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[ Music ] [ Applause ] >> The scripture reading of the morning is taken from Paul's letter to the Romans, the fifth chapter. I begin the reading at the verse numbered one.

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Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God.

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More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope,

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and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, which has been given to us. And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his word.

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Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. Great effects have great causes,

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and so it was with the Reformation. The Reformation was surely one of the greatest effects of human history. It not only changed the face of the church, it not only influenced all of the subsequent course of the history of Western civilization,

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it quite literally changed the future of the world. We might then properly ask of such a great effect, what were its causes? Historians enumerate a number of causes for the Reformation, but surely principal among these

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are the sickness and the arrogance of the church of Luther's day, and the flaming, incendiary personality of Martin Luther himself. Luther was born in 1483, the son of a peasant family. He decided early to go into the study of the law,

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but in 1905, contradictory to that, he entered study for the priesthood. In 1507, he was ordained a priest, and was set to the task of teaching at the University of Wittenberg. At the same time, he was given leadership and authority over 11 different monasteries,

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and he continued this work very effectively and successfully, until the year 1516, when suddenly Luther came to see something in scripture to which the church of his day was blind.

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What Luther came to see was that God's love is so great that all you have to do is trust it, and you will be saved.

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On October 31, 1517, 467 years ago this next Wednesday, Luther nailed to the door of the church in Wittenberg 95 theses defending the sovereignty of God's love.

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The rest of the story of the Reformation you know. It was a magnificent effect, and it came about principally because of the spiritual insight and the courage of this one man.

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His impact upon subsequent history is beyond our measuring. It may surprise you to know that there are only two persons who have ever lived who have had more books written about them than Martin Luther.

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One of those persons, our Lord Jesus Christ, and the other, interestingly enough, Abraham Lincoln. Today I want to think with you about where Martin Luther took his stand. But before I do that, I must share with you a prior word.

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The Roman Catholic Church of today, of the 20th century, meeting in its Second Vatican Council just a few years ago, began a complete reassessment of the life and work of Martin Luther. And many of the leading and most profound scholars in the Roman Catholic Church today

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acknowledged that Martin Luther was right, and that the church of his day should have been more sensitive to what he was saying. Had the position of the Roman Catholic Church in that century been as it is today, perhaps there would have been no Reformation.

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No Reformation Sunday such as this Sunday. I want you to understand that in order to grasp this truth, that when I speak of where Luther stood, I am talking about where he stood in terms of the church of his day.

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The Roman Catholic Church of today is not, in many regards, the same church that it was 500 years ago. I call you to think of where Luther stood then in order to recall the importance of his message, and also in order that we might recommit ourselves to it.

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So where did he stand? And how may we stand with him? Well, he stood first against those who misunderstood the nature of justification. The church of that day taught that a person's salvation

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came about as the result of the activity of God and man. That is, God came in love, but that love coming from God had to be met by the good works, the valued accomplishments of men.

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Theologian, an earlier theologian, whose thought was still primary at the time of Luther, taught that until your good deeds exceeded your bad deeds, you had no hope of heaven. And Thomas Aquinas, who is still the official theologian of the Roman Catholic Church,

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taught that God reaches down to us, but only partway. And we must then reach up to him with our good deeds if we are going to be saved. Now, Martin Luther, as a young man, believed this. And he gave himself to trying to accumulate good deeds.

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He threw himself into the tasks of faith. He literally whipped his own body in order to subdue his flesh. He prayed earnestly, twenty out of every twenty-four hours. He plunged into the monastic responsibilities which were his,

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to such a degree that his peers in the monasteries looked at him with awe and respect. But he found no peace. He found never any sense of having done enough good deeds

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to have gained the blessing of God. And then in July of 1517, Luther was working on a lecture based upon Paul's letter to the Galatians, chapter three. And there the words appear,

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"The law was our custodian until Christ came, but now that we have faith in Jesus Christ, we no longer need the law as custodian, for in Jesus Christ all are the sons of God through faith."

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Now, when Luther read those words, suddenly the whole message of the New Testament snapped into focus. That salvation depended not upon the works of men,

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but upon the supreme work of God in sending his Son, Jesus Christ. This is the message of the Scriptures. It is perhaps nowhere said more succinctly or eloquently

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than in Romans, where we read that no human being is justified before God on the basis of his good works. The righteousness of God is given to us through our faith in Jesus Christ.

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And a man is justified by faith apart from his works. In other words, what the New Testament teaches and what Luther grasped was this, that salvation is not something that we attain.

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It is rather something that we obtain. And we obtain it not through our own efforts. It is a gift given to us by God. Now, in order to understand this better,

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it might be well to take a moment to look at this little word "justify." When we use the word "justify" in our English language, we usually mean to advance arguments in our own behalf. When a person seeks to justify himself,

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he tries to defend his own behavior, to prove the rightness or the correctness of what he has done. But that is not the meaning of the word "justify" in the Greek language,

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the language in which our New Testament was written. Quite to the contrary. In the New Testament, the word "justify" means that you treat a person

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as if that person were altogether innocent of any wrongdoing. In other words, what the New Testament teaches is that it's not the responsibility of any man or woman to seek to justify herself or himself.

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Quite to the contrary. God justifies us, that is, God counts us as innocent when we simply have faith in him. I always think of it in terms of the question

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which was put to Abraham Lincoln toward the end of the Civil War. They asked him how he was going to treat the rebel South after the war was over, and he said, "I will treat the South as if it had never been away."

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And what is being said in the New Testament about God's justification is this. God treats us as if we had never been away. Think of the pictures of God

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that are spread upon the New Testament pages. A shepherd who takes more delight in finding one sheep that was lost than in the 99 sheep who had enough good sense

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not to get lost in the first place. Or an eccentric host who invites the country club set to dinner and they're too busy to come,

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and so he goes out into the alleys and the soup kitchens and he invites in a veritable freak show of individuals, men who have no legs and sell shoelaces, women who wear six coats and visit garbage dumps,

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winos with their brown bags holding their pint bottles, the idiot who stands on the corner and waves to every car that goes by. He invites all of these to his damask covered table.

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He lights the candles, the champagne flows, and then he turns to the orchestra and bids them play. And what do they play? Why, amazing grace, of course.

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Or God is shown to us in the New Testament as a father who has a bad kid. And he runs away and he wastes everything that he has and he decides that he better go back home

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because at least his father's a good meal ticket. And he prepares a little speech of apology, a speech which he never gets to give, because as soon as his father sees him coming,

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he runs down the driveway, he throws his arms around this kid, almost knocks him down with his laughter and his tears and his whiskers. He never says to the boy, "Have you learned your lesson?"

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He never says, "Now go upstairs and apologize to your mother and tell her you'll never do this again." Instead he says, "Bring out the food and the drink and let us make merry,"

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which means they cranked up the stereo and had a great time inviting all of the neighbors. He treated the boy as if the boy had never been away. This is the New Testament message,

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that salvation is God's gift. Nothing that we gain, but that which God gives. And that's the first stand that Luther took. And that stand offended many people.

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Then, as it does now. Because you see, that stand not only holds up the generosity of God, but it also points

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to the utter sinfulness and inability of man. And this is where Luther took his second stand. He stood against those who misunderstood the nature of the human condition.

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You see, the theology of the church at that time taught that it was possible for you to get God into debt to you. It was possible to do so many good deeds that God owed you salvation.

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It was, in fact, possible to do more deeds than were necessary to get God to owe you salvation. So many good deeds that some of your bonus points could be given to others who had an insufficiency.

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In other words, the relationship between God and man was seen not as a relationship of love, but a relationship of law. Not where God lovingly gives to all those who believe salvation,

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but rather, that you fulfilled your part of the contract by a certain number of good deeds, and when you went to God with your part of the contract fulfilled, then He was obligated to come through with His part of the contract as well.

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A legal relationship. Now to this the Bible says no. The Bible says none are righteous, not one. The Bible says all have turned astray,

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and everyone has gone aside. The Bible says no human being will be able to justify himself in God's sight by his own works. The Bible says all of our righteousness is like filthy rags.

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The Bible says quite simply that if a man's hope of salvation rests in himself, then he is without hope. For he is so lost in his own sin, that he can contribute nothing to his own saving.

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Now this does not mean that all people are equally bad, and this does not mean that anyone is as bad as he or she could be, and this does not mean that we are unable to do anything that is good, and this does not mean that human nature in itself is evil.

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What it means is that mankind has moved into a state in which man would rather rule himself than be ruled by God. It is an essentially rebellious relationship against God. It's rather like a band of pirates.

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Now this band of pirates might be a hard-working group. They might build a very fine ship and keep it in excellent trim. They might have rules and regulations within their piratical band, and they might honor those rules and regulations.

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In fact, they may love each other and be willing to give their lives for one another. But the fact of the matter is, they are all still pirates. And although they may do good things for each other, they are still living outside of the law.

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And they cannot be expected to be treated as just in the eyes of the law until they confess the fact that they're pirates and surrender to the law. Now just so, we live in a kind of piratical state. There is what you might call a deep and fundamental crack

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that runs through all of the human experience. And that means it runs through all of our hearts as well. So that the good that we want to do, we don't do. And the evil that we do not want to do, we often do do.

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And when we do manage to pull off something that is good, we congratulate ourselves on it so that our goodness is immediately infected with pride. We think somehow that God is going to say how good we are because of what we have done. When in fact, our whole lives are being lived out of relationship with Him in a rebellious state.

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My sin is not only the name of a perfume, it is a stinking reality in the human experience. And the worst aspect of this sin is to deny that it's in us. I'm carrying right now at this very moment,

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the heaviest burden that any preacher ever has to carry into a pulpit. Because you see, unlike most salesmen, who work very hard to bring their customers up to their price, I am working in God's name to try to bring you down to God's price.

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See what everybody does, they want to higgle and haggle over this matter. I'll do something for God or I'll promise something to God or I'll be something to God. And then when I do these things, God will owe me glory. When the fact of the matter is that our lives are so marred and mauled and messed up,

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and we even in our goodness so wound and hurt other people, consciously or unconsciously, the web is so thick amongst us that we cannot separate ourselves from it. We are so caught in this that we have nothing to offer to God. But He asks us to offer nothing.

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He only asks us to believe in His love. You see, the love of God can only flow into an empty place. If your heart is filled with yourself, and with some kind of proposition you plan to offer to the Almighty,

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or if your heart is filled with anything other, your associations, your church, anything other than your utter dependence upon God, then that heart is not empty and there is no room for God's love in it. But when you stand empty and naked before God and say,

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"I believe your love and this is my only hope," then He treats you as though you had never been away. And this was Luther's second stand. And his third stand is closely related to it.

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Because he stood against those who misunderstood the nature of God's grace. You see, the church at that time taught that the grace of God was a kind of energy or a force or a substance. One of the theologians who was popular in the day talked about it as the divine essence which comes into us. He used the word which impregnates us.

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And the way in which we get this grace, it was taught, was through participating in the sacraments of the church. When you receive baptism and holy communion and the other sacraments, which were considered to be sacraments then,

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you receive this grace of God, this magical substance which entered into you and made you whole. Grace was not God saying to you, "You are forgiven." Quite the contrary. Grace was that which moved into a person and made that person perfect

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so that that person did not have to be forgiven anymore. They were made pure and whole. And you see, the dangerous part about a doctrine like that is this. If the way in which you get God's grace is through the sacraments

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and the church controls the sacraments, that means there's no way that you can get to God except that which is offered to you by the church. And this is what broke Luther's heart.

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For you see, in those days, they sold the grace of God. There was a Pope, Leo X, who wanted to build and expand St. Peter's. And he needed a lot of money to do it. And he decided he would raise money by selling God's grace.

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He sent people out into all the world with documents that stated that if you purchased this document, sufficient of God's grace was given to you to save you for eternity with God or to save any others for whom you brought this service.

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The man who came up into Luther's part of the country was a man named Tetzel. He actually had a singing commercial, which we have. "As soon as your coin in the coffer clings, the soul from purgatory springs."

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It sounds absurd, yet I would suggest to you that even today there are people who try to purchase their way through mass cards and the like, purchase their way into the kingdom of heaven. Now what this does is it cheapens God's grace.

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It makes it something you can buy, and if you buy enough, you are obligated to respond in accordance with your wishes. And it also puts too much power in the hands of the church. Bernard of Clairvaux, one of the great preachers of the Roman Catholic Church,

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said on one occasion, "If I were to meet a priest and an angel, I would salute the priest first and the angel afterwards, for the angel only obeys God while the priest can create and command God." He creates and commands God, you see, in the dispensing of the sacrament.

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But what is worst about this concept of grace is that this kind of grace can be lost. In other words, you have to keep coming to the sacraments again and again to make sure that you have an adequate supply,

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and if you do not have an adequate supply, then heaven is lost to you. It is as if man is at the bottom of a well, and that well is his sin. And God comes down into that well in the person of Jesus. And according to the teaching of the church of that period, God only came partway.

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And by your good deeds, and by the grace that you got from the sacraments, which you could only get from the church, you were to reach up and grab hold of God. And then God would begin to lift you up out of this hole.

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And as long as you held on, as long as you had enough good works, as long as you were frequent enough at the sacraments, as long as you received enough grace, you had a hope of making it. Think of that, the precarious nature of that.

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Any moment, the grip might be lost. But Luther comes along and he announces the truth of the scriptures, which is this, that man is at the bottom of a well so deep he can do nothing whatever to get out of it. But God comes down into that well, but he doesn't stop halfway.

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He comes in great love all the way. And he takes hold of man. And he lifts man, believing man, up out of that well. And God never loses his grip.

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Oh, we squirm sometimes, and we struggle. And for a moment, in our own hearts, we might feel insecure. But the truth of scripture is what Jesus said, "No sheep that God has given me have I lost." Blessed assurance, Jesus is ours.

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Here is the foretaste of glory divine. Grace, you see, is not a medicine that you have to take and keep taking so that you might live. Grace is to the contrary. That gift which God gives us and once it flows into our lives, never ever does it disappear away. So that when you accept God's gift of salvation and faith, it is yours.

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And it is yours for good and forever. Well, it is a great tragedy that the church in Luther's time did not recognize the truth of what he had to say about justification and about the nature of man's sin and about the wonderfulness of God's grace. Now that situation is changing.

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And since Vatican II, the Roman church has acknowledged that Luther was a man of great wisdom and insight and faith. And that he was quite correct when he took his stand. Then, of course, they arrested him. And they brought him to the Diet of Worms.

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And they stood him before the religious and political leaders of the time. And they said, "You must recant. You must deny that which you have affirmed." And Luther said, "My conscience is captive to the word of God. I will not recant. Here I stand. God help me. Amen."

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And today, I come to this pulpit to say that where Luther stood, stand we. God help us all. Amen. Let us pray.

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O God, as we look backward into history, help us to see more clearly forward into faith. As we remember what those who have gone before have suffered and died and stood for, that we might have the promise of eternity alive and vital and unflagging in our hearts. Fill us with a deep and profound gratitude for them. And with a deep and profound commitment to hold high the torch that has been passed.

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To give light to our own time. And also down the corridor of the coming years. We pray our prayer in Jesus' name. Amen.

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[Applause] [MUSIC] (whooshing)