Hear the word of the true and living God. First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you all that your faith is spoken of throughout the whole world, for God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of his son, that without ceasing, I make mention of you always in my prayers. making requests, if by some means, now at last, I may find a way in the will of God to come to you. For I long to see you, that I may impart to you some spiritual gift, so that you may be established, that is, that I may be encouraged to gather with you by the mutual faith both of you and me. Now, I do not want you to be unaware, brethren, that I often planned to come to you, but was hindered until now that I might have some fruit among you also, just as among the other Gentiles. I am debtor both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to wise and to unwise. So as much as is in me, I am ready to preach the gospel to you who are in Rome also, for I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek. For in it, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith. As it is written, the just shall live by faith. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. Because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes are clearly seen. Being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so that they or without excuse. And thus far we have the reading of God's holy and infallible word. All flesh is as grass and all the glory of man is the flower of the grass. The grass withers and the flower thereof falls away. But the word of our God shall stand forever. Let us pray and seek the face of God and ask him to give us illumination as to this passage of Holy Scripture. Let us pray. Oh, Holy Father, we thank you once again for your holy and infallible word. And we thank you, O God, that many of us can say tonight by conviction wrought in our hearts by the Holy Spirit that your word is truth. We do confess tonight our confidence in your word, but we acknowledge, O God, that that confidence and that conviction do not guarantee that we shall rightly understand your word. And therefore, father, as we come and sit before this passage, which arrested the soul of Martin Luther, and became, as it were for him, the burning bush of Moses. Help us, O God, to turn aside now and to see this great sight, even the glorious gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. Be pleased, we pray, to neutralize all the insufficiencies of your servant, to proclaim it and give us, O God, your spirit to take away the dullness from our minds, the darkness from our hearts, indeed, the slowness to respond with alacrity on the part of our wills, that we may mark your word aright. and respond to it in the joy of faith, love, and obedience. And therefore, we bid you come, O Spirit of grace, that you would be pleased to take the things of Christ and reveal them with power. Be our teacher, we pray, and do your blessed work in all of our souls this hour. And we ask that you would hear us then for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray, Amen. Now, then, since this particular Lord's Day coincides with that day which has come to be known in the anniversary of the church as the beginning of the Protestant Reformation that broke out all across the continent of Europe in the 16th century, We thought it most appropriate if our congregations could come together and to pause and to consider something of the significance of this particular event in terms of the impact which it had upon the world in general and upon the Church of Jesus Christ in particular. And that in turn leads me to say that there is a sense in which I think it would be completely incomprehensible to observe the anniversary of the beginning of the Reformation without at least making reference to this text of Scripture that we find here in Paul's epistle to the Romans in chapter one, especially verse 17. Now, it's not my intention to open it up and give an in-depth exposition of this text of Scripture, but rather it is my design this evening to underscore something of the effect that this text had upon one man in particular. which in turn led to a certain chain of events when he began to take seriously its implications for salvation in the Lord Jesus Christ. And that was some 493 years ago today. Now, the text, verse 17, for in it that is in the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith as it is written, the just shall live by faith. Now, to be sure, I think it's very important for us to understand that the moral, the doctrinal, and the spiritual corruption which ultimately consummated in the Reformation, it had been brewing for a number of centuries. The deterioration of the spiritual decay of the Church of Jesus Christ did not take place overnight. And the only thing tragic about the Reformation is that it was necessary. But placing those facts aside for the moment, and while I suppose that a case could be made for dating the outbreak of the Reformation to this or that other event in the life of Martin Luther, nonetheless, throughout the course of many years now, The beginning of the Reformation has been remembered in connection with the day of October the 31st in the year 1517. And without that, and I think it's very important for our children to grasp this as well, without the Reformation of the 16th century, our lives would be altogether different. from what they are today. What then was the Reformation? It was, as one theologian, William Childs Robinson, has described it, a rediscovery of grace. And that word grace immediately takes us out of ourselves. God's grace is that which transforms our lives. It causes us, indeed enables us, to see everything in the new, a different, and a holy light. Now, there were, of course, other reformers besides Luther. There was Philip Melanchthon. We've already mentioned tonight the name of Martin Busser, Henry Bollinger, Ulrich Zwingli, John Calvin and John Knox, whose prayers Queen Mary confessed she feared more than all the armies of Scotland. But nonetheless, it remains that the first And the chief among them all, at least chronologically, was Martin Luther. You see, the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century was no accident unless all of history is an accident. That time in the 16th century has been described as fertile ground for religious upheaval. The time was indeed a revolutionary one, and those who could see beyond their noses, they could read it in the skies. Storm clouds had been gathering over the continent of Europe for some time. The Roman communion had by fear and superstition controlled the lives and the destinies of her followers. And there were many abuses that were being perpetrated in the name of Christianity. And many of Rome's own adherents were beginning to observe and to question the abuses prevalent in the practices of their own clergy. But the prevailing climate of that particular period was not the sole sufficient catalyst for the birth of the Reformation. On the occasion of the 400th anniversary of Martin Luther's birth, James Anthony Froude, the 19th century British historian, He wrote these words, he said, philosophic historians tell us that Luther succeeded because he came, so to speak, in the fullness of time, because the age was ripe for him, because forces were at work which would have brought about the same changes if he had never been born. Some changes, Froude writes, There might have been, but not the same. The forces computable by philosophy can destroy, but they cannot create. To be sure, the false spiritual despotism which dominated Europe would have eventually crumbled, collapsed from its own internal hollowness. But a lie may perish. and no living belief arise again out of its ruins. A living belief can only arise out of a living human soul. And that any faith, any piety, Freud says, alive now in Europe, even in the Roman Church, whose insolent hypocrisy he humbled into shame. is due in large measure to that poor minor son born in a Saxon village over 400 years ago, Martin Luther. And I think we can, you and I, re-echo even today those same observations and sentiments of Freud. So how did the Reformation begin? I speak now not of all that had gone on before, anticipating what consummated in Luther's striking and remarkable protest against the Roman Church, but I speak now of the immediate catalyst that prompted the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation. It was Luther's reaction to the cell of indulgences in the form of his 95 theses, which he posted to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg. It was that courageous act which we celebrate on the 31st of October, traditionally known as Reformation Day. Now, I think that just a brief word is in order here concerning the whole matter of indulgences. You may be thinking, what is an indulgence? Well, according to the Roman communion, an indulgence was a forgiving favor which could be purchased from the Roman church. And the purchase of an indulgence, it was said, would in turn free a departed loved one or even oneself from either part or all of the time that one must spend in purgatory, that alleged intermediate state between heaven and hell which, according to Rome, people must undergo before reaching the heavenly state. According to the catechism of the Roman Church, an indulgence is defined in the following way. An indulgence is a remission before God of the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven. which the faithful Christian, who is duly disposed, gains under certain prescribed conditions through the action of the Church, which, as the minister of redemption, dispenses and applies with authority the treasury of the satisfactions of Christ and the saints. And the same catechism goes on to say an indulgence is partial or plenary, according as it removes either part or all of the temporal punishment due to sin. Indulgences may be applied to the dead or to the living. Now, in Martin Luther's day, the Pope had commissioned the number of monks for the explicit purpose of selling these indulgences to finance, among other things, St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome. And one such monk who caught the attention of Luther was one by the name of Johann Tetzel, a Dominican monk. It was commonly reported that when he was selling these indulgences, just think of that, selling the grace of God, as it were, as though something could be done. But his common sales pitch went like this. At the very instant the money rattles at the bottom of the chest, a soul escapes from purgatory and flies liberated to heaven. Or as another version had it, as soon as the coin in the cocker rings, a soul from purgatory springs. It is reported that Tetzel remarked to one man, you stiff-necked and thoughtless man, with twelve groats you can deliver your father from purgatory. And are you ungrateful enough not to save him? I declare to you, though you should have but a single coat, you ought to strip it off and sell it in order to obtain this grace. The Lord, our God, he said, no longer reigns. He has resigned all power to the pope. Well, it was such. An outlandish and blasphemous claim from the preaching of Tetzel that became, as it were, the proverbial straw to break the camel's back for Luther. And it was more or less an ordinary, routine, academic procedure which virtually overnight shot Luther out of obscurity and seclusion as a religious professor and preacher into the public limelight. and made him one of the most widely known figures all across the nation of Germany in his day as he posted his 95 theses. The posting of his theses itself was a common procedure in that day, which essentially was a public announcement inviting discussion and debate on a particular topic. It was a formal protest against the general theme of indulgences, and it happened on the eve of All Saints Day on the 31st of October in the year 1517. But Luther's initial blow against the terrible spiritual corruption of his day came only after a long struggle within the man himself. You see, Luther was a man with a problem. a problem so terrifying to his conscience that it had driven him into monastic life in the first place. Now, his problem was not his alone, mind you, but he was as aware of it, indeed as sensitive to its implications as any man has ever been. His problem can be described In the ancient words of Job, how can a man be righteous before God? And if you read something of the life of Luther, then you are conscious from your own study how that in many ways, indeed, in every way known to him. Luther sought relentlessly to find an answer to this question of all questions. In the way of the church, in the way of monasticism, as many of you know, he left off the study of law in order to become an Augustinian monk. In the way of mysticism, of abandonment of himself to God, but nothing prevailed to help him. And it was not that Luther was especially more sinful than other men. He speaks of himself indeed as a blameless or an impeccable monk. But he was especially conscious of sin. Indeed, of his own sin. His question was the question of the Ethiopian eunuch of the Philippian jailer, of the Apostle Paul, of Augustine, of every true seeker after God, not to have asked this question would have been to have ignored the most basic and ultimate and consequential issue of all of life. The question was the cry of an unholy man in the presence of an all-holy God. It is not the cry of angels in the presence of God who have never known the taint or the stain of sin, but the cry of men and women created in the image of God But living in rebellion against him and estrangement from him, it is the question, how can a man be right before God? What must I do to be saved? And I would digress for just a moment here. To inquire, have you asked that question? I would hope and pray that given our situation here in our gathering tonight that you have, that you and I must always be pressed at this point. Have you asked this question? Have you yourself cried out to God in the darkness of your own spiritual night and in the restlessness of your own conscience under the conviction of sin? What must I do to be saved? It is fair to say, I suppose, that it is a question not asked in many quarters at the present. But that is no argument whatsoever against the necessity of asking it. Indeed, the reverse is rather the case. The infrequency of that question at the present time is, in fact, an argument for pressing the true position of us all. All the more, what must I do to be saved? How can a man be right? before God, and if you've asked that question, have you asked it with the same honesty with which you'll be forced to reckon in the last day? And if you have asked that question. I asked you, what answer have you found for that question? Where do you stand in relation to this issue tonight? If you can, as it were, put place yourself in the shoes of Martin Luther. You see, one may be of Reformation lineage, a child of Luther or of Calvin in one sense, and yet in another sense, not be a descendant of Luther or of Calvin. Now then, that leads me to say, that there can be no mistaking, no misunderstanding of the connection between this issue and the genesis of the Reformation itself. Indeed, the case cannot be overstated. It is this issue which ignited the fire of the Reformation. which fueled its flames and sustained its heat throughout those difficult years which followed. For, you see, Luther was not only a man with a question, but he came to be, at the same time, a man who found the answer to this question of all questions. You notice I did not say an answer, but I would insist Luther found the answer. There is, you see, only one answer to this question. Not many, not several, not the best of two or three, but one answer. To this question of all questions, and that answer is found in a passage like Romans chapter one and verse 17, which lies at the very heart of Reformation teaching. The just shall live by faith. Luther, delighted to translate this expression, which the Apostle Paul quotes from the prophecy of Habakkuk as the just shall live by faith alone. Thus, he adds something to the words of the Apostle Paul, and it is with a large measure of warrant for doing so. Surely it is evident from the fact that the Apostle Paul himself says in this very seventeenth verse of the first chapter of Romans, for in it, it referring to the gospel from the previous verse, for in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith. And if you consult the commentaries, You will discover a great variety of interpretations is to be found, and many commentators differ as to the precise meaning of this phrase, from faith to faith. But without addressing certain critical questions that are involved, I would nonetheless venture to insist that while Paul may mean this or that in addition to the central thrust of the verse, the reference repeated three times over in this single verse to the word faith in itself is enough warrant for Luther's translation. From faith to faith, that is to say that nothing but faith is involved in the apprehension and the application of God's great act of justification. From faith to faith, as it is written, the just shall live by faith. The principle of life, Paul is telling us, and as Luther and the other reformers with him agreed, the principle of life is faith. And the only means whereby a man, woman, boy or girl may come to stand before God justified, cleansed of their sins and forgiven is not by works of righteousness, which we have done, but by faith and by faith alone in the Lord Jesus Christ alone. Let me give you Luther's own description of his discovery of God's free grace from this passage. He wrote these words, I was seized with an intense longing to understand Paul in his epistle to the Romans. What had hitherto hindered my comprehension was not coldness of heart, But the single word in the first chapter, namely the righteousness of God, is revealed in it, that is, in the gospel. Luther wrote, I just hated this word righteousness of God. For I had been taught according to the usage and custom of all the doctors to understand it in the philosophical sense of the so-called formal or act of righteousness in virtue of which God is just and consequently punishes sinners and wicked men. And I felt that despite my irreproachable life as a monk, In the sight of God, Coram Deo, I was nothing but a sinner of exceedingly troubled conscience who could not hope to placate Him with my satisfactions. I did not love, but hated this just God who punishes sinners, if not blasphemously, Yet, silently and vehemently, I murmured against God. And yet, I returned ever and again to this passage in Paul, ardently desiring to know what Paul meant. At length, by the grace of God, After days and nights of study, he says, I fixed my attention on the context of the words, namely, the righteousness of God is very and revealed as it is written, the righteous shall live by faith. I then began to understand the meaning of the passage to be that righteousness of God, which is revealed in the gospel, is the passive righteousness by which the merciful God makes us righteous by faith. Luther, you see, came to see with Augustine that this righteousness was redemptive, not retributive. And Luther says, Now I felt as though I had been completely reborn and entered paradise through open doors at once. The whole scripture took on a new aspect as greatly as I had once hated this word, righteousness of God, as greatly now I loved. this word in which I now gloried as the sweetest of all words. So this word of Paul became to me the very gate of paradise. The just shall live by faith. At long last, comprehension dawns upon Luther's seeking soul. The just shall live by faith. How is one to be right with God? How is one to stand before God no longer in terror and in dread? How is one to have that righteousness which God demands and which is utterly indispensable for salvation? It is by faith, by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and by faith alone. And the righteousness of which the Apostle Paul speaks here, the righteousness which God imputes to us and declares to be our very own, is a righteousness which ascribes credit and praise to him and which comes from God. Conferred upon us, bestowed, granted in virtue of the perfect finished work of the Lord Jesus Christ, dying in the room instead of sinners, separated from God and by his resurrection from the dead. With such a rediscovery in his own experience, Do you wonder now, after having been reminded of it, that Martin Luther became a reformer of the church? And do you wonder that he became a mighty preacher of the gospel? of the Lord Jesus Christ. Do you wonder that the other reformers with him, having made the same rediscovery of grace, likewise became preachers of the gospel? I am convinced, you see, that the Reformation was a mighty movement of the Spirit of God, one of the greatest revivals that the church has ever known throughout her long history. And if you are at all familiar with ecclesiastical history, then it will astruck you that very often there is a break in continuity of spiritual health. There is this intermittency of decay and restoration in the church because the record of the progress of the gospel in the world is not one of steady growth. but growth mingled with spiritual decay, arrested by periodic and successive renewals which we call revivals. And that, dear people, is what the Reformation was. And what we need more than ever today is just such a movement of God We need to be crying out for such in our own generation that we may be actively engaged in seeking just such a refreshing from heaven by an outpouring of the Spirit of God, the Spirit of grace that calls men and women to faith. and the Lord Jesus Christ, and who justifies them, not on the basis of righteousness, works of righteousness which they have done, but justified by faith in Christ, which involves what Calvin described as imputing the righteousness of Christ to them as if it were their own. This, Calvin said, we call the righteousness of faith. Namely, when a man made void and empty of all confidence in works, feels convinced that the only ground of his acceptance before God is a righteousness which is wanting to himself and is borrowed from Christ. On at least two occasions in his written remains, in his letter to the Romanist bishop, Saul de Ley, as well as in one of his treatises on the sacraments, at least twice over, Calvin refers to the Reformation as the revival of the gospel. It is said of Calvin, that the gasping words of that poor, pain-wracked body were heard all around the world. Why? Because the light of God had dawned upon him and his fellow Reformers, and all the burden and fear and trembling before a broken law that could not save rolled from their shoulders into the empty tomb of our Lord Jesus Christ, and they were set free from the weight and load of the guilt of sin by faith in the person of Christ, in His doing and dying and rising again from the dead. The Reformation, because it came to understand afresh the doctrine of justification by faith at the same time became a reformation of preaching. And here and there, in Wittenberg, in Zurich, in Geneva, and elsewhere across much of the face of Europe, in Strasbourg, men were raised up to preach and proclaim, as it had not been done for centuries, the everlasting gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, And I would suggest this evening for our own reflection and consideration that the degree to which we understand, you and I, and are ourselves refreshed by the doctrine of justification by faith is also the degree to which, with mind and heart and soul and strength, We, who are heirs of the Reformers, have been called to testify to the gospel of Christ. Luther understood, and Calvin understood, their fellow Reformers understood that the light of the world is the Lord Jesus Christ. And the only way to apprehend, to appropriate, to lay hold of all that God offers us in His Son is by faith, and by faith alone. And on that account, the Reformation was, as I've already intimated, a revival of joy and spiritual release from sin and its guilt. And no wonder, when a man has walked for years, pounded down to the ground with the weight of his sin upon him, and hanging over his head the burden of a law that could never bring life. And then all of a sudden, the grace of God gives him to see that the just shall live by faith. He has joy in the gospel of the Reformation, the gospel of Luther and Calvin, the gospel in a paramount sense, of course, of the Lord Jesus Christ is a gospel of joy. Thank God for the Reformation. Thank God for men like Martin Luther and Calvin. But even more, thank God for this glorious truth, which they and others with them rediscovered and thus recovered as a rich heritage for you and for me, namely the transforming, life-giving power of the gospel. For in it, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith. As it is written, the just shall live by faith. Let us pray. Oh, Holy Father, as we bow in your presence, how we thank you for this gospel of joy, this gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. We thank you, O God, for giving us in the scriptures a clear and sure and certain word revealing your saving mercy to hell deserving sinners. And as we have set before this portion of your word tonight, pointing us to the gospel wherein your righteousness is revealed. and how it may be appropriated to ourselves by faith. May your spirit be pleased, as no mere preacher could ever do, to take your truth concerning the gospel of Jesus Christ and make it efficacious to all of us here tonight, either renewing or strengthening our faith, or perhaps bringing others for the very first time to all abandonment of creature confidence in order to lay hold of him whom to know is life eternal. Oh, God, renew us in the confidence which we ought to have in this gospel. And renew us, too, we pray, in the expectation that you will make it in our own day the instrument of your power unto salvation. And may we dare to let it loose in all of its pristine simplicity and in all of its saving power and beauty. And, O Lord, if there are any here tonight who are yet strangers to your grace in Christ, Oh, God grant that they may not be able to pillow their heads tonight until they're able to do so in the comfort and the unspeakable bliss of knowing that all controversy between them and the God who made them has been resolved by the blood of our matchless and majestic Savior. And may the great day of judgment reveal that it was no mere happenstance that these sobering truths were brought to bear upon our minds and our hearts in this hour. And, O God, we plead that the last day of unveiling will make it manifest that this word of yours this evening did not return unto you void. Thank you, O God, for this day in your courts. Thank you for your presence. Thank you for your people. Thank you for all of your institutions, for your word and for your sacraments. Oh, Lord, our hearts are full as we offer to you our praise and adoration for this glorious gospel in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.