TPW 44 Solus Christus Christ Alone

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After watching Luther express his dismay at the sight of a large collection of relics,
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Staubitz looked at Luther and said, If you leave the Christian church to live only by faith, without the crutches of visible relics and prayers and all these other things that you dismiss, what will you put in their place?
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And Luther answered, Christ. Welcome to the
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Protestant Witness. This is Pastor Patrick Hines, continuing forward in the Reformation Conference series.
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And once we're done with these, we'll get back to the Genesis sermons. But this is on Solus Christus, Christ alone.
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And it's a very essential, important sola of the
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Reformation. And the solas are the pure and unadulterated Christian faith, without the add -ons and the mixtures of error and falsehood and idolatry that Rome and, well, really many forms of Protestantism have been adding to the purity of the
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Gospel for a long time. Solus Christus, Christ alone. He is the only hope of the
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Christian. It is his righteousness and his shed blood alone that reconciles us to God. It is through Christ alone that we approach the throne of grace and prayer.
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And Christ alone is the mediator between God and man. And so I hope you find this edifying.
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And shout, that's cool. But let's not try that at home. Okay, please take your
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Bibles and turn to Romans chapter 1, verses 16 and 17, is our scripture reading for this final talk of the day.
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I appreciate the die -hards who are still here. That's good. I saved the talk that I think will get your blood going the most for the last.
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So hopefully the, what is it called? Post -cranial narcolepsy that you get after you eat. The blood goes from here to your stomach.
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So I'm going to try my best to keep you up for this one. Romans 1, 16 and 17.
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This is God's word. For I'm not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes.
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For the Jew first and also for the Greek. For in it, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, the just shall live by faith.
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May God bless this reading of his infallible word. Let's pray, please. Our God in heaven.
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We thank you again for the opportunity to open your word and to spend all this time together today studying it and thinking about the great doctrines of the
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Protestant Reformation, which are simply the great doctrines of divine revelation and scripture. We pray that you'd be with us now as we walk through this passage and as we talk about this wonderful theme of Solus Christus, Christ alone, help us understand what it means.
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We pray in Jesus name. Amen. In his excellent book,
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Mary, another Redeemer question mark. Dr. White wrote this paragraph quote.
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It caught my eye a small booklet tucked in the fold of a chair in the corner. I normally wouldn't have seen it, but it was sticking out just enough to be seen.
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I picked it up. The blue and white cover bore the title devotions in honor of our mother of perpetual help.
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Thank you. I found through the booklet scanning a few of the prayers that contained my eyes caught a line about my eternal salvation.
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So I backed up and started from the beginning and here's the prayer quote. Oh mother of perpetual help, thou art the dispenser of all the goods, which
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God grants to us miserable sinners. And for this reason, he has made these so powerful, so rich and so bountiful that thou mayest help us in our misery.
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Thou art the advocate of the most wretched and abandoned sinners who have recourse to thee. Come then to my help, my dearest mother, for I recommend myself to thee.
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In thy hands, I place my eternal salvation and to thee do
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I entrust my soul. Count me among thy most devoted servants. Take me under thy protection and it is enough for me.
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For if thou protect me, dear mother, I fear nothing. Not from my sins, because thou would obtain for me the pardon of them.
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Nor from the devils, because thou art more powerful than all hell together. Nor even from Jesus, my judge himself, because by one prayer from thee, he will be appeased.
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But one thing I fear, that in the hour of temptation, I may neglect to call on thee and thus perish miserably.
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Obtain for me then the pardon of my sins, love for Jesus, final perseverance and the grace always to have recourse to thee, oh mother of perpetual help.
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Followed by three Hail Marys. At first I could not believe what I just read.
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So I ran back through the last few lines. Was this prayer really saying that the petitioner did not fear his or her sins, the devils and Jesus?
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That's what it said. I shook my head in disbelief. A few years later, I found myself in a radio studio in Boston, Massachusetts doing a radio discussion with a former
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Protestant turned Roman Catholic named Jerry Matitix. The topic was Mary and the Saints.
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Mr. Matitix and I were scheduled to do two public debates at Boston College over the course of the next week.
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But today, we were live on the air taking calls on the subject of prayers to Mary and the
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Saints. As I packed for the trip, I found the little blue and white booklet and decided to bring it along.
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Now, I reached into my bag and brought it out. Surely, quoting this prayer would bring a strong reaction from Mr.
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Matitix. Surely, he denied that such a prayer was proper and that the people who had written it were just going overboard in their piety.
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The talk show host involuntarily gasped as I read the final lines. And as I put the booklet down,
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I looked across at my opponent waiting for the expected reaction. The host likewise turned to Mr.
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Matitix. He was quiet for a moment and then spoke. Mr. White, he began, I can only hope that someday you too will pray that prayer.
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End quote. I want to be as clear as possible on this topic. The person who prays such a prayer to Mary, asking her to save them from Jesus is lost and cannot possibly know
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Jesus. Anyone who would ever pray to anyone to rescue them from Jesus, who alone is the
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Redeemer of mankind and the one and only Savior of lost sinners, certainly does not know
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Jesus and cannot understand who he is or what he did and cannot understand the way he is to all repentant sinners who come unto him for salvation.
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Again, we are confessionally bound to this great Reformation of Solus, Solus Christus, who is the
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Redeemer of God's elect, the Westminster Shorter Catechism says. The only Redeemer of God's elect is the
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Lord Jesus Christ, who being the eternal Son of God became man and so was and continues to be God and man in two distinct natures and one person forever.
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When Martin Luther had what historians and scholars call his evangelical breakthrough, when he really came to Christ and was saved,
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Luther was very zealous to make his findings known to others. Luther had entered a monastery because of a vow that he made to Saint Anne, the patron saint of minors, in the midst of a thunderstorm which he feared for his life after lightning struck nearby.
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He entered the monastery troubled by his own sinfulness and was extremely devout in his monastic duties.
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He fasted often, prayed for hours on end, and wore out confessor after confessor during the daytime, confessing the most trivial of sins imaginable.
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Even Luther's mentor in the monastery, Johann Staupitz, once told him, I've never once heard you confess anything even remotely interesting.
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After all, how much trouble can you really get into in a monastery? The biographer Roland Bainton in his monumental book, which
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I highly recommend, Here I Stand, A Life of Martin Luther, wrote this, This assiduous confessing certainly succeeded in clearing up any major transgressions.
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The leftovers with which Luther kept trotting in appeared to Staupitz to be only the scruples of a sick soul.
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Look here, said Staupitz to Luther, if you expect Christ to forgive you, come in with something to forgive.
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Parasite, blasphemy, adultery, instead of all these peccadillos. But Luther's question was not whether his sins were big or little, but whether they had all been confessed.
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The great difficulty which he encountered was to be sure he had everything been recalled.
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He learned from experience the cleverness of memory in protecting the ego and was frightened when after six hours of confessing, he could still go out and think of something else which had eluded his most conscientious scrutiny.
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You see, and that's the end of the quotation from Bainton, you see the problem was Luther knew better. The Holy Spirit of God had pulled back the curtains from Luther's eyes and had given him a glimpse of what he really was, a depraved and sinful man who was on his way to hell.
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And no matter what Rome gave Luther to do, it would not relieve his tormented conscience. Luther reasoned, if God truly is
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God, and God is holy, and God knows all things, then I am most certainly damned.
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I am lost. God is a righteous judge who can tolerate no sin in his holy presence and before his holy eyes.
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When Luther's superiors in the monastery saw how troubled he was, they made the decision to send him off to the newly founded
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University of Wittenberg to make him a professor of scripture. And from Rome's perspective, that was certainly a tactical blunder.
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Luther's intensive study of scripture is where he found Christ. It's where he found the answer to all of his troubles.
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In particular, the impact of Paul's letter to the Romans was enormous upon him. As he read and re -read this epistle, he contemplated this glorious theme verse at the beginning, for I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the
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Jew first and also for the Greek. For in it, in the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed.
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From faith to faith as it is written, the just shall live by faith. Luther wrote these words contemplating that passage, quote,
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I greatly longed to understand Paul's epistle to the Romans and nothing stood in the way but that one expression, the righteousness of God, because I took it to mean that righteousness whereby
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God is just and deals justly in punishing the unjust. My situation was that, although an impeccable monk,
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I stood before God as a sinner, troubled in conscience, and I had no confidence that my merit would assuasion.
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Therefore, I did not love a just and angry God, but rather hated and murmured against him.
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Excuse me. Yet I clung to the dear Paul and had a great yearning to know what he meant.
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Night and day, I pondered until I saw the connection between the righteousness of God and the statement, the just shall live by his faith.
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Then I grasped that the righteousness of God is that righteousness by which through grace and sheer mercy,
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God justifies us through faith. Thereupon, I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise.
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The whole of Scripture took on a new meaning and whereas before the righteousness of God filled me with hate, now it came to be inexpressibly sweet and greater love.
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The passage of Paul, this passage of Paul became to me a gate of heaven. And then Luther wrote this wonderful sentence.
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If you have a true faith that Christ is your Savior, then at once you have a gracious God for faith leads you in and opens up God's heart and will that you should see pure grace and overflowing love.
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This it is to behold God in faith that you should look upon his fatherly friendly heart in which there is neither anger nor ungraciousness.
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He who sees God as angry does not see him rightly, but looks only on a curtain as if a dark cloud had been drawn across his face."
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Solus Christus is Latin for Christ alone. Throughout Luther's days as a
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Roman Catholic monk, he was given many things other than Christ to try to bring him some sense of comfort in his sin -broken conscience.
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Luther took a pilgrimage to Rome and viewed relics. Luther went to mass. Luther went to confession.
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Luther prayed to and knew all about the Saints and looked to them as well for peace, for hope.
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Luther understood purgatory and if you've read the 95 Theses, you know he still believed in purgatory when he wrote the 95
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Theses. Luther tried every arrow in Rome's quiver but nothing worked.
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He knew that he was still lost. He was hopeless and sad about what he knew to be true in his heart.
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He was a sinner and when he was judged by God, he would be justly and righteously condemned eternally to hell.
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But when Luther finally saw the gospel and saw Christ, all of that changed.
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Luther saw that what God demands from us in the law, he grants to us freely and apart from works by faith alone in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
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Luther shared these findings with his friend and mentor Johann Staupitz in a very memorable conversation.
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After watching Luther express his dismay at the sight of a large collection of relics,
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Staupitz looked at Luther and said, if you leave the Christian Church to live only by faith without the crutches of visible relics and prayers and all these other things that you dismiss, what will you put in their place?
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And Luther answered, Christ. A man only needs Christ, not
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Mary, not Saints, not pilgrimages, not even good works, not relics, not masses, not priestly confession, not purgatory, not the
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Pope, not fastings, only Christ, Solus Christus. You see, Luther had spent years and years looking at all the other things out there.
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Looking to pilgrimages, looking to his works, looking to fastings, confession. He looked to Mary, he looked to Saints.
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None of that stuff worked. The only thing that will work for the conscience that is terrorized by the Spirit of God is the true gospel.
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It is Christ alone. The only redeemer of God's elect is the Lord Jesus Christ. This confession of Luther's was the lifeblood of his sin -weary soul.
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But like the Roman Christians who received Paul's letter so long before this, believing the one true gospel and rejecting all of its competitors would cost
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Luther dearly. Now let's look at our passage, look at Romans 1, 16 and 17, and let's unpack what this says here.
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Romans 1, 16, great verse, great theme verse for Romans, for I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the
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Jew first and also for the Greek. If we believe that it is becoming more and more difficult to become, to be a
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Christian in our country today, what we experience really can't be compared just yet to what
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Christians were experiencing when Paul wrote this letter to the church at Rome. The Lord Jesus said that his disciples were the light of the world.
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I'm sure many of you who are students of church history understand that the first Roman Emperor to persecute Christians officially was that Emperor Nero, who unleashed all of his power and his hatred against the truth and righteousness, unleashed all of it on Christ's followers.
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He would have their bodies dipped in tar and then set on fire to light his garden parties and then he would go around the garden on chariots with his friends and mockingly point to the
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Christians and say, behold the lights of the world. Yes, it is becoming less and less popular to be a
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Christian today in America, but most of us today would probably fall into the category described in Hebrews 12 for you have not yet resisted the bloodshed striving against sin.
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Some of us may have to do that, and if we do, then we'll have a better resurrection. Don't worry about it. Whatever our situation or political climate, we are to be unashamed of the gospel and unashamed of Christ and of God's word and of God's righteousness,
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God's law. It is very easy for me to say that, standing in a pulpit in a room with friendly and loving people who probably agree with most of everything
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I'm saying anyway, but think of Paul standing in front of mobs who wanted his blood, much the same way
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Luther would one day stand before the Diet of Worms where his enemies likewise wanted his blood. Think of Paul who described himself in this way, describing his missionary work in the world, 2nd
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Corinthians 11, 23, in stripes above measure, in prisons more frequently, in deaths often.
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From the Jews, five times I received 40 stripes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods.
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Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked. At night and day I had been in the deep, in journeys often, in perils of water, in perils of robbers, in perils of my own countrymen, in perils of the
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Gentiles, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren, in weariness and toil, in sleeplessness often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness.
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When we experience the God -imposed antithesis, the hatred of the enemies of Christ, which we will if we're faithful to him, for the sake of your biblical convictions and the biblical gospel,
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I want to exhort you to listen to what Paul says there in Romans 1, 16, never be ashamed of it. Martin Luther at the
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Diet of Worms was given one day to consider how he would answer their order, that he simply recant what he had written, and it's not likely that Luther slept much that night.
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A person who suffers for Christ, however, for his sake and for his gospel, for his righteousness, for his law, that person will love
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Christ all the more. That person will have an even clearer vision of the heavenly glory that awaits them.
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Indeed our Lord promised us this, blessed are you when they revile and persecute you and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for my sake.
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Rejoice and be exceedingly glad for great is your reward in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
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Knowing how much mockery is heaped upon those who love and talk about Jesus in our culture might tempt some of us to be more quiet about him, but I want to encourage you never to let that happen.
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The only way that people can revile and persecute us and say all kinds of evil against us falsely for Jesus's sake is if they do know that we are his disciples.
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We must live and speak for Jesus's sake, and all of you know what I'm talking about. The world around you does not want to hear it, does not want to hear
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God's law, and does not want to hear about the exclusive claims of Christ and things like that. You will be labeled, you will be excluded, you will be reviled and have evil spoken of you falsely for the sake of Christ.
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And they can only know that we are his disciples if we love one another and if we hold to and speak about the doctrines of the
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Word of God. In other words, we as individuals must have the same commendations as the church at Rome, Ephesus, and Colossae had.
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People must hear about our faith in the Lord Jesus and our love for all the saints. Remember how Paul commended all those churches?
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Your faith is spoken of where? Throughout the whole world. Everyone in the world knows you all are the followers of Christ.
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Everyone around, there's no denying it. You guys are not secret agents. You guys are Christians and the whole world knows.
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That's the way we need to be as well. We must not be ashamed to be labeled as Christians. The book of Hebrews speaks of people who were treated terribly by the world for their faith.
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Hebrews 11 35, and others were tortured not accepting deliverance that they might obtain a better resurrection.
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Still others had trial of mockings and scourging, just of chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, were tempted, were slain with a sword.
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They wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins being destitute, afflicted, and tormented, of whom the world was not worthy.
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Luther was not quiet about what the Word of God said. He was very brave. It's easy to romanticize.
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He was a man with feet of clay and with his flaws just like anyone else, but he was very courageous in his stance for the true gospel.
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His commitment to Christ and his burden for the lost souls around him necessitated that he speak.
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Never be ashamed of Christ and never betray him and always remember that his glory and the sanctity of his name that you wear are more important than your own life.
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Please don't ever forget that. The glory of Jesus Christ, the glory of God, it is a fearful thing for me to stand up and tell the world,
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I am a Christian. I know the one God that made everything that's here. I represent him in this world.
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That is a major thing to claim that to the world. Don't ever be ashamed of it. If people know that's what you are, you be a
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Christian. You speak up when you know something's wrong. You stand for what is right.
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You tell people the gospel when those opportunities are there. Many Christian people have lost their lives rather than openly and knowingly commit even a small sin against him.
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When Luther was summoned by the Diet of Worms to give his final answer to the charges of heresy that stood against him, his answer was an answer for the ages.
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Luther was asked, I ask you Martin, answer candidly and without horns. Do you or do you not repudiate your books and the errors they contain?
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Luther answered, since then your majesty and your lordships desire a simple reply. I will answer without horns and without teeth unless I am convinced by scripture and plain reason.
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I do not accept the authority of Popes and councils for they have often contradicted each other. My conscience is captive to the word of God.
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I cannot and I will not recant anything for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe.
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God help me. Amen. Historians have pointed out that Luther ended that speech with God help me amen because his assumption was that by taking this stand upon the word of God that his life would soon be over at the hands of the
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Inquisition. Thankfully Luther had been granted a safe conduct by Charles the fifth but once Luther's safe conduct ended it was made very clear that his life was indeed forfeit.
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Luther's own Prince Frederick the Wise kidnapped Luther and hid him in a castle at Wartburg in Germany for a year and during that time
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Luther translated scripture into German and let us remember the lesson Luther taught us about the clarity of scripture and the courage to stand for the
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Savior whose gospels held forth therein. How could we ever be ashamed of the one who died for us? Why was he willing to make that stand when he knew that his life was going to be in grave danger for doing it because it was for the sake of Jesus and his truth in his gospel.
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How could he be ashamed? How could he recant and betray? It's just like Polycarp had said 1 ,500 years or 1 ,400 years before that.
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Eighty and six years I have served him. How could I betray my King who saved me when they said curse
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Christ and you won't die? No way will I do that was Polycarp's answer. No way. How could we be ashamed of identifying ourselves with our
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King the one who bled and died and suffered in our behalf to bring us forgiveness and justification and our place in heaven as children of the living and true
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God? Paul's reasoning here in verse 16 is for being unashamed is quite simple.
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Why am I not ashamed of the gospel? It's the power of God for salvation for everyone who believes. It's the very thing that defines my life in this world and the next.
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It's what my whole hope is based upon. How can I be ashamed of the most important thing to me in this world?
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The most important thing in the universe and yet there's still a temptation to be ashamed.
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There's still a temptation to be quiet about who Jesus is. If our greatest need is salvation from sin, how can we be ashamed of the one who saved us?
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The one whose righteousness covers us on the day of judgment by which we will enter eternal heavenly glory?
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How can we be ashamed of that great gospel message by which we're saved? How can we be ashamed of the only hope for mankind?
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Let us always remember how strong the temptation is to be ashamed of Christ. Jesus gave us this important warning in Mark 8 38.
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For whoever is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him the
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Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels. And let us never forget also that one of our
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Lord's closest disciples, Peter, when he felt threatened and in danger, denied with great passion, with cursing and swearing three times that he even knew who
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Jesus was. I want to speak directly to everyone here who professes to be a Christian and especially younger people present here.
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You need to decide now, ahead of time, that you will never be ashamed of being a Christian. No matter what setting you find yourself in, whether it's a university classroom or unbelievers that you work with who enjoy talking about immoral things and make dirty jokes, you need to decide today,
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I am not going to be ashamed of what's right. I'm not going to be ashamed of who or what I am. If that gets me blackballed, if that gets me excluded, if that means that people don't think
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I'm any fun, then so be it. Many of your peers and even professing conservative churches today will end up being traitors, cowards about being outspoken disciples of Christ.
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The need to be cool, the need to fit in is great when you're younger. Barring a revival from on high, the price of being a believer in Jesus seems like, it's almost like it's in the air, it's about to take a big step forward in this country.
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And I want to ask, how precious is the gospel to you? How much does it occupy your thoughts? When you look at the people around you, do you look at them from an eternal perspective?
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Do you wonder, I wonder if they know Christ? I wonder if they're going to be forgiven on the day of judgment, if they will be justified. Do you pray?
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Do you read the Bible on your own? If Christian churches become banned in this country and your family wants to meet in secret gatherings in people's basements or out in the woods or in a cave somewhere for worship, will you children want to go with them?
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What if the danger was really great? What if you heard that local authorities put another pastor in jail because he condemned other religions, condemned homosexual behavior, abortion or drug use from his pulpit?
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Would you be willing to be in danger to worship Christ? We need to answer these questions now while we still have freedom before we are forced to answer them under duress.
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Remember Peter, so confident he would never deny Christ and then did so three times the same day, he said he'd never do it.
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Even if he had to die, he said he'd never do it. Remember the martyr Thomas Cranmer, a man who signed a confession denying the true gospel out of fear for his life and later on he repented of doing that.
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And when he was sentenced to be burned at the stake, he walked up to the fire and stuck his right hand into the flames.
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The hand that had signed that confession denying the true gospel into the fire. Fox's Book of Martyrs records that incident with these words quote, then it was that stretching out his right hand, he held it without shrinking in the fire until it was burnt to a cinder.
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Even before his body was injured, frequently exclaiming this unworthy right hand.
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His body did abide the burning with such steadfastness that he seemed to have no more than the stake to which he was bound.
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His eyes were lifted to heaven and he repeated this unworthy right hand as long as his voice suffered him.
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And using often the words of Stephen, Lord Jesus received my spirit in the greatness of the flame he gave up the ghost end quote.
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Make up your mind now, I will not ever be ashamed of Jesus. I will not ever be ashamed of the one true gospel.
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Is there forgiveness even for that sin of being ashamed? Of course there is. But let us seek to live in a manner worthy of the calling with which we have been called.
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Never be ashamed of our Lord. To the covenant children who are here, God has been so good to you.
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If you have parents who loved you enough to obey God's Word, to teach you the Christian faith and to read the
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Bible to you and to call you to repent and believe in Christ, God has been so good to you. You owe him so much for being so good to you.
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Make up your mind now, this is the God I will serve all my days and I will never be ashamed of him.
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I don't care if the whole world and everyone else around me my age thinks I am a total loser. I don't care.
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I will stand with him. I will be reviled for his sake. You may not be able to see it yet, but if you live for a while and are able to look back upon your life and see it for what it is, you must know that God has favored you and given you so very much to be thankful for.
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If you have Christian parents that read you the Bible and gave you a Bible and took you to church, that is one of the greatest blessings a human being can have.
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It's greater than money, it's greater than anything else you could ever get. Parents that are concerned about your salvation, every child in here at some point in your life, and I hope you live long enough to realize this, is going to get on their face on the ground and praise the
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God of heaven and earth that you had loving Christian parents. I still think about it, how much my parents loved me, how much they prayed for me, how much they made sure
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I had a Bible even though I never read it. I was a fool, but they wouldn't be denied.
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Their prayers and their tears for myself, my sister, it's one of the greatest blessings God ever gave me in this world.
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It's one thing for individual Christians to be ashamed of the gospel or to deny or compromise the gospel, but what about the professing
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Christian church itself? What about entire denominations that begin to move away from the truth? What about local churches that do it?
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In his commentary on Romans, R .C. Sproul points out in the last sermon that Martin Luther preached just two days before his death, he expressed great concern about the clarity of the gospel.
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Luther said that anytime the gospel, the true gospel, the pure gospel of justification by faith alone that were justified on the grounds of Christ's righteousness and his cross alone without our works, when that's preached with passion, conviction, and clarity, it will result in conflict.
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We don't like conflict, do we? We prefer peace and comfort. Because of this, the church, every generation of the church will have a tendency to water down, de -emphasize, or hide the gospel, allowing it to be eclipsed by darkness just like it was before the
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Great Reformation took place. When Luther died, that tendency to water it down was already starting to happen.
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The church growth marketing gurus of our day teach us that we must itch people where they scratch if we want our churches to grow.
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I remember reading an article, it was in Christianity Today, a megachurch pastor was being interviewed. What about the great doctrines of the
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Bible? Don't you ever teach on justification and sanctification and things like that? And his answer was, people have no interest in stuff like that anymore.
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That's why we don't teach on it. It's our duty before God to do everything short of using the barrel of a gun to make people realize they must be interested in things like that.
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What do you think? You think the non -believers around you, if you go and survey them with a clipboard, what would you like to hear about?
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I want to hear about justification and sanctification and adoption, the sovereignty of God, His decrees. Of course not.
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What are you going to hear if you go with a clipboard and knock on people's doors? I would like the sermon this coming
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Sunday to be about me. And many people say, okay, fine, we'll do that. Everything will be about you.
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How to have a happier this, a better this, how to do this in your life, how to live a stress -free life, how to balance your checkbook, how to do this and that.
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That's what the church growth marketing gurus are telling us to do. And we need to try to show people how useful the
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Bible is to daily life. It's sad to consider that much of the conservative church in America today has fallen headlong into all these betrayals of the gospel.
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Gone is the holiness of God. Gone is the wrath of God. Gone is the doctrine of sin.
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Gone is the blood of the cross. Gone is the doctrine of hell. Gone is
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God's clear condemnation of both homosexual desires and behavior.
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There's a PCA church in Nashville, handed his pulpit to a young man whose same -sex attracted and he stood there in front of a church and it was on YouTube.
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Having homosexual desires is not a sin, just acting on the myths. And immediately I thought Colossians 3, 5 says evil desires are sin.
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You can't say that well as long as you don't act on this or that, that is as ridiculous as saying yeah you can commit adultery all day long in your heart with other women, just don't act on it.
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What did Jesus say about that? The desire for things like that is a sin. The desire for anything contrary to God's law is a sin.
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But even that's being removed, not from from evangelical or broadly Armenian church, it's from Reformed churches.
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God's condemnation of the murder of unborn children through abortion. We don't want to upset people in the congregation by talking about things like that.
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God's condemnation of the rise of tyrannical big government. Gone are the exclusive claims of the gospel.
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Gone is a call to people to change, to repent of their lifestyles and to surrender to the Lordship of Christ.
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Gone is the doctrine of God as the judge and the great doctrine of the justification of sinners by faith alone through the imputation of Christ's righteousness to their account and the imputation of their sin to Christ on the cross.
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R .C. Sproul said this, quote, God's priority is that people understand his holy character. People may not feel their need of that, but there is nothing that they need more than to have their minds exploded in their understanding of who
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God is. God forbid that we listen to Madison Avenue and to those who tell us to become hucksters, which is what
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Luther was complaining about at the end of his life, end quote. What people want today, what the non -believers around us want is power.
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They want power to manipulate and control life. They want an emotional high or religious experience.
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But the only place in which we find the power of God is the gospel of Christ.
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Romans 1 16, I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ for it is the power of God and the wisdom of God are manifested to the world in the bloody body of Christ on the cross as the substitute for sinners.
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It is not in the articulate speech of the preacher. It is not in his jokes or his disarming personality.
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It is not in his ability to get people whipped up into an emotional fervor. God has chosen the foolishness of preaching and the foolishness of the cross to save those who believe.
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And thus when the church is faithful to God's gospel, all of the glory will go to Christ alone for every good fruit that happens from the salvation of souls to the rescuing of marriages, to the deliverance from personal sin, to the sanctification of believers.
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It is solus Christus, Christ alone. That's all we have. If people are saved, it's not because we used funny movie clips shown on plasma screen
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TVs. If people are saved, it's not because the preacher walked around on the stage with an earpiece and keeping people in stitches telling funny stories and anecdotes with a parrot on his shoulder.
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If people are saved, it was not because everyone's eyes were filled with tears because of an emotional story. The glory for the salvation of sinners and the sanctification of believers always and only goes to God because only he can bring these things to pass.
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And he brings them to pass only through what Romans 116 calls the power of God, the gospel of Christ.
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It is the power of God and salvation to everyone who believes. Martin Luther understood this perhaps better than anyone ever has in church history.
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The reason this was so important to him was he'd already tried everything other than Christ. Why was he such a stickler on Christ alone?
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You can almost hear him just slamming. I read in a biography of Luther that his pulpit had a dent in it from just, he was a hammer, hammer guy.
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When he wanted to make a point, he would hammer it with his fist. Why was that such a big deal to him? He'd already tried everything else that the
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Roman Catholic Church of his day had given him to try. He saw plainly there was no saving power in any of it.
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Luther had been to Rome and looked at religious relics. He had seen a tooth from one of the apostles, pieces of straw from Jesus's manger, a vial of breast milk from the
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Virgin Mary, nails from the cross of Christ. Luther once jokingly said there were enough nails from the cross in Europe to shoe every horse in Saxony.
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Wood from Noah's Ark. He also said there was enough wood from the cross to rebuild
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Noah's Ark. And even saw pieces of Jesus's diapers. Yeah, you should read
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Calvin's inventory of relics. It's humorous if it wasn't so sad. What Luther saw, there's no power in any of this stuff.
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And all the while there's Christ. All the while there is in his word. The gospel is all we have, folks.
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It is our offensive weapon. It's what breaks through the strongholds. It's what disarms and plunders the strongman's house.
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And if we don't have it, if we're not protecting it and proclaiming it, then we're left without a weapon with which to assault the gates of hell.
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What looks like power to men. Power sermons, power laser light shows, power music, power illustrations, power jokes, power this, power that.
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If it's not the gospel of Christ, there is no saving or life -changing power in it at all. It's an illusion.
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Oh, sure, it may work to grow a crystal cathedral or a remodeled warehouse filled with people, but God is not glorified by thousands of unbelievers pretending to worship him.
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The power of God is the gospel. I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation to everyone who believes, for the
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Jew first and also for the Greek. Every generation will be tempted, as Luther said, to shy away from the power of God because it is in the display of the power of God in the gospel, listen, that the antithesis with evil, falsehood, and unbelief comes out into the sharpest relief.
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The world is content if we as the church talk about wisdom in general.
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They're content if we talk about being good in general. If we talk about God in general, spirituality in general, talk about being nice in general, be having good marriages in general.
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But when the cross of Christ is lifted high as the only way that men can be saved and enter heaven, the teeth of men begin to gnash at us.
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And this is why Luther looked at persecution as a mark of the true church.
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If we're not being persecuted by someone, it can only mean one thing. We're not preaching the gospel anymore.
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Jesus said in Luke 6 26, I hope everyone here will weigh this carefully. Jesus said, woe to you when all men speak well of you.
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Why would he say that? Don't we want people to think well of us and speak well of us? He says, woe is you.
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He pronounces a curse. Woe is you when everybody speaks well of you.
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For so did their fathers to the false prophets. Yes, it may cost you a lot to be unashamed of the gospel, but let
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Jesus's words echo in your ears. Woe is you when all men speak well of you.
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Look at verse 17 of Romans 1. For in it, in the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith.
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As it is written, the just shall live by faith. In the gospel, the gift righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith.
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There is every reason contextually to take the phrase, the righteousness of God, to refer to the righteousness that is imputed to the account of the believing sinner, such that they then have a righteous standing before God.
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In fact, any other interpretation of this phrase in this verse causes the rest of the book of Romans to make little sense at all.
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So the phrase, the righteousness of God, which is revealed in the gospel, is that righteousness by which sinners are justified before God.
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Paul mentions it in Romans 5, 17, where he says that just as by one man sin entered the world, much more those who receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life to the one
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Jesus Christ. The righteousness of God is revealed in the gospel, and we're said to be justified by the gift of righteousness.
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This is the righteousness that was achieved by Christ that is put upon us and covers us like a garment when we're justified before God.
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It does not come from the works of men, but from the righteousness of God. Paul then quotes
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Habakkuk 2, 4, the just shall live by faith. And when that passage says shall live, this is not speaking of the daily
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Christian life. It's speaking of reconciled life with God as opposed to being dead in our sins.
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The just live, are declared righteous and reconciled to God, have life, spiritual life by faith alone.
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Faith is merely the instrumental cause. It is the link between us and our Savior. We trust and believe in Jesus and we are united to Christ through that link of saving faith, that instrument of saving faith.
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Romans 1, 17 was one of Luther's favorite texts. As he said, he felt himself to be reborn. Once he had read
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Romans over and over again and he realized what Paul is talking about, in it, in the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith as it is written, the just shall live by faith.
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The person who is justified lives by faith, not by his works. You trust in Christ, you trust in that gift of righteousness, you are declared righteous on that basis.
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As Paul says, listen to it again in Romans 5, 17. For if by the one man's offense death reign through the one, much more those who receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the one,
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Jesus Christ. How do the just live by faith? Through the gift of righteousness, Paul says.
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Why did that bring so much relief to Luther? Because the man lived in terror of the holiness of God.
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He had no sense of peace with God until he discovered this. The Holy Spirit had convicted him of his sins and the only remedy to the conscience, which is supernaturally convicted of its sin and misery by the
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Holy Spirit, is the gift of righteousness. The righteousness of God that is revealed in the gospel and is given to us by faith alone.
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Once that poor depressed German monk saw the gospel for what it truly was, a free gift given to repentant sinners by faith alone, he would he refused to let go of it.
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Even if it was going to cost him his life, he was not going to let go of it. If you do not yet fully understand why we need this gift of righteousness that Paul speaks of in Romans 5, 17 and all the way through the
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Bible, if you don't understand why we need that gift of righteousness from God in order to be justified and go to heaven,
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I pray that you will today and that right now will be the moment. So many people I've preached Christ to over the years have told me that they they don't really need
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Jesus. I'm doing fine without him and I can't help but want to shout to them there's nothing in the universe that you need more desperately than Jesus and I wish that God would open your eyes to see it.
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For it is only Jesus Christ crosswork that can forgive you of your sins and it is only Jesus Christ righteousness that can justify you before your certain appointment at the judgment of Almighty God.
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The only people who will go to heaven are those whose reliance is upon Christ alone, not
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Christ plus works, not Christ plus faithfulness, Christ plus Mary, plus good intentions, plus purgatory, plus church attendance, plus sacraments.
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Christ plus anything is Solus Christus. We trust in Christ alone because he is the only
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Redeemer. He is the only Redeemer of God's elect. To come to God on God's terms is to trust in Christ alone for your salvation.
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As Peter preached long ago, I hope it echoes throughout the ages and long after all of us are dead, Peter said to that crowd in Acts 4, nor is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.
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Let's pray. Our God in heaven we thank you for the gospel that 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. And we thank you that we have received the abundance of grace and the gift of righteousness, the imputed, legally credited gift of Jesus's righteousness to our account so that we stand dressed in the robe of his salvation, the robe of his perfect obedience, and his crosswork has made it so that Romans 4a will be true.
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Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not charge sin, will not impute sin. Our sins will not be charged against us, and we are blessed because Christ, our curse bearer, took the punishment for them away.
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Lord, help us to hold on to that pure gospel message all the days of our life, and we pray that our children would embrace it, and that you would bring revival on an unprecedented scale, that millions would come to know you, and that this whole world would be transformed by the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea.
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We pray in Christ's name, amen. This is
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Pastor Patrick Hines of Bridwell Heights Presbyterian Church, located at 108 Bridwell Heights Road in Kingsport, Tennessee, and you've been listening to the
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Protestant Witness podcast. Please feel free to join us for worship any Sunday morning at 11 a .m. sharp, where we open the word of God together, sing his praises, and rejoice in the gospel of our risen
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Lord. You can find us on the web at www .bridwellheightspca .org,
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and may the Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you, the