Today is Reformation Sunday, and once again we
hear our Lord’s words from the Gospel of St. John: If you
continue in My Word, you are truly My disciples, and you will know
the truth, and the truth will set you free. Once again
Jesus says, as He does every year on this Sunday:
Truly, truly I say to you, everyone who sins is a
slave to sin. . . . If the Son sets you free, you will be free
indeed.
Jesus speaks here as if He knows what He’s
talking about, doesn’t He? As people observed on several occasions
when they heard Him preach and teach, He spoke as one who
had authority. No ifs, ands, or buts with Jesus. No
maybes, I supposes, or perhaps. Jesus speaks the truth to us, and
He speaks that truth with authority. Truly, truly I say to
you, Jesus says. When Jesus talks to us, He’s not pulling
our leg.
Politicians may try to pull the wool over your
eyes, but not Jesus. An internet scam artist may try to trick you,
but not Jesus. A slick advertising campaign may fool you into
forking out your money for a product that’s worthless, but Jesus
will never deceive you. He will never speak less than the truth to
you. When Jesus says that everyone who sins is a slave to sin,
he’s describing our true condition, for all have sinned and
fall short of the glory of God. When He says that if the
Son sets you free, you will be free indeed, He’s talking about
real freedom, eternal freedom – freedom from sin, freedom from
death, freedom from the hellish penalty our sin deserves.
Jesus speaks the truth as it is. He doesn’t give
us some gilded, prettified, rose-colored version of the truth. The
truth our Lord speaks hits us where we live. He tells us plainly
that apart from the grace of God we are by nature slaves to sin
who have no right to a place in God’s household. Jesus wants us to
see the chains of sin that bind us to death and the devil. But
notice that Jesus doesn’t leave us in our slavery. He doesn’t say,
Too bad for you, I wish there was something that could be done.
But there’s not, so get along to the pit now, where all sinners
go.
No, Jesus says us that if the Son sets us free,
we will be free indeed. And we don’t have to do it ourselves.
Jesus does it for us. Jesus makes us free by His holy life, by His
death on the Cross, and by rising from the dead. This freedom
Jesus gives – freedom from sin, guilt, and hell – is what got the
Lutheran Reformers so excited some five hundred years ago. They
discovered the freedom of the Gospel in the truth of God’s holy
Word. They learned this freedom was had through faith in the
liberating message of Jesus Christ and Him crucified. What does
real freedom look like? It looks like the Cross on which the Son
of God died for the sins of the world. What does it sound like? It
sounds a lot like the Name Jesus, for as the angel told Joseph:
You shall call His name Jesus, because
He shall save His people from their sins.
The question for you and me on this Reformation
Sunday is this: Are we excited about this freedom like the
Reformers were five hundred years ago? Is the freedom Jesus gives
our bread and butter, our meat and potatoes, our very life and
breath and being as it was for them. Or are we perhaps a tad
complacent, lackadaisical, apathetic when it comes to the freedom
that Jesus gives through the Gospel?
The sad truth is that we Christians in America
are frequently afflicted with apathy about the Gospel. An
overwhelming majority of people in our country profess some
version of the Christian Faith, but an underwhelming minority of
these actually attend church regularly. 35 years ago something
like 75 percent of those worshiping at a congregation of the
Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod on any given Sunday also stayed for
Bible Class or Sunday School. Today it’s way less than 40 percent.
Just look at the attendance figures in our bulletin next week, and
you do the math.
At one time the Lutheran Church stood firmly
upon the Biblical truth that we sinners are justified by God’s
grace and set free from sin through faith in Jesus alone. Today
you’re likely to hear a Lutheran say that there are many roads to
God apart from Jesus, all of them equally valid. You’re likely to
hear church-members say that they hope they’ve lived good-enough
lives to make it to heaven when they die. And these things are
true, not just of Lutherans, but of people from every
denomination. The Good News that God reconciles sinners to Himself
for Jesus’ sake can be a rare commodity in America’s churches. We
are rapidly losing our Reformation heritage.
There’s an antidote to this complacency and
ignorance. And that antidote is the same one that the Reformers
rediscovered by the grace of God. For centuries the antidote had
been locked in the back of the medicine cabinet as the Church
peddled all sorts of religious snake oil and pious quackery. But
by God’s grace the antidote to superstition, false-belief,
ignorance, and complacency came to light again through the Word of
God and the Gospel that Word proclaims.
Jesus says that if we continue in His Word, we
are truly His disciples and we will know the truth that sets us
free. Through the Word of God alone we come to know the truth of
our sin, the truth of our wretched condition before God. Through
the Word of God alone we come to know the truth that when our
Savior suffered and died on the Cross He took the sin of the world
upon Himself (our sin too!).
Disciples of Jesus continue in His Word and thus
know the truth that sets them free. Continuing in Jesus’ Word
doesn’t mean sleeping with a Bible under your pillow. There’s a
little more to it than that. If you’ve got a respiratory
infection, sticking an antibiotic under your pillow’s not going to
do you any good at all. You’ve got to get the antibiotic into your
system. It’s got to be placed on your tongue and slide down your
throat into your stomach and get into your blood stream.
That’s the way it is with Jesus’ Word too. 1
John 2:24 says Let what you heard from th beginning
abide in you. If what you heard from the beginning abides in you,
then you too will abide in the Son and in the Father. St.
Paul writes in Colossians: Let the Word of Christ dwell in
you richly. Richly. Not dribs and drabs. Not
a smattering here and there. But richly. Abundantly. Profusely.
For you have been born anew by the Word of truth, because Jesus
your Savior has the Word of eternal life. The Word of Christ
brought you to faith. It keeps you in the Faith. It will call you
out of your grave on the last day. As Christians, therefore,
shouldn’t you and I be eager to give the Word of the Lord a
special hearing, a prominent place in our lives? Shouldn’t we, of
all people, gladly hear God’s Word and learn it?
One of our members told me something recently
that really struck me. He said there was once a man who wanted to
borrow an axe from his next-door neighbor. She told him, “Not
today.” So he came back the next day and asked to borrow it again,
but she gave him the same answer. “Why not?” he wanted to know;
“you aren’t using it for anything.” “Because I’ve got to make some
soup,” she replied. “Make some soup? What are you talking about?
You don’t make soup with an axe!” “I know that,” she said. “But
when you don’t want to loan someone your axe, any excuse will do.”
Will any excuse do to keep us at Mt. Olive from
regularly, faithfully attending the Divine Service? Will any
excuse do to keep us from gladly hearing and learning God’s Word
in Bible Class and Sunday School? I pray not. I pray that we at
Mt. Olive will again take hold of the Word of God as our great
heritage. I pray that we will know the Word of our Lord Jesus
Christ to be the Word of life, the Word of hope, the Word of
forgiveness, the Word of our salvation.
Today is Reformation Sunday, the day we give
special thanks to God for restoring the truth of His Word and
Gospel to the Church through Martin Luther and others. But we
can’t dwell in the past, can we? We’ve got to live as a body of
believers in the present. We’ve got to face the unique challenges
of our own day armed with the Word of truth and life. And that
means that we as a congregation need to be reformed by the Word of
God today.
Think about the word “reformation.” It literally
means the act of being formed again. It’s opposite is
“deformation” – that is losing form, or being disfigured.
Reformation is good. It’s an ongoing necessity in the life of the
Church. Deformation, on the other hand, is bad. It’s the
temptation to compromise, to give up the truth of God’s Word, the
saving truths of the Gospel, for something more appealing. The
Church is either being reformed by the Word of God or deformed by
the corrupting influences of human opinion. The Church is either
standing on the truth of God’s Holy Word, or it’s trying to stay
upright on the shifting sand of human preferences, like and
dislikes. The Church is either standing on the rock-solid
certainty of Christ crucified to atone for the sin of the world,
or it’s trying to levitate on the vague wishful notion that all
roads somehow lead to God and you can bypass the Cross of Jesus if
you want to.
But the One who went to the Cross for your sin,
for your salvation, says that He alone sets you free. He alone
forgives you and reconciles you to God. He alone gives you eternal
life and the hope of resurrection at the end of the age. He loves
you. He died for you. He claimed you as His own in Holy Baptism
and wants you to continue in His life-giving, liberating Word.
Because in that Word your Savior Jesus Christ speaks the truth to
you. He does not lie. Whenever you hear the Gospel proclaimed,
it’s as though He signed in His own blood the words, “yours
truly.” Whenever you have your sins absolved or partake of the
Sacrament, it’s as though He signed in His own blood the words,
“yours truly.” For Jesus truly is your Savior. He truly is your
Redeemer. He truly is the One who sets you free from sin, death
and hell.
“Yours truly,” Jesus says to you in His Gospel.
Despite your sin, your guilt, your feelings of inadequacy, Jesus
is truly yours. Through the ups-and-downs of life, in sickness and
in health, in life and in death, Jesus is truly yours. So cling to
His Word. Cling to His Gospel. Cling to the Means of Grace by
which He forgives you and makes you free. That’s what the
Reformation of the Church is all about. In the end, it’s all about
Jesus. It’s all about faith in Him. And as the Catechism says,
this is most certainly true.
In Nomine Patris. . .
