"Reformation Day" Romans 3:20 Sunday Evening Worship Service

Well, October 31st, 1517 marked the first Reformation Day, probably unbeknownst to Martin Luther what he was launching.

Luther was a relatively obscure theological professor in Wittenberg and ministering there.

He had already had conflict with the Catholic Church for a few years, but of course it came to a head that day, October 31, 1517, when he nailed his 95 theses to the church door there.

The 95 theses were 95 disputations, 95 concerns.

You might say it this way.

If it was on Twitter, it would have been a 95-post thread where he was laying out his objections to the Catholic Church, particularly in the area of indulgences.

Luther, it doesn't seem like he was trying to start a Reformation.

He was tweeting, or at least writing, in Latin, not in German.

It was a language that was really only spoken by those who were active in church ministry.

He was not trying to fan the flames of revival or anything like that.

It's not even clear in 1517 if Luther understood the doctrine of justification fully.

If you would say he was even converted, then Luther certainly wouldn't have said that himself.

If you would ask Luther, Luther would have said he was converted at his baptism, probably.

So it's unclear exactly what Luther understood at this point.

It will be by 1535.

18 years later, it's very clear when Luther writes his commentary on the book of Galatians that he understood the gospel by then.

But on October 31st, 1517, he had more pressing concerns.

His concerns were the way the Catholic Church was selling indulgences.

Really, he felt exploiting people in his congregation.

Now to understand that, you really need to understand what the world was like in 1517.

And in order to understand that, you need to go back a little bit further.

This is a world that is just coming out of the Dark Ages.

The Dark Ages had ended uh just a few centuries earlier, and Europe in the Dark Ages is probably nothing like you're imagining.

Uh Europe in the Dark Ages was entirely backwards, one of the darkest places in the world.

That's why it's called the Dark Ages, although people don't call it the Dark Ages anymore.

They say it's, I don't know, offensive or judgmental to the people there.

But you know, none of there's no survivors left to be offended, if you ask me.

Uh so I'm fine calling it the Dark Ages.

It's called the Dark Ages because there was no literacy, there was no uh writing, there was no mathematics.

I mean, to this day, we use Roman, uh we don't use Roman numerals because they're impossible except for the Super Bowl.

We use Arabic script because the the Islamic world was the ones doing science and the ones with math, and people through Europe, for the most part, were unable to count, really.

Um the average life expectancy for a woman in the Dark Ages was 24 years old.

Uh for a man was probably more like 30 or 32.

The average height was five feet, and the average weight was 135.

William Manchester, in his kind of definitive book on the Dark Ages called A World Lit by Fire, uh, has a line that's always stuck out to me.

He says, A squirrel could go from Paris to Moscow and never touch the ground.

It was Europe was completely covered.

There were no maps.

The only roads in Europe during the Dark Ages were that built by the Roman Empire a thousand years earlier.

And I say there's no maps because sometimes we watch movies about the Dark Ages, and the movies usually have somebody like going away to fight in the Crusades or something, and then coming back later.

Oh, that never happens.

You know, if you left your home, if you left your village in the Dark Ages, you're not coming back.

You know, if you went two mountains away, you're not coming back.

You couldn't find the place.

I mean, there was no travel, no literacy, no roads, no currency, no effective government.

There were two inventions during the dark ages, the the water wheel and the windmill, and that was it.

It was one of the most stagnant times in world history.

Um, you know, you were considered married when she got pregnant.

That was marriage.

Uh mentioned there were no roads.

Um it was a time when languages developed.

You know, at the start of the Dark Ages, Latin and Greek, everybody was basically proficient in that through the Dark Ages, through a lack of travel and lack of mobility, is when you have really languages that develop the languages that we see in the dot Europe today.

Entire countries were made Catholic by their leaders through the Dark Ages, and they were kept that way through fear.

The only literacy to the Dark Ages was in the monasteries.

The monasteries were built to remove the priests and religious people from society.

Monasteries had some uh you know connection to the world through the Catholic Church and reading and studying Scripture in Latin, and the Bible only existed in Latin through this time.

Now the Dark Ages ended somewhat abruptly with massive Muslim integration, uh Islamic immigration into Europe, with the kind of the rediscovery of Greek history, uh, the you know, new technological advances that such as the windmill and the water wheel, which enabled the feudal system to come about, and that radically changed the society immediately.

You had to start having local kings that now started exerting power underneath the authority of the Pope.

The priests were the people that collected taxes during this, and they didn't collect taxes for their government, they collected taxes for the Catholic Church.

And there's still holdos or holdovers of that in much of Europe where the Catholic Church is exempt from taxation.

That's not a kindness towards religion.

That's owing to the historical fact that they're the ones that used to collect taxes.

Um priests would sometimes graduate from the monastery and be sent out to find a place to minister and just wander, wander, wander, wander until they found a village with no effective church or no priest, and would introduce them to the sacramental system, and that was their connection to the Roman Catholic Church and really to religion.

The whole system was backwards, stagnant, surreal in world history.

Nobody could become a king without the Pope's blessing.

And then the whole time, this whole thing is chaotic.

There was a hundred-year period during the Dark Ages, or during this, you know, 11, 1200 in that period, where there were two different popes, both rival to each other, both excommunicate each other.

There was a brief period where there were three popes.

And you think, how could the Catholic Church endure that kind of chaos?

And the answer is just simply people didn't know.

There were no newspapers, there was no, you know, communication to the world about what was happening inside of the church.

I tell you all that, just so you kind of have your mind around what the soil was that the Reformation grew out of.

It was a world that wasn't literate when it came to the Bible, certainly.

People were not allowed to read the Bible unless they knew Latin and really only the priest knew that.

It was a it was a capital crime.

You'd be executed if you were caught trying to translate the Bible into a language people could read.

This is what got uh Tyndale blown up.

This is what got um Huss martyred as Huss tried to bring the Bible into the Czech language.

The Catholic Church had complete control over the religious system of Europe.

Even his own political systems in their own countries, Spain and France and Portugal and Germany, started to develop.

It was still under the absolute control of the Catholic Church.

Well, as I mentioned, massive immigration sparked a renewal in science, Greek culture, and all of that.

Different languages were now formulated, different cities started to start their own universities to explore science.

That's what really codified the languages, which gives us English up in England, of course, and Spanish and Portuguese and of course German.

But through those changes, the Renaissance we call it, 1300, 1400s, through those changes, the Catholic Church did not change.

The monasteries, what used to be like the forefront of society, the monasteries used to be on the cutting edge.

That was the place where people could read.

That's the place where the Bible was.

By around 1500, the monasteries were the backwards place.

Where there were universities outside the door doing science and math and all that, the monasteries were still done in Latin.

The scripture was still guarded in Latin.

And people still had to go to the priests and to the monks to have restructur instruction in religion, and mostly to learn how to escape the fires of hell.

That's the world in 1517.

Carl Truman writes that it's hard to understand Martin Luther's reformation unless you first understand the people there had a sincere fear of goblins in the forest.

That's a good Carl Truman turn of phrase right there.

The Catholic Church at that time was marked by a few doctrinal distinctives.

I'll rattle these through one at a time.

This is just kind of a brief overview of Catholic doctrine, which is largely unchanged today, as it was then.

The Catholic Church did have a concept of justification, but justification in the Catholic Church was a state of righteousness.

It was a state of being righteous with God.

The Catholic Church did not teach what we call an alien righteousness.

You know, we understand that you are justified by a righteousness that's outside of you, it's God's righteousness that's given to you.

And the Catholic Church justification is uh being righteous, but it's something you attain through your own righteousness.

It has to be an internal righteousness to you.

That internal righteousness is manifest by the deeds that you do on the outside.

That makes justification really an impossible task.

It's something you can never fully obtain in this life.

I don't have it on the screen, but that's really where purgatory uh functions.

When you die, you have sin in you that you were not able to have justified or dealt with.

You are sent to purgatory when you die in the Catholic Church, where the fires of judgment purge sin from you.

And this is so foundational to understanding how the Catholic world functioned, not just in the 1500s, but even today.

You know, when you die, you don't go, I know it's kind of Catholic uh humor and artwork that you you go to you die and you go to the pearly gates and Saint Peter lets you in, but that's not Catholic teaching.

When you die, you are in the fires of purgatory that are called it's called purgatory because it's purging you from the sin that you had.

And that was terrifying to the people in Europe, which Europe would be, apart from the Muslim immigration, Europe would be in basically entirely Christian.

There were some Jews there, of course, but the people that purgatory was designed for were not the Muslims or the Jews, it was designed as a doctrine for the Christians.

So the Christians, the Catholics of this time, feared the fires of purgatory.

As one today might fear hell, they feared the fires of purgatory because justification was an impossible task for them.

Secondly, they had the concept of the Pope, of course, who is the head of the church, and the Pope was infallible in matters of faith.

Matters of faith and doctrine, he could not be corrected, or he was infallible.

Now there's an ongoing tension in the Catholic Church at this time between the Pope and Councils.

They had their own kind of checks and balances, but not three.

There wasn't a third party to wait in.

So there was a continual battle between the pope and church councils.

The councils trying to exercise authority over the pope, the pope trying to exercise authority over the councils.

Councils that could only exist if the pope called them, and popes could, in theory, end them.

But what about if one pope called a council and then that pope died and the council still went on?

Could the next pope disband the council the previous pope called?

I mean, that was the kind of tension that was happening in the Catholic Church as you know, popes began excommunicating each other and uh announcing anathemas on even their own councils.

It was it was a hot mess, basically.

But the pope was in charge.

He was over the political realm as well.

If somebody were to be king of uh of Spain or uh, you know, a protector in Germany, he would have to have that position through the um blessing of the Holy Roman Empire, and the Holy Roman Emperor was blessed by the Pope.

Third was the celebration of Mass.

This is what kept the church functioning.

This is why villages wanted a priest or a monk for the purpose of celebrating Mass.

Uh, and to use our own terms, Mass is the re-sacrifice of Christ.

It's where transubstantiation takes place, where a priest uh can transform the bread into the actual body of Christ, the blood, uh the wine into the blood of Christ.

Transubstantiation is a Catholic doctrine that teaches that it's the real presence of Christ in the Mass, the real presence of Christ's blood in the wine.

Mass is the re-sacrifice of it, where the priest elevates the bread and breaks it to honor or to to you know perpetuate uh the death of Christ.

In fact, it's even called the perpetual sacrifice of the Mass.

Now, this is so critical when you think of the sacramental system, which we'll talk about in a few minutes.

For you to have your sins forgiven in this context, you need to celebrate the Mass.

You need to receive grace from the Mass.

But the only person who has the authority to turn the bread into the body of Christ is somebody through the authority of the Catholic Church.

And so this is a world that is held in bondage, spiritual bondage by that uh sacrament.

That you needed the church's blessing to have Mass.

You needed Mass to escape purgatory and have any hope of forgiveness.

Fourthly, is Mary.

The worship of Mary was um perhaps not as extreme in the 1500s as it is today in the Catholic Church.

Nevertheless, it was still prevalent in the Catholic Church.

Mary had already was already taught by this point that Mary had been assumed into heaven, that she didn't die.

The miraculous uh conception of Mary was that she um uh was born sinless herself.

The the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is that not that Mary conceived Jesus, the Immaculate Conception is that Mary, when she was in her mother's womb, had her sin nature removed from her.

This is already taught by this time.

Um and so people viewed Mary as the mother of heaven as the official title for her.

But more than that, she was a mediator.

You could pray to her, she had sympathy for you in a way that Jesus did not.

So so much again of this system hinges on sacraments through the priests and then uh fanatical devotion to Mary.

I'll just pause here to say, you know, I'm coaching the Emmanuel Christian soccer team right now, and we played at a Catholic school last week, and before it was their senior day, and so they all got together at honor, the seniors before the game, and the opposing coach asked us if we would come uh pray with them at midfield uh before the game, and so we said yes, and so I've got these, you know, 18 or so ICS students with me, and there's you know, they're 15 or 18 uh students from the school that were playing, and their AD leads the prayer, and he begins with the sign of the cross, and uh which our kids give our students pause, but then it went from there into the Hail Mary, uh uh and then followed that after the Hail Mary with now we beseech St.

Thomas, who has enough grace that he can dispense it to us, and we're gonna ask Saint Thomas to keep his eyes in the soccer game.

So these students prayed to Mary and well were led into prayer to Mary and led into prayer to St.

Thomas, and judging by the looks on their face, I don't think any of them had ever experienced anything remotely close to that in their entire Protestant little lives.

In fact, afterwards the referee who was part of this came up to me and said, Hey, you guys, you guys aren't a Catholic school, are you?

And I was like, No.

And he said, Well, the highlight of my soccer season was watching the expression on your boys' faces when the Hail Mary started.

Uh yeah, I I huddled the guys together right away afterwards and said, you know, you're gonna go off to school one day, and you're gonna have, you know, some liberal professor, some liberal roommate, or some you know, relative somewhere that's gonna tell you there is no difference between Catholicism and Christianity.

It's all the same thing.

And when that happens, I want you to remember this moment right here where people made you pray to St.

Thomas.

Anyway, I digress.

Mary, known as the Queen of Heaven, and then finally, indulgences.

And this is what finally provoked Luther over the finish line here, but uh all of these are, of course, connected.

Indulgences were just the straw that that broke um the German camel's back here.

Indulgences are a sacramental system, uh, that is part of the sacramental system, it's connected to penance, where you confess your pr your sins to a priest and are given something to do to demonstrate repentance and that your repentance is genuine.

That's how it started.

But by the time of 1517, it had progressed well beyond that, and it was just the straight-up selling of uh remission of purgatory, that you could purchase an indulgence from somebody uh for somebody, and your purchasing of you know your grandmother's indulgence, get your grandmother out of purgatory.

And the whole thing happened with, and all the money was used to build cathedrals, by the way, and the whole thing happened complete with like plays acting out, people suffering in the fires of hell and in the fires of purgatory, with like kind of used car salesman uh coming up in front and saying, you know, do you want your grandmother to keep suffering in the flames of purgatory?

Think about how much she's burning right now.

And you have the power to free her by putting money in uh to build the basilica in Rome.

So that's what was happening.

And Luther was vexed by this.

Luther by 15, 17, had gotten to the point where he was rejecting indulgences because he saw them as exploitive.

He had been to some of the sales of indulgences, and he just thought it was so vile, so vile that this would happen, uh, that he began warning his congregation against buying them.

And in fact, Germany had stopped allowing the indulgence salesmen to come into Germany because remember, the taxes were collected largely by the priests.

Well, now you had German leaders, protectors, they were they were called, that were trying to keep the taxation inside of Germany.

And so the Catholic Church responded by selling indulgences.

That's a great way to get money out of Germany and into Rome, is indulgences.

And so a lot of resistance to it was political, of course, but for Luther it was less political and more just the fact that this didn't seem right.

If the Catholic Church can get people out of purgatory, why don't they do that all the time?

We'll talk more about Luther's thoughts on that in a minute.

But before we we do go there, I do want to make sure you're all familiar with the sacramental system, because I used that phrase a couple times this morning in my sermon this morning, and a couple people asked me between services.

When you say the sacramental system or the sacredal system, what do you mean by that?

Well, in the Catholic Church, there are seven sacraments, and some of them go by different names, but this is the order I memorize them in, and there's different, you know, you can order these somewhat differently, I suppose, but baptism is always the first, it happens at birth, and in the Catholic Church, uh, baptism kind of removes Adam's sin nature from you.

It doesn't permanently justify you, but it puts you in a new start.

You know, you're in the Catholic theology, you're born with Adam's sin nature, but that can be taken from you and you're as a baby through baptism, and you're put back in the condition of Adam in the garden.

So now you're not going to be held accountable for Adam's sin, uh, but you're held accountable only for your own because baptism removed Adam's sin from you.

Again, very different than Christian understanding of baptism.

Even in in the Presbyterian or covenantal world, even in the infant Baptist Protestant worlds, they don't teach that.

You know, even in the Protestant world, we teach that you are accountable for Adam's sin.

You know, the way you do get Adam's sin.

That's why you die.

And baptism doesn't remove that from you.

Uh, you need a different righteousness that takes its place, is what we would teach, but very different than Catholic baptism, which leads to uh confirmation.

Now, today a lot of people will celebrate communion before confirmation, so you could reorder those.

But confirmation is the class where it perfects the work of baptism in your in your heart.

It's where you are now, you know, attesting with your own mouth that you're a Catholic.

Uh communion is now able to be celebrated in a way that you experience the grace of the sacrifice of Christ.

Um, confession is part of this.

Before you celebrate your first communion, you go to confession, you confess your pr your sins to a priest, and this restores your relationship uh with God that has been severed through sin.

The act of confession is what restores it, uh, demonstrates repentance.

The priest will often give penance, which is prayers to pray or acts to do or money to give, and that's how indulgences got shoehorned in there.

It was a form of penance that came from confession.

Uh fifth is marriage, uh, which represents, of course, the union of Christ with his church.

It has to take place in the the under the authority of a Catholic Church, of a Catholic priest, only a uh a Catholic priest can perform marriage in the eyes of God.

Often Mass is celebrated at a marriage ceremony.

Uh six, ordination, and this is huge.

In some of us, ordination is the last one, but uh ordination is huge.

Ordination is what gives the priest the power and the authority to perform the other sacraments.

So without ordination, you don't have the rest.

And this was a massive tool in the Holy Roman Empire to deprive people of grace.

I mean, the the Pope had the authority to just kind of freeze marriages or ban marriages in a whole province and say priests can no longer marry people in this area until they pay taxes.

And it was a huge uh hammer to bludgeon people into uh submission to the Catholic Church.

And then finally, last rites.

Sometimes this is prayer for the sick.

It doesn't happen just at death, but last rites is the one we as Americans are most familiar with, and that unites a suffering person with Christ.

Now, if you're sick any time in your life, you can be anointed with oil.

It's a sacrament of the Catholic Church.

It gives you the uh unites you to the Christ's suffering on the cross, you become united to that through the sacrament of of unction or uh prayer for the sick are often called last rites, which happens at death.

Um an odd story is this was was being debated in the Catholic Church.

Uh the Pope after Leo, um, the Pope after the one who excommunicated Luther only lived for a year or so, a year and a half, but um early on in his Papacy, somebody died in front of him.

A cardinal died in front of him and he performed last rites, and that was a way of demonstrating that he was embracing the sacramental system despite Luther's objections to it.

So that's the sacramental system.

That's what makes the Catholic Church go round.

So you jump from that back to Martin Luther 1517, who is begging his people to stop buying indulgences.

You're just giving your money to these really hucksters.

They're using it to build a cathedral, and it's it's not right.

Now, Luther, by the way, is a priest at this time.

He was from a monastery.

He was very intelligent.

He had gone to law school and wanted to be a lawyer.

His parents, his father at least wanted to be a lawyer.

But in the summer of 1505, so 12 years before this, he was caught in a lightning storm.

I'm sure many of you know the story.

He was thrown to the ground in that lightning storm, believing he would die.

He called upon St.

Anne to help him.

And if St.

Anne rescued him, he vowed to become a monk.

This is what Truman says.

You have to believe, you have to understand they really believed in goblins and the trees.

You know, it wasn't that he was afraid of getting hit by lightning, although I'm sure it was part of it.

It was that he's now lost in the woods, so to speak, and he's begging for help.

He did make it back.

He was rescued, and so he left the legal profession, joined a monastery, and in the monastery, he's now becoming exposed to the Bible because he can read it for himself in Latin.

He can study it.

And uh, man, he becomes aware of his own sin, gets terrified of his own sin.

He became more and more distressed with his own ability to be righteous before God.

And there, by the way, an ordination, when you are ordained, it's like a you know replication of baptism.

All of your sins before that moment are removed in your ordination.

So when somebody gets ordained in the Catholic Church, they get a new start right there.

All their previous sins are gone.

So Luther embraced that, but then finds himself sinning more as a priest.

And he Luther latches on to uh admonition in the book of James about sin of omission, not just commission, but omission, things that he should have done that he didn't do.

Luther becomes aware of his thought life, and maybe he should be thinking holy thoughts about God, but instead he's thinking sinful thoughts, or even more neutrally, if the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, then Luther is reasoning the greatest sin is to not love the Lord with all of my mind at every moment.

And so Luther becomes convinced that he is continually and repeatedly committing the greatest sin imaginable.

And it vexes him.

It vexes him.

1507, he begins begging other priests for help and mercy.

This is his first year as a priest, and um he doesn't know what to do, just a full-on, overwhelming recognition of his own sin.

His father, meanwhile, is heaping more guilt on him, telling him, hey, the commandment to love your father and your mother is greater than your commandment to be submissive to the church, and your father and your mother forbid you from being a priest.

Um but Luther wanted to be a priest because he thought that was the way he could get his sins forgiven, and he was so disappointed because he saw he just saw his heart filled with sin and apathy towards God.

He tried staying up all night, he tried fasting, he tried self-mortification, he tried confession repeatedly.

Luther would later write, if ever a person, if ever a monk got into heaven by monkery, I would have gotten there.

And of course, you know that he I've mentioned this to you a few times before, but the priest he often confesses sins to got so tired of these confessions about not thinking holy thoughts all the time.

The priest finally told him, Stop, Martin, stop.

Come back when you have a real sin to confess.

And that was Luther's dilemma.

He said, Oh, what can I do to win a gracious God?

He knew that God was gracious, but he knew that he was so sin, so sinful.

You know, just think of his starting point.

God is gracious to me, I am sinful towards him.

That makes my reconciliation to God even more impossible.

Even more impossible.

He was finally told by the leaders of the monastery, you need to go to Rome.

Go visit Rome and get this all sorted out.

And of course, it was the visit to Rome that pushed him over the edge against indulgences.

He goes to Rome and he says, you know, it was it was the most wicked place he'd ever been.

Um he he would he later wrote, I brought onions to Rome and I came back with garlic.

If there was a hell, Luther wrote, Rome was built on it.

Rome was the holiest city and it is now the worst.

He saw brothels reserved for priests, he met illegitimate children of popes.

I mean, all of this.

So imagine a guy coming from the monastery who thinks my greatest sin is I don't think enough about God, and going to Rome, the holiest city on earth, and finding brothels for the priests.

This just crushed him.

Julius II was Pope at the time, building St.

Peter's Cathedral, Michelangelo's work, that that place.

Uh it had the place where where Luther counted the graves of 46 popes, cemeteries of 80,000 martyrs' bones.

Luther began becoming sarcastic about it.

He said there's enough nails for the cross of Christ to shoe every horse in Saxony, one of his lines.

I mean, the relics were out of control, and of course they taught that relics could dispense grace.

That's what made them a relic.

But the highest of the relics was the uh sanctifying stairs, the scala sancta, which is Pilate's stairs, the stairs that Jesus supposedly walked up on his way to be interviewed with Pilate.

There are 28 steps.

Supposedly, if you walked up those steps confessing your sins, you would have remission of your time in purgatory.

And Luther walked up those steps.

He walked up, well, walked up, he crawled up on his knees, he kissed the steps, he confessed the sins in every step.

At the end of it, he wrote later that he ran out of steps before he ran out of sins.

And he said, All I could think about is who knows if his soul will ever really be released from purgatory.

He went back to Wittenberg, and that is when the indulgence salesman started following him and coming into his city and preying on his people.

And that is what provoked him to write the 95 Theses.

So understand, when you read the 95 Theses, it wasn't so much, you know, a statement of sola, the five solas, it wasn't about sola fide, salvation comes by faith alone.

It was more just the church is out of control.

And indulgences are wicked and are exploiting the poor and the vulnerable.

And Luther would say later that he really thought by writing the 95 Theses that he would persuade the Pope.

He thought he would be able to persuade the Pope to, you know, repent and to get the church back following the teaching of the New Testament, even though Luther, I don't think, could have fully articulated that at the time.

So Luther writes the 95 These, this provokes the debate with Eck in 1519.

And in that debate is when Eck got Luther to denounce the sacraments, deny the power of the sacraments, and say that the sacraments can't save, because Eck laid a logical trap for Luther.

Do you think that indulgences can save you?

And Luther says, no.

Do you think that all the things you experience in Rome can save you?

And Luther says, no.

Well, the Catholic Church says they can, the same church that gives you the sacraments, say those things also save.

So are you saying the sacraments don't save?

And of course, Luther lacked a logical distinction here to be able to say the sacrament most of the sacraments, yes, but this form of them no.

And so he just denounced the power of the sacraments and said none of them can save you.

And so at this point, his bridge back to Rome has been entirely burned.

In 1520, he's excommunicated.

In 1521, his books on this were all banned.

And later he was put on trial in the Diet of Worms.

1521, I was overseen by Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, Leo X.

This is right before he died.

And of course, you know, I know, I'm sure you know most of this.

This is not, I think, new for most of you, but it's good to just remind ourselves of this history.

Luther is put on trial, and this is a massive trial where Luther was afraid he was going to be put to death.

They kill people all the time, by the way.

He was afraid he'd be put to death, but the Emperor Picky promised Luther that he would have safe passage to trial.

Didn't say anything about safe passage home, but safe passage there.

And so Luther went, and on his way there, he was treated like a hero by Germans.

They were celebrating him because he was standing up to Rome again, not for religious reasons, more political reasons.

People tried to beg him not to go because they thought he'd be killed.

But he gets there to Worms, and you know, the first day of the trial, they ask him, Do you recant?

And his answer was less than glorious.

His answer was like, Can I think about it for a day?

And the emperor granted it to him and said, Fine, we adjourn until tomorrow.

So very short first day of the trial.

I mean, imagine that.

How do you plead?

Uh, can I get 24 hours?

After a long parade to get to the courtroom.

It was that night that he said he wrestled with the devil and he shows up the next day, and all of his books, by the way, are stacked on the table for this.

You know, do you recant those books?

That's the question.

And Luther's response was so good.

He said, It's not really fair to ask me, do I recant all of the books?

I mean, there's a lot of them, first of all.

He was a prolific writer, but he said, you know, some of these books, some of these books are about German culture.

And you wouldn't ask me to recant what I say about German culture, would you?

So notice Luther's not naive to the political pressure here.

You know, you you, as the the Pope and the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, wouldn't want me to say anything against the German people, would you?

Nod, nod, wink, wink.

And some of these books are about the abuses of the Catholic Church, which certainly you all would agree are bad, right?

Abuse is bad.

So I couldn't recant the things that are abusive.

Some of these things are about truth that the Bible teaches.

So you wouldn't want me to recant what the Bible says.

But if there's mistakes any of them or errors, which I'm sure there are, Luther said, I'm sure there, I'll grant that there's errors.

Show me those errors, and I'll recant those.

What a good answer, huh?

Way better than can I think about it for a night?

But in fairness, he had a night to think about it.

And of course, Luther, the answer was not accepted.

He was pressed for a clear answer, a simple and clear yes, no, definitive, and Luther's response.

I'm conquered by the Holy Scriptures quoted by me, and my conscience is bound by the Word of God.

I cannot and I will not recant anything.

It is neither safe nor honest to act against one's conscience.

Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me God.

Amen.

That led to the trial being over.

It was very clear.

There's no need for any more evidence against him.

He said he's not recanting.

He was led out of Worms.

He was kidnapped on his way back to Germany by friends.

His political leader kidnapped him and squirreled him away in the Wartburg Castle, where he spent several years writing.

This is where he translated the New Testament and much of the Old Testament into German.

It launches the German Bible, it codifies German language, which was happening all over the uh European continent at the time, but this was the first time in Germany where it had been put in one place.

Now there's a book written in German.

It's the Bible, it's open for everybody.

This, of course, is too much for the Catholic Church.

He's fine, by the way, while he's in the castle translating the Bible into German, he is going out in disguise as like a knight.

He took an alias, Junker Jorg.

That'd be a good name for a dog, by the way.

Luther's knight name.

He was released from his castle and finally went back to Wittenberg, where he began pastoring.

He married right away when he got back, because now his ties with the Catholic Church are over.

So he married a woman who escaped from a monastery in a beer barrel.

Luther joked that God never gave us anything wicked from a beer barrel.

Married his wife, Katrina.

They had children together and much joy together.

And he spent the rest of his life preaching and ministering in Wittenberg.

He preached on Sundays, the guy preached three or four sermons, different sermons, not three or four services like we think of, no, three or four different sermons.

And people would come and go.

What a contrast with the Catholic world.

The Catholic world, you'd come from Mass to receive grace.

You'd go to Mass every day if you could, and many Catholics did.

Luther didn't have anything like that.

In Luther's church, you came for the preaching.

And sometimes people would stay for three or four sermons.

And I know I'm speaking in the Sunday night crowd, so amen or amen.

I mean, that's what he did.

Steve Lawson said that Luther left his mark on the church with the three M's.

Ministry, speaking of preaching, music, speaking of singing, and I love that we're singing six songs tonight, and then marriage, reintroducing the Lord to the family.

Remember, God had been in the monasteries for so long.

Like if you were religious, you were on that side of the wall with that language, totally separated from the culture.

The only interaction of the world and the church was through Mass and the sacraments.

And here comes Luther is like whose marriage is on display for the church, who wrote books on parenting and told people their faith is shown and how they lead their families.

I mean, the whole thing is just so much, literally anathema to the Catholic Church.

They declared it to be anathema.

Luther was excommunicated for his stance and indulgences in the sacraments.

He was, you know, sentenced to death for his for getting married.

I mean, that put it over the top.

And he was repeatedly denounced for his teaching on justification.

It was the Council of Trent, canon number nine.

If anyone says that by faith alone the sinner is justified, let him be anathema, which means cut off.

No hope for salvation, no hope from purgatory.

What a contrast with Romans 3, verse 20.

Romans 3:20

Your Bibles might still be open to it from earlier.

I want to spend just a few minutes looking at Romans 3, verse 20.

Romans 3:20

Of course, so much of what Luther wrote about was all over the Bible.

He wrote a commentary on Galatians.

That was one of his first substantive works.

But Romans was the book that had really captured his heart.

Romans 1.16 was the verse that led him, really, I think, to his conversion.

Romans 1.16, I'm not ashamed of the gospel.

It's the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.

Romans 1, verse 17, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith as it is written, the righteous shall live by faith.

Romans 1:17

That's Habakkuk 2.4.

That is the verse that Luther would say led him to understand the doctrine of justification.

Remember earlier I said in the Catholic Church, justification was a state of righteousness that you had to obtain to by your own works.

So Luther encounters Romans 1.17, Habakkuk 2.4.

It says, those two don't work together.

If righteousness is a state of holiness you attain to by your own conduct, even mix your conduct and faith together.

Works energized by faith, faith energized by works, this is a typical Catholic syncretism behind this, and you're trying to achieve righteousness, and you encounter Romans 1.17, the righteous will live by faith.

Luther says the two don't work together.

Righteousness is revealed from faith.

And it's the righteousness of God that is revealed.

That was the phrase that just jarred Luther's mind.

That's what he wasn't able to account for.

If it was the righteousness of men is revealed from faith to faith, that fits inside of Catholicism nicely.

But it's the righteousness of God.

It's God's holy standard that it comes to earth, faith to faith.

This is why even the Old Testament says the righteous will live by faith.

So this is what knocked Luther right out of the monastery and into the pulpit, honestly.

But Romans 3, verse 20 is what seals it for him.

Romans 3:20

Romans 3, verse 20, by works of the law, no human being will be justified in his sight.

Romans 3:20

I mean, there it is.

That is diametrically opposed to what the Catholic Church taught on righteousness.

Again, contrast that with the Council of Trinity.

If anyone says that by faith alone the sinner is justified, let him be anathema.

And then you get to Romans 3 verse 20 that says, no human being can be justified in his sight by works.

Romans 3:20

The law just gives you knowledge of sin.

The law shows you how you failed.

And that can seem like abstract or ethereal to us, but it's not abstract or ethereal.

If you are wrestling with your own heart and your own conscience, if you are aware of your own sin, if you believe the greatest commitment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, if you believe that, and then you think that my mind wanders, my heart does not love the Lord as I ought, then this is not ethereal.

This is very real to you.

If you're aware that your heart does not love the Lord with its full capacity, and you believe that your way to be justified is to do that, then the more you try to do that, the further apart you get.

This really is Romans 7.

Had Luther kept working through all the way to Romans 7 before his conversion here, Romans 7 would have been the dynamite on it.

And Romans 7 makes so much more sense now because Romans 7, it's almost like the more mature you are, the more frustrated you get with your spiritual life.

That's the reality in Romans 3, verse 20.

Romans 3:20

You try to live by the law.

The more you live by the law, the more aware you are of your own sin.

The more distant you feel from God.

That's what the law does.

It drives you away, it shows you you're not right with Him.

So if you try to live by works, if you try to rely on your works, you become powerfully aware of its inadequacy.

You can't do it.

The Catholic Church went on to say, if anyone shall say this, this is Council of Churn again, that justifying faith is nothing else than confidence in divine mercy, pardoning sin for Christ's sake.

Or it's by that faith alone which we are justified.

Let him be anathema or cursed.

And Luther gets to Romans 3.21.

The righteousness of God has been manifest apart from the law, although the law and prophets bear witness to it.

The righteousness of God is through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.

And there it is.

He even says the law, Paul even says the law and the prophets bear witness to it.

This is the message of the Old Testament.

This is the message of Christ, that the righteousness of God comes solofide through faith alone.

What your works do is show you how much you need faith.

Now Luther arrives at this not through studying church history, although he had access to some of the Greek philosophers, he had access now to some of the church fathers in Wittenberg.

That's not how he got here.

Erasmus was powerfully helpful to Luther in directing him to some of these resources, but that's not how he got there ultimately.

He gets there through the study of Scripture, and he realizes that what the Bible teaches is contrary to what the Catholic Church not only teaches but guards and protects as if their whole existence depends upon it.

And once you start down that road, you know, even to this day, once a Catholic says, you know, this is the authority, it cannot be long before they end up leaving the Catholic Church.

Because when you start wrestling through the doctrines of the Catholic Church that we had on the screen earlier, you recognize they're just not taught in the Bible.

Like you can argue with them logically, but you realize those things just are not biblical.

What the Catholic Church teaches about justification, you can combat it logically, or you can go to Romans 3.21.

What it teaches about the Pope is against what the Bible says.

The Mass is not the rescrifice of Christ.

Jesus is the final sacrifice once for all.

You know, Mary is not the queen of heaven.

She was not conceived in an immaculate conception without a sin nature.

That's just not what the Bible teaches.

Indulgences are not taught by the Bible.

I mean, all of this goes away when you encounter the Bible.

And that's solo scriptura that Luther just says, this is what the this is going to be church now.

I'm going to preach.

And people are going to come and they're going to have their eyes open to what the truth of the word of God says.

It's all a gift.

Solo gratia, that God gives salvation through grace, not of works.

It's through the faith that he gives, and he gives faith because of his gracious nature.

Remember where we started tonight?

Luther was aware of how gracious God was, and that just drove him further away from God.

The more gracious God was, the more Luther realized he fell short.

And then you realize that salvation comes only through God's grace, and he gives the faith, and that faith is in Christ, not your own works.

There's no other way for salvation.

And this directs you all to belief in God, that God's glory, that's Romans 3, verse 23.

Romans 3:23

All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, but are justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

You can get all five of the souls just out of these few verses.

And that's what Luther did.

That led him ultimately away from Rome, never to return.

The Catholic Church responded by saying the holy in fact, I'll even go present day, well, 1967.

1967, Indultitarium Doctrina, an official doctrine of the Catholic Church, says the Holy Mother Church again recommends the practice of indulgences to the faithful.

The church recommends its faithful not to abandon or neglect the holy traditions of those who have gone.

Before, speaking specifically of indulgences.

The Catholic Church says again, we declare, say, define, and pronounce that it is absolutely necessary for the salvation of every human creature to be subject to the Roman pontiff.

The Church is necessary for salvation.

Whoever knows the Catholic Church was made necessary by God through Jesus Christ and refused to enter her or remain in her cannot be saved.

That's Vatican 2, 1967.

I mean, this division is still ongoing.

And at the heart of this division is what Luther saw: an attack on the doctrine of justification, the most important doctrine of all.

Salvation comes as a free gift from God through faith in Christ.

You'll find that out if you read the Bible.

And if you place your heart in what the Bible says, it directs you to God who is gracious, and because he is gracious, he saves people through faith placed in the person and work of Jesus Christ, not in the work of their own hands, but in the work of Christ who is the sin bearer, and it's through propitiation of his blood.

His blood takes away the wrath of sin.

And God receives that person by faith.

If you believe that, there's no concept of purgatory anymore.

The God receives you by your faith.

The flames of purgatory are extinguished, and instead you find the warm embrace of a heavenly Father and his Son Jesus Christ, who longs to be reconciled with sinners and who makes the means of that reconciliation meets the requirements of those means through the person of Jesus Christ.

This is not contrary to the Bible, as Paul ends Romans 3 by saying, it's not contrary to the law.

No, it upholds the law because it shows you that through the trying to keep the law, you cannot be reconciled to God.

The only way to have faith in God is not through the works of your hand, not through a sacramental system.

A sacramental system cannot produce faith.

It cannot get you righteousness.

There is no treasury of merit of the saints in heaven that is dispensed through your works here on this earth that does not exist.

The Bible teaches that the only treasury of merit is the merit, the infinite merit of Jesus Christ through his sinless life and his sin-bearing death.

And through faith in him you can be saved.

God, we're grateful for the news of Jesus Christ and his death and resurrection, and we're thankful for the reformation that we can commemorate in this, you know, evening service on Reformation Sunday.

That's a small way, Lord, but it's our way of reminding ourselves that the gospel was costly to Christ.

Of course, he laid down his life, and it comes to us through the lives of those who have preached and taught it and really rescued it from the hands of those who would deny it.

We know that every human in church history, apart from Christ, is a sinner.

None of these are perfect.

We don't worship or honor uh any man like that.

Nevertheless, we consider the lives of those who have gone before us so that we might follow in the footsteps of their faith.

We're thankful uh for how you used Luther to rescue the gospel and to give it to us in the written word before us, not in German, but in English.

Yeah, we see Luther's fingerprints all over it.

We give you thanks for it.

In the name of Christ.

Amen.

And now for a parting word for Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thanks for joining us.

If you're in the Washington, D.C.

area, I would love to see you at Emmanuel Bible Church.

For more information on our church or our current service times, go to IBC.church.

For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to TMS.edu.

I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel with boldness.