Calvary Lutheran Church

Main Themes of the Reformation: Justification

Grace and peace are yours in abundance through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our blessed Lord and Savior. Amen.

Romans 3:21-31

Dear Christian friends:

            I don’t know what your favorite subject was in school. But it probably was not history. And yet history has shaped our lives more than any other subject we might study. Abraham Lincoln told the congress in 1862, “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history.” His point was that the outcome of the civil war would be remembered and its impact felt for a very long time. He, of course, was right.

            When it comes to our spiritual lives—what we believe about God and faith and eternity—we, too, cannot escape history. There were two main events that took place in history that have had the greatest impact in that regard. The first was the life and work of Christ Jesus himself in the first century. The second was the Reformation and Martin Luther in the 16^th century. Each Sunday throughout the year we focus on the first, but for the next five Sundays in celebration of the 500^th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation we want to focus on the second. We don’t have time to go into all the details of the Reformation so we will look at just the

MAIN THEMES OF THE REFORMATION

I have chosen four of them. They are justification, the Scriptures, the priesthood of all believers, and worship and sacrament. This morning, justification.

            Let me describe for you what your faith life would be like today if the Reformation had not taken place in the 16^th Century or any other century since. First of all, your spiritual life would be completely under the control of the only Western Church in existence—the Roman Catholic Church. That church would be telling you, as it does to this day, that there are two kinds of sins—mortal and venial. Mortal sins are the more serious. Mortal sins are those that you commit with full knowledge and deliberate intention of violating God’s Law. Mortal sins include any willful breaking of the 10 commandments. So they include abortion, adultery, murder, theft, as well as anger, disobedience towards parents, and jealousy. All mortal sins must be confessed one by one to the priest and penance or restitution be made before that priest pronounces absolution or forgiveness. The penance may include saying the Our Father or the Hail Mary a certain number of times. It may be doing something nice like donating time in a soup kitchen or nursing home or hospital one day a week for a month. Your penance is whatever the priest tells you it is.

Venial sins, on the other hand, are not so serious. Venial sins are minor violations of the moral law and are not deliberate. They are sins that you have simply fallen into in time of temptation, such as giving an obscene gesture to another driver while in traffic, it was done in a moment of haste. Venial sins do not need to be confessed before the priest; but they do require repentance. After all, they are still evil, and if done repeatedly, venial sins could lead to mortal sin.

While the Catholic Church would say that penance does not actually forgive sins, only Christ’s sacrifice on the cross can do that, another teaching of the church indicates that Christ’s sacrifice apparently was not enough. And that is the teaching of purgatory.

Purgatory is from the Latin “purgare” which means to “make clean,” or to “purify.” So purgatory is a hell-like place where believers go immediately after death to be purified of their guilt. You see, even after confession and absolution and penance, the guilt over venial and mortal sins remain. Only the very, very good believers who perform super acts of good works here on earth get to go to heaven directly. Every other believer must go through purgatory. It is not forever, and you are guaranteed to eventually enter heaven, but it could take a very long time in purgatory, perhaps millions of years. But the more prayers that are made on your behalf by others on earth, the less time you will spend in purgatory. This would be your religious life today without the Reformation.

But instead you came here to Calvary Lutheran Church this morning and just a few minutes ago you confessed your sins in general, and the pastor announced absolution, complete forgiveness, immediately—no distinction between serious sins and not so serious sins, no verbal enumeration of all mortal sins, no penance, and certainly no purgatory. Why this tremendous difference?

It all has to do with Martin Luther’s rediscovery in the Bible of the doctrine of justification. In this doctrine, sin is sin. All sin is a breaking of God’s law, whether done deliberately or accidently, whether we know we are sinning or not. All sin separates us from the holy God. All sin brings God’s wrath and deserves eternal death in hell. James wrote, “Whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it” (James 2:10). You break one commandment—you lie just once or you have one lustful thought—you have broken all the commandments. Why would God make such a statement? So that we might not think that we can make up for sins by our own good works or penance, or by being purified through our own suffering in some hellish place. If we are ever to be free from sin, God himself will have to free us. And he does in the doctrine of justification.

The word “justification” or to be “justified” means the same today as it did in Luther’s day and as it did in Paul’s day. For example, if someone is accused of a crime, it is necessary for the court system to establish whether he is guilty or not. If, during the course of the investigation, it is proved that he is “not guilty,” then he is “justified.” That means that he stands as one who is righteous. He has done nothing wrong. He is completely in the right. Justification in the Bible means that God declares us and the whole world “not guilty,” righteous, holy.

Why does God justify us? Does he do it because we actually are righteous and holy and have never sinned? No. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). Does he do it because we just try hard to live a good life, and God will just forget our sins? That is how most people think they can be right with God. No. Solomon wrote, “There is a way that seems right to man but in the end it leads to death” (Proverbs 16:25). God justifies us purely by his grace through faith in Christ Jesus. Paul, who lived anything but a righteous life when he was persecuting Christians, wrote, “And being found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith” (Philippians 3:9). You see, this righteousness does not originate inside of us, but entirely outside of us from Christ. It is actually Christ’s righteousness that he accomplished by his perfect life and innocent death on the cross that becomes our righteousness. Jesus took our sin, we took his righteousness. “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us so that in him we might receive the righteousness of God” (1 Corinthians 5:21).

And Paul wrote in our text that this “righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify” (Romans 3:21). This is a doctrine that is found throughout the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. Moses wrote, “Abraham believed and it was credited to him as righteousness” (Genesis 15:6). The psalmist wrote, “Rescue me and deliver me in your righteousness, turn your ear to me and save me” (Psalm 71:2). Habakkuk wrote, “The righteous will live by his faith” (Habbakkuk 2:4). When some Jews who trusted in their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else came to Jesus, he told them the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector in the temple. Remember who went home that day justified? Not the Pharisee who pointed out all the good things that he did, but rather the tax collector who beat his breast and said, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner” (Luke 18:13). Paul wrote in our text, “All are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:24).

We can understand Luther’s horror when in 1516 Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar and papal representative, was sent to Germany by the Roman Catholic Church to sell indulgences. The pope needed money to rebuild St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Buying an indulgence that was signed by the pope meant not only that you could have your sins forgiven, but that you could get a loved one released from purgatory earlier, if not immediately. A saying that was attributed to Johann Tetzel was this: “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.”

Luther insisted that since forgiveness was God’s alone to grant, indulgences were a gross heresy. On October 31, 1517, Luther wrote to his bishop, Albert of Mainz, protesting the sale of indulgences. He enclosed in his letter a copy of what he called his Disputation of Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences, which you know better today as the Ninety-Five Theses. Those theses he then nailed on the church door in Wittenberg to be debated and discussed by his colleagues, and you probably know the rest of the story.

The first of these 95 theses reads this way: “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent,’ he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.” In other words, no mere piece of paper, no matter who signs it, can forgive sins. Only the blood of Jesus cleanses us from all our unrighteousness. So we simply turn to God daily in repentance, asking for forgiveness, and then purely out of thankfulness, we strive to turn away from the sin. The third of the 95 theses reads this way, “Yet it (repentance) does not mean solely inner repentance; such inner repentance is worthless unless it produces various outward mortification of the flesh.” “Mortification” means a horror, a shame over sins committed and a determination to remove that sin from our lives.

This is now your spiritual life after the Reformation. What a difference—total freedom from guilt and sin, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free” (Galatians 5:1); peace with God, “Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,” (Romans 5:1); and the sure promise of the immediate gift of heaven the moment we die, just as Jesus said to the thief on the cross, “I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43).

The story is told that one night Martin Luther went to sleep troubled about his sin. In a dream, he saw an angel standing by a blackboard, and at the top of the board was Luther’s name. The angel, chalk in hand, was listing all of Luther’s sins, and the list filled the blackboard. Luther shuddered in despair, feeling that his sins were so many that he could never be forgiven. But suddenly in his dream, he saw a pierced hand writing above the list these words: The blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanses us from all sin.” As Luther gazed in amazement, the blood flowed from the wounded hand and washed the record clean. Perhaps that dream is the best picture of all to remind us of this first main theme of the Reformation—justification. Amen.

May we pray:

Dear heavenly Father, as we begin our celebration of the Lutheran Reformation, help us to see clearly what Martin Luther rediscovered in your Word—the doctrine of justification. Yes, we are freely declared “not guilty” of all our sins, purely by your grace and our faith in Christ Jesus. May we never be tempted to return to the teachings of guilt and fear, or thinking that somehow we can remove our own sins. But may we always build our hope on nothing less that Jesus’ blood and righteousness. On Christ, the solid rock, we stand, all other ground is sinking sand. In Jesus’ name. Amen.