1011. The Reformation Must Continue

Welcome to The Daily Platform from Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina. The school was founded in 1927 by the evangelist Dr. Bob Jones Sr. His intent was to make a school where Christ would be the center of everything so he established daily chapel services. Today, that tradition continues with fervent biblical preaching from the University Chapel Platform. Just over 500 years ago, in October 1517, Martin Luther wrote his 95 Theses, which is considered to be the beginning of the Reformation. Let's listen now to today's message where Dr. Sam Horn will conclude the series on the Protestant Reformation called Truth Triumphs.

His scripture passage is from 1 Timothy 4.16. The text I've called to your attention in 1 Timothy 4, verse 16, reads like this, We spent our semester really thinking about the application of Paul's instruction to Timothy as we've considered the incredible truths that were recovered by the Reformers in the Protestant Reformation. We have really summed it all up well as we've listened this semester to the idea that truth triumphs. It triumphed in the day of the apostles. It triumphed through the first centuries of church history. It triumphed ultimately over darkness in Martin Luther's day. So the question this morning that we draw out of the text before us is not whether truth has triumphed. Clearly, it has. Nor is it whether truth will continue to triumph and whether it will triumph in the end.

It will. The real question for me this morning and for you is whether or not truth will triumph in our own day and in our own age. And the answer in part depends on whether or not you and I are willing to pick up our own mallet and join the successors of the Reformation in personally celebrating and proclaiming and protecting the truths that they recovered during that great protest. And I think we could take the truths that they recovered for the church and organize them in sort of three categories.

I'd like to do that very quickly this morning. When you think about what the Reformation recovered, when you think about what the Reformers won through their hard efforts, we could say first of all they recovered something that has become known in Reformation theology as the formal principle or the foundational principle for the Reformation. And you know that as sola scriptura. We had an entire message on this earlier in the semester and at the end of the day, this formal or foundational principle restored the scripture to its rightful place as the sole and supreme authority for the church. Now out of that formal principle came what the Reformers called the material principles, the essence of the Reformation. And the material principles of the Reformation revolved around three primary truths about justification. And you know them as sola gratia by grace alone, sola fide by faith alone or through faith alone, and solus Christus in Christ alone. And again, this semester we took a message on each one of the material principles of the Reformation as it had to do with justification. And then the Reformers recovered and established for the church the teleological principle or the end goal of all of this and it is soli deo gloria or for God's glory alone. Not for the glory of the church, not for the glory of the Bishop of Rome, but supremely and ultimately and only for the glory of Christ and the glory of God.

And so we spent time looking at that principle throughout the semester. But when is a protest over? When is enough enough? I mean, think about the fact that 500 years have come and gone and the Protestant Reformation is not over. When does the time come for both parties to come to the table and talk together and lay aside their differences and be reconciled so that unity can be restored and the breach healed?

When is the protest over? I would observe that to be sure, reconciliation is desirable and when it happens in God's way, it is sweet and it is glorious. But sometimes reconciliation can be deadly when it loses the truth or it gives up hard-fought spiritual ground. And in our own day, there are those who argue that the Reformation has actually accomplished the goal of the Reformers and after 500 years, it is time to be reconciled with Rome and the Roman Catholic Church.

Let me give you several examples of this. In 1994, there was a document that was put together and signed by 40 prominent Roman Catholic theologians and prominent evangelical leaders. The name of that document was Evangelicals and Catholics Together. The subtitle of that document was the Christian Mission in the Third Millennial. The heart of that document was the recognition that both the Roman Catholic Church and evangelical churches are really on the same page when it comes to justification and they shouldn't try to be converting people out of each other's flocks because after all, we are all together on this issue.

In 1999, another document was crafted and formed called the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification. This was created and agreed to by the Catholic Church's Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and the other signatures were the Lutheran World Federation and the Inheritors of Luther's Reformation. And their basic premise was, we have come to agreement on the doctrine of justification and so brothers, the Reformation is over. And then the third thing I would mention to you is the current dialogue that is happening right now in 2017 between Protestants, evangelicals, and Pope Francis. And this discussion would indicate that for many, the time is right for mutual respect and reconciliation between Protestants and Roman Catholicism. Pope Francis is the most ecumenical pope in the history of the Roman Catholic Church. Of the 266 popes that have risen up in the Roman Catholic Church, he is by far the most popular. He enjoys worldwide popularity in favor, he has been well received by leaders of almost every other faith in the world, and he is well respected and well received by many millennial evangelical Christians. I ran this sermon by a number of different people and one of them was a student from our own student body and he wrote back to me and he said something and I want to quote it to you.

I ask this permission to share it with you. He said, we millennials are prone to be tolerant. We are prone to be nice and accepting and this can be seen in our response to Catholicism. You touch on it with Pope Francis. He is a hip figure in millennial culture. He is what a lot of millennials want to see the church become, someone who doesn't press hard on social issues like homosexuality and abortion and is immensely kind, going around the world, feeding the poor, doing kind deeds everywhere, standing up for Muslim refugees. He is a popular figure.

Even I have been drawn to show him praise, but he is a false teacher. Rome hasn't changed since Luther's day. Even when Catholicism seems cool and modern, it's dangerous and heresy. I am very passionate about calling millennials away from this dangerous theology. More than a discussion of the history of evangelical alliance with Catholicism, as important as that is, is talking about the 2017 attraction toward Pope Francis. It is something I think most of the audience is familiar with.

Now I want to ask you a question this morning. Do you agree with that assessment? Do you agree with what you just heard? I want to end our series on the Protestant Reformation with the sober reality that the Reformation is far from over. The Reformers had a slogan and it went like this, Semper Reformanda, which means always reforming.

And by that, they didn't mean that they were always looking for new truth to bring into the church. By Semper Reformanda, they meant the idea that the church would constantly be assessing itself against these primary principles that were recovered in the Reformation by the Reformers and that the church would always be reforming itself against those principles. And so this morning, I would suggest to you that Semper Reformanda, the implication that the Reformation is certainly not over, needs to come to bear in four areas that the Reformers recovered for the church of their day and that needs to be applied to the church of our day. So let's look at what the Reformers recovered and what they insisted consistently needed to be the measure by which every church and every age ought to constantly be evaluating itself and reforming itself around these basic principles. The first thing they recovered was the sole and supreme authority of the church. What would be the sole and supreme authority of the church?

Would it be the word of God or would it be the word of the Pope? And the Reformers recovered the scripture and made it not just an authority in the church, but they made it the sole authority over the church. And they reformed the church by insisting that the scriptures be the source of all the doctrine of the church, not just the doctrine of justification. And that shook Roman Catholic theology to its core. Its very foundations began to crumble as the Reformers began to insist that the sole authority and the sole source for any teaching in the church be the scripture. And if you know anything about Roman Catholic theology, much of its theology is extra biblical.

And I would argue that much of it that is extra biblical is also unbiblical. Not only did they recover the supreme authority for the church as the scripture and insisted it be the source of all doctrine for the church, they used the scripture as the way to regulate the worship of the church. One of the things that you and I have inherited from the Reformers is the worship that you and I enjoy and participate in every time we come together and we gather corporately as the body of Christ. For example, they took the scriptures and they read it publicly in their worship. For the first time, the common man, the everyday man on the streets, heard the scriptures in his own language. He had access to the truth.

They proclaimed it authoritatively. It became the measure, not just for the doctrine of the church, but for what you believed personally and how it applied to your life. They preached it expository. We take expository preaching for granted in a group like this. Most of you come from churches where the word of God is taken seriously and when Sunday morning comes, somebody who has spent a substantial amount of time thinking and studying and finding out what God has actually said about a passage of scripture stands up and communicates to the body so that all of them, the preacher included, can submit to what they have understood.

That practice did not exist before the Reformation. They preached it expository. They prayed the scriptures. They sang the scriptures.

There was an amazing recovery of congregational singing and rich hymnody. They saw the scriptures in two sacraments that displayed and illustrated grace as opposed to the sacraments in Roman Catholicism that were taught to be the means by which saving grace would be imparted. So Sola Scriptura defined the church and it set the boundaries for everything that happened in the worship of the church. Think about the evangelical church today.

Not necessarily the church you come from, but the evangelical church at large is a church where there is an appalling lack of biblical preaching of any kind in the evangelical church today, much less expository preaching. Many churches have added worship practices to their worship that have no express warrant in the scriptures. I mean, think about things like sacred dance or sacred art or the use of a labyrinth in worship. Many churches have adopted medieval practices of worship as an aid to discipleship. Think about monasticism, for example.

Think about the observation of Lent or the celebration of Ash Wednesday. The content and practice of the worship of the evangelical church is primarily decided not on the sole authority of scripture, but mainly on what is relevant to the culture, what is pleasing to the congregation, and what is non-offensive to unbelievers. The scripture is still a sacred text.

I mean, we would still give it sort of a nod, but it no longer governs the teaching of the church, the worship of the church, or the moral and ethical lives of the worshippers. The Reformation is not over. Here's the second thing that the Reformers recovered. They recovered the true gospel of the church.

They recovered and they celebrated the material principles of the Reformation. Justification by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. This is the essential gospel, and these are the necessary components of saving faith.

Luther wrote a famous hymn, the Reformation hymn. A mighty fortress is our God, and in that hymn there is a line that has this statement, one little word shall fail him. Have you ever thought about that word?

I would suggest to you that that word is the word sola. It is the word alone. In the defense of the gospel, that word became the differentiating mark between the truth of the Reformers and the error of Rome. Everybody talked about faith. Everybody talked about grace. Everybody talked about Christ when it came to justification.

The difference was the Reformers talked about grace alone, and faith alone, and Christ alone. And they were willing to stand up and take seriously Paul's statement in Galatians 1-9 that anyone who preached a different gospel than the one that Paul and the apostles taught and that the Reformers recovered, anybody who did this was under the curse of God. And they did not hesitate to say so about the Roman Catholic Church clearly and boldly.

Now let me ask you an honest question. What do you think would happen to a congregation of believers who stood up and spoke out against gospel error? What would happen to them when they with gracious boldness declared the gospel that is proclaimed and taught by the formal doctrines that the Roman Catholic Church continues to hold is heretical and sends people to hell and is actually damnable heresy? What do you think would happen to such a congregation of evangelical believers? What would you think would happen to a Christian leader?

How would he be received who stated in no uncertain terms that the current pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church is a false teacher who is damning people to hell by his teaching and according to the clear teachings of Galatians 1-9 he is anathema? How do you think that would play in the evangelical world? The Reformers were willing to do that. They were willing to stand up and defend the gospel and then they were willing to give their life in the proclamation of that gospel. Their world was completely changed as the gospel they proclaimed went to the entire western world. But you know today in our day there are parts of the world without the gospel that was proclaimed by the Reformers. You have the 1040 window, you have the Muslim world, you have China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam and it's not just the unreached parts of the world. There continue to be entire Christian communities that have embraced a false gospel or who have so shrouded the gospel in sacramentalism, sacerdotalism and ceremonialism that most worshipers never hear it clearly or embrace it personally.

Let me give you three examples of this. In Eastern Europe, the entire part of Eastern Europe is under Eastern Orthodoxy. Latin America continues to be dominated by Roman Catholicism and if you go to Africa today the false gospel of the prosperity gospel is throughout that land. The Reformation is clearly not over. The third thing that the Reformers recovered was the central purpose for the Christian life. Soli Deo Gloria, God's goal for the Reformers was his glory and he sovereignly designs and directs everything in his universe, in his church and in your life to that end.

Therefore all of life must be lived for the glory of God alone. In other words, we can't afford to adopt the idea that it's okay just to have three dollars worth of God. I just want enough of God.

I want three dollars worth. I just want enough to get me out of hell. I want enough to kind of bring me into the body of Christ, but I certainly don't want enough God to change my life entirely. The Reformers refused to use God's word or his gospel to serve their own personal ends. They used their lives and their ministries and their deaths to bring God glory through the proclamation of this gospel. How many times do we see that in the Evangelical Church at large? We tend to use the gospel to serve our ends. We are willing to give God some space in our life. We're willing to make him prominent, but the idea of him being preeminent and our life being used to serve his agendas and his goals rather than fitting God into our life so that he can make our life better is a far cry from what the Reformers thought.

Many of the Reformers would not recognize Soli Deo Gloria in our Evangelical churches today or even in our own lives. Think about the man-centeredness of much of our worship. We preach a man-centered gospel. We worship in man-oriented ways. We live man-oriented lives and it shows up in our worship.

And it has a profound impact on the strength and the vitality of the church. I mean, think about how we use the Bible. The Bible is preached primarily for what it can contribute to my life.

If it's read at all, it's packaged in some kind of a brief, catchy message that doesn't go much beyond 15 or 20 minutes. And it's sort of the spiritual vitamin that we need every week to keep the devil at bay. A chapter a day keeps the devil at bay.

And if you don't have time for a chapter a verse a day, it can keep sin away. The church today is designed to inspire me, to help me, to heal me, to entertain me. And really what's happened to us, if we're honest, is it hasn't been about God.

It's become about us. Welcome to the church that's all about me. And the truth, the triumph, and the reformation needs to come front and center. And each of us, as we are part of the churches that God has placed us, needs to bring that truth to bear. Not just on our churches, but on our lives.

And that brings us to the final thing this morning, and that is this. The Reformers recovered the spiritual vitality and morality of the church. Think about the spirituality piece of this. The Reformers recovered a precious doctrine that meant individual believers could worship God personally as well as corporately. You know it as the priesthood of the believers.

We addressed it along the way. The sole liberty of every believer to come himself before God. And to sit himself under the scriptures that his conscience would not be bound by men, but by God. And what a precious truth that is, but in Luther's day this had been lost. It had been covered up under sacerdotalism.

It had been shrouded in ignorance. And the way to God was through the church. And the Reformers came and said, you, you have direct access to God.

You and your conscience are bound only and solely by the word of God. You say, well how in the world is that showing up in our churches today? Think about how often we tend to look at the church, and we tend to think that if we can just get more church in our life, or more religion in our life, then God will be pleased with us. And it never stops to rest on our soul that we have a personal relationship and direct access to God ourselves. I mean how often and how, how much do we actually pray?

How often do we actually take the time to go to the scriptures and say, for my own spiritual vitality, I need to actually know what God has said about this issue and not just what the church has said. They recovered vitality and then they restored morality. The Reformers insisted that all believers, pastoral leadership and laity alike, needed to live genuinely holy lives that adorned the gospel and exhibited the transforming power of the gospel. In other words, true piety, genuine authentic spirituality, personal morality so that our religion would not be in vain. Think of the scandals.

Think of what you have heard in your own lifetime. The church in our day is as scandalous in some ways as the church in Luther's day, and so the Reformation must continue. For that to happen, you and I must become the successors to Luther and the Reformers.

We actually have to pick up Luther's mallet. We have to be infused by Calvin's passion and Zwingli's zeal and Bucer's piety and Knox's boldness so that we in our day will continue to resist what the Reformers resisted and will give our lives to proclaiming what the Reformers proclaimed and will cherish and nourish and apply what they recovered. And we must do all of this for God's glory and not our own.

And so until the Reformation happens in every age, in every place, in every church, the Reformation must continue in our day, in our churches, and in our own lives. For truth to triumph around the world, it must first triumph in you and in me. Father, thank you for our semester. Thank you for what we have seen and heard and celebrated. The 500 years of church history, of your church that has been transformed and energized and revived by these truths. And so, Lord, as we take them, and should you tarry for the next 500 years, may these truths continue to triumph. May they continue to change the world. May they continue to change people. And may they continue to be reflected in your church. In Jesus' name, amen.

You've been listening to a sermon from the series about the Protestant Reformation by Dr. Sam Horn. I'm Steve Pettit, president of Bob Jones University. If you're looking for a college, please consider BJU, where our Christian liberal arts education will prepare you academically and spiritually to reach your highest potential for God's glory. For more information about our more than 100 accredited undergraduate and graduate programs, visit bju.edu or call 800-252-6363. We hope you'll join us next time as we study God's word together on The Daily Platform.