Reformation Sunday
October 29, 2017
The Key to the Rediscovered Truth
Romans 1:16,17
In the name of our Risen Savior, dear friends,
October 31st is just around the corner, and on Tuesday evening, many of you will have all sorts of creatures and superheroes ringing your door bell. I remember when Halloween masks were made of plastic and they stayed on your face with a rubber band around the back of your head. Instead of 50 cents people now spend a small fortune to get the most elaborate costumes.
I’d like to talk about masks. When it comes to God’s Word, some concepts seem masked or covered, so that what you see at first is masking the real truth. This happened with Luther when he was in the process of rediscovering the truth of the Gospel. And the concept that wore a mask for him was this: “The Righteousness of God.”
To him, that was a scary concept. It made Luther very much afraid. He was afraid of his sins, and he was afraid of the devil, and he was afraid to die, because you see, above all he was afraid of God.
Have you ever been afraid of God? If not, that’s because you’ve been taught from little on, that God loves you and forgives you. But that’s not what Luther had learned when he was a child. He saw God as an angry judge that would punish him if he didn’t make up for all his sins. God was too righteous and holy to have anything to do with a poor sinner like him. Matter of fact, if God was just, he would have to condemn Luther to hell. So he became a monk. And that didn’t help. Later he said of his days in the monastery, “The holier we became, the more we became children of the devil.” That’s because so many thought that what they were doing was so good, that God would certainly take them straight to heaven.
But Martin Luther never felt that he was getting holier. The more he tried, the more unworthy he felt and he just knew that God was angry with him. And that got Luther upset. He said: “I hated God and almost wished that there were no God.” That’s how he felt until he started studying the Bible, and started to understand what the passage we have for today really meant. This passage was Luther’s personal key to rediscovering the truth, the true Gospel. He was brought up in a world that had lost the truth. The true Reformation in Luther’s heart happened about 3 years before he posted his famous 95 theses on the church door. And our passage for today was for Luther The key to rediscovering the truth of the Gospel.
Let’s look at this special Word of God: I am not ashamed of the Gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes.
For Luther, it was easy to understand these words. The Gospel is the power of God for everyone who believes. God has great power: he not only created the world but controls it to this very day. He has the power to do great miracles and the Bible is a record of those miracles. But parting the waters of the Red Sea or causing the sun to stand still didn’t save anyone from their sins. The Gospel is the power that can save you from sin, from death and it’s for anyone and everyone who believes it, But Luther just couldn’t see it, he was ashamed of what he saw as the Gospel, because he just couldn’t make sense of the next verse.
For in the Gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written, “The righteous will live by faith.” To understand this verse, you have to know what righteousness is. Righteous is something that God is. He is holy and perfect and without a hint of sin. And that is something that we need to be saved. To be with God someday, we need to be like him, holy and perfect and without a hint of sin. We need to be right with God, not just some days but everyday. Being mostly right with God is not enough, we need to be completely right with God. And if you complained about having to get up today and going to church, or said some mean thing to someone in your family, or had a thought of anger or dissatisfaction with what God has given you, you’ve already blew it, not only for today, but for your whole eternity. You see, you and I cannot make ourselves perfectly right with God. We cannot manufacture perfection. That was one view of God’s righteousness, but Luther just couldn’t see what this verse meant.
It was like an illusion. I have one for you here. What do you see? Looks like an old man with a beard and wispy hair. Especially from a distance. But now that it’s up close, can you see something else? His hand is really a dog, his ear is a woman with a baby, and his nose and eye are a man with a hat. You have to shift mental gears for this to happen. And that’s what Luther had to do with this verse.
Historians have called this his tower experience, because he spent many many hours in the tower of the Black Cloister in Wittenberg, studying for his classes and learning so much for himself in the process. This is where the light bulb went on in his heart and soul. Here’s what he said about it:
This phrase was customarily explained to mean that the righteousness of God is a virtue by which he is himself righteous and condemns sinners. As I read this passage, I wished that God had never revealed the Gospel, for who could love a God who was angry , who condemned the people? I finally examined more carefully the word of Habakkuk: “The just shall live by his faith.” From this passage I concluded that life must be derived from faith! 2600
Then I felt as if I had been completely reborn and had entered Paradise
through widely opened doors. Instantly, all Scripture looked different to me.
Thus the work of God is that which God works in us; the strength of God is that through which He makes us storng; the wisdom of God is that through which he makes us wise;
As intensely as I had formerly hated the expression “righteousness of God,”
I now loved and praised it as the sweetest of concepts; and so this passage of
Paul actually was the portal of Paradise to me. 3905
For us too here is the good news! God is righteous and holy but there is a righteousness that comes from God, and this is what saves us. This righteousness from God is a gift, and it comes to us by faith, by believing in Jesus. It was already there in the Old Testament, Paul points out. He quotes the prophet Habakkuk, and emphasizes in the original: “Those who are righteous by faith, will live. And this is the righteousness, the holiness and perfection of Jesus that comes to us when we believe. We needed righteousness to be saved, and it had to be greater than the most religious people. Jesus said: “For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.” Matthew 5:20
And it was only Jesus that could surpass them. He was the only one who could live his entire earthly life without sin, not even one bad thought. He lived perfectly for us so we could have this righteousness as a gift!
What’s more, Paul says literally, In the Gospel, a righteousness from God is revealed, by faith for faith. What power! The Gospel not only saves us by faith, it actually is for faith, it results in our faith! There is nothing that we have to do with this: When the Holy Spirit works in our hearts to believe, he uses the message of God’s righteousness through Jesus to give us faith!
But what happens, dear friends, when we keep falling into sin? Every sin plunges us into a bottomless sea of death. In that ocean, we can’t even tread water, but less swim to safely. Every sin is like the rip tide, which carries us farther away from our heavenly shore. We need help. We are like the man was walking along the cliffs next to a sea of water one day. He got careless, slipped and fell off the cliff, heading straight for the water. On the way down, he thought, this is it, I can’t swim. When he hit the water, he started kicking his legs and flailing his arms, trying to learn very quickly now to swim. It seemed to be working. He didn’t sink, he started to float and stay on top! After his fear and desperation passed, the man realized, that he didn’t have to do anything to float on top of the water. You see, our novice diver and swimmer had fallen into the Dead Sea, in Israel. The mineral content of that water is so high, that any person will float, no matter what they do.
In the same way, our sins pushed us off the cliff into the sea of death, and we had no ability to swim. But we float and stay alive under no power of our own. It is all God’s power, the power of the Gospel, that keeps our heads above water. He keeps us floating by faith in Jesus Christ, which he gave us in the first place!
I’m sure that man who fell into the Dead Sea told others of his experience. He just had to tell the story. How about you? When you really have a wonderful experience, don’t you want people to know what you saw and what you did? You’re not ashamed of it, you want to get the message out.
So Paul says: I am not ashamed of the Gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. The gospel is the most inclusive message in the world – Jesus died for all the world, and salvation by faith is for the Jew and the Gentile, which includes every human soul that ever lived. But the Gospel is the most exclusive message in all the world—It’s either you have Jesus, or you have nothing.
And Paul was not ashamed of it. He was willing to suffer just about anything to spread that Gospel to others. He traveled thousands of miles, some by boat, mostly on foot, through some very dangerous country. Three times he was shipwrecked, and once spent a day and night floating on a piece of wreckage before he was rescued. And travel was not the most dangerous thing, it was preaching the Gospel. He went to the synagogues, to the Jew first, and when they drove him out, he went to homes and riversides and rented halls. When they drove him out of one city, he went to the next. Sometimes his enemies followed to cause more trouble. They put him in prison for preaching the gospel, once they stoned him and left him for dead. By his life, Paul proved what he says here: I am not ashamed of the Gospel.
How about you or me? In our world, we are in no danger of stoning or prison for sharing the message of Jesus. What makes us sometimes so afraid? We may not be ashamed of the Gospel on the inside, but on the outside, our actions may look like it! And I’m not talking about standing up for the commandments and the morals that God desires. Standing up for the Law is important, but standing up for the Gospel is more so. What makes us so afraid to say, You need Jesus to be saved? It is because we worry: What will people think? They’ll think I’m not loving or accepting of all kinds of people. But is it loving to let people think they are right with God, when the only way to be right with God is through faith in Jesus? Is it loving to let people think they can make it with God by being a good person? There are going to be a lot of good people in hell, because they didn’t believe in Jesus. But the good news is that God is accepting of everyone, and wants all to be saved by coming to the knowledge of the truth. How can we not share it?
Let’s say you were in a car accident, and the emergency squad came and got you out of the car just before it caught on fire and blew up. How many times would you tell that story? You never need to be ashamed of the story of the Gospel, how Jesus redeemed you, paid with his holy precious blood to rescue you from the slavery of sin. When people have problems, and don’t know what to do next, you can tell them how God has helped you, but first of all he rescued you from the biggest problem of all: sin and death. And you know that God will help them too – he’s got the gift of salvation for them too. That’s his amazing grace: I was blind but now I see!
Remember the key verse that opened our eyes to the Gospel There are still so many out there who just can’t see it. But they have a righteousness from God too, and his name is Jesus. And want everyone around us to see him too. Amen.