The Church Still Needs Reforming

Transcript

Auto-generated from the audio. Click a timestamp to jump to that part of the video.

[0:00] sermon text is Romans chapter 3 verses 19 through 28. And just a word of introduction about this. This is my sermon for Reformation Sunday, which was last week. But last week, we had also Good All Saints Sunday. And so we couldn't do two sermons in one day. There would have been a revolt or something. So we can't have that. So we're going to talk about Reformation Sunday today. I don't do this every year, but some years. And just the caveat, I used to be Lutheran, so it's going to come out a little bit. I'm sorry. It's going to spill out. But once a year, once every other year, it's not so bad. October 31st, 1517. Think about that, how long ago that was, over 500 years ago. On that day, Martin Luther nailed what he called the 95, well, I don't know if he called it that. It's just a list of things he wrote. It came to be known as the 95 Theses. A thesis is singular. Theses is plural. The 95 Theses, were nailed to the door of the Church of Wittenberg, Germany. And these were a list of things that were on his chest and he wanted to write about. Some of them were things that were wrong with the church at the time, by which we mean the Roman Catholic Church, because there really was no other church in Northern Europe at that time. And so these were the abuses or the

[1:19] mistakes, theological and functional, of the Catholic Church. And just as a note, this is not to be anti-Catholic. It's not to be anti-Catholic. It's not to be anti-Catholic. It's not to be anti-Catholic, because the good news is the Catholics, as a result of the Protestant Reformation, also had their own, what was called the Counter-Reformation. They realized that that was impetus to them to also reform many of their practices. And so in the end, this ended up being very good for the Catholic Church, too. And they identified, along with Luther, that there was some disorder in their own house and they cleared it up. And that's just how it is, is we don't like a stranger to come into our house and tell us what a mess it is. But we can complain about what a mess our own house is. Right? And so that's why there was a little bit of friction at first. But Luther was a Catholic. Luther was a Catholic monk. He was the professor of a Catholic theological university. So he was definitely within the house, but they actually kicked him out of the house, as we'll see. And just a bit of a note about our reading. Luther became a Bible scholar. I'll get into that. And he was struck, especially by Paul's letter to the Romans.

[2:27] And Paul's letter to the Galatians. And when he had to start teaching those books at the seminary university, you know how you don't learn something until you teach it yourself? And he learned it. And he's like, holy cow, Romans and Galatians? This is different than the practice of the church that I'm in now. And so our reading is from the Apostle Paul. It's about grace. It's about keeping the law. Paul wrote this, I think, with a heavy heart. Right They don't make you right with God, even if they're good to do. So there's plenty of good works and they're good to do. You should do them, but they don't save you. Paul came to realize by reading Romans that only faith in the saving work of Jesus saves a person and puts us in a right relationship with God. And from that place flows this freedom, this great freedom to live a different life. And a lot of law keeping happens in that freedom, but that's not the goal of it. The freedom is to be free in Christ. So let's go to our reading, Romans 3, and I'll start with verse 19. The Apostle Paul writes this. Now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law. By which he means those who are bound to keep the law. Those who are under the law.

[4:13] So that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world may be held accountable to God. For no human will be justified in his sight by deeds prescribed by the law. For through the law comes the knowledge of sin. But now, and this is the famous part of Romans that you probably have memorized. But now, apart from law, the righteousness of God has been disclosed and is attested by the law and the prophets. The righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Amen. They are now justified by his grace as a gift. Through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. Whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood. Effective through faith. He did this to show his righteousness. Because in his divine forbearance he had passed over the sins previously committed.

[5:18] It was to prove at the present time that he himself is righteous. And that he justifies the one. Who has faith in Jesus. Then what becomes of boasting? It is excluded. By what law? By that of works? No. But by the law of faith. For we hold that a person is justified by faith.

[5:43] Apart from works prescribed by the law. This is the word of the Lord. And you don't have to say that again. I got confused. Let me pray. Lord, thank you for this word. And we ask that you would. Add your blessing to it. In Jesus name. Amen. All right. So.

[6:04] I want to give you just a short history of Luther himself. And it's very short. But he was the son of a well-off middle class family. His father wanted him to attend law school. Does it sound familiar? Dad wants me to become a lawyer. And he got almost all the way there. But he dropped out of law school. One day he was. Riding through a field in a thunderstorm.

[6:28] And he was really frightened because a lightning bolt struck a tree right near him. And he was just terrified. And I can relate because I've been near lightning before. And it just does something inside you. Like blah.

[6:41] And he cried out to Saint Anne, who was a protector, I guess he thought. That if he could make it across the field safely, he would become a monk. So he made this promise in this sort of. It's very interesting. Like what? What? What would have happened if the lightning hadn't struck? Like what are the odds of lightning striking? Like it's not high. So without this lightning strike, he would have gone on and become a lawyer. And maybe he would have been a much. He's not a footnote in history, that's for sure. But he would have been. I don't even know if we'd ever know his name. He might have been some. He was pretty smart. So he might have been some famous German lawyer from the 16th century. But I doubt we'd ever have heard of him except for this lightning strike. He promises Saint Anne he'll become a monk if he gets home safely. He gets home safely. And I think to his credit, he keeps his promise. Don't you think most of us would have been like, oh, I was so scared. I didn't mean it. I didn't mean it. He meant it. So there's something about him. He was sort of a man of his word. He kept it. So he joined the monastery, which was against his father's wishes.

[7:44] And at the monastery, he quickly became a real headache for all the other monks, especially the leaders of the monastery, because he honestly took all of everything that they said way too seriously. Like he was a very serious monk. He was obsessed with his own sinfulness. He thought he was a terrible person. He would put his knees on the floor at 2 a.m. and pray for three hours for God to forgive him. He would lash himself with a whip, you know, to chastise his own flesh because he felt so bad about being a sinner. And all the other monks were brewing beer and, you know, tending the beehives and doing fun monk stuff. And he's out there just, you know, up and running. And he's out there just, you know, up and running. And he's out there just, you know, up and running. And he's out there just, you know, up and running. And he's out there just, you know, up and running. And he's out there just, you know, up and running. And he's out there just, you know, up and running. And he's out there just, you know, up and running. And he's out there just, you know, up and running. And he's out there just, you know, up and running. And he's out there just, you know, up and running. And he's out there just, you know, up and running.

[8:44] And he's out there just, you know, up and running. And he's out there just, you know, up and running. And he's out there just, you know, up and running. And he's out there just, you know, up and running. other people. And so that was their biggest mistake. If you want to think of it as a mistake, as they set loose somebody who was going to reform the church because he started actually studying the Bible. He actually started studying the Bible. He read Romans, he read Galatians, and he had this insight, which was, I wouldn't say it was like one night, but it was sort of over time. And the more he looked at it, he's like, why am I beating myself up over my sin? For one thing, he was really obsessed with his own sin. Why are we doing these things that we're always emphasizing that people in the Catholic church have to work for their salvation? Why are we doing that? Why are we doing something called selling indulgences, which was sort of a paper that you could buy that would forgive you of some of the sins you had committed without even repenting for them. And so when Luther wrote the 95 theses, he said his very first one was when our Lord Jesus Christ said, repent, he intended for the entire life of a believer to be one of repentance. But if you buy an indulgence,

[9:56] you're not repenting. It's a money transaction that you're buying grace and justification and righteousness with cash, like dirty, grubby cash. You're giving to the church so that they could build the cathedral or the church in the Vatican, St. Peter's Cathedral Basilica in Vatican City. And that's what they were actually doing. At that time, because that's when that building was being built. And they're like, this building is expensive. We need to come up with some money. And somebody said, let's sell forgiveness. It's called an indulgence. And that was an abuse. That was one of his biggest complaints about it. And theoretically, the Catholic church, to their credit, shouldn't have done that. And they realized they shouldn't have done it. But when there's money involved, sometimes some of the scruples go out the windows. And then the other problem was, it's like, you don't want to motivate a salesman. Right and he nailed this paper to the door. And it spread like wildfire because this is very interesting. This overlaps with more or less the beginning of the invention of movable type and printing presses. And so Luther's ideas were able to be copied down and disseminated very rapidly in Germany. Germany didn't actually exist as a country back then,

[11:38] but we won't get into that. So he got into trouble for his writings, and normally he would have been put to death or he would have been severely punished. A century before this, there was a Czech from the Czech Republic, not the Czech Republic, but Czechoslovakian. His name was Jan Hus. He was burned at the stake for similar ideas just 100 years before Luther.

[12:02] Luther's ideas were able to get out more quickly, and Luther had the support of some political leaders in what we call Saxony, which is where he was from. And so they protected him, at least his physical life, from any kind of danger that was going to come. And he was called to account. He was going to be excommunicated. He was called to a conference to defend his work. They said, are you going to recant? Are you going to take back everything you wrote? Because if you don't, you're going to be in big trouble.

[12:29] And he said, give me a day to think about it. So he sat and he prayed and he thought about it, and he came back and he stood up and he said this. He said, unless I am, and this is the important part, unless I am convinced, by scripture and plain reason, logic, unless I am convinced by scripture and plain reason, I do not accept the authority of the popes and the councils, for they have contradicted each other. He was asked if he would repudiate his writings about the problems with the popes and councils and the teachings of the Catholic Church. I do not accept the authority of the popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other. Sorry. Then he wrote this, or he said this. My conscience is captive to the word of God. I'll say that again. My conscience is captive to the word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise. God help me. Amen. Can you imagine? A little bit dramatic in that room? Because they're like, everyone who's there is like, are you going to take it all back? Takes his back seat. Hurry up. You got a chance. His last chance.

[13:51] And all eyes in this room were on him. He stands up and he says, I can't take it back because the word of God has held my conscience captive. It's really powerful. And so they whisked him out. His friends whisked him out of there. They hit him because he was in danger. Actually physical danger to his life. And so he went. Up into what's called the Vorkburg Castle. Can you imagine him way up in the turrets of the castle, sitting alone in a room? And he was there for years, kind of laying low. That's when he translated the Bible from Greek, Latin and Hebrew into German. That's he had all this time. And that became the basis for actually the modern German language. And it was a great gift to the world, to the people to have the Bible in their own language, because they would go to church. And if the Bible was read at all, it was read in Latin and they'd be like, I don't know what that is. So he's like in the churches, we need to start reading the Bible to the people in German, in their own language. And if possible, if they get wealthy enough, they can buy one of their own. You know, now Bibles are on. You can get a Bible for free or you can look at it on your app for free. Back then, even to own a Bible was expensive.

[15:03] But so this was the beginning. Do you see how the word of God is central in all this? It was reading the word of God and Romans Galatians that led to this. It was the word of God. That held Luther's conscience captive. And then in his time where he had to hide, it was the translation of the word of God into the language of the people so that they could experience this as well without having to learn, you know, Roman, Roman, Latin, Greek and Hebrew to translate the Bible themselves. So this is a great thing that he did. And so you kind of, you realize that, you know, there's all sorts of special people in this world. There's all sorts of remarkable people in this world. If, bro, if Luther had been a lawyer, uh, I do think he might have been sort of a famous person because he just was a worker and he was really smart. Just luckily he almost got hit by lightning one day and became a reformer. He was just an exceptional person. He wrote so much. He thought so much. He wasn't a, I mean, I think he was afraid, but he was also brave. So he had this rare combination of a lot of book smarts, a lot of street smarts, and a conscience held captive by the word of God in this amazing amount of courage. Now, it doesn't mean that he's perfect.

[16:12] He made all sorts of mistakes and we can go into those and probably next week. I'll not about, I'm not gonna talk about the reformation next week, but next week I'll talk about some other mistakes he made. He had feet of clay. All people, all humans are broken sinners, right? So there are problems with Luther. Uh, he was rude. He was crude. Um, he, he, uh, called the Pope the antichrist like a thousand times. It was just, it wasn't very, he was intemperate. Sometimes he would say things, uh, you know, he once said that he would fart at the devil. You know, you get the idea, you know, he's like, that's just, just sort of earthy German bar room talk. That song we sang last week, a mighty fortress is our God. The tune was a bar tune, but he put scripture into it. Do you see that? How that's working? You know, it's like the people can, oh, here you go to church. Are you gonna introduce a new him for you? It's called infested board, a mighty fortress. And the people like, oh, I know this tune. And Luther's like, how do you know this tune? Cause you've been drinking at the pub. That's how we know. But he realized that the church needed reforming. So once the reformation started, he sent people out to visit, uh, the churches in the countryside and found all sorts of problems.

[17:28] People didn't know anything. Uh, and the pastors were also didn't really know that much and had a lot of bad habits. I won't go into them all. And so Luther said, we have to teach the people and we have to teach the pastors. We have to train the pastors. And we have to give the people to catechism. So he wrote the small catechism for people and the large catechism for pastors. And it was to give people theology in their own hands, in their own lap and interpretation of scripture and scripture itself. So that's the reformation. And the, and as I said, the Catholic church, um, tried to stop it. They couldn't because he had some political protection. They did finally excommunicate him, but in essence, a new church was formed. The Lutheran, the Lutheran church, but he didn't, Luther didn't like that name. He didn't like that they were named after him. In fact, it might've been kind of a slight that other people called them the Lutherans. You know, it's like if a bunch of people started following me and somebody called them all the Hansians, you know, it would be kind of sound like, oh, there's the Hansians. Like they're kind of stupid people and they would be for following me. That's for sure. So then they weren't following Luther.

[18:33] They weren't following Luther. They were following the scriptures. Luther had just sort of opened that all up for everybody. So now, you're thinking, well, why is the reformation important to us? Is this important? This is like 500 year old history. Do we care? It's a fair question. It really is a fair question. It's not just a history lesson, right? So why do we care? Is the, uh, is the reformation important to us?

[18:57] Just real quick. I mean, it had huge consequences in the immediate sort of aftermath of it. There were several years wars in Europe, millions of people died. That's not good, but that happened. So there's, there's a lot of sort of things happened in history because of the reformation.

[19:15] It highlighted the power of the printing press. So they sort of kind of became an early test case for mass communication. So that's important. It contributed to the Renaissance and the enlightenment, which revolutionized civil society. The Catholic church had a sort of a strong hold on scientific inquiry. So you know what they did to Galileo? It wasn't great, you know, and this idea that, that the church could be challenged with plain reason, logic with the word of God or other things was a great loosening for good or for ill in Europe. And so science was able to flourish after this. And so I tell you the truth, the world would not look like it looks now without Martin Luther. It might be behind somebody else would have come along and done something similar, but it might be behind by 40, 50, 60 years. Do you understand what I'm saying? Like he did lead to the sort of modernization. Of the world. Now you could also say, and this would be a fair thing to say is, was that such a good thing? You can say that. And I don't have an answer to that, but he was a consequential person and the reformation itself was a consequential event.

[20:25] And so for better, for worse, the reformation happened. But I think what we need to focus on is the reformation was always bathed in the word of God. This is so important. Okay. And so the question then is what do we do? What do we do with the reformation today? Do we, do we just study it? My answer is going to be no. Otherwise I wouldn't even be talking about this today because I'm so excited about it. You see is the, the look at the, the title of the sermon. It's in Latin, Ecclesia, Ecclesia reformata, Semper reformanda. The church reformed is always reforming. So reformation, the reformation of the church can't stop in 1517. It shouldn't stop in 1517. It has to keep going in 2025. And the church needs reformation. I hope we can all agree with that. Like maybe hopefully not this church so much, but there's probably some things we could do better. But the church with a capital C in this wide world is beset with all sorts of wrong practices and wrong teachings. I'm, can we all agree with that? If you don't agree to that, come talk to me afterwards. I mean, it's okay if you don't agree to the sign, but the church, so we've talked about the many times, right? The, the church is always being, being corrupted by the world. And that's the devil's strongest card.

[21:42] I think this year it's nationalism, Christian nationalism taking over next year. It will be money again. Money is always up there, but next year it'll be money again. So there's, there's always some form of selling indulgences. You give the church money. The church gives you some kind of righteousness. We're not going to call it an indulgence, but it looks like the same thing on some fundamental transactional level. It's the same thing. The church should be changing the world. The church should be reforming and reconciling the world to God. But the world is always corrupting. The church is always coming in with us. It comes in, in our pockets, comes in, in our minds. And this is your weekly one hour cleanse from the world. I hate to say it because the rest of the time you're, you're, you got 167 hours of social media, you know, doom scrolling, right? That's not great. It's not great. So here you are. The, we need to change the world, not let the world corrupt the church. And the number one defense against the encroachment of the world, it's not better governance in the church, although that's been tried, right? It's not separating from the world and living on a Christian commune out there in the forest because that's been tried and it's failed like 99% of the time.

[22:59] There's a few outstanding things where it hasn't failed, but almost always turns into something worse. And it's not the church trying to control the world. Notice that difference. There's not the church. We want to change the world, but we don't want to control the world. Christian nationalism is a form of trying to control the world. Let's win some elections, et cetera, blah, blah, blah. It works on the other side too. Uh, if you do that, if you try to control the world, then the world's going to come in the back door anyways, because it always follows power. And if the church starts to amass power, then the world is going to be right there, chicken gel with it.

[23:36] So how, how, do we keep the church from being corrupted by the world? The church keeps reforming itself. The only way that Luther said is what he said. My conscience is captive to the word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise. God help me. Like this is a lonely perch to say, I'm going to, I'm going to stay true to the word of God. And there's going to be a lot of pressure from all sides telling me not to, but I have to, here I stand. I can't do anything else, but may God help me in this moment because it's only with God helping you that you can have the courage to do that. So it's the word of God that we have to keep going back to like a well for a person who's dying of thirst. Like you just have to go back to the well of the word.

[24:28] And this is what our founders said. The founders of our denomination, the covenant church, a new idea would come along and they'd say, well, where is that written? Where's that? New ideas come all the time. Sometimes they're good. Sometimes they're, they're from the world and they're not great. They would say, well, where is that written? Let's compare that to scripture. Now, even if it's not exactly in scripture, scripture has some precepts and ideas and, and patterns in it where you could identify, yes, this is from the Lord. No, this isn't from the Lord. So we always sort of measure it back against scripture. Show me in the scriptures where we can support that. So I think I'm going to end there because even I had one more section, I'll save it for another time and that's okay. So the reformation, it's important. Historically, it's important. Your life is very different now today. If this hadn't happened, let's set that aside. What do we do with it? We are always reforming the church. We always have to be reforming the church. The source of the reformation of the church is the word of God. I don't have any problems with this crew. You guys are all such good Bible students, you know, so I'm preaching to the choir right now.

[25:34] You have to take the word with you out into the world. Yeah. You have to change the world and redeem it. Bring it back. Not, not from, you know, you're not trying to control it, not to try to make it in God's image. It's already in God's image, but to be light in this world and bring people to know Jesus. So you take the word out with you. Let's pray.

[25:57] Father, thank you again for your word, for the Apostle Paul teaching us on justification by faith alone. Thank you that it captured Luther, so mightily. Thank you that he had courage that came only from you. I have no doubt. And he was able to stand and Lord help us to stand in lonely places in this world with your strength and preach your world, your word to the world. And we ask this all in Jesus name. Amen.