We’re leaving our series entitled, “You Are Lord: Understanding and Embracing the Lordship of Jesus Christ.” We are going to take a break. We only have one message left in our series and next week we are going to be getting back to it talking about our future. Jesus is Lord of our future. It’s not really a thing that we can do anything about. Jesus is the Lord of our future, but we need to, I think, be reminded of it especially in times like right now – we have elections, economy, we have the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, we have people who are losing their jobs, money is tight. A lot of things are going on that can cause us to have doubts about God being in control. Next week we’re going to be addressing that – that Jesus would be Lord of our future. Maybe you have a family member or a loved one who is going off somewhere else and you are worried about them. God is Lord of their future too. We’re going to join up with that and finish next week.
But today we’re going to be talking about the Reformation. Today is traditionally what is called “Reformation Sunday” and the Reformation has given us a bunch of different churches.
The first grade class was having a “show-and-tell” and the teacher told them to bring something from home pertaining to their religion. So the Catholic boy brought his crucifix, the Jewish boy brought his yamuka, and the Lutheran boy brought his Crockpot.
How many Lutherans does it take to change a light bulb? Change?? My grandmother donated that light bulb!
How many Baptists does it take to change a light bulb? 4 ---- One to change it and 3 to stand around talking about how much they’ll miss the old one.
There are those denominational jokes. Oh, I’ve got one more to try out on you:
There was a man that was walking across a bridge one day, and he saw another man standing on the edge. He said, “Stop! Stop! Don’t do it!” He looked like he was going to jump.
“Why shouldn’t I?” he said.
The other man said, “Well, there’s so much to live for!”
“Like what?”
“Well…are you religious or atheist?”
“Religious.”
“Me too! Are you Christian or Jewish?”
“Christian.”
“Me too! Are you Catholic or Protestant?”
“Protestant.”
“Me too! Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?”
“Baptist.”
“Wow! Me too! Are you Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?”
“Baptist Church of God”
“Me too! Are you Original Baptist Church of God, or are you Reformed Baptist Church of God?”
“Reformed Baptist Church of God.”
“Me too! Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1915?”
“Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1915!”
To which he said, “Die, heretic scum!” and pushed him off.
These are just some denominational jokes, but why do we have all these churches? Have you ever taken a moment to think about all of the different churches that we have in our country, around the world? We have Catholics, Episcopalians, Anglicans; we have Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists, Pentecostal; we have Nazarene, we have Non-denominational churches. We have Church of God, United Church of Christ, the Christian Church…all of these churches and where did it all come from?
The Protestant denomination came from what is known as the Reformation. The Reformation was a 16th Century religious movement that was marked by ultimately rejection or somewhat of a modification of Roman Catholic theology. They modified or changed or did away with some of the doctrine and practices of the established church and then that gave us the protestant churches.
Today we’re going to be going back to the beginning because some of you might be thinking, “Well, where did the church come from?” We read in the Bible that the church is here and it’s Jewish and now there’s like no Jewish Christians. What happened there? We have the Catholic Church and they go all the way back to Peter so where do we fit in the whole thing. We’re going to try to straighten all that out. Then the last third of the message, we’re going to try to take some points from the Reformation and try to see how they apply to our life and how they apply to our church. So this is going to be a history class for the first 2/3 of the message and if you’re not a history buff or you don’t like class, I encourage you to try to listen, but I’ll wake you up in about 30 minutes and then we’ll close off, okay?
The History of the Church – who started the church? Let me ask you: who started the church? Not a trick question. Who started THE church? Wow! We’re going to have to go back to the very basics. Jesus Christ started the church, okay? If ever in doubt, just answer Jesus. It’s probably right!
Jesus was Lord of the church. Ephesians 2:20 says that he is the foundation, the cornerstone. The foundation is built on the prophets and the apostles, but the cornerstone is Jesus Christ. He came to start the church. Jesus calls the church his bride. We are a people that will be made into his image, into the bride of Jesus Christ. That’s the church.
Is the church, buildings? No. Is the church, programs? Is the church, people? Yes. The church is people and we right here - we make up the body of Christ along with people all over the world. When you join the body of Christ, when you accept Jesus Christ as your Savior, your Lord, you know that He died for your sin; you become a part of the church universal. It doesn’t matter if you’re part of a church like West Lisbon or a church over somewhere else, it doesn’t matter. You are a part of the universal church – the church of all believers that are united by Christ.
So let’s go back first to the birth of the church and that goes back to the time of Jesus when Jesus was put to death on the cross and he died and we later found out that the disciples learned of this mystery – why Jesus had to die was actually that he had to pay for the sin of humanity to make salvation possible…to make a way possible for humans who are sinful to come to Almighty, Holy, Perfect God. Jesus had to do that work on the cross for that to happen – to give you eternal life, to give you hope, to give you forgiveness of sin. That had to happen.
After Jesus died, then three days later some people started murmuring that Jesus had risen from the dead. And pretty soon, seven weeks later the world was beginning to be turned upside down with the message that Jesus Christ had been risen from the dead and they went into all the world to tell of this good news of Jesus Christ. You can read the story in Acts. In Acts, chapter 2, the disciples are all waiting for the Holy Spirit. Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would come and they are waiting in Acts, chapter 2 and sure enough, just as Jesus had promised the Holy Spirit comes. They are filled with power and these cowards that ran away when Jesus was…and I say coward because I would have been one of them. They denied that they even knew Jesus. Most of them ran away, fled. And now all of a sudden something happened with the resurrection of Christ and it’s the gift of the Holy Spirit. And now they go out into the world to start the church.
The early church set up was like this. There were leaders in the church. There were those who, you would kind of say, were in charge, but in true New Testament fashion, the disciples didn’t claim to have power and authority to lord it over people, but they knew that God had a system whereby which He operated. And we read that one of the leaders in Jerusalem was James, the half-brother of Jesus. He doesn’t seem to be a believer or a follower of Jesus when Jesus was teaching, but after Jesus’ death and resurrection, James comes around and he’s one of the leaders in Jerusalem along with Peter.
There are some leaders there; they’re missionaries. Who is one of the biggest missionaries of the early church? He wrote 2/3 of the New Testament. Paul. Paul was one. Who was another one? Early missionary…Barnabas. How about another one? Timothy and Silas and John Mark. These were missionaries that went out from the early church to start new churches.
Then we also read about elders in those churches. In Acts 14:23, Paul and Barnabas are going from town to town starting churches and appointing, it says, elders to oversee the work of the church. Elders or pastors or bishops…whatever the word that you want to use…same thing – people who are called by God to lead the people of God.
So the first churches were mostly Jewish because Jesus was Jewish and his disciples were Jewish. Mostly Jewish, but then increasingly so, became more Gentile. We had churches in Philippi, Thessalonica, Corinth, Ephesus, Jerusalem and then it began to spread from there throughout Asia Minor and Greece and over to Europe and then to Rome and Italy and by the end of the third century, can you believe this? Most parts of Europe had a church somewhere in the vicinity - even up to England and Scandinavia by the end of the third century.
Now there are some early church fathers that are good to know about. One of them is about a man named Polycarp. He was the Bishop of Smyrna. Now when I say Bishop you might have things that come to your mind from the training or school or maybe you have a Catholic background. Bishop is a word in scripture that is interchangeable with elder or presbyter. Some of these elders are pastors so an elder, bishop…same thing. So this bishop Polycarp was a disciple of John, the apostle John. It’s really an interesting story – you can read about his martyrdom. He was 86 years old and he was brought before the authorities to renounce Jesus Christ because everybody looked at Christianity back in this time as being some weird cult. And this group called The Way were just troublemakers. They ate their own flesh of people; they were cannibals. They didn’t understand the Lord’s Supper. And they were promiscuous and they did all sorts of weird stuff with love…love everybody. That’s what the people thought about Christians. So Polycarp was brought before the authorities to renounce Jesus Christ. Of course, he didn’t. He considered it an honor to die for the Lord Jesus and at 86 years old, they burned him at the stake. That’s Polycarp.
Then some other ones…we can’t name them all. Ignatius…we have a school named St. Ignatius. Ignatius was the bishop of Antioch; Ireaneus, bishop of Lyons; Tertullian, one of the great scholars from Carthidge. Then we have Clement and Origen…Clement was first and then Origen taught at a school of Christianity in Alexandria. Origen was one of the guys who first started translating scripture from the original Hebrew text, Old Testament scripture. Then we have Justin Martyr - the guy that knew his stuff. He knew how to defend Christianity and he would do that. He would present logical reasons why you can believe in Jesus and why you can believe that he is the Son of God. He was put to death in 165.
Scripture of the church: The scripture that they had were the Old Testament just like we have and then they had letters that were circulating among the churches from the apostles. Letters that we have in our New Testament – I and II Corinthians, the letter to the Ephesians, Philippians, etc., etc. These books and the Gospel, (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) were copied and circulated for all of the churches. At the end of the 4th century, the Canon was finalized. It was put together. The Canon is the Canon of scripture put together, bound together, in the book that you have in front of you and then combined it with the Old Testament – there is the Bible, scripture, the Word of God.
Now you say, “Well, how is that just put together? The New Testament just put together. Where did these books come from? How did they know that that was the Word of God?” Well, they had some rules, you should say, about how a book could become part of the Canon.
The first one is that it had to have apostolic origin or it had to be related back to a follower of an apostle. So if an apostle wasn’t behind a book, then it wasn’t in the New Testament. So an apostle – the definition of an apostle is one who had seen the Lord Jesus Christ. Now Mark who wrote the Gospel of Mark did not, as far as we know, maybe he was a disciple. He was around to see the Lord Jesus, but he is actually writing from Peter’s perspective. Peter is giving him the information to write down about the gospel. You see, there’s the apostolic origin. That’s number 1. They had to have apostolic origin to be considered part of the Canon.
Secondly, and these are just three reasons. It had to be used in the churches. It had to have universal acceptance in the churches. So the churches were passing around these letters. It had to be universally accepted like the letters of Paul. “Yeah, this is the letter of Paul. This church has one. Down the road, this church has a copy. It’s being used.” These weren’t books out of left field with somebody just trying to make up stuff. These were letters from apostles that were being circulated.
Third one is the content. If it was just some wacky, far-out weird stuff, it wasn’t going to be included into the New Testament Canon because it had to match already accepted documents and letters that were there. The standard. And so in the Apocrypha…the Apocrypha is a series of books and letters that is not in the New Testament, but it is in some Bibles. It’s in the inter-testamental period between the Old Testament and the New Testament. There you find some stories that are a little far-fetched…a little hokey. That’s why they are not a part of the New Testament Canon. There is a story of Jesus when he was a little boy and he’s playing with his friends. Jesus makes a clay bird and the other kids are watching and playing and Jesus blows into the clay and then he throws the bird up and it flies away. You can tell a difference in stories because of the content. So that’s the scripture.
They also had the Didache which was a very early document that gave instructions about baptism and the Lord’s supper. A Shepherd of Hermes and I Clement, written by Clement. This is the birth of the church. The church was being persecuted. If you accepted Jesus Christ, if you became a disciple of Jesus, that most likely meant that your family would write you off; most likely meant that you would lose your work and your place of business; it likely meant that you would lose your family and your life. This is part of the Roman Empire.
Part of the reason that the Roman Empire – the Romans were very accepting of all different kinds of religion but because of the fact that Christians refused to declare that Caesar was lord, (they only have one Lord, Jesus)…because they refused to do that, that’s what got them into hot water. They were brought before authorities. All they had to do was renounce that Jesus was Lord. Just say Caesar is lord. It’s not a big deal; you don’t even have to mean it. But these Christians took so seriously their faith that they would go and be torn apart by beasts for the sake of not renouncing the name of Jesus Christ.
Secondly, birth of a religious state. Things began to change when Constantine, the emperor of Rome, came into power. The story goes like this: there is some discrepancy as to the truthfulness of it, but towards the end of his life, Constantine told the story about how he went into battle. They were far outnumbered. He went into battle and the opposing army was led by a leader who was said to be into mystical religion and calling on the powers of the universe to help them defeat the Romans and Constantine said that he cried out, “Oh Supreme Most High God,” and he had a vision. The vision was a cross in the sky and then he heard the Lord’s voice say, “by this sign, conquer.” And so the story goes that he put the sign of the cross on the shields of his warriors and they won like an amazing victory.
After that, Constantine then made Christianity the state religion. Christianity went from being a persecuted minority religious practice to being the state religion of the Roman Empire. Much of these early things mixed paganism in early Christianity. One example of the mixture that happened was with Christmas. Christmas we celebrate December 25. What does that commemorate? The birth of Jesus Christ. Back in that day, pagan religion worshipped the sun and the sun god and around December 21, Solstice, they would worship the sun’s birthday. They would light candles and they would give gifts and they would have feasts. Now you can see how that merges with Christmas. Christianity took over that and no longer was it the celebration of “Saturnalia”, but it was the celebration of Christ’s birth.
Sunday was also recognized as a holiday. Constantine declared it to be and also Easter week was a holiday.
One man in this religious state that has such a strong mark on Christianity is Augustine. He was a man who came to know Christ. Let me tell you in his own words because he had such an impact on Christianity. Here is his conversion from his own words from his book that he wrote, “Confessions.”
“I probe the hidden depths of my soul and wrung its pitiful secrets from it, and when I gathered them all before the eyes of my heart, a great storm broke within me, bringing with it a great deluge of tears…For I felt that I was still enslaved by my sins, and in my misery I kept crying, ‘How long shall I go on saying “tomorrow, tomorrow”? Why not now? Why not make an end of my ugly sins at this moment?”
I was asking myself all these questions, weeping all the while with the most bitter sorrow in my heart, when all at once I heard the sing-song voice of a child in a nearby house. Whether it was the voice of a boy or a girl I cannot say, but again and again it repeated the chorus, ‘Take it and read, take it and read.’ At this I looked up, thinking hard whether there was any kind of game in which children used to chant words like these, but I could not remember ever hearing them before. I stemmed my flood of tears and stood up, telling myself that this could only be God’s command to open my book of Scripture and read the first passage on which my eyes should fall. For I had heard the story of Antony, and I remembered how he had happened to go into a church while the gospel was being read and had taken it as an instruction addressed to himself when he heard the words, ‘Go home and sell all that belongs to you. Give it to the poor, and so the treasure you have shall be in heaven; then come back and follow me.’ By this message from God he had at once been converted.
So I hurried back to the place where Alypius was sitting, for when I stood up to move away I had put down the book containing Paul’s Letters. I seized it and opened it, and in silence I read the first passage on which my eyes fell: ‘No orgies or drunkenness, no immorality or indecency, no fighting or jealousy. Take up the weapons of the Lord Jesus Christ; and stop giving attention to your sinful nature, to satisfy its desires.’ I had no wish to read more and no need to do so. For in an instant, as I came to the end of the sentence, it was as though the light of faith flooded into my heart and all the darkness of doubt was dispelled.
So he left a life – the life of orgies, a life of wildness, around the age of 40 and he became one of the greatest theologians of Christianity. He wrote about the doctrines of the fall and of original sin, of grace, of free-will, but also of predestination. The religious state.
Now this might betray some of my political views, but to me it’s always a bad idea when government gets a hold of stuff and this is what happened with religion. They got a hold of Christianity and now it was no longer Christianity, it was not just the Roman Empire, it was the Holy Roman Empire. And here was the birth…this was the beginning which would lead to the Reformation. You had the pope that came to power that were just evil and then it became a power struggle in Rome. You had kings and princes who had to answer to the pope because he’s the highest authority of this Christian nation, empire.
In 1095, Pope Urban II began the Crusade and in 1095 he said to anyone who would come and lay aside their life to go east and to go into the Middle East and to go to Jerusalem to fight the Muslims. The Muslims had sprung up in 600-700 and they were encroaching upon the west and if anyone would go there and kick these infidels out then they would be rewarded. They would be paid for; their family would be protected. They’d be well taken care of and then here’s the kicker: he would receive an indulgence. These were the first indulgences that were given. An indulgence was this: an indulgence was the decree given by the pope to somebody which would get them out of purgatory faster because at that time the Catholic theology there was a belief in purgatory. So if you believed in Jesus Christ you would get to heaven eventually, but you still had sin. So in order to pay for that sin and get rid of it, you had to go to purgatory for a time and then you could enter into heaven. So this teaching of indulgence said that you can get this indulgence by doing this thing and you can cut down your time in purgatory. Not only that, but later on you could get indulgences for someone who has already died and they could be sprung from the throes of purgatory.
Well, how could this happen? How could this teaching…this teaching was not in the Bible about indulgences…and it’s not in the Bible about purgatory. How does this happen? It has to do with the way the church viewed revelation. How the Roman Catholic at the time viewed the revelation of God? Hang with me. This is such a class right now. I’ll get going here in a little bit, but we’ve just got to go through the Reformation.
They had to look at revelation and you could do it in different ways. This is how the Roman Catholic Church looked at it. They looked at it as we have scripture and then we have tradition. We have scripture – scripture is all true – but the only ones that could correctly interpret scripture is the church because the church is God’s representatives here on earth. And so then tradition becomes equal with scripture. What the church says is equal to what the Bible says because the Bible is the church and they are the same. And we believe that the Bible is the final authority. We don’t believe that tradition is the same as the Bible. We believe that the Bible is. This is just different ways to view it. So if the church starts saying something that is different or a little bit different from the Bible, but if they can maneuver around it, its okay and that becomes church law according to the Catholic Church at the time.
By the way, the Reformation changed the Catholic Church too. In the Catholic Church you don’t get indulgences anymore. Actually, you talk to a lot of Catholics, they don’t even learn about purgatory much anymore either. They’ve had a lot of reform because of the Reformation. Vatican Council, Vatican I, Vatican II…so they’ve changed because of it.
But let’s fast forward to Martin Luther. Martin Luther has more books written about him than anyone else in history except Jesus Christ himself. He was a monk that taught at Wittenberg and he was so entrenched in the thought that he could never please God; he could never please Jesus Christ. He was always a sinner and then he was saved and then he felt like he was still sinning and he couldn’t justify until he read the book of Romans. And then he was saved by God’s grace and he realized that God’s salvation comes by God’s grace through faith alone. It’s not of works so that no one can boast (Ephesians 2:8,9) Luther came to that conclusion and he saw the injustices and the teaching that was going on in the church at the time and he had to stand up against it. He was a professor; he knew the Bible; he knew the languages and he posted his 95 theses on a church in Wittenberg. The majority of those are teachings against indulgences.
There was a guy named Stetzel who was going from town to town and was raising money for St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome and they were selling bricks. You could sponsor a brick and pay money and you would get an indulgence. He would say this: “The moment the money tinkles in the collecting box, a soul flies out of purgatory.” Martin Luther heard this and he’s like this is not right. People were using the fear of hell, the fear of purgatory, to get people’s money. So he took a stand. He took a stand that would forever change the church. He was brought on trial. He said, “I will change my mind if you can show me anywhere in sacred scripture that I’m doing wrong.” And of course, they couldn’t because they couldn’t point to scripture. They could point to the church. He was saying things that were against the pope, against the council, against everything, but he was saying things that were according to scripture. So they couldn’t and under fear of death, he had to go into hiding. He translated the New Testament into German and from that time, the Reformation, and for many others…John Calvin, Zwingli…there came three different movements out of that – Lutheranism, which spread from Germany to Scandinavia; the Reformed Calvinist Church went into Scotland, France, Holland, Switzerland; the Church of England – those three branches and from those branches trickled all the way down to today we have over 400 denominations.
Okay, there’s the history lesson. Now what can we learn from the Reformation? What can we learn from it? The first one is the importance of Biblical authority. Look at II Timothy 3:16, 17.
“All scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”
The Word that we have, the Old Testament, the New Testament is God-breathed words. If there is one thing that we can take from the Reformation, it was the unashamed stance on this being the actual Word of God and people stood upon that. Martin Luther being one of them. The importance of Biblical authority. In the Bible we understand who God is. Maybe some of you had dads that were not the best to you. God is not like your father. You don’t get your idea about God, the Father, from your father. He’s not. He’s not from your pastor growing up or me. I’m not God. He’s not anybody that you get an idea from from culture. No. How we know who God is is from his revealed Word and this Word reveals that he is holy and that he is righteous. He is full of mercy; he is full of love and grace and he’s longing to have mercy and grace showered upon you. “How?” you say. Well, we understand God’s plan of salvation.
That’s the second thing under Biblical authority. We understand His plan. The Bible says, “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” What is the wages of sin? “The wages of sin is death.” Okay, but what about grace? Well, the free gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. And so now Romans 5:1, “we are justified through faith.” How can we be justified by believing that? By believing in Jesus? Well, because in II Corinthians 5:21 “God made him who knew no sin, Jesus, to be sin for us so that we can have the righteousness of God.”
So now Jesus goes to the cross to pay for our sin and actually when we have faith in him that he did that on our behalf, (Jesus in my place; the gospel) we believe that! We have faith and we trust in that. Our sin is imputed on Christ. He takes our sin and what do we get back? We actually get the righteousness of Jesus Himself so that God sees you. He doesn’t see a sinner. He sees His Son. That’s awesome! That doesn’t come from me; it comes from God Almighty and it’s in His Book.
Then we also see that there are rules for living. There’s a standard which God calls us to – good things that we are called to do. Good things that we should do – that should be a part of our life, but that aren’t things that save us.
So the first thing is the importance of Biblical authority. The second thing is to challenge everything. Here’s my challenge from the Reformation. It’s to challenge everything. In II Corinthians 10:5 Paul writes, “We demolish arguments in every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.” So I would say to me, you’re taking captive every single thought to be obedient to Christ. How do we know who Jesus is? How do we know about God? Do we know salvation through His Word? So I would challenge everything according to scripture. Everything that you hear. No matter if you hear it on TV or it’s from a Christian author. When you listen on the radio…you read a book. You come to church; you go to Sunday School class…wherever you are at, you’re challenging everything according to the standard of God’s Word and that you would be doing that when you are listening to me. And you would call me on things if there is something that I’m saying that is not according to the Word.
I believe that God does put people in leadership position in the church. That’s clear from scripture. But I also believe that the scripture is not to be hidden from the masses. “Jesus loves me, this I know. For the Bible tells me so…” A child could understand it. So challenge everything.
Thirdly, don’t be afraid to change. You know culture changes and I would say we need to change. Culture changes and we need to change. In I Corinthians 9:22…let me explain what I mean by this. Paul writes this: “To the weak, I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some.” Elsewhere he says, “all things are lawful, but not all things are profitable.” Paul becomes all things to all men. Does he become entrenched in sin? No. That’s not what he’s talking about. He’s living for the Lord Jesus Christ, so what is he talking about? He’s talking about the things that are on the peripheral – that don’t have anything to do with the gospel and that sometimes Christians get so fired up and worked up about and a lot of times it has to do with culture. It has to do with change and we get so scared of change and then the message just stays within our little group because we’re going to stay the way that we are. Meanwhile, the world is going forward. We don’t change the message; we don’t change the truth; we always hold onto the truth. We speak the truth in love, but we’re willing to change the things that we can change in order to reach more people.
Truth doesn’t change, but methods must. Styles can change. Back in the Catholic Church and they reformed this too. They don’t do this anymore, but I’ve heard of a movement within the Catholic Church to get back to this. They used to have mass in all Latin. The Vatican Council II changed that and they could have the services, mass, in vernacular of the people. So they changed that. That was a good change for the Catholic Church. That was a good reform in my mind. Because you’ve got a bunch of people in all these different countries coming in that don’t know Latin that are just sitting there and they’re taking communion and leaving and they are not learning anything about God. We sometimes have to change our methods that we use. It’s not easy. Sometimes it’s uncomfortable. It is uncomfortable. I get uncomfortable sometimes because I like to do the things the way that I like to do them.
Martin Luther wrote a song called, “A Mighty Fortress”. We sang it last week. He used a tune from a tavern song – a popular tavern song. He used that tune and he wrote “A Mighty Fortress”, put it to that tune and introduced it to his church. Now what if I was to come in here with a rap song from…I don’t even know who the stars are nowadays…Shawn…whatever his name is…come in and say, “Here’s this song from him. You guys have probably heard him on the radio; a lot of your friends probably know it, but I’ve got some new words to it.” And that would be just like, “Wow! What are you doing?”
But Martin Luther was a reformer. He stood up against everything that he was brought up in to stand for the truth. He had to face mentors and loved ones and his family to say that this is not true. He had to face the establishment, but he would use everything that he could in his power to get the message of God’s grace alone through faith alone.
That’s what I want to do here. You with me? Because it’s such a good message – that God would send his Son, Jesus, to die for you that if you would just believe and receive him, you’d have everlasting life. No purgatory. Straight to heaven.
