The Heart Of The Reformation

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Well, I can't say that I was at all surprised by Jeff's humorous comment.

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I heard that at a Reformation Day party that someone else from our fellowship who will remain nameless,

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Dennis, dressed up like me as if I am one of the

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Reformers. And so, it does give me a little bit of an insight to be able to tell you about sitting around with Luther and his table talk and all that kind of stuff, but that would be great to have had that opportunity, but I'm afraid that some of you have just not done your math as to exactly where I am in life.

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But it is Reformation Sunday, and that is a special day.

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I need to start off by bursting a bubble, sorry. It's just, the first class

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I ever taught after graduating seminary was a church history, so it's my thing.

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And you just need to know that all those really cool t -shirts and memes and hammer time and all that stuff going on today is complete mythology.

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I can assure you that this is what happened on October 31st, 1517,

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Luther as a young professor at the University of Wittenberg, which was an upstart little university.

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It had only started a few years earlier, and there was a lot of competition for students.

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Getting students to come, let's put it this way. Think about this. Think about how things have changed.

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The plague would regularly come through town in those days, and the plague was a real pandemic, okay?

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I mean, there were forms of the plague that between 1347 and 1351 had killed as many as 70 % of people in an area.

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So seven out of ten. And there were certain forms of that plague that could kill you in 12 hours, okay?

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So this was the real thing, and there was no way of treating it, and so if you decide to go to school, you're taking your life in your hands.

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That's how things were. Everybody who lived in that day had seen dead bodies in the streets.

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Everybody who lived in that day had lost a brother or sister, or if you were a parent, had lost children.

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There were periods of time during the medieval period and into the Reformation where a woman would have to have ten live births on average to get one child through to maturity.

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Different world, much knowledge of mortality and death. We hide all that stuff away, all right?

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And so Luther was trying to help his university get students, and you had to attract those students, and you had to—there was only certain ways you could do it.

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You couldn't take out any ads on Facebook. Their football team really was really bad, and so—there weren't any football teams, of course.

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And so what you did do is you had debates. Yay, I like debates. And so you'd have debates, and so he was trying to get a debate with a larger university, which would give some free advertising to the

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University of Wittenberg. Now I'm not saying that he was not passionate about what he wrote about, because he was, but he was not the first one to say the things that he said in the 95

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Theses. He was speaking as a faithful Catholic son, and on October 31, 1517, he walked up to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, and there would have been all sorts of things posted on that door.

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When the next farm fair was going to be, who had just lost a pig, all sorts of notices about this, that, or the other thing in the little rural town of Wittenberg.

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And so when he nailed those up there, no one would have noticed. No one came flocking.

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No one was going, oh, a Reformation is beginning. He had no earthly idea.

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So we need a day to mark the beginning of the Reformation, but it was actually a move of God that started hundreds of years before and extended for hundreds of years after.

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And in many ways we're still a part of it, though there are some ways in which we need a whole new version of it, and I'll talk about that a little bit later on.

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But we need to, you know, I know we all love the idea that Luther walked up there and no one had ever seen anyone nail something to the church door before.

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Wow! And he points to it and says, there's your fixed theology. No, he was a

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Catholic, and if you read them, he's still speaking as a Catholic. But he started to see.

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He started to see light. And how did he start to see that light? Well, most of you probably know the story.

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I'll be very brief. In 1516, a man by the name of Desiderius Erasmus published a diaglot

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New Testament, two languages, one Latin, one Greek. Now, that was very unusual.

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What was even more unusual, it was, it was not the Latin Vulgate, which made it very dangerous, because the

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Latin Vulgate was the official translation of the church. At that point in time, the Roman Catholic Church had decided that the

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Latin, even though it wasn't, they, they recognized that wasn't the language it was originally written in. The Latin had been so used by God for so long, 1 ,100 years, that clearly that was the language

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God wanted used. And that was the official text of the church. And so for Erasmus to come along and go, yeah, there are actually a few problems in the

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Vulgate. There's, there, there've been some, there've been some issues with it down through the years. And he comes up with his own translation.

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That was dangerous. But then he also put the Greek in. Now, to be honest with you, he was not focused upon the

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Greek. That wasn't, it was sort of a side issue. He wanted there across the page to substantiate his own renderings, but it was, it was sort of a, it was in his way, really.

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And he, he sort of rushed through it in many ways in that first edition. In fact, it's fascinating, most of you know the story, that when he published that first edition,

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Book of Revelation, which he had very little respect for, and I think if he had had his way would have had it decanonized, did not really think it was up to the rest of the

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New Testament. He only had, he could not find a single Greek manuscript of the

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Book of Revelation anywhere. And he looked, and he looked, and he looked, and finally what he found, he borrowed from his friend

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Johannes Reuchlin, who by the way was also one of the first people to learn Hebrew. He risked his life to do that, to learn

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Hebrew from a Jewish rabbi. That could have gotten him tied to a stake and, and burned as well. But he borrowed a

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Latin commentary on the Book of Revelation that had the

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Greek text intermingled with the Latin, and that's where he got the

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Greek from. The problem was he was missing the last couple pages, which happened very frequently with books back then.

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And so he, he did not have time to try to find another Greek manuscript. His printer was pushing him to get it done, and so he translated from the

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Latin of the Vulgate into Greek for the last six verses of the Book of Revelation, Revelation chapter 22.

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And the process came up with a number of Greek readings that no Christian had ever seen before in the history of the church.

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But they are still a part of what's called the Texas Receptus today, and they're still a part of your King James Version of the

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Bible. Now you might say, how in the world? I mean, okay, he, he, okay, the first edition, he had to rush it out, all right,

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I get it. But he, he put out, he put out a number of versions all the way up to 1535.

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Why didn't he fix that stuff? Well, here's a funny story that I can guarantee you, this is probably the only church in the

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United States where this story is being told on Reformation Sunday, I can assure you of that. I didn't know about this because I had wondered the same thing for many years.

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Why didn't Erasmus ever fix the problems in the Book of Revelation, because there are a number of them, including the last six verses?

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He thought he did. And before the second edition went to print, he told the printer, go get, it started with an

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A, as I recall, allel, something like that, go get there. There had been another Greek New Testament that had been printed since his had come out, by some brothers.

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And he said, go get theirs and correct mine by theirs.

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So fix Revelation so it reads like theirs does. There was only one thing he never knew, they had used his for theirs.

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And so it never got fixed. And those problems are in what's called the Textus Receptus to this very day.

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But here's the point, that was 1516. And guess who purchased one of the very first editions of Erasmus' Diglot?

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The young, new professor of theology at Wittenberg by the name, an

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Augustinian monk by the name of Martin Luther. And so Luther is studying books like Romans and Galatians, and now he has right in front of him the

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Latin that he knows so well and that everyone knew so well, at least those in the priesthood.

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And now the Greek right across the page, so you can look right across the page. Now not as easily as you and I can, there were no verses yet.

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The verses were going to be introduced by Robert Stephanus in 1551.

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So it's coming, but still, you really had to be able to read this stuff, but you can still look across the page, find where you were, and see what the

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Greek was. So for example, one of the important things that Luther recognized was he'd read in the

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Latin text, punitentium agitate, due penance. And that's what he had been taught.

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He's a faith Augustinian monk. But then he looks across the page, metanoia te, metanoia te.

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He looks it up. That doesn't mean to do penance. It means to have a change of heart, mind, direction.

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He knows that that Greek was what was written first, and the

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Latin is a translation of it. And so Luther has started to see justification and faith and grace, but he's not there yet.

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He's not there yet. He recognizes, as many people recognize, that the horrible practice of indulgence was just such a, it was such a blatant money -raising scheme.

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You go to Rome today and you visit the, the grand buildings there, and you visit the

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Vatican and St. Peter's Basilica specifically, and it was built with the money coming from German peasants trying to buy their, their loved ones out of purgatory.

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And there were a lot of people who looked at that and just said, oh man, that's crass.

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That's horrible. Horrible. So he wasn't the first one, but he was pretty brave to put it in print and to put it as boldly as he did.

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And that's what those 95 theses were about. But what happened was he wanted people to see them, and so a, a

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German printer printed a number of them up. Some say that Luther didn't know about it, some say he probably did.

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In any case, they start going around and they raise a lot of eyebrows.

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And what eventually happens is Luther is being pushed to think through and to think through if, if, if the

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Pope's wrong about this, then could he be, be wrong about this, and, and, and what about this here?

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And it seems that the New Testament is teaching the freedom of God's grace, and it, and, and it, it seems to be saying that there's no works that we can do.

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How do we put all this together? And then you start thinking about all of the sacraments that we do, and, and Luther had already had that experience years earlier, where he had gone to Rome and he had just been shattered by how worldly the city was.

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He had seen the Pope riding through the streets in armor, the armor of a knight.

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And he had gone into the places where priests could go to say Mass, and he'd see these priests and they're taking money to say

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Mass for dead people, and they, they'd come in and they'd go rushing through it, or they, they barely even knew enough

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Latin to, to mumble their way through it. And he's trying to do it properly, and they're just doing as fast as they can, get as much money as they could.

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He had seen the corruption of the church, and so it was easy for him to start looking to the

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New Testament and going, where is all of this? If, if we're wrong about that, where is all of this to be found?

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But it wasn't until a couple, you know, just a period of time after this that you have the debate that he wanted to have.

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He was, he was taken up in his challenge. The debate took place in a place called Leipzig, and Luther debated a man who had become his lifelong nemesis, his lifelong nemesis.

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And he, the debate, to put it mildly, did not go the way that Luther expected it to go.

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Now again, what you did is you got all your students together. The man's name is Johann Eck, and so Eck was well -known, and he was well -known in Rome, and so this brought a lot of students together, and you traveled to Leipzig, there's lots of people in the room.

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You didn't debate for two hours. You debated in the morning, took a break, you debated in the afternoon, took a break, then you had dinner, and everybody had too much

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German beer, and bad things happened. And that's, that was the equivalent of a college road trip, in essence.

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But it was for debates, very different than football games. In the middle of this debate,

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Eck begins to quote certain statements that sound like what

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Luther was saying, and then he identified the source, a man by the name of Jan Hus.

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Now, I can only imagine that Luther's heart started to race when he realized that Jan, that Eck was associating him with Jan Hus, because all he knew at that time was that Jan Hus was a heretic, and Jan Hus had been burned at the stake barely a hundred years earlier at the

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Council of Constance. So during the lunch break, Luther rushes to the library, skips the food, and he rushes to the library, and he finds everything he can get his hands on by this

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Jan Hus guy. And I just, I can't imagine what the feeling was as he read the words of Hus and realized

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Hus was right, and Eck is right, I'm a Husite. And so he comes back for the next part of the debate, and there are, there is, there are electors, people who are high in the government, in the audience.

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He has to be very, very careful. He isn't all that careful. And in response he says,

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Jan Hus said many evangelical and true things. I think that may be where the

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Reformation really started, in a sense. Because not only did Luther recognize there's much more here than has, than I've even come to understand at this point, but it was

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Eck that forced Luther to recognize the next of the solas that you and I believe today.

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He had already started to come to, he already understood sola fide, he was coming to understand sola gratia, faith alone and grace alone.

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But it was Eck that pushed him, with the authority of the Pope, to come to understand sola scriptura, the formal principle of the

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Reformation, that which gave form to the Reformation, Scripture as the sole infallible rule of faith.

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It was Eck that forced him to do that. You know what one of the great ironies and sad ironies of the

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Reformation is? Luther, almost everything that you and I read and appreciate about Luther was written up through 1525.

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And after that, there's a different Luther. I can't go into all of it today.

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I gave a presentation a number of years ago, it's available online, it was at the same conference that Sommer spoke at,

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Jordan Peterson spoke at. They were talking about relevant cultural things and I was talking about Luther.

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There you go, that's sort of how it works. And I gave a presentation on the two

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Luthers, the pre -1525 and the post -1525.

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The post -1525 Luther is somewhat of an old curmudgeon. He doesn't have the same vitality that that earlier

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Luther had. What happened in 1525 was called the Peasants' Revolt. The peasants revolted.

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They thought Luther would support them. Luther was terrified of anarchy.

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He was terrified of being blamed for anarchy, and so he sided with the princes.

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And well over a hundred thousand peasants were slaughtered. And Luther lost southern

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Germany as a result, and he was never the same. Something changed in Martin Luther in 1525.

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And one of the sad ironies that you probably never hear about, well you certainly heard that Luther was anti -Semitic.

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The interesting thing is he didn't make those comments pre -1525, in fact he made numerous comments that would be considered extremely liberal in that day concerning evangelizing

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Jews and so on and so forth. It was after 1525 that he began moving that direction more and more.

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And in fact, two of the books that were the most extreme anti -Semitic screeds of that time period were written by who?

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Martin Luther and Johann Eck, his great enemy.

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They almost raced each other in that field. What an astonishing thing.

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Now, part of the reason I say all this is I do not want you to have a caricature, a cartoon version of the

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Reformation. You need to understand that the great men that we honor, and that I have benefited so much from over the years, would probably have never given me the right hand of fellowship.

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And in fact, most would have had me banished, arrested, and some would have had me executed.

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I'm well aware of that fact. That's why we have to, if we are going to look back at history, do so with maturity and with an understanding that if you're looking back at history and expecting to find a bunch of people that look like you and dress like you and talk like you, you're not going to find them.

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The history of the church is a broad history. And while you will find tremendous areas of agreement and we have that commitment to Christ, you're going to find all sorts of differences, too.

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And so when I see people who, on the Reformed side, turn Luther and Calvin and Zwingli into people they never were, it becomes far too easy to pop those bubbles and refute that kind of falsehood.

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We need to know who they were, appreciate them. Be thankful for what God did through them, but then realize if I had lived in that day, if you had lived in that day, each one of you, would you have been a

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Reformer or would you have stayed with that which was comfortable, that which was safe?

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Would you have just gone along and if your town, if your city, if your country, and things were a little bit different back then, how those things were measured and determined, had remained

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Roman Catholic? Would you have remained Roman Catholic? Maybe out of fealty to Romans 13, that's what you're supposed to do, right?

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Or would you become part of the Reformation just because everybody around you was doing it?

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That was a danger. State churches, that's what you had in that day.

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And so do you just go with the flow? How far would any one of us have gone in reforming our beliefs?

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Because there was a lot of stuff to be reformed. So we have this, we have a dangerous idea that you just look to those early

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Reformers and then you stop there. No, the Reformation had to continue. For example,

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Rome had not defined the last two of the great doctrines concerning Mary.

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And so the Reformers didn't really say much about Mary. And they believed things about Mary.

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You and I don't believe about Mary because it just wasn't an issue. Rome hadn't defined a lot of the, they didn't believe in the bodily, well, they didn't, hadn't defined the bodily assumption, hadn't defined immaculate conception, etc.,

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etc. And so there needed to be a continuing process that was going to take place in the next generation and the next generation after that, which is why we have semper reformanda, always reforming.

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We say that, but then we sort of don't live that when we look back and expect the first generation

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Reformers to have gotten it all right first shot. Where would we have gone?

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How far would we have gone? It's a question you can ask yourself in your own time.

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But the title today is The Heart of the Reformation. And there is no question that if you ask what was the key issue for Martin Luther, he laid it out and he, he did it in the book that he said was his greatest work of theology.

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His greatest work of theology he identified as the bondage of the will. He wrote many books, but the one that he himself said was his greatest work, was the bondage of the will.

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And it was a response to Desiderius Erasmus, the same Erasmus who produced the

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Diglot Greek New Testament, Latin New Testament that he had read earlier. And Erasmus, as a

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Roman Catholic priest, defended the sacramental system of Rome and the view of man's will and grace.

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Grace was something that was channeled through the sacraments. And so it's controlled by the church, and man has to have a free will to work those sacraments to get that grace.

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And Luther's response was, man's dead in sin. Man's will is in bondage.

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Now, he was an Augustinian monk, so that meant he read a lot of Augustine, and so you, he certainly talked about that.

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It's, this wasn't the first time it had been debated. But Luther said to Erasmus, he said,

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I appreciate this about you, Erasmus, of all of my opponents, you have put your finger on the heart of the matter, the hinge upon which it all turns.

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And what was that? The freedom or bondage of the will. The freedom or bondage of the will.

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You'd have to have faith alone. If the will is in bondage, you have to have

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God do something to, to free that will. An enslaved person can have access to all sorts of sacraments, but if they're in bondage, there has to be something that comes from God first.

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And it's not just some kind of helping grace, there has to be something supernatural. And so Luther had a strong doctrine of predestination.

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How strong? Well, I've got a long quote for you.

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I'm not trying to go as long as last week. Don't worry. Don't worry. I know we have other things to do tonight.

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But listen to what Luther said, and this is in his debate with Erasmus, this bondage of the will. But granted foreknowledge and omnipotence, it follows naturally by an irrefutable logic that we have not been made by ourselves, nor do we live or perform any action by ourselves, but by His omnipotence.

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And seeing He knew in advance that we should be the sort of people we are, and now makes, moves, and governs us as such, what imaginable thing is there,

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I ask you, in us which is free to become in any way different from what He has foreknown or is now bringing about?

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Thus, God's foreknowledge and omnipotence are diametrically opposed to our free choice, for either

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God can be mistaken in foreknowing and also err in action, which is impossible, or we must act and be acted upon in accordance with His foreknowledge and activity.

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By the omnipotence of God, however, I do not mean the potentiality by which He could do many things, which

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He does not, but the act of power by which He potently works all in all, which is the sense in which, oh, here we go, sorry, you have to turn it back on, which is the sense in which

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Scripture calls Him omnipotent. This omnipotence and the foreknowledge of God, I say, completely abolish the dogma of free choice.

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Nor can the obscurity of Scripture or the difficulty of the subject be made a pretext here. The words are quite clear and known even to schoolboys.

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Think about that for a second. And what they say is plain and easy and commends itself even to the natural judgment of common sense.

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So it makes no difference how great a tally you have of centuries, times, and persons who write and teach differently.

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Admittedly, it gives the greatest possible offense to common sense or natural reason that God by His own sheer will should abandon, harden, and damn men as if He enjoyed the sins of the vast eternal torments of His wretched creatures.

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When He is preached as a God of such great mercy and goodness, etc. It has been regarded as unjust, as cruel, as intolerable to entertain such an idea about God.

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And this is what has offended so many great men during so many centuries.

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And who would not be offended? I myself was offended more than once and brought to the very depth and abyss of despair, so that I wished

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I had never been created a man before I realized how salutary that despair was and how near to grace.

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That is why there has been such sweating and toiling to excuse the goodness of God and accuse the will of man.

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It is here the distinctions have been invented between the ordained and the absolute will of God and between the necessity of consequence and consequent and so forth, though nothing has been achieved by them except that the ignorant have been imposed upon by empty talk and the contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge.

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Nevertheless, there has always remained deeply implanted in the hearts of ignorant and learned alike whenever they have taken things seriously, the painful awareness that we are under necessity if the foreknowledge and omnipotence of God are accepted.

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Even natural reason herself, who is offended by this necessity and makes such efforts to get rid of it, is compelled to admit it by the force of her own judgment, even if there were no

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Scripture at all. That was Luther's argument against Erasmus.

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Did you notice what he said? Even I have come to the very point of despair in considering the reality of the relationship between God's absolute omnipotence and power and His knowledge of all things and the will of man.

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And so what is the heart of the Reformation? Well, Luther said what he said and he starts touching upon this issue of God's foreknowledge,

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God's perfect knowledge of all future events which can never be falsified, and hence

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His decree, His sovereignty. Zwingli touched upon it as well, not quite as fully as Luther.

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Calvin, of course, develops it greatly in his own writings, but Calvin is a second -generation

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Reformer. He is converted years after 1517, probably in the early 1530s, maybe late 1520s.

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So over a decade after that period of time. And he begins to speak upon these things as well.

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But what is it about the Reformation that we need to see continues to have absolute central importance today?

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That's what Ephesians chapter 1 is about. Look at it with me very briefly. Look, go ahead and turn to it. If you already have, then don't worry about it, but turn to it.

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You know what this is. You know Ephesians chapter 1, that tremendous discussion of election, predestination.

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And I suppose it would be good to give the whole context. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him.

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In love He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will, to the praise, the glory of His grace, which

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He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved, that is in the Beloved One, that is in Christ. In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace, which

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He lavished upon us. And here's our key text. In all wisdom and insight He made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His kind intention, which

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He purposed in Him, in Christ, with a view to an administration suitable to the fullness of the times, that is, the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things upon the earth.

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In Him also we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to His purpose, who works all things after the counsel of His will, to the end that we who are the first to hope in Christ should be made, should be to the praise of His glory.

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Now, here is where the issue,

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I think, lies for us today. Think about these words.

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Think about what is found here in the text of Scripture. God has made known to us the mystery of His will.

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Some people say you shouldn't talk about predestination and election, you shouldn't touch on these things, it's too difficult. To say that, and Calvin said this, to say that is to impugn the wisdom of the

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Holy Spirit, because the Holy Spirit gave this to us. So we have to deal with what

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God has given to us in His Word. And He has made known to us in all wisdom and understanding the mystery of His will, not our will.

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If we recognize who we are as creatures, the first desire of our heart should not be to know our wills, but His will, the will of our

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Maker, our Creator. And He has made known to us the mystery of His will.

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Well, what's a mystery? Well, it's something that was hidden from the past, but it's been made known now.

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He's made known this, the mystery of His will. But then notice, according to, and here's what

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I want you to take away with you for Reformation Sunday 2021.

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The term is eudaicheia. Eudaicheia, it's translated as kind intention.

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The kind intention which He purposed in Him. God has a kind intention, a good intention, a good purpose.

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And it's found in Christ. Do we really believe it's good?

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There are a lot of people who claim to be Christians who find the idea of God's decree,

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His good intention, as something that they loathe. In a way,

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Luther admitted to that. He loathed the term of God's righteousness because he thought he could never live up to it.

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There were things he just could not understand until grace became the lens through which he saw all things.

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And for some reason, there are a lot of Christians who have much more faith in the will of their fellow man, their own will, than in the will of God.

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They fear the will of God. Some detest the will of God.

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But he had already used this term up above. It's central to his understanding of what

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God is doing God has a good intention, a kind intention, a proper intention.

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And He has a purpose in Christ. And fundamentally, what came out of the

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Reformation and what every generation afterwards has to be focused upon is the reality of God's good intention.

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His decree. Why? Because it is of the essence of you and I to try to blunt the central focus of what

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God is doing in Christ. What does man always want to do? We want to turn the focus off of God and off of His demonstration of His own glory and kind intention in Christ and put it on what?

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Us. Us. Because you see, if God is accomplishing all these things in and of Himself, where is the room for your glory and mine?

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There is none. I can't think of any teaching or theology that is more absolutely destructive to the arrogance and pride of man than the recognition that God is accomplishing

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His purpose in the way He has chosen to His greatest glory in all things.

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And that He is in fact summing up all things in Christ.

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This administration suitable to the fullness of time.

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It's the fullness of time. How can we even use this language unless what lies behind it is an absolutely sovereign

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King who is accomplishing His purposes? You see, the history of man's religion and the history of the development of the

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Christian faith has been a constant tilting away from an acknowledgement and acceptance of the full sovereignty of God and what

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He is doing in this world. When you think about the sacramental system of Rome, what's it all about?

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What's its purpose? What's its function? Why did it grow? There are only two sacraments or ordinances in the

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New Testament, baptism and the Lord's Supper. They had seven by the days of Luther, still have it today.

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Where'd that come from? Why would people want to multiply these things? Because it's the mechanism by which you can continue to say that we must have

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God's grace. However, God's grace, while necessary, is not in of itself sufficient.

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Rome says it to this day. God's grace is absolutely necessary. Can't be saved without it. And there are actually a lot of Protestants who go, whoo -hoo, yeah, there we go, we're all together now.

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But you see, the Reformers knew that. Reformers knew of the necessity.

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They knew they believed that. What they preached was the sufficiency. Because see, once you take grace and you turn it into an assisting power that you can then channel through things, you can channel it through baptism and you can channel it through the

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Mass and you can channel it through the various sacraments of marriage and ordination and last rites and all these types of things and now you've just got this big reservoir of grace.

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It's like a bunch of gas up there, you know? And you gotta get it flowing in the right place and you gotta get it to the right place.

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You gotta do everything right to make it work right. What have you done? Well, we still recognize we need

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God's grace. Yeah, but you've put it completely under the control of man. It's no longer a powerful, efficient thing that glorifies

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God. It's something that you have to work on and well, eventually they came up with the idea you had to come to the church and do it the church's way over and over and over again.

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And that's why in the days of Luther, you could come to the

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Mass and you could have that priest stand up there in a language that you may or may not understand and offer the body, soul, blood and divinity of Jesus on the altar for your intentions, whether it be for your own sins or the sins of others and guess what you can do the next day?

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You can come back and do it again. Because it never perfected you, nor was it intended to, nor did you expect it to.

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It had a limited propitiatory effect. It was necessary, but not sufficient.

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You see the difference between that and what was being proclaimed in Scripture? And so, when you think about what the heart of the

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Reformation would be, that which we need to see became, started to become clarified, maybe not with full clarity at first, but becomes clarified over time.

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When we have the centrality of Scripture, when we have tota Scriptura and sola Scriptura, what we see now is

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God's absolute freedom. God's absolute freedom.

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That then becomes the foundation for understanding who we really are. What's one of the things that we have completely messed up in our secular society now?

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Because we no longer have a creator, we ourselves are now autonomous.

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We are a law unto ourselves. And so look at what's happening in our society. Today I'm a male.

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Tomorrow I'm a female. Oh, now I'm a four -star admiral. Wow! What society can survive this insanity?

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Why is it happening? You could not have it as long as everybody in the society recognized there's a creator who made that man as a man.

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And to say he's anything other is to deny the creator. There's no creator anymore.

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So you can do whatever you want. Think whatever you want. Foundations are gone.

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Foundations are gone. What do we need to see when we hear of the fact that our

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God is described as the one who works all things after the counsel of His will?

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When you hear that, what's the response of your heart? What's the response of your heart?

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Yeah, it says having been predestined, chosen, but He works all things after the counsel of His will.

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Do you trust the counsel of His will more than your own? Can you believe that He has a good purpose in what

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He's doing even if you can't see it in your own life? Some of the greatest callings of a Christian is to grow in the grace and knowledge of the

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Lord Jesus Christ to the point where you can trust that when God brings tremendous pain and suffering into your life,

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He has a good purpose. And you don't have to know what it is until you see

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Him. That's called faith. That's called trust.

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But here's what I want you to hear with me now. I had the opportunity, some of you have seen it, it was, it was a bucket list thing.

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Four years ago, just before the 500th anniversary, I was standing behind a wall and when

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I heard my name mentioned, or we're now going to hear from Dr.

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White, I walked up a spiral staircase and came out and I stood in Luther's pulpit in the

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Castle Church in Wittenberg. Buried right there was

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Martin Luther. Over there, Philip Melanchthon, his successor there in Wittenberg.

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I'll never forget that. Well, Lord, please, never let me forget that. It's burned in my memory.

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It would be for any preacher of the word. I will tell you a humorous thing before I get to the serious part.

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When we first, when I first started, there was a little bit of a, a little bit of a hum or buzz in the sound system once in a while.

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It wasn't, it wasn't really bad. It wasn't, a lot of people probably didn't even notice it, but I'm a,

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I'm a former sound guy, so I hear things like that. And when I finished my sermon and I went down,

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I was talking with our group. I made the comment that I had heard that sound.

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I said, I think that was Luther spinning in his grave because a Baptist was preaching in his pulpit because he would have.

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Oh, he would have been so offended. Oh, I'd like to think that if we could sit down and, and, and he could learn about what's happened since the 1500s and, and, and look at where a lot of Lutherans are today, he'd be happy to have me around in comparison to a lot of people that bear his name.

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I can assure you of that. I'd like to think all that stuff, but the simple fact of the matter is, nah, he would not have wanted a

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Baptist preaching in his pulpit. One of the stories that I told from history during that sermon was what had happened in that very room.

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This room is a little, well, it's interesting. It's similar in size, certainly not in height, and there's, there's not much in the way of stained glass here in comparison to what you have in the castle church in Wittenberg.

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The pulpit would be pretty cool to have. It would be over there someplace. It would be up about there. That would be pretty neat.

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And if you're up that high, nobody would be doing it, so it'd be great.

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But in that very room, Christmas Eve, I believe 1521,

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I'd have to check my notes. I didn't recheck them before I thought about this. Luther's associate, who eventually he would split with,

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Andreas Karlstadt, having been told that he would not be allowed to offer both the bread and the wine for the

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New Year's service, obeyed by doing it on New Year's Eve, or Christmas Eve.

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That was his way around it. You need to realize the people had been, they had not been allowed to partake of the cup.

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The, the bread we placed upon their tongue, but they had not been allowed to partake of the cup, because since the doctrine of transubstantiation developed, it was sort of dangerous to spill

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God. And so the priest would drink of the cup in place of the people.

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And so Karlstadt said, that's not what the scriptures say. And so we're going to have the

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Lord's Supper, and we're going to make everything available to the people. And in that very room, the people surged forward just to have the opportunity to partake of the cup.

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To partake of wine. Can you see it in your mind? Can you see?

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These weren't scholars. Wittenberg was a rural town.

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They were farmers. They were peasants. Some of them worked in the towns. They might have had some shops.

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There might have been some blacksmiths, things like that. But these were the people of the land.

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And they are pushing forward. They want to be included in partaking of that cup.

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Look at today. You see that happening anywhere? Oh, I'll have to admit, since the lockdown started,

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I know last year, there was many times I'd be standing over there and we'd have people who came from Oregon, Washington, California.

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One of the things they loved to say was, man, that was the first time I've had the Lord's Supper in 18 months.

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So there was that. But here's what I want you to think about.

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Think with me about it. Do we need a new

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Reformation? I think so. You know why?

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Because we live in a day and a culture that is significantly less spiritually attuned to the world than the peasants of Wittenberg were.

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Well, wait a minute. We've got tech. You're reading from an iPad, man.

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We've got our iPhones out. We've got tech. We've been to the moon. I haven't been there for a while. We've been to the moon.

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What do you mean? I'm suggesting to you that in those days, people were walking down, walking down the streets of Wittenberg, and they've got a cow in one hand and a

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Bible in their other, and they're talking about justification and imputed righteousness. You know why they were?

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It wasn't because it was just the most popular thing of the day. They knew that this world was created by God and that they were going to, in the very near future, stand before their

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Maker. And they needed to know that they could have peace with God.

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Secularism, the very religion of the culture of death, starts by numbing the spirit and the mind, by distracting you, and by removing any concept that there will ever be a day of judgment that you will face.

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So we are in the midst of the rise of a thoroughly secular generation in our country.

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The results are far -reaching. But for the church, on Reformation Sunday, what do we need to be focusing on?

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Where does the Reformation have to take place in our experience?

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What truths do we need to be proclaiming? Because we can talk about the imputed righteousness of Christ all we want.

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But if a person does not believe that they have any transcendent meaning, that they are created by God, and that they will ever be at a day of judgment, why do

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I need that? What does it mean to me? So the

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Reformation message of our day has to be significantly more basic.

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The people who rushed forward in the castle church, they had much more spiritual understanding of the world in which they lived than we do.

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Our knowledge of the mechanics of our world has absolutely numbed us to the spiritual reality of the

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Creator of this world and our nature as His creatures. Thank you.

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There is one amen, I think. I'll take the amen. This is where we are.

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This is what we're facing. And if you sit here in this room today and you understand the need of imputed righteousness, then you need to understand

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God has been gracious to you to reveal that need to you because the world going by on this street out here, 99 % of them are utterly insensitive to the reality that a truck could come through the next stoplight up here and they're going to be standing before their

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Creator. They don't even think about it. Let's be honest, we rarely do either.

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We rarely do either. And so if we want to be used of God in continuing the

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Reformation or bringing about a new Reformation, then we need to be quick to be communicating to the world around us the fundamental realities that we have been made by God.

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There is a God. We are made in His image. Everybody knows that, but suppresses that.

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We need to be going down to that basic level because if we don't, we can be talking about all this wonderful stuff up here.

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The world's not going to hear us. The world's not going to hear us. When Luther proclaimed a means of having true peace with God, he got a hearing because everybody in his audience knew they could be dead the next day.

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They knew about the plague. They had seen the dead bodies in the streets. They knew about war.

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They knew the reality of this world and that spiritual aspect of it.

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We need to be all always aware of it and we need to be the ones that communicate to our secular neighbors, family members, the reality that secularism is a religion of death and if they want life, they need to come to the one who gave us life.

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Jesus said, I have come that they might have life, might have it more abundantly. To walk in the rebellion of secularism is to reject the light and life that is offered in Jesus Christ.

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I look at history and there has never, ever been a greater denial and denigration and rebellion against everything that Jesus Christ taught and stood for than today's secularism and God has called us to live in the midst of it.

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So let me ask you a question. You ready to be a Reformer? Luther expected to die when he stood before Charles and at least at that point he did say what we have heard that he said.

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He was told to recant of his works and he said he could not.

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It would go against conscience. He asked to be shown from Scripture where he was wrong. He was not and that's when he said those words.

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Hier stehe ich. Ich kann nicht anders. Gott helfe mir. Hier I stand.

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I can do no other. God help me. He expected to be dead in a matter of days.

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I think Luther was shocked that he died of a heart attack years later. How about you?

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How about me? I don't think that when

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Luther said those words he was arrogant. Some people say that he did say it with bravado and then

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I don't know. He had asked for 24 hours to think about it. I'm just not sure those two things fit together. But how about you and I?

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Will you be a reformer? Parents will you communicate to your children that they are made in the image of God and that there will be a day when they will stand before their creator and answer to him for all the good gifts that he has given to them?

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Will we say that to our neighbors to our family members? Will we be reformers and stand firm in our day?

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That is a question for all of us. Let's pray together. Our gracious heavenly father on this day we remember what you have done with great power in the past.

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We ask that you would make us to be a people reliant upon that same power today to stand firm upon your truth.

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Help us to bring light in the midst of this deep darkness of this secular world around us.

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This great rebellion against our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Father give us the strength to honor and glorify you.

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To serve you. And to give our all if that's what you call us to do. We pray in Christ's name.