So good morning, everybody. As we jump into it today, there's a lot to talk about. We've got seven pages of notes here, which I have never yet accomplished. But I have great hopes for today. And the reason for that is because it's the last day and I have no other choice. So we will get through this, come what may. But before we jump into things, let's think about a little bit where we came from, right? We talked a few weeks ago about the austere background that Luther grew up in. And we talked about the fact that he grew up with a great concern about the judgment of God. And he looked at his own life and he said, I don't measure up to that, right? And he looked at God as a condemning judge. And so he went through this period in his life where we talked about the storm that he got caught in. He was very afraid that he would not survive that storm. And he cries out at one point to St. Anne, who was the patron saint of miners. Father was a miner. St. Anne, save me and I'll become a nun. He survives the storm, and true to his word, he goes on to, excuse me, become a monk, not a nun. Luther was never a nun. So Luther becomes a monk, and you would think that at that point that that would give him some sense of peace and well-being, and it sort of did for a while, but it wasn't long before he was back to his old worries that I don't measure up, right? Because I'm in a different place, I'm now a monk, but the fundamentals haven't changed. I'm still the same person, right? And so the same concerns that he had persisted. We talked about how he came to the discovery of what we later called this double imputation of grace on the cross that Jesus paid for our sins and that when God looks down at us, he sees the righteousness of Christ. Something that was not recognized in his day, And so he came across this, and this truth was a startling revelation to him, that he changed his whole viewpoint, and he went from being somebody who was very fearful to somebody who was very joyful. And he wanted to introduce these truths into the church, and so he discussed it with his faculty, who a lot of these people came around to his way of thinking, that he started to write these theses. And we talked about the 97 theses, in which he talks a lot about the fallen nature of man and so on, stuff that we all recognize today. And then we talked about the 95 theses, which had a lot to do with indulgences, and then of course we talked about how there was a climax there when Luther was declared a heretic, he was dragged over, he was required to go to Worms, and there he was tried, and at the end of the day there was the edict of Worms where the where the emperor stated and where the council stated that he was an enemy of the state, that he was a heretic, and that he was supposed to be given over to the authorities. And of course, that's kind of where we left things. Luther is whisked away by his protector, by his prince, Frederick the Wise. And Frederick, of course, says to his soldiers, don't tell me where you take him, I don't want to know. And therefore, Frederick is protecting himself and at the same time protecting Luther. That's where we left things last time. So Luther is now in the castle of Wartburg, and of course he can't go out into public as himself, because to do so, he was supposed to be handed over to the authorities, right? And that, of course, would have been the end of him. Because heresy was a capital crime, he would have been burned at the stake for sure. So he is hidden in this Wartburg castle and he grows a beard and he changes his appearance and he does occasionally venture out and when he does so, he refers to himself as Junker George. Junker was kind of a low-level knight, I'm told, and so he completely changes his identity, right? All right, so this is, I say this is where it gets interesting. I guess the whole thing is kind of interesting, but what Luther does at this point, if he had done nothing else, we would have been, the whole world would have been in his debt, I think, for centuries to come, because what he did was to translate the Bible into German. Now we have our own stories, right, in the English tradition about William Tyndale and about Wycliffe and so on and how they translate the Bible into English. Luther is translating the Bible into German, so why is this so important for, besides the obvious, right? Why is this so important for the development of the Reformation? For one thing, there had been a number of translations from the Latin Vulgate and from various copies into various Germanic dialects. But none of them were very good, and a lot of them were just copies of copies. So they were difficult to read, they weren't always very accurate, and so the German-speaking world did not have an accurate German Bible. Well, you can imagine the impact that would have had. So if we think about, in our own day and age, of course, we have disputes about different things. In the public forum, there are things that we sometimes dispute about politically and also from the doctrinal standpoint. And what do we do when we have those disputes? We read, right? We inform ourselves. We read the news. We look to such sources as we have for good information. And we try to inform ourselves about which stance that I want to take on any given issue. But of course, how do you do that if you don't have, in this particular case, how do you take a stance on the Reformation if you've never read the Bible? And are you being read the Bible when you go to Mass? What are you being taught there? You don't have the Bible at home. So you can see where the people would have been hard-pressed to take a stance for Luther or for the Roman Catholic Church if they really didn't have these sources to draw from, right? So it was a big deal. Luther translates the Bible into German starting with the New Testament, which took him a couple years, I guess. And then moving on to the Old Testament, didn't get the whole thing done at the castle, but he got a big jump on it there. And this thing had tremendous impact. So again, before this, the average people did not have a German Bible that they could read. that was strictly forbidden, and at this point suddenly they have this Bible. And we think back to the 95 Theses and how these were copied, right? Copies were made, the Gutenberg printing press, these copies went out and people were able then to to read the 95 Theses, and the issue just exploded, right? Well, the same thing was true with the Bible. It was printed, hundreds of thousands of copies were printed. Millions of people now had access to this Bible, and they were reading it, and they were memorizing it. And so you had the bizarre phenomenon of normal people sometimes disputing with clergy, right? Which you would have never had, because now these people can, of course, read. So from the standpoint of the development of the Reformation, now people are able to read for themselves and they're able to come to some sort of conclusion, in many cases to support the Reformation, and the support for the Reformation is growing by leaps and bounds at this point. A couple more words to the impact of this Luther Bible. If you've ever been to Germany or Austria or Switzerland or someplace where they speak German, and if maybe you've studied a little German in school and you go over there, you'll notice right away that, boy, if you study school German and then you go to some of these places in Europe, that you might not understand them. Why? It's because the dialects are so different, right? So if you studied school German and then you go to a city like Hamburg, you might be able to understand more or less what's going on, but you take that same knowledge to Bavaria or to the Rhine Valley or to Switzerland or some of these other places, Austria, and boy, you're really going to struggle, right? I had that struggle myself. I moved from northern Germany down to Bavaria and after that to the Rhine Valley and then later down to Switzerland, and each time I moved, I hate to learn all of these things because they're so different. In the United States, when we think about differences in how people speak regionally, from region to region, if you're from the deep south, maybe you have a southern drawl. If you're from out west, maybe you have sort of a twang to your accent. If you are from the Midwest, maybe you speak a bit like we do. But of course, at the end of the day, we make jokes about these things, but we all pretty much understand each other. Such is not the case in Europe today, and such was definitely not the case 500 years ago. And so what we have happening over that time is gradually these languages, these dialects are starting to merge. And when Luther comes out with his Bible, remember, this is the one standard, the one printed piece of material that everybody is reading and that everybody is memorizing. So the linguistic impact of this Bible is such, and beyond the impact on the Reformation, it helps create this common German language that now everybody can understand. And of course, when you read school German today, what do you read? something akin to the dialect that Luther spoke. His German Bible, the Luther translation, has been used ever since. In fact, my grandfather's Bible was the Luther translation. In fact, the Bible that I used when I lived overseas is a Luther translation. This latest one was revised in 1984, I think. And some of the terminology is a little bit antiquated. You can tell it's not quite like people talk today. But the point is, we still use it, right? And so the impact of his Bible is often compared to the impact of the King James Bible, meaning it was just tremendous. All right, we could speak more about that, but there's so much more to talk about, so let's move on. I'm going to have to probably pick up the pace a little bit. The Reformation continues. I might have changed this heading to the good, the bad, and the ugly, because we're going to see all three of those here. But okay, so Luther's stuck in Wartburg, right? And while he was stuck in Wartburg Castle, things are not standing still. So his compatriots, his friends over at the university and so on, they're continuing the work of the Reformation, sometimes in good ways, sometimes in not so good ways. One of the things that happens is that a lot of monks and nuns escaped from where they were serving in their monasteries. And so this is something that Luther helped instigate. And so the most famous example of this, of course, is Catherine from Bora was a nun and she escaped with several other nuns hidden in fish barrels. Hidden in fish barrels, how'd you like that? And so when you read about this, I can't help but think about The Hobbit. If you've ever read The Hobbit or seen The Hobbit where those dwarves are stuck there and they get hidden in these fish barrels and then they somehow escape and they're floating down the river. They have orcs shooting at them and I don't know what happened, but anyway. Maybe Tolkien got this idea from Catherine from Bora, I don't know. But stranger things have happened, right? Anyway, interesting. What else is going on? So there are advances being made in the Reformation, the way that the church services are being held. Worship is simplified, is provided in the German language so people know what's going on now. Masses for the dead and days of fasting and abstinence. Abstinence were abolished. The cup and the host were provided at the Lord's Supper. So remember we had talked about the fact prior to the Reformation that only the bread or the wafer was given to the common people and that the cup was reserved for the clergy. So that's changed. And now the ordinary people are getting both. Lots of changes here going on. Lots of things that we would look at and say, yep, that sounds good, right? Well, not everything is so good. To some extent, things kind of go off the rails here. Among other things, we start to see some really bizarre characters turn up. So one example of this, three prophets appeared from a neighboring city, claiming that God spoke to them directly, right? God spoke to them directly, and so they no longer needed the Bible. So if you thought that was a modern phenomenon, it's not. This has been going on for a long time. And back in the days of the Reformation, we saw these people that were kind of claiming similar things. I'm sure we've all heard of people who are claiming that God speaks directly to them. And so I always think, well, you better staple that to the back of the Bible then, so we don't miss out on those insights. Anyway, One such kind of radical character, his name was Thomas Munzer. He taught that the present revelation of the spirit took priority over the written word of God. And this guy joined together with what became known as the Peasants' Rebellion. So this is a particularly ugly portion of this history of, let's say it's a cross between secular history and it was also part of the Reformation history. And in that, peasants, Hundreds of thousands of peasants rose up against their lords, and they had all kinds of concessions that they wanted to demand. And they were trying to ride the coattails of the Reformation in doing so. So they claimed the things that they were claiming was by divine right, and that if they could be proved from scripture that they would withdraw their claims and stuff like this. Well, Luther was sympathetic to some of their claims and we don't have time to go into date to what those claims were, but they wanted a better life for themselves and they wanted the types of things that people always demonstrate about in terms of lower taxes and more rights and the ability to elect, I think, their parish priests and things like this. historically, up until this point, had been dead set against violence. So he did not support any violence. And he was sympathetic to a lot of the things that these folks were asking for. But when they became violent, he no longer supported them. And so there was one very, very violent episode where Some peasants attacked, I think it was a nobleman of some sort or a knight, and they murdered him and others that were with him. And so it was a very ugly story. And Luther made some comments in response to things like this, and he said, in effect, that these people should be hunted down like dogs and destroyed, which they were. So you have over 100,000 peasants being killed in this peasant uprising, and so the thing had a very, very ugly end to it. So a lot of the people of the lower classes, these peasants, looked at Luther and said, well, this guy's abandoned us. I guess we're going to go back to either the Roman Catholic Church or we're going to go back to doing something else. We're going to follow maybe the Anabaptists. We're not going to follow Luther anymore. So he lost a certain amount of support among those people at that point. The Catholic Church, of course, blamed the whole thing on Luther. So this is all Luther's fault. This is what comes of wild boars in God's vineyard. So anyway, kind of an ugly story. We can talk more about things that went on during this time that were kind of ugly. Some of the Reformation folks went into Catholic sanctuaries and destroyed them, tore down works of art, tore down statues, and so that was particularly ugly as well. I remember being in Amsterdam once in a museum, and we were looking at pieces of art from the Reformation period, and they were paintings. You can tell where folks had come in and had obliterated parts of the paintings that were deemed to be offensive. And so you can see marks of this today, yeah. All right, so moving right along. I'm gonna get us through the seven pages. Augsburg Confession and the League of Schmalkalden. Well, there are a lot of diets. These people had more diets than my wife and I combined. There were a lot of diets. And remember, what was a diet? A diet in the Holy Roman Empire was a council of the government. So the empire was ruled over by all of these princes that ruled over these principalities and dukedoms and duchies and whatnot. And then the whole thing, they had an elected emperor that was kind of the head of all of this, but the guy did not have a whole lot of power. He was definitely a powerful person, but it wasn't maybe the very type of powerful monarchs that we see in some cases, because it was, among other things, he was an elected official. And so he needed the support of these princes to rule the empire. We're not gonna get into detail about all of these, but I just wanna mention a couple. There was a diet in Nuremberg. Let me back up a step. So we talked about the Diet of Worms. What happened as a result of that? Luther is declared an enemy of the state, and he's declared heretic, and he's to be delivered over to the authorities and then executed, right? Yeah, that didn't happen. So there's another diet in Nuremberg, and the emperor has left at this point. That was good. The emperor left and there's this other diet that takes place and a new agreement is reached, a more lenient agreement, despite the protests from the legates from the emperor. 1526 there's another diet that met at Spire. At this point the The emperor is out duking it out with his political rivals. We talked about that last time where the emperor, at this point, he was fighting with the king of France, Francis. He was fighting with, I think, the pope. And all of them were fighting against the Turks. And so he was very distracted. During this time, there's this diet. And what happens, each state is given its own right to determine whether it's going to be Catholic or whether it's going to be Lutheran. And those are the options. There's no third option. So we would have been out of luck. You could be Catholic. You can be Lutheran. And the head of state decides that. So even now, if you look at Germany, One state is more Lutheran, one state is more Catholic, and so on. So today, of course, all of these things are recognized by the state. But at that point, and again, even now, you look at the map, and you can see where the pieces fell. Because one state, if you look at Bavaria, it's Catholic. If you look at some of the northern states, Schleswig-Holstein, I think, is Lutheran. So even today, we see the results of this decision. So that'll happen while the emperor was gone. All good things must come to an end. And 1529, there was a second diet at Spire, which reinstated the Edict of Worms. So we're back to square one. The Lutheran princes protested, resulting them in being labeled Protestants. Interesting, right? Where this comes from. All right, so 1530, the emperor returns and attends the Diet of Augsburg, and at that Diet, a group of these princes approach the emperor and they present to him an Augsburg Confession. You've probably heard of this, because there are a lot of folks out there, Lutherans and so on, that refer to themselves as Augsburg Confession Christians, right? And so that's where this came from, this Diet in Augsburg. I'm going to skip what comes after this, and we're going to jump down to what comes after that and talk a little bit more about the Augsburg Confession. Because I want you to get a flavor for what kinds of things these, what kind of protests these people had. You're going to recognize them. And this is just a small sampling. We're not going through by any means all of these, right? Justification, Article 4. This is from the Augsburg Confession. They teach that men cannot be justified before God by their own strength, merits, or works, but are freely justified for Christ's sake through faith when they believe that they are received into favor and that their sins are forgiven for Christ's sake. Who by his death has made satisfaction for our sins? This faith imputes for righteousness in his sight. So remember this imputation discussion that we had? We see this being manifested here in this Augsburg Confession, Romans 3 and 4 cited here. Of new obedience, the next heading, also they teach that this faith is bound to bring forth good fruits and that it is necessary to do good works commanded by God because of God's will, but that we should not rely on those works to merit justification before God. For remission of sins and justification as apprehended by faith, as also the voice of Christ attests, when ye shall have done all of these things, say, we are unprofitable servants, Luke 17, 10. The same is also taught by the fathers, for Ambrose says, it is ordained of God that he who believes in Christ is saved, freely receiving remission of sins without works by faith alone. So we might think of this as sola fide, right? Or sola gratia. Looking at just a couple more of these of the church, they teach that the one holy church is to continue forever. The church is a congregation of saints in which the gospel is rightly taught and the sacraments are rightly administered. This is, of course, still how we recognize the true church today, right? This formulation that came out of the Protestant Reformation. And of course, when they were doing this, they were taking a little bit of a shot at the Roman Catholic Church, right? Because those were exactly the complaints, that the church wasn't teaching the gospel, and that the church had seven sacraments, and it was the sacramental system by which the grace was supposed to be given to the believer, and so on. All right, moving right along, notably here of the Lord's Supper, of the Supper of the Lord they teach that the body and blood of Christ are truly present and are distributed to those who eat the Supper of the Lord and they reject those who teach otherwise. This is an important topic, and we're going to get into it more later, so let's just kind of leave that there for now. And of free will, this is the last one I'm going to mention. Of free will, they teach that man's will has some liberty to choose civil righteousness and to work things subject to reason, but it has no power without the Holy Ghost to work the righteousness of God. That is spiritual righteousness, since the natural man receives not the things of the Spirit, but this righteousness is wrought in the heart of the Holy Ghost, is received through the word. So a lot of these things that we're reading, these are all things that we would attest to today, right? Part and parcel of what we believe as Reformed believers. If you'd like to look these up for yourself, there's a lot more of them, and I have the source listed below, and you can look at that as you wish. So let's just finish up this heading. What happens? So these Lutheran princes present this confession to the emperor. This guy's not happy about this. He's a dedicated Romanist, and when he sees this Augsburg confession, he is just infuriated. So he gives these guys an ultimatum. You either recant or you're gonna suffer the consequences. It's the same ultimatum he gave to Luther, correct? So, what now? The emperor's not happy. The princes are not going to back down. War is inevitable. So both sides start gearing up for war. And then you're reminded a little bit about what happened back in the days of Huss and the Huss battle wagons that we talked about, right? But fortunately at that point, at least, it did not come to blows because the emperor and the princes themselves faced a third and common enemy in the Turks. And so confronted with this common threat of the Turks' invasion, they have to work together to repel that. And consequently, the emperor looked at that threat and he said, of course, I can't have all these divisions in the empire and effectively combat the Turks. And so through that collaboration, they were able to repel the Turks and the Reformation had opportunity to continue to gain hold. All right. Next page there, if you're following along, we're going to briefly go through the law and gospel. I'm just gonna sum this up briefly by stating the following. I want you to remember what we were talking about in terms of the Catholic understanding of how people are justified and how people receive grace, right? It is this view of justification that kind of regards the grace and righteousness of Christ as being poured into the believers, right? And so this grace is poured into the believers like you would pour water from a pitcher into a glass of water. And the picture we can envision as being the sacraments. So there's the righteousness and grace of Christ being poured into the believer by means of these sacraments. So when you're baptized, you have this infusion of grace. And when you take part in the other sacraments, you have further infusions of grace. But when you sin, particularly when you commit serious sins, mortal sins, you could imperil your soul, right? And so you could lose your salvation. And so at the end of the day, Were you saved or were you not? It really depended upon what you had done or what you had not done. And you were not regarded as righteous by God until this righteousness adhered to your soul. In other words, God doesn't look at you as being righteous until you're really righteous. And so for that to happen, you can wait for a long time, right? Which is why you end up with purgatory. Luther came along and he said, okay, he reintroduced the gospel. But he did not do away with the law. So the law is still there, the law and the gospel come to us together. But it is only after one is converted, only after one is justified that one is willing and ready to fulfill the demands of the law. And there I'm reminded of the first question and answer of the Heidelberg Catechism. where it states, if you've ever studied this, remember memorizing it, that Christ makes us willing and ready henceforth to live unto him. It's not something that Luther could have done earlier, right? After he had this justification suddenly, he became willing and ready to live to Christ. And so he summarized this concept into a phrase called simul justus et pecador, And if you know a little bit of Spanish, you might recognize that word pecador is to be a sinner, right? Simile justus et peccator, at the same time, we are justified and we are sinners. That's kind of the opposite of what Rome was teaching, right? You're not gonna be justified in God's eyes until you achieve that. Whereas Luther is saying, God justifies you by the merits of Christ, at the same time, you are a sinner. The fact that you're a sinner does not mean that you are not justified, because the justification that takes place is by the merits of Christ. All right. The church and the sacraments. We're going to focus in on a couple of these. We're not going to spend a whole lot of time on all of them. Starting out talking about the baptism just very briefly. Luther taught that the baptism is a sign of believers' death and resurrection. It ought to be given to children, why? Because faith is a free gift of God and not a work. You don't have to wait for people to become an adult and recognize their sinfulness and do good works before they become baptized because this faith itself is a gift of God. So the saving initiative is God's, not the human beings. So children are to be baptized. Baptism is the beginning and foundation of Christian life. And so I'm gonna just kind of leave it there because there are a couple other topics here that merit a little bit more focus, I think. We're gonna talk now about communion. This is an area, of course, where we have diversions of views between not only the Catholics and the Lutherans. but between the Catholics, Lutherans, and the Reformed, right? And so the views that we hold as Reformed people are not the same views that Luther held or that Lutherans hold today. All right, where do we start? We start with what was the prevailing view of the Roman Catholic Church at the time, which is called transubstantiation. And so I'm gonna actually quote here from the Roman Catholic, this is the Roman Catholic Catechism, At the Last Supper on the night he was betrayed, our Savior instituted the Eucharist, sacrifice of his body and blood. This he did in order to perpetuate the sacrifice of the cross throughout the ages until he should come again. This idea of perpetuating the sacrifice made on the cross was a significant area of departure between Luther and the Church of Rome. And I'm going to give you one more, okay? Not only is this a perpetuation of the sacrifice of the cross throughout the ages until Christ comes again, it is also something that is performed on an altar, and it is a sacrifice then that is presented to God. Okay, so you have this sacrifice that is being made in the Mass, as it were, and then you have this being offered to God as a sacrifice by the priest. So Luther really took issue with this. So when we think about transubstantiation, consubstantiation, and the way that we view all of this, we think about, well, were the elements real bread and wine, or were they something else? That's kind of where our minds go. What Luther was concerned about is, Rome is saying, number one, this is something that we do for God. We're offering God this sacrifice on an altar, whereas really, what the Lord's Supper should be is something that God is doing for us. So that was a significant point of departure. a sacrifice that is being perpetuated from the ages is another area of departure. So you and I are still sitting here scratching our heads and saying, well, wait a minute. I thought this whole deal was over, whether or not the bread and the wine were really bread and wine, or whether they became the body and the blood of Christ, and how does this all work out? And maybe you're confused about this. I was confused about it. I don't know anybody that couldn't be confused about this, because I think it's just confusing. So if you look at bread and you look at the wine and you partake of this, of course, you taste what? Bread and wine. How then does the Catholic Church come to the view that this could be real body and blood of Christ with a physical presence? To do this, they borrowed from Aristotle. Okay, so I'm not gonna drown you with the philosophy of Aristotle other than just to say that. This teaching goes more or less as follows. An object, a person, a thing, what have you, has both its substance or its essence, what that thing really is, and then it has its characteristics by which you identify it. So I'm about 5'10", right? I've got blue eyes. I've got whatever is left of my hair is kind of blonde, a little gray mixed in. Those are, that is not my essence. Right? Those are characteristics about me, what would be called, in this philosophy, accidents. It's not accidents like you would have a car accidents. They're accidents in terms of the word meant to refer to these characteristics. My height, my weight, my appearance, et cetera. These are accidents. These are things that describe me. But that is not my essence. The essence of who I am is not the fact that I have blue eyes. That's just a descriptive characteristic. the essence of who I am is something else. And so they made this distinction that you have the essence of the elements, the bread and the wine, and then you have these accidents, these characteristics, if you will, right? And so when the mass was done, when the priest conducted the mass, two miracles happened simultaneously, right? The substance, was converted into the real body and blood of Christ. So it was a real presence, not just a spiritual presence. But the accidents or the characteristics remained those of bread and wine. So there are two miracles going on at once. And that is how the Roman Catholic Church, in my understanding, viewed this. Luther came along and had a different view, which we today understand as consubstantiation. I've studied it, I still don't understand it. But basically, he says, no, those two miracles didn't really happen. What happened was a third thing, was one miracle, in that the body and blood of Christ were added to these elements that already existed. So, the elements didn't change, they were there, but then they were added to by the supernatural act. At the end of the day, I don't really understand how those things can be different, but anyway they are. So he sees there one miracle, as I understand it. The bread is still bread, the wine is still wine, but Christ's body and blood are in, under, around, and behind the bread and the wine. If you can understand this, then you're better off than I am. All right, they did not call it consubstantiation, that's just what it came to be known as in time. But I don't want a couple of very important concepts to be lost on us here because of this whole debate. And I'm just gonna read this last bullet, or second to the last bullet point here in the last one. Discussions concerning the presence of Christ obscure the main significance associated with the sacrament. These words, given and shed for you for the forgiveness of sins, show us that the sacrament, forgiveness of sins, life and salvation are given to us through, should be these words. For where there is forgiveness of sins, there's also life and salvation. Whosoever believes in these words has exactly what they say, forgiveness of sins. And that comes out of the Luther's Catechism, which my kids got from the Lutheran school they attend. The forgiveness of sins obtained here through the sacrament is therefore one obtained through faith in Christ. So although there is debate about the presence of the body and blood and how the body and blood is present and how it's not present, there is a really significant difference between Luther's view in the Catholic Church and in that the Catholic Church is viewing this as a repeated sacrifice of Christ through till the time of his next coming. And this is viewed as a sacrifice that is made on an altar, something that we do for God, whereas Luther is saying the opposite, something that God does for us. We have forgiveness of sins through this, but it comes by faith. So the doctrinal and spiritual meaning is completely different, notwithstanding these thorny issues of the presence of the body and blood. Okay, moving right along. Page five here. Oh my goodness, I'm gonna have to hurry up. And we're exactly at a place where I don't want to hurry up because we're going to talk about music. So if you read any textbook about Luther and the Protestant Reformation, what you don't find is a whole lot of writing about music, which irritates me because this is so important to me personally. So let's go through this. During the Middle Ages, the music of the Catholic Church It wasn't sung by folks like you and me, okay? There was a choir of fairly professional folks which sang. And they did not sing the choruses that we sing today. They sang oftentimes in very complex polyphonic variations. So you're looking at me scratching your head thinking, okay, what exactly does that mean? It's very hard to explain what polyphonic variations mean if you don't know them, you haven't heard them. But I'll try. Basically, you have going on here two or more simultaneous lines of independent melody. So when we sing a song, generally there's one melody we all sing, right? In this style of music, there are multiple melodies going on at once, sung by different people. And the words are not all starting and ending at the same time, so you can imagine it's a little complicated. Personally, I love the style of music, music of the Renaissance, the late Renaissance, the Baroque, and so on, and it's hauntingly beautiful. But it was not intelligible. So that was a problem. Does it edify you if you don't understand it? Here's a second problem. Even if you could understand it because everybody's singing at the same time, the same text, it's in Latin. So there's just no way you're gonna take anything away from this. So the average person goes in, listens to this, doesn't understand a word of it, walks away. Well, that's unfortunate, you might be thinking. We're originally blessed by our music. It goes a little deeper than this, I think. I want you to think about the music that you know and love and sing here, perhaps going back to your earliest days. You think about the hymns and the psalms and such that you really like, that really move you. So when I think about these things, I think about a mighty fortress is our God, right? I think about the deep, deep love of Jesus. There are just a lot of hymns and psalms that I think about, that I learned in my youngest days, that really contributed to my understanding of the things of God and to who I eventually became. Jesus loves me, right? Think about the kids downstairs when they're learning these songs. It becomes part of who they are and how they think. What if you didn't have that? What if you never had that? What would that do to your understanding of the things of God? Would it have been diminished? I dare say yes, because the things that we learn in song, we remember. They're written in rhyme, they're written in verse, they're written in tune. These things are catchy, they go into our minds. We go out later in the day, we're sitting in the car driving home and we're still singing, right? And that helps develop us as Christians. What if you never had that? You'd be in the same situation these people were in. So Luther, how did the church respond? How did the church respond? They responded in different ways. So, 400 years before Pete Townsend and Jimi Hendrix were destroying their guitars on stage, Ulrich Zwingli was destroying church organs in Switzerland, presumably not during the the worship services, but destroying them nonetheless. This just horrifies me, personally, because I'm one of those that still think that the organ is the king of all instruments. But at any rate, you can see the context in which this was done. The gospel was being obscured, it was very complicated, they wanted to make it simple. Not everybody responded that way. Kelvin instituted psalm singing, right, and simple verse psalm singing. That's the background that I'm from. I did not know hymns so much growing up. I kind of heard of them here or there, but we were just about psalms. That's all we learned. We didn't have hymn sings. We had, we called them singspirations. We sang only psalms. In church, we sang only psalms. We know the psalms pretty well, but didn't learn about, you know, a lot of hymns until later in life. At any rate, that was his response. Luther did not take that response. Luther was a musician, among other things. So he had studied music and composition, and he had joined a group. So he was very, very musically inclined, and he regarded music as being second only to theology and level of importance of all the things that you could think about and study. So he was trained in music theory in Eisenach. He sang in the church choir, he studied, he played the lute very well, and he wrote these four-part compositions. Many of them are in your Your hymnal, okay? So if you look, number 92, a mighty fortress is our God. All praise to the eternal Lord. 219, 220, from heaven on high I come to you. 279, Christ Jesus lay in death's strong bands. 554, from the depths of woe I raise to thee. All in our, we, they're in here, okay? And I dare say, I'm gonna go out on a limb here, I don't know, Eileen, but I wouldn't be surprised if we were to sing something like this before the end of the day. We all see, right? OK. I get an amen from. And you're going to hear it too. What's that? And understand it. And understand it, yes. All right, folks, I'm sorry, but I am gonna go a couple minutes overtime, if you will indulge me, okay? There's another page there, number six, where I kind of go through a particular poignant song that Luther wrote. I'd love to talk about it, but I don't have time, because I really need to get to what comes after that. Let me just summarize it by saying, number one, we're gonna sing more of these songs later. Luther is known and told to have written 37 songs. He probably wrote more, but that's what we have today. These songs were said by some to have converted more people than his preaching. And you can understand why that would be the case, right? Because, again, you never learned any songs that you could understand in church. Now, suddenly, there are these catchy tunes. They're written either in unison or four-part harmony. You could easily sing it. You could easily understand it. It was catchy, went to your head. You went home, on the way home you were still singing this song, and people memorized it that way, right? And in this way the gospel could spread. So music was an incredibly important tool in the arsenal of the Reformation. All right, so how did the Catholic Church, that is, respond to all of this? And this is an important point, I think, to make because I have friends, some Catholic friends that said, I understand some of the points of the Reformation, but what they really should have done is just worked out some of the reforming work and not left the church and created all this division. which I think is kind of an unfair challenge because of what happened actually as a result of the attempts at reformation. And as I say this too, I just want to make clear that I am one of these why can't we just all get along type of people. I do not like conflict. I have lots of Catholic friends that I really love and respect, intelligent people, some of them very devout people. And so I have all kinds of respect for a lot of folks that I don't necessarily agree with. Having said that, we have to address the church's response. In the Council of Trent, the church responded in a very comprehensive manner to the tenets of the Protestant Reformation. We don't have time to get into all of them. I'm gonna read a few. If anyone says, this is number one, and by the way, these numbers are my own. They're not the numbers the way that they numbered them. I number them just so that I could call them out to you. If anyone saith that all the works done before justification in whatsoever way they be done are truly sins, or merit the hatred of God, or that the more earnestly one strives to depose himself for grace, the more grievously he sins, let him be anathema. And basically what they're saying here, if you think about the Catholic doctrine of things, the way things work with justification, with the way of salvation, you have to be positively inclined to receive the grace of God before you're gonna receive it. Okay, so the will has to be able to do that. That's what this is getting at. If anyone saith that by faith alone the impious is justified and such wise as to mean that nothing else is required to cooperate in any order to the obtaining grace of justification and that it is not in any way necessary that he be prepared and disposed by the movement of his own will, let him be anathema. If anyone saith that men are justified either by the sole imputation or by the justice of Christ, or by the sole remission of sins, to the exclusion of the grace and the charity which is poured forth, remember this pouring we talked about, into their hearts by the Holy Ghost, and is inherent in them. This is really long, I know. And even that the grace whereby we are justified is only the favor of God, let him be anathema. In other words, let him be accursed, let him be separated from the church, etc. It doesn't get any stronger than this. If anyone saith that a man who is born again and justified is bound of faith to believe that he is assuredly in the number of the predestinate, let him be anathema. If anyone saith that he will for certain of an absolute and infallible certainty have the great gift of perseverance to the end, unless he have learned this by special revelation, let him be anathema. If anyone sith that the grace of justification is only attained to those who are predestined unto life, but that all others who are called indeed, but receive not grace as being by the divine power, predestined unto evil, let him be anathema. If anyone sith that the justice received is not preserved and also increased before God through good works, but that the said works are merely fruits and signs of justification obtained, but not the cause of the increase thereof. Let him be anathema." So if anybody asks you what is the difference between the Catholic Church and the Protestant churches, you can kind of point back to this, right? Clearly pointing to justification, faith, clearly pointing to issues that we would call the depravity, total depravity in Calvinistic terms, totally looking at the fact that Luther's stance about being justified only by faith and by works in that, as we would state, those works that we do are fruits of the justification and not causes of it, they're saying, let them be anathema. So the problem here, when you get right down to it, is that the Roman Catholic Church and the Council of Trent anathematized the gospel. The Council of Trent was an ecumenical council. It cannot be withdrawn, okay? So the Catholic Church is not going to walk away from this. All right, so what are the implications? And I know I'm going a little bit late here. The implications, in our own day, the statements that we read here pronounce an anathema on those who hold the doctrine of justification by faith, the preservation of saints, total depravity, in other words, the basic tenets of the Protestant Reformation as taught by Luther, Calvin, and others. So my friends, there are those who state, and among them I believe is C.S. Lewis, that the Reformation should have never happened. But when you read what the Catholic Church presented here in the Council of Trent, and you read what they protested against within the Protestant Reformation, and you read what the Bible says, then we can recognize that the Protestant Reformation was not simply a few people and monks' habits objecting to certain key points of doctrine. These people were standing on the word of God, and they were maintaining that faithfulness to the word of God. That's what the Reformation is and was about. And so is the Reformation over? No, I think a lot of these challenges we continue to face today. The stances that our friends in the Catholic Church held in Trent, they still hold today and teach today. Some of these other doctrines that we read about, we face these objections not only from the Catholic Church, but from others. The work of the Reformation that took place in the 16th century is not over, because the need to stand steadfast for the word of God is still with us today. My friends, let me end on a happy note. Happy Reformation Day. Look forward to the service. Look forward to singing those great Reformation hymns. And let's close now with prayer and ask God, thank God for what he's given to us, and ask him to help us to persevere, yeah?