Reformation Day (Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity)

God has instituted and ordered His church so that within it, and nowhere else, we might find the forgiveness of sins. The church is that gathering of sinners in which the Lord Jesus is present among us with His forgiveness. We know this is true from His own words in Matthew 18, that great chapter on forgiveness, “For where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them.” (Mt 18:18, 20)

Therefore, apart from the gathering of the saints around the crucified Christ, instead of forgiveness, one can find only guilt and condemnation. The guilty conscience will follow you everywhere, but the forgiveness of sins is found only where Jesus is present with the towel and basin. He said to His disciples, “I am among you as the One who serves.” (Lk 22:27) Remember that Jesus said these words on the night He instituted His Supper for the forgiveness of sins, after having washed their feet with water, saying, “You are already clean because of the word which I have spoken to you.” (Jn 15:3)

And so, according to our Lord’s promise, when we gather together in His name, He is present in the midst of us, serving us with His holy Word and Sacraments, delivering to us the forgiveness of sins which He purchased with His blood upon the cross. This is the purpose for which Jesus instituted His church, so that this word of forgiveness might have free course, and those paralyzed by sin might hear these words, “Take heart, child, your sins are forgiven!” (Mt 9:2)

But you can be certain that the devil rages against this forgiveness and will do anything he can to interrupt its free flow from the cross. Martin Luther said, “Where God builds a church, the devil builds a chapel.” Where is the devil’s chapel? In the same place that God has built His church. And what is the devil’s purpose? He has only one. The thief comes only to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. (Jn 10:10) Satan builds his chapel inside the church to steal away the forgiveness of Christ, to kill souls with despair, and to destroy all Christian comfort and assurance of salvation.

Consider the history of God’s church, and you will always find evidence of the devil’s chapel within the temple courts. The antichrist comes, not from without, but from within the church, as Scripture tells us. Where Abel worshipped God through faith and acceptable sacrifice, Cain built an altar through unbelief and pride, resulting in hatred and murder. Even as Moses received the Ten Commandments and instructions for the building of the tabernacle, the devil was already erecting his golden calf with its worship. And in the days of Eli the priest, his sons committed abominations within the tabernacle of God. And what about Nehemiah? While he was rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem to keep enemies out, he discovered that Tobiah, the opponent of God and His church, was already living in a furnished room within the temple. And most of all, when our Lord Jesus came to His own holy temple, true worship of the Father had been replaced by a marketplace of greed and corruption, where moneychangers profaned the courts of prayer and priests bartered the grace of God for worldly gain.

Given this history, is it any surprise that Luther would also find corruption within the late medieval church? Perhaps it’s actually a miracle that it took 1,500 years for the church’s corruption to reach full strength. The devil had often before accomplished it in a generation. His instrument in Luther’s day was new: the institution of the papacy, arrayed in opposition to the authority of Christ. But the focus of the devil’s attack was the same: to interrupt the free flow of forgiveness and to leave sinners without hope of salvation.

Luther was one such sinner. As an Augustinian monk living under the darkness of the papacy, he found himself continually tormented by guilt and paralyzed by sin. He was that man in our gospel text, unable to take a single step on the way of salvation, lying helpless upon a stretcher—until he heard the word of Jesus, “Son, be of good cheer; your sins are forgiven you.” (Mt 9:2)

When it was time to reform the church, Moses ground the golden calf down into powder and made the people drink it. Nehemiah bodily threw Tobiah and all his possessions out of the chamber within the temple. Jesus made Himself a whip of cords, drove the merchants out of the temple, and overturned the tables of the moneychangers. And Luther, rather than a whip, wielded the lash of his ready pen and biting wit, with which he overturned the indulgence racket of the papacy.

But each time of reformation within the church was never a single, once and for all event. From the beginning until now, there has never been a time when the church is not in need of reform. Our enemy never rests. If one room has been cleaned out, he will be busy setting up shop in the next. Jesus forgave the sins of the paralytic, and the multitudes saw it and marveled and glorified God, who had given such power to men. (Mt 9:8) We call this power the office of the keys. Jesus said, “I give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose—that is, forgive—on earth will be loosed—forgiven—in heaven.” (Mt 16:19) He gave this authority to his disciples, the first generation of pastors, who passed it on with the laying on of hands to the next generation. But by Luther’s day, the authority of the keys was being used only for personal gain. “Would you like to be forgiven? Alright, a hundred bucks!”

By the grace of God, the pure gospel of forgiveness as the free gift of Christ was restored to the church in the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century. But then what? The devil doesn’t give up. Once the church had been corrected from error in one direction, the devil simply introduced an error from the opposite direction. This is the case within Christianity today. The church is like a drunk peasant, Luther said. One moment he’s about to fall into the ditch on this side. The next moment he overcorrects and is about to fall into the ditch on the other side. The pope’s church abused the office of the keys to make a profit. And as a reaction against this, most of the Protestant church denies the office altogether. “Why does this man speak blasphemy, saying, ‘In the stead and by the command of Christ, I forgive you all your sins’? Only God can forgive sins.”

The devil doesn’t care which error it is. Whether the office of the keys is used to make money or whether the office is denied altogether, he cares only that the gospel is obscured, so that it cannot be heard and believed. In either case we need a reformation. And this is true within your own heart. The devil doesn’t care which error he catches you up in. He cares only that you don’t hear the truth of God’s word.

And what is this truth? It is two things: First, that you are a sinner. This is the Law, and you must hear it! And second, that Christ died for sinners, which, if you’ve heard the first part, means that Christ died for you. This is the Gospel. If the devil can stop you from hearing either part of this message, he can rob you of the forgiveness of sins. So, he doesn’t care which part you don’t hear. The result is the same.

This is how the devil has one group in the church believing that they aren’t really sinners. Well, they’re pretty good people, actually. And another group is believing that there is no such thing as sin. “Jesus doesn’t care about things like the Sixth Commandment. He doesn’t care who sleeps with whom. All He cares about is if you’re driving a gas-guzzling car and polluting the environment.” And the devil has other Christians caught up in terrible guilt over their sin, but believing that they can make amends for sin by their own efforts, that they can work their way into heaven. You might as well tell the paralyzed man to try harder to walk.

Which error are you more prone to? The devil doesn’t care, so long as he separates you from the forgiveness of Christ. That’s why you need your own personal reformation this morning, in your own head! You need to hear the two messages from God again today. First, the Law: You are a sinner. You are paralyzed, lying there on a stretcher, and there is nothing you can do about it. And second, you need to hear again that Jesus died for sinners such as you. This is the Gospel. Jesus purchased your forgiveness at the cross, and He delivers this forgiveness to you here today through His Sacraments, which He places into the hands of His ministers. And so when God’s man says to you today, “Child, be of good cheer, your sins are forgiven,” instead of grumbling in your heart as the Pharisees did— “How can a man, a mere man, say these words?”—instead, you can rejoice with the multitudes who marveled and glorified God, who had given such power to men. For here within our Lord’s church, He stands behind His ministers, among His people once again, keeping His promise to be with us for the forgiveness of sins. Amen.