Hebrews 10:38
On July 6, 1415, Prague preacher
John Huss was led to the stake to be burned as a heretic. Huss
was condemned for preaching the gospel, for calling for a return
to the biblical faith, for cleansing a corrupt priesthood. The Council
of Constance, meeting on the Swiss border, stripped him of
his priestly vestments. A sooty chain was fastened round
his neck, and just before the flames burned him, he made a
pun of his last name, Hus, which means goose. He said, Today you
are roasting a lean goose, but hardly one hundred years will
have passed, and from these ashes shall arise a swan who will preach
the gospel more fairly than I. And no net of yours will snare
him, no trap capture him.” Hus died singing. Just to the northwest
of Prague, exactly 102 years later, Martin Luther began the
Protestant Reformation. This is his story. The Father, the Son, and the
Holy Spirit are one. ♪ Guglielmino, Guglielmino, Guglielmino. ♪ ♪ Deo gravitur domine Deo ♪ ♪ Magnificia
♪ Big doors swing on the smallest
of hinges. For instance, Bethlehem. A simple
carpenter, Joseph, marry a single teenage Jewish girl, yet in the
providence of God, the hinge of history is on a stable door
in Bethlehem. I, a miner’s child, a simple
monk, I turned scholar, teaching at Then the world’s largest university
in Wittenberg, 2,500 students. All I did was nail 95 points
of debate where I thought the church had departed from scripture.
I nailed them on the town bulletin board, the church door, and again
in the providence of God, a spark was ignited that led to the reformation
of the church. I’m sort of like a woodpecker
pecking on a tree when a lightning bolt hit it, split it right down
the middle. Woodpecker got up and shook his
feathers and says, God, I didn’t know I had it in me. I didn’t have it in me. But God
had it in his heart. And I was only a part of what
he was doing. The world that I was born into
in the late 1400s was a lost world. The Bible, called the
Vulgate then, had only been translated into Latin, and less than 2%
of the population of Europe could even read Latin. There was immorality
among the priests, vainglorious bishops, drunkenness and fornication,
And there was simony. You weren’t called to the pastorate
by God and identified as the people and trained and then elected
pastor. It was like a franchise that
you purchased. And many pastors weren’t Christians. They were ignorant. They couldn’t
read. Yet they were a pastor of a church. There was simony when you simply
bought your office. Then, of course, there was superstition.
There were enough teeth of the Apostles, or an elbow of the
Apostle Peter, to be venerated. There were enough pieces of the
Apostles to make 18 instead of just 12. And you’re alone. During worship, the priest spoke
in Latin, which very few could understand. He spoke with his
back to the congregation. He communed himself, but didn’t
offer communion to the people except the bread. They might
spill the wine and desecrate the blood of Jesus Christ. So the people were bored during
worship. They didn’t sing. They were entertained. It was
done for them. And in their boredom, one of the monks invented this
chain that people carried around their wrists called a rosary.
There was one bead for every Hail Mary that he said that was
timed so that when you set enough Hail Marys, the Mass was over. This is how ignorant and inattentive
the Church of Jesus Christ was. In the century of my life and
in the centuries before, thick judgments of God came upon the
Western world. The rise of Islam in 700 AD,
it looked like the Muslims would sweep across Europe itself. And then in the 13th century,
the devil’s own horsemen from the steppes of Mongolia came
in the form of Genghis Khan. And again, they came to Prague
and would have gone to the Atlantic Ocean had there not been a death
that recalled him home. And then in 1347, came the worst of them all, the
Black Death. A Genoan ship had come in from
its travel in the east, and some sailors had died on the voids,
so their bodies were dumped into the canals. The healthy sailors
went ashore. But during the night, they sickened
and began to die, and then their wives and children began to die.
And in the next eight years, half of the world’s population,
from India to Iceland, perished in the bubonic plague. Again,
we saw this as the book of Revelation coming to pass, the blood of
war, the scandals of the people, and the thick judgments of God.
There was one time before my life when there was not one pope
of the church, but count them, three popes, each hurling excommunications
as the other, saying they were the authentic one to lead God’s
people. Now, I don’t want you to think
that the world was entirely evil in my day. For in the providence
of God, many stirrings of an awakening were beginning to happen. This Italian named Marco Polo
had traveled across Europe and Asia to Mongolia. And there under the Chinese dynasty
of Genghis Khan, he studied and came back to report and write
a book, The Journeys of Marco Polo. Polo talked about this
sophisticated society called China, far, far away from Europe. to the West, and he also talked
about a movable type printing press and some strange substance
he called gunpowder, which was used to fire all kinds of fireworks. He talked about their strange
vocabulary and their powerful wealth and sophistication. And
the church began to persecute Marco Polo and said, you’re lying
to people. You’re stirring up vain imaginings.
These stories cannot be true. to which Marco Polo simply said,
behold, the half of it I haven’t told you. It was the birth of
the Gutenberg Press that was borrowed from China. And for
the first time, books could be printed more cheaply and swiftly. And then nine years after my
birth, 1492 it was, Christopher Columbus I sailed westward and
discovered a vast continent that he thought for sure was India,
but it was so underpopulated and it looked like a wonderful
place to begin the world again. Then there was the birth of the
universities. A Wittenberg University you may
have heard of before if you’ve studied William Shakespeare.
Do you remember his play Hamlet? Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
and Hamlet were students at the largest university in Europe
at the time. Two and a half thousand students
in the village that I eventually taught in. The universities raised
people from ignorance. And then there was the birth
of the middle class. In the Black Death, so many men and women
had died that there was a worker shortage. And what fair workers
there were could demand a higher pay. And so the meager professions
were elevated in our world, and there became a more educated
class of people, and the middle class grew with that. I, Luther,
was born a miner’s son in Eiselbein, in Saxony, Germany. My father
wanted me to be a lawyer. Since he was a miner and owned
several mines, I could be his contract rider and his negotiator. And also as an attorney, I would
earn a good wage, And in my father’s old age, I could care for him
and my mother. I was his social security. It was while I was in Erfurt
University studying to be a lawyer. In my senior year in the spring,
I was returning back to the campus for my last semester. And two
things were to happen that were to change my life forever. One,
a disgruntled student ax-murdered his professor. And that professor
was a good friend of mine. And I thought, what if that had
been me? Would I have gone to heaven? Or would my soul rot
in hell forever? And I didn’t know the answer
with any assurance. And it bent me to the very toes
of my soul. It was coming home in that spring
semester that I was trapped in the wilds with a terrible thunderstorm. lightning flashing and striking
all around me. And as a good miner, I prayed
to St. Anne, the patron saint of miners.
Save me, St. Anne, I’ll become a monk. The
storm passed, and two weeks later, true to my word, I presented
myself at the Augustinian Monastery there in Wittenberg to become
a monk. I was a good monk, too. I lived
in a cloister. I fasted myself real thin. I slept on a plank board bed
to show my humiliation before the Lord and my contrition for
my sins. I confessed my sins so endlessly
that my confessional booth time went on for hours. They had to
replace the priest and replace that priest just to hear all
my sins. And I would walk away and remember
another sin and have to go back and say, another word with you,
Pastor. I was very vexed in my soul.
It was about this time that my monastery sent me to Rome on
official church business. And while I was there, the Pope
made a decree that anyone who climbed the labyrinth steps and
stopped on the numbered step where Jesus in his trial fell,
and he kissed that step, he would be offered an indulgence. Instead
of purgatory, he would immediately be ushered into paradise, into
heaven itself. I climbed the labyrinth steps
on my knees till they were bloody. And I kissed that step, and immediately
my heart smoked me. Who can say I’ve done enough
to earn my salvation with the Lord? Who can say that the Pope’s
decree gives me the freedom of knowing that I’m a Christian
and I will pass from this life into heaven through the portal
of death? Who can say that I’ve done enough?
I began to hate God in those days. How could he demand so
much of me and I couldn’t give it? and I began to hate him because
his standard of the law seemed so high I could never keep it. It was about then that my father’s
superior in the monastery there in Wittenberg among the Augustinians,
Johann Stauppitz, said, Luther, you focus too much on yourself
and your failures and too little on God and the righteousness
of Christ. I’m sending you to teach the
Bible at Wittenberg University. We need to get you out of the
cloister. You have too much time on your hands, and you’ll devote
yourself to teaching the Word of God, Greek and Hebrew, to
the students there.” Well, I obeyed Johann Staupitz and presented
myself in the walled city of Wittenberg in the north of Germany,
in the region called Saxony. As I said earlier, Wittenberg
University was a school of 2,500 students, the largest one in
Europe in its day. And the city had an equal number
of citizens, 2,500. It was called a city because
it had a wall around it to protect it. And my study was in that
wall where I could overlook the town to which I preached and
taught. For the first time in my life,
I began a serious study of the Bible, the book of Psalms, the
book of Galatians, the book of Romans. To prepare my student
lectures and my sermons in St. Mary’s Church, I had to study
the Word of God. And I discovered something in
those days. The Bible has eyes, and it sees
me. It has feet, and it pursues me. It has ears, and it hears my
cry. It has hands that reach out to
clutch at me And I began to realize as I studied the book of Romans
chapter one, verse 17, a quote from the Old Testament, one of
the minor prophets, the just shall live by faith. And I began
to understand that salvation is not a prize we win with our
good effort behavior, but it’s rather a gift we receive in the
sheer grace of God in Jesus Christ. Perhaps I can explain it to you
better this way. The word religion is one of our
Latin words. The prefix re means again. And legion comes from the Latin
word ligament. Your ligaments hold your bones
together. And so the word religion means
to bind together or to bind about. Now you must understand in comparative
religions that all major religions agree on two tenets. One, we’re
the creation of God made for fellowship with. Two, we’ve lost
fellowship with God through our human sin. It’s on the third
point that religions disagree. And here religion breaks into
two different categories, active religion and reactive religion. Active religion says God is going
to get you At your death, you’ll be ushered into hell because
of your sins. Unless you achieve righteousness
with your good behavior and your deeds, God will punish you sure
for your sins. So you must earn your keep in
heaven. You must earn your salvation. And so you have active religions,
where man actively pursues his relationship with God. Judaism
teaches you earn salvation by keeping the Ten Commandments.
Islam teaches you must follow the five pillars of Islam. Fasting during the month of Ramadan
and so forth. Now Christianity is not an active
religion. Among the great religions of
the world, it’s the only reactive religion. Christianity says your
relationship with God is so destroyed that you couldn’t repair it yourself,
even if you tried and had a thousand lifetimes to do it in. Your relationship
is so broken with God that you can’t fix it. But here is the
good news. God can fix it Himself. And in
the atoning death of His only Son, Jesus Christ, He has done
just that. And the righteousness of Christ
can be applied to our lives as a gift that we hungrily receive
by simple faith. Maybe I can explain it to you
one more time a little more simply. When I was a little boy, I climbed
a tree. And I went way up high in the
crown of the tree and I made a serious mistake. I looked down. And scared out of my wits, I
clung to that tree, not wanting to go any higher, but not able
to come down. And my father was called, as
people heard me sobbing hysterically. And he held out those big, strong,
minor arms of his, and he said, Luther, I am here. Let go, Martin. I’ll catch you. And I let go
of that horrible, hated tree and fell back into the waiting
arms of my father who caught me. This is salvation. We’re up the tree of sin and
can’t go any higher and don’t want to come down or can’t come
down, but Jesus holds out his nails, scarred hands. Let go. Trust me. I’ll catch you. It
was in my 34th year that I did see through scriptures
the portal of heaven opened by faith. And I stepped across to
become a son of God. Very quickly, my faith was tested. All Saints Day, this time of
the year that you celebrate next Sunday, 500 years ago, The Pope
needed to raise money to build what you today know as the Vatican. And a certain bishop of Germany
had bought his office and needed to make payments to the Pope,
who needed to make payments to the builders of the Vatican.
So the church was raising money through the offering of indulgences. Do you want to pray your loved
one out of hell? A certain amount of money would
allow for that. Do you want to get out of purgatory
into heaven? A good deed in God’s bank account
would be just enough to move you out of that. So one of the
so-called, in your language, televangelists of our day, Johann
Tetzel, came through the village nearby, and he was preaching
this. When a coin in the church coffer
doth ring, that soul from purgatory doth spring. Now, my friends,
where is that in the Bible? The church misleading people,
a group of predatory priests getting in people’s purses for
the wrong motive. Well, I went back to my study
in a froth of anger, and I had been thinking about this for
one long year. And I wrote down 95 arguments
with the church I had. of misbehavior, of misappropriation
of the truth, of half-truths, and of out-and-out lies. Ninety-five
theses written out in academic form that says the church teaches
this, however the Bible teaches that. Ninety-five points, and
I wanted to debate them. That’s what we do in academia,
you know, debate what is right, what’s wrong, what’s true, what’s
false. And I went down around noon,
just as the fog was burning away, on the 31st of October, All Saints
Day, 1570, 500 years ago, this coming week. And I nailed them
on the church bulletin board. I can still hear that hammer
ringing. Well, in the dry tinder of discontent, people tired of
being fleeced by the church financially, people tired of spiritual insecurity,
tired of boredom in church, tired of seeing the Bible from a distance,
but not being able to read it for themselves. The Gutenberg
Press picked up those 95 theses, and before three months, it was
published all over Europe. And it started a firestorm of
desire for change in the church. Pope Leo, oh, he was a piece
of work. He was a Medici nobleman, filthy
rich, and when he was elected to the papacy, he said this,
God has given us the papacy. Let us enjoy it. Someone also
gave him an elephant, and he loved to put his liturgical clothes
on with great pomp right around the city of Rome. showing off
the pomposity of what it was to be a church leader in those
days. He heard about my 95 points of discontent, and he said, Luther
is but a drunken monk. When he sobers up, he’ll get
over it. As the Reformation spread and I intensified my zeal to
reform the church, he said, a wild boar is loose in the church vineyard,
and we must capture it. And so I was called to the council
in Leipzig to teach my doctrine. I was called to debate again
in Augsburg. And finally, Charles, the leader
of the Holy Roman Empire that I might add was neither holy,
nor Roman, nor an empire. He called me to the Diet of Worms
to give an account of myself. Now many of you are looking at
me strangely saying, Diet of Worms? Well, you need to understand
that the word diet means day in Latin. And Worms is a town
south of Frankfurt about an hour on the Rhine River. It was the
day that Charles I and the cardinals and bishops of my region called
me to the floor to give an account. I got there expecting to debate
and was very disappointed that they only wanted to condemn me
as a heretic, but not be allowed to debate what I had to teach.
But Frederick the Great, the prince in Saxony, vouchsafed
my safety, that if they tried to burn me at the stake like
Hust did a hundred years earlier in Constance, they would save
me with the knights and spirit me away. 2,000 people from Burns
came out to meet my entourage when we rode into town. And I
was so pleased that word of the Reformation was spreading so
rapidly like that. In the council itself, the bishop
looked at me with my books and writings and sermons and print
all laid out on the table. Did you write these? Well, I
knew that my answer could determine whether I lived or died. I lost
my nerve there and asked for a day to think about it and to
study the documents. And during that night I wrestled
with the devil and my cowardice. The next day I went into the
Diet of Worms there and again they said, did you write these?
And I told them, yes I did. I believed them to be true from
the word of God. And they asked me to recant.
And I said, it’s not a safe thing to do to depart from the truth
when God has given it to you, especially if you’re departing
from the truth for a lie. My conscience is bound to the
word of God. Here I stand. I can do no other. The council did admit that I
was a heretic, that I departed from the truth of the church.
And true to their word, they allowed me to leave and have
a three-day’s head start, and then I would be declared an outlaw,
and anyone who killed me would be considered a hero in the church.
As I was leaving the ox cart, heading back to my village in
Wittenberg, about three days’ drive away, a group of knights
came pounding out of the forest, and immediately I thought I would
be arrested and burned, but they were Frederick’s troops. They
spirited me to the town of Eisenach, the town where Bach would be
born a hundred years later, and they hid me in the Wartburg Castle. There I grew a long beard and
changed my name to George. I was called Junker George, Junker
meaning the German word for knight. So I dressed as a bearded knight
with a sword, and everyone called me George. During the 10 months
that I hid out there, I translated the entire New Testament from
Latin to German. I wrote sermons there. Again,
the Gutenberg Press printed the New Testament and my sermons,
and they spread like wildfire across Europe. I was the best-published
and best-known pastor in those days by then. But I began to
hear that the Reformation I had been away from for 10 months,
hiding out in a castle, was spinning out of control in the college
town of Wittenberg. Priests were leaving the priesthood
and marrying. Women were leaving the convents
to marry. Students were smashing churches
and icons as idolatrous. Karlstadt was giving the mass
in German. The monster was teaching that
the rebellion needed not be just against the church, but against
the civil authorities. And it looked like a peasant’s
revolt was brewing. Unless the Reformation spun out
of control and tried to do too much too fast and so be condemned,
I had to leave my safety in hiding in the Wartburg and return to
Wittenberg. The next 10 years of my life
were incredibly busy, not just preaching the word of God, but
translating the Old Testament into German, too. I wrote the book, The Bondage
of the Will, in this time. Have any of you read it in your
college days? Three treaties I wrote at that
time. I debated endlessly and preached.
Now, many of you asked me about my personal life. Do you know
at age 41 I was a single man? And unbeknownst to me was soon
to have a wife? My father had always said I should
marry and show the freedom of a Protestant that a minister
can have a wife and a family. The Catholics say he cannot.
Where is that in the Bible? Well, my marriage happened like
this. I got a note in secret from a nearby Catholic convent
for sisters. Ten of the ladies wanted to leave
the convent and become Protestants. Now in those days, helping women
leave the convent was a capital offense. Your head could roll
for that. So we decided to spirit them
out secretly. We found out that a fishmonger
used to carry barrels of pickled herring to the convent. And so
as they ate the herring, The barrels were emptied. We put
a woman in each of ten barrels, put the lid back on it, put them
on the cart, and brought them into Wittenberg. We popped the
tops of the barrels, and out comes ten women, smelling great
fish perfumes. Six of the women went home to
their families. But four of them had no family
to return to. And since women couldn’t afford
a career in those days, what would we do with these four women?
They must surely starve. So I began to find wives for
each of the four women. Arranged marriages. Now, the
mother superior was a rather old woman to be married at that
day. She was 28. Since people only
lived into their 40s, she was rather old for marriageable age.
I arranged a marriage with her, with one of the leaders of the
Ralphskeller in our village, but she met him and said, he’s
too gruff, I will not marry him. Another man I arranged a marriage
for, and she said, he’s too old, I will not marry him. And in
frustration, I looked at this Spitfire Mother Superior, 28-year-old,
red hair, Catherine Von Bora she was, and I said, Catherine,
who will you marry? And she said, well, I would marry
you, Hair Looter. Well, I was a bit surprised and
taken back. But as the days and weeks followed,
and no husband appeared for her, I began to warm to the idea.
And so I told Catherine von Bora, I do not love you, but I can
learn to love you. In an obedience to the Lord,
I will marry you. Now, ours was a happy marriage.
Six children were the issue of that marriage. It is an incredible
thing to wake up and find pigtails on your pillow in the morning
when you’ve been single for so many years. And it’s an even
more wonderful thing to rock the cradle of a child while you
write a sermon. Frederick gave us the old Augustinian
monastery that I was once a monk in, and we used it as our home.
I played the lute, and so we filled our home with friends
and students. We always had good food. And
around the tabletop, we talked issues of theology, of music,
of art, of Jesus Christ and the Bible. I remember one Advent
season, returning late at night after a midnight Christmas carol
service. And I saw a beautiful evergreen
tree, festooned with icicles, glowing in the moonlight. So
beautiful, I chopped it down and brought it home, brought
it inside and set it up. I put little red berries on it
to remind my children of the blood of Jesus. who came at Christmas
to die on the cross for us. I put candles on them, symbolic
of Jesus, the light of the world, and a star on top. Looking back,
that was the first Christmas tree. And it was the German and
the Lutherans that spread that tradition, I think, that comes
to your nation today. It was at that time that I wrote
a lullaby for my children on Christmas Day. I think you still
sing it today, do you not? Away in a manger or crib for
a bed. A good marriage, my friends,
is an earlier heaven. And I tell you, in those days
I would trade my family and my marriage for all the riches of
Vienna put together. Well, I don’t want to tell you
that becoming a Christian and a leader in the Reformation was
easy. Every time Christians act, Satan
always tries to act to counter it. Do you know that there are
three things, three things that Satan hates? He hates God, he
hates the Word of God, and he hates Christians. If you study
the Scripture, every time a new movement of God gets going, Satan
tries to nip it in the bud. Do you know how? When Jesus was
born, immediately Herod, who was insanely jealous, slew the
innocents, hoping that Christ would be among them. Again and
again, you see Satan trying to kill the revival of God as people
return to his word. There were many hardships in
my day that Satan generously provided. I struggled with obesity
in my later life. I had gout in my ankle and in
my knee. I had tympanitis ringing in my
ears. I suffered from insomnia. I had
an ulcer on my leg that never healed, and I often struggled
with depression. I looked at the Word of God in
its purity, and the Church in her impurity. I looked at the
struggle for life itself, not just in this life or in the life
to come, and I despaired in all these things. And once, in the
blackest deepest depression, My Catherine Ronduro, my lovely
wife, dressed all in black as a widow, with a hat on and a
label. And after watching her for two
days, I looked at her and said, are you crazy woman? Why are
you dressed in black? And she said, oh, Herr Luther,
God has died. And I said, are you crazy woman?
God can’t die. And she said, but I act just
like a husband. And it shook me in my lethargy. And so I turned to Psalm 46 in
the scripture, which is one of my favorite. And I loosely translated
it in German, and I paired it with a German drinking song.
And in my day, people couldn’t read, and they especially couldn’t
read music, but they knew all the drinking songs from the German
pubs. And so I took a psalm that they
all knew and slowed it down a few measures, and I put the words
in German, Psalm 46, to it. A mighty fortress is our God,
a board never failing, and festivo gesunter Gott. That’s still carved
around the turret of the church where I preached and nailed the
95 theses to this very day. Many times in the darkest points
of the Reformation, I would say to my children or my wife, Let’s
go sing Psalm 46. Well, it was about then in my
early 40s that I decided to visit the churches that had taken on
the Reformation. So I began to travel across Saxony
with my sons and other leaders of the church to see how fair
the Reformation. And much to my shock and great
disillusionment, I found ignorant pastors, liturgy gone askew,
Sermons again telling truth, yet half-truth. And I learned
something then, and I hope you already learned, that criticism
is the easiest part of any job. It’s easiest to criticize the
church and walk away, but to stay and make the church better
through effective means is the real hardship. And so we redouble
our efforts to teach the clergy, to teach the parish. We created
Lutheran schools to teach reading and writing. I wrote many hymns
which teach theology and they’re easy to memorize. We wrote the
longer and the shorter catechism that children can memorize and
be quizzed on so they can memorize and know the basic tenets of
our faith. And for the pastors, we wrote
the Augsburg Confession. a distillation of the gospel
in its many theological points that every pastor had to ensure
that his teaching stayed within his biblical boundaries. Well,
I remember it was in my 61st year. I said to my wife, I’m
sick of this world. And I had about enough of it.
And I think this world is sick of me and has had about enough
of that. I was called to the bedside of
a little eight-year-old boy that was dying of a fever in those
days. And taking his hand and looking
into those beautiful blue Saxon eyes, I said to the little boy,
surely you must die soon, lad. Where will you go? And he said,
I will go to God. I said, what will you take to
God? The little old boy looked at me, his eyes dancing with
faith and wonder, and he said, I will take everything good and
pure. And I said, but young man, how
can you, a sinner, take anything good and pure to God? And he
said, I take my position in heaven by faith. And I will take a life
and a soul sprinkled clean by the blood of Christ. And I die
and live again in the merits of what Christ did on the cross.
I came home a fulfilled man. And I said to my Catherine Ronduroff,
when an eight-year-old boy understands the simple message of salvation
by grace alone, through faith alone, through Jesus Christ alone,
truth solos victura, When a child understands that, my work on
earth is done. Indeed it was. Traveling with
my boys to Ashleban, the very city of my birth, to help a church
that was conflicted solve some of its difficult problems. About
10 o’clock that night, February the 18th, 1546, I was taking
great pains in my chest. and I suffered miserably for
the next four hours. But about two in the morning,
I took my son’s hand and uttered my last words. So, it is really
true. In the end, we were all beggars
to God, and I breathed my last. They carried my body home to
Wittenberg, where I am buried under the pulpit to this very
day. And in Worms, where I made my
famous stand, there is a statue of me to this very day. And the
inscription on the statue says this, if the work is of God,
it will last. If the work is of man, it will
fail. In the 500 years since that stand,
Protestantism has gone around the globe. It has created Christian
schools. The great universities here in
America, Emory, Framingham, Davidson, Duke, Yale, Princeton, Harvard,
were founded by Protestant Christians. It has started churches, little
outposts of the kingdom of God, like this one, around the globe. Not just in Europe, but it’s
become global. Hospitals have been created in
the name of Jesus Christ to help those who suffer. Some of the
greatest art that’s ever been created has come out of the Protestant
Reformation. The art of Rembrandt, Vincent
van Gogh. In Saxony, two of the greatest
composers ever to live were born 100 years after me, Johann Sebastian
Bach, Georg Friedrich Handel. Historians say to this day that
there had been no Luther, There would be no Bach and no Handel. Evangelists have done their work.
Music has done its work. And here in the United States,
the birth of freedom has come. Do you know when you mix politics
and religion like medieval Europe did? When you have a state church? and you have a state government
as in France, you have the worst kind of government. The Taliban
is an example of that in your culture today. So how was it
that Americans got it right? They separated church and state,
and the church government that had checks and balances was used
as a model for American republic government. The president has
certain powers, but he’s accountable to the Congress and to the Senate. They’re accountable to the United
States Constitution. All of them are accountable to
the governments by judges who read the Constitution, judge
all measures of law by that. This form of government and this
birth of freedom that you enjoy came out of the heart of covenantial
theology. and the Protestant Reformation.
But my good friends, the work of the Reformation is not finished
yet. You have a part. in the ongoing
Reformation of God. The saying of the Church is,
and always should be, reformed, and ever reforming. I notice
in your Book of Church Order that when you join, you promise
to practice the purity and peace of the Church, to judge the purity
of the Church by what Scripture says, The elders get in a room
when there’s a problem and say, what does the Bible say? And
this is what we shall do. The purity and the peace of the
church means that you adhere to scripture and curb your will
to it. And peace means you find peaceful
ways to do it. I’ve seen people tear churches
apart unpeacefully trying to reform a church that needed it. I’d like to close with you today
with one of the last quotes that I wrote. This life, therefore,
is not righteousness, but growth in righteousness. This life is
not health, but healing. It is not being, but becoming.
Not rest, but exercise. We are not yet what we shall
be, but we are growing toward it. The process is not yet finished,
but it is going on. This is not the end, but this
is the road. All does not yet glean in glory,
but in Jesus Christ all is being purified.