This weekend, many churches around the world will celebrate Reformation Day,a commemoration of Luther's nailing the 95 Theses to the church door at Wittenberg in 1517, the event that launched the great Reformation of the church. It is not overstatement to say that Western culture is what it is, in many ways, because of the Reformation. If you are Protestant, if you have the Bible in your own language, if you are middle class and educated, if you live in the assurance that you glorify God in your work, whether you're a pastor or a banker or a realtor or a mom--and these are just a few things--then you have experienced some of the blessings of the Reformation.
Perhaps one of the simplest truths that Reformers like Luther and Calvin recovered is that words--God's words to us in Scripture--mean something. He has communicated with us in meaningful ways so that we can come to an understanding (not complete, of course) of him and the salvation he has provided. As a Roman Catholic monk, Luther wrestled with the church's teaching that salvation was to be earned by man's good works. He realized that even though he would perform good works, he would still sin, and he could never feel assured that he was righteous, that he would be saved.
And then he began to study the book of Romans, where the apostle Paul tells us that in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, and the righteous live by faith. Simple and profound at the same time, these words, "by faith," meant something--something very different from what he had been taught. He also learned from Romans that no one was righteous, and that eternal life was a gift--not something that he could earn. Anyone who has had to work to get a paycheck knows the difference between a gift and something earned, two very different things.
Luther began to see that God's words were different from the words that he had been taught. God said salvation is by faith in Christ's work; the church taught that salvation was by good works. God said salvation was his gift; the church taught that salvation was something that men had to earn.
As Calvin pointed out, it has to be one or the other: "Faith righteousness so differs from works righteousness that when one is established the other has to be overthrown." Because words--and the concepts they represent--mean something, they cannot co-exist. Both the church and the Reformers understood that.
Martyr Anne Askew understood that. At age 25, Anne, living in England during Henry VIII's reign, denied the Roman Catholic teaching regarding the Lord's Supper. The true words of Scripture meant so much to her that she refused to recant when she was tortured on the rack. And when she was carried (because she could no longer walk after being tortured)to the stake to be burned to death, she still refused to recant and died.
And so today, when we say that we believe something, our words have meaning, and that meaning is either consistent with God's words, in line with his truth, or it is not. In this century, with its emphasis on unity, finding common ground, and tolerance, we like to blur the lines and minimize the difference between God's words and the words we and others like to use. Sometimes we'd like to believe that words really don't mean what they mean. Works righteousness or faith--it really doesn't matter, we tell ourselves. But we must learn this lesson of the Reformation. God speaks to us in his word. His are the words of truth. And words have meaning. Salvation cannot be both a gift and something earned. We can't be made righteous both by faith in Christ's work and faith in our own works.
This realization should lead us, as it did the Reformers, to gratitude and a desire to deliver to others the meaningful words of the gospel.
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