If you missed last week, we began a four week series called Stories to Tell. For these 4 weeks I’m going to tell you 4 stories of 4 heroes of our faith, which many of you have probably never heard. My hope is that these stories give you new heroes who encourage you in new ways, and that you have stirring new stories of faith to pass to your children and your children’s children. (turn to Romans 5)
Each of these stories are deeply rooted in a biblical truth that at one point was challenged, and God raised up a hero of the faith to be a defender of that truth. The biblical truth we’re looking at today is the…
Solo Christo
Solo Christo is the biblical truth that Christ is the only mediator between God and man, and there is salvation through no other. Our hope is to be pinned on nothing other than Jesus Christ and his finished work for us on the cross and his victorious resurrection three days later. In him, and him alone, we have new life. Ro 5:1-11
Through faith in the finished work of Christ we have been justified, our sin has been removed from us as far as the east is from the west. That’s what justified means, to be blameless, to be completely free of guilt. You and I, through faith in Christ actually have the capacity to stand before a perfectly holy God, blameless, not cowering in shame, but standing confidently in his presence, having been justified by Christ, 5:1-2.
Think about that Christian, if you were somehow able to record in a ledger, every sin you’ve ever committed, and every sin you ever will commit, nothing excluded from the ledger, all the dirt, all the things you cringe in shame when you think about, all the things you hope nobody ever finds out about you, all of it. Justification, is God taking that ledger and stamping across it, ‘paid in full by the blood of my son,’ then taking the ledger and destroying it. That’s what you and I have in Jesus Christ.
Christian, if you think God is still angry with you, keeping you at arm’s length because of some sin, you need to know Jesus has set you free from that. You are forgiven, blameless, without guilt before God, through faith in Christ. I remember well the moment I put my faith in Jesus, I could sense immediately I was a new man. I was no longer a guilty sinner, I was a justified son. My desire is for all of you to know the saving work of Jesus.
5:6-8…The justification we have with God through Christ, is NOT the result of us cleaning ourselves up enough to earn it. It’s not about any good work we’ve done. When we were powerless, dead in our sin, ungodly pagans, Christ died for us. That’s how much God loves you, even when you were a wretch, he gave his all to save you.
Aren’t you so glad God’s love for you isn’t based on your goodness. What an incredibly exhausting way to live, trying to clean yourself up enough to be accepted by God. That’s the difference between Christianity and every other world religion. In every other world religion, God’s love is earned by good behavior. In Christianity it’s given by grace to wretched people, unable to earn it on their own. That’s grace, and it’s the best news the world has ever known.
Listen sinner, you can’t clean yourself up enough to impress God. He loves you right now, and his offer to you is grace, if you’ll receive it.
5:9-11…Because we’ve been justified by the blood of Christ, we will be saved from the wrath of God to come. Make no mistake, Jesus is coming back, and there will be a day when every person will stand before the throne of God. There will be judgment upon those who rejected Jesus and died in their sin. But Christian, you don’t need to fear that day, because through the blood of Jesus you will be saved.
Our 75 years on this ball of dirt may be filled with turmoil and pain, but our future in Christ is eternity in unending glory with our risen Lord.
All of these blessing we have are through our Savior, Jesus Christ. There is one mediator between God and man, Jesus Christ who died for us. Solo Christo, Christ alone. My hope and prayer for the people of Mission is that you would pin your hopes on, that you would bet the farm on, no one else, but Jesus.
There was a time in history, when the people were encouraged to pin their hopes, not in Christ alone, but in the church. For hundreds of years, the church taught that they were the mediator between God and men, and grace was distributed or withheld, by them. With that power, the church became an oppressive regime. In the midst of those dark times, God raised up spiritual heroes to call his people back to his Son. One of those heroes was
Wycliffe
For the remainder of the message I’m going to ask you to sit back, and listen to this amazing story of faith. During the 11th-13th centuries, the papacy emerged as the most powerful office in all Europe, religious and secular. The Roman Catholic Church declared the pope to be the vicar of Christ on earth, the mediator between God and man, below God but beyond man. They declared unam sanctam, which states there is no salvation without submission to the pope. To quote pope Boniface, “we declare, we proclaim, we define that it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff.” So you see, in those days, it was believed that the pope held the keys to heaven and hell. And from his throne he wielded his power with those keys. If anyone challenged the authority of the pope, he would excommunicate them, cutting them off from the church, cutting them off from grace, and cutting them out of heaven. They couldn’t even receive a Christian burial.
In fact, to subdue a nation, he could essentially excommunicate the entire nation, it was called interdict. During interdict, no public worship services could be held in the nation, no communion, no blessing. It’s hard for us to imagine, but in the those days, nations under interdict would overthrow their king, in order to remove the interdict, because they couldn’t stand the thought of being cut off from grace and cut out of heaven. That’s the kind of power the pope wielded. Pope Innocent applied interdict 85 times during his reign.
So the pope was considered the mediator between God and man, having the keys to heaven and hell. And through his priests in the local church and their dispensation of the sacraments…baptism, communion, confession, confirmation, the lay person stayed in God’s grace. To the church person, those sacraments were not just symbols of God’s grace, they were necessary to stay in grace. A child needed to hurry up and be baptized for the remission of original sin. Communion needed to be taken, to receive grace. In those days the people rested their hope of salvation in the work of popes and priests as their mediators.
In fact, the pope and priests were not just mediators on earth, but their reach extended beyond the grave. The church taught that upon death, the wicked are sent to hell, the faithful go to heaven, but the vast majority of Christians were those who didn’t follow Christ adequately, and they would go to a place called purgatory, where they would suffer for a time as punishment for their sin, before they could pass to heaven.
The Roman Catholic Church taught, and still does to this day, that it alone has access to the treasury of merit, which can be used by the church to grant remission from that purgatory punishment for a particular sin. They’re called indulgences. Still, to this day the Catholic church teaches that a person receives an indulgence, a removal of some punishment in purgatory, for doing things like…reading scripture for 30 minutes or more, or praying through the rosary.
So you see, for hundreds of years, the average person in the church rested all their hope in popes, priests, sacraments and indulgences. In every way, the church had become the mediator between God and man, and in the church, people rested their hope of salvation. Those were dark days for the church (wish I had time).
In those days, God raised up heroes of the faith that would have the courage to defy the authority of the pope and priests, and teach that Christ alone is the mediator between God and man…that popes and priests don’t have power or authority to be the dispensers or withholders of grace. Only Christ is our source of grace, and our hope is in him, and him alone. That was dangerous teaching in those days, because if popes and priest and sacraments and indulgences were no longer needed for salvation, then their keys to heaven and hell had been taken away, and the power they wielded over people and nations was gone. The pope would not go down without a fight. So heroes of the faith would risk their all to free people from the churches abuse of power.
One of those men was John Wycliffe. He was the leading professor at Oxford University in England. Wycliffe was bold enough to stand up to the power of the church that could excommunicate, imprison, torture and kill dissenters. With great courage, Wycliffe wrote, “Christ is truth, and the pope is the principle of falsehood.” Christ alone, Wycliffe proclaimed, is the head of the church, not a pope or priest. He taught that the scripture know nothing of papal offices; nor can salvation be conditioned by masses, indulgences, penance, or any other device of the priesthood. In those days, to teach such things took incredible courage.
When pope Gregory heard what Wycliffe was teaching, he ordered his imprisonment where he would await judgment from Rome. Gregory’s words to the English crown… “Recently, with great bitterness of heart we have learned that John Wyclif has burst forth in such abominable folly, that he does not fear to publicly preach, or rather to vomit forth from the poisonous confines of his own breast, propositions which threaten to subvert and weaken the condition of the entire church.”
For all his effort to free the people from the abuses of papal power, Wycliffe was condemned as a heretic, and silenced at Oxford, for teaching that Christ, not popes or priests, is our mediator. But his teachings lived on. Believing the church needed a wide scale return to the teachings of Christ, found in scripture, Wycliffe determined the best way to do that was to get the Bible into the language of the people, so he oversaw the first translation of the Bible into the English language.
Followers of Wycliffe called the ‘poor priests’ went about the countryside, preaching the good news of Christ, all throughout England, with portions of the Wycliffe bible they preached the word of God in the language of the peasants. Seeds of revolt against papal abuse were spreading, as people realized there is only one mediator between God and man, and he is Jesus Christ. Those poor priests were heroes of the faith.
But those who carried forth the teaching of Wycliffe paid a heavy price. One of those heroes was Jon Hus, who was burnt at the stake, but before they lit the fire, he spoke these last words, “In the truth of the gospel I have written, taught, and preached; today I will gladly die.”
Upon his burning at the stake, the church also ordered the remains of Wycliffe, who had died 40 years earlier, to be exhumed and burned. Heroes of the faith paid the highest price, for the sake of the gospel. Their courageous faith began to change the face of Christianity. These daring heroes set the stage for the protestant reformation.
Not only that, the Wycliffe Bible Society was started in 1942. Following in the footsteps of John Wycliffe, they have now translated the bible into 700 different languages, to get the word of God into the hands of people all over the globe. Hundreds of years after his death, the courage of John Wycliffe is still changing the world.
What can we learn from this hero of the faith?
Solo Christo
May we never forget that Christ, and Christ alone is our hope. To rest our hope in anyone or anything else is idolatry. The church is beautiful, together we make up the body of Christ, and it’s good for us to gather and worship together, and bless each other, and live in communion with each other. But the church is a horrible substitute for Jesus Christ. The church cannot save you. The church is not your hope for life eternal. That life and that hope comes only from Christ.
Let me just be really straight forward, for your own good…many of you are here today because you like the church, but you’ve never really surrendered your life to Jesus Christ. You may love this place, but if nothing changes, in the end Jesus will say to you, “get away from me, I never knew you.” Maybe you like having your kids being taught here, or you like the music, or you have good friends here, or maybe church just feels right to you, but please here me, the church is a lousy substitute for Jesus. We have nothing of eternal value to offer you, but Jesus.
In Jesus is your salvation. In Jesus is resurrection life. In Jesus is justification, the forgiveness of sins. Please, please, please, please, do not put your hope in the church to provide any of that for you. We can’t. Instead give your life to the one who can truly save, Jesus Christ, and him alone. Solo Christo. Let’s pray.
