Standing on the "Alones"

[Below, you'll find the message shared during worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church, Centerville, Ohio, yesterday, Reformation Sunday, along with live stream videos of both services.]

John 8:31-36

On this Reformation Sunday, we consider an important question: What is a Lutheran?

Lutherans have always seen Christian faith, the faith commended to us in the Bible, as having three key truths: Grace alone; Faith alone; and Word alone.

What does that really mean?

When the thirty-three-year-old German monk and priest, Martin Luther, accidentally began the Reformation movement back in 1517, he found himself addressing both a religious elite who no longer cared about the Word of God, choosing to replace it with their own ideas and traditions, and Christian masses whose allegiance to the Church was as an institution and a habit, rather than a fellowship with the living God. No wonder that the elites hated Luther or that the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire put Luther under an imperial ban, meaning that anyone who saw him was authorized to kill Luther on sight!

Luther’s witness to the justification of sinful human beings by God’s grace through faith in Jesus, to the Lordship of Jesus Christ, and to the authority of the Bible as God’s Word undermined those who wanted to replace Jesus with other lords and the authority of the Bible with traditions and customs that brought them control or power. 

The experience of Luther and the other church reformers was nothing new. As I mentioned last Sunday, when you read the Old Testament, you see a recurring pattern in the life of God’s chosen people. God would call them to repent, trust in Him for life, and follow Him, and the people, feeling weak or vulnerable or afraid, would do so. For a time. Then, once they got a little food in their bellies, a tract of land to farm, a bit of wealth or power, they would mostly forget God. Or, they would make God into an indulgent Santa Claus who didn’t care if they repented, believed, or followed, so long as they were happy. Or, they would tinker with their faith, adding their own rules, intermingling the worship of other deities. It was to God’s people in these latter circumstances that God would send prophets to call people to repentance and faith in Him.

We see this rejection of God and of God’s Word in the people Jesus confronts in today’s Gospel lesson from John. Just before our lesson, Jesus foretells His crucifixion and resurrection. Then Jesus lifts up those three distinctives of Biblical faith, three distinctives that would become the three principles of the Lutheran movement within Christ’s Church. John tells us: "Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in Him, ’If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” (John 8:31-32)

Lutherans don't claim to have a corner on the truth market. But the Confessions of our movement, found in a book called The Book of Concord or Concordia, hold that Jesus is the Truth that sets us free. We believe that people are set free from sin, death, and futility, first of all, through God’s grace alone. Jesus doesn’t say, “Perform these deeds and I’ll set you free from sin and death.” He doesn’t say, “You’re just perfect the way you are so nothing needs to be done to make you righteous, or acceptable for life with God.” Instead, Jesus tells us that we are sinners who need to be righteous and then, on the cross, through His innocent suffering and death, does the hard work of taking our sin into His body while giving His perfect righteousness to us.

He does this as a free gift, an act of grace (or charity) from God for us. We are saved by God’s grace alone. 

Lutheran Christians also believe we are saved through faith alone. Faith is how God delivers the grace Jesus bore for us on the cross.

Jesus told His fellow Jews that they would only be free to be the people of God if they trusted or believed in Him, literally the original Greek says "remain in My Word."

To have faith is to remain rooted in Jesus and to draw life from Him alone. This is what Jesus means when He says elsewhere, “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.” (John 15:5)

Faith, the gift God gives by His Word, both proclaimed and given in Holy Baptism and Holy Communion, overcomes our deadliest enemies: the devil, the sinful world, and our sinful selves. As Jesus tells Martha: “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live and everyone who lives and believes in me will live forever.” Then Jesus asks, “Do you believe this?”

Well, Christians, do you believe this? Do I? I mean, how is it possible for self-centered, untrusting people like us to have faith in Jesus?

The Small Catechism tells us, “I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to Him; but the Holy Spirit has called me through the Gospel [that is, the good news message that God the Father sent Jesus, God the Son, to save me from sin and death], enlightened me with His gifts [The Bible and the Sacraments], and sanctified and preserved me in the truth faith.”

In Jesus, God not only does everything needed to save me from myself, He also creates my faith in Jesus.

A Lutheran is someone who, because of God’s great grace or charity, gratefully receives the Word about Jesus that creates faith. 

Finally, Lutherans believe that we come to know God through the Word alone. Above all, we know God through “the Word made flesh,” Jesus. The Bible, the inspired Word of God, which is about Jesus from Genesis to Revelation, points us to the life God gives through Jesus. This Word brings us life with God.

In Martin Luther’s day, the Church added to or ignored the witness about Jesus found in the Scriptures. Luther and the other Reformers said that the Church dared not do or say anything contrary to the will of God revealed to us in the Bible. Second Timothy 3:16 says: “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness...”

We all have our favorite sins and so we may not like the things that God calls sin. But we Lutherans believe that when the righteous, loving God of the universe and we disagree about how we should live our lives, God is right and we are wrong.

We may want to know much more than God reveals to us in Christ and in Scripture. But in the 66 books of the Bible, everything we need to know about God, about ourselves, about salvation, about how to live, and about Who can be trusted, is found.

We live in an era in which the Bible is routinely snubbed, dismissed, or misused. The Bible isn’t the writing of just one person claiming a hotline to God, as is true of the books of Islam or Mormonism. The Bible doesn’t claim to give us a means by which we can work our way to heaven or to a state of spiritual enlightenment, as is the case with eastern religions. The Bible is a library of books that tells us how God reaches out to us in our sin, repents us, saves us, loves us, and wants to be reconciled to us through the Savior He sent for us. The Bible is the Word from God that has the power to change the lives of anyone who stands under its authority. The New Testament book of Hebrews says, “...the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.”

God saves through grace alone, faith alone, and Word alone. It was true in 33 AD, true in 1517, true today, and true for all eternity.

So, what is a Lutheran? At the least, Lutherans are people who stake their eternal lives on these three  truths.

And when the world rejects or demeans or tries to tell us to reject the Bible's witness to these three essential truths, we must say with Luther who was commanded by the powers of the Church and of the State to recant or repudiate his witness for Christ, “Unless I am convinced by the testimonies of the Holy Scriptures or evident reason…I am bound by the Scriptures…and my conscience has been taken captive by the Word of God…I am neither able nor willing to recant. God help me.” 

May God help us to be true to our Lutheran heritage, not from a commitment to tradition, but from simple faith in Jesus, the One Who has borne the cross and opened eternity for us. 

May we be true to our good confession as Lutherans that we are saved from our very real enemies–sin, death, and the devil–by God’s grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone!

Faith in the Savior Who justifies sinners, making us innocent of our sin through His death on the cross, this faith is the best way to celebrate Reformation Sunday, today and always. Amen

Reformation: Grace Alone, Faith Alone, Word Alone

[Below are the live stream videos of this morning's worship services with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, as well as the text of the message prepared for them.]





John 8:31-36

On this Reformation Sunday, we consider a simple and important question: What is a Lutheran? Lutherans have always seen Christian faith, the faith commended to us in the Bible, as having three key truths: Grace alone; Faith alone; and Word alone. What does that really mean?

When the thirty-three-year-old German monk and priest, Martin Luther, accidentally began the Reformation movement back in 1517, he found himself addressing both a religious elite who no longer cared about the Word of God, choosing to replace it with their own ideas and traditions, and Christian masses whose allegiance to the Church was as an institution and a habit, rather than a fellowship with the living God. No wonder that the elites hated Luther or that the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire put Luther under an imperial ban, meaning that anyone was authorized to kill Luther on sight!

Luther’s witness to the justification of sinful human beings by God’s grace through faith in Jesus, to the Lordship of Jesus Christ, and to the authority of the Bible as God’s Word undermined those who wanted to replace Jesus with other lords and the authority of the Bible with traditions and customs that brought them control or power.

The experience of Luther and the other church reformers was nothing new. When you read the Old Testament, you see a recurring pattern in the life of God’s chosen people, the Israelites or Jews. God would call them to repent, trust in Him for life, and follow Him, and the people, feeling weak or vulnerable or afraid, would do so. For a time. Then, once they got a little food in their bellies, a tract of land to farm, a bit of wealth or power, they would mostly forget God. Or, they would make God over into an indulgent Santa Claus who didn’t care if they repented, believed, or followed, so long as they were happy. Or, they would tinker with their faith, adding their own rules, intermingling the worship of other deities. It was to God’s people in these latter circumstances that God would send prophets to call people back to Him.

We see this rejection of God and of God’s Word in the people Jesus confronts in today’s Gospel lesson from John. Just before our lesson, Jesus foretells His crucifixion and resurrection. Then Jesus lifts up those three distinctives of Biblical faith, three distinctives that would become the three cornerstone principles of Lutheranism.

John tells us: "Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in Him, ’If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” (John 8:31-32)

Lutherans don't claim to have a corner on the truth market. But the Confessions of our movement, found in a book called The Book of Concord or Concordia, hold that Jesus is the Truth that sets us free. We believe that people are set free from sin, death, and futility, first of all, through God’s grace alone. Jesus doesn’t say, “Perform these deeds and I’ll set you free from sin and death.” He doesn’t say, “You’re just perfect the way you are so nothing needs to be done to make you righteous, or acceptable for life with God.” Instead, Jesus tells us that we are sinners who need to be righteous and then, on the cross, through His innocent suffering and death, does the hard work of taking our sin into His body while giving His perfect righteousness to us. He does this as a free gift, an act of grace (or charity) from God for us. We are saved by God’s grace alone. 

Lutheran Christians also believe we are saved through faith alone. Faith is how we grab hold of the grace Jesus gives us on the cross. Jesus told His fellow Jews that they would only be free to be the people of God if they trusted or believed in Him, literally the original Greek says "remain in My Word." To have faith is to remain rooted in Jesus and to draw life from Him alone. This is what Jesus is talking about when He says elsewhere, “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.” (John 15:5)

Faith, the gift God gives by His Word, overcomes our deadliest enemies—the devil, the sinful world, and our sinful selves. As Jesus tells Martha: “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live and everyone who lives and believes in me will live forever.” Then Jesus asks, “Do you believe this?”

Do you believe this? Do I? I mean, how is it possible for self-centered, untrusting people to have faith in Jesus, the Lord we’ve never actually seen? The Small Catechism tells us, “I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to Him; but the Holy Spirit has called me through the Gospel [that is, the good news message that God the Father sent Jesus, God the Son, to save me from sin and death], enlightened me with His gifts [The Bible and the Sacraments], and sanctified and preserved me in the truth faith.” In Jesus, God not only does everything needed to save me from myself, He also creates my faith in Jesus. A Lutheran is someone who, because of God’s great grace or charity, has been given and receives the Word about Jesus that creates faith. 

Finally, Lutherans believe that we come to know God through the Word alone. Above all, we know God through “the Word made flesh,” Jesus. The Bible, the inspired Word of God, which is about Jesus from Genesis to Revelation, points us to the life God gives through Jesus. 

In Martin Luther’s day, the Church added to or ignored the witness about Jesus found in the Scriptures. Luther and the other Reformers said that the Church dared not do or say anything contrary to the will of God revealed to us in the Bible. This agrees with 2 Timothy 3:16, which says: “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness...” We may not like the things that God calls sin. But we Lutherans believe that when the righteous, loving God of the universe and we disagree about how we should live our lives, God is right and we are wrong. We may want to know much more than God reveals. But in the 66 books of the Bible, everything we need to know about God, about ourselves, about how to live, and about Who can be trusted, is found in the Bible.

We live in an era in which the Bible is routinely snubbed, dismissed, or misused. The Bible isn’t the writing of just one person claiming a hotline to God, as was true of the books of Islam or Mormonism. The Bible doesn’t claim to give us a means by which we can work our way to heaven or to a state of spiritual enlightenment, as is the case with eastern religions. The Bible is a library of books that tell us how God reaches out to us, saves us, loves us, and wants to be reconciled to us through the Savior He sent for us. The Bible is the Word from God that has the power to change the lives of anyone who stand under its authority. The New Testament book of Hebrews says, “...the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.”

God saves through grace alone, faith alone, and Word alone. It was true in 33 AD, true in 1517, true today, and true for all eternity. 

So, what is a Lutheran? At the least, Lutherans are people who stake their eternal lives on these three  truths. And when the world rejects or demeans or tries to tell us to reject the Bible's witness to these three essential truths, we must say with Luther who was commanded to recant or repudiate his witness for Christ, “"Unless I am convinced by the testimonies of the Holy Scriptures or evident reason…I am bound by the Scriptures…and my conscience has been taken captive by the Word of God…I am neither able nor willing to recant. God help me.” 

And may God help us to be true to our Lutheran heritage, not from a commitment to tradition, but from simple faith in Jesus, the One Who has borne the cross and opened eternity for us. May we be true to our good confession as Lutherans that we are saved from our very real enemies–sin, death, and the devil–by God’s grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone! Faith in the Savior Who justifies sinners, making us innocent of our sin through His death on the cross, this faith is the best way to remember Reformation Sunday, today and always. Amen

Justified by Grace Through Faith in Jesus Christ (with audio)

[This message was shared yesterday during Reformation Sunday worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Romans 3:19-28

Today is Reformation Sunday, a day that calls us to focus on the whole idea of righteousness and what it means to be righteous.

These are two words used a lot in the Church, but hardly ever in the rest of the world. But according to the Bible, the Word of God, being righteous is of eternal importance to every human being. Righteousness is the quality we must possess in order to claim an eternal place in heaven and avoid eternal consignment to hell. 

So, this business of being righteous is, to put it bluntly, the single most important thing any of us can appreciate, appropriate, or understand. And that’s no overstatement.

To be righteous means to be in sync with the Law of God, the will of God for human beings. To be righteous is to walk in the ways of God.

A young German, Roman Catholic monk named Martin Luther, who lived in the sixteenth century, knew how essential being righteous is for anyone to have a relationship with God, either now or in eternity. 

Luther likely would have read words like those of Jesus in Matthew 5:20--”...unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven”--and think, “I need to get busy. I need to do more good things. I need to remember more of my sins and repent for them. Otherwise, God will damn me for eternity.” Luther thought that to become righteous, he had to work at it.

The problem was that no matter how much he repented or how many good things he did, he would always remember one more unrepented sin or commit new ones after confessing the old ones or fail to do enough good or fail to do good for the right reasons. Through daily experience, Luther learned that there was nothing that he could do to attain the title of righteous.

And guess what? Luther was right. Luther couldn’t make himself righteous. 

Neither can you and I. 

When we consider the sinful things we do or think or fantasize about, we’re bound to confess with King Solomon, who writes in Ecclesiastes 7:20: “...there is no one on earth who is righteous, no one who does what is right and never sins.” No one. 

And so, Luther looked at how far he fell short of the moral standards of righteousness embodied in the Ten Commandments and realized that he would never measure up. Life with God was out of his reach. 

Luther later confessed that there in the monastery, working at being righteous for God and realizing that he never could make himself righteous, he hated God. And in hating God, his guilt and his sense that there was nothing he could do to avoid being swallowed up by the fires of hell, only increased.

Then, something happened. At the direction of his superiors, Luther became a student and teacher of the Bible. (Dangerous things can happen to us when we start studying the Bible!) 

Through his study of God’s Word, Luther came to realize that righteousness can never come to us through our perpetually failed attempts to keep God’s Law. 

That’s what our second lesson for this joyous day, Romans 3:19-28, tells us. Take a look at what the apostle Paul, writing to Christians in the capital city of the Roman Empire in about 65 AD says, starting at verse 19: “Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. Therefore no one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of our sin.”

It’s good and loving for God to give us His commandments. They mark out the boundaries within which the righteous life happens, the ways in which our lives not only are more pleasing to God but also more fulfilling for us. All of us, for example, would acknowledge that it’s better for us not to steal, or covet, or live in hatred toward others. But because we can never keep God’s Law perfectly, His Law can never make us righteous. 

At the most, the Law is a mirror that shows us the awful truth with which Luther wrestled about himself, which is true of us as well, that we aren’t righteous and can’t make ourselves righteous. The Law makes all our pretense of being wonderful people pure nonsense. 

The Law is very bad news for anyone who thinks that being nice or doing good is enough to give us an in with God. But there is good news!

Verse 21: “But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness is given through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith. He did this to demonstrate his righteousness, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished— he did it to demonstrate his righteousness at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.” 

To understand the message of these magnificent verses from our lesson, let’s consider the meanings of two words that Paul uses. They’re Greek words, of course, because Greek is the language in which Paul and the other New Testament writers composed their books and letters. 

The first word is δικαιοσύνη, which we translate as righteousness. 

The other word, which you see in verse 26, is justifies; in the Greek in which the apostle Paul wrote the verse, that word is δικαιοῦντα, a form of the verb dikaio. 

These two words share the same root., which you can detect just in hearing them pronounced: dikaio, dikaiosune.  

What these two related words tell us is that despite our sin, despite our inability to obey God’s Law or to make ourselves righteous, God GIVES Christ’s righteousness to those who trust Christ, to those in whom, by the power of God the Holy Spirit, the fire of the faith has been kindled by the good news of Jesus! 

We can’t attain the righteousness necessary to enter God’s Kingdom. 

We can't work to become righteous, but God makes righteous, He "righteous-fies," all who entrust their lives to Christ. 

Jesus has perfectly obeyed God’s Law for us and then shares the perfection of His obedience, made perfect by His death on the cross on our behalf, with those who believe in Him to make us righteous. 

Martin Luther said that when he realized that we can be justified--made righteous--not by anything we do, but only by faith in Christ through the charitable grace of God, it was as if the doors of heaven opened to Him. 

Through Christ, he came to know God not as an angry judge, but as our loving Father. 

And whenever we trust in Christ rather than ourselves, our efforts, our goodness, our achievements, our success, our worthiness, or our parents’ faith, heaven opens to us too.

Look at how Paul finishes our second lesson. Verses 27-28: “Where, then, is boasting? It is excluded. Because of what law? The law that requires works? No, because of the law that requires faith. For we maintain that a person is justified by faith apart from the works of the law.”

Many of the self-identified Christians who get play in the media are people who seem to make a point of telling others how good they themselves are, how wholesome they are, and what good values they have, while others are evil, devoid of values. 

These phonies are braggarts, counterfeit Christians. 

If people brag about their own goodness or imply that they’ve attained righteousness by being wonderful people, they’re probably not Christians. 

Or, at the least, they’re Christians who need to repent for their sin and surrender their egos to Christ.

When Christians do brag, it’s about something else altogether. After Martin Luther died, a scrap of paper was found in his pocket, on which he had written six words: “We are beggars; this is true.” As Christians, we don’t brag about how wonderful we are. We know better. Our daily gaze in the face of God and into the mirror of God’s Law will tell us that. Instead, we brag about how wonderful God is! 

We’re not braggarts, we’re beggars: completely, utterly, totally dependent on the crucified and risen Jesus to justify us, to make us righteous, fit for life with God. Like the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 64:6), we can honestly confess: “All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags...” 

But we live with the joy of knowing that even when the devil, the world, and our sinful selves are forced to agree with the Law that, in our own power, we aren’t and never can be righteous, in the power of God, through the spent blood of Jesus on the cross and our faith in Him, we are justified, we are right with God, we are righteous!

And so, Paul writes elsewhere in Romans: “...there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus…” (Romans 8:1) We’ve been set free from sin and death and condemnation. And set free, no longer under the thumb of the Law, we can focus on truly living as disciples: following Christ, drawing on the Holy Spirit’s power to love God as He has loved us and to love others as Christ has loved us.

In Christ, we are justified, we are righteous. That’s worth celebrating not just on the October Sunday closest to October 31, but every single day. Friends of Christ, happy Reformation Day!

Amen

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Here is the audio of this message.