An Introduction to the Reformation

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Transcript:

Romans chapter 1. Now you may be wondering about the things that I’ve handed out to you and why we sang that song. I mentioned to you Sunday night that we were going to be talking about something from history that occurred on this date.

And I don’t want this just to be a history lesson, but it’s important that we remember the history of what happened today. Today’s the 495th anniversary of what history has called the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. And I know that we as Baptists traditionally have not considered ourselves Protestant.

It bothers me, as a matter of fact, when we’re lumped in and we’re referred to as Protestant. When it comes to any kind of demographic thing, they’re taking a survey. I know when I was at Southgate, there were people who were in the military, and they’d ask what religion they were, I guess, for their forms, and they’d say Baptist, they’d say, oh, Protestant.

No, we’re not. It bothers me because we’re not Protestant. If you’ve read The Trail of Blood or any of those other books, there were churches that teach much like we do now that have existed from the time of Christ up until the current day.

They were called Anabaptists. They were called Waldensians. They were called Albigensians.

They were called Paulicians, Donatists, Novatians, Montanists, all sorts of different names throughout history, depending on what country they were in. They may not look exactly like us today, but they were teaching essentially the same gospel. They were teaching essentially the things that mark us out as different, believers’ baptism instead of infant baptism, all these sorts of things that were lost during the Middle Ages.

And so we can trace our history, we can trace our doctrine back to these churches and not to the doctrines that are not to the historical beginning of groups like the Lutherans and the Methodists and all these things. But when it comes to conservative Methodists and Lutherans and Presbyterians, We have more in common with them than we do the Catholics or any other group, so I understand why they lump us in there. But just know, as I teach tonight, I understand we’re not Protestant.

However, the Protestant Reformation is still something I think we can celebrate because I want you to imagine a time, and it’s not just imaginary. For us, it’s not something we’ve ever experienced. But I want you to think about a time about 500 years ago or more when you would go to church every week because that’s what’s expected of you.

You would go there and your life was hard. I don’t mean to sound like there was no joy. There was no enjoyment of life.

But life was hard. You worked constantly. Life was a struggle for most people just to survive, just to feed your family.

We think life’s a struggle today, but the struggle then was literally between life and death. If your crops didn’t come in, if you couldn’t find work, you couldn’t feed your family, you could just starve to death in front of the community around you. Life was a struggle.

Life was hard. And people found some solace as they do today in religion. People would go to the church not only because it was expected.

It was the church expected it. The law expected you to go to church. But they also found some solace there.

there was the tantalizing hope of something better that you could possibly find. At the end of all this drudgery and struggle, there was the chance at something better. And they were told, they were warned in the churches as they went week after week, they were warned of a hell that is very real that we also believe in.

They were given glimpses of a heaven that’s very real. But they were also told in the midst of this, that this heaven that they wanted so badly, you had to essentially run an obstacle course throughout your life to get there. You had to do just the right things. You had to say just the right things.

You had to attend just the right things in order to achieve heaven. You had to go to the Mass. You had to receive the communion, which they believed was the literal body and blood of Christ. They believed that when the priest sent his blessing over it, it somehow mystically transformed.

That’s why they call it transubstantiation. It was transformed into the literal body and blood of Christ. And you had to partake of that. And you had to partake of the other sacraments.

And you had to go to confession. You had to do all these things. And seemingly the goalpost was moved constantly throughout the game.

If you don’t know what I mean by that, try playing a game. Try playing a board game with somebody who keeps changing the rules throughout the game to suit them. Whatever, wherever you land or wherever they land, they change the.

. . I see chuckling back there like some of y’all are guilty of this.

I see looks and elbows going. Imagine playing a game where somebody keeps changing the rules, making them up as they go along to suit whatever best benefits them. Now, I won’t say that everybody involved in the Catholic clergy at that time was involved in this, but there was definitely a sense I get as I read historical accounts that the Catholic Church was changing teachings over time, changing the goalposts for people of what they had to do, how much they had to do, how much they had to give in order to get to heaven.

And it’s a system where you had to struggle and you had to work your whole life just to try and grasp at God’s acceptance. And you had absolutely no guarantee, absolutely no guarantee throughout your life that you had done enough. I say imagine that because we have the Bible.

We have the teaching in this church. We teach what the Bible says, that these things were written, as I mentioned Sunday night, that you may know that you have eternal life. We have assurance of eternal life in Jesus Christ. We have the scriptures we can turn to that tell us these things.

The scriptures did not, God didn’t want to leave us in doubt, and so he made some things very clear and plain in the scriptures. And we can turn to that and say we know the criteria. We know where the goal post is.

We know what has to be accomplished in order for us to have eternal life. And we know that having all of this lined out, we know the way there. But they also didn’t have the Bible in their day.

It was illegal to make or to own a copy of the Bible in the common language. All the Bibles were written in Latin, which of course was the official language of the Roman Catholic Church. Only the very highly educated in colleges and in the clergy, the monks and the priests and the bishops, they were the only ones who were literate in Latin for the most part.

And so most of the people didn’t have even the Catholic Bible in their own language. They had nothing. You had to go to the church and not understand for yourself, but accept at face value whatever you were told, because they had the book.

You didn’t, and you were completely at their mercy for knowing what it said and what it taught about eternal life. That’s why groups like the ones I mentioned, the Anabaptists, the Waldensians, they would translate the Bible into the common language of the people, and they would stick to the Bible. And so they were persecuted by the church once it gained political power.

Why the Protestant Reformation is so important, what happened 495 years ago tonight is so important, is because, yes, the churches that we look to as our historical forebears were already teaching these things, but what happened with the Protestant Reformation? It was the time when, for the first time, most Europeans heard the true gospel. Yes, I like to think of it as it wasn’t something new they rediscovered.

It was when they finally caught up to where we were. But the point is, it’s the time when the bulk of the people, for the first time, heard the things that we take for granted about eternal life. And so even though we don’t hold to the same doctrines as they do about everything, I think we can be grateful.

We can celebrate in what God did 495 years ago today. Before we get into Romans chapter 1, I want to tell you a little story as I already have. I’ve set the stage.

We sang that song just a minute ago that was written by Martin Luther, and he talks about a mighty fortress is our God. He talks about God throughout the song, God being our refuge and God doing battle on our behalf. If anybody knew that, outside of King David and some others in the Old Testament, if anybody knew that, it was Martin Luther.

Martin Luther was born in the late 1400s in a small city called Eisleben in Germany. And he was born into a sort of a middle-class family. His dad had worked very hard all of his life and wanted better for his children.

He was a copper smelter, which means he would take the copper ore and melt it down into forms that people could use and would sell it. and he was a hardworking man, also a very stern and strict man with his kids, and so was the mother. And Martin Luther had a rough upbringing.

His father put all the extra money he had into sending young Martin Luther to school to become a lawyer, because at that point you could earn a lot of money by being a lawyer. And so when he was 18 years old, he entered the university at Erfurt. I have no idea where that is other than it’s somewhere in Germany, and apparently was a big college town at that day, because Martin Luther writes later on that the college and the town were a beer house and a whorehouse.

So apparently it was a big college party town. Took him four years of study there to earn his degree, his master’s degree in law. And in 1505, he graduated from the university.

I promise all of this will not be just dry dates and things. I’m just trying to set the stage for you. In 1505, after four years of study, he graduated with his master’s degree in law.

He’d gone back home to visit his family, and he was riding back to Erfurt one night on horseback when a major storm hit and he was caught out in the forest in the middle of nowhere in a thunderstorm. And historians to this day still debate about what happened, but whether it was lightning or whatever, he got caught out in it. And Martin Luther tells the story that he fell off his horse and fell to his knees, terrified by the thunderstorm, and made a deal with God.

Actually made a deal with God through the saints and cried out to St. Anna that if she would intercede on his behalf to God, if she would protect him from the storm, if God would spare his life, he would become a monk. and his life was spared, he went back and to the great irritation of his father.

He threw away all the money that he’d spent on that fancy law degree and decided to take the vows of poverty and obedience and all these other things and entered an Augustinian monastery in Erfurt. And Martin Luther, from that time on, became obsessed with the idea of trying to please God. Became obsessed with the idea of trying to do enough to please God.

And he, as a monk, as a literate man, he would study the scriptures and he would confess his sins and the stories. He almost became, almost to the point of it being a mental illness, I think. He was so obsessed with the concept.

Not that we should not want to please God. But he would go to extremes. They tell a story that when he was in the monastery, at one point he went into confession and confessed his sins over and over for four hours.

Because he was obsessed with the idea that if he didn’t remember a sin, he couldn’t confess it. And if he couldn’t confess it, it couldn’t be forgiven. And if it couldn’t be forgiven, he couldn’t have God’s acceptance and he couldn’t make it into heaven.

So he confessed for four hours. And when the priest finally cut him off and said, enough, he said, I think we’ll have to start again in the morning. Martin Luther said, I think we’ll have to start again in the morning.

He would pray and fast for so long in trying to please God and became obsessed with the fact that the harder he worked, the more he realized he fell short of God’s standards. And he would pray and fast for so long that the monks would have to go and get him from his cell and force feed him because they were afraid he was going to die.

and he finally got to he got to the point I believe of getting there were people who would beat themselves they would scourge themselves because they thought if they could suffer enough, if they could suffer like Christ, they could erase some of their sins and the harder he worked to try to get God’s acceptance folks the same thing is true today, the harder we work to try to get God’s acceptance the further we are from it because our works add nothing and he became very aware of that and finally a friend in the ministry sent him off to the University of Wittenberg because he said, we’ve got to do something where you’re not sequestered in this monastery all day just trying to work on your own spiritual well-being because you’re going to lose your mind. We’ve got to force you to be out around people.

So they sent him to the University of Wittenberg to make him a professor of theology, and he studied there while he was teaching and eventually earned his doctorate, but he would lecture on the Psalms and on Hebrews and Galatians and Romans, still preoccupied with the idea that he could not earn God’s acceptance. And think to this time when, I mean, he was plagued by this even as an educated man who could read the scriptures, but going by the church’s teachings at that time, he was literally killing himself, trying to earn God’s acceptance, and was no closer to having it. Imagine a point where you’re told to work through your entire life, and you still have no assurance that God’s going to forgive anything.

He goes to the University of Wittenberg, and as he’s lecturing on the scriptures, he came to a passage that troubled him. That’s a passage we’re going to look at just briefly tonight before we move to some of these other things. Romans chapter 1 troubled him, as Romans chapter 1 has troubled a lot of people.

It goes into talking about sin and the sinfulness of mankind, but let’s start in verse 14. It says, I am debtor to both the Greeks and to the barbarians, both to the wise and to the unwise, so as much in me is, so as much as there is in me, I am ready to preach the gospel to you that are at Rome also. Paul tells the believers at Rome that he feels like he’s in debt to the people around him to share the gospel with as many people as he can, so he’s ready to come and preach to them at Rome also.

He says in verse 16, For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. And here’s where, from what I’ve read, and again, I’m not an expert on the life of Martin Luther, but knowing this was coming up, I’ve done a lot of study, and I read about him some as a child and wanted to refresh what I knew. But from what I’ve read, verse 17 is what really got him and made him start to think differently.

It says, For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, the just shall live by faith. He was consumed by the idea of God being holy and separated from us because of our sins, the concept of us being corrupt to the core and separated from God. And how do we get justification?

How do we get the slate wiped clean before God? He tried to work for it. He tried to give enough.

He’d tried to sacrifice everything he had. He’d tried to suffer enough, and he still wasn’t any closer. And then he comes across the verse that says, the just shall live by faith.

And that verse got him to think. He studied more and more on it, and gradually came not to accept the church’s teaching on salvation anymore. Because he also had one thing going for him that I think a lot of people didn’t.

Having come from his scholarly background in law, He realized also that his own reasoning, human reasoning, philosophy had gotten him no closer to God’s acceptance. And he realized early on, even before he became a monk, even before he got to this point and went to Wittenberg, that it was only through the Scriptures that he could have knowledge of God. It was only through the Scriptures that God had revealed himself.

And so he began to pour over the Scriptures, and the more he did, he came back to this idea of justification by faith, which was completely opposite of what the church taught. The church taught that faith plus good works brought justification, whereas Luther began to understand what the Bible teaches, what the Anabaptists had taught all along, that faith brings justification and good works. And so his idea about it began to change.

And about that time, they began what was called the selling of indulgences. It was a piece of paper that would absolve you of the sins you had committed. It was signed with the pope’s name or the bishop’s name or whoever, and if you would pay the money to them, you could purchase this little piece of paper that basically lets you off the hook for your sins.

And what made Luther even angrier was that a man named Johann Tetzel came to a nearby city and began selling these indulgences and actually said that for people who were already in purgatory, you could buy it on their behalf and their sins would be forgiven. It would shorten their time there and would throw these emotional sales pitches of can’t you just hear your loved ones burning in the fire and they’re crying out, Can’t you spare a coin? Can’t you spare?

And he would sing a song that as soon as the coin into the coffer clings, the soul from purgatory heavenward springs. It made Luther angry. Made Luther angry because he had already begun to realize that salvation was the gift of God.

It was bought and paid for by Jesus Christ. And here they were trying to get people to pay money for what Jesus Christ had already purchased. It made him angry. And what’s more, even the Catholic clergy didn’t believe that the indulgences did anything.

When you look back at it in history, half of the, I don’t know about throughout Europe, but in this town, every indulgence he sold, and it was for exorbitant amounts of money, every indulgence he sold to the poor, half of it went directly to Pope Leo X so that he could finance the building of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, and the other half went to the Archbishop of Mainz and Magdeburg so that he could pay the Pope back for letting him have the office of Archbishop of Mainz and Magdeburg. And Luther became incensed not only at the idea that they were making people pay money for what Jesus Christ had already offered them freely, but also the fact that they were building their churches on the backs of the poor when they already had so much money anyway.

So Luther, upset, Tetzel had begun selling the indulgences near Wittenberg in 1516. And it was a year later, it was on October the 31st, 1517, that Luther wrote up a list of 95 theses, 95 complaints, against the selling of indulgences, and against some of the greatest aspects of the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church. And history tells us that he went and nailed that list of complaints to the door of the castle church in the city of Wittenberg.

Now that seems like such a revolutionary act, but in a college town, that’s what was done. It outlined the things that he wanted to discuss and debate, and that’s just what you did. You went and put it on the doors like the bulletin board.

But on this day, 495 years ago, he did what we now see as a revolutionary act of going and nailing those complaints against the abuse of the church to the door. And he mailed off copies, sent handwritten copies to his superior, the bishop, and to the archbishop who was responsible for the selling of the indulgences. Sent them handwritten copies.

Now, it was a few months later that some friends of his got a hold of the printing press that had been invented a couple decades before. This wouldn’t have been possible to spread his ideas like this before that because you had to handwrite everything. But they translated his complaints into German.

While the church hierarchy was still dealing with how are we going to respond to this, they translated his words into German and printed up thousands and thousands of copies and distributed them across the country where the people started reading them and for the first time said, what? They’ve been telling us this and it’s not this, and it caused great controversy. And so the church called on Luther to give an account of his views.

Well, he was sent to debate with Catholic scholars, and he’d done more study and more study, and he, in 1518, first brought out the idea that neither the church nor the pope were infallible, and said, and I question whether or not the pope, the papacy, is part of the biblical church. Well, while the pope was still trying to decide what to do about his teachings, this quickly put him on the pope’s bad side, and took away any chance, really, of a peaceful resolution between them. And when he did this, it was only because of a sympathetic political ruler, a sympathetic prince named Frederick III, who happened to be in charge of the city where he was debating.

It was only because he was sympathetic that the church wasn’t able to have him arrested right then and there on the spot. And so Pope Leo, a couple years later, took them a couple years. He wrote up a bull, a collection of letters, giving Luther 60 days to recant 41 of the statements in the 95 Thesis that they decided were heretical. He said, if you’ll recant, we’ll pretend this never happened, but there are going to be consequences if you don’t.

So Luther receives this, and in response, he goes and publicly sets fire to the letter that the Pope had sent him and sends the Pope a copy of one of his books in response. I did not realize that until today that in his response, he sent the Pope one of his books on the papacy. I like this guy even more the more I read about it.

It took some guts. And so shortly thereafter, the Pope excommunicated him from the Roman Catholic Church in 1521. Think about what a.

. . We would not bat an eye about this if the Pope said, OK, we don’t like you.

You can’t be part of our church. Thank God. I’d say that today.

But in 1521, you didn’t get into heaven, or at least so they thought and were taught. You didn’t get into heaven unless you were part of the church and had the church’s blessing. Imagine the courage of the man to be willing to say, I have to side with the Bible.

It doesn’t matter what you say. salvation’s not in this organization anyway so at that point when he was unfazed by that within just a few months the church called on the they were not able to stop him so they called on the political leaders and said you’ve got to clamp down on this guy so the political leaders insisted that he come to an imperial court in the city of worms to give an account of what he’d taught he had to come and answer for himself and when he came they had to actually the emperor had to issue a letter saying that he was not to be harmed on the way because people wanted to kill him that he was not to be killed, he was not to be harmed, he was to be allowed to come freely to the imperial court to give an answer for what he did, for what he’d said.

And he goes there and several things went on through that court, but one of the most famous was when he was shown a copy, he was shown a pile of his writings and books, and he was asked, did you write these and do you still stand by them? And he said on the first question, yes, I did write these. He said, can I have a little time to think about it before?

And I don’t think he was questioning going back, I think he was preparing his response. He Can I have a little time to think on the second one? So they gave him until the next day.

And when he was asked again, do you stand behind the statements that you’ve made? I’ve copied it down so I could get it verbatim. His response to them was, Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures, or by clear reason, for I do not trust either in the Pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves, I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted, and my conscience is captive to the Word of God.

I cannot and will not recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. Here I stand, I can do no other. May God help me.

Amen. At that point, Luther left. The emperor and his people were left there to debate for a few days what to do with him, and they decided to make him an outlaw.

He was declared an outlaw throughout the Holy Roman Empire. All of Germany, most of Italy, Austria, a big part of Central Europe, he was declared enemy of the state. That meant anybody who found him anywhere could kill him legally.

I forget who I’ve talked to, but I told you the joke I used to be told about in Texas going to court and the defense saying, well, judge, you need to kill him. The judge said, well, fine, but don’t let me catch you killing anybody that doesn’t need killing. It was a joke that was told to me.

I’m not great at telling it, but I thought it was funny because it just fits Texas so well. But basically, he was considered by the government at that point somebody who needed killing, and anybody who found him could kill him. And it was made a criminal offense to give him food, to give him clothing, to give him housing, to give him help of any kind.

You could be thrown in prison as well. So on his way back home, the same sympathetic prince who kept him from getting arrested the first time, Frederick III, the elector of Saxony, I believe his name was, had him kidnapped. Had him kidnapped so it would look like somebody had just taken him off and killed him and that was it.

And actually kidnapped and took him back to his castle at Wartburg where they could hide him away. And he continued his ministry on there for several years. We won’t go into any detail about that.

But that was essentially the start of the Protestant Reformation. The man put his life on the line because he discovered something in Scripture that people had not known about or they had ignored for centuries, that the just shall live by faith. And the reason I tell you about this tonight is not because I want us to be Lutherans, but because it’s a monumental thing to think about, to be in this position where, ladies and gentlemen, if nobody had ever taken this step, we might very well be living in Europe today and unsure of ever getting to heaven.

But because somebody, again, it wasn’t a new teaching, but it was the first time the masses had ever heard it, because somebody put his neck on the line to make this teaching, to make the Word of God readily available to the people, people all over the continent, and now people all over the world for the first time could hear the true gospel, not pay enough money and will give you a piece of paper that lets you out of your sins, but that Jesus Christ died for us, that Jesus Christ died for us, and now we have free access to the grace of God. This paper that I’ve given you tonight, I wanted to talk to you about these things called the Five Solas. These things called the Five Solas.

The reason I want to tell you about these is because these all go back to the Protestant Reformation. Now, they were taught in the Bible long before that. I believe they were taught in true New Testament churches throughout all the centuries, but most of Europe rediscovered these five points, these five essential things about the gospel at the time of the Protestant Reformation.

And being that I’m talking to you about the anniversary tonight, I wanted to give you a crash course in these things, not that you don’t already know them, but putting them together and saying, these are what the Reformation became about. These are what eventually caused people throughout Europe to abandon the Catholic Church. And these are things that we, there’s plenty we disagree with the Protestants on, but these are some things that we agree on.

These are the essentials of the gospel. If we don’t get these right, it doesn’t matter a whole lot else what else we do get right. But these are some things that we can agree on.

These are some things that we need to know, and these are some principles that even today we need to stand on, regardless of whether the Catholic Church or the New Agers or the Judaizers or the secularists or whatever they tell us, whoever it is, when we’re attacked on all sides today about the gospel and they want to chip away at it and say, well, can’t we change this, make it a little less offensive? Can’t we rework what it says over here? These are some basic principles that people have fought and died over for centuries.

And when I say fought, I don’t mean we’ve gone to war to make people accept these. But I mean we’ve fought for in the sense of debating. We’ve fought for in the sense of standing firm on these things, and people have even died for these things for hundreds of years.

And they’re things that we shouldn’t give up without a fight. This first, and you may wonder, what is this? This is Latin.

Now, I didn’t give you Latin to prove how smart I am because I don’t speak Latin. All of the debate in his day was written in Latin, and some of these terms that theologians use today have just carried over. I’d much rather everybody just said, Scripture alone, this alone, but sola scriptura just sounds kind of nice, sounds kind of theological, so they stick with it.

The first of these that we hold to is sola scriptura, and I’ve given you a blank below. It means by the Scripture alone. By the Scripture alone.

That was a radical concept. We take for granted that the Bible says, talks about the people in Berea in the book of Acts, and says these were more noble than those in Thessalonica in that they received the word with all readiness of mind and searched the scriptures daily whether those things were so. We take for granted what it says in Acts 17, that these people heard Paul, heard what he said, and instead of just taking at face value what he said, they received what he said, but then they went and checked it against the scriptures.

We take for granted that when the preacher says something, we should check it against the word of God. We take for granted that when the radio says something, When a church says something, we should check it against the Word of God. They didn’t even have the Word of God in this day to check it against. They had no choice but to go by what the church said.

Ladies and