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For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from the works of the law. You may be seated. In the name of Jesus, Amen.
Dear Saints, it is good that we have this celebration of the Reformation today because it’s an occasion for us to think back on the history of the Church and to recognize the gifts that the Lord gives throughout the history of the Lord’s church and the confession of His name.
Really, I think we can think of the history of the church in this way: there’s a succession, one after another, of errors that arise in the church. And mistakes and heresies and wrong and false teaching. And those false teachings turn into a conversation about what does the Lord’s word say and what is the truth from God. The church continues to confess His saving name against various errors.
We think that about the Reformation as well. There were a number of errors that had built up in the church regarding the doctrine of salvation. How are we saved? Is it by faith or by faith and works? Is it through grace or grace and merit? Are we taught from the Scriptures or from the Scriptures and tradition and from the magisterium of the church?
So the Reformation became a great time of conflict. And we rejoice that we’re the inheritors of that doctrine, the pure doctrine of the gospel, the clean distinction between law and gospel and the doctrine that comes forth from us from that time.
But we are not here today just because of the theological argument that happened 500 years ago, 508 years ago. We’re gathered here because the argument that happened so long ago is the argument that is always happening. And it’s not happening out there; it’s happening in here. There is a false doctrine or a false teaching that clings to our hearts and minds and our own sinful flesh. The Reformation and the doctrines that were preached there help us in that same battle today. That’s what we need to consider.
I want to consider it with the epistle reading from Romans, and I want to talk about three specific errors that our flesh holds on to and how those three errors are addressed by the text and corrected. But here’s the basic idea.
Maybe the kind of two points of quick preface is that we normally think of our sinful flesh as the thing that motivates us to sin, that part of us that wants the wrong thing. Those desires and passions that want to do the wrong thing or think the wrong thing or say the wrong thing— that ally inside of us that allies with the world and the devil to sin and to break the commands of God. And that surely is true.
But there’s another part of our sinful flesh that we don’t often think about, and that’s the teaching part of our sinful flesh. Our sinful flesh has a doctrine, a native belief system that’s just built in from the very moment that we’re born. It’s like all of the programs that are on your cell phone when you buy it from the store; they just come preloaded. Your sinful flesh comes preloaded with confessions and creeds and doctrines, and they’re wrong and they’re bad. The basic idea of it, the name for it that the old Lutherans gave, is the opinio legis, the opinion of the law.
Something like this: If God is mad at me because I sin and do wrong, then He must be happy with me if I do right. If God is upset because of my law-breaking, He’ll be pleased with my law-keeping. And that… that is just baked into our own minds and hearts. That is the argument of the Reformation—that that is not the truth of the Scriptures, that that is, in fact, wrong and false. But it’s baked into us, and so we have to address it also in our own flesh.
So we’re going to look at three ways that that doctrine shows up. By the way, this doctrine is what Martin Luther called the little monk that lives in each one of us. Can you think of it that way? Or the little Pharisee that dwells in our own heart? There’s a teacher there, a false teacher that’s always trying to convince you that you can make God happy by your own works and obedience.
Now, I think the first argument that our text addresses is this: If God commands it, then we must be able to do it. Oh, this is so tempting for us to believe. Because it makes so much sense, right? If God commands us to do something, that must mean that we have the ability and the capacity to do it. Otherwise, why would God ask us and demand us to do it? Especially, why would God threaten us if we don’t do something that we can’t do in the first place? That just seems cruel, doesn’t it?
If God gives us a command and we can’t keep the command, and the result of not keeping the command is that we get punished by God, that seems completely unreasonable and irrational. In fact, that’s the argument that Erasmus made in the Reformation. Remember, one of the big fights was with Erasmus and Luther. Erasmus wrote the Freedom of the Will, and Luther responded with the Bondage of the Will, and they were back and forth over this whole question.
That’s basically what Erasmus said. He said, “Look, we have to have a free will to keep the commands of God because God gave us commands. And if God gave us commands and we can’t keep them, then He is a cruel tyrant.” And Luther responded to that argument from Erasmus.
He said, “Erasmus, that argument is so reasonable, so rational. The only problem that you have with that argument is the Bible, which says something different.” Right? Let me read it to you. This is from the first paragraph of our epistle lesson where Paul is arguing against this idea that the law is showing us how we can be obedient. He says, “No, no, now we know that whatever the law speaks, it speaks to those who are under the law so that every mouth may be stopped. The whole world may be held accountable to God. For by the works of the law, no human being will be justified in His sight since through the law comes the knowledge of sin.”
Amen. The purpose of the law, as Paul outlines it in this particular text, is not obedience, is not our works, is not the fulfillment of the law. The purpose of the law is to bring about the knowledge of sin, to stop every mouth, to hold the world accountable to God. Here’s the best picture I have for this. I think I’ve preached it before; so excuse me.
But you’ve got to stick with it for now. If you imagine that you’re out walking the dog some night, and you’re walking through the neighborhood, and one of your neighbors is out in the front yard—a dad and his son. His son is little, five, six years old. And you’re walking by, and you hear the father give a basketball to his son, and he says, “All right, dunk it.” And you think, “Well, what is going on?”
You’re trying not to pay attention, but you can’t help yourself. Because what is he doing? Is he playing around? Is this a joke? But then you realize, as he says that he’s serious. He says, “Dunk it.” In fact, if you don’t dunk this basketball, then you don’t get dinner and you’re going straight to bed. Now you’re really worried about this, right? Because what kind of tyrannical, wicked father would give a basketball to a six-year-old and command him to… the kid can jump like four inches in the air. You know, this is impossible. And not only is it impossible, but the thing that he’s commanding is impossible, but he’s threatening to punish him if he doesn’t do this impossible thing? What kind of wicked father is that?
You’re thinking you should probably go and talk to him—that you need to have words with him—that this is completely inappropriate. Here’s the trouble: you and I, this night, missed the previous conversation that happened inside. Right? Because just a few minutes earlier, the son was sitting at the table with his father and his mother, and mom put dinner on the table, and I’ll admit it wasn’t the son’s favorite.
And so he pushed the plate away, and he says, “I’m not eating anything. In fact, I don’t need this food. I don’t need this dinner. I don’t need this house. I don’t need you as my mom and my dad. I’m going to go take care of myself because I’m the best basketball player the world has ever seen, and I’m going to make a living by winning all the slam dunk contests.”
Ah. So now the father takes this rebellious and prideful child out into the front yard—not to show him his sin, but to show him his weakness, to show him his pride, to show him his need for his father and his mother. And he says, “Okay, fine. If you can be on your own because of your great basketball skills, here’s the basketball: dunk it. And if you can’t, no dinner; straight to bed.”
You see the point—that the command is there not to show us what we can do, but exactly to show us what we cannot do. The law of God is given to us by God to show us our sins, to show us that we can’t save ourselves, that we can’t be good enough for God, that we can’t be holy by our own efforts. It’s to expose this little monk that’s living inside of us, this little preacher of works, this little boaster of our own efforts and our own accomplishments, to expose him and to put him to death.
The second theological argument that the little monk makes is that if we are going to be righteous, it must be by our own efforts. “There is no other way,” says your little inner Pharisee, says your and my sinful flesh. “There is no other way to be righteous except by doing it ourselves, by accomplishing it by our own efforts.”
Here’s how this argument showed up in the Reformation, and it’s right at the heart of the thing. In fact, you know we celebrate Reformation on October 31st. Probably the real Reformation date— we were talking about this yesterday—should be July 25th when they presented the Augsburg Confession. But I think the moment when, like, the threshold where something was crossed and you couldn’t go back—we don’t even know when it happened—but Luther writes about it later—is when he was teaching.
He was teaching on Romans, and he was teaching on Romans chapter 1, verses 16 and 17, where Paul says, “I’m not ashamed of the gospel, because in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith.” And Luther says he was trying to figure out this word righteousness, and he really only had one option. It was the righteousness of works, the righteousness of obedience, the righteousness of our efforts in doing active righteousness.
Here’s how he was taught it in the monastery, and we see this still today. It was like this: the normal people, the everyday people, have to keep the Ten Commandments. Don’t murder anybody. Don’t commit adultery. Don’t steal anybody’s stuff. Don’t lie. Go to church. Basic outward righteousness kind of stuff. But if you wanted to be really righteous, then you had the evangelical counsels. You had the righteousness of the gospel. You had the extra commands, like what Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount. If you are angry with your brother, you’ve murdered him. If you look with lust, you’ve committed adultery.
So to be extra righteous, to have the righteousness of the gospel, you’ve got to try even more. You’ve got to take the vow of poverty, chastity, and obedience. And so while the normal people can’t steal, you can’t even have any money. And while the normal people are commanded to not commit adultery, you can’t ever be married. And while the normal people just have to be obedient to the normal stuff, you have to, you know, go to church on Sunday, you’ve got to get up seven times a day and say these prayers in the middle of the night and all this stuff.
And now you have the righteousness of God, the righteousness of the gospel. That’s how Luther understood it. See, it’s almost—can you imagine—you have a backpack, right? And we’re going to put ten cinder blocks in your backpack. Okay. And you’re walking around. You barely can carry those. That’s the Ten Commandments. And then I said, “Alright, I’ve got good news! I’ve got gospel for you. I’ve got some extra good news from God: three more cinder blocks!” Pfft. Three more commands, three more extra difficult laws.
As Luther is reflecting on this, and he’s trying to understand how in the world having more laws is in fact good news, he’s raging against this word. He writes about it himself, and it’s pretty tough when you’re reading it because he’s so straightforward about what he says. He says, “I was pressing on this word in St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans, trying to understand the righteousness of God. And I was taught that it was these evangelical councils, the righteousness that God requires of the monks and nuns and holy people.”
And he says, “And I was railing against that word, the righteousness of God. I hated that word, the righteousness of God, and I hated the God who demanded that righteousness of me. And even if not outwardly, inwardly, I was blaspheming against God and angry that He required so much of us that we could not do. If we can’t even keep the Ten Commandments, the Lord piles upon us even more reason for Him to be angry with us with this righteousness of the gospel.”
But then something happened. Luther says, “I paid attention to the words.” And here’s what he realized: that the righteousness of the gospel was the righteousness of faith. Now, to understand this, I think we just have to think about faith and works in this way: faith is what you do with a promise, and works is what you do with a command.
So if I give you a command, the way that you keep that command is by doing it. But if I give you a promise, the way you keep that promise is by believing it. And here Luther realized that the righteousness of the gospel was kept by faith. And that means that this righteousness must be a promised righteousness, not a demanded righteousness. It must be a righteousness that’s given to us as a gift.
Now, and this is the point: that you have a righteousness that is not your own doing. It is, in fact, the righteousness of God in Christ. His perfection, His holiness, His obedience, His glory. And that is given to you as a promise, and you have it by faith. So the righteousness of the gospel is not the doing active righteousness, but the passive received righteousness.
And something amazing happened. Luther says, “When I saw that, it was like heaven itself was opened. My heart leapt for joy. And I ran through the scriptures. And I found this everywhere. That the wisdom of God is the wisdom He gives to us. The power of God is the power He gives to us. The glory of God is the glory He gives to us. The holiness of God is the holiness He gives to us. And now all of these things are given to us as a gift freely by grace, not by our earning, or striving, or deserving, or grasping, or efforts or anything. No, it’s given to us freely.
And he says, “I felt as if I was born again.” And from that point on, there was no going back. Can you imagine? You come to Luther and you say, “Hey, Luther, you’ve got to stop talking about this passive righteousness!” And he says, “You’re going to have to cut my tongue out, cut my lips off, put me in the grave.” And then I’m still going to preach it. You cannot stop it. Because it is so good, and so full of comfort, and so glorious that you are saved not by your righteousness, but you are given the righteousness of Christ.
Heaven is opened for you by Jesus. So that little monk inside of you that says the only way to be righteous is for you to do it, for you to achieve it, for you to work it, that monk is now again exposed and cast out because the righteousness that we have is the righteousness of Christ. His perfection, His holiness, His obedience, His keeping the Ten Commandments. And that’s what’s given to you.
Can you imagine? This is so good. When you stand before the judge on the last day, and you think that you’re going to stand there and be judged because of what you’ve done and somehow achieve salvation because of what you’ve done, but it’s just not the case.
The judge starts looking at the ledger that belongs to your name, and he says, “Oh, look at this. You kept all the commandments. Yes. You always honored your father and your mother. You always treasured my name. You always cared for your neighbor. You were chaste and generous, and you never told a single lie. You kept all the commandments perfectly.” And you say, “You must be reading about somebody else.”
Yes, and he is. He’s reading about Christ! But Christ’s righteousness is given to you, to your name. It’s not just… I used to think of it like this: here’s a chalkboard that has all my sins written on it. It’s a pretty big chalkboard. And I thought the forgiveness of sins is just… that gets wiped out. But it’s more than that. It’s not just that the sins are erased. But all that Christ has done is put on you. It’s given to your name.
So that you, by faith, are as holy and righteous as Christ. It’s not even as Christ; you have His righteousness. It’s yours. You know, we think sometimes it’s hard to get into heaven. It will be as hard for you to get into heaven as it was for Jesus to get into heaven. The doors are thrown wide open for Him and you because you are clothed in His righteousness, covered in His blood. All of His perfection is given to you.
This is what Paul is saying, and let this throw out this monk that wants to be righteous by our own works. Listen to what it says: “The righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law. The law and the prophets, the Old Testament bear witness to it. The righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.” There’s no distinction. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, but are justified by His grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.”
Whom God put forth as a propitiation in His blood to be received by faith. This is to show God’s righteousness. Because in His divine forbearance, He had passed over the former sins. It was to show His righteousness at the present time, that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. So this little false doctrine that you’ve got to do it—that’s out.
Alright, but third. That little false preacher, that little monk sneaks up and he says, “Okay, okay, okay, okay. I get it on this thing about faith, and I get it about the righteousness of God, and I get it about the grace of God. It’s a gift. Okay, I got it. You’re saved by faith, but you’ve got to do something. At least you’ve got to do a little bit. You’ve got to be saved by faith and love, or by faith and works, or by faith and obedience, or by faith and not falling away, or by faith and making a decision for Christ. You’ve got to at least do some little tiny bit.”
And this is the… a gasping sermon of that little works-righteous monk in your own heart. He wants to somehow get your will and your efforts in there, even just a little bit. And this is a problem for all of us. Can I tell you that I think I realized this most clearly when I got to get COVID a couple of years back? You guys maybe remember this. I hardly remember because I was kind of going crazy.
Okay? But I, you know, have preached God’s grace and faith alone for 20 years, saying that it is not by our works or not by our efforts or not by our obedience. And I know that that’s true, but then I got sick and I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t work. I couldn’t drive to church. I couldn’t. I could barely walk straight. I couldn’t finish writing a sentence. I could barely spell my own name. I couldn’t think straight. I couldn’t finish talking. I just couldn’t really love, at least by any sort of action of my own. I just couldn’t do any works.
Finally, I had to realize at that particular moment that this whole business about grace is in fact true. Right? Because we… it’s just—and I realize how deep this idea of my own works and my own efforts clings even to my own heart. I think that, you know, at least I didn’t reject it, or at least I do something, or at least there’s a little obedience, and we’re always tempted to trust even the smallest amount in ourselves.
I remember that I was sitting in the backyard, kind of roasting in the sun and not doing anything, and feeling a little bit sorry for myself and wondering, “What good am I because I can’t love, and I can’t serve, and I can’t preach, and I can’t walk, and I barely can eat? What good am I?”
And I think the Lord must have somehow ministered to me this thing that I know, but here now it gets to hit my own heart. And it sounds like this: “Brian, you are loved. You are loved. It doesn’t matter if you are not loving.”
Here’s the point. This is who you are. You, dear saints, listen: you are loved. You are loved by Jesus. You are forgiven. You are saved. You are the object of the Lord’s affection. It does not matter what you’re doing. This is not the point. You are loved.
And it is by the Lord’s doing that you are saved. Faith and faith alone; not faith and, not faith with—faith alone—because God alone is the one who saves and loves and delivers and rescues and has mercy and opens heaven and brings us to eternal life.
So let’s silence this false preaching little monk in our hearts today who always wants to keep the law, who always wants to impress God by our works, who always wants to add something to our own salvation. And let us rejoice in this: Christ Jesus is the Savior.
We hold that one is justified by faith apart from the works of the law. You are justified. You are holy. You are righteous because of your Lord Jesus Christ.
And this is our confidence and our joy and our peace. In the name of Jesus, Amen. And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.