Sola Fide: The Material Principle Of The Reformation

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Before we open the word together, I did want to bring to you greetings from Rudy and Natalie Jabouri.
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I had lunch with Rudy and Natalie and their children this past Friday.
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Most of you know I spent an entire week in the Detroit area. They live about an hour's distance north.
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Rudy now works for a pharmaceutical company, which makes him evil,
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I informed him, at least in our society today. He is maintaining super chilling equipment, so that's where the connection is.
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You sort of wonder how did Rudy go from being on the top of buildings in the heat of the summer in Phoenix to working for a pharmaceutical company in Michigan.
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That's where the connection is. His resume was online and seemed to fit what they were looking for.
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He's really enjoying his time there. They were looking for a house, and Natalie had all the things she wanted in a house.
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You know how the ladies are. So the real estate agent turned to Rudy and said, what do you want in a house?
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He thought for a moment, he said, I'd like to be able to shoot deer out of the bedroom window. So he can shoot deer out of the bedroom window.
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They have, I think, 15 acres. They have 1 ,500 acres north of them and 1 ,500 acres south of them.
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Then it's wooded to the other direction, so basically they are out in the middle of nowhere.
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He loves it there because it's bow hunting season. So the next morning he was going to be getting up in the stand and getting some venison for the winter,
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I guess. Mr. Callahan is going, sounds good to me, sounds good to me. So I bring you greetings from them, and they are doing well.
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But I think they generally mean it when they say they miss us. I know we miss them as well.
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So greetings from the Gibrory family. If you're just visiting with us, please forgive me for that few moments of past history and family talk.
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But I wanted to bring you greetings from them. Turn with me please to Romans 3.
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Romans 3. You know the context of this section of Scripture, this high point of Scripture.
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Beginning in chapter 1, Paul has briefly mentioned the Gospel. And then immediately upon speaking of the
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Gospel, he has spent the rest of chapter 1, all of chapter 2, and the first half of chapter 3 discussing the necessary pre -message of the
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Gospel. And that is the bad news of sin. And he has concluded in chapter 3, verses 10 through 20, with a lengthy section of verses that convict all of mankind.
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Jew and Gentile stand together, convicted as sinners, without hope, without means in and of themselves of bringing about their own salvation.
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And it is in that context then that we read these words, beginning at verse 21.
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But now, apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets, even the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all those who believe.
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For there is no distinction, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified as a gift by His grace, the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom
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God displayed publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith. This was to demonstrate
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His righteousness, because in the forbearance of God, He passed over the sins previously committed.
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For the demonstration, I say, of His righteousness at the present time, so that He would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.
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Where then is boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? A law of works?
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No, but by a law of faith. For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the law.
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Or is God the God of Jews only? Is He not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also.
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Since indeed God, who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith, is one.
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Do we then nullify the law through faith? May it never be. On the contrary, we establish the law.
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Now here in this signal passage, we have laid out for us the very heart of the gospel of grace.
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The free gift of salvation in Christ Jesus, it is by faith.
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It is apart from works. There is nothing that we can do. Even the satisfaction of fulfilling the law of God is not enough because of the fact that we never fulfill it perfectly.
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There is the stain of sin. There is the fact that no amount of good works, no amount of obedience can possibly undo the broken law itself.
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The law points out our sin, but it does not contain within itself the remedy for the person who has violated it.
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If you are going to live by keeping the law, then you must keep it perfectly.
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This is the message. We see it as good news. Because as believers, the
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Spirit of God has convicted us of our sin. We no longer stand in rebellion.
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We no longer stand in such a way that we reject the revelation of God's word that we as individuals are justly condemned by God's holy law.
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We recognize our own sin. We embrace it. We confess it.
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We confess God's justice and we look away from ourselves and we look to a perfect Savior as the only source of a right standing with God.
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We recognize that this righteousness that we have, this act of justification is a divine act.
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It is something God and only God can do. He is the God who justifies the ungodly, as Paul says in the next few sentences in Romans chapter 4.
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It is a forensic action. It is an action of God as judge, yet God as Savior.
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Christ Jesus has come. He has taken on human flesh.
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He has lived the perfect life. He has voluntarily given His life as a sacrifice for sins.
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So that everyone who places his faith and trust in Jesus Christ, that person's sins are imputed to Christ.
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His righteousness, His perfect life is imputed to them. And that is how they can have peace with God, Romans 5 .1,
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through this message of justification, by faith alone. It is by faith alone because to add anything to it, to come to God and put something in your hand and say,
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I know I can't do it all myself, but I want to give you something anyways, is an insult to the righteousness of Christ.
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It is an insult to the holiness of God that anything stained, as it were, with our rebellion, with the stench of our sin, that we could somehow add that to the work of Christ, shows we don't understand the work of Christ.
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We don't understand God's holiness and we don't understand the depth of the stain of sin that is ours.
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We don't understand the true righteousness that is His in condemning our rebellion, in condemning our sin.
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And so Paul will go on to contrast saving faith in Romans 4, 4 -5, with that kind of faith that does not save.
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He will contrast it because he will say that the one who works, what he receives because he works is just simply a wage.
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It's what is paid to him. But to the one who does not work, but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is credited to him as righteousness.
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It is only the empty hand of faith that can possibly save.
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When we speak of sola fide, faith alone, we are not saying that a dead, empty faith saves.
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But we are saying that it is only a saving faith alone that brings the great transaction that is salvation, that brings that great imputation of the righteousness of Christ to us, that we stand before God not clothed in our own righteous deeds, not clothed in the righteous deeds of others, saints or Mary or anyone else.
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We stand before God clothed in the spotless, single, seamless robe of righteousness of Jesus Christ because that is the only righteousness that will ever avail before a holy
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God. What I have said to you, I would imagine there are very few in our midst that would raise even the slightest objection.
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You understand what the Gospel message is. You understand that there is a great divide between those who would say,
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Oh, we need Christ. We need to have the grace that he won for us on the cross.
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But you see that grace is then infused into us and it makes us objectively pleasing to God.
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And then it is up to us. We have to work the system. We have to go to the sacraments and get more grace and get forgiveness and get more grace and get forgiven.
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That is very different than the message of the New Testament. Four hundred and ninety -five years ago, this coming week, an event took place that we mark as the beginning of a great outpouring of the grace of God in what is called the
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Reformation. Now you and I, as we read through Romans chapter 3, our souls were thrilled to read words like,
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For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works, the law. What a great freedom is found there because we know that we could never keep the law perfectly.
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We know that the law is our schoolmaster. It brings us unto Christ. It shows us our sin, but it points away from itself as the means of redemption because none of us can keep it perfectly.
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These are words of freedom and they're glorious words because they point us to Christ. They point us to the
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One who is the perfect Redeemer. And we find in Him our all in all and that is why
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I can never understand. I have stood in the presence of many a man and a few women who once professed to believe what
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I am saying and now they believe something else. Now they are on a treadmill of sacramental forgiveness and I don't understand it.
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If Christ was your all in all, if you have seen the perfection of His righteousness, how can you ever find any substitute that would take the place of that?
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I don't understand it. How can that be? And yet there are those who continue to present these things and let's be honest with ourselves.
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Other than our brethren in the
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OPC and some of our brethren in the PCA and our fellow
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Reformed Baptist brethren and probably a few Founders churches today and the
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Southern Baptist Convention and certainly my good Anglican brethren down in Sydney in the
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Anglican Church down there that are strong gospel preachers.
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Other than us, and we don't make up a large percentage of the population of even those who call themselves evangelicals, this
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Sunday is not being observed. Nobody thinks about October 31st and nobody thinks about what
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Martin Luther did. This message no longer rings the bells of the hearts of men for many reasons.
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We can understand why to an Augustinian monk by the name of Martin Luther, this was a message of absolute glorious freedom.
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We can understand because we know what happens when the Spirit of God begins to bring conviction of sin into someone's heart.
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We know what happens when the Spirit of God reveals the holiness of God to someone.
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And in those days, they didn't have a lot of amusements to keep themselves from thinking about the inevitability of death.
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Infant mortality rates were sky high. The plague was still in the memory of many and it still moved from city to city.
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There was a period of time in the 1530s when Calvin was in Strasbourg after having been kicked out of Geneva and the plague came to Strasbourg while he was there.
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And Calvin was known as one of the pastors who refused to leave. He continued to minister to his flock even during that time.
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When the plague was still around, you had no guarantee. I mean, we talk about the fact we have no guarantee of reaching our homes this day because we travel in a car and who knows what could happen.
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We recognize that. But most of us know we're going to be back this evening. We don't know that for certain, but we certainly have a high probability.
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But in those days, there were just so many ways in which human life could suddenly disappear and many of the ways people didn't even understand.
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And so it was not like today where we have found a way to insulate our minds from the recognition that we live but a heartbeat away from eternity.
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And as a result, many people in our society do not think for a moment about whether they're ready to enter into eternity, whether they're ready to meet the
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Lord of eternity and to give an answer for their actions done to flesh.
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There was an understanding in that day. There was an understanding on Martin Luther's part that there is going to be a judgment.
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Now, don't get me wrong. There were many people in Martin Luther's day that had found a religious way around thinking about those things.
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Religion can often be used as a means for dulling the conscience and silencing that voice that says, you know.
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When the Spirit of God began to work upon the heart of Martin Luther, at first he turned to the things he had been taught.
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And as he himself said, if any a monk could have been saved by monkery, it would have been me.
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He slept upon the cold stone floor in the Augustinian monastery in the
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German winter without using a blanket. He denied himself many things.
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I mean, you live in a monastery. That's not the most exciting place to be. And yet, he could not find in the penances and the self -deprivations freedom from the conviction of sin and the conviction that he had of the holiness of God.
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He knew he was not ready to enter into eternity. And yet, he knew more than we know that he lived on the very edge of eternity.
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He did not have all the things we have to keep him away from that realization.
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And so he was driven to despair. He was driven to the confessional for six hours at a time, confessing his sins.
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But he could not find any peace in confessing the fact that he was a sinner.
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Because the system in which he lived did not have a finished work of Christ.
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It had an ongoing work of Christ in the sense that he had been taught that every time the priest raised the host to heaven and said,
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Hoc escorpus meum, this is my body, that the miracle of transubstantiation took place.
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And Christ was rendered upon the altar, body, soul, blood and divinity as a propitiatory sacrifice.
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But you see, Luther knew as well that he could approach that sacrifice.
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And he believed in it. Do you remember what happened when he first tried to celebrate
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Mass? He couldn't do it. He could not take that host and say the words of consecration.
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Why? Because he's a sinful human being. Who am I to handle the very body and blood of the sinless
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Son of God? And another had to come and take his place. So under the conviction of sin he was.
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But you see, even that only drove him to deeper despair because he had gone to Mass a thousand times.
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He had gone and he had bowed and he had been penitent, but he knew that the system said you're going to have to do it again and you're going to have to do it again and you're going to have to do it again.
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And when you're dying, you better hope a priest can come, because this will not perfect you.
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It's just another source of grace. But that grace is never enough.
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And so, he didn't know what to do. And a wise man, recognizing he wasn't going to make much of a priest in a parish church, set him on the scholastic track and he had to start teaching through the
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Scriptures. He started with the Psalter. I wonder how long it took him.
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He started with the Psalter and then he found himself in Romans.
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And in God's providence, at that very time in history, because of the invention of the printing press a number of decades earlier, books were becoming more prevalent.
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You didn't have to handwrite your own copy. And so Luther there at the new university in Wittenberg, he obtained
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Erasmus' Latin Greek New Testament in two columns.
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In Sunday School I showed you a picture of one of those original 15, 16 editions.
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And as he began to use it, as he began to look at the Latin that he was used to hearing, he probably had this text memorized or portions of it in the
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Latin. But now there was this other column. These other words, the original words.
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Latin Vulgate had gone through 1 ,100 years of copying. 1 ,100 years of incrustation with the traditions of men.
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He looks over at this other column. He begins to see differences. Begins to wonder why the
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Latin reads the way that it does, but the Greek it reads differently. He begins to see that the
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Latin says one attentium agitate, do penance, but the Greek says metanoia te. And he begins to look through.
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What does metanoia te mean? It means to change one's mind, to be going this direction and turn this direction.
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It has nothing to do with penances. It has nothing to do with doing works and gaining something from God. That's not what repentance is.
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That's not what God demands. Slowly, light begins to dawn in the darkness of the prison that he has been in for years.
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And finally, in that little room, that little study, that little safe place that he had as a scholar, surrounded by his books, alone, away from the need to answer the prying questions of the students,
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Luther is considering what this means to be justified. And up until now, he had interpreted that within the light of law.
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He had interpreted it as something that was simply impossible. There's a holy
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God. I'm a sinful person. I can't be made just. I've tried. But then he begins to see things.
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And the light grows a little brighter. And it's not that no one had ever known these things.
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It's not that there were no Christians on the planet at this time. But there was so much smoke and fog, the traditions of men, just as in the days of Jesus when
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He had rebuked the traditions of the Pharisees. They had the Bible in their hands. They knew the
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Word of God, but their traditions functioned as a lens. And they couldn't see because of the traditions and the abuse of those traditions.
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And that's where Luther was. And that's where the vast majority of Germany, England, Spain, France, that's where they were too.
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The light of the Gospel had become dimmed by the fog of tradition.
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But that fog began to lift in that little study, in that little room attached to Luther's home.
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And he began considering these words. We maintain that a man is justified. At first, that idea of the righteousness of God.
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Justification. All that spoke to him was of his sin. It spoke to him of his condemnation.
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He had originally been trained in law before that great event as he was coming back and the thunderstorm caught him and the lightning struck near him.
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And his life had been changed. The course of his life altered. He had been trained in law before that.
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His dad wanted to have a lawyer in the family. Thought it was good to have one around. They're useful.
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Just not all the time. They're not fun at parties, but they're useful when you need them. And that's where he had been going.
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And so that legal training had placed within his heart and his mind this clear category.
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God is holy. God is just. Here is His law. I break it every day. The result is there must be punishment.
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And he saw. You saw death. You saw the plague.
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There were battles. There were poor people. You'd walk along the street. You'd find a body. It's not like here in our nice, clean, sterile
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United States. Most of us don't see dead bodies, but you would see death all the time. You could not avoid the recognition that I could be there and I'm not right with God.
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And I know it. And so he'd see these words. Righteousness.
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I don't have it. How do I get it? I've tried, but it's promised to me, but it's like a carrot that's held out.
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I can't get there. In the Roman system, you can have it for a while, but then you commit sin and if it's venial sin, now you have to go to purgatory and get that purged off of you.
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If it's a mortal sin and you've lost the grace of justification, now you're lost again.
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You go to one priest and he'd tell you this is a mortal sin, not a venial sin. Another priest would tell you actually they're both venial sins or another would tell you both mortal sins.
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You didn't know. You had no way of knowing. You had no confidence of your relationship to God.
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So he sees these words and he starts contemplating them as he sees it in the original language.
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I don't know what day it was and we've all seen the movies where all of a sudden there's a change in his face and maybe a choir starts singing and they change the lights or something.
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I don't know. Was it a sudden realization one evening? Was it something over a few days, a few weeks?
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Putting things together? I don't know. But all of a sudden, and it wasn't just Luther.
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There were those before him. There were those contemporaneous. But again, God works such things, placed people in certain places, politics and religion and armies and inventions and science.
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He puts it all together. So this one man, an unlikely man, a man who couldn't even get through his first mass because he was so afraid of the holiness of God.
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It just doesn't strike us. That's the one God would use, but that should have been something we actually were sort of accustomed to by now if we know the
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Bible. God uses people we don't expect Him to use. Ask Balaam. But this man...
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It took a few seconds for Balaam, Balaam. Okay, yeah, okay, I got you. But this man all of a sudden realizes righteousness is a beautiful thing because it doesn't come from me.
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It comes from God. And it's not something I buy. It's not something I purchase. It's not something
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I get on loan. I don't have to make installment payments. It comes by faith.
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And faith alone, not faith plus. Not faith plus my works.
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Sola Fide. Faith alone. We maintain that a man is justified by faith and there isn't a list there.
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It's just faith. Now, we are told by many people today, ah,
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Luther even mistranslated that. He put alone in his
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German translation. It doesn't say that. He made it all up. Just a little tidbit of information for you lest someone tell you that.
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There were translations long before Luther that said faith alone in Romans 3 .28.
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The Nuremberg Bible of 1483. 1483.
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Remember, we're talking 1517 for the time of the Reformation. So, 1483 had
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Allein durch den Glauben Through faith alone is what the
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German translation, and that was before the Reformation, said. And even the Italian Bibles of Geneva in 1476 and even 1538, after the
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Reformation, 20 years after 1517, after Luther had already been condemned, even then, the
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Italian Bible of Geneva in 1538 had per sola fede. Sola fede.
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Faith alone. By faith alone. So, this wasn't something that Luther came up with. This wasn't something that was unknown.
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That translation had already existed. It's faith in opposition to anything else.
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It's that empty hand. It's only that empty hand that can embrace the grace of God.
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You put something else in there, and there's going to be something in the way. There were two primary principles of the
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Reformation. I think we all should be able to sing A Mighty Fortress without the hymnal and know the two principal issues of the
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Reformation. There was a material principle and there was a formal principle.
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The material principle was what made up the heart of the preaching of the Reformation.
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And that was sola fede. Faith alone. Not all the sacramental systems.
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You don't have to be running off to saints and angels, let alone Mary, to try to get righteousness and grace and help and favor.
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Sola fede. Faith alone was the material principle. It was the essence of the preaching.
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But there was a formal principle as well. The formal principle gave the foundation.
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It gave the basis. Because you see, as Luther discovered very quickly, he had stumbled onto something.
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He had stumbled onto the Gospel. But what had happened was the traditions of men had obscured the
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Gospel and in fact ended up denying the Gospel. And Luther could see the results of this.
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He could see in the indulgence trade. This is a violation of God's grace.
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To sell God's grace to raise money to build St. Peter's Basilica. This is disgusting.
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Who can defend this? Lots of people could. Why? Well, because it's taught on the authority of the papacy.
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The Pope is the vicar of Christ, so that's it. It doesn't matter what your exegesis of Romans 3 says.
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The Pope says you're wrong. So Luther had to begin looking at the foundations of the papacy and the foundations of this assertion that the
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Bible wasn't enough. And that's when he discovered the
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Bible's own teaching that it is enough. That it's unlike any other source. It's unlike any of man's traditions.
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That the Scriptures are sufficient as the sole infallible rule of faith of the church.
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There's the formal principle of the Reformation. Sola Scriptura. Material?
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Sola Fide. That's what was preached. But to substantiate that, you had to say it's what
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Scripture teaches about the Gospel. Not what tradition teaches. Not what the Pope teaches. It's what
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Scripture teaches about the Gospel that really matters. And to establish that, you had to establish
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Sola Scriptura. There are the two principles.
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Material and formal principles of the Reformation. Now, I'm not saying that people didn't preach
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Sola Scriptura. They did. But what caught the attention, what changed
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Europe, what changed entire political systems was the message that you could have peace with God by believing the promises
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He has made in Jesus Christ, and not by anything else you could do. It was a presentation of a sovereign
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God and of a grace that actually saves. Not a grace that makes salvation possible.
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And, my friends, there is a huge difference between those two things.
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And that's just as much the case today as it ever was. Nothing has changed.
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We have, in a sense. In fact, what I would like to suggest is that our culture today is significantly less spiritually sensitive and significantly less spiritually wise than the culture in which
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Martin Luther lived at the beginning of the 16th century. Our technology has made us spiritual pygmies.
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How much time does the average person in our society really spend in a day or a week or a month or even a lifetime giving serious consideration to eternal matters?
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We are so amused. We are so distracted. We are so plugged in.
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Plugged in to what? In many ways, we are significantly inferior to these men spiritually and,
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I would suggest to you, intellectually. There are not many people today who can produce the commentaries that John Calvin produced in a day when he had to write by candlelight.
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And we've got iPads. I can talk to my computer and it'll write things down.
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But we don't produce stuff like that anymore, do we? Pretty much, no, we don't.
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We think ourselves so superior, but the fact of the matter is you preach unjustification by faith in the vast majority of churches in our land today, and people will have no idea what you're talking about.
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They're not excited about it. They're not thrilled about it. Am I standing with God?
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God's just lucky to have me. I mean, that's what I was told when
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I got here. It seemed that everybody was telling me that God's just really happy to have me. And He just couldn't make it without me.
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And why can't we get out of here? Because there's some really important gains today. Isn't that where most of Christianity is today?
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And doesn't that reflect our society? You go out and talk to people and you try to talk about sin.
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You talk about the atonement of Christ. They just look at you like, what are you talking about?
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Why should I be worried? That was 2 ,000 years ago. They don't see themselves connected with previous generations.
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They don't care about their place in history. What they're going to leave behind? Let me tell you something.
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We live in a day where because of what we believe about our origins, not only do we believe we're animals, we live, act, and think like them too.
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So it's no wonder that, yeah, they're sprucing things up in Wittenberg.
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Giving the city church a facelift. I couldn't even touch the
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Wittenberg door because they're working on getting it all nice and everything for 15, 17, 20, 75 hundred years.
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It's going to be great. And yet the vast majority of the people living in Wittenberg, the vast majority of the people
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I saw on the train riding there from Berlin, didn't even think about the things
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Luther thought about. And if you really asked them, they'd sort of go, yeah, they really got uptight about some stuff that really isn't all that important.
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The secular state. That's not an advance.
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That's degradation, my friends. That's not evolutionary advance. That's de -evolution.
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Thankfully, we're still creating the image of God. The Spirit of God is still active and the
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Spirit of God still brings conviction of sin. And it may be one here and one there, but once that conviction comes, this is the message that heart longs for.
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And once that conviction comes, this is the message it brings life.
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And that's why we have to stand by it, and that's why we have to continue to preach it, even if it's mocked, even if it's derided, even if people look at us and go, you'll give your life for that?
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And we say, yes. 500 years to us.
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Long time. 500 years to God. No time. Do you see the connection you have?
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Do you see it? Is it important to you that you stand in the line of those who have been faithful?
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When you see Luther standing before the emperor, yes, he was afraid. Yes, he asked for 24 hours to consider things.
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But when push came to shove, he stood in front of the emperor and said, I will not recant.
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Unless I am convicted by Scripture in plain reason, it is not safe to go against conscience.
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Here I stand. I can do nothing else.
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It wasn't so much a here I stand as it was a here I stand, I can't do anything else.
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How about you? Can you do anything else? Is the reason you stand on this message and you stand in the light of this
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Gospel because you, like him, the world has no answer to my recognition of my own sin.
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I've found everything I need in Christ. There's nothing else that can be offered to me. Truly, that is the only way for us to stand with the
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Reformers. To stand in that line is that in our lives today, we recognize this message of faith.
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Faith alone, in the finished work of Christ alone, is all I truly have.
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The world can take everything else from me. The world cannot take that from me.
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Oh, our mighty fortress, we thank you that you are still the same God who by your grace dispelled the darkness and brought the light to that tortured
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German monk in his little room so long ago.
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And, Lord, you dispelled the darkness for us too. Same Spirit, same message, same salvation.
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We thank you for it. Lord, if there be any within the sound of my voice that have not come to understand what sola fide means, have not come to understand that to add anything to faith is to deny the finished work of Christ, oh,
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Lord, you this very day by that same Spirit would bring the light.
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We thank you for that light. We know that in the land where it once broke out, it has become very dim.
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But we know that you delight to bring that light. You've brought it to us.
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You must use us to bring it to our world, to our city, to our friends and our neighbors.
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May we be used to bring that same light of message and hope. We pray in Christ's name.