Reformation Day Sermon

Reformation Day Service 2023

(Begin with a Mighty Fortress is our God)

(Say afterwards that that was written by Martin Luther in 1529)

Good evening! I’m so very glad that you all have joined us here for this very special Reformation Day service.

That which we call “Reformation Day” marks a very important event for us as Protestants to recognize and be reminded of. It reveals to us who we are, where we have come from, and Lord willing, where we are heading.

Everything that we will be doing this evening will have a hint of Reformation in it, including the hymn that we just sang and the special that I am going to sing in just a moment with both of them being penned during the Reformation era.

And Lord willing, after everything that we discuss tonight, we will all leave here with a new appreciation for our Protestant heritage and a grateful heart as we recognize the immense blessing that God has bestowed upon us in making us Protestants.

Let us now begin with a word of prayer…

(Introduce Jesus, Still Lead On)

(Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, bishop of the Moravian Church and a pioneer in the Protestant mission movement. Written in 1721)

What I plan to present all of you with now in the first half of this lecture is a very concise account of Church history leading up to the time in which Martin Luther lived, while I then plan to present a somewhat more detailed account of what led to Luther’s nailing of the Ninety-five theses in the second half of this presentation.

And as we begin this brief account of Church history leading to the time of Martin Luther, I would like to point out the fact that when you speak of Church history, what you will find many people say is that the study of Church history is unimportant. Such people will say that there is really no need to study what has happened in the history of our faith after the last chapters of the Bible.

And yes, it is true that there is no other document or any kind of history outside of the Bible that has been directly inspired by God. The Bible alone has been directly inspired by God, and the Bible alone contains the Word of God.

But just because the Bible alone is the Word of God, that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t study other works that are in agreement with the orthodox faith. Those other works, of course, are not the Word of God and should not be received as such, but there is nothing wrong with studying other Christian works, in fact, quite often God causes us to grow tremendously through those other works. And therefore, what I encourage all of us to do is to study Church history.

Now, you may ask, “Why? Why study Church history?” My answer to that question is twofold. The first reason why I believe we should study Church history is because Church history is the story of us. It is the account of God’s people and our history from the time of Jesus to the present day.

But the second, more important reason why we should study Church history is because as we study it, we see God’s sovereignty as we observe how He has ruled over His Church. We also see God’s overarching Providence, guiding, directing His Church through every struggle and obstacle that came her way.

And as we study Church history, we receive even more confidence that God will continue to reign over His Church and lead her into more green pastures.

And today marks a very special day in the history of the Christian Church. While there are many who are out and about celebrating what our culture knows as Halloween, the careful student of Church history knows that October 31st marks an event that is far greater than Halloween, as 506 years ago, on October 31st, 1517, what we know as the Protestant Reformation officially began.

In churches like ours, we are known as Protestants. But the name “Protestant” actually came to be applied 12 years after this event when the followers of Martin Luther protested against the decision of the Holy Roman Empire to put an end to the toleration of further reformation in Germany. These followers of Luther, they said, protested and were thus known as Protestants, which means “those who protest”.

Now, as had been said, what the Protestants were protesting was the Empire’s decision to cease its toleration of the religious reformation that the followers of Luther were espousing.

And what a reformation is, is the action or process of reforming an institution or practice. And to reform means to make changes in order to improve. And what Luther and his followers were seeking to reform, to change in order to improve was the Roman Catholic Church.

They were seeking to reform, to make the Church better, to do away with its unbiblical practices, and to practice only those aspects of their worship that were in line with biblical orthodoxy, and also to introduce to the Church aspects of worship that were in line with biblical orthodoxy.

But this was not the first attempt at reform in the Church.

As we study church history we see some of the cracks within the established orthodox church begin to form when Constantine, Emperor of Rome supposedly converted to Christianity.

In the first 300 years of the Christian Church, for the majority of those years, the Christian religion was outlawed in the Roman Empire, and the Roman Empire consisted of almost the entirety of the known world at that time, thus the Christian faith was basically universally outlawed.

The penalty for being a practitioner of the Christian faith included having your property seized, having your rights as a Roman citizen stripped, Christian churches and texts being destroyed, and being executed in some of the worst ways imaginable. In fact, it has been said that the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the Church.

And indeed, it was the seed, for it seemed as though the more that the Church was persecuted, the more that the Church grew.

And this persecution of the Church continued in varying degrees until Constantine, after becoming a Christian himself, legalized the religion. But even more than that, not long after Constantine legalized Christianity in the Empire did he make Christianity the official state religion of the Roman Empire.

Now, it would seem as though everything is heading in the right direction at this point, the Church is no longer outlawed, in fact, it had now become the preferred religion of the Empire. But it was when Constatine became a “Christian” that many say that the devil joined the Church.

In order to make concessions to the pagans in the Empire who were hesitant about becoming Christians, Constantine would make comprises, such as recognizing December 25th, a day in which pagans held a festival celebrating the sun god as the birth of Jesus, the Son of God, what we know as Christmas, in order to appease the reluctant pagans.

William Ramsay, author of the book, Church History 101 says, “(The church’s) mergers with popular custom were questionable. Protests against participation in war virtually disappeared. Once the church had questioned how a rich man could enter the kingdom of heaven. Now the church itself gloried in its wealth. Pomp and ceremony, modeled in part on that of the state, replaced the simpler worship of the early church. Allied with a hierarchical, dictatorial government, the church gave more and more authority to its own hierarchy, with laypeople having a smaller role in the worship and the government of the church. Indeed, the emperor himself issued decrees concerning church government and doctrine.”

The Church was looking less and less like the Church and more and more like the world that God had called her out of. Because of this, many fled societies in general and formed monasteries and convents where monks and nuns would live out their service to God in solitude away from the temptations that were found in both the world and in the church.

It was also at this time that the bishop of Rome began proclaiming himself to be the pope, the chief officer of the universal, or Catholic Church.

The Church had entered into a long, long period known as the Dark Ages. This was a time spanning nearly one thousand years when learning was discouraged, and the Bible was kept away from the general public as only monks and priests were allowed to read the scriptures. And to ensure that this happened, the pope declared that the Bible was never to be translated from Latin, a language that only a select few could understand.

The pope, the cardinals, the bishops, and the priests feared that if the everyday man or woman could read the Bible for themselves, they would see just how wrong the Church was in matters of religion and would demand that they reform.

Because the Church had become so unlike that which is described and commanded of it in the Bible, the officers in the Church tried to get around their ungodliness by saying that popes and councils held equal and at times greater authority than the Bible.

Thus, if one accused them of practicing and/or enforcing something that is not in accordance with scripture, all they had to do is say that it didn’t have to be in accordance with scripture, because they were just as authoritative as the scriptures.

The Church and the State were so closely intertwined that they greatly benefited one another. The Church became the wealthiest institution in the world owning just over one third of the land in western Europe.

Oftentimes Popes were more powerful than many of the kings in Europe. Kings would work with Popes to negotiate both political and religious matters, working with one another to ensure that both succeeded at the cost of their subjects.

While the popes erroneously claimed to be the direct successors of the Apostle Peter, it had come to the point to where several of the popes, the supposed spiritual leaders of the Church had become so worldly that several of them became pope simply because they purchased the position.

In addition, many popes throughout these times were known to have complete harems of mistresses and be among the most ungodly and immoral of those who were subject to them, but no one would bat an eye because, well, he’s the pope.

But even in these dark ages there were still several who stood apart from the heresy that the Catholic Church was espousing and stood for the orthodox faith. Among them were Augustine, the great theologian of the fourth century, St. Patrick, the missionary to Ireland in the fifth century, Gottschalk, who was a zealous practitioner of what we know today as Reformed theology in the ninth century, the philosophical Thomas Aquinas, and the greatly renowned St. Francis of Assisi both in the thirteenth century.

These men, among many others all stood for orthodox Christianity in the centuries that made up the Dark Ages. But it was in the fourteenth century when teeny, tiny glimmers of light began to shine on the Dark Age of the Church.

It was in the fourteenth century when an Englishman named John Wycliffe came on the scene.

Concerning Wycliffe, Sinclair Ferguson tells us in his brief work on Church history:

“(Wycliffe) became concerned about the low spiritual state of the visible church. His concern led him back to the basic principle that Holy Scripture should be the church’s rule of faith and practice. In 1382, Wycliffe translated the Latin Bile into the English of his day so that the people might have the Word of God in their own language. His translation has influenced all succeeding English versions of the Bible. His followers, the Lollards, stressed the primacy of preaching, denied transubstantiation, questioned the papacy, and influenced later men and movements, including John Huss and the Reformation. Often cited to answer charges in church courts, Wycliffe refused to be silenced and went on with his work. After his death, the Council of Constance excommunicated him posthumously in 1415 and had his remains disinterred, burned, and cast into a river.”

Thus, Wycliffe boldly stood apart from the commands of the Church by translating the Bible into English so that the everyday man or woman could read the Bible in the modern English language.

But Ferguson also mentions in his quotation, a man named John Huss, and John Huss, in the fifteenth century certainly shook things up in the Church.

John Huss was from Bohemia, what is now the Czech Republic. As he studied the Bible more and more, especially the New Testament, he came to realize that the teachings of the Bible and the teachings of the Catholic Church were at odds with one another.

And the Catholic Church recognized this, so what was the Church’s answer to the fact that their teachings were at such variance with the Bible? They responded by saying that the teachings of the Catholic Church were no longer equal to the Bible in terms of authority, but that they were now of a higherauthority than the Bible.

They said that it’s ok that the teachings of the Catholic Church aren’t in line with the teachings in the Bible, because according to them, popes, priests, and councils held greater authority than the Bible, therefore, according to them, if the Bible said something that was at odds with what they said, then not they, but the Bible is the one that is wrong.

Well, John Huss would not and could not accept such heresy. Therefore, he began to preach about these concerns, and when he did he was excommunicated by the Church.

After being excommunicated, he was put on trial by the Catholic Church and was commanded to repudiate everything that he had taught. His response was that he would gladly recant everything that he had ever saidif the officers of the Church would show him in the Bible where he was wrong in what he had taught.

They ignored his challenge and responded by deeming him a heretic and burning him at the stake, with Huss singing hymns as the flames grew higher and higher.

Before being executed, Huss looked at those who condemned him, and he said, “You are going to burn a goose, but in a century you will have a swan that you can neither roast nor boil.”

And 102 years later, a century later, just like John Huss prophesied, the swan whom he prophesied of came in the form of a German monk named Martin Luther who nailed a document later known as the Ninety-five Theses to the castle church door in the city of Wittenburg, Germany.

But what led to the nailing of these Ninety-five Theses? Well, there are several things that led to it, but all of them, I would say, can be confined to three things: Luther’s own struggles, Luther’s study of the scriptures, and Luther’s opposition to a thing called “indulgences”, which we will get to in a bit.

Martin Luther had been attending the University of Erfurt in central Germany, studying law, until an event occurred in his life which caused him to cease pursuing a career in law.

Harold Grimm in his work on Church history from the Reformation era describes Luther’s decision to leave his pursuit of law and to commit himself to the life of a monk, when he said:

“As Luther was returning to Erfurt from a visit to his home on July 2, 1505, he was thrown to the ground by a flash of lightning during a heavy thunderstorm, a few miles from Erfurt. Believing at that instant that he would die without the last sacrament, he called upon St. Ann and vowed that he would enter a monastery if he were spared from death. He immediately repented of his vow, but, certain that God had spoken to him in the storm, he was determined to bow to the divine will. Two weeks later he summoned his companions to a farewell dinner, on which occasion he announced his decision. The next day these friends accompanied him to the monastery and tearfully watched the gates close behind him.”

But though he had now entered the monastery, the troubles for Luther were just beginning.

The monastery which Luther chose was the Augustinian order of Eremites. Augustine is well known still to this day as his thinking was extremely influential not only to Luther, but also to other great reformers like Huldrych Zwingli and John Calvin. Indeed, those of us who are of the Reformed tradition, which obviously includes us Presbyterians, owe much of our theology to the thinking of Augustine.

But though this monastery that Luther dwelled in bore the name of Augustine, Grimm continues to tell us, “they apparently knew little of his evangelical, experimental theology but followed the prevalent Neo-Pelagian tendencies of the scholastics and stressed the necessity of man’s working out his own salvation. Emphasis was placed upon God’s sovereign will as well as man’s freedom of the will which enables him to become good even without divine grace. Thus good work which man does itself merits divine grace and thus earns him salvation. This in effect minimized the importance of the merit of Christ’s suffering and death.”

From that description you can see the kind of heretical reasoning that was running rampant at Luther’s monastery: they said that salvation is by grace plus works. You have to work to earn salvation, and if you slip up, you better confess, repent, and ask for forgiveness in a hurry, because if you don’t, you will lose your salvation.

This is the kind of works-based gospel that will drive a person mad, and that’s almost what happened to Martin Luther.

Luther took the monastic life and his studies much more seriously than the average monk. Remember that the Catholic Church and this monastery which Luther attended taught a works-based salvation. But Luther found that he could never do enough good works to please a holy God.

Luther found himself doing an unlimited amount of works of penance, visiting the confessional and pouring out his sins several times a day, spending hours confessing seemingly trivial sins.

He was a model monk. In fact, after his conversion to the orthodox faith, Luther said that “if a man could be saved by monkery, it was I!”

Yet he knew that no matter how many good works he performed, they were never enough. He knew that he could not merit salvation from a holy God. Luther would consider verses like, “You must be holy, for I, the Lord your God am holy!” and no matter how hard he tried, Luther knew that he had not done enough to make himself holy as God is holy.

He was so agonized, so perplexed that it is recorded that when one asked him if he loved God, Luther responded by saying, “Love God? Sometimes I hate Him!”

Yet it was in Luther’s consistent study of the scriptures that he finally found freedom.

Romans 1:17 tells us, “The righteous shall live by faith” and as Luther would read those words, he would cringe. He saw there the command to be righteous, but like I said, the Church had taught that righteousness was obtained through good works, through pleasing God, but as was said, Luther knew that he could not please God, but even more, he knew that because of his depraved nature, apart from the intervention of God, he couldn’t do any kind of work that was truly good.

But then it came to him, the righteous are not righteous because of meriting righteousness but rather, as Romans 1:17 says, “the righteous live by faith” they are righteous by virtue of their faith.

He came to realize that our salvation begins in the mind of God the Father, determining to save whom He will, predestinating them to salvation in the process, then in the fullness of time, God calls those whom He predestined and gives them the gift of faith, and it is through their faith that they believe and are justified, made righteous.

When speaking of how this new discovery affected him, Luther himself said:

“I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise. The whole of Scripture took on a new meaning, and whereas before the “justice of God” had filled me with hate, now it became inexpressibly sweet in greater love. This passage of Paul became to me a gate to heaven.”

The shackles of legalism, bondage to his own inability, and the dreadful terror of God’s displeasure had all ceased to be for him. Martin Luther had truly been set free; but little did he know that God was going to use him to set countless captive souls free.

Because what God was going to use to spark Martin Luther to nail his Ninety-five Theses was something so corrupt, so vile, so blatantly wicked that fifty years after the nailing of the Ninety-five Theses, the Catholic Church outlawed its practice, and today they will try to claim that they never practiced it at all. And that wicked thing which I speak of is the buying and selling of indulgences.

Now, before I explain what indulgences are, let’s talk for a minute about what led up to the Church’s decision to sell them when they did.

The pope at that time, Pope Leo X, had wanted to continue the construction of St. Peter’s Basilica, which was extremely expensive. Thus, in order to secure the funds that the pope was seeking without dipping into the treasury of the Church, he decided to issue the selling of indulgences.

Now, what an indulgence was, was almost like a “get out of jail free” card when it came to atoning for one’s own sins and the sins of others who had already passed on.

You see, the Catholic Church taught that though the faithful Catholic had already been saved at his baptism and his sins were then cleansed from him, still the sins that he commits after his baptism had to be accounted and paid for through constant confession and repentance.

But of course, no one could recall, confess, and repent of every last one of their sins. So, the Church came up with a solution. They said that when a good, faithful Catholic dies, he does not go immediately to Heaven, but he goes to a place of suffering in order to cleanse himself of whatever sins he may not have recalled and repented of. They called and continue to call this imaginary place, “Purgatory”.

According to the Catholic Church, the more sins that one did not repent of, the longer he would have to be in “Purgatory”. But what the Church said an indulgence from the pope would do is shorten the length of time that one would have to spend in Purgatory.

Now, couple that with the pope’s desire to continue the expensive project of building the elaborate St. Peter’s Basilica and the pope felt as though he had struck gold.

With this great construction project underway, the pope said that he was going to run “a special” so to speak when he said that if one contributed a great amount to the basilica building project, he would grant that person an indulgence.

But to sweeten the pot even more, he said that these indulgences could also be extended to loved ones who had already passed on.

So, the pope was basically telling people like the poor widow who owned next to nothing that if she would give everything that she owned to the pope, he would make sure that her wayward son who lived a life of sin and died young could be set free from Purgatory and be at Heaven’s gate as soon as the transaction was complete. She would have nothing left and thus would soon die starving and destitute, but by golly, the pope said that her son wasn’t in Purgatory anymore.

Now can you see why the Catholic Church has done its best to act like this part of their history doesn’t exist?

But, in order to accomplish his goal, the pope commissioned men to go out and be what you might call indulgence peddlers. They would go from village to village, church to church, parish to parish proclaiming the “good news” of the pope’s special offer on indulgences.

One infamous indulgence peddler was a friar named John Tetzel who was famous for his indulgence sales pitch in which he would declare, “As soon as the coin in the coffers ring, the soul from Purgatory springs!” Tetzel’s sales pitch was widely popular and even more successful, he was one of the pope’s most effective salesmen.

But one man who John Tetzel was not effective in convincing to purchase an indulgence was Martin Luther. In fact, in Luther’s Ninety-five Theses on points 27 and 28, when speaking of Tetzel and others who peddled indulgences, Luther said, “27. They preach only human doctrines who say that as soon as the money clinks into the money chest, the soul flies out of purgatory. 28. It is certain that when money clinks in the money chest, greed and avarice can be increased; but when the church intercedes, the result is in the hands of God alone.”

Enough was enough and God led the Augustinian monk, Martin Luther, to compile his Ninety-five Theses.

On the morning of October 31, 1517, Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door of the Wittenburg Castle Church. This would be almost like putting something on a bulletin board in the modern day for everyone to see.

Interestingly enough though, Luther did not intend for the common man to read this work as what he was hoping to accomplish was discussion among scholars and monks in the university, that’s why Luther wrote his theses in Latin, the language of the scholar. But though that was the case, the theses were translated into German, the language of Martin of Luther, and then into almost every language in Europe.

Now, couple this with the recent invention of the printing press and the result was the mass production and distribution of Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses all throughout Europe.

It may have been Luther’s intention to merely illicit an intellectual discussion between monks and scholars, but God obviously had other plans for the biblical message of justification by faith in Jesus Christ alone, that sacred scriptural doctrine that for so long had been hidden away was now spreading like wildfire across the continent.

And people, for the very first time, were learning of and hearing the biblical gospel proclaimed, and thousands upon thousands were believing that biblical gospel.

God had allowed the light to be all but snuffed out in the “Dark Ages” but now, “Post tenebras lux!” After darkness, light!

And may we be faithful to bask in the light that God has made available to us through the Protestant reformers.