Christmas Light

[Here you'll find live stream of video of today's Christmas morning worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, along with the text of the sermon presented.]

John 1:1-14

Christmas morning may be both the best and the worst time to have John 1:1-14 as our Gospel lesson.

It’s the best time because it tells the story of the first Christmas simply: “The Word [that is, God the Son] became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” (John 1:14)

It’s the worst time because there is so much richness from God to unpack in these verses. That’s a tough thing to address when so many of you are likely tired from family celebrations and crazy weather. 

So, I’m going to do my best to nutshell these verses.

The lesson, known by scholars as John’s prologue, starts before God created anything. There was just God and uncreated chaos. John shows that while God is one being, He’s also more than one person. “In the beginning was the Word,” John tells us, “and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1) This Word, God the Son, John goes on to say, made the cosmos. He is the Word that God spoke to the chaos–"Let there be light, let there be a vault [the sky], let the dry land appear.” And it all happened!

In this Word, John says, is “the light of all” humanity. 

In other words, the God revealed to us all in Jesus Christ is the One Who can lead us through sin, death, and temptation to life with God. 

“Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path,” the Psalm says. (Psalm 119:105) 

“I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me,” Jesus tells us. (John 14:6) 

According to the Bible, the idea of God being the light of all is to be taken both literally and figuratively. 

When Moses met God, His face bore the radiance of God’s presence. 

When Jesus revealed His divinity to Peter, James, and John at the Transfiguration, pure light poured from Him. 

And according to Revelation 21:23, heaven “does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb [another title for Jesus] is its lamp.” 

God, including God the Son, is pure light, and the darkness of sin, unrighteousness, and impurity isn’t in Him.

The problem is that, as people born of sinners, we want to do whatever we want, no matter how much it may hurt God, others, or ourselves. We like the dark. Jesus says that we love darkness instead of light because our deeds are evil. (John 3:19) 

When I was a kid, I loved to let my parents know what good thing I’d just done for one of my sisters. But I tried like everything to keep them from knowing when I’d done something rotten.

Once I was put in charge of my sisters while my parents went out for a while. "Don't have pillow fights," they told me. Of course, we had a pillow fight. As I raised my arms to wallop one of my sisters with a pillow, I broke one of the glass shades on the living room's overhead chandelier. How was I going to keep this in the dark so my parents couldn't see what happened? 

I remembered that in the attic, there was an extra glass shade. I cleaned up the old, broken one and installed the spare. Then I swore my sisters to secrecy. After all, I told them, they'd been involved in the pillow fight too.

The misdeed and the cover-up worked just fine until the day that another one of the chandelier's glass shades was broken. No problem, my parents thought. "Mark," my dad said, "go up to the attic and get the spare." It was then that a bright light shone on my lie and cover-up. Busted!

On the first Christmas, as we remembered last evening, shepherds, prompted by angels, visited the manger where the baby Jesus lay, then told everyone they encountered that the Word–the Lord, Messiah, and Savior–had been born. “All who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them,” Luke says. (Luke 2:18) 

“Yet we may suppose,” Martin Luther remarks in one of his Christmas sermons, “that with most of them this astonishment was but of short duration.” 

Within a short time after Jesus’ birth, people seem to have totally forgotten about the news the shepherds brought and nobody really wanted a Savior Whose truth or light would show them their sin or guide them off the dark paths of sin and self-worship that they preferred. 

And we too, if we’re honest, prefer darkness. 

Or, maybe we want just enough of God’s light to reach us in order to help us do what we want to do, but not so much that we need to accede to His control over our lives.

And so, John writes in our Gospel lesson of Jesus the Word: “He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.” (John 1:11) That phrase "His own" should not be read ethnically as though the only people who qualified as Jesus' own were His fellow Jews. Every member of the human race, including you and me, is meant by that phrase, "His own." His own didn't want to receive Jesus!

For years, I used a shallow understanding of science to spurn Jesus. I clung to this nonsense even though a creation must have a Creator. The fact is, there was no room for God in my arrogance. 

Others spurn Jesus because they can’t imagine a loving, omnipotent God presiding over a world in which there are things like child abuse, racism, human trafficking, drive-by shootings, abortions cavalierly used as birth control, war, and injustice. But the very fact that we can be revolted by the darkness of our world should tell us that we know, beyond the limitations of our human reasoning or efforts, that there is a light–the Light–Who shines in the darkness and our darkness cannot overcome it!

When the Light of the world came to us, what did we do? 

We did what the darkness of a world enthralled by sin, death, and the devil led us to do: We killed Jesus, thinking that we really could be in charge of things if we did so. 

We were like the tenants in Jesus’ parable: “This is the heir [the Father’s Son]. Let’s kill him, and the inheritance [the creation] will be ours.” (Luke 20:14) 

Even today, I encounter people who tell me that the world will be a better place when the last vestiges of belief in God or trust in Jesus have been wiped off the planet. 

But no matter how hard we may try, friends, as you’ve heard me say before, Jesus will not and could not stay dead! 

When Jesus offered His sinless life on the cross to destroy the hold that sin and death had on us and He finished the work He had come to do for us, God the Father raised Him from the dead!

And that is exactly what Jesus will do for all who receive Him.

It’s what He will do for you. 

Not because you’re perfect. 

Not because you abide by commandments you cannot keep in your own power. 

But solely because He came into your world and has died and risen for you. 

To make you His for all eternity. 

As John writes in our lesson: “...to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.” (John 1:12-13) 

To you, Jesus says: “...My Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.” (John 6:40)

The lights of our altar candles and the lights on your Christmas trees are meant to remind you that you no longer are stumbling in the darkness, forced to fend for yourself in a sinful, death-plagued world. 

All who have received Christ at the font and at the table and in His Word walk in the light of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, Who came to us at Christmas to die for us on Good Friday, to rise to give eternity to us on Easter Sunday, to be our light in this life, and to one day return to usher us into the heavenly city where He alone will be our light and where darkness will be no more. 

Merry Christmas, friends! 

Amen

The Word from God

[Here's a video of today's 11:00 AM worship service from Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. Below, you'll find the text of today's message.]



Luke 5:1-11

Our Gospel lesson for today begins: “One day as Jesus was standing by the Lake of Gennesaret, the people were crowding around him and listening to the word of God.” (Luke 5:1) A Lutheran Bible commentator of the last century insisted, rightly I think, that the preposition in the last phrase of that verse shouldn’t be translated as “word of God,” but “word from God.” In today’s lesson Jesus, the Word of God made flesh, speaks the Word from God to a crowd of people who, for reasons they may have been unable to articulate, are hungry to hear from God.

Are you hungry to hear the Word from God? Not just on Sunday but every day? 

Or are you so sated and enticed by the junk food of this world–its temporary rewards, entertainments, and distractions–that you don’t have time to listen to the Word that the God we know in Jesus wants to give to you?

Human deafness to God is the greatest pandemic in our world today. I find myself afflicted by this deafness to God more often than I care to admit. And it’s a pandemic of resistance to God’s Word that is far more deadly, eternally so, than we may imagine. We prefer to hear almost anything to hearing the Word from God. This past week on social media, Lutheran theologian Chad Bird shared an observation by a contemporary Roman Catholic cardinal: “The world no longer hears God because it is constantly speaking, at a devastating speed and volume, in order to say nothing.”

But what the Word that God has for us, for the whole world collectively and for each of us individually, is far from nothing. 

In his prayer to the Father on the night of His arrest, Jesus says, “Your Word is truth.” (John 17:17) 

In Old Testament times, the psalmist tells God, “Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path.” (Psalm 119:105) 

And during Jesus’ ministry, Simon Peter, whose call as an apostle we consider today, tells Jesus: “You have the words of eternal life.” (John 6:68) 

Truth, guidance, eternal life: These are just a few of the blessings God gives us in His Word. Jesus Christ came into our universe to give us this definitive Word from God. And today, we see that that Word from God brings three major effects to us.

Now, you’re familiar with this incident. Jesus is teaching by the Sea of Galilee, here called the Lake of Gennesaret. It's daylight hours and, because the professional fishermen of Galilee only fish from dusk to dawn, there are two boats on the shore. Jesus climbs into one owned by Simon Peter to continue His teaching. You see, there are a series of craggy inlets around the Sea of Galilee, each forming perfect amphitheaters. This is what allows the large crowd listening to Jesus to hear Him now even though He’s likely speaking in a normal voice. Teaching done, Jesus, tells the professional fisherman Simon Peter, “Put out into deep water, and let down the nets for a catch.” (Luke 5:4) Peter knows from years of experience that there will be no catch of fish in the middle of the day. Despite his doubts, Peter paid heed to Jesus’ word because, as Scripture tells us elsewhere, Jesus “taught as one who had authority, and not as their teachers of the law.” (Matthew 7:29) 

You know what happens next. It’s a miracle at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry with Peter that will later be matched near the end of the resurrected Jesus’ ministry with the apostle (John 21:6): a haul of fish so great that Peter had to call for the boat of James and John to help bring it all in.

It’s here that we see the first effect of the Word from God. The first thing that happens to us when we encounter the Word from God is this: We see God’s sinlessness and we see our sin. 

Peter knows that in Jesus, He is seeing God face to face. Peter tells Jesus, “Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man!” (Luke 5:8) 

The Word from God shows all of us how far from God we are, how filled with sin, how unworthy to be in God’s presence, how unloving we are compared to God, how ungracious toward the sins and faults of others. 

I have an idea that’s exactly why so many people avoid listening to God’s Word and try instead to drown it out with the dead and dying things of this world.

But God doesn’t readily give up on us. That’s why Jesus says what He does now to Peter, the very words God has always spoken to those who come into His presence and are both intimidated by His power and overwhelmed by His holy perfection. “Don’t be afraid,” Jesus tells Simon. (Luke 5:10) 

This is the second Word from God we receive from Jesus, "Don't be afraid." 

Jesus is saying: “Yes, Simon; yes, human race; yes, Church, you are sinners and you deserve death and condemnation. There’s a chasm you cannot forge that lies between us. But I am the bridge between God and you. You need not be afraid that your sins will pull you away from My love. You need not fear condemnation.” 

There are many things in this world we might rightly fear: putting God to the test, suffering, causing suffering to others. But we need not be in terror of God. 

God’s Word tells us that, “...there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus…” (Romans 8:1) 

Your sins may convict you, but Jesus, the one to whom you turn in daily repentance and trust, has set you free from sin and death. 

This requires no work or effort on your part. 

You needn’t fear that you’ve failed to take the right steps. (You haven’t and can’t, by the way.) 

You needn’t fear that you’ve not believed enough or done enough. (Again, you haven’t and can’t.) 

On His cross, Jesus has justified, qualified, and sanctified you for life with God, now and always. There, Jesus did all the good, followed all the right steps, taken the perfect path of obedience so that He, though sinless, could absorb all the sin and death of the human race so that we can be set free. 

That’s why Jesus tells Peter, and us, “Don’t be afraid!”

We see a third thing that Jesus’ powerful Word from God does to those who listen to it. Jesus tells Simon Peter, “from now on you will fish for people…” (Luke 5:10) 

After saving us from sin and death in Holy Baptism, creating faith in Christ within us through His Word, and sustaining us on His body and blood in Holy Communion, the third thing the Word from God from Jesus gives us is a whole new life! 

No longer afraid of condemnation, Jesus’ Word gives us a new life, a new reason for living. 

Our mission in life becomes, no less than it became the mission of Simon Peter, to follow Jesus and to fish for people, that is, to share the Word from God so that others can, like us, repent, believe, and have everlasting life with God. Jesus enlists us to share His Word everywhere.

There’s a small group composed of several men from Living Water and another man who’s part of another area congregation. They began meeting together over God’s Word several years ago, at the time we began our discipleship initiative. Even in the pandemic, they found ways to remain connected to God and each other. 

In the past year or so, a friend of two of the men, an unchurched man with no apparent connection to Christ and His Church, learned he had cancer. As the disease grew worse, the two small group members visited their friend, both at the hospital and later, at a hospice care facility. 

At one point, they shared a Christian book, Jesus Calling, with him. Later, during one of their visits, they shared another book, John Eldredge’s All Things New. 

On a subsequent visit, one of the group members asked their friend, “Did you read that book?” 

“Yes,” he said, “I’m counting on it.” 

The group member asked his friend if that meant he was receiving the Word from God that Jesus is Lord and Savior, the One Whose death and resurrection brings the forgiveness of sin and everlasting life with God? “Yes,” their friend said. 

Then they prayed together to declare their Word-given faith in Jesus. Their friend’s mother was there at the time and as the men prayed, she wept tears of joy. 

Three days later, that man died and, I am sure, because of His faith in Jesus and His Word, entered into the everlasting arms of God. 

Friends, Jesus’ Word sets us free to be His agents of grace in the world, to be fishers of people.

The Word from God that comes to us in Jesus is powerful! 

This Word shows us our distance from God and convicts us of our sin and shows us our powerlessness before life and death. 

This word also convinces us that in Jesus Christ, we need not fear condemnation because all who trust in Him have everlasting life with God. 

And this Word gives us an entirely new life, one in which our whole mission, our whole reason for living is changed by our gracious God. We’re empowered to live for the only mission worth living–or dying–for: to be fishers of people, makers of disciples, messengers of God and His love for everyone we meet. 

There is no better way to use the earthly lives God gives to us than that, to be fishers of people! 

May Jesus and His life-giving Word do God’s work in and through us. Amen

Are You Ready?

[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, this morning.]

Isaiah 2:1-5
Advent, which begins today, is a time for getting ready. Just as many are working themselves into frenzies preparing for Christmas, Advent asks us, “Are we ready, not for Christmas Day, but for the advent of Jesus, for the appearing of Jesus?”

Are we ready for Jesus to show up to bring an end to this world of sin and death and establish a new heaven and a new earth free of sin and death and grief?

Are we ready to meet Jesus face to face should our lives end before Jesus returns?

The last thing that any human being should want is to be ready for Christmas or for things like tomorrow’s special project, school assignment, or big game, yet not be ready to meet Jesus.

So, are you ready?

Each of our appointed lessons for this first day of the new Church Year can help us to be ready for Jesus’ return or, should we die before His return, for the moments we first see Jesus face to face. (1)

Please pull out the Celebrate inserts for this morning. Our first lesson is Isaiah 2:1-5. Verse 4 is probably the most famous passage here. It's a verse that promises that, beyond these days when sin drives human beings to warfare and factionalism, there will be a day when God will destroy war itself and turn our weapons into implements put to better and more productive use. That will happen on the day of the risen, ascended Jesus' return to this world!

This vision of a new creation at peace is one that would have especially appealed to Isaiah’s likely first listeners and readers.

Isaiah started his work as a prophet of God in about 740BC. At that moment, the Assyrian Empire threatened the destruction of first-century Judah.

(Judah, you’ll remember, was the southern portion of what had once been a larger nation, Israel. After King Solomon’s death, Israel split into two kingdoms, the northern one with its worship and national life centered in Samaria, the south remaining focused in Jerusalem. Seven-and-a-half centuries after Isaiah began prophesying, Jesus was born and raised in Judah, also called Judea.)

In Isaiah’s day, the people of Judah were terrified of the strong, menacing Assyrians. And their fear proved well founded: In 722BC, Israel would fall to the Assyrians, just as God had revealed through Isaiah would happen. God used the Assyrian army to chasten His people, calling them to repent for sin, especially their dalliances with false gods, and to trust, have faith, only in Him.

In our lesson, God declares a moment when people from around the world would acknowledge the God of the Jews as the one true God of the universe. They would stream to worship Him along with the Jews, He says. According to God’s words here, Mount Zion, the humble hill in Jerusalem where the Temple then stood, would be acknowledged as “the highest of mountains.” People would turn to the God Whose presence once lived in the Temple’s “Holy of Holies,” saying (look at their words in Isaiah 2:3 in our first lesson):

Come, let us go to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that He may teach us His ways and that we may walk in His paths. For out of Zion shall go forth instruction and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.” 

The lesson ends at verse 5, with these words:

O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!

In these words, God wasn’t just telling the descendants of Jacob how to get ready for the restoration He wanted to bring to them once the Assyrians had conquered their land and, as a result, became desperate enough to once more realize their need of God.

God also is telling us how to prepare for the final scenes in human history, when, as Jesus puts it in our Gospel lesson, at a moment known only by the Father, the risen and ascended Jesus will return. It's then, that Jesus will, as we confess each week during worship, “judge the living and the dead.”

God's words here also tell us how to be prepared for the final scenes in our own lives, whether they come years from now or they happen this very day.

Now, it’s important to understand that what God says in Isaiah is, in a way, metaphorical. Let me explain.

Yesterday, as I was about to eat breakfast, already dressed in some of my Buckeye gear, I found Ann reading the newspaper, and said to her, like any good Ohio State alum anticipating the afternoon game must have said when first facing the day: “We must annihilate them!”

Now, I didn’t literally mean that. To annihilate something is to reduce it to nothing. If the team from up north were annihilated, who would the Buckeyes beat on certain Saturdays in November each year? I meant simply that I wanted the Buckeyes to soundly thump the Wolverines. I spoke metaphorically.

Some eight-hundred years after Isaiah shared the words of our first lesson with the people of Judah, Jesus sat by a well in the Samaritan village of Sychar. His disciples, in spite of their shared distaste for the citizens of the breakaway northern kingdom of Samaria, had gone into the village to get some food.

A Samaritan woman shows up at the well and among the things that Jesus tells her is this: “Woman, believe Me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain (Mount Gerizim in Samaria) nor in Jerusalem (on Mount Zion). You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews (more accurately translated, “the Judeans”). But the hour is coming and is now here, when we true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship Him.”

The point is that while salvation has come to the world through the Jews, you don’t have to be a Jew to have God in your life. While God’s presence came to the temple at Jerusalem, now “in these last days,” as the New Testament book of Hebrews tells us, “[God] has spoken to us by a Son, Whom He appointed heir of all things, through Who He also created the worlds.”

Our lesson from Isaiah then, foretells a time when people throughout the world won’t necessarily book flights on El Al Airlines in order to stream to Jerusalem, but a time when people from throughout the world will turn to the God first revealed to the Jews and then definitively, to everybody, through Jesus Christ. “For God so loved the world,” Jesus famously told Nicodemus. People from throughout the world today stream to Mount Zion every time they...

• confess their sins in Jesus’ Name, 
• confess their faith in Jesus, and 
• strive, by the power of God's Holy Spirit living within them, to live as His redeemed and saved people in their every day moments.

So, how do we prepare for Jesus’ Advent, for His appearing?

First: We turn to the God made known in Christ. “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,” our lesson says.

In Isaiah’s time, God upbraided His people for failing to acknowledge Him as the only means of wholeness and hope in their lives. “I reared children and brought them up,” God says in Isaiah 1, “but they have rebelled against Me.” 

In these last days, God has shown that the only remedy for sin, death, and purposeless living is to turn in repentance and trust to Jesus Christ.

During His time on earth, Jesus denounced villages that refused to repent and believe in Him.

“Repent,” Jesus says elsewhere in Matthew's gospel, “for the kingdom of heaven is near.”

To repent and to believe (or trust) in Christ is nothing other than agreeing with God about our sin, on the one hand, and agreeing with God about His grace and forgiveness, on the other.

To be ready to meet Jesus, we can repent, that is, turn back to God, and trust in the grace of God to grant us forgiveness and the powerful Holy Spirit to help us live differently from day to day.

Second: We place ourselves under the authority of God’s Word. Out of Zion, where God revealed Himself to Israel and then to the world in Jesus, our lesson from Isaiah says, comes God’s “instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.” Through His Word, the lesson says in verse 3, God will teach us His ways.

Jesus, of course, is the ultimate Word of God, of course, and the Bible is God’s Spirit-inspired, perfect witness to that Word. Many spurn the authority of Christ over their lives. Many reject the authority of God's Biblical Word over their lives. “But to all who [receive the Word of God],” the Gospel of John says, God gives the power to become children of God.

God’s Word is the truth against which everything we do, say, and are is to be measured. (2) To build our lives on anything else, whether it’s our own experiences or the latest scientific research, is to build on quicksand.

The Lutheran Confessions says that the Word of God in the Bible is to be treasured as a precious jewel. (3)

The psalmist said that God’s Word is a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path.

And in today’s lesson from Isaiah, God invites us to walk in that light.

In God’s Word, we are enlightened to see God’s passionate love for each of us, God’s desire to set us free from our bondage to sin and death, and the lengths to which He goes—even to a cross—in order to make it possible for us to return to Him.

We also see that God will not force or coerce us to return to Him or stand under His life-giving Word. God woos us. God is wooing us still.

To take hold of the life that only comes through Jesus Christ, we must stand under the authority of Scripture even when we don't and never will fully understand it.

My two heroes of the faith are Martin Luther and Billy Graham. Early in his career, Billy Graham was an evangelist with an organization called Youth for Christ. He often traveled and became pals with another Youth for Christ evangelist, Chuck Templeton. Graham says that Templeton remains the best preacher he ever heard.

Templeton, a learned man, underwent a crisis of faith in the late 1940s. He came to reject the Bible's teachings about miracles, the virgin birth of Jesus, the resurrection, and so on. (Ultimately, he became an atheist.) Because he had been so close to Graham and because Graham was impressed by Templeton's mind, personality, and preaching, Billy Graham was shaken by Templeton's rejection of the authority of the Bible. As a consequence, Graham himself began to question the reliability of the Bible. Templeton's challenge to Billy Graham--"People no longer accept the Bible as being inspired the way you do"--taunted Graham.

One evening, during a retreat in southern California, Graham took a walk into a nearby woods. He dropped to his knees by a tree stump, where he set his Bible. In the gathering darkness, he couldn't read his Bible, but he could cry out to God. Though he can't recall the exact words he used as he prayed that night, Graham does say he told God honestly that the Bible was filled with many things he couldn't comprehend or explain. But he told God, "I am going to accept this as Thy Word--by faith! I'm going to allow faith to go beyond my intellectual questions and doubts, and I will believe this to be Your inspired Word."

As Graham explains in his autobiography, not all his questions were answered, but "a major bridge had been crossed." He knew that a great spiritual battle in his heart and mind had been fought and won. It is the same battle you and I need to fight, and, by the power of God's Spirit, can win, when we place ourselves under the authority of God's Word.

This past week, I had an appointment with the cardiologist who performed my heart stent procedure five months ago. He checked me over and asked lots of questions. "I feel optimistic about your recovery," he told me. Then, he fell into a long silence as he clicked through and considered my case history on his laptop computer. I wondered what he was thinking. Finally, he broke his silence: "I still don't know why you had a heart attack."

Folks, everyone in this sanctuary knows that, as happened to me five months ago, inexplicable things happen in life. And they can happen in a hurry. You have to be ready for anything!

But above all, you have to be ready for the advent of Jesus, for the moment when you come into His presence. If you will turn to God in repentance and faith in Jesus and if you will stand under the authority of God's Word, you will be ready for Christ's return. You will be ready for anything!

(1) The appointed lessons for this First Sunday in Advent are: Isaiah 2:1-5, Romans 13:11-14, and Matthew 24:36-44. The psalm is Psalm 122.


(2) The Formula of Concord, a basic confessional statement promulgated by Lutherans in 1577, expresses a Lutheran understanding of the Bible and its authority:

We believe, teach, and confess that the prophetic and apostolic writings of the Old and New Testaments are the only rule and norm according to which all doctrines and teachers alike must be appraised and judged, as it is written in Psalm 119:105, "Thy word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path." And Saint Paul says in Galatians 1:8: "Even if an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which we preached to you, let him be accursed."
Other writings of ancient and modern teachers, whatever their names, should not be put on a par with Holy Scripture. Every single one of them should be subordinated to the Scriptures and should be received in no other way and no further than as witnesses to the fashion in which the doctrine of the prophets and apostles was preserved in post-apostolic times...


...the Holy Scripture remains as the only judge, rule, and norm according to which as the only touchstone of all doctrines should and must be understood and judged as good or evil, right or wrong...

(3) Martin Luther writes this in The Large Catechism, another of the core confessional documents which every Lutheran congregation and pastor claims as true confessions of faith:

The Word of God is the true holy thing above all holy things. Indeed, it is the only one we Christians acknowledge and have. Though we had the bones of all the saints or all the holy and consecrated vestments together in one heap, they could not help us in the slightest degree, for they are all dead things that can sanctify no one. But God's Word is the treasure that sanctifies all things. By it all the saints themselves have been sanctified. At whatever time God's Word is taught, preached, heard, read, or pondered, there the person, the day, and the work are sanctified by it...Accordingly, I constantly repeat that all our life and work must be guided by God's Word if they are to be God-pleasing or holy...


Conversely, any conduct or work done apart from God's Word  is unholy in the sight of God, no matter how splendid and brilliant it may appear...