SUNDAY SCHOOL: Sola Gratia

Welcome back to the Shepherd's Church podcast. Just like our Lord's Day sermon, we hope that this Sunday School message blesses you and strengthens you in your faith.

Perfect. Let's pray.

Lord, thank you so much for today and for this wonderful Lord's Day that you've given us to come into your presence, to worship you, to love you, to praise you, and for our hearts to be filled with your word.

Lord, help us as we study here in Sunday School and we enter back into the heart of the Reformation and we examine men and women who were key figures in the Reformation. Lord, let us understand what it means to be reformed and let us always be reforming and always be looking to the Scriptures to teach us and shape us.

In Jesus' name, amen. We gotta start a little stronger than that. Amen.

Amen.

There we go.

Zurich, Luther, and the Need for Grace Alone

I want you to imagine that you're in Zurich, Switzerland in 1518, just a year after Martin Luther nails his 95 Theses upon the door of the church in Wittenberg. You're in the middle of the town square and the church bells are ringing, but not in celebration, but as a warning.

Inside, the people are gathering for Mass. The priests are speaking in their customary Latin, which the common people could not understand. And it was merely, they were merely watching with no connection to what was being said.

The priests are up there talking about grace, but in such an inaccessible way, they weren't really offering it. Now, they would sell it to you for the right price. They'd light a candle for you if you paid them.

They'd sell you, or say a prayer, they would do a ritual, they would walk, or you would walk away hoping that it would be enough to assuage the wrath of the Almighty God. But none of this was grace. None of this was good news.

It was a kind of religious slavery perpetrated upon people. But even when the shepherds throughout history have caused abuses and have been the ones who have actually become the wolves, God does not leave his people in chains forever.

From the snowy Alps of Switzerland, a year after Luther nailed the theses to the door, God raised up another reformer, and his name was Ulrich Zwingli. And just like Luther, Zwingli didn't come to any new ideas.

He came to an old one, which is grace alone, sola gratia. Not grace plus money, not grace plus rituals, not even grace plus Rome, just grace. Pure, unadulterated grace. That was the message that lit a fire in Zurich, Switzerland, and from that spark, the Reformation fires began taking hold all over Europe and beyond.

But before those fires could spread, God would need to actually shape the man who would be the conduit through which that flame would burn. And I wanna talk about just for a moment who Ulrich Zwingli was.

Zwingli was born on New Year's Day, 1484, in that snowy village tucked away high in the Swiss Alps. His family was large, devout, and respected, and from the start, Ulrich stood out among his family as a very erudite and bright child.

He wasn't brooding like Luther or as linguistically interesting as Luther, but he was bright, he was curious, he was sharp, and his uncle, who was a priest in the Catholic Church, saw these tendencies about him and sent him away to study.

By 10 years old, Zwingli was in school. By 16, he was studying in Vienna, and is it Basel or Basil in Europe? It depends on what level of culture you're at. I'm gonna say Basel, because I think it sounds fancier.

These were major centers of learning at the time, but how Zwingli was shaped most profoundly wasn't in the classroom. It was through the voice of a budding scholar and rising thinker at the time named Desiderius Erasmus.

Erasmus was calling Europe back to the original sources, which was a controversial thing at this time, because in biblical studies, he wasn't pointing to the Latin Vulgate, which at that time was the sort of King James only translation that was unassailable and you could not question it.

He was calling people back to the Bible written in their original autographic languages, which are Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic, and it was Erasmus that published the first of its time, Greek New Testament, which brought together all of the best Greek manuscripts, except Revelation, that were available to him in one glorious volume, and Zwingli devoured it, and what he found shook him, and the pages of the New Testament from the manuscripts that were older than the Latin Vulgate, older than Jerome's translation, he couldn't find any mention of purgatory.

He couldn't find any mention of indulgences, nothing about potpourri, not potpourri, potpourri, no priestly powers, just Christ and his grace that was found in the pages of Holy Scripture. At that time, the church had been saying that grace comes through the priest, that grace comes through the rituals, that grace comes through, ultimately, through the papal system that was in place that was set up by Rome, but Scripture said that grace came from God and not the institutions of men.

As he was wrestling with these things, he became a priest in the town of Ein Seiden, where, I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right, where pilgrims came hoping for healing, this is the problem here, you've got me, who's a North Carolina redneck trying to pronounce very fancy things, forgive me, but he came to be a priest in that town where pilgrims were hoping to come for healing.

Every day he watched desperate people crawl for comfort in the Roman system. He gave them mass in the morning and then he went back to his study in the afternoon, grieving, heartbroken. He could see that the system itself was broken, that people were hungry for God and the only thing Rome was offering them was superstitions and lies.

One day, in the town that he was serving in, a man named Samson came to the town, selling indulgences and a kind of theatrical showmanship, like a snake oil salesman coming to town to give you his next elixir.

And he called the man out publicly, this is sort of Zwingli's coming out party in a non, I didn't mean it that way. He was announcing who he was going to be. It was the point that Zwingli stood up, he called the man out, he warned the people that you cannot buy grace for copper coins.

It was grace that you could not purchase. And if you thought that you could purchase it, it actually would not be grace. It would nullify the fact that it was grace. You couldn't buy it, you had to receive it.

It must be a gift from God, not something that you can earn on your own. Now that sort of takes us to 1518, where Zwingli was praying that God would give him an opportunity to share these convictions that he was seeing in the Bible.

And you'll notice that the Reformation, all of the reformers were just going back to the Bible. They weren't inventing a new system of doctrine. They weren't conclaving together to try to figure out how they could form a new denomination.

They just wanted truth. They just wanted to go back to the word of God. So he prays, and providentially, we know how God does these things. There was a job posting in his town for the preacher position.

Not just the priest, not just the one who's handing out the Roman sort of sacraments, but the preacher. And he took the job. By providence, he got it. And on January the 1st, his birthday, 1519, 15 months after Luther started to kick things off, he came into the pulpit and he brought the Bible and he preached Matthew chapter one, verse one, the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ.

And we can trace the Reformation in Switzerland as beginning from that very day. Now, how did the gospel break into Zurich? Well, line by line, verse by verse. It didn't come through a system of religion.

It came through preaching the word. For Zwingli, the people didn't need more superstitions. What they needed was God's gospel. What they needed was to be able to hear the truth from scripture in a language that they could understand.

Remember, the system at that time was to be preached in Latin. They didn't even speak Latin. And it was to hold the truth at a distance from them to create a kind of necessity of the Catholic church so that the church could be the purveyor of grace and that people couldn't understand the truth on their own.

And ironically, that was a radical concept in their day. And it was certainly risky to bring the Bible into the language of the common man. But as you might expect, whenever the Bible is heralded rightly, the people are invigorated.

That's been the story of this church. We've done nothing. We've preached the word and watched God invigorate his people through it. And that is where reformation always begins. Now, it's also providential that just a couple months later after Zwingli began preaching, one of the most devastating plagues that has ever hit really anywhere, but especially Europe, came upon the scene known as the Black Death or the Bubonic Plague.

The summer after Zwingli took his pulpit, the Black Death swept into Zurich and one out of three people in his town died. Now, you might think to yourself, why would God do that? They finally have a gospel witness in the town.

Why would he bring such a devastating plague? Well, we have to remember Job, when he was rebuked by God, he realized that he didn't have enough information to actually critique the Almighty. And he couldn't see everything that God was doing in these things.

I will tell you that we can see a little bit of God's purpose in this. Maybe not everything, but we can see some. Because at the time, all of the priests left the town, all of the Catholic priests, they were scared of getting the Bubonic Plague.

But Zwingli stayed. So now the only voice of biblical truth in the town is the man who's preaching it rightly. And he would go and he would heal people, he would minister to the sick. He even got it. And he wrote from his bed, he thought he was gonna die.

He said, help, Lord God, help in this trouble. I think death is at the door. Stand before me, Christ, for you have overcome him. You've overcome death. Zwingli survived the ordeal, but he was forever changed by it.

He then saw a deeper aspect of what grace is. He saw how helpless and pitiful that he actually was as a person. How he could not even save his own life. And how God's grace must be, must be a gift of God that is undeserved and not something that we can earn.

The Sausage Supper and Freedom from Human Tradition

Now this leads us to one of my favorite scenes in all of the Reformation, which is a truly masculine event. I think Zwingli, in our Presbyterian circles, doesn't get enough credit. And I think that a lot of people will say, oh, he's the memorialist when you're coming to talk about communion.

And I didn't agree with Zwingli on communion. But there is a supper that I agree with Zwingli on, and it was the sausage supper of 1522. It is an incredible event. Okay, it was the season of Lent in 1522, which if you know what Lent is, Lent is this Roman kind of tendency to fast for 40 days.

It's become kind of weird today, and now it's, I'm gonna fast from social media, and all, but in those days, it meant you could not eat meat for 40 days. And if you did, you would be at least risking excommunication.

And if you remember at that time, the church is the one who was the purveyor of grace. So if you are not in the church, the prevailing theory was you have no grace. You have no access to God. They were the IV that brought the saline into your veins sort of thing.

That's not true, but that's the system they created. So Ulrich Zwingli had been preaching Christ now for a couple years. Not Christ plus the priest, not Christ plus penance, not Christ plus traditions, just Christ.

And some of his congregants were starting to understand the implications of this, that grace is from God alone. So one spring evening in 1522, a handful of believers gathered in a modest home in the heart of Zurich, right in the middle of Lent.

And instead of waving protest signs, they decided that it was time to fry up some sausages. Hot, savory, sizzling sausages. And they didn't do it in secrecy. They actually went and ate right out in the open.

They ate it publicly, they ate it deliberately, they ate it defiantly. That's what I think is one of the coolest things. And sitting right there in that gathering was Zwingli, right in the middle of it, risking his entire career.

We don't take for, or we take for granted how revolutionary this was. And the very next week, Zwingli is preaching on the theology of food. So it's very clear that Zwingli was doing this on purpose. Zwingli, in that past, or in that next week at church, preached from 1 Timothy 4, for everything created by God is good and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with gratitude.

Now, it wasn't about the pork. It was about freedom that we have in Christ. And in that Sunday sermon, he said, this is his quote, to forbid food where God has given freedom is to take the place of God himself.

He was saying that the Catholic Church had put himself in the position of being God. What an indictment. Obviously, Rome was angered by this. And this led to great trouble in the life of Zwingli, for sure.

But the people in the city were listening. The city was stirred and captivated by it. And the council of the city took notice and the Reformation strengthened and deepened there, not just in cathedrals, but really out of the kitchen.

As one historian put it, the Reformation in Zurich did not begin in the cathedral. It began in the kitchen cooking sausages. Zwingli would go on to call for priests to become married, to avoid sexual temptation.

He would call for the removal of idols in the town. He would call for worship that was built on the word of God. Because once you know that grace alone saves, every man made claim starts to break down.

Zurich Breaks with Rome and the Word Governs Worship

Now, in 1523, a year later, things are starting to get a little tense. As the snow blanketed the rooftops of Zurich, inside the council halls, things were getting ready to ignite. Rome was angry. The people were nervous.

The city was at a crossroads. And at the center stood a man, not with robes or relics, but his Bible. And Zwingli does the unthinkable here. He challenges Rome's authority and he challenges them publicly to a public debate.

Publicly to a public debate, sorry. That's the same thing. And one question hung in the air. Will Zurich, as a city, stay loyal to Rome or will they follow the path of the Reformation and become a Protestant city?

From its government all the way down to its Laodian people. Zwingli came prepared for this event. He wrote 67 bold statements. We hear a lot about Luther's 95 Theses, but Zwingli also had 65 Theses, or 67, that are worth reading and they're very good.

A summary of them would say that they claim that we should preach only from Scripture. That salvation is by grace alone, not through works. The Mass is a meal. It is not a re-sacrifice of Christ. Christ alone is the head of the church.

Priests should and can marry. And no tradition can bind us where God has freely spoken.

That's the claim.

Rome came armed with their canon law and their tradition, but they never quoted from the Bible. Again and again and again throughout the proceedings, Zwingli said, show it to me in Scripture. And they could not, and they would not.

And then Zwingli, it's reported that he said, well then you cannot bind the Christian's conscience with your traditions. He wasn't arguing necessarily to win, but he did preach so that the people would be free of the tyranny of the Roman system.

He lifted up Christ, his cross, and his grace, and his finished work, and at that moment, grace won. The council in the city of Zurich voted, and the town of Zurich became a Christian Protestant town.

The Mass was abolished, the priests were free to marry, images were taken down, preaching took center stage. And what I love about this is that Zwingli is not a brilliant general of sorts. He's not necessarily a man who was entrepreneurial.

He literally just preached the Word of God, and the Word of God changed an entire town. It's such an encouraging thing for us today to remember to stay focused on the main thing. Now, there wasn't without some division in the Reformation, especially with Zwingli.

Zwingli, the Anabaptists, and the Marburg Colloquy

By 1525, now a couple years later, Zwingli, or Zurich, was glowing white hot with the Gospel. The Bible was being preached, the sacraments were being rightly administered mostly, and people were free, but the Reformation rarely runs smoothly.

Zwingli was kind of caught in the middle of two different factions who were fighting against him. There was the Anabaptists, and then there was Luther himself. The Anabaptists at first, men like Conrad Grebel and Felix Manns, stood shoulder to shoulder with Zwingli, and they helped him break from Rome because they loved the Gospel of Grace, but they said he didn't go far enough, that he didn't reject infant baptism, and what they did was, it was a category error.

They said that because Rome was wrong on this issue, they must be wrong on all issues, and that in order to truly reform, we must reform from every aspect of Rome, and every aspect of Rome was not flawed.

Now, the way that they understood infant baptism was wrong, but infant baptism itself as a practice was not wrong. These men, who would later be known as Anabaptists, thought that only adults could be baptized.

They were the Mark Devers of their day and others. Only adults could be baptized, and it should be faith and profession of faith that initiates the baptism, not God's promises to his people. Zwingli disagreed and even argued that baptism was like circumcision.

It was a sign of God's grace for believers and their children. It was a covenant sign, but that did not stop the Anabaptists from doing what they do, and there was a schism involved. Now, after that, there was also tension between Zwingli and Luther, to say the least.

I think I mentioned one of the weeks, but Luther, in typical fashion, said that Zwingli was the love child of his mother and Satan. I think I mentioned that. That's a pretty strong statement for a man who's preaching the Bible, loves his people, but Luther is extra, and that's what he said.

They started disagreeing on the supper. Roman taught that the bread became Christ's body. The wine became Jesus's blood. That's called transubstantiation, and Luther, while rejecting that, said that Christ is still physically present at the supper, that he's in, on, among, around, and with the table, which is called consubstantiation, and Zwingli could not agree with that, which I think Zwingli was right not to agree with that.

He believed the Lord's Supper was a memorial. That's where I don't believe he was right. He believed that Christ was spiritually present here with us, but not physically present, and in 1592, Luther and Zwingli met at what's called the Marburg Colloquy, where Luther, in a sort of frustration, slammed his hand down on the table, and said, the words say, this is my body, and Zwingli replied calmly, but Christ also said, I am the door, so therefore should we believe that Christ is made of wood?

They argued over 15 points, and they agreed with 14 out of 15 of them, but not this one, and Luther departed, refusing unity with Zwingli, because he said, you are of a different spirit. So the break between Luther and Zwingli from that point on was permanent, and it was painful, but God used the divisions that happened in that early movement to actually bring his gospel to more people, and that is one thing that we have to remember about God and the way that he uses our sin.

He uses sin sinlessly. He uses our little breaks and fractures and divisions for his glory to bring his gospel to more people. Look no further than when Paul and Timothy, or not Paul and Timothy, Paul and Barnabas got to this place where they could not serve together anymore, and yet, in their break, God was gracious and allowed the word of God to go to even more people.

God uses our ignorance, our finitude, our whatever leads up to it, he uses that for his glory to make his kingdom and make his gospel known. Now I wanna pause here just for a second to see if there's any questions.

I am not a Zwingli scholar, so I may not know the answer to this. Like most people in the reform movement, I know less of Zwingli than I do of the others. Yes, sir. Yeah, so if you're taught, I mean, what I've always heard with that, Ken, so the question is what movements would trace their lineage back to Zwingli?

Zwingli's actually quite orthodox. He's just, I think, he gets typecast as the memorial guy. So if you wanna look at Zwingli as who people would claim lineage to, I would say like modern-day evangelicalism in the way that they do the table.

The table is a memorial. The table is not actual grace being conferred to a people through the eating of it. It is a remembrance of Jesus. So you'll think of the Southern Baptist Convention sort of has a Zwingli in view of the table, evangelicalism, Acts 29, churches and movements like that that have what we would call here a lower view of the table, but it's more of a spiritualized, maybe the right word to say.

So I would say that's the ones who would trace their lineage to Zwingli. We would agree with Zwingli on paedo-baptism. He was strong on that. We would agree with him on a lot of what he said. It's just that view we part ways, and we don't agree with Luther either on the table.

Luther believed that Christ was physically present at the table, whereas Calvin came along later, and Calvin's actually, he does this a lot. He's a very careful thinker. Calvin said, well, Christ is in heaven at the throne of God sitting down and reigning.

How can Jesus Christ come down from heaven and be physically present here and also be physically present in heaven? That would make what Calvin calls Jesus bi-local. And then if you think about, well, how does he choose which church he's gonna visit?

Does he go to two churches and he's physically present with them? Does he go to four? Does he go to 10? And how many times are we gonna divide Christ? And I thought that that was an exceptional way of putting it.

So what Calvin says is Jesus doesn't come down to us to meet with us physically at his table. Christ calls us up on the Lord's day to him, and he nourishes us with his spiritual presence in heaven. So while our bodies are here on Sunday morning, we are with Christ in the heavenlies, and I think that's the most faithful view, that we are with Christ, that he really is ministering to us.

He really is nourishing us. We are really eating the body and blood of Christ, but not physically, spiritually. So that's our view. Good question, Ken. Yes, sir?

After, like a year later?

A year later?

Yeah.

So it's not so easy to say that one reformer pioneered one sola, because they were all working on sort of this, and the solas came after them as a way of codifying what they were teaching. But one of the things I thought about this series is a way that we could teach it is through teaching the reformers.

So we're accomplishing two things at once. You're getting to hear who the reformers are, what they thought, and you're getting to see what I think is characteristic of their ministry. So I think what really defined Zwingli's ministry was grace alone.

Even though he was teaching faith alone, and to the glory of God, he was teaching all of these things, grace alone really defines Zwingli's ministry. Does that help?

Yeah, yeah.

Just not at the table. I said just not at the table.

Just not at the table.

Yeah, no priest at the table. Maybe it was just a turn of phrase, but you said they posted it, like, did they actually post a job and say, hey, anybody that wants to come and you want to preach here? Did they actually do something like that, like an open invitation for just anybody to apply and be a preacher?

So definitely not open.

I was gonna, yeah.

But among the priest and among the church officers that were already there in the town, there was a job posting, a vacancy in the pulpit. He applied and he got it. But yeah, it wouldn't be for the plowman who has no theological training.

Yeah.

Yes, sir.

During that time, that was the Roman Catholic Church,.

Basically.

I guess those guys were still leading heavily Roman Catholics. So having just, you know, was there a feud there? I'm sure, because when he stood up and read through Matthew, like, hey, he's saying different things there.

Should we have this guy continue on?

Yeah, so Zwingli became a kind of firebrand and then there were others who joined with him and came around him. And what we see in that sausage supper is that congregants then were starting to see it and live it out in practical ways.

But Zwingli really did lead the charge. And for a while, actually, shouldered a lot of it. He was just, he was faithfully teaching his people. And I think it's, you know, I hope this point comes through.

I think it's pretty interesting that he wasn't really doing anything radical. But if you think about the first church service where he preached and he wasn't preaching in Latin, but he was preaching in the language people could understand.

It reminds me of my mom. She told me a story one time of how she was at home and her family, my grandma and grandpa didn't have a lot of money when she was little. And they only owned a black and white television.

And she, her favorite movie was Wizard of Oz. So she thought the whole movie was in black and white. And then they finally bought a color TV. And the first part of the movie is black and white. So no surprises.

But when the movie turned to color, she was like, she never knew that it did that. And it was like a whole new world had opened up to her. I can imagine in a similar way, those congregants sitting there.

And then as soon as he began speaking in their language, like the world's changed, something's different. So just through him preaching, though the congregation started becoming discipled and eventually the whole town became Protestant, which pretty controversial thing that they did.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, he could have gotten executed for that. He could have gotten executed for the public disputation where he invited them to argue with him. Could have gotten executed for leading the town to become Protestant and out from underneath the banner of Rome.

And then later, he, well, we can get to it in a minute, but later he actually did go to war. Zwingli, for not being as flashy as Luther, was like a pretty masculine guy. He went to war and carried a sword in fighting for the faith.

And on his, he was basically stabbed by a sword. This is how Zwingli died. And the Catholic across from him saw him and said, will you recant and will you repent? And he said, no. And they took his body and set it on fire publicly in order to dishonor him.

But one of the things that is very interesting about this is every time these saints in the Reformation were burned, the fires of Reformation actually grew hotter. So, the Catholics at that time had this habit of killing you and then burning you.

It was like double dishonor. Is there?

Yeah.

Yeah.

At the time, 10 of the population of Rome was Jewish. So, in order to gain a large voting block in Nero's favor, it's reported by Suetonius that he threw the Christians under the bus like a politician to get this massive population base on his side.

So, yeah. Yes, sir.

So, it seemed like Zwingli not flew under the radar like he was trying to be clandestine, but because he wasn't as bombastic and confrontational as Luther was, he kind of maintained his position for much longer than Luther did.

I thought that was, is that how that kind of, how long until he was officially removed? Was he ever officially removed from the Catholic Church?

That's a good question.

It's okay if you don't know.

I don't know. 1531 is when the battle was. So, from 1518 to 1531 was his sort of ministerial career. So, what is that, 13 years? So, not actually quite long. Luther died of natural causes, and so he would have, Luther actually had a longer ministry, but not through the Catholic Church, more of he had a ministry out of his home.

That certainly puts a damper on your public life, yeah. Because of all of this, because of the Swiss people becoming Protestant and the Catholic Church being enraged by this, Switzerland eventually gets to the place where they're on the brink of civil war.

The Reformation had split Switzerland into two factions, Protestant and Catholic, with regions no longer debating with words, but facing off with weapons. Peace vanished in a mostly docile nation today, what we think about Switzerland.

But at that time, it was on the brink of war. And Ulrich Zwingli was a preacher. He was a shepherd. But when his congregants started taking up arms to defend their homes, Zwingli didn't stay behind. He went and carried, or he didn't carry a sword in battle, he carried a Bible.

He didn't go there to kill people, but he came there to care, to pray, to present the gospel to his people. And he believed that shepherds were not meant to only preach from pulpits and the safety therein, but to walk with their flock where their flock was walking, even if it meant to the valley of the shadow of death.

And with the fires that had ignited in him from Sola Gratia, he marched into the battlefield at Capelle, and on October 11th, 1531, his army was ambushed and at the threat of death, he was told to confess.

And this is what he said. They may kill the body, but they cannot kill the soul. And then they killed him, and then they burned him, and that was the end of Luther's life. But the legacy of Sola Gratia lives on.

Zwingli, excuse me. Sola Gratia means by grace alone. Grace is unmerited favor from God. Grace is when you get what you do not deserve and what you cannot earn. And that's at the very heart of the gospel, is that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us, that we could not clean ourselves up.

There's no one righteous, not even one. And yet by the free gift of God, we've been made righteous through Jesus Christ. That's the legacy of Zwingli, and that continues on to this day. Praise God for that.

Any questions on Sola Gratia or Zwingli or anything? Amen. Well, let's pray. Lord, thank you for today, and thank you for this time you've given us, and thank you for our brother in arms and our co-belligerent in the faith that went before us, Ulrich Zwingli.

Lord, we thank you for his faithful witness, even to the point of death. We thank you for his courage and his tenacity and his conviction not to back down when the powers in culture were trying to silence him.

Lord, may that be something that we always hold fast to, that in a world that beckons us to compromise the gospel, that we would always thunder it with clarity, conviction, and truth, that we would never compromise.

Lord, we live in a state full of compromise. Would you allow us, this little church, by your grace alone, to remain faithful, to continue to proclaim your gospel, and Lord, would you allow us to do it until the day that we die?

In Jesus' name, amen.

Amen.