about what we're going to be celebrating a mere, if my math is correct, 23 days from now. Any guesses what's going on in T minus 23 days? Reformation Day. That's right. It is Reformation Day. How many of you guys knew that, to be honest here? All right, about one fifth of us. I respect that. Reformation Day is a tradition in the Williams home. It commemorates what happened October 31st in the year 1517 when a young German theology professor and monk by the name of Martin Luther made his way down the streets of Wittenberg, Germany and approached Castle Church in Wittenberg and hammered his 95 theses of the Protestant Reformation to the door of Castle Church. So every year, every October 31st, I dress up like Martin Luther, and I tell the kids, you know, before I dress up, I say, I got four kids. I saw the program and it said I only had two, which means I've been speaking here a long time that my bio is two kids out of date. Anyway. So I tell the kids, you know, daddy's got to go run some errands, you know, I'll be back in an hour or so. Then I run out to the garage, dress up like Martin Luther, the great German reformer, knock on the front door, and then come in and teach my kids all about the Protestant Reformation. I highly recommend fathers dressing up like Martin Luther. But it's a huge year this year because we are, I guess you would call it the bi-millennial, the 500th anniversary of October 31st, 1517, this German monk going and hammering these theses to the door of the Wittenberg Church. Just a little appetizer of some of the things that young Martin Luther had in his 95 theses. He says things like this in Thesis 27. He says there's no divine authority for preaching that the soul flies out of purgatory immediately when money clinks in the bottom of the treasure chest. And what he's responding to here, if we were to hop in a time machine together and go back 500 years, it was common in the Roman Catholic Church in the 16th century, the early 1500s, to hear a doctrine summed up by a guy called John Tetzel. He was kind of like a televangelist of the 16th century, going around and scamming people for money. And he had this go-to phrase. He said, the minute your coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs. And that was like one of his little catchphrases that would get people to reach into their wallets and reach into their purses. And he would just play with people's emotions. He would say, you know, can't you hear your dear departed great grandmother crying out from the fires of purgatory? And if you could just throw some more money into that coffer when it comes around, she would be forever free to enter her heavenly bliss. And what Luther saw was that this was not good news. This was not gospel. This was anti-gospel. This was bad news because now salvation is no longer free. Salvation literally has a price tag on it. And so that's where we find Thesis 27, that there's no divine authority for preaching that false gospel. He continues Thesis 36, again, just to give you a taste of what rocked the entire Western world 500 years ago. Thesis 36, any Christian whatsoever who is truly repentant enjoys plenary or complete remission from penalty for their sins and guilt. And this is given to him without letters of indulgence. And this is a big deal 500 years ago where you could purchase a little scrap of paper that was known as the plenary indulgence. The Pope at the time, 500 years ago, was a guy called Leo X. Leo X wanted to build St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican. Anybody ever been to St. Peter's there in Rome? It's beautiful. Well, it was built through Leo X's indulgences. It was a scrap of paper that was supposedly your ticket through the pearly gates. It would wipe out all of your sins if you purchased this piece of paper. It was your passport to heaven. And again, Luther had the clarity to realize that this is not good news. This is bad news. This is not the gospel. This is anti-gospel because now salvation is no longer free. That's what's behind Thesis 36. Let me give just one more example here. Thesis 62. Luther writes, the true treasure of the church, the true treasure of the church, and this stands true for Riverview Church as well, our true treasure is the holy gospel of the glory and the grace of God. That is the true treasure of the church in the 15th century and the church in the 21st century. It is the gospel of the grace of God. And so with all the sad headlines in the world after a brutal week, I want to talk to you about six things to celebrate as we approach the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. We could all use something to celebrate after such a brutal week. And so I want to zero in on those. If you're taking notes, you might want to scribble down the left margin. There's a little paper you can pull out of your bulletin there. You might want to write the word reform down the left side. And I'm going to use those six letters to talk you through six things that define the Protestant Reformation that need to continue defining the church in the 21st century. And so I'm just going to dive right in here. The first one, the R in our reform acrostic, one thing to celebrate as we approach the bi-millennial celebration of the Protestant Reformation is to celebrate the return to the Bible. The return to the Bible. If we could time warp back 500 years, What you would find if you were to walk into a typical church cathedral back in Europe, what you would find, right now you have this amazing privilege where you can reach to the seat in front of you and there's Bibles back here. Back in the 16th century, you did not have access to the Holy Word of God. In fact, in a typical European cathedral back in the 16th century, they had one Bible. That Bible would have been literally under lock and chain. You would have had to go on like a ninja mission to sneak in and do some kind of Ocean's 11 mission to get your hands on a Bible to begin with. You didn't have access to it as the congregation. Now, even if you did some ninja mission and you were able to get your hands on a Bible in the local cathedral, that wouldn't do you much good because it was kept in a different language. More often than not, it was Jerome's Latin Vulgate, and your average Joe European, or your average Hans European, I guess, didn't know Latin, and so they didn't have any way to access the precious truths of God's words for themselves. And so when Luther comes around, He gets back to the text. He gets back to the text of Scripture. That was one of the rally cries of the Protestant Reformation that we can celebrate 500 years later. They had a phrase that they would throw around, ad fontes. Ad fontes was what they would say back in the Reformation, and it meant to the fountain or to the source. Let's get back to the fountain of our faith, to the source of all truth. Let's get back to sacred Scripture. And so that's the first thing to celebrate. Luther went on to translate the Bible from the original Greek and Hebrew, and he gave the world its first ever German Bible that your average Hans on the street could now have access to the gospel. The same thing had gone on a generation before in what's now the Czech Republic, thanks to an even earlier reformer called John Hus. John Hus took the Bible and gave it to the Czech people. If you cross over to England, that's what William Tyndale was doing. That's what John Wycliffe were doing, giving us our very first English Bibles. And so we have that privilege of living in the Protestant tradition where you now have direct access to the inspired, authoritative, error-free Word of God. That is an awesome privilege. I mean, you can literally pull out a little black box, a cell phone, hit a few buttons and be reading the text of scripture in about 50 different translations anytime you want. And so my encouragement is that we don't take that privilege lightly. You have access to the word of God, but if you actually begin to look at the statistics on the church world in our country, that privilege is taken for granted every day. We are in what George Barna, the famous pollster and researcher, calls, quote, the crisis of biblical illiteracy in this country. A crisis of biblical illiteracy. George Gallup, the famous pollster, after decades of research, has reached the same conclusion. He says that, by and large, we have more access to the Bible than any prior point in history, but people just don't read it. A study came out, this is going back about 10 years, by a huge church back east that was trying to figure out what, more than anything else, causes spiritual growth in the lives of believers. Not only believers who have been believers through the decades, the veterans of the faith, but the brand new believers across the board. They were trying to figure out, is it having a talented worship leader? Is it about having entertainment value on Sundays with smoke machines and a light show? Is it about having a dynamic pastor with charisma in the pulpit every Sunday? Is it having a robust small group program, a life group outreach? What is it more than anything else that causes real spiritual growth in the lives of believers, baby believers and veteran believers? And you know what they found the number one factor was by a landslide? Very simple, reading the Bible. The number one factor in significant spiritual growth in the lives of brand new and veteran believers was reading the text of Holy Scripture. And so take that as an encouragement. Right after those statistics came out, there's a huge church up in Minnesota pastored by a theologian pastor named John Piper. And after the research came out, he wanted to gauge how his congregation was doing. And so he sent out a little anonymous survey. And Piper was depressed for about two months after those survey results came back because the numbers were so dismal for people in his congregation that actually bothered to dust off the text and read it for themselves every week. And so after I read that, I was leading a small group, my wife and I in our living room, and we had about 20 people from young families that would gather every Monday night. And I thought, surely this small group is reading its Bible on a daily basis. And so we took an anonymous poll. Out of 20 people, Take a guess what the average, the weekly average, times in a typical week people were reading their Bibles for themselves. Just throw out a number. Three? You're more optimistic than you should be. Down? Two, zero, a little up from there. Our group average was .4 times a week. .4, we couldn't even bring ourselves as a group to read the Bible one time. And so if we wonder why the church in the country is in the state that it's in, why we, just like in the 16th century, are in need of reformation again, a re-reformation, we need to return to the Bible just like they did 500 years ago. We need to return to the text. And so that's the first thing to celebrate that comes with encouragement. Riverview, be a church that returns to the Bible again and again as your sole and supreme authority. Now let me just zero in on that point for 60 more seconds to put it in our 21st century context in a way that wasn't quite true 500 years ago. 500 years ago, the biggest rival to scripture was the authority of the church. What the church said, what the pope said, what the canons of church law said, that was more authoritative than the inspired error-free word of God. In our day, there's a different competitor with the authority of scripture, and that is, in our day, in the 21st century, particularly in America, the authority of feelings. My feelings are the final, unquestionable, error-free authority on all reality, and so I need to change the whole world out there to reflect how I feel subjectively. So if we're going to experience re-reformation in the 21st century, we need to challenge that and say what God's word says is infinitely more true, infinitely more authoritative than what your own fallen feelings say. Now let me just bring that close to home for a second. Some of you might feel Broken, some of you might feel unlovable. Some of you might feel like an outsider. We have all these fallen emotions swirling around inside of us. But hear me when I say this, what God says about you is infinitely more true than how you feel about yourself. What God says about you is infinitely more true, infinitely more authoritative, infinitely more reliable than how you feel about yourself right now. And so you see this beautiful doctrine, the Reformers called it sola scriptura, scripture alone is the final authority. It isn't just a box to check on a doctrinal statement, it's something for all of us to live every week to remind ourselves that's right, what God says is infinitely more true and authoritative than how I feel. This leads us to a second thing. to celebrate from the Reformation as we approach the 500th anniversary. And that is the E in our Reform Acrostic. So the R, return to the Bible. The E is the elevation of God's grace. The elevation of God's grace. This was what the Reformers described as sola gratia in Latin. It means grace alone. You are saved by grace and by grace alone. And this is something that struck Martin Luther in a revolutionary way. And let me just give you a little bit of his backstory. Luther was in law school and one day he's out in the German countryside when a thunderstorm strikes that basically scared him to death. He thought, this is it, I'm gonna get zapped, I'm done for. So history tells us Luther falls off his horse, he's down in the mud, he's hiding from the lightning bolts that are raining down, and he prays, he was a Catholic at the time, so he prays, Saint Anna, if you save me from this thunderstorm, I'll drop out of law school and become a monk. And then the clouds part and the sun shines and he thinks, oh wow, big life change here. Unenrolls from law school and joins the local Augustinian monastery. Now as a monk, he becomes something of an obsessive compulsive about his own salvation. And so he spends, history tells us that he would average six hours a day in the confessional booth. Just think about that, that's like a full-time job almost. Six hours a day to the point where his father confessor, the priest that he was confessing to through the screen, finally pulled him aside one day and kind of took him by the shoulders and shook him and slapped him around and said, Luther, if you're gonna be taking up six hours of my day every day, at least bring something interesting, at least bring some sins worth confessing. And so Luther was just in this crisis of conscience. where he never felt like he was good enough. He would sleep without a blanket in the middle of the German winter in his cell there at the monastery and freeze and almost get hypothermia just to prove, see God, see how good I am, see how holy I am, see how sorry for my sin I am. He would do self-flagellation where he would just beat his own back bloody to prove how sorry he was for his sin. Now, for all of those self-help strategies, Luther said he was led, in his own words, there's a quote from Luther, he said he was led to the abyss of despair. The abyss of despair. And if anybody in the room, if you've ever tried to please God by your own power, you know something of that abyss of despair. One day, After having this deep crisis of faith, his father confessor, the head of the monastery, says, Luther, I want you to drop out of the monastery for a while, take a little breather, and I want you to go and teach theology in Wittenberg. And Luther's scratching his head like, I'm in a crisis of faith, I don't know if I'm saved, I spend six hours a day in a confessional booth, my back is covered in scars from me whipping myself, I almost had hypothermia last week from the German winter, and you want me to go teach theology? So he does. Luther ends up at the University of Wittenberg and he's teaching theology. Now this is the first time in his life, he'd been a monk for years, he had never actually read the Bible for himself until he was thrown into that post as a theology professor. And one day, the way history tells it, Luther was sitting on the commode of all places. It's interesting, that's where a lot of epiphanies happen. They certainly did for Luther. He's taking care of business there on the commode and he opens up his Bible and he reads Romans chapter one. He had to prepare a lecture on the book of Romans, which he had never read before. And right there in the first chapter, the apostle Paul says, for in the gospel, The power of God is revealed for the salvation of all who believe. And in the gospel is the righteousness of God. And in reading those words from 1500 years earlier from the pen of the Apostle Paul, Luther says in his own words, he says, the doors of paradise opened before me and I entered therein. He went from the despair, the anxiety, the depression of trying to save himself to realizing the gospel, that the righteousness of God becomes ours, not by our performance, not by six hours in a confessional booth, not by beating our own backs bloody. Our salvation, the righteousness of God becomes ours because of the finished, complete, saving crosswork of Jesus, amen? And so that's the second letter. The elevation of grace is what came to revolutionize the life of Luther and what then came to revolutionize the Western world as he began to preach that we're saved by grace and not our own performance. Now, just like I did with the R, the return to scripture, set it in a contemporary context, let me do the same thing with the elevation of God's grace. Put it in our 21st century context so we can have a re-reformation. In our day, there's not one main worldview in Western culture like there was in the 16th century. Catholicism was kind of all over the place. You had a much more monolithic culture. But in our day, it's very pluralistic, right? You can walk down anywhere USA, just walk down a street and knock on one door and you're talking to a Buddhist. Knock on the next door, you're talking to a Scientologist. Knock on the next door, you're talking to a Mormon. Knock on the next door, you're talking to an atheist. And so it seems like Things are much more diverse than they were in his day, which raises the question, well, how do we have a reformation all over again if things are very, very different? Well, let me say this, for all the different worldviews swirling around in this city and in this state and in this country, They all come down to the same false gospel that the Roman Catholic Church was teaching 500 years ago. They all come down to some version of you have to save yourself. In Mormonism, I save myself by going to the temple and by participating in these rituals and by rigid adherence to a mile-long list of do's and don'ts for the Jehovah's Witness across the street. If I knock on enough doors, if I keep enough rules, then maybe, just maybe, I'll make it to the kingdom, for the Muslim down the street, if I can just keep these five pillars, if I can just keep my five daily prayers towards Mecca, if I can just tie the 40th of my income, if I can take my Hajj, my pilgrimage to Mecca, if I could fast during the month of Ramadan, if I can keep all these rules that maybe, just maybe I'll please Allah enough to be welcomed to paradise one day. To the atheist down the street, if we can just do enough science And if we can just educate enough people and if we can just purge the world from the superstition of Christianity, then we can save ourselves. It's all just variations on the same old false gospel. We can't save ourselves, Jesus can. And so that's the central message of a re-reformation would be the same message of the reformation. We're saved by grace and grace alone. Which leads us to the third thing to celebrate as we approach the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation and that is the F in our Reform Acrostic, faith with empty hands. Faith with empty hands. Now this is a phrase that Luther himself used and I think it's really powerful because he's getting to the gospel that it's not a matter of I bring all of my accomplishments all of my spiritual deeds before God and say, look, God, I read my Bible today. Are you impressed? Look, God, I went to Riverview this weekend. Are you impressed? Look, God, I went and served in Mexico. I went to the men's retreat. Look, God, are you impressed? Let me just save you the suspense here. God isn't impressed. He's impressed with the perfect righteousness, the supreme holiness of his son, Jesus. That's what impresses the father. And so in trusting Jesus, we come with an empty handed faith. And this is something that Luther realized that was so liberating. He had been trying to fill his hands up and say, look how many hours I slept on that sub-zero German winter night to prove to you how sorry I am for my sin. Look how many hours I spent in the confessional booth. Look how my knees had been bruised bloody trying to crawl up to kiss some sacred relic. Look at how devout I am, God, aren't you impressed? And he finally, reading Romans 1, reading Paul's letters, came to that realization, God's not impressed. One of the breakthroughs for Luther came from reading Philippians, where Paul, just like Luther would about 1,500 years later, Paul had tried by his own religiosity, by his own performance, by his own super spirituality, he had tried to secure a right relationship with God, and he talks all about it in Philippians 3. He says, look, if any of you guys think you can get to heaven by doing good stuff, you don't hold a candle to me. And he goes on to list all of his spiritual credentials. He says, look, I basically got a PhD in Jewish theology. I was circumcised on the right day. I'm from the right tribe. I kept all the rules. When it comes to the 613 commands of the Old Testament, I can check every one of those boxes. But Paul finally reaches his conclusion there in Philippians 3, where he says, I count it all as rubbish compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ my Lord. All of his self-righteousness was a pile of rubbish. And the Greek word there is a very interesting word that Paul chooses to use. He uses the word skubala. Skubala was a Greek word that you would use if we were back in the first century and you're walking through the streets and somebody's dog had just left a little present for you. And you're strutting along and you step in it, you would say skubala. It was the first century Greek word for fill in the blank. And Paul is saying that's what all of his own righteousness amounts to compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ. And so that's the third sola of the Reformation, sola scriptura, number one, sola gratia, we're saved by grace alone, number two. And number three, sola fide, we're saved by faith, not by works, but by faith, trusting in the perfect righteousness of Jesus, which leads us to the fourth sola of the Reformation. And the fourth thing to celebrate, which is only Christ's finished work. That's the O in our Reform Acrostic. Only Christ finished work. Sola Christos. By Christ and Christ alone we are saved. He lived a life of moral perfection. He died as our substitute. He rose bodily as our all-sufficient Savior. We can't save ourselves. Now, let me borrow from a 20th century theologian, a brilliant guy called A.W. Pink, Arthur Pink. And he has just a beautiful image some of you can relate to, some of you might take a little stretch of imagination here. But he says, what if you were trying to build like an archway to the front door of your house? And so you hire the world's greatest front door archway builder. And he shows up, and he custom chisels this just work of art, this masterpiece. And you come out, and you take a look at it. You're surveying his work. And you pull a hammer out of your back pocket. And you're like, yeah, this is perfect and all, but. You know, I think we can improve it a little bit over here. And you start chipping the nose off a seraphim and you come over here and you say, well, this rose is nice and everything, but I think we can make it a little better. And you start chipping away. And the problem there is the work is already perfect. You can't add to it. It's already perfect. Jesus's cross work on your and my behalf, his dying for our sin is already perfect. There's nothing to add. You can't add to an already perfect work. You are saved by his all sufficient cross work and resurrection. Let me say it like this. If you were to ask just average Joe Christian on the street, hey, why did Jesus die? I bet the answer you get, more often than not, is just something like, well, Jesus died for our sins. Jesus died for our sins. Is that true? Sure. Thank God that's true. Jesus died for our sins. But it's almost a half truth. Because the more you read scripture, the clearer it becomes, Jesus is not only dying for your sins, that's half of the good news. What we have happening in what Luther called the great exchange is that as Christ is taking your sin and the wrath that you deserve for violating the will of a holy, holy, holy God, All of his righteousness, all of his perfection, his flawless law-keeping, his moral perfection is credited to you as if that's the perfect life you lived. And so yes, Jesus died for your sin, but Jesus also died to credit to your account all of his perfect righteousness. And that's your and my standing before God. Just think about that. When the holy, infinitely just God and Father of the universe looks at you, He sees Christ's utter perfection. Now this is another area where we can easily go wrong. Where, let me say it like this. I've heard, teaching theology over the years at Biola University, I've heard a lot of students say something to the effect of, well, why did Jesus die? What's the cross about? Or here's probably the most common way I hear it is I asked God how much he loved me and he stretched out his arms and died and said this much. And so the cross is an expression of God's love. And they're kind of the story ends. Well, the problem with that, and it's true so far as it goes, make no mistake, the cross is God's ultimate way of saying, I love you. But if it's just an expression of love, then the cross becomes strange and it sounds strange to people who were never raised in the church. Let me illustrate like this. If I said to Pastor Greg in the back, if I say, Pastor Greg, I love you, brother. He says, thanks, man. I love you too. And he said, no, I really love you, brother. Boom. I hit myself in the head with my iPad. And he's like, okay, I get it. You love me. I'm like, no, you don't understand. I really, really, really love you. If I start just beating myself up to express my love for pastor Greg, that's just weird. That's just self abuse, right? If God is just saying, I love you, let me show you how much I love you, Jesus is gonna be executed. That doesn't make much sense if it's just a love expression. Because God's expression of love for you on the cross is not merely an expression of love, it is simultaneously an expression of infinite divine justice. Are you tracking with me? The justice of God that must punish sin is poured out in full on Christ on the cross. The New Testament word for this that the reformers helped to rediscover 500 years ago is a word propitiation that is kind of lost from our vocabulary. We don't talk much about propitiation anymore. But it's this root idea of a wrath taker. A wrath taker. You and I deserve the just wrath of a holy God. Picture it like this. Let's say you commit a crime, it's a capital crime, you deserve the death penalty and you stand there in front of the firing squad and you deserve every one of those bullets for the crime you've committed because you've offended an infinite being that merits infinite justice and infinite wrath. And you stand there, hands tied behind your back and you hear the command, ready, aim, fire. Fire. Your propitiation, my propitiation, is the guy who runs in front, sprawls his body out as big as he can, and absorbs into his flesh every single bullet until every executioner's magazine is clicking empty. And then he collapses to the ground and you stand there without a scratch. Jesus is our great propitiation. You hear that this morning. There's not a bullet of divine wrath left for you. Every single one has been absorbed into the body of our Lord Jesus on the cross, amen? This leads to a fifth truth to celebrate this morning. The fifth truth is the R in our Reform Acrostic. One of the things the Reformers did 500 years ago to do again now is recognizing God on the throne. recognizing God on the throne. This was the fifth sola of the Reformation. So we got sola scriptura, scripture alone. Sola gratia, we're saved by grace alone. Sola fide, we're saved through faith alone. Sola Christos, we're saved in Christ alone. And last but not least, soli Deo gloria, God's glory alone. We exist for God and God's glory alone. Because you see, if you actually could perform your way to God, if I actually could rule keep my way to salvation, then we would have a way of patting ourselves on the back and thinking, you know what? I'm better than that guy over there. I'm better than her. I'm holier than them. And so it becomes about self-glory if we can save ourselves. If on the other hand, as Paul says in Ephesians 2, he starts out this powerful statement on the gospel by saying you were dead in trespasses and sins. You were dead, you could no more save yourself than a lifeless corpse could run a marathon. And so this maybe a metaphor would help make Paul's point from Ephesians 2 here. The way the Roman Catholic Church was thinking about this back in the 16th century is disturbingly the way most Christians in the American church think about it today, which is something like this. You're stuck in the bottom of a well. You can't climb out yourself. You can't save yourself. So God throws a rope down. God throws a rope down. And now it's up to you and your free will to grab that rope and then climb yourself out of the well. That's the way salvation worked in 16th century Roman Catholicism. That's the way salvation works for most 21st century, quote, evangelicals. I've quoted these statistics here several times. Maybe some of you remember. What is the most, the favorite Bible verse of American, quote, born again Christians? Anybody remember? 82% of American Christians in a survey a few years ago said God helps those who help themselves. was their favorite Bible verse. 82%. Again, what's the chapter and verse on that, anyone? First, not in the Babylonians, 316s. It's not there. And not only is it not there, it is antithetical. It's the opposite of the driving biblical message that God helps those who were utterly broken beyond self-help. That's the gospel. That's the good news. And over eight in 10 American born-again Christians have fallen into the very false doctrine, the very bad news that Protestantism was originally protesting. Do we need a re-reformation? You betcha. A more recent study just came out two months ago that found 83% of American evangelicals said that when it comes to salvation, we initiate and then God responds. So instead of this picture of, okay, we get to climb the rope and save ourselves, what the reformers realized from passages like Ephesians 2 was that you are dead at the bottom of that well. If the rope was lowered down, it would just bounce off your skull. And so what God does in Christ is he not only throws the rope down the well, he climbs down the rope in the person of Jesus, and like divine defibrillators, he jolts spiritual life into your corpse, he throws you on his back, and he carries you out of the well and saves you. So salvation is beginning, middle, and end by grace for the glory of God. Do you see how in that scenario, God gets 100% of the glory? You see how if you believe that gospel truth, it is really hard to be self-righteous. It is really difficult when you realize you are a rejuvenated corpse that God saved beginning, middle, and end. That's where true humility kicks in. Which takes us to the final thing to celebrate from the Reformation. So we've seen the five solas. We learn from Scripture alone that we're saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. So God and God alone gets the glory. That's what we're celebrating the 500th anniversary of. Which leads us to a sixth thing. which is an implication of the first five, and it's the M in our Reform Acrostic. And what the Reformers did was, M, they were making all things spiritual. Making all things spiritual. What am I getting at here? The idea of the Protestant Reformation is that because God is supreme and sovereign over all spheres of life, His lordship is to be celebrated in art and science in our jobs. God can't be relegated or pushed aside to some little private compartment. He's not going to be jammed inside of a box. And so this, again, is an implication of the previous five solas because it works this way. If I'm saved by grace and grace alone, if God does the saving, I don't need to freak out about myself anymore. We don't need to worry about ourselves anymore. We are saved by the grace of God and the grace of God alone for his glory. And that now frees us up to engage all of life under the domain of Christ's lordship. Let me show you the impact this actually had on Western culture. When it came to doing a job, in the 16th century, the idea was if you're a pastor, you're spiritual. If you're a priest, if you're a cardinal or something like that, you're doing spiritual work. If you're a mason, if you're a shoemaker, if you're a janitor, that's down here. That's not very spiritual. Well, what Luther came to realize was how unbiblical that hierarchy was. And so he has a famous quote that's attributed to him where he says, the widow sweeping her floor to the glory of God can be more spiritual than the Pope high up on his throne. Isn't that beautiful how Luther came to rediscover that because God is sovereign and we're saved by his grace and for his glory, all of life becomes spiritual. One of my favorite Luther quotes is he said the cobbler the shoemaker doesn't doesn't glorify God by etching little cross symbols or little fish symbols into the soles of his shoes. The cobbler glorifies God by making good shoes. You see how the Protestant work ethic came out of this, that I want to do all things for the glory of God. Now just apply that. Whatever you set your mind to this week, whatever takes up the lion's share of your time, don't just do it as if, okay, I had my spiritual time on Sunday, this is my secular time. It's all spiritual under the Lordship of Jesus, so do it all for the glory of God. You see how this impacted science in the West, where the charter of the Royal Society that came directly out of the Protestant Reformation, it was the first official science academy in Western culture. In their charter, they said, direct your scientific studies to the glory of God and to the benefit of the human race. They came to rediscover, it's not this hierarchy, the pastors are spiritual, the scientists aren't. Science is spiritual work coming out of the Reformation. Music, Johann Sebastian Bach, one of the greatest composers in the history of the world, famously said, and I quote, the aim and final end of all music is the glory of God. And so that's the final point to celebrate and something else to reclaim 500 years after the Reformation. That it's not like the spiritual pastors up here and you guys are unspiritual. All of life is spiritual under the Lordship of Jesus, amen? Evangeline Patterson is an Irish poet, and she said it better than I can. She said, I was raised in a Christian environment where because God was so important, nothing else was allowed to be important. But I had broken through to the position that because God exists, everything has significance. So let me close like this if the band wants to start heading up here. Here's what we celebrate the 500th anniversary of here in 23 days. That according to the Bible alone, we are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, for God's glory alone, so that all of life becomes spiritual. So Riverview, I just leave you with this encouragement. Be a reformational church. One of the rally cries of the Reformation was Semper Reformanda, which means always reforming. The church is always in need of getting back to these precious truths. So be an always reforming church, a Semper Reformanda church. Be a church that returns again and again to God's precious life-giving and authoritative word. Be a church that elevates the grace of God, a church of empty-handed faith that receives God's blessings every day, not because we deserve them, but because Christ deserves them for us. Be a church that looks only to Christ and to His sufficient saving work, a church that recognizes God on His sovereign throne, and that He doesn't exist for our glory, we exist for His. and finally be a church that makes all things spiritual, play, work, family, fun, science, politics, art, intellect, emotion, imagination, culture, all of it lived out under the Lordship of Jesus, to whom be all glory forever and ever, amen? Amen. Great God, we pray that this congregation would be part of re-reformation. Oh, how our culture needs it. a culture that is just lost in the dark, trying to save itself, looking to their own feelings as the final authority, missing out on enjoying Jesus. God, I pray that this community fulfills the great commission right here in our own backyard, and it would reverberate out from here, just like you pulled off 500 years ago, that people came to realize the aim and final end of all things for your glory. Help every one of us to preach this gospel to ourselves every day, in Jesus' name. Let's stand together and sing this last chorus. Bless the Lord, O my soul, O my soul. Worship his holy name. Sing like never before, O my soul, I'll worship your name. Can we have a round of applause for Dr. Thaddeus for coming. Thank you for coming. We have elders and home group leaders who will be up front to pray with you if you have anything that needs prayer. And we're going to live this week Jesus paid it all, all to Him I owe. Sin, hot laughter, crumbs and stain, He washed it all. Praise the one who paid my debt and raised this life up from the dead. Oh, praise the one who paid my debt and raised this life up from the dead. Oh, praise the one who paid my debt and raised this life