Well, on this Reformation Sunday, we are looking at a message under the title Semper Reformanda. And some of you may be familiar with that, but I'm aware that many may not be. But the title literally means always being reformed in the passive voice, not simply always reforming as it is sometimes interpreted in the active voice, making it sound like we are the agents of reform. We're the ones who are always changing, always being more progressive. That's not the idea at all. Rather, we are the subjects of the reform, and it is God's word that is the one, the agent of reform in every true instance. In fact, some of you are aware that the November issue of Table Talk Magazine dedicated the entire issue to that phrase, the Latin phrase, Semper Reprimanda, what it really means. And I read the articles very diligently, of course, this month, because I had already prepared my message. I knew what I was going to say, and I wanted to find out if they were going to present a message along the same lines. And I was pleasantly surprised. I found out that although many of the articles have a slightly different take on the meaning of it, they all came down to what I would consider the fundamental central thesis that true reform always goes back to the Bible. It is the word of God that is the heart of all true reformations. So it seems to me that at least more than one mind has been thinking about this phrase and what it really means. Every true believer who knows God's Word also understands that our hearts and our churches are in constant need of biblical reformation. And that's really the basic idea I have behind this title. None of us have arrived yet. We all need constant, ongoing reform, which is really just another way of saying we all need the Word of God to constantly be going through our hearts and our minds. Incredibly, this is my sixth October here at Providence, and so this is also my sixth reformation sermon, and this time I want to make a case for the relationship between Semper Reformanda and Sola Scriptura in all true examples of spiritual reform. In one way or another, we're really building on the messages that we've heard earlier this month on God's all sufficient word. This morning is no different, but the theme is rather God's word is all sufficient for true reformation. That's the major emphasis of this message. I also want to make some clear distinctions in this message between what I want to distinguish as biblical reformation. as opposed to the various denominational, traditional, or confessional views of what Reformed has sometimes come to mean. And I want to appeal to the broad extent of our Reformed brethren that we might all agree on what may rightly be called our one form of unity, the Word of God. Some of you may get my little play on words there because you're familiar with the reform distinctive called the three forms of unity in the church. That refers to the Belgian Confession, the Canons of Dort and the Heidelberg Catechism. Now, ironically, These three forms of unity have somewhat divided the reformed community into various camps and groups just by the nature of having a catechism or a confession. But let me begin here by defining how I'm using the word reform. Let's just get a definition out there so you can understand my perspective and where I'm coming from. And then I want to seek to defend from Scripture as well as Christian history that this is, in fact, the ancient meaning of reformed in a spiritual context. When I speak of myself as being reformed, I desire for my beliefs and practices in life and in the church to align with a correct interpretation of Scripture. That's what I mean. That's all I mean. I desire for my beliefs and practices in life and in the church to align with a correct interpretation of Scripture. I am certainly not above being corrected. I want my views to be shaped by a correct understanding of Scripture. And yet, one of the protective things about having a church with a plurality of elders, that is more than one person making all the key decisions, a group of men who meet the qualifications of an elder. One of the benefits built into that system ordained by Scripture is that one person, namely the pastor who preaches, that one person's opinion never has the sole direction, course setting agenda for the church unless, in our case, three other men also see it that way and agree. Now, because it's possible, of course, for all of us to be wrong at the same time on the same issues, it's not a foolproof system, you understand. But at the very least, it means that no maverick opinion set the course for the direction of the church. We only go forward on the basis of unity and consensus as elders. That reveals one of the inherent dangers of solo pastor rule, where in even the best circumstances, you still have just one man with his views and opinions that sets the dominant course for the church. But if the elders don't have a correct interpretation of Scripture, then we aren't biblically reformed either personally or corporately. If any aspect of our church tradition doesn't line up with Scripture, then it's our tradition that needs to be reformed at that point of disagreement. You've heard me say this many times. This is not new. But one shouldn't claim to be reformed or biblical if they give the Bible a different meaning than that which is derived from the native context and grammar of Scripture itself. And yet, having said that, there are various traditions within the Reformed community that today have no basis in Scripture. They need reformation. Every verse, every passage, every doctrine in the Bible has one intended meaning. The Bible was not given to confuse the church, it was given to direct and inform the church, to enlighten our hearts and minds with God's perspective on life in the church. And so, if you or I don't have the correct meaning of Scripture, we don't really have the Scripture as God intended it. At best, we have a misinterpretation of what God gave us. In other words, the Bible doesn't mean whatever somebody wants it to mean. Just because they're using the Bible does not mean they have a biblical interpretation. Just because different groups use the Bible to make their point doesn't mean they have a biblical argument. It usually just means at best they have a misinterpretation on those views. Now, rooted in the historic reform view, every scripture has one intended meaning, but with numerous applications, numerous implications, and numerous illustrations that can be applied to life. Now, if something differs from biblical theology or from biblical orthodoxy, then it is not reformed as the term has historically been used among God's people. Until the last few centuries, the adjective reformed has always been more or less shorthand for going back to the true meaning of the Bible. That's what reformed has always boiled down to the original authorial intent as interpreted in a consistent, contextual, literal, historical and grammatical sense. Now, that's a mouthful. But it's important that you understand that it's the original authorial intent, the dual authorship. We know that there were men of God who wrote, but under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. So you have two aspects that are united in God, that the original writer, whether it was Isaiah or Paul or John, They were writing under the inspiration of the Spirit as they were moved along by the Holy Spirit. So that that combines this authorial intent as God would intend it. And that is as interpreted by us. Now we're on the interpreting end in a consistent, contextual, literal, historical, grammatical sense. This is the way God has communicated to us in human language. Now, in our day, there are about 14 divergent perspectives on who has the right, quote unquote, to use the word reformed to describe their beliefs and practices and theology. And as regards the November issue of Table Talk magazine, I was very pleased that they more or less affirmed my fundamental thesis, namely that the Bible alone is the true standard of all reformed theology. The single perfect tuning fork of all reformed theology is sola scriptura, scripture alone. The objective nature of scripture is the final court of arbitration on matters of doctrine or faith or its practice, not church traditions, not the creeds or confessions or catechisms, as helpful as they may be, or even the writings of the church fathers. But Scripture alone, sola scriptura, if there are any sour notes or sharps or flats that are out of tune with the analogy of Scripture, the Bible will reveal it. That's why there is great danger when Christians begin to tune their beliefs or their theology or their churches by any standard that is even one step removed from Scripture itself. And yet that is happening. that is happening all around the Church of our day, or when they make the meaning of being truly reformed consist in secondary sources like certain creeds and confessions, while excluding other believers on that basis alone, regardless of what the Bible actually teaches. After all, it was moving further and further away from Scripture one step at a time that eventually led to the rampant apostasy within the Roman Catholic Church. That's why, as you'll recall, Martin Luther did not appeal to the faithful documents or the correct ecumenical creeds within the Roman Catholic system as the basis for his protest. But instead, what did he do? He rested his entire argument on the word of God alone. That is the heart and soul of biblical reformation. It is sola scriptura. Now, in our day, many of the so-called reformed traditions are not derived from or inferred by the clear teaching of Holy Scripture. They are just differing interpretations among brethren, but all interpretations are not equally valid or biblically correct. Merely saying that something is based on Scripture does not make it so, even though it might be logically or rationally defended. We all have certain man-made standards, don't we? Whether they are historic documents like the Westminster standards or just our church's own doctrinal statement, we all have those. But these documents made by men, godly men, however helpful they may be, are not infallible and they are not beyond reform. And so we need to keep that in mind and hold them with a loose and humble grip. Scripture alone remains the absolute, unchanging authority for the Christian life and for the Church. And this spiritual understanding of reform among God's people as going back to God's written word is actually a very ancient view of reformation. I don't want you to think by any means that this is a 20th century or 21st century Johnny come lately addendum to what we have learned to be reformed theology. This is ancient. In fact, this is more ancient than the magisterial reformation. In both the Old and New Testament, the most basic understanding of reform, even though the word does not occur in the Bible, you understand, but the principle of reform is in the Bible and where it is there, you see that it implies that there is an absolute and objective standard to which you and I must return whenever we have drifted away from that standard. We go back to something that's known, something that is true and objective, that endures across the ages. Now, for true believers in every era of human history, our standard, our plumb line, our measuring rod has been and remains the written word of God, the Bible. And praise God, we have a Bible in our own language and in multiple translations of our English language. We are such a blessed people. Revelation from God and reformation of heart and church and home have always gone together. Nothing can be called truly reformed if it departs from Scripture where Scripture speaks. God speaks whenever any doctrine of Scripture is rejected or distorted or silence. It is really an assault on the authority of God himself. But in spite of the clear and unifying effect of appealing to scripture alone as rightly interpreted as the bond that unites the Reformed community in general, the ambiguity surrounding the meaning of Reformed as an adjective has only grown in recent years. This past summer I was visiting with a pastor friend of mine who lives and ministers in another part of the country. He's a faithful expositor of God's Word. He's been pastoring a non-denominational Bible church for many years where he lives going verse by verse through various books of the Bible like we do here. And he was telling me that some brethren from a covenantal and Presbyterian background in his area had been criticizing him and his church just for using the word reformed in their literature to describe their church and their theology. They told him He's not really reformed, and he has no right to use that term to describe either himself or his church. And so to keep peace, he recently removed the word reform from all of his church literature. Now, he's fully committed to the doctrines of grace. He embraces and teaches the five solas of the Reformation, and therefore, he also passionately defends the reform doctrine of justification by faith alone in Christ alone as the only way of salvation. And so, my friend is certainly reformed in his soteriology, which is how a person is saved, and he's also reformed in the sense of going back to the Bible for his beliefs and his practices. However, the real basis for the criticism is that he did not embrace many of their traditional ideas and methods. That's the rub. He was not a covenant theologian. His church did not subscribe to the three forms of unity. He did not appeal to the Westminster standards. He was not a preterist or an amillennialist. He was not a Sabbatarian or a Pado-Baptist. And he did not believe that the church had replaced Israel, but that Romans 11 would be fulfilled for national and ethnic Israel and during the millennium, no less. And so that was the issue with these reformed brothers. In other words, even though my friend embraced the same core beliefs that the 16th century reformers held dear, he did not agree with Luther and Calvin on other secondary issues, nor did he agree with later reformed theologians in Holland who rejected a national future for Israel. And to that extent, they said he did not have a right to call himself reformed. We should follow the 16th century reformers wherever they were faithful to Scripture. Absolutely. And you have a lot of range there because they were very faithful to Scripture in so many ways. There are plenty of things on which we all agree across these boundaries. But whatever parts of their theology or ecclesial practice that does not go back to the Bible, don't follow them there. We are living in an age of beautiful latitude and grace where our lives are not at risk for taking a position. We don't have a duress that prevents us from going back to the Bible in full. There's nothing binding our hands or our feet or our tongues from declaring the whole truth of Scripture. The Roman Catholic Church is not going to kill any of us in this day for taking a position that differs from them, as was the case in the 16th century. But even great men of the faith can err and make mistakes. We don't disregard their whole life in their ministry just because they're fallible, do we? No. But neither do we need to perpetuate their errors where they made mistakes. Such men, we could say, were not truly reformed in a biblical sense in those areas that they left unreformed from the Roman Catholic Church. And so, historically speaking, it's really those brethren who follow the unbiblical elements that are peculiar to Luther or Calvin or others who are not being authentically reformed. Now, as I've indicated already, the idea of spiritual reformation is going back to what the Bible teaches is much older than Protestantism as such goes way before the Protestant Reformation. The Judeo-Christian understanding of reformation is actually rooted in Old Testament history. King Josiah in 2 Kings 23, for example, was a reformer in Israel. And here's how it went. Josiah began his reformation by personally reading out loud the entire book of the covenant, which refers to the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch. He read it all to the people. Can you imagine a ruler, a leader doing that in our day? Josiah went back to the Bible and it restored the spiritual life of Israel. That made him an early reformer. And then King Asa, in the beginning of his reign, he heard God's word through a prophet named Azariah, recorded in 2 Chronicles 15. And as soon as Asa heard God's word, he instantly obeyed by tearing down all of the detestable idols in Judah. And during the first half of his reign, Asa restored the altar of God. He reinstituted the sacrifices and he deposed the wicked queen mother by putting her to death. Asa's reforms in Judah began when he returned to the written Word of God, and Asa's trouble only came later when he departed from God and His Word. King Jehoshaphat, in 2 Chronicles 19, was rebuked by the seer Jehu, and the Word of God came to Jehoshaphat as a rebuke, and the king repented and reformed his nation. King Jehoiada in Second Chronicles 23 made a covenant between himself and his nation that they should be the Lord's people. And like the others before him, Jehoiada's reforms began by obeying the precepts in God's word. They went back to the Bible, back to the Bible, back to the Bible. All of these reforms spiritually begin with a return to God's word. Then, after seventy years of Babylonian captivity, Nehemiah, along with Ezra the priest, became Jewish reformers who began by proclaiming God's word to Israel as soon as they returned to the land. They stood for the reading of God's word, and in Nehemiah 8, Ezra read and he exposited the meaning of every verse. Nehemiah 8.8 says they read from the book from the law of God clearly, and they gave the sense so that the people understood the reading. That's exposition, that's one of the most clear and beautiful examples of exposition in the Old Testament, Nehemiah 8.8, and so exposition and reformation have the same ancient DNA The spiritual rebuilding of Jerusalem began by returning to the word of God. And even as you go back further, even Joshua, going back to the time of the conquest of Israel, he took God's law and he fortified the hearts of believing Israel as they inherited the land. It was a reformation through a return to God's word after 400 years of Egyptian bondage. And this is where God's word began to be written, of course, later incorporating the earlier work of Job. Now, all of these men in the Old Testament were biblical reformers, and their reformations had one trait in common. In one way or another, they all returned to the book of the law as their basis for reformation in Israel, sola scriptura, even in the Old Testament Israeli context. And not only that, but every reformation in the Old Testament confronted unbiblical religious traditions that had displaced the clear teaching of Scripture. We need that we need that today, and then so now God's people are always being reformed. We're not the agents of reform. We are the subjects. We must be reformed as then. So now this return to God's word is the ancient pattern for every biblical reformation, not traditional, not denominational, but biblical reformation has this one link. The Bible is the Alpha and the Omega of true reform in every generation. After all, it is the truth of Holy Scripture that is ultimately going to unite all true believers one day in heaven. And God is his own interpreter, and he will make it plain. And it is a departure from the truth of Scripture that currently divides the church until now. You show me any practice in the church that deviates from scripture, and I'll show you a source of division among the brethren and a clear violation of biblical reform. The Protestant reformers simply return to scripture on the key matter of justification by faith alone. They proclaim the Bible and God used them mightily. But the Reformation is not over. The 16th century reformers left plenty of unfinished work to be done. There are still numerous unbiblical practices and teachings that need to be reformed in our day. We need to go back to the Bible. Like Lazarus of old, large segments of the Protestant church in our day are still bound up in the stinking grave clothes of sacramentalism. And so this is not the time to rest on the laurels of our predecessors. Now is the time to go back to the Bible and to stand clearly and without shame for what it says and for what it means. The body of Christ needs the ongoing exposition of Scripture. We need biblical ecclesiology. We need biblical church leadership. We need scriptural baptism for believers, as the apostles gave us. We also need biblical eschatology and biblical gender roles. We need a biblical view of Israel in the church, not an anti-Judaism view invented in Holland during the 1600s. We need reformation in the church. And like the reforming kings in the Old Testament, we need to tear down our own man-made idols of tradition and custom and reinstitute a biblical pattern for worship in all areas of the New Testament church. Now, I began this message by telling you about the Latin phrase Semper Reformanda. Let me bring this message to a close by telling you where that phrase originated. According to most church historians, it was first used in 1674 by a reformed pastor named Yodicus von Lodenstein. Although in the Table Talk magazine, Professor Scott Clark at Westminster Seminary has recently argued that the complete phrase originated in the 20th century at Princeton Seminary. Notwithstanding that, many of the Reformed brethren in our day have quoted this work from Von Lodenstein to suggest that he really intended for his Dutch Reformed church to go back to the catechisms and back to the creeds of the church as their enduring standards, as if that's all he meant by the phrase. But listen to this English translation of his actual words, where he first used this phrase that has been called Semper Reformanda. He wrote, The church is reformed and being reformed according to the word of God. Now, some have inserted the word always there, and sometimes it's translated with the word always. It's debatable whether the always was there, but you get the point. The church is reformed and being reformed according to the word of God, not the creeds, not the confessions. That's where the phrase Semper Reformanda started. And this brings me back to where I began. The word of God is the true and ancient foundation of reform among God's people. And we are living in a time today when true reform within the church is so desperately needed. And for that reform, there's only one place that we can go. We must go back to the Bible. That's why we do this. That's why we pause in our series, whatever it may be, once a year to talk about these issues. But we need God's help to do this in his way to persevere with faithfulness and with joy. Would you pray with me for that? Father, we do acknowledge that true reform begins when we go back to your word rightly interpreted. But if our hearts aren't changed by your indwelling spirit, by the gift of regeneration that only you can do, then all of our creeds and all of our confessions and catechisms are empty and in vain. And so reform our hearts and our whole lives and our church by your spirit. We ask this in Jesus name. Amen.