaching that's false? And so I quickly found out resources online that helped me to make sense of my faith, and at the same time, apologize, defend it against false religions like that of Roman Catholicism.

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But we have to keep in mind that the internet was invented not too long ago, and I remember

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I was very impatient with a couple, an older couple, who said that it took them five years to come out of the

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Catholic Church when they got saved, and I didn't understand that. I was like, what? How could you stay there for five years when everything they do, so much of what they do is blatantly contrary to the

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Bible? How could you just stay there? And then I realized, wait a minute, they didn't have internet back then.

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They couldn't just look stuff up online like we can now. They don't have the embarrassment of riches that we now suffer from of an overabundance of information, right?

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It's not, it wasn't as easy to look things up. You had to know where to look to find a book or something, a resource, someone to tell you, to help you, to guide you like the

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Ethiopian eunuch who was led by Philip the Evangelist, right? How can I know what this scripture says unless somebody shows me what it means, right?

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And that's why it's important to also recognize that God uses pastors and teachers to instruct us in His Word, right?

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So that's really key to understand in all of this.

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And now, what is an indulgence?

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So pay attention here to what the official Catholic encyclopedia,

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New Advent, defines it as, okay? An indulgence is the extra -sacramental remission or forgiveness of the temporal punishment due in God's justice to sin that has been forgiven, okay?

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Note that, that has been forgiven. Which remission is granted by the church in the exercise of the power of the keys to the kingdom through the application of the superabundant merits of Christ and of the saints, right?

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The canonized saints and for some just and reasonable motive.

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Okay, so wow, notice that. It's supposed to be for the temporal punishment due for sin that has been forgiven already.

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If that's not a contradiction, we'll see further why that's a blatant contradiction and many more.

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There's so much wrong with this that it's no wonder that Luther blasted away with 95 canons.

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Now, what is purgatory, right? Because all of this is tied to the doctrine of purgatory.

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Once again, the Catholic encyclopedia says, purgatory, which is

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Latin for to make clean, to purify, to purge, right? To purge sins away in accordance with Catholic teaching is a place or condition of temporal punishment for those who, departing this life in God's grace, are not entirely free from venial faults or venial sins or have not fully paid the satisfaction due to their transgressions, okay?

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So, if the sin has already been forgiven, why are you still paying for it in purgatory?

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Because apparently they haven't fully paid the satisfaction due to their sins, their transgressions, okay?

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This is a blatant contradiction, right? Now, does anybody recall what the

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Bible says about the forgiveness of sins? Who is it that forgives sins but God alone, right?

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God alone forgives sins, and even the corrupt

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Pharisees understood that. Who can forgive sins but God alone?

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No one can, right? It's the blood of Jesus Christ that wipes away the stain of all our sin, not in indulgences or in any man -made device.

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That's of the devil, right? So, and this is precisely what

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Luther begins to articulate in his 95 Theses, which I will read the preface to now.

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Luther starts out by saying, out of love for the truth and the desire to bring it to light, and by the way, this is where people suspect he changed his name to Luther because of,

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I think it's a Greek word for Eleutherion, which

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I think means to bring light, something like that. And the following propositions will be discussed in definitive

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Wittenberg under the presidency of Reverend Father Martin Luther, Master of Arts and of Sacred Theology, and Lecturer in Ordinary on the same at that place.

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Wherefore he requests that those who are unable to present and debate orally with us to do so by letter.

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In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, Amen. So Luther here was writing out 95 Theses in Latin.

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This was not meant for public consumption, okay? This was not meant for the public. The public could not read or understand

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Latin. This was meant for internal debate with the scholars and priests of his day in the church, the

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Roman medieval church, to discuss these abuses that he was highlighting.

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And he starts out with Thesis number one by saying or writing, When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said,

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Repent, in Matthew 4 .17, he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance, okay?

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So he willed the entire life of believers here. Luther is starting to tap into a biblical reality, a very important biblical reality of the

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Christian life. And that is that repentance is a lifelong thing.

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It's not a one -time thing, okay? Because godly sorrow leads to repentance.

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And Paul is preaching, he's writing this to believers, right? So repentance is a lifelong thing.

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It's not something that you purchase. Oh, okay, I can purchase it with an indulgence and my sins are suddenly vaporized because of a papal edict that says you can have forgiveness of your sins and be released from purgatory in your afterlife after you die, right?

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So Louis Burkhoff, a most excellent reformer theologian and a systematic theologian, which

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I highly commend everyone for your reading and reference. You can find it online for free as well.

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He says this, Sad to say, the church gradually lost sight of the original meaning of metanoia, which is repentance in the

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Greek. The English translators rendered the Greek word by repentance, thus stressing the emotional element and making metanoia equivalent to metameleia, okay?

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So here he's explaining that the word was mistranslated and thus stressing an emotional outward response as opposed to an inner change of mind.

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In some cases, the deterioration went even farther. The Roman Catholic Church externalized the idea of repentance in its sacrament of penance.

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That's one of the seven sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church, which we as Protestants would reject, and that is the sacraments of penance.

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You have to do penance for your sins. And some of the translators,

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I'm sorry, some of the translations of Erasmus, now

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Erasmus was another Roman Catholic priest who was alive at the time of Luther, and he had a very fierce debate with Luther on the freedom of the will.

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Luther responded to Luther's thunderously to Erasmus in a masterful treatise called

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The Bondage of the Will, which I highly commend that work to you all for your benefit and edification.

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It is one of my favorite books, Luther's Bondage of the Will, and that's where he's talking about describing the depravity of man, that man is depraved and can do nothing for himself apart from the grace of God.

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That is why the Sola says it is by grace alone, right?

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Not by any of our human efforts are we able to come to God or save ourselves or reach out to God, but God must first come to us and bring us back to life the way he brought

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Lazarus back from the dead. We likewise must be brought back from the death, the spiritual death of our sins, transgressions and sins, like Ephesians 2 says.

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So, this Erasmus translated the bondage of the

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Bible into Greek and fixed a lot of the corruptions from the Latin Vulgate, okay?

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So we're going to learn a little bit more about this here.

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The Greek text, this is the Greek text which Luther and the reformers used to translate the

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Bible into their language. In Luther's case it was into German, and created a furor.

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One of Erasmus' translations was of Matthew 4 .17, that's the text that this sermon is based on, where Jesus says,

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Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. The Vulgate, the

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Latin corrupted Vulgate, has poenitentiam agite, okay?

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Which was taken to mean, do penance, right? Do penance, do acts of penance according to the sacraments of the

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Catholic Church. Erasmus in 15 .16 translated it instead as poenitate at vos, poenitate at vos, or be penitent.

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Be, not do. Be. And thereafter, reciprocite.

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He also translated it as that, reciprocite, which means change your mind.

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Not your behavior, change your mind. Not perform works of penance, but change your mind.

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Thereby removing any possible philological connection with the sacrament of penance of the

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Church of Rome. So Erasmus was really stirring things up himself. Even though he stayed a loyal son, he remained a loyal, faithful follower of the

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Roman Church. But Luther, so Luther made good use of this version in his

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German translation of the Bible. Very good use of it. That's why he translated that, for example, in Ephesians 2, that we are saved by faith alone, apart from works of the law, of penance, of any other kind, right?

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There's also a famous saying of the Reformation that Erasmus laid the egg that Luther himself hatched.

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Erasmus had laid the egg that Luther hatched. Luther was the one that brought this to light.

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He really brought it to light in his writings, and that is because God used Luther's flawed pen to bring about Reformation, to bring about a recovery of the

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Gospel. And Erasmus' writings are not as remembered today.

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Hardly anybody reads Erasmus' work on the freedom of the will, but the bondage of the will by Martin Luther, that is one of the classics.

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In fact, B .B. Warfield, another Reformed theologian, said that it is the manifesto of the

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Reformation, right? So this is how God decided to weigh out the balances and scales regarding to these men's contributions.

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Now, here's some things to consider, okay? Because this problem of adequately defining repentance sadly continues to this very day in our own time, even in so -called

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Protestant churches, okay? It's not just the Roman Catholic church that has a problem with defining it.

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It's also the Protestant church, evangelicals, you know, so -called believers in the

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Bible who have a problem with defining what repentance actually means, such as men who hold to lordship salvation, like John MacArthur, because they tend to veer dangerously towards Rome and externalize repentance by making it more some outward thing, some kind of outward demonstration of remorse, which is exactly what

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Louis Burkoff was saying it doesn't mean, right? That's metameleia, not metanoia.

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Metanoia is meta. Meta means change. Noia means mind, right?

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So it's a change of mind. That's what repentance truly means.

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So these teachings we have to be careful, even in our own backyard, because men do not properly teach what repentance truly is.

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They don't distinguish repentance as the internal change of mind or of conviction as opposed to outward fruits of repentance, right?

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And in the... so, you know, in the Christian tradition, so that's a key takeaway from this event in history, a very important takeaway because it's still a problem today.

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There are, sadly, these churches you will find, these men, you will tend to find that they have a predefined agenda, theological agenda in their mind that they are imposing on the

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Bible, or they have no knowledge or concept of the Reformation. They have forgotten the

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Reformation heritage and it has not been embraced into their church, into what they teach and preach, right?

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That's why church history is vitally important in historical theology as well, because it is what

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Luther's study of church history also led him to realize that popes and councils often do err, right?

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That was from his famous speech in the Diet of Worms, which I'm going to get to shortly. So, back to the theses now.

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In the first few theses, Luther begins to develop the idea of repentance as the Christian's inner, inner struggle with sin rather than the external system of sacramental confession, okay?

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And then Theses 5 -7, he states that the pope can only release people from punishments.

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He has administered himself or through the church's system of penance, not the guilt, but not the guilt of sin.

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The pope can only announce God's forgiveness of the guilt of sin in his name, okay?

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So you can see he's not completely against indulgences, just against the abuse of them, according to his understanding at the time.

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And then in Theses 14 -29, Luther challenged the common beliefs about purgatory.

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In 14 -16, he discusses the idea that the punishment of purgatory can be likened to the fear and despair felt by dying people.

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So he says that that in a sense purges you, not having to end up in an actual place in the afterlife where you have to spend thousands and even millions of years there purging your sins, purging all your sins.

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So, and in Theses 17 -24, he asserts that nothing can be definitively said about the spiritual state of people in purgatory.

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How do we know? How do we know? And the reason he's saying this is because obviously the

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Bible doesn't speak to this. The Bible contradicts this concept of purgatory. So, Theses 18,

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I want us to really bear in mind. This is a very important thesis, number 18, okay?

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I highly encourage everybody to read the 95 Theses for yourself. It's a good exercise in church history.

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But Thesis number 18, okay, get this. Furthermore, it does not seem proved, either by reason or by scripture, or by scripture, that souls in purgatory are outside the state of merit that is unable to grow in love.

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Okay? Does that ring a bell? Either by reason or by scripture?

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Does that ring a bell? Chew on that for a little bit as we continue to see where Luther begins to draw this out even more, that conviction.

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Our conviction must be grounded in reason, in sound logic, consistent reason and argumentation, and scripture alone.

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Even this early on, Luther was developing and solidifying his conviction in the formal principle of the

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Reformation itself, which is scripture alone, right?

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Sola Scriptura. Now, remember, recall that the

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Pope and Emperor Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire required

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Luther to attend a hearing and defend or retract his teachings. When Luther appeared before the

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Emperor at the Imperial hearing in Worms, which is called the

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Diet of Worms, it's like a trial. So these words sound kind of funny, you know. Worms is actually spelled worms, but it's

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German. And then the Imperial, the Diet is the trial.

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It's not like going on a diet, right? In Germany, and there was a big struggle that Frederick the

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Wise, his prince, the prince of Wittenberg and of Germany at the time, one of the princes, he really fought to keep

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Luther in Germany because there was already the concern that if Luther appeared before Rome in their home turf, he was going to be burned, that there was going to be no mercy given at all.

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So Luther himself was asked if he would recant his writings, which was much to Luther's dismay because he was hoping to make his case.

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That was the whole idea. Come, let us reason together. That's what the Bible repeatedly teaches us as well.

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Judge for yourselves. Make your case, right? But they didn't, they wanted nothing.

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They wanted nothing of what Luther had to say. So after a fitful night and remarkable prayer, he appeared on April 18th, 1521, and made a powerful speech, which concluded thus, okay?

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This is what he says. This is what my son recited a few weeks ago when we were celebrating the

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Reformation Day. Since your most serene majesty and your lordships require of me a simple, clear, and direct answer,

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I will give you one. And it is this, unless I am convinced by the testimony of the scriptures and by clear reason, logic, for I do not trust in the

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Pope or councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted their own selves.

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I am bound by the scriptures I have quoted. My conscience is captive to the word of God alone.

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I cannot and I will not retract anything, since it is neither right nor safe to go against conscience.

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Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise. God help me.

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Amen. And God's people to that said, amen, right?

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This is one of Luther's momentous moments in his life, where he defied

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Rome and the false teaching of Rome and said, we must be convinced by the testimony of scripture and clear reason.

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And even in Thesis 18, he had already started to develop this understanding in his mind.

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So, that is in essence what Sola Scriptura means. That's what it's all about.

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God alone can bind the conscience, like our 1689 Confession also tells us, explains from the scriptures.

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God alone binds the conscience. The word of God alone can bind the conscience. Not traditions of men, like penance or indulgences or confession or things like that, confession of priests and things like that.

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Those are traditions of men that are null and void, because they are not in accordance with the will of God and the word of God.

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Right? So, here's an important public service announcement now.

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In order to be grounded in truth and sound doctrine, we need these two things.

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Scripture and clear reason. Logical consistency that is not contradictory and that is not, that is in accordance with what the

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Bible teaches. Okay? That is absolutely critical for us to grow in the grace and knowledge of our

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Lord and Savior. All things are given to us by God for life and godliness through the knowledge of Him, through the knowledge of God, of Christ and His word, according to Peter, and many other places.

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That is why God has given us His word and the church, through the leaders of the church, pastors and teachers, to instruct us in sound, clear understanding of the word and of clear reason.

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That we may also, not only understand it, but defend it, apologize it.

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Right? It's not to say that you're sorry for it. It's to apologize it, according to the

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Greek, which is to defend it against the opposition, anything that contradicts it.

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So, and this is rather exactly, in fact, what the 95

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Theses are. They are Luther's initial attempts to test the Roman Catholic teachings of purgatory and indulgences for internal consistency and biblical fidelity.

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It's just using simple logic and scripture. And this is some of the excellent training that he received in the

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Latin schools that he was raised in and in the legal school, the law school, that he was studied at.

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We need this stuff. We need to know this stuff ourselves. We need to understand logic and how it is the way

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God thinks. God thinks according to reason, logic.

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That's why God says, come let us reason together. Christ himself is the logos of God.

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The word logos means wisdom. It means reason. It's where we get the word logic from. Okay?

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So this is God's nature. The very image of God in man is reason.

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It's one of those things. It's reason. If you recall when I was preaching earlier on the previous series.

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But this is what we have to understand because so many churches fail to grasp and embrace this very reality.

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You know, they say really dumb, really. Some of the dumbest things

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I've heard, I've heard from people who are so -called believers. They claim to be

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Christians. Oh, life is deeper than logic. You know, all these, it's irrationalism is what it is.

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And God is completely against that. You read the Bible, all throughout the Bible, you read that God demands that we be of a sound mind, reason, mature in understanding, so on and so forth.

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That's a whole other sermon for another day. But now,

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Luther then denies that the Pope has any power over people in purgatory in Theses 25 and 26.

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And in Theses 27 to 29, he attacks the idea that when the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.

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He sees it as encouraging sinful greed and says that it is impossible to be certain because only

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God has the ultimate power in forgiving punishments in purgatory. Again, Luther here is tapping into the biblical truth that God alone can forgive sin.

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God alone can do it. And so that was the, if you all have seen the

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Luther movie, I highly recommend that you all check out those Luther movies. The older one, the newer one, they're all really good.

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They have, they highlight different aspects of Luther's life. They're not fully, they're not all fully accurate, but they have, they sort of portray the gist of Luther's struggle with Rome.

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And we see here one of the things that the indulgence preachers would often preach.

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When the coin in the coffer rings, when you pay money for an indulgence, the soul from purgatory springs away from heaven.

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It's released from heaven because you purchased an indulgence on behalf of a relative or a friend and were able to release them from the bondage of purgatory.

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Sort of a get -out -of -jail -free card, basically what it is. On the merits of saints, of the works of Christ and of the saints, the canonized saints, according to the

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Church of Rome. So Luther, very early on, we see even though Luther himself describes himself as a raging papist when he wrote the theses, he's kind of not giving himself the credit that I think

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God had already planted very strong seeds that were already starting to sprout and grow of biblical truth.

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So I want to leave you all with that today and to really consider how the importance of these things, especially logic, the solas, the reformation, the gospel, the importance of understanding the nature of God and how it's important for us to reason together to understand the

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Word of God and the doctrines of the Bible and not contradict ourselves by having wrong understandings of what the

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Bible teaches. We cannot contradict Scripture and we cannot contradict sound reason like what

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Luther was explaining. Like Jesus said, let your yes be yes and your no, no. God is a

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God of reason and He is the Logos, right?

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So we need to make sure that we internalize these things ourselves and rightly understand what repentance itself means, right?

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So I want to leave us with those things for today. We can pick up next week as things start to get even spicier.

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Let's go ahead and bow our heads in prayer. Our precious, gracious, heavenly

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Lord and almighty Father, we thank you so much for the wonderful opportunity to gather today as your people, especially in light of the elections and having hopefully a chance for our country to really turn around into a direction of repentance and of restoration towards truth and righteousness and law and order and decency,

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Father, like your Bible, like your Word teaches us. Father, we ask that you would help us to grasp these things and to internalize them, to digest them, to meditate on them in our minds and to internalize them so that we may also externalize them by bearing the good fruits of repentance, as your

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Word tells us. And as your servant Luther said, you're flawed, but nonetheless very powerful servant that you use mightily, as flawed and sinful as he was, you used him to help us to know and understand the differences between true and false religion, especially when it comes to the

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Church of Rome. Father, help us to understand and grasp these things and to really embrace what it means to be a

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Protestant, what it means to know the gospel, what it means to know the law gospel distinction, what it means to be a true believer in the one true gospel of your

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Lord, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. We thank you, Father, and we ask these things in Jesus' almighty name.

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Amen. Thank you for listening to the sermons of Thorn Crown Covenant Baptist Church, where the

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Bible alone and the Bible in its entirety is applied to all of faith and life. We strive to be biblical, reformed, historic, confessional, loving, discerning

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Christians who evangelize, stand firm in, and earnestly contend for the Christian faith.

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If you're looking for a church in the El Paso, Texas area, or for more information about our church, sermons, and ministries, such as Semper Reformanda Radio and Thorn Crown Network Podcasts, please contact us at thorncrownministries .com.