Reformation: Sola Fide

Intro:

Open in Prayer :-)

Today in history is the day that Martin Luther nailed his 95 thesis on the door of the castle church in Whittenburg Germany. This act, while mostly insignificant at the time, is seen as the key event that set to flame the fires of reformation within the church of Europe. Though it would be impossible to pin the entirety of the reformation on one singular act it was this act by Martin Luther that set him on a collision course with the institution of the Roman Catholic Church. In His providence God had set Luther apart as the man who the church would not silence, Luther unlike so many others was born into a place and time that saw him receive special protection from the rulers there in Germany that kept him from being burnt at the stake as so many other reformers had and would continue to come to their end. Luther though would never be silenced by the flames and as his teaching spread through Europe others would have their eyes and hearts open to this new teaching, which was not new, but rather a rediscovering of what had been there all along… the heart of the gospel, the true way in which sinners are reconciled to God.

October 31, 1517, this is when Luther nailed his 95 thesis to the door. Over 500 years ago now. Today if you were to ask many Christians why it was that there was a reformation, what it was that drove the increasingly wide divide between what we would call the protestant and catholic church. (I say increasingly wide because Martin Luther, contrary to popular belief never set out to split the church, he set out to reform it, hence “Reformation”)

Most folks, if asked that question, might point to the catholic view of the Pope, they might point toward the institution of the priest hood in one aspect of another, they might even point toward the divergent views on communion, or the eucharist. And while all of these are very important issues none of them truly get to the center of the issue, the core of the problem that Martin Luther drove home as God graciously opened his eyes to see and understand what was revealed in God’s own word, the center issue was this, “How is one saved” or to put it more in reformation and more correctly precise theological language, “How does one stand righteous before God when before they had stood condemned under the guilt and punishment justly due to sin?”

There is no more important of a question than this! For we know that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, as we have seen time and time again throughout the OT prophets, God does not gloss over sin, God doesn't simply sweep wrongs done under the rug so that he can gush all over us with some sort of weepy blind snotty love, God is just and therefore can not and will not ever let one ounce of sin go unpunished! We all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God! The punishment for that sin is death and death, physical death is what ushers the soul into its eternal abode for we are all created by God with souls that will never pass away, we will spend eternity somewhere and for those who die in their sins as all of us will do apart from any action outside of ourselves the location where we will spend eternity is the Lake of Fire, a place in which the just wrath of God will for all of eternity be poured out against sin.

Yes, we ought not take sin lightly!

This is perhaps why when asked what the central issue during the reformation was many Christians simply do not know. We have so turned our collective hearts and minds away from these dreadful realities in an effort to make the gospel more appealing to a sinful world. Pragmatic approaches say that if we start by telling people how bad they are there is no hope that they will ever stick, lets just tell them how much God loves them, however, this doesn't really work because when you try and get people in the door that way a funny thing happens, (its not really funny) for some reason that stuff about how bad off we are apart from grace doesn't really ever come up. We tend to draw people into community, encourage them to live a relatively moral live, encourage them to take part in the church and help out others, encourage them toward felt experiences of love and excitement during moving worship services and even, and get them to feel loved by God.

These people though have been brought to a thing that is not true salvation! Churches around this country are filled with these kinds of people, people who think they are right with God, or more precisely think that God loves them and yet they have never come to a true knowledge of the Gospel that saves! They are lost and don't even know it.

We have truncated the call of the gospel and for this reason many people in churches today will not know that the central issue of the Reformation, what came to be known as the material cause of the reformation was salvation by grace alone through faith alone!

Grace Alone, Faith Alone, these form two of the central Solas of the Reformation, sola simply meaning alone. That we are saved by Grace Alone through Faith alone!

Typically on this reformation Sunday we take time to explore one of these Solas. I have covered Sola Scriptura, Scripture Alone, and Solus Christus, Christ Alone, and today we are going to spend some time in Sola Fide, faith alone!

How is it that faith alone saves us? Why is that utterly important? What is this faith that saves? And where does it come from?

Now these are big questions and we certainly wont cover all of the ground today, but I wanted to take us to a verse to ground our understanding of what faith is and how it is that we are saved through faith. Bonus, it also connects us back to the time that we have spent in the Minor Prophets and was also one that was of great importance to Martin Luther as he wrestled with these exact same questions.

Lets turn to the book of Romans and we will read Chapter 1:16-17.

English Standard Version Chapter 1

For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. 17 For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”

As we think about the book of Romans I would like to read you a bit of what Martin Luther said about the book in the introduction to his commentary on Romans. (First Paragraph of preface, xiii)

It would be hard to overstate the importance of the book of Romans for our understanding of how it is that God saves sinners!

And here in these verses we see the purpose statement of the book. This will be a book where Paul will unashamedly unpack this Gospel of Grace that is the power of God for Salvation to everyone who believes and then verse 17 will summarize exactly what this gospel or good news is, it is the revelation of “the righteousness of God revealed from faith for faith...”

Finally he ties this understanding of salvation into the historical stream of redemptive history by showing that even in the days of Habakkuk salvation was accomplished through this faith... “The righteous shall live by faith.”

So lets take a moment to unpack this verse as we walk through it a bit with Luther and see what it shows us about this foundational truth of Sola Fide, faith alone!

Verse 16

Romans 1:16 ESV

For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.

Here we see the message that Paul has been called to proclaim. In other places he calls it the message of the cross and notes that it is foolishness to those who are perishing. When we carry a message that sounds foolish to the world it is going to take a determined boldness and a true and firm belief in the reality and veracity of the message to give us the will to proclaim it publically. Paul notes this, by saying that he was not ashamed of this message!

Gospel means good news. Paul as well as us, has a message that, though it may be foolishness to the world is the best news that one can ever hear.

This gospel, this message of good news Paul tells is is: “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes...”

Luther here speaking of this “power of God” notes that this is “the power by which he makes anyone or anything powerful or mighty.” In other words this power contained in the message is not properly speaking God’s own power or omnipotence but rather the power that He disperses into others to bring about the desired outcome of that distribution. (Theologians can really split hairs sometimes!) This is important though! This message of the Gospel comes with a power, power given by God himself to effectively accomplish that for which it was sent!

Luther goes on to show that Paul here is alluding to what he will flesh out later in the book, a contrast between the power of God to effect salvation an the power of man. The gospel is the message that comes with a power from God to effect its desired outcome whereas the power that naturally resides within man is not sufficient, not even close.

And the outcome here is salvation!

“The power of God for salvation!”

More specifically we also see that belief is key, this message is attended with power for salvation for those who believe.

Paul will later say “if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead you will be saved.” Those who believe are those who are saved, in these the power of God is at work bringing about the end for which God sent it forth!

Finally we see that this power is now at work, not just in the Jew, but that while God’s saving power was first extended to those from the line of Abraham this saving power was never intended to stay just within that blood line, it was to extend to people from every tribe, tongue, and nation as we read in the book of Revelation.

So this is what the gospel is and what it is intended to do. It saves, it has the power to save, the power to accomplish the purpose for which God sends it forth. It saves those who are Jews and those who we read later in Romans are children of Abraham by faith, those who share the faith of Abraham.

In just this statement we see what is lacking so much in the presentation of what many today would call the gospel. If you were to ask many Christians what it means to share the gospel with someone they would in all likelihood tel you it means to share the love of God with them or maybe to tell them how much Jesus loves them. This is at best truncated and short sighted and at worst is a total twisting of the message of the gospel.

This gospel is the gospel that saves and the only people that need saved are people in peril. The Puritans, of which Jonathan Edwards was one of the last were well acquainted with the need to preach so that people became well acquainted with the consequences of their own sinfulness and were brought face to face, as much as within the preachers power to do so, with the impending consequences of their sin. Edwards in what may be his best know sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, pictured this in various ways, one of which was that of a spider dangling by a thin line of web over a roaring fire, the heat at any moment which could destroy that barest of threads and send the spider plunging to his utter destruction. The gospel is a call to wake up and see, to deal soberly with the reality of our sin and to turn and flee to Christ!

This announcement of Paul’s gospel and its power then leads into verse 17 where he will reveal what is contained in this message. What is it that is attended by such power that it can save a dead sinner on his or her way to eternity in hell?

Verse 17

We read:

English Standard Version Chapter 1

17 For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”

For in it, that is in the gospel, in the message of the good news, the message endowed with the power to save sinners, in this message “the righteousness of God is revealed.”

It is interesting to note here that Luther, before he came to faith in Christ had hated this verse, or more specifically the phrase “Righteousness of God.” Luther was well acquainted with law and the relationship between breaking the law and justice, and he knew well that when the law was broken the penalty needed to be paid. He knew, as so few are willing to acknowledge that we cant sweep the sin away, God would not be just and therefore God would not be God if He did not punish sinful people for falling short of the righteous standard which in this case is God Himself. This is exactly the way in which Luther viewed this phrase, the Righteousness of God that was revealed was God’s righteous standard to which men would be measured and Luther knew that the most pure and humble of saint in this life could not ever hope to measure up to that standard and if one could not stand before God having measured to that perfect standard Luther knew that the only other alternative was to be punished for the failure to be perfect.

As a monk Luther spent hours in confession seeking to clear his conscience of each and every little sin and stray thought, it nearly drove Him mad! In reality though God was not driving Luther out of his mind but rather to Himself.

As Luther wrestled with this very verse God pealed back the blinders on Luther's eyes and mind and Luther writes:

“Then finally God had mercy upon me, and I began to understand that the righteousness of God is a gift of God by which a righteous man lives, namely faith, and that sentence: “The righteousness of God is revealed in the Gospel.” is passive indicating that the merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written: “The just shall live by faith” now I felt as though I had been reborn altogether and had entered paradise. In the same moment the face of the whole of scripture became apparent to me… Just as intensely as I had hated the expression “the righteousness of God” I now lovingly praised this most pleasant word. This passage from Paul became to me the very gate to paradise.”

Oh that we all would have such a recollection of the saving grace of God upon our lives!

Luther had seen the true nature of the righteousness spoke of here. This is the righteousness of God that is not held over the sinner as the standard for living but the gift of righteousness given to the sinner whereby the sinner can be justified, can be declared righteous before God. Luther, through faulty doctrine had been brought to hate the very thing that he needed the most, the answer to his burning question of how a sinner could ever stand before God. The answer was and always has been that a sinner can never stand before God on his own merits, in his own righteousness which as Isaiah tells us amounts to nothing more than a pile of filthy rags, but God never expects a sinner to be able to stand before Him on their own merits, in this glorious Gospel God has granted the sinner, from Himself, the righteousness which cloths the sinner and makes the sinner able to enter fully into Gods presence!

This righteousness that comes to us in the gospel is a righteousness that the reformers would call an “Alien Righteousness” meaning that unlike the catholic doctrine that said a person had to literally do enough righteous thing to become legally righteous, Luther said that we were made righteous when this righteousness from outside of us was applied to our lives.

Paul says it this way in 2 Corinthians 15:

English Standard Version Chapter 5

Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. 21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

The glorious work of the cross was that there Christ took our sins and as a result we are able to take into our account His perfect righteousness. He was made sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God, that we might take a share in His perfection, that we might be clothed anew in the glorious white robes that He offers and stand before God cleansed of all our filth and wretchedness. This is how one is reconciled to God.

At at last we come to faith, Paul says here in verse 17 that this righteousness from God is revealed “from faith, for faith.”

The meaning is that this righteousness and by extension the salvation that this righteousness effects through the power of God in our lives is a result or product of faith or that it comes into our lives through faith and faith alone.

This one verse in Romans is not enough to build the entire frame work of what faith is and how it works out in our lives but when Paul says from faith to faith or from faith for faith he is saying that this thing starts with faith and continues on in faith. In other words, faith alone! If it starts with faith, continues on in faith and is ultimately brought to its completion in faith then there is nothing else that does this thing, nothing else that connects us with and keeps us connected to this righteousness whereby we gain salvation.

It doesn't say as many think it should say, from faith to works. Many think that salvation begins with faith but that then salvation is brought to completion in our lives as we work and do righteous things that merit our entrance into glory. The RCC teachings while perhaps a bit more nuanced boils down to something like this. This is what Luther fought hard against. He knew that no amount of work could ever make a person righteous enough once they had failed to live up to the standard of God’s perfection and it had driven him mad but finally had driven him to this glorious verse where we find that through faith and faith alone we receive the righteousness of Christ, the righteousness that saves sinners!

What is Faith

But what is faith? What is this thing that brings us into possession of this righteousness of God through this gospel that is filled with the effectual power to save us?

Faith can be hard to define and we will see why in a moment but there are a few verses to get us where we need to be:

First in Hebrews 11 we read that:

English Standard Version Chapter 11

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

Faith is an assurance of things hoped for, faith and hope, confidence and conviction are all linked together in what faith is.

We also read in James 1 that:

English Standard Version Chapter 1

6 But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind. 7

Faith, true faith is so confident that it does not doubt.

Theologically speaking faith has three components, the reformers listed these in Latin but we will do it in English as such:

Content, Conviction, and Confidence

The content of our faith is important. We must have faith in the right things. Specifically we must have faith in the sinless Son of the triune God who was born of a virgin lived a sinless life, died on a cross, was buried in a tomb and rose again on the third day. We must believe that God is the one and only God, that there is none outside of him or before hi that can claim His right to rule over creation and that all things that we can see and all that we cant was created by Him, before him there was nothing and that there was never a time when He did not exist. We must believe that Jesus has ascended into Heaven where he rules at the fathers right hand and that one day he is coming again to judge the living and the dead an to usher in the glories of eternity where his people will spend forever with Him.

Conviction

Faith also is not faith unless it is met with conviction that these things are true. Someone can know all of those things I just said and more but believe them to be fairy tales and fables. true faith knows them to be 100% true.

Confidence

I chose confidence because it had a C and there may be a better word but the key is that simply knowing the right content and believing it to be true are not enough. You see the Demons believe these things and tremble, they knew exactly who Jesus was! They did not have faith. To have faith one must have placed all of their trust, hope and, confidence in these things.

Faith is a hope and confidence that contains these three essential elements. In this last element we see that faith ultimately involves the new heart that God has given us that even more than having confidence in these things loves them and desires to live in them. True faith loves God and trusts fully in His wonderful plan of salvation.

The thing that sets faith apart from a general hope or confidence though is its source or origin and that is where we turn next.

Where does it come from?

The last major question is where does this faith come from? Do we all have the innate ability to exhibit faith or does someone need to supply us with it?

Most Christians would say that yes, human beings have the ability to exhibit faith, that faith is something that is produced in us. Now they would still say that grace is a necessary condition, that God must show grace and enable us to com to Him but that faith is our response to his offer of salvation.

The problem with this is that faith is pleasing to God and God’s own word tells us that people are naturally unable to please God, in John 3 we learn that the natural man can not even see the kingdom of God, he has no capacity to see or be awed by truly spiritual things, the book of Romans in these first three chapters goes into great detail about the dead state of mankind apart from God.

And on top of all this in Ephesians 2 verses 8-9 we read:

English Standard Version Chapter 2

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast.

Here the verse is more explicit in Greek than we see it in English. Here this clause, gift of God specifically refers back to not just the grace but also to the faith. The gift of God is the grace and the faith not just the grace then cooperating with a faith that we generate. This would cause Charles Spurgeon to pen a short little book well worth reading called “All of Grace.”

Faith then is a hope and confidence that comes to us from God, this is what sets it apart from general hope, faith is a gift that we, apart from a special working of God’s grace have no capacity to generate. This is why examples for faith, like say, sitting on a stool, fall short because that hope and confidence is something we have the capacity to generate. Faith is not.

We are then saved by a faith alone and that faith comes from God and is a part of the wonderful process through which this Gospel powerfully takes dead sinners and reconciles them to God making them alive in Christ!

Finally, as our verse ends we see this great little quotation from Habakkuk 2:4

English Standard Version Chapter 2

“Behold, his soul is puffed up; it is not upright within him,

but the righteous shall live by his faith.

We don't need to go back and dredge up all of Habakkuk but you might remember that here in this verse there is this contrast between the wicked who are going to be judged and the righteous and the righteous are said to live by their faith.

In Habakkuk there was this dual meaning there that is nearly the exact if not the exact same thing happening here with faith to faith. Habakkuk was showing that the faith of the righteous will save them, they would live even as the rest of the people were judged, there was as it were an ultimate salvation that was brought about because the person had faith, faith by the way which had all of the necessary components that we looked at just a moment ago, content, conviction, and confidence. But we also saw in Habakkuk that this faith was also that which moved these people through their day to day lives as well. It wasn't just about the ultimate living but that the living of each and every moment was carried out in faith as well.

That is exactly what Paul is drawing on as he quotes that verse, for the child of God faith is everything because it is that faith that connects us with this power of God unto salvation and it is that faith that will keep is connected with that power until that glorious day when we stand physically in His presence and as the Hymn “It is Well With My Soul” says, “Our faith will be sight.”

Closing:

As we close I want to address one last thing, actually in honor of Martin Luther I will give him the last word. Many believe that this understanding of Faith and salvation may lead to someone claiming faith but not doing anything, if it is faith to faith and not faith to works where do works come in? James writes a whole book to address this but for today lets listen to Luther again in his intro to his commentary on the book of Romans:

Pg: XVII