Message Information
- Key Scriptures: Romans 1:17, KJV
- Series: Individual Messages (2012), no. 23
- Date: Wednesday, October 31, 2012 (Evening)
- Venue: Eastside Baptist Church — Fayetteville, Arkansas
- Speaker: Jared Byrns
- Audio File: Open/Download
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Text
A World Without Assurance
The Protestant Reformation is something we can celebrate because I want you to imagine a time, and it’s not imaginary. For us, it’s not something we’ve ever experienced. 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 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 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. 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 run an obstacle course throughout your life to get there. You had to do the right things.
You had to say the right things. You had to attend 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 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.
The Scriptures Hidden from the People
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. 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 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. 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 is why earlier dissenting groups and reform-minded believers who translated the Bible into the common language of the people, and who tried to hold closely to Scripture, were often persecuted once the church gained political power. The Protestant Reformation, what happened 495 years ago tonight, is so important because many of these doctrines were not new; they were rooted in Scripture and had been preserved by believers in different times and places. But the Reformation brought them into public view across much of Europe.
The point is that the bulk of the people, for the first time, heard the things that we take for granted about eternal life. And even though we may not agree with every doctrine that came out of the Reformation, 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.
Luther’s Burdened Conscience
Martin Luther’s hymn, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” speaks of God as our refuge and of God doing battle on behalf of his people. 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. He was a hardworking man, also a very stern and strict man with his kids, and so was his mother.
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. 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. 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. 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. He finally reached the point where he realized that some people would beat themselves and scourge themselves because they thought if they could suffer enough, if they could suffer like Christ, they could erase some of their sins.
The harder he worked to try to get God’s acceptance, the more aware he became that our works add nothing. The same thing is true today: the harder we work to try to get God’s acceptance, the further we are from it. 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.
The Just Shall Live by Faith
He went 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 pore 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: faith brings justification, and good works follow. And so his idea about it began to change.
The Clash over Indulgences
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 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.
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.
Here I Stand
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 is not in this organization anyway. When he was unfazed by that, within just a few months the church called on the political leaders because they were not able to stop him. They 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 had taught.
He had to come and answer for himself. When he came, the emperor had to issue a letter saying that he was not to be harmed on the way, because people wanted to kill him. He was not to be killed, he was not to be harmed, and he was to be allowed to come freely to the imperial court to give an answer for what he had 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 said, 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.
The Five Solas
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.
I want 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.
These doctrines were rooted in Scripture and had been preserved by believers in different times and places, but much of Europe rediscovered these five points, these five essential things about the gospel, at the time of the Protestant Reformation. Since we are talking about the anniversary tonight, I want to give you a crash course in these things—not because you do not already know them, but because putting them together helps us see what the Reformation became about. These are truths that eventually caused people throughout Europe to break with the Roman Catholic Church. And while we may disagree with some Reformation traditions on other doctrines, these are gospel truths we can affirm.
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.
Scripture Alone
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, It means by 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 gentlemen, as Luther discovered early on, our human reasoning, our human philosophy does nothing to bring us closer to God. We know about God.
We know about His nature and His character. We know about His plan of salvation only because He’s chosen to tell us about it through His revelation in the book, in the Bible. And when people tell us, well, we have to go by church tradition, and I know this sounds like an anti-Catholic message, it’s not just the Catholics who do this, but when somebody says we’ve got to go by our religious traditions, we’ve got to go by what we’ve always done before, we’ve got to go by, well, let’s be reasonable, what philosophy and psychology and all these things tell us. Ladies and gentlemen, when it comes to the truth about who God is and what He’s done to save us, we need no other rule than what the Scripture tells us.
Now, that doesn’t mean that we’re not reasonable and think through the way we apply things. But we cannot elevate reason and tradition or anything else to the same level as Scripture. Scripture is the final arbiter. Scripture calls the shots in what we believe and what we do.
That’s sola scriptura. That’s one of the things that he fought for.
Grace Alone
The second is sola gratia. Sola gratia. And that means by grace alone. And again, we take for granted that salvation is by grace through faith.
We take for granted what it says here in Romans 11. 6. And if by grace, then it is no more of works. Otherwise, grace is no more grace.
But if it be of works, then it is no more grace. Otherwise, work is no more work. We take for granted that salvation is the free gift of God. We take for granted that it’s offered to us not because we deserve his forgiveness, not because we deserve his acceptance, but in spite of the fact that we don’t deserve it.
We take for granted that salvation is given because of the goodness of God and not our own goodness. We accept that. Many of us have been taught that since the time we were young children. And it seems like, yeah, that’s grace.
That’s what we’ve been taught. Ladies and gentlemen, that went against everything that they were taught in that day. He had grown up thinking, I’ve got to be good enough. I’ve got to be good enough.
I’ve got to be good enough. And the realization, the weight that that would lift off your shoulders to go from thinking, I’ve got to be good enough to, oh, I have eternal life because God is good and because God chooses to give me what I don’t deserve. Salvation is by grace. Anybody who tells us, oh, you just be good enough, you’ll be all right.
If the good outweighs the bad, that’s not necessarily just a Catholic church teaching. We hear that in the prevailing culture. We hear that in churches. We hear that from people that occupy pews, maybe even at our church on Sunday morning.
If I’m just good enough, if my good outweighs my bad, I’ll be all right. Sola gratia means it’s by grace alone. It’s only because of the goodness of God and Him giving us what we don’t deserve and what we can never deserve.
Faith Alone
So how do we get that grace? Do we work for it? Well, the Bible contradicts the idea that we work for it, and yet there are people that believe, oh yeah, if I work hard enough, God will give me grace. Folks, grace and works.
It says here in the verse we just talked about in Romans 11, that if it’s grace, it’s not work. If it’s work, it’s not grace. So how do we have access to the grace of God? It’s where sola fide comes in.
How are we justified? How is the slate actually clean before God? Do we just work hard and He gives it to us in spite of the fact that we don’t measure up? No, it’s by faith alone.
And with each of these, I’ve given you one verse to look at. I don’t want you to think I just pulled out one verse that happened to sound like it went with. These are teachings that are found throughout all the Bible. I challenge you, each of these Solas, go through and look at it.
You’ll find it throughout the Bible. But I couldn’t very well print the entire Bible under each point. So I just gave you a little snippet to look at and to start your study. But I encourage you to go through and study, and you will find these principles taught throughout the entire Bible.
Sola Fide, Romans 117, we’ve already looked at. For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith. As it is written, the just shall live by faith. Where are the goalposts when it comes to God wiping our slate clean?
Because we know we can’t get into heaven by deserving it. God has to make us, God has to make us acceptable to him. Well, how does that come about? Where are the goalposts?
What am I shooting for? It’s faith. He says the just, those who have been justified by God, have been justified by faith. We don’t have to work.
We don’t have to do, we don’t have to earn and just pray that God makes up the difference where we fall short. All we have to do is believe that His grace is freely available to us. All we have to do is believe that Christ died for us. Now, I’m not saying that that means, oh, I just believe Jesus died and I’m all right.
We know plenty of people who, for them, it’s an intellectual decision where, okay, I’m choosing to believe Jesus died because that works for me, but it’s never been a decision of the heart. There’s never been real faith. There’s never been a time when they were really born again where there was faith. And they said, Jesus Christ died for me.
Because it’s not just faith in anything, it’s faith in Christ, which will bring us to the next point. But it’s also a faith that does produce results. As I said a minute ago, the Catholic Church at that time taught that faith plus good works brought justification. Whereas the Bible teaches that faith brings justification plus good works.
But it’s all by faith, not by our goodness, not by earning anything. But it matters what we put our faith in.
Christ Alone
That brings us to solus Christus, which means by Christ alone. It matters what we put our faith in. It’s not faith in the church. It’s not faith in my membership.
It’s faith in Christ. If we’re putting our faith in anything else or even Christ plus anything else, if there’s anything to our faith other than Christ, it’s not valid faith. It’s Christ alone. You don’t need the, you don’t, ladies and gentlemen, you do not need me as a mediator.
You do not need me to get you to heaven. You are in big trouble if you are trusting in me or this church to get you to heaven. You don’t need any human priest. You don’t need any human effort by anyone.
Christ is our mediator. It says here in 1 Timothy, For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Jesus Christ. That means when it came time for somebody to reconcile us to God, the order was so tall that only Jesus Christ could accomplish it. And to say that now we need the church to intercede between us and Christ, or we need Mary to intercede between us and Christ, or the saints to intercede, folks, is ridiculous and goes against the Bible.
The Bible teaches that there is one God and one mediator. That mediator is the go-between. If Jesus Christ was not powerful enough to accomplish our reconciliation with God, if Jesus Christ wasn’t capable of being a mediator between us and God, I seriously doubt that the Pope, as wonderful as he may be, could accomplish the same thing. I seriously doubt that Mary, even though she’s blessed among women, could accomplish the same thing.
There’s nobody who can accomplish it if Christ didn’t. But because Christ is our mediator between us and God, that’s all the mediator we need.
Glory to God Alone
And so our faith for salvation is in Christ alone. And finally, that brings us tonight to soli deo gloria, glory to God alone. In all of this, in all of this, there is nobody to glorify but God. There’s nobody who receives the credit for us being born again.
There’s nobody that deserves credit for the transformation other than God. And people will look at us as Christians and say, Oh, he’s changed. He lives such a good life now. Folks, there’s nobody to praise or to glorify for how good I may do or how good you may do but God because he’s the one who’s worked in us and transformed us from the inside out.
I hear people, I read where people write on Facebook. I understand the sentiment behind it, but I can’t agree with the theology where somebody will get saved and they’ll say, good job, or I’m so proud of you. And I understand we’re happy for them that they got saved. It’s a wonderful thing and something we should rejoice in.
But what in the world are you proud of them for? They recognize that they were a worthless sinner. God did all the saving. And if somebody, when I was five years old, would have said, I’m proud of you, I probably would have taken that as a compliment.
Now, if somebody said, I’m so proud of you for getting saved, I would think I didn’t do anything. There’s nothing for me to glory in in realizing how awful I was and realizing how good God is. God did all the saving. God does all the transforming.
God does all the changing. Everything that needed to be accomplished for our salvation was accomplished by God. It was thought out, planned, and executed by Him from first to last. And it’s no wonder, given that, that Paul writes to the church at Ephesus, unto him be glory in the church by Jesus Christ throughout all ages, world without end.
Amen. Everything that goes on in the church, everything that goes on in our Christian lives, the glory, the credit is due to be given to God because he deserves it all. Everything we do should be to his glory and to his credit.
A Gospel Worth Defending
This is just a very fast introduction to these things. Theologians have written for centuries about these things and not exhausted the topics. So I haven’t given you everything you need to know about these, but these are five important principles that they rediscovered 495 years ago tonight. Five things that are vitally important to our spiritual life, to our spiritual well-being.
And these are principles that the world around us still today hates and wants us to give up. We can’t afford to surrender on any of these five points, because if we do, it’s not the gospel. It has no power to save anyone.