We’re in the 3rd week of a 4 week series called stories to tell. My purpose in this series is to tell you 4 stories of 4 great heroes of the faith, to stir your soul to stand for Christ. I want you to have new stories of the faith to tell your children and your children’s children. (please turn to Romans 1)
I start there, because each of these stories are rooted in a biblical truth, essential to our faith, but challenged in the past, and almost lost, if God had not raised up heroes of the faith to contend for them. The biblical truth we’re going to examine today is…
Sola Fide (sola feeday)
Sola fide means faith alone. It’s the teaching that justification and salvation of the soul is by faith alone, and not earned by good works. Scripture teaches that "faith yields justification and good works" not "faith and good works yield justification." In other words, salvation is not earned by the doing of good works. But the saved person gladly does good works in response to salvation. The apostle Paul put it this way…
Ephesians 2:8-10… For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
Do you see how clear this is…you are saved by God’s grace through faith, it’s not the meritorious reward for doing good works. But, now that we’ve been saved, we gladly want to please our Savior by doing good.
Sola fide
This is not a matter of semantics, it’s foundational to how you understand your relationship with God. Martin Luther called sola fide the "doctrine by which the church stands or falls.” Luther grew up under a works based salvation that tormented his soul. It was this passage of Scripture God used in his life to set him free…
Romans 1:16-17
The gospel, the good news about Jesus, is the power of God for salvation. Biblical salvation means to be transferred from the kingdom of darkness and into the kingdom of God, to become a child of God, to become an heir to an eternal inheritance, and to be rescued from the wrath to come. That’s biblical salvation.
But how does a person get this salvation? The answer is clear, by faith. You’re not born into it, you don’t get it by ethnicity, it doesn’t happen to you by means of baptism, it’s received by faith, and faith alone. Sola fide.
The formula is not 75% faith plus 25% works = salvation. It’s by faith from first to last, from beginning to end. Your faith doesn’t carry you to the 2 yard line, where you punch it in by your human effort of works. It’s 100% by faith. To whatever degree you add works to the gospel as a requirement for salvation, you destroy the gospel. It’s like going up to a Van Gough with a can of spray paint, thinking you’re going to improve on it. No you’re not, you effort will only destroy the masterpiece.
Warning, if you want to be judged by your works, you better prepare yourself for God’s review, Ro 3:10-20. That’s God’s assessment of our good works, they’re filthy rags. Even our best attempts at righteousness are polluted with selfishness, deceit, bitterness, violence. There is not one single person who will be declared righteous before God based on their works. So, if your plan is to stand before God and try to convince him that the good outweighs the bad in your life, or that you’re basically a good person deserving of salvation, you may want to rethink that strategy while you still can.
Thank God he provided a way of salvation we could not do on our own, vv.21-24. This righteousness from God comes from faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no other way, you can’t earn it; it is received only through faith in Christ. Sola fide. 3:22a, 1:17. Sola fide.
Some might say, that gospel is a license to sin. No, it’s like this…we rescue girls from sex trafficking. Prior to their rescue those girls were among the most oppressed people on the planet. Through homes of hope they’ve been rescued, loved, cared for and given hope for a bright future. Those girls don’t need to be required to follow Jesus, they want to. Sola fide, isn’t a license to sin, it’s the motivation to follow your Savior
(Challenge to put faith in Christ)
Now, there was a time in the history of the church, when this doctrine was all but lost. By the fifteenth century the church had become a massive institution of power, and the gospel was polluted. The church was teaching salvation by subjection to the pope, receiving the sacraments, and doing good works. In fact, by the fifteenth salvation was for sale. In order to raise funds for the building of St Peter’s basilica in Rome, the church was selling admission to heaven, even for dead relatives. It wasn’t by faith at all, silver and gold got you into the heaven. In those dark days, God raised up a hero of the faith to stand against the powers of the empire, and the most powerful institution on the planet, to preach sola fide. That hero’s name was…
Martin Luther
For the rest of this message, sit back and listen to the story. We’re going back to the days when Columbus was sailing to the Americas. Copernicus was discovering that the sun, not the earth was the center of the universe. Leonardo Davinci was painting the Mona Lisa. Guttenberg was about to develop the first printing press. It was an age of amazing discovery. It was also the age when the church would experience a movement that would forever change her, the protestant reformation. The protestant reformation, was one of the great emancipation movements in history, freeing people from popes and priests and sacraments and an institution that kept people in bondage to a system of works in order to achieve heavenly glory. Arguably the most influential of all protestant reformers, was Martin Luther.
Martin was in training to be a lawyer, when caught in a terrible storm and fearing for his life (some say struck by lightening), he cried out in prayer and made a vow to become a monk in exchange for his life. Martin survived, and kept his vow. He entered one of the most strict monastic orders, the Augustinian monastery, which practiced extreme asceticism, the practice of beating the body into submission as spiritual exercise. Through fastings, sleeping in the cold without blankets, back breaking work and all night vigils, Martin nearly killed himself in an effort to gain righteousness from God. He would later write, “if ever a monk got to heaven by sheer monkery, it was I. If I had kept up any longer, I should have killed myself.”
But still, no amount of penance could settle Luther’s soul from the conviction that he remained a miserable, doomed sinner. No matter how hard he worked, he felt he couldn’t earn righteousness. And he was right.
Then one day he took a pilgrimage to Rome. Luther had spent his entire life in small town Germany. Rome was the ecclesiastical center of the world, the holy city. What Luther would discover there would forever change him. The grandeur of the city, the Vatican, the basilicas, the statues of the saints was overwhelming. At that time Michaelangelo would have been on scaffolding painting the ceiling of the Sisteen Chapel. The pope, Leo X was an extravagant spendthrift. He was known to ride through the city on his pet white elephant, with a lavish parade of jesters and panthers and musicians going before him. Luther was disgusted with how the German people were taxed so heavily by the church in Rome, to subsidize such luxury. And underneath the grandeur Luther saw a corrupt institution. In fact, he would later write this to the pope…
“the church in Rome, formerly the most holy of all churches, has become the most lawless den of thieves, the most shameless of all brothels, the very kingdom of sin, death, and hell; so that not even antichrist, is he were to come, could devise any addition to it’s wickedness.”
Returning from Rome, Luther was distraught by what he saw in the holy city. And his soul was still tormented under the weight of a works based system of justification. Then in 1515, while reading the Scripture, Luther was struck by Romans 1:16,17 (read). He came to understand the system of works for salvation that was tormenting his soul, was not the message of scripture at all, but man is justified and saved by faith alone. Sola fide. His tormented soul was at last set free. Luther wrote, “at that moment I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise.” This doctrine of salvation by faith alone would define the protestant reformation and transform the church forever. After all, if it’s by faith a person is saved and justified, then the intercession of popes, priests, saints and sacraments were no longer necessary, which was the entire structure the Catholic church was built around.
With his newfound faith, Luther began to preach the gospel in Germany. It was during this time that a fateful event happened. To understand that event you need to understand a bit about Catholic theology. The Catholic church teaches that purgatory is a place Christians who have not followed Christ adequately go after death, to be sufficiently punished prior to going to heaven. Indulgences are religious works a person can do in this life to get ‘time off for good behavior’ in purgatory. Of course, neither purgatory nor indulgences are taught anywhere in scripture.
Now, as Luther was preaching sola fide, a representative of the pope came to town by the name of John Tetzel. Tetzel’s job was to sell indulgences in order to raise money for the building of St Peter’s basilica in Rome. Tetzel was a master salesman, and his jingle was, “as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.” In other words, you can buy your way out of purgatory. You can even buy the way out for your dead relatives currently being punished. People lined up by the thousands to purchase their salvation.
Luther was appalled. In response he drew up an argument against the church in Rome containing 95 theses, and nailed that document to the castle church door at Wittenburg. Let me read for you a few of those 95 theses.
50-52. Christians should be taught that, if the pope knew the exactions of the indulgence-preachers, he would rather the church of St. Peter were reduced to ashes than be built with the skin, flesh, and bones of the sheep.
Christians should be taught that the pope would be willing, as he ought if necessity should arise, to sell the church of St. Peter, and give, too, his own money to many of those from whom the pardon-merchants conjure money. It is vain to rely on salvation by letters of indulgence, even if the commissary, or indeed the pope himself, were to pledge his own soul for their validity.
76. the pope's pardons are not able to remove the least venial of sins as far as their guilt is concerned.
The pope responded by declaring the teachings of Luther heresy, and that anyone who criticized indulgences would also be guilty of heresy. But Luther would not back down. In fact, he would be the first to make massive use of a new invention called the Guttenburg press (internet of it’s day).
Luther wrote several pamphlets arguing that the church was holding people captive through it’s works based gospel and system of sacraments. He wrote boldly about sola fide. In his pamphlet, “the freedom of a Christian” Luther wrote …
“ it will profit nothing that the body should be adorned with sacred vestments, or dwell in holy places, or be occupied in sacred offices, or pray, fast, and abstain from certain meats, or do whatever works can be done through the body and in the body. Something widely different will be necessary for the justification and liberty of the soul…One thing, and one alone, is necessary for life, justification, and Christian liberty;. . .For faith alone brings salvation.” Luther’s words spread like wild fire.
Pope Leo issued a papal bull demanding Luther to recant or be declared a heretic, for which the punishment was death. Luther responded by burning the papal bull in a bonfire. The spark of the reformation was now a flame that could not be put out.
Soon Luther was on trial by the church, where he spoke his famous words in defense… “I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither honest nor safe. Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise, God help me. Amen.” Facing certain death, Luther was rescued by a friend and sent into hiding. In hiding he translated the bible into German, and continued to be a prolific writer and influencer of the reformation.
He even took a wife, an emancipated nun by the name of Katherine Von Bora. Luther wrote, “there is much to get used to in the first year of marriage. One wakes up in the morning and finds a pair of pigtails on the pillow which were not there before.” It’s due to his influence ministers were free to marry and have families.
But the biggest influence Luther had was in establishing the freeing doctrine of…
Sola fide
Romans 1:16,17. You cannot earn your salvation. You cannot buy it. Nobody can do it for you. Salvation is by God’s grace, through faith alone in Jesus Christ. That is the truth that liberates your soul.
Call to salvation
