Seven Things the Reformation Gave Us

Hello, and welcome to The Dividing Line for today. My name is Pastor John Sampson from King's Church in Peoria, Arizona.

Delighted to be here while Dr. White is in New Zealand at the moment, teaching in conferences and churches.

Please be praying for him and follow the blog to find out exactly when and where he is ministering and be praying.

So, delighted to be with you. What I would love to talk about in our hour together is the

Reformation, what has it brought to us. And I want to talk about seven things that the

Reformation has brought to us, recognizing the Reformers sought reform rather than revolution, which would represent the overthrow of authority.

Essentially they sought to reform the church back to biblical

Christianity, to embrace the true biblical gospel. And they had the hope at the beginning at least, that Rome would bow its knee to the scripture in the area of authority and in the area of the gospel that of course did not happen.

That's why there was such a split, the greatest church split in church history.

But it also represents the greatest move of God outside of the book of Acts.

I really believe that's the case and entire countries were swept by the gospel during that time.

So, I'd like to talk about the ramifications, what is ours as Westerners because of the

Reformation and the benefits emerged not simply for those who embrace the gospel, but society has benefited too.

I'd like to talk about that and then move on to some of the benefits of the church. But in the area of civil government, we have free speech and a lot of it can extend back to the fact that people like Martin Luther and others stood for the right to express a view other than that which was the norm.

Under penalty of death, they did so. Martin Luther, as I say, was just simply one of them.

At the time, the church and the state were the power at large.

To come against the church was to come against the state in many, many ways. That's why an act against the church or to defy the church could be seen as a treasonous act.

Not really easy to understand that in our day because there is such a separation between the church and the state, but that wasn't the case in that time.

Though they would have different rulers, a ruler in the state and a ruler in the church, certainly they were very much in unity to want to come against one was to come against the other.

So free speech, Luther at the Diet of Worms in 1521 made that historic speech,

Unless I am convinced by sacred scripture or by evident reason, I will not and I cannot recant, for my conscience is held captive by the word of God.

To act against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand. I can do no other.

God help me. That was certainly a key in the Reformation, the appeal to scripture rather than any man -made authority, and the right to speak.

I think his namesake, Martin Luther King, stood on the principles established by Martin Luther in the rights of all citizens for freedom of speech.

I think our civil laws in many Western countries can be traced back to the reformers and especially a man called

John Calvin. I remember reading of a particular historian who made the case, you might not agree with him, but he made the case that John Calvin could be listed as at least a, if not the, but certainly a founding father of America.

His influence was massive, not simply because he systematized the doctrines of the Reformation in his institutes, but he was instrumental in the study notes that were provided in the

Geneva Bible, 1560. That in fact, the

Geneva Bible, was the Bible that came over from Europe on the Mayflower.

It was the Puritans who were greatly influenced by John Calvin who came to the shores of America.

As they say, the rest is history. Many of the laws we live by in our land, certainly in Europe as well, can be traced back to the influence of this man,

John Calvin. And so whether or not you are a Calvinist or embrace the gospel, certainly as a citizen, we have much to be thankful for in the lives of Luther and Calvin.

I think that is actually lost by many people in our day. There's not a great knowledge of history, especially of church history, and many people, the only thing they ever hear about Martin Luther are negative things.

Things that he said or doctrines that he espoused, and the same is true of John Calvin. And they're not seeing that in the big picture, these men were champions in the area of even secular society, giving us a great moral grounding for the laws of our land.

And so there should be some respect for these men, even if people have hostility towards the doctrines they taught in the realm of church doctrine and biblical doctrine.

Just on the level of influence, there should be a pause before we attack such men, understanding their place in history.

Problem is, for most people, history began in their lifetime. Church history goes back as far as Billy Graham, if you're lucky, and maybe

Dale Moody, but before that, all history is lost. We're the new generation, it's

Jesus and me with my Bible, and such is the shallowness of modern day Christianity by and large.

There are huge exceptions to that, but many of the people I run into have very little knowledge of this, and it's important to understand that even on a civil government plane, we owe a debt to these men.

Let's talk about the church though, and it's the reformation in the church that is the historic thing we look back to.

In 1517, Martin Luther is the one who penned the Ninety -Five

Theses in Latin, the language of the scholar, and was hoping for a debate amongst the scholars, and it was not an act of violence to nail the thesis to the church door at Wittenberg in Germany.

It's basically the bulletin board of the town, and he was hoping that the debate would take place whereby the scholars, the people of influence in the church would look to the scriptures on the matters he was raising, 95 of them in his

Ninety -Five Theses. That didn't happen. What happened was the students of Luther who were schooled in Latin quickly translated those words into the vernacular of the

German, and because of God's providence, I believe, the Gutenberg printing press was already invented and ready to circulate these

Ninety -Five Theses in German, and that's exactly what happened. Within 10 days, within two weeks, the

Ninety -Five Theses in German was found in every little town and hamlet of Saxony and modern -day

Germany, and the result was that really Luther had lit the match, and the

Reformation had been sparked, and all of Germany and beyond were then going to be influenced by this

Reformation. There were political reasons, too. Much of Germany was incensed that the money that they were making was being sent over the hills, so to speak, to Rome, and so even on a political level,

Germany was ripe for some kind of reform, and whether everyone involved or not were spiritually sensitive to God is a matter of debate.

In fact, I don't think it's too much of a matter of debate. Not everybody involved in the Reformation were right with God or had the right kind of motives, that's for sure, but God uses means, and certainly

I think that's one of the reasons why Martin Luther's reform had such wide impact rather than those who had gone before.

It was Luther who we look back to and say that tacking of the Ninety -Five

Theses on the door at Wittenberg, the church door, really was the sparking point,

October 31st, 1517. What has happened in the church?

Well, architecture is where I want to start. It's an unusual place, but in Protestant churches, you'll notice that the

Lord's Table, as it's called, where we celebrate the Lord's Supper, the table itself is not always center stage, but it is in the

Roman Catholic cathedrals and churches, and there's a very theological reason for that.

Sometimes in our day, you'll see a pulpit, and then the Lord's Table is just before the pulpit as the congregation looks towards the pulpit, they can see the table, and they can see the pulpit, and it can be center stage, but oftentimes it's not, and that's because of the theology of Roman Catholicism over and against the

Protestant. The Protestant would say the central act of worship in the church and its service is the proclamation of the

Word of God. It's here the Word of the Lord. For the

Roman Catholic community, the Mass is center stage. It is the be -all and end -all.

It's where every road is leading in the service. In fact, they want people to honor the host, as they would call it, as he is present on the altar, and they want everyone to be enraptured by that.

The bowing down towards the host is certainly something that happens. Even in the area of architecture, there's a huge difference between walking into a

Protestant cathedral in Europe and a Roman Catholic one. I've been to Cologne Cathedral, very different from what you'd find in Edinburgh, Scotland, the

Protestant one there. Center stage in the Roman Catholic church and cathedral is the table, and center stage in the

Protestant churches and cathedrals is the Word of God in its pulpit environment.

Oftentimes, the Word of God was chained to the pulpit. It's very much the case that most

Christians in history have never had one of these, never had a full

Bible. The only time they'd have access to it was when they came to church.

It's interesting that Paul, writing to Timothy, told Timothy, give yourself to the public reading of Scripture.

That's because most of the Christians, first of all, it's a good thing to do, it's a right thing to do, it's a holy thing to do, but most of the

Christians didn't have the book of Luke, the book of Galatians, or the book of Jeremiah at home.

The only time they'd hear it read would be in a church service. I believe that's the most important part of our service, and that's why the pulpit is center stage in the

Protestant environment. Just a quick illustration, something that was very, very grieving to me, was a church here in the

Valley, it'll be nameless to protect the guilty. I went along on a Saturday night, seeing that my church service, the service

I was serving at was on a Sunday, I had the evening free, and I just wanted to take a look at what was a mega church, still is a mega church, and I walked around the grounds, was just amazed by, certainly the beauty of the grounds, but the colossal size of the buildings, plural.

It looked like an aircraft hangar, and that was just for the five to eight year olds, for them to meet in.

Same for the nine to 12 year olds, and on and on we could go, and parents would drop their kids off, and there'd be fun entertainment, and then a

Bible lesson, I assume. I went into the church service, and was just a little perturbed when

I saw that I was the only one carrying in a Bible, I think the rest were just looking to see the verses that might be read up on a screen, or perhaps they had it on a phone,

I need to remember the fact that a lot of people bring their Bibles in on their phones, and that's an adjustment I've needed to make, but I did notice the fact that I was the only one walking in with a

Bible, the only one amongst thousands, and in terms of what

I saw, it was an amazing show, the music was upbeat, couldn't fault it in terms of the theology that was expressed, although there was little of it, but it seemed a little shallow for my taste,

I prefer meat in the hymns, that we sing truth, and yet I didn't want to be critical or hypercritical, but I was really interested in what the preacher would do with the

Word of God. That to me is the test of a church, that to me is, you might have a great statement of faith that says,

I affirm, sola scriptura, or I believe the Bible is the Word of God, and the sole infallible rule of faith for the church, that might all be true on paper or online on an internet statement of faith, but I want to see how the

Scripture is handled. I was a little concerned that I didn't see a pulpit, I saw a chair and a little table, like a coffee table, and eventually after the music had ended and there was a few announcements, the preacher came out, and he immediately pointed people to the screen behind him, which was huge, like a megaplex,

I don't know how many feet of screen it was to allow thousands to be watching, but it was huge, and it was obvious that for the five or seven minutes of this presentation, a lot of work was involved in that video.

He outlined the fact that he was going to go to talk about a parable of Jesus and wanted us to watch this five to seven minute video, very professional.

It looked like it had been done by the greatest of filmmakers, a lot of effort, and it was interesting.

Then he started talking about his life as the video had finished, and then he started talking about one or two other things, and quotes from various different people, and after about 20 minutes he said, now

Jesus had something to say about this, and immediately my ears pricked up,

I thought, yeah, we're actually going to get to the Scripture now, wonderful. This is where it counts.

He then did this, he looked at his watch, and recognizing time was a factor, he said, now, we're running short of time, so let me just summarize what

Jesus said, and my heart sank. I thought, of all the millions and millions of dollars that has gone into this facility, and especially for the church arena,

I think you could rightly call it that, my heart sank that we weren't going to hear the words of Jesus, we're going to hear a pastor summarize the words of Jesus.

My heart sank and it still sinks today. That is not a biblical church, if that's what's happening regularly.

I then attended a wedding a few weeks later at the same church, and the underpastor, a different pastor from the one who was upstage present when

I was there, did the exact same thing. In a marriage ceremony, he says, now

Jesus has a lot to say about marriage, let me summarize it. No, no, no, that's not the time to summarize.

Let's hear what Jesus said, let's hear what Paul says, let's hear the word of the Lord. To me, the art of the sermon is to have the

Bible read, interpreted correctly, and applied to the people, and that's it.

There's no show. If people don't like that, I'm sorry, but the sheep will hear his voice.

The sheep will love the words of Jesus, but rather than saying we're doing this next week and giving that away next week, and this entertainment, and that is happening next week, and we've got this guest speaking, we've got that thing happening, and this event, the sheep will love it when next week,

I know we're in verse 7 this week, I believe we'll be in verse 8 and 9 next week, do come along.

It's a totally different mindset. We get our theology from the Scripture because our thinking should be based on it, because it is the word of God, and it is the most important part of our service.

In contrast, it was Rome that was bringing a very different kind of message.

Trust us, the message was in Latin. If there was anything said to the people, it was in the language of the scholar, not the language of the people.

There was no hymn singing. Do you realize hymn singing came out of the Reformation? When the people came to the church and they, instead of getting bread, were given stones, the bread of the gospel, they were not receiving that.

They were hearing more of tradition, and ceremony, and pomp, but they were not hearing the gospel.

And there's a huge difference because of the way Rome sees the Mass and Protestants as the

Lord's Supper. John Calvin summed it up like this. The Lord has given us a table at which to feast, not an altar on which a victim is to be offered.

He has not consecrated priests to make sacrifice, but servants to distribute the sacred feast.

That's it. That's it in a nutshell. We're not like the Roman Catholic priest turning the back on the audience, the congregation, and offering a sacrifice of the

Lord Jesus Christ up to God. Christ has already been sacrificed once and for all, as Hebrews 10 makes so clear.

And we're in celebration of what Christ has achieved and feeding on Christ even in the elements.

So three things so far we've talked about. Free speech, civil laws. Church architecture is greatly influenced by the

Reformation, and that either excites you or it doesn't. I remember telling one person that I was entering

Christian ministry and they thought I had a fascination with church buildings because of that.

Oh, you're going into the ministry? You must love church buildings. Actually, no, but everywhere they went on vacation and holiday, they would send me pictures of different cathedrals they'd seen and had really no interest, but I tried to be polite.

Fourthly, the Reformation has given us pastors instead of priests, and it relates to what we've already talked about.

The priest is someone who offers a sacrifice. Pastor, a shepherd on the other hand, feeds

God's people, God's word, and serves a meal, the Lord's Supper, in celebration of that one sacrifice already made.

The sacrifice of Christ, according to the book of Hebrews, perfects all for whom it was given.

That is not true of the Roman Catholic mass. You can go to mass thousands and thousands of times and commit a mortal sin and all that you have supposedly received beforehand is to no avail.

You are damned unless a remedy is made. Not so of the biblical sacrifice of Christ.

He died for our sins and he's done it once and for all and has brought us into a perfect relationship with the

Father because of it. Much could be said about that. When I tell people

I'm a pastor, a lot of people assume that means I am a priest. No, no, no. The message of the

Scripture is probably the fifth point I want to make of seven, and that is the Reformation really stressed the priesthood of all believers.

1 Peter 2 and verse 9 is a familiar verse, and it's a verse written by Peter to speak of the church, not an elite group within the church.

Hear that. The church, the church of Jesus Christ. And in 1

Peter 2, verse 9, he's quoting from the book of Exodus, which was a word to national

Israel, and he's applying it to the people of God. And may I say all the people of God.

That's the you involved here, the Y -O -U. The you he's writing to are the elect, according to chapter 1 and verse 1 of 1

Peter. And 2 Peter tells us he's writing to them the second time.

But here in 1 Peter, it's obvious it is God's people he's writing to, not an elite group amongst them.

And 1 Peter 2, verse 9 says, But you, plural, you, are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people, plural, a people for his own possession, that you, plural, may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

Once you, plural, we're not a people. The word people is plural.

Once you were not a people, but now you, plural, are God's people.

Once you, plural, have not received mercy, but now you, plural, have received mercy.

The priesthood of all believers. Are we offering a sacrifice? Yes, just one sacrifice, the sacrifice of praise.

We're not offering the body of Jesus up to God. Jesus offered himself without blemish to God once and for all.

But we do offer a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving for the fact that he has called us with a powerful calling out of the world to serve him as a covenant community.

We are the people of God, a nation of priests before God. And that means very, very clearly that you and I can go directly to God through the

Lord Jesus Christ. 1 Peter 2 .5 says, There is one God and one mediator, one go -between, between God and man, the man

Christ Jesus. And so rather than saying, Well, I would love to talk to God, but I don't have a priest.

Yes, you do. Your priest is the Lord Jesus Christ, and he is our prophet, priest, and king.

And through him we have perfect and abundant and eternal access to God.

He is our standing before the Father. We come to the Father in Christ, in his name.

We're praying in his stead. We're saying, Because of Christ I can come, because of Christ who has mediated between us, between myself and the

Father. I can come on the basis of Christ and Christ alone. I don't need another mediator.

And it's the Protestant Reformation that has taught us that from the scriptures. If all we had on this theme was 1

Peter 2 .9, it would be enough. It really not only weakens, it destroys the arguments of a

Roman gospel so -called that says, We will distribute grace.

Thank you very much. You cannot get to God without us, without us as priests performing sacraments on your behalf.

No, through the one sacrifice of Christ, all God's people, all those who are justified by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone are received by the

Father. And we can be heard and are heard because of Christ. And that's why we pray in his name.

Our ending of prayers is in Jesus' name. In other words, because of Christ, in his name, that's how we come and because of him.

Number six and seven of the seven things I want to talk about, I really want to hone in on.

That's what the Reformation has brought us. And number six is the formal principle of the

Reformation, sola scriptura, the scriptures themselves. It's Martin Luther who translated the

Bible into German. But before him, there were other men of God who were greatly used by God.

Peter Waldo, he lived from around 1140 to 1205, preached the gospel, and he translated the

New Testament from Latin into French, and he was pronounced an enemy of the gospel.

His followers were known as the Waldensians. His name was Waldo. You can see the relationship.

Waldensians, and they were tracked down and hunted and persecuted. Later, they became known as the

Huguenots. You might have heard that name as well. But Peter Waldo is one who, again, pre -Reformation was used by God to bring something of the scriptures to the people.

It wasn't the best because he didn't go to the original Hebrew or the original Greek, but he was translating the

New Testament, which of course would have been the Greek, except he did so from the Latin. But it was better than nothing, a whole lot better than nothing.

We owe a debt to Peter Waldo. John Wycliffe, hugely used by God.

He lived from 1320 to the last day of 1384, December 31st, and he translated the

Bible into English and paid a huge price for doing so. He went from the

Latin Vulgate into English. He was at the Council of Constance, declared a heretic on the 4th of May, 1415.

That's after his death, and they banned his writings. The council declared and decreed that Wycliffe's works should be burnt and his remains exhumed, removed from the consecrated ground.

And this order confirmed by Pope Martin V was carried out in 1428, and Wycliffe's corpse was exhumed and burnt, and the ashes cast into the

River Swift, which in England flows through Lutterworth. And if you trace where the water is going, it goes from that little river out to a larger river, out to the sea, and out to the world.

Historically, it's been said that Rome, in doing what they did, just summarized in visible form the influence of Wycliffe, this little man with just simply the ability, very

God -given ability to do a lot with what he did have to work with. His influence, in terms of the

Bible, caused the Word of God to go out to the world, just like the rivers into the sea.

Of course, the big man in all this, in terms of the English -speaking world, was William Tyndale.

He lived from 1494, around then, to 1536, and he was instrumental in translating the

Bible from the original Hebrew and Greek into English. One estimate is that of the

King James Version, at least the New Testament, 83 % of the wording comes directly from Tyndale.

83%. And of the Old Testament, 76%. It was

William Tyndale who had an absolutely historic influence on the

English -speaking world, and phrases that you and I know, as in the beginning,

God, Lazarus come forth, Jesus wept, many of the sayings that are so endearing to us, the flow of language so easy to remember.

That's why there's a beauty and flow about the King James Version. A lot of it was found through the writing of Tyndale, word for word.

He was burnt at the stake, and the reason for that, and people say, well, why would

Rome not want the Bible out? Well, they weren't thinking as we were, as Protestants, well, the

Scriptures disagree with Rome, so we don't want the Scriptures out. It wasn't like that.

It was simply the case that they didn't want the commoner to be led astray by being exposed to the

Bible without a priest. They wanted Rome's interpretation on the Bible, and they thought that the

Bible and Rome were in agreement. Such was not the case, but that's where they're coming from, and so when they talk about the authority of the church, they don't think there's too much of a discrepancy between that and the

Bible, except when you read the Bible, there's a very different message. It was said to people like Luther, if you translate the

Bible into the language of the people, you'll open a floodgate of iniquity. There will be splits and schisms, and I think

Luther understood that. He knew that there was a risk of when people have access to the Bible that people wrongly interpret the

Bible. Now, God never gives us the right to wrongly interpret the

Bible, but Luther's thinking was this, and I agree with him. At least the

Gospel could be proclaimed and understood if the Bible was in the hands of the people, and while many would distort it and distort the message of the

Bible, didn't cause Luther the anxiety that it would cause others because he would say, but at least it allows the people to rightly interpret the

Bible. People were doing the same with Paul's writings. Peter wrote of that. He says many twist the unstable, twist

Paul's writings as they do the rest of the Scripture. But for Luther, and I think for us, we would say, better the

Scripture is out there so that it can be rightly interpreted, and we can challenge Rome, the

Pope, and anyone else. The Bible says, let God be true in every, not most, every man a liar.

Every word and decree of the Pope has to be scrutinized in the light of Scripture because Scripture by its very nature is

God -breathed, and every word of man is not, has a lesser authority.

While we appreciate the great teachers of the church, never one of them individually nor all of them collectively rise to the level of infallibility contrary to the

Roman position. So the Scriptures, you wouldn't have the

Bible available to you in your known tongue outside of the Reformation. Now, you may not love the

Scriptures, but if you do, you're a huge debt to the Reformers. There's not only the blood of Jesus that has caused us to have access to God, but it's the blood of the martyrs that has caused us to have access to the

Scriptures. I've been to places in my homeland of England and through Europe where a father and a child has been burnt at the stake for simply having and possessing the

Scripture. I remember one place where a father was put to death simply because he taught his child the

Lord's Prayer. That's it. That was his crime. We have so much freedom because of the

Scripture and because people have died for the fact that they believed it was the

Scripture and wanted it in the hands of people. So there should be respect for the

Peter Walders, the Wycliffs, the Tyndales who've gone before us and others in other languages.

There's, in fact, a translation group called the Wycliff Translators in our day who are seeking to get the

Bible into the language of people groups that are unknown to us but known to them.

Such is the case, and these are heroes in my thinking. The last of these seven is, again, something that the

Reformation has given to us. With the historical note that Luther wasn't the first to propagate the

Gospel, it was the Reformation that brought the Gospel to the people in the sense of reintroducing the wonderful message of Christ to the people.

I brought with me a couple of large books. I believe there's going to be a third in this series written by Stephen Lawson.

The first of these is called Foundations of Grace, and I brought it for the simple reason

I want you to see how thick it is. There's almost 600 pages, and what

Steve Lawson does in this book is trace the doctrines of grace through the

Scriptures from Genesis to Revelation. Rather than it being a very thin book because it's only three or four verses on it somewhere in the

Bible, he's tracing these doctrines through Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, all the way through to Revelation, and that's why it's such a thick book.

But it's only on the theme of discovering the doctrines of grace in the Old and New Testament.

I'm not sure there's been a book quite like it written where that's the theme. But I just want you to see how thick it is.

The second book of three that I believe the third one is being written and will be finished, but that's

God willing, but the second one's called Pillars of Grace, and what this does is trace quotations of people in the church, the church of the

Lord Jesus, from A .D. 100 through to 1564.

Again, it's of equal size, almost 600 pages, and it's filled with quotations from church fathers through to the

Middle Ages, Augustine, of course, but many, many, many, many others.

I just want you to see how thick it is, again, showing that Jesus was building his church through the centuries.

A lot of people think the gospel was completely lost from about the first or second century to the time of Luther.

Not the case. Not the case at all. There were always those who knew Christ in the gospel.

Certainly, there's no time in church history where there was a perfect understanding amongst all God's people, and that's true in our day with all of the technology we have walking to any

Christian bookstore in our day, and it's like a minefield to find something that is sound and theologically rich and true to Scripture.

I don't know what the percentage of the books are that would be true of the books there, but it's not a high percentage.

I couldn't say 95 % of the books are harmless. There's poison in them there hills.

They're not gold, and it's a minefield. And so it is through church history, but there were definitely pockets of believers who understood the biblical gospel right from the first century, and I love the fact that a book has been written just outlining that, tracing the doctrines of grace through the centuries of the church.

The gospel is center stage in the Reformation. The formal cause of the

Reformation is the Scripture as the authority. Every man and woman, every priest and bishop and pope, for their words to be true, it has to harmonize with Scripture because Scripture is

God -breed, theonoustos. It's that kind of material. Only the

Scripture has the right to bind the conscience of men. The material principle, the thing that was talked about far and away beyond any other subject in the

Reformation was the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. As I say, before Luther, people were given stones rather than bread, but in the gospel,

God's Word was like bread for food. Man was not to live by anything else but the bread of God's Word bound in the gospel of the

Lord Jesus. Romans 117 was a key scripture for Martin Luther in understanding the gospel, that the righteousness of God spoken of there in the gospel is not the gospel of works, that if we work, work, work, we might one day attain to this righteousness of God, but it is the gift of God.

God's righteousness is given as a standing before Him to the one who believes.

For in it, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith, from first to last, as one translation puts it.

All of the mechanisms of grace operate by faith. In it, the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith, from first to last, as it is written, the just shall live by faith.

In understanding the clear words of Scripture there, Martin Luther went from an extremely troubled man to someone who understood and embraced the gospel, and as he shares in his own testimony in what he calls

The Tower, or what others have called The Tower Experience, he went through the gates of paradise because of Paul's clear words in Romans 117.

Recently, over the last few months, I've been enjoying the ministry of a man called Dr. Michael Reeves.

He's from England and has a greater accent than I do.

He lives in Oxford, and he has related how medieval

Rome viewed grace, and I think one of the things he shared is just so helpful,

I wanted to share it with you. Rome never, ever denied that grace was necessary, and as Dr.

James White says so often, the issue was then and is now not the necessity of grace, but the sufficiency of grace.

Rome always believed grace was necessary for salvation, but including with it was our cooperation, our will, our works, our merit, and in the end, you and Christ together achieve salvation.

Romans 5 .5 is a key verse, and wrongly understood would mean the difference between being damned and being right with God.

You remember what Romans 5 .1 says a few verses before, therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our

Lord Jesus Christ. That's justification, which, as Paul makes clear there, is by faith, by the means of faith, by the instrument of faith, we have justification for the

Christian who's believed in Christ. He can look back on his justification because it's something we have.

Having been is past tense. Having been justified by faith, we have peace with God.

Have peace is present tense. We have peace with God because we have been justified by faith.

But just a few verses on, it says in Romans 5 .5 that the love of God has been shed abroad in our hearts by the

Holy Spirit. And the idea here is that God pours out his love in our hearts, and we, therefore, moving and cooperating with that love, can now love others with the love of Christ, the love of God.

Now Romans 5 .5 is a tremendous verse, but it's a verse about sanctification, not a verse about justification.

But for Rome, they would see Romans 5 .5 as representative of the way to justification.

By cooperating with what God pours in, they can have a right standing with God.

God pours it in, and this thing called grace is poured into the soul.

It's infused into the soul, and we cooperate, and as God does his part and we do our part, we can one day have justification.

That's such a misreading of the text, but Romans 5 .5 is a verse about sanctification, not justification.

Verse 1 is justification, but this is talking about the Christian life. Grace, according to Michael Reeves, I think is a good way of talking about it, is a bit like a can of spiritual

Red Bull. It's divine energy poured into the soul. We find ourselves unable to cooperate or even have the will.

We're feeling lazy, not really wanting to do much on a spiritual plane. So we take a bit of Red Bull supplied by God through the priests, through the sacraments, and we can get the

Red Bull, the grace, into our soul, and it peps us up, makes us alert, and we now want to do things for God.

We now want to cooperate where we didn't want before. We wanted it now, and we have pursued it, and it enabled people to become holy and gain their salvation.

Now, as foreign as that might be to the Protestant ear,

I think in many churches, because people confuse and conflate justification and sanctification, many people in our day think that God does his part, we do our part, and then hopefully

God will save us by that process. And so there's very little in many, many churches, especially mega churches, very little talk about the cross, very little talk about the exchange made at the cross, that our sins were transferred to Christ, and that he bore the anger, the wrath of God due to us as our substitute, as the

Lamb of God who bore the wrath deserving of others.

He stood in our place, Isaiah 53, or we like sheep have gone astray. We've turned everyone to our own way.

The Lord has laid, laid on him the iniquity of us all, the transfer of our sin to Christ on the cross.

But he was wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities, the chastisement, the punishment due to us came upon him, and by his stripes we are healed, the great exchange at the cross.

So in our day there's a blurring, a real blurring, a fuzziness about the gospel.

And for Luther, as a very troubled man, he writes about the great trouble he felt until he understood the gospel.

I believe that he would have, without doubt, become a very insane man, having to live apart from society as so many have to when their mental faculties are under attack.

But that's because he was so troubled, so deeply troubled by his sin. Having been schooled in law, he realized that God was holy and just, and that was not in any way good news for Luther, for Luther was a sinner.

It's Luther's own words I'm quoting. He says, I was a good monk and kept my order so strictly that I could say that if ever a monk could get to heaven through monastic discipline, monkery,

I should have entered in. All my companions in the monastery who knew me would bear me out in this, for if it had gone on much longer,

I would have martyred myself to death, what with vigils, prayers, readings, and other works.

And yet my conscience would not give me certainty, but I always doubted and said, you didn't do that right, you weren't contrite enough, you left that out of your confession.

The more I tried to remedy an uncertain, weak, and troubled conscience with human traditions, the more daily

I found it more uncertain, weaker, and more troubled. As I'm suggesting, that really is the heart of Luther, and that really was the cry of his heart.

How do I get right with God when he is holy and I am not? He is righteous,

I realize I am not. And so the revelation to him of Romans 117 broke forth in his soul, and he was a forever changed man.

The law says do this, it's never done. Grace says believe in this, and everything is already done.

Again, that's quoting Martin Luther. What a difference. I can't keep the law, but Christ kept the law for me.

I believe in him, and God gives me his righteousness as a gift, and that is my standing before God.

Let me again make reference to this, quoting Dr. Michael Reeves.

In Reformation thought, grace was no longer seen as being like a can of spiritual

Red Bull. It was more like a marriage. In fact, when Luther first sought to explain his

Reformation discovery in detail to the world, it was the story of a wedding that framed what he said.

Now picture this. I wonder how you would explain the gospel. Luther went to the

Song of Solomon and described the relationship there of the husband with the bride.

Again, to quote Dr. Reeves, Who marries this poor, wicked harlot, redeems her from all her evil, and adorns her with all his goodness.

At the wedding, a wonderful exchange takes place whereby the king takes all the shame and debt of his bride, and the harlot receives all the wealth and royal status, or status, depending how you say it, of her bridegroom.

Hear that again. Here's the exchange. The king takes all the shame and debt of his bride, and the harlot receives all the wealth and royal status of her bridegroom.

For Jesus and the soul that is united to him by faith, it works like this. Again, to quote

Luther, Christ is full of grace, life, and salvation.

The soul is full of sins, death, and damnation. Now let faith come between them and sins, death and damnation.

In between them will come Christ, while grace, life, and salvation will be the souls, the possession of the soul.

For if Christ is a bridegroom, he must take upon himself the things which are his brides, and bestow upon her the things that are his.

If he gives her his body and very self, how shall he not give her all that is his?

And if he takes the body of the bride, how shall he not take all that is hers? Michael Reeves goes on.

In the story, the prostitute finds that she's been made a queen. That does not mean she always behaves as befits royalty, but however she behaves, her status is royal.

She is now the queen. So it is with the believer. She remains a sinner and continues to stumble and wander.

W -A -N -D -A -R, wander. But she has the righteous status of a perfect and royal bridegroom.

She is, and until death will remain, at the same time, both utterly righteous in the status before God and a sinner in her behavior.

We could quote Luther as he made use of the phrase in Latin, simul justus et peccator, at the same time, sinner and righteous.

Sinner in one sense. If you looked in my soul, you would see sin and the sin nature very readily at work.

But if you look at my standing with God, I'm covered with a royal robe of righteousness, and he is my standing, and God sees me in Christ having all of the benefits that Christ has.

And just as God would never reject his son and banish him from his presence, so he will not reject me, for I'm in him.

I'm covered by him. I'm in Christ. He's in me. My beloved is mine, and I am his.

It's a beautiful thought. Again, to quote Dr. Reeves, that means that it's simply wrongheaded for the believer to look to her behavior as an accurate yardstick of her righteousness before God.

It was Jerry Bridges who said, so many Christians renegotiate their justification by means of their sanctification.

They do that all the time. I'm not living well. I can't receive communion. When did

God ever said you did live well? When did God ever say, this week, you perfectly pleased me in word, thought, and deed?

No, every time we come to God, to the Lord's table, to even come into his presence and pray, we come because of another, an alien righteousness, something outside of us.

That's our standing with God. 2 Corinthians 5, 21, He, God, made him,

Jesus, who knew no sin, to become sin for us that we might be made, the righteousness of God in him.

Again, to quote Dr. Reeves, her behavior and her status are distinct. Now, we make a distinction between justification and sanctification, but we don't separate them.

If I was to explain the difference between a distinction and a separation,

I can distinguish between you and your head and you'd still be alive.

There's your head, there's your body. But if I separate your head and your body, you're dead, because the head and the body need to be together.

So it is. We don't separate justification and sanctification. The justified person is someone with a regenerated heart, a new heart that now wants to do the things of God.

Doesn't argue with God and say, I will not, but says, yes, Lord, at least there's a desire to obey

Christ in the soul. Now that it's been regenerated. But standing with God is based on the performance of someone else, not us.

Praise the Lord for that. He writes, the prostitute will grow more queenly as she lives with the king and feels the security of his love, but she will never become more the queen.

Just so the believer will grow more Christ -like over time, but never more righteous.

Thus, because of Christ and not because of her performance, the sinner can know a despair crushing confidence.

To quote Luther, her sins cannot now destroy her since they are laid upon Christ and swallowed up by him.

And she has that righteousness in Christ, her husband, of which she may boast of as her own and which she can confidently display alongside her sins in the face of death and hell and say, if I have sinned, yet my

Christ in whom I believe has not sinned and all his is mine and all mine is his.

Ladies and gentlemen, that's the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. For the rest of his life,

Luther took this message as good news that needs continually to be reapplied to the heart of the believer.

From his own experience, he found that we are so instinctively self -dependent that while we happily subscribe to salvation by grace, our minds are like rocks drawn down by the gravitational pull of sin away from belief in grace alone.

So he counseled his friend as follows. They try to do good works of themselves in order that they may stand before God clothed in their own virtues and merits, but this is impossible.

Among us, you were one who held to this opinion or rather error, so was I, and I'm still fighting against the error without having conquered it yet.

Therefore, my dear brother, learn Christ and him crucified. Learn to pray to him and despairing of yourself, say thou,

Lord Jesus, art my righteousness, but I am thy sin.

Thou has taken upon thyself what is mine and has given to me what is thine.

Thou has taken upon thyself what thou was not and has given to me what

I was not. Grace for the reformers was not a thing, not some spiritual red bull, some energy in the soul.

Grace is the Lord Jesus Christ in his gospel. It's him through the means of the gospel.

Christianity is Christ knowing him, being found in him, having righteousness in him.

In Roman Catholicism, grace was seen as a thing, a force, a fuel. Hail Mary, full of grace, as if she's been wired with this spiritual energy and she's got energy to give us.

But no, it's all him, all him. Grace, grace is all

Christ. To speak of grace alone through faith alone as the means by which we're justified is to speak in theological shorthand, to say it's

Christ and Christ alone who saves. He does it, not some force that he provides, but he in the gospel is the savior.

Do you live under grace alone? You should, because that's the Bible message recaptured at the time of the

Reformation. Yes, there should be change in our life. Yes, there should be more holiness. Yes, yes, yes.

But yes, there should be a starting point of the gospel, the one I believe is based on what

Christ did for me, not what I do for him. Christ on the cross said, it is finished, not half finished, now it's all over to you.

He achieved what he set out to achieve, the redemption of his people. As the angel said to Joseph, you'll call his name

Jesus, for he, he will save his people from their sins.

I hope your chains fall off, your heart goes free, and you walk and run with grace in Christ.

And it's been my joy to come to you to talk about these seven things that the Reformation has brought to us. I'd love to see you at King's Church if you're in the

Phoenix area. Pray for Dr. White as he's continuing to minister so clearly with a voice that God has given him.

May God keep him healthy and sound and give him a voice that is even more influential in our day.

Thank God for raising up leaders like this man. Thank God for Alpha and Omega Ministries, Rich Pierce behind the scenes doing so much.

Thank God for this ministry. Pray for this ministry, support this ministry. I'm John Sampson.

It's a delight, has been a delight to come to you for this hour. God bless you as you walk in the light of his word.