139. ¡Viva La Reformacion!

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 139, Viva La Reformation. A hundred and seven years ago, a thunderous earthquake of truth ruptured the silence of a spiritually stagnant Europe.

The Protestant Reformation as a Divine Revival

That bomb that went off was the Protestant Reformation. It was championed by men like Martin Luther and John Calvin, Ulrich Zwingli, John Knox, and other fellow reformers. This movement shattered the chains of religious opacity, and it returned the church to the pages of Holy Scripture, and it fundamentally altered the course of Western civilization for the last 500 years.

Far from a mere academic disagreement or a restructuring of ecclesialistical furniture, the Reformation was a revival. It was a divine gift given to the church which needed course correction after centuries of stagnancy from heresies that had subtly and forcefully crept in.

Jan Hus and the Pre-Reformation Witness

Before Martin Luther's hammer struck the door of Wittenberg, the call for reform had already begun. One of the earliest and most courageous examples of this was Jan Hus, a Bohemian priest who spoke out against the corruption and false teachings of the church 100 years before Luther.

Hus was convinced that Scripture alone should be the ultimate authority for the church, and that belief, that passion, which is a thoroughly biblical one, cost Jan Hus his life. In 1415, 102 years before Luther's famous gavel slammed against the castle church's door, Hus was burned alive at the stake.

An attempt by the church to silence the growing embers of the Reformation that they saw coming. But as the flames consumed his mortal body, he proclaimed that God was going to raise up the voice of a swan, a coming reformer, who would, unlike Hus, was not gonna be able to be silenced.

He would build upon the foundation that Hus had already laid, and he would take the Reformation further in a way that the Catholic church could not quench or silence. And a century later, Hus' prophecy found its fulfillment in the German monk, Martin Luther.

Luther, Justification by Faith Alone, and the Five Solas

Like the swan that was foretold, Luther shattered centuries of falsehood and proclaimed the truth with power that changed history forever. This is because the Reformation wasn't just a blip that popped up out of nowhere.

No, it was a crescendo, a climactic moment of theological pressure that had been building for centuries that finally exploded in that 16th century at Luther's rediscovery of justification by faith alone.

And eventually, these rediscoveries and these doctrines that were found that had been lost for centuries would be codified in these terms called the five solas, which aren't merely the doctrinal quibblings of a German hothead, but instead the battle cry of men who would rather die than betray the purity of the gospel.

Sola scriptura, in opposition to the teachings of Rome, asserted that scripture alone, not the edicts of popes or councils, held the supreme authority for the life of the church. Sola fide, defiantly declared that faith alone, not the practice or the purchase of indulgences, justified a sinner before God.

Sola gratia, belligerently heralded that salvation was a gift of grace alone, not deriving from the treasury of merit or time spent in purgatory or any of that. Solus Christus, thunderously placed Christ back as the sole mediator between God and humanity in the church and not the corrupt and abusive class of priest in Rome.

And soli deo gloria, to the glory of God alone, affirmed that all glory was due to God. Stripping away the vain glory of the harlot Rome and her perverted achievements that she had tried to put before Christ.

Martyrs, Translation, and the Spread of Reform

The Reformation's mission was urgent and it was dangerous and the reformers risked everything to put the word of God back into the hands of the common believer. It wasn't enough for a select group of clerics to guard the scriptures in Latin, which was the language of the scholarly class.

No, the scriptures were for the plow boy as much as they were for the priest. Men like William Tyndale, who paid with his life in order to translate the Bible into English, died with this prayer on his lips that future generations might read and understand the word and live by what it says.

And as they killed him and then tied his dead body to a stake in order to let it burn into ash, Tyndale's final plea that the Lord would open up the eyes of the King of England was answered. As the ash of Tyndale's body wafted his way up to heaven, the Lord himself was seeding the very clouds overhead for a future downpour of reformation in England and beyond.

This path of reformation has been trodden by countless martyrs who held fast to their confession even as the pyres cracked beneath their feet. Nicholas Ridley and Hugh Latimer, bishops that were burned at the stake in 1555, encouraged each other as they were dying with this reformation vision of hope.

Latimer's words to Ridley still resonate today. He said, be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle by God's grace in England that shall never be put out.

They sang hymns as flames lick their mortal flesh, refusing to recant under the cruel gaze of their executioners. Men like Thomas Cranmer, who once faltered in the face of martyrdom and fear, who signed a letter that he recanted as Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, grew to be mighty oaks that would stand in the face of tyranny, and would stand in the face of persecution, and would stand firm in his final hour.

It was Cranmer himself, the one who signed the letter denying Jesus, who repented of that sin, and who willingly didn't die as a betrayer of Christ, but he died as a friend of Christ, placing the very hand that he signed that letter into the fire first, saying, this unworthy hand must be the first thing that burns.

Puritan Reform, America, and Semper Reformanda

The Puritans who carried forth the legacy of the Reformation faced severe persecution for their commitment to reforming the Church of England from the inside out. And when their efforts were met with all kinds of resistance, they created new communities that were rooted in biblical worship and governance.

They even left and planted America, which means that America is downstream of the Reformation. Their goal was to strip worship of its human traditions that had weakened it and obscured true devotion to God, and they wanted to uphold the principle of Semper Reformanda, which means always reforming.

And they were willing to cross oceans, face martyrdom, death, starvation, and whatever it took, no compromise to herald the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Now, five centuries and seven years later, here we stand, heirs of this incredible and blazing legacy, and yet, once more, surrounded by a church and a culture that is steeped in corruption and confusion.

Modern Evangelical Drift and the Need for Scriptural Renewal

The seeker-sensitive movement that we all witnessed before our very eyes has diluted the message of the gospel, replacing the sharp, convicting truth of scripture with motivational speeches that soothe and tickle the ears of the onlooking crowds.

Charismatic extremes chase emotional highs instead of doctrinal truth, and they deny even the word of God's sufficiency and power by their fake miracles. Liberal, woke, mainline churches twist the gospel into a message of social activism and wokeism devoid of its redemptive power, and they echo the same kind of distortion and compromise that plunged medieval Europe into unprecedented darkness.

Brothers and sisters, we live in an age where we have boundless access to scripture, and yet, we face the same kind of tragedy that was in that pre-Reformation era, a new, self-imposed era of wordlessness, of ignorance, of darkness.

Our shelves groan under the weight of specialty Bibles, study Bibles, journaling Bibles, niche books, versions tailored to every demographic, and yet, our souls are malnourished in this country, growing light and brittle and starved for the meat of the word of God.

The sacred texts that our forefathers fought over, bled over, died over, and cherished to the point of death now gather dust on the collective shelves of our country. We have exchanged the passion of the former martyrs that have came before us for indifference and comfort.

We've traded the daily bread, the living bread, the bread that feeds us for second-hand interpretations and experiences. The lessons of the Reformation, brothers and sisters, remain as urgent today as ever, and we must remember that Semper Reformanda, always reforming, is not just a dead slogan of history or something that you put on posters.

It is our ongoing duty, and it is our rallying cry as the Church of Jesus Christ. The Church cannot afford to become calcified into thinking that we have fully reformed. We have not. We cannot become satisfied with our past triumphs.

We can't be lulled to sleep or complacency by what's going on in the modern world and simply retreat into our churches and think that that's enough. We must return to the word. We must let it pierce us and let it shape us and let it define us and let it drive us and let it propel us into the world so that they may see the light of Christ once more before the world tips back into darkness.

As Luther declared in his first of 95 outstanding theses, that all of life is to be about repentance. And that call didn't end in the 16th century. It continues today. And we must be vigilant. And we must be courageous in the darkened days that we have been given.

It is not for us to decide why we've been given these days, but it is for us to decide what we will do with the days that we have been given. And we must sacrifice our lives like the men of old sacrifice their lives in the heat of flames in order that the world would burn again for the glory of God, that the word and the true religion would herald across this land and that we would refuse to settle for weak and tepid and shallow expressions of faith that have been peddled to us in modern evangelicalism.

A Call for a New Reformation

Brothers and sisters, it is time for a new reformation. It is time for the church to cling to the word of God again and to stop clinging to our comforts and to stop clinging to our packed suitcase thinking that Jesus is gonna return at any moment.

As we've been talking about on the show, that is not what we are waiting for. Christ is waiting for us to pick up the hammer and build and to unpack the suitcase and to get to work. Should our Lord tarry for another 500 or even 1 ,000 years, my prayer is that future generations would not remember us as the people who squandered the legacy of the reformation and allowed the world to which we were given to be plunged back into darkness.

But instead, I pray that we are the generation that was known for setting it back on fire again. And to that end, brothers and sisters, God bless you and viva la reformation.