Is the Reformation Still Important?

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I want to invite you to take out your Bibles and turn with me to Ephesians chapter 2.
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In July of this year, thousands of people who would identify themselves as Christians gathered in Washington D.C.
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for a rally.
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It was entitled Together 2016.
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Guests and speakers included such notable personalities as Ravi Zacharias, Tony Evans, Josh McDowell, and many others.
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What got the most attention, however, was one name in particular who was added to the list of speakers, Pope Francis.
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Pope Francis delivered a message to the crowd via video.
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Nick Hall, the leader for the event, said this.
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He said, We are humbled and honored by his involvement and are eager to share his message with the crowd that gathers at Together 2016.
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That his holiness would choose to speak into this historic day is a testament to the urgency and the need for followers of Jesus to unite in prayer for our nation and for our world.
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End quote.
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Now many people would see this as no big issue at all.
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Some would even laud it as a major important good, important event.
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Yet the reality is that this is just one of many ways that the line which separates Catholic and Protestant has been blurred.
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A line which seems less and less significant as the years progress and yet a line which still means something and should mean something to us.
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So I want to start this morning with a question.
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Is the Protestant Reformation still important? Is the Protestant Reformation that which the reformers died for and many gave up their freedoms for and many spent years on the run for? Is it still worth contending over? Or should we simply lay down our differences, set aside our issues and allow for those who give allegiance to Rome and her doctrines to simply be seen as another denomination? Well I've chosen this subject today because today is an important day in church history.
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It's an important day in the church year.
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Most of us are aware that October 31st is a very, there's a secular holiday associated with October 31st but there's also an important day in church history.
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It was on October 31st, 1517 that Martin Luther put forward his 95 Theses which would challenge the authority of the Pope, the teaching of the cell of indulgences which were being used to manipulate the people through a false religious system which had been concocted by Rome to raise money for St.
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Peter's Basilica.
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There is a question historically as to whether or not Martin Luther actually did nail those theses to the door or whether he mailed them out to the governing leaders to read.
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Some historians go one way or the other but whether they were mailed or nailed, God used them to spark a flame which would become a huge turning point in the history of the church.
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And how dare we say that that was in vain and didn't matter and it all needs to be whitewashed now.
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We should not give ear to the Pope.
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He is a false teacher and apart from repentance will bust the doors of hell wide open.
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The Reformation still matters and those who are trapped in Rome's false system need to be evangelized not encouraged in their system.
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One of the greatest mission fields in the world is the Roman Catholic Church and yet we overlook it that so many are lost in her false teachings.
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So, today we are going to examine a little bit of history and a lot of Bible but we are going to begin with the reading of Scripture as we always do, Ephesians chapter 2.
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Let's stand to give honor and reverence to God's word.
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One of my most favorite of Scripture texts is found in Ephesians 2 and it begins in verse 1.
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And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work, and the sons of disobedience, among whom we also once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind.
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But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ, by grace you have been saved.
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And raising us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace and kindness towards us in Christ Jesus.
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For by grace you have been saved through faith.
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And this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.
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For we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.
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Father in heaven, I thank you for this precious text of scripture.
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I pray that today as I seek to give an exposition of it that you would keep me from error.
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I pray also, God, that as we look at the history of the church, that we would understand the value of men like Luther and Calvin and Zwingli and others who stood, as it were, against the world and took on the false system of Rome to stand for the true gospel of Christ.
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May we, God, never, ever forget the price that has been paid for our independence.
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Not independence from you, but independence from the tyranny of Rome.
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And God, may we never shrink back from standing on those solas which separated us from her tyranny.
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In Jesus' name, amen.
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Sometimes I walk into the pulpit and I wonder, how will I ever get through this? Because I have so much to say and often times I'm in a series and I can give it a week or two weeks and just spread it out.
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But on a special day like today, Reformation Sunday, I don't want to spread it out.
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Next week I do plan to say something about our trust in God in the face of a very difficult election.
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By the way, God will be on His throne the Wednesday after the election.
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That's the title of the sermon.
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That's the title of the sermon.
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So I have something to say next week also.
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So I'm not going to be able to divide this one up.
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So I will hasten my way through what I have to say.
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One of my favorite periods of church history to teach on is the time of the Reformation.
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I spent my first hour this morning with my Sunday school class talking about the Middle Ages.
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Between the 600s and the 1600s and that thousand year period often called the Dark Ages because the church fell into such dark theology and spiritual superstition and false teachings.
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And men's hearts were lost in that darkness.
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But there were still lights.
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Even in the Middle Ages, there were people who stood for truth.
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The Waldensians, the Polesians, those who stood for the very doctrines that we continue to stand for today.
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Justification by the imputed righteousness of Christ.
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But they were overshadowed by the mushroom cloud of Rome and her false doctrines.
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In the 1300s, there was a man, 150 years before the Reformation would see its birth, there was a man by the name of John Wycliffe.
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Some of you have Wycliffe Bible commentary on your shelf.
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Wycliffe was a brilliant student of the Bible.
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He entered Oxford at the age of 16.
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After 12 years of study, he received his doctorate.
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And in 1371, he was acknowledged as their leading theologian.
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Yet as their leading theologian, his knowledge of Scripture made it apparent to him that the church was teaching that which was untrue.
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And so he began to stand against the church.
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And that would eventually lead him to be forced out of his teaching position, excommunicated, expelled from Oxford.
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And he moved to Lutterworth where he would undertake the most important work of his life.
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He translated the Bible into the English language.
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This was many years before William Tyndale.
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He translated into English because he believed that men should be able to read the Scripture for themselves.
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One of the terms that comes out of the Reformation was the mightiest, or rather the plowman with Scripture is greater than the mightiest pope without.
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So they wanted to put the Bible into the hands of the people.
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And John Wycliffe did that.
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And he died in the pulpit on New Year's Eve 1384.
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Many years later, his bones would be exhumed and burned at the order of one of the councils of the Catholic Church.
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After him, another man came along.
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His name was Jan Hus.
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Jan Hus was the rector and preacher of the Church of the Holy Infant of Bethlehem in Prague.
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He was heavily influenced by the teachings of John Wycliffe and it led him to become more and more desirous to see Reformation in the Church.
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Because of his preaching, Prague was put under an interdict by the Church, which meant that no religious services could be done there.
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No weddings.
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No last rites.
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No communion or the Mass.
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All because of the preaching of the Gospel, the Church puts an interdict against the Church in Prague.
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And through a series of events, he was finally forced to face the council of Constance in 1414.
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By the way, that's the same council that had the bones dug up and burned.
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The same council in 1414.
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Even though he had been promised safe passage to the council to give his case by Emperor Sigmund, he had been promised safe passage even though when he was brought there, before the council, the emperor was convinced that a heretic need not be given safe passage and thus he was burned at the stake.
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You've heard the term, your goose is cooked.
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Jan Hus' nickname was the goose.
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And that is where the term finds its origin.
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In 1517, about a century later, Martin Luther was a monk of the Augustinian order.
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He himself, finding it difficult to have any peace in his understanding of God, in his understanding of his faith, seeing Christ not as a loving Savior, but as an almighty vengeful judge, found himself unable to be encouraged in his faith and spending hours upon hours confessing his sins before a priest as a monk.
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And it's often been joked, what can a monk do that he would have to spend hours? You know, I was coveting Brother Henry's bread or something.
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What do you do when you're living in a monastery? But he found himself hour upon hour confessing his sins to the priest and to the point that his leaders were saying, Brother Martin, do not return until you have something of note, some sin of note to confess.
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And what was his response? But every sin.
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I know my heart.
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I know the wicked man that I am.
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And he could not find peace in the system of Rome.
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But he was sent to study the Scripture and he found his peace in Scripture.
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Romans chapter 1.
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The gospel is the power of God unto salvation for everyone who believes.
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To the Jew first and also to the Greek.
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For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith.
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As it is written, the just shall live by faith.
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And Luther's point was this.
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It says from faith to faith with nothing in between.
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So we are justified not by what we do, but by faith in what Christ has done.
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Sola fide.
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Justification by faith.
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Sola Scriptura.
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In Christ alone.
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Contemporaneous with Luther was a man by the name of John Calvin.
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John Calvin.
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John Calvin has an interesting history because his scholarship has influenced the church like none other.
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But John Calvin never intended to be a pastor.
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He intended to live the life of a scholar.
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It's interesting because as he was making his way through Geneva, he didn't plan to stay there.
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But another man came to him and said that God's curse would be upon him if he did not pastor the church in Geneva.
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And John Calvin, the great theologian, did not want God's curse to be upon him.
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So he pastored the church in Geneva, teaching verse by verse through the Bible.
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To the point that at one point he was put out of Geneva.
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And he stopped at a particular verse of Scripture.
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Later they begged him to return because so much had happened in his being gone.
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They begged him to return and when he returned, he started preaching at the very verse that he had left just a few years before.
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That's where he stopped.
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That's where he started.
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No expositor in history outside of, of course, the Lord Jesus Christ can match the intellect and the expression that Calvin has given.
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Calvin, his institutes written in his twenties, rival today the greatest writings of Christian history as to understanding the Scriptures.
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Calvin is often vilified because he did teach things like predestination, which people don't like.
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But Calvin was a genius in his own right and God used him in a mighty way.
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Ulrich Zwingli, one of my favorite characters of the history, historical times, because Ulrich Zwingli, not just because I like to say his name, but Ulrich Zwingli took the mass as his battle and said that is not the body and blood of Jesus.
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But that is a memorial to the body and blood of Jesus.
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One of the things that he did, he actually served communion on wooden plates and bowls.
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And that was a great offense because at that point, Jesus's body was put on golden plates in the church or silver, not wood.
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But he said, you have made an idol of that which is to memorialize the king.
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It was out of Zwingli's teaching that the Anabaptists would find their way.
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The Anabaptists would then become the Mennonites.
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Often times people think that modern Baptists are the descendants of the Anabaptists, but really the modern Baptist church has more in line with the Calvinists.
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It was Calvinist teaching that made its way into England and the English Baptists who wrote the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith that really gave birth to modern Baptist theology.
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But it was those Anabaptists who did take a stand for believer's baptism.
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There is so much I want to say.
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There is so much I want you to hear.
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There is so much I want you to know about this history.
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Men were drowned and women were drowned for believing what you believe about baptism.
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Men were burned for holding the scriptures that you hold in your hands.
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Women had to watch their husbands be burned.
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I think about Margarita Sattler.
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She watched her husband.
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They were part of the Anabaptist movement.
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He was burned after having had his tongue ripped out.
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They put an explosive powder on it.
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It was like an early form of gun powder on his chest so that when he was thrown into the fire it would explode.
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And then his wife being forced to see that was drowned the next day.
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Our history is amazing.
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Men and women standing for their faith.
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And now we want to wrap our arms around the Pope? I think not.
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Because it was that false system that these people were standing against.
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It was that false teaching.
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The teaching that was leading men and women into the gates of hell.
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What is it that these men and women contended for? What was the heart of it all? One would argue that the heart of it was justification by faith alone.
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It was Luther who said, that is the hinge upon which it all turns.
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Justification by faith alone and Christ alone.
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But I want to add a thought this morning and that's where we're going to get to our text.
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That was a very lengthy introduction to get to where we're going.
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Because I love this text and I could spend a year preaching it.
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And I'm going to try to condense that into the next 20 minutes.
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Because the heart of the Reformation, though Luther would argue it was justification by faith alone, the heart of the Reformation is salvation by grace alone.
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And I want to show you what I mean.
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And I do want to, anytime I borrow an outline, I want to thank the man, Dr.
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Alan Carnes, a Presbyterian minister, very well known, very powerful preacher.
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He gave a very short outline on this text and I want to share it with you today.
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And I'm going to use it as my outline as I preach.
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But in this short 10 verses of Scripture, we see three things about salvation by grace.
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Number one, Salvation by grace is necessary because of the nature of man.
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Number two, Salvation by grace is possible because of the nature of God.
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And number three, Salvation by grace is realized because of the merits of Christ.
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And we see that in this verse.
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So let's look at that.
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Let's look at this together.
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The first, Salvation by grace is necessary because of the nature of man.
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It says in Ephesians 2.1, And you were dead.
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Just stop there.
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I've heard people say so many times and boast about how when they came to Jesus, when I trusted Jesus, when I made my decision to follow Jesus, beloved, might I share with you today that if you are in Christ, Christ came to you.
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You did not come to him.
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You were dead in your trespasses and sins.
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Oftentimes the picture of salvation is the picture of a man, as it were, in a pool of water.
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And he is drowning.
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And the evangelist comes with a ring to save him.
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And he tosses the ring into the water.
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And he says, grab a hold of the ring.
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And the man grabs the ring and that is his salvation.
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And that's the picture of salvation that many people have.
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And that's often, I've heard evangelists use that.
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They'll say, today I'm tossing you a life ring.
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All you need to do is reach out and grab the ring and salvation will be yours.
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That is not the picture given to us in Scripture.
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The picture given to us in Scripture is the man in the water has succumbed to the water.
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He has drowned.
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He has sunk to the depth of the water.
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His flesh on his bones is beginning to be picked clean by the carnivorous fish.
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And he lays there a dead man.
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Would you throw him a life ring? No.
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What would you say? Only God can save him.
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Because he's dead.
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The picture of salvation is not a man grabbing onto a rope.
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It's a man who is dead, who Christ has breathed into him life.
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He's taken those bones.
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Do you remember the story in the Old Testament of those bones, those dry bones? And God by His word adds to them flesh and blood and sinews and all of the muscles and He gives them life.
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That is salvation.
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You were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked.
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You had no desire for Christ.
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You had no desire for righteousness.
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And you might say, I always desired God.
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I will tell you this, my friend.
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You always desired God's blessing.
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Because every man wants to go to heaven.
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Every man wants the blessing of God.
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But you did not desire righteousness.
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The Scripture tells us by our nature we do not follow after righteousness, but we follow after the prince of the power of the air, who is Satan himself.
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It tells us in the text, in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now working, the sons of disobedience, among whom we all lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and of the mind and were by nature children of wrath.
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I'll never forget in that room many years ago, the Fellowship Hall used to have a small stage, as it were, built in the corner.
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We've since taken it down.
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But we would have Sunday night services in there.
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And we'd come in, we'd play the guitar a little and sing, and then I'd preach.
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And I'll never forget one night a person wanting to argue with me that they were not a sinner by nature.
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So I opened the Bible, and I said, you were dead in the trespasses and sins.
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I read this text to her, and I said, and were by nature children.
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Why is it that Paul can say that? Paul says that because you were born as the fallen son or daughter of Adam.
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When Adam fell, acting as our representative, he fell in our place, and in him we fell also.
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I've heard people say children are born neutral.
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They are not born neutral.
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They are born dead in sin.
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They don't become sinners when they sin.
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They sin because they are sinners.
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You sin because you are a sinner.
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And Paul is so clear because he says, like the rest of mankind, no one, no matter how virtuous he may seem socially, no matter how good he may seem morally, no matter how blessed he may be physically, no man outside of Christ is alive to God.
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Paul is so clear.
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Here is where this issue comes up in the Reformation.
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By the time of the Reformation, the teaching of the church, and still today in Roman Catholicism, is that yes, you are saved by grace, but that grace has to be accompanied by your merit.
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Grace will save you from hell, but you must merit heaven.
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And this is why there is such a thing as called purgatory.
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Purgatory is the place where the Roman Catholic will believe that you will go there because you will die impure.
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The only person who doesn't die impure, I would assume, is the person who is just leaving Mass or just leaving the confessional, and that person will still have some unconfessed sin in their life that they will have to be purged of in purgatory.
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Roman Catholicism teaches a salvation system which is essentially based on the merit of the individual, and that is a false gospel.
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Dead people don't bring anything to the table.
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Dead people don't bring anything to the game.
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Do you know what dead means? It means unresponsive.
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You ever seen a dead person? They don't move.
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I remember when I worked at a funeral home as a young man, I would be in the preparation room with bodies all the time, and I remember the first few times I had to go back, it was very hard on me, 16 years old, working at a funeral home.
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You can imagine, it was a little daunting task to have to walk back there and do work.
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But the one thing I noticed immediately was nothing really to be afraid of, because they're not responding.
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They're not going to sit up and talk to you.
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They're not going to have a conversation.
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There are no walking dead.
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They just lay there, and yell in their ear, strike them with a stick.
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You could offer them a million...
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You could jump on them.
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You could offer them...
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You could offer them a million dollars to sit up or a billion dollars to give you a high five.
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They can do nothing because they are dead.
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And so Paul uses that to describe your state of spiritual nature prior to regeneration.
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You are unable to respond to God because you are dead.
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God comes to you.
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You do not come to Him.
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And when He comes to you, He brings the merits of Christ.
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You don't merit a thing.
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That's the danger.
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You know, in Roman Catholic teaching, there's something called the thesaurus meritorum.
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The thesaurus meritorum, the treasury of merit, wherein it is believed that certain saints, and Christ and Mary, have had so much merit that it's gone into a treasury, that in case you die in needing of merit, their merits can now take your missing points and fill them in.
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Well, in a sense, they almost got it right.
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But here's where they missed the boat completely.
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Number one, there's never been a man who outmerited anything and his merits were so in overabundance that they went into a treasury.
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That dog won't hunt.
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That ain't true.
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But the merits of Christ are why you're saved.
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So in a sense, there is a treasury of merit, but the only person's merits who's in it are Christ's.
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And they are what saves you.
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Yours don't play a part at all.
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When you face the God of this world, your works, which are, as Isaiah said, as filthy rags before Him, your works were merit, not a thing.
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That's why I always ask somebody when I'm evangelizing, if you died and you faced God, why should He let you into heaven? If the answer is anything but the merits of Jesus Christ, it's the wrong answer.
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Well, I went to church for 40 years and you warmed a seat for 40 years, but you knew not Christ, Christ and Christ alone.
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I'm getting ahead of myself because that's the...
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Salvation, as we said, is necessary because of the nature of man.
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You couldn't be saved any other way.
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You can't be saved by good works.
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You can't be saved by your merits.
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You cannot be saved by anything other than grace.
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Number two, salvation by grace is possible because of the nature of God.
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But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses and sins, made us alive together with Christ.
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By grace, you have been saved.
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That is a beautiful passage because it tells you where you were and what God did.
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You notice the passage never says anything about what you did.
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People make such a big deal about their decision.
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You are not mentioned here except as a recipient.
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Some people say God does 99% and you're responsible for 1%.
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I will tell you this, if God did 999,000th of the percent and you only had 1,000th of a percent to do, you would miss heaven by a mile because you can do nothing of your own.
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It is all of grace.
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You don't add 1%.
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You don't add a fraction of a percent.
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You receive it all by grace.
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The most beautiful two words in the Bible, but God.
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You were dead in your sins, but God saved you by His grace.
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I want to begin to work towards the end now because I do want to point this last part out.
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Salvation is realized only in the merits of Christ.
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Salvation by grace is necessary because you're dead in sin.
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You couldn't be saved any other way.
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Salvation is possible because of the nature of God.
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God is gracious.
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You know God is gracious by nature? God gives freely by nature.
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I don't think in Reformed theology we talk enough about this.
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And oh how I could spend weeks on just this.
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God is abounding in loving kindness.
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And His grace and mercy are amazing.
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You know that's why John Newton wrote that song.
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Amazing grace, how sweet the sound.
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By the way, John Newton was Reformed.
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He said, amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a nice guy like me.
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See, that's not what he said.
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A wretch.
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See, he knew who he was.
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And he understood.
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Only when you understand who you are can you understand the amazing grace of God.
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If you think you bring something to the table, grace gets that less amazing.
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But only when you realize the absolute necessity of grace to save you will you understand how amazing it is.
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But finally, salvation by grace is realized only in the merits of Christ.
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You will notice, he says here in verse 5, Made us alive together with Christ, by grace you have been saved, and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places, in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages we might show the immeasurable riches of His grace and kindness toward us, in Christ Jesus.
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You go through the book of Ephesians, you'll see one phrase, in Christ, in Christ, in Christ, in Christ.
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That's why you're saved.
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Because you are in Christ.
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His merits allow God to be just and the justifier of those who draw nigh unto God through Him.
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He is just because He has already punished your sin in Christ, and He is justifier because He has already punished your sin in Christ.
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In verse 8-10, bring a nice little finality to this thought.
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Because he says this, For by grace, you have been saved, past tense, it's already happened, through faith, and this, by the way, that word this, pronoun, pointing back to all that just came before it.
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Grace, faith, salvation, all of that is in the this.
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This is not your doing.
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It is a gift of God.
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Not a result of works, because if it was based on your works, you could be proud.
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But not a result of works, so that no one would boast.
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For we, and here's the beauty, verse 10 clarifies, in case anybody says, well man, if I'm saved as a gift, that means that my life then doesn't really, I don't have any point to my life, I just basically just live, what am I supposed to do? Verse 10 clarifies, For we are His workmanship, masterpiece, we are His, we are created by God, as His workmanship, in Christ Jesus, for good works.
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God didn't save you, for you to live like the devil.
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God didn't save you, for you to not live for Him.
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God saved you, so that you would live like Christ.
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And God prepared for you, before you were ever even created, things for you to do, and walk in.
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Beloved, the Protestant Reformation, was a watershed moment, in the history of the church, not just for the church, but also for the world.
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And those doctrines, for which the reformers thought, are as important today, as they have ever been.
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And I want to end by saying this, I would never say that, there are no saved Roman Catholics.
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But I will say this, any Catholic who is saved, is saved in spite of what they've been taught, not because of it.
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Because their doctrines, do not lead to salvation, they lead to hell.
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Some people say, is the Reformation over? My response, has Rome repented? No.
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Just a short while ago, the Pope himself, was offering indulgences, for people who followed him on social media.
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It's not over.
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It's not over.
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There's still false teaching.
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There's still lost souls.
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Some may say, you've been hard on Rome today, why so upset? Because people are dying without Christ.
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And if there's anything, that should upset our soul, it's to see someone, who thinks they know Christ, die.
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And go into everlasting perdition, because they have trusted, in a system created by men, rather than in the Gospel of God.
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Out of the Reformation came a phrase, Semper Reformanda.
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Latin.
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Always reforming.
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The Reformation has not ended, and will not, until Christ returns.
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We will always, be looking back to Scripture, and seeking to be in confirmation, to what it teaches.
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Let's pray.
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Father, I thank you for your word.
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I thank you for the truth.
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I thank you for, men like Luther, and Calvin, and Zwingli, and others, whose shoulders, you used to carry, the Reformation.
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And Lord, for those who died, and gave their lives for it, we are grateful.
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For those who, dealt with unspeakable torments, for the Reformation, we are so grateful for them.
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We're saddened by their situation, but we're grateful, that they took the stand that they did, for we are here because of them, because of what you did through them.
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Father, may we be ever grateful, for those who came before us, and most grateful for the work of Christ, who is our Savior, apart from which we would not know life.
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And I pray today, that if there are those who have come, who are trusting in themselves, who are trusting in their merits, who are trusting in their goodness, Lord, that they would give that up, and that they would recognize, that there is no other name under heaven, given among men, by which we must be saved, than the name of Jesus.
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And Lord, save them, if it be in accordance with your will.
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Lord, break their heart, over the anvil of their sin, that they might have a new heart, given by you, that loves and seeks to serve you.
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And for the believers, Lord, may we come ever closer to conformity, to Jesus Christ, in his name, Amen.
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Well, let's stand.