It is very good to be with all of you this evening, even among many in our own congregation
here tonight.
It is appropriate that we would come together to celebrate and remember the Reformation.
It is right and good to do so.
And as soon as we draw our gaze to Luther and to Calvin and to the other Magisterial
Reformers of the sixteenth century, as soon as we begin talking about them and praising
them, and they would be the first to say, "You're praising the wrong one."
Luther and Calvin and the other Reformers would draw our attentions and our gazes to
Christ alone.
They would tell us to fix our attentions on the gospel of Jesus Christ.
They would say it is right to see what God has done.
It is appropriate to celebrate what the Spirit has done.
But they would be the first to say that they themselves were not by any means the heroes
of the Reformation but that God was the hero of the Reformation, that the Word of God was
the hero of the Reformation, that the Spirit of God was the hero of the Reformation, that
it was God, who by His sovereignty and by His grace and by His power, who led these
humble sinners to serve Him, giving them the stewardship and the message of the gospel
to expound it, and the whole council of God for the people of God that God's people from
every tribe, tongue, and nation, from all around the world might hear that gospel that
had been hidden and bound and chained for so long.
And so it's to the gospel of Jesus Christ that we turn this evening to that passage
which the Lord used by His Spirit to awaken Luther and ignite Luther, to invade Luther's
heart by His Spirit.
And so, we turn this evening together to Romans chapter 1 and verse 16 and 17.
Turn there with me, if you would.
We read in Romans 1 in verse 1 that this is the gospel of God.
Paul says this is God's gospel.
It's not fundamentally Paul's gospel.
It didn't belong to him.
It was the gospel that Paul preached, but this was the gospel of God that Paul expounds
throughout the epistle to the Romans and it, in one sense, is that which is expounded by
God Himself throughout all of sacred Scripture.
And so in verse 16 we read these two verses that ignited Luther and set the world on fire.
"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.
For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, 'The
righteous shall live by faith.'"
In 1505 Luther, after completing his Master's degree, was caught in a lightning storm.
It terrified Luther, and he impulsively swore and vowed to the Lord and vowed to St. Anne,
the patron saint of miners.
And he vowed to St. Anne that he would become a monk if the Lord would save him.
And immediately, just two weeks later, went back to Erfurt and knocked on the door of
that Augustinian priory and became a monk.
And not just any monk, he became one of the most devout monks they had ever seen.
As Luther was devout in his own studies previously, he became devout as a monk.
He was the one most in prayer, most in fastings, the one most in his giving, and the one most
in his learning of the ancients.
Luther became a devout man, who was so seeking to end the torments of his soul that he might
gain some measure of assurance that he might know God and that he might be able to rest
in God and have true peace in God.
But he didn't find it.
In all his duties and all his obediences, he didn't find that peace.
He didn't attain that peace and that hope and that freedom that he so desperately wanted
that tormented his soul night and day.
And so his mentor, his father confessor, the head of the Augustinian order, Johann von
Staupitz, sent him to Rome on business.
And in 1510, Luther went to Rome and what Luther saw brought him to a point of total
despair because what he saw were the abuses of the church.
He saw the abuses of the doctrine, and he saw how Rome was laying upon the shoulders
and the backs of its people great burdens, the weight that no man could carry, that men
had to work their way to God, that they had to climb a ladder of works righteousness,
that they had to do whatever they could not only to earn their way to God but to earn
their way out of the man-made tradition of purgatory, that they had to buy indulgences
not only for their own souls but for the souls of those who had already passed on that they
loved.
And Luther was brought to the end of himself and coming back from Rome and there in Erfurt,
he was unsettled.
And so Staupitz sent him to Wittenberg.
And there in 1511, after Luther completed his doctoral studies, he became a professor
at Wittenberg.
And it was in 1513, in the fall, when Luther was lecturing on the Psalms, and it was there
when he first came in contact with another verse that was equally as significant for
Luther as was Romans chapter 1 and verses 16 and 17.
He came upon Psalm, verse 1 of chapter 31, where we read this psalm of David.
"In you, O LORD, do I take refuge; let me never be put to shame; in your righteousness
deliver me!"
"In your righteousness," Luther read "deliver me!"
Luther realized that the only way he could be delivered, the only way he could be rescued
in his sin, the only way that he could be redeemed from this torment of his soul, the
only way he could really find assurance was to be rescued, and he had to be rescued by
none other than the righteousness of God.
And so in coming to Romans 1, in reading about the gospel of God and hearing the gospel of
God explained, as Luther not only read through Romans but studied Romans and studied Romans
in the original language, not just the Latin.
And as he came face-to-face with verses 16 and 17, he read that it wasn't just any righteousness,
but it was righteousness and the righteousness that God gives to His people that gives people
the gift of faith, that enables His people to live by faith.
And that all of this comes through the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Now in verse 16, a verse that I'm sure most of us are familiar with, the Apostle Paul
writes, "For I am not ashamed of the gospel."
Have you ever wondered about that?
Why would Paul say that?
Why would he say, "I am not ashamed of the gospel"?
Well, because it's easy to be ashamed of the gospel.
The world thinks the gospel is absolutely foolish.
And what is the gospel?
Well, the gospel is very simple.
It's so simple that even little children can understand it.
Beware of those men, I don't care if they're in pulpits or robes and all the regalia that
the world can offer.
If they complicate and confuse the gospel, if they make the gospel incomprehensible,
they're not preaching the very simple gospel of Jesus Christ.
And the gospel is that victorious message of all that our Triune God has done in and
through the life and the ministry and the perfect law-keeping and fulfilling all the
righteous demands of the law of God, in the atoning and sacrificial and substitutionary
death of Jesus Christ, His resurrection and all His life and ministry even now.
It's what God has accomplished through Christ and all by the power of the Spirit.
This story is news and it's good news.
But you see, in preaching that good news we also have to preach the bad news.
And that's what Paul does in Romans 1 and 2 and 3.
Just after he talks about the gospel and how we're not to be ashamed of the gospel and
what the gospel does, Paul starts to talk about the wrath of God.
Well, it's not easy to talk about the wrath of God.
You know when we were growing up, what is one of the things that our mothers teach us?
And they teach us if you don't have anything nice to say, then don't say anything at all.
Well, it's not very nice, is it, to tell people that they're going to hell?
It's impolite to tell people that they're dead in sin and rebels against God and hate
God and are running from God, and if God came and showed up we'd kill God.
It's not very nice to tell people that they're sinners and deserving of the wrath and the
condemnation of God that will send them to hell forever.
It's hard to do that, and you know what, it's also embarrassing.
But we need to be more concerned about our neighbor's soul in hell than we are at our
own embarrassment in telling them about it.
And so we become timid and afraid, and we're scared to talk about the gospel.
Because in talking about the gospel, we have to talk not only about the good news but the
bad news of sin and wrath and condemnation.
We have to tell people about their own wretched sin.
We have to tell them that we're sinners just as they are and that we need this good news
that we need the righteousness of Christ.
And so we're afraid, and we grow timid because we want to be liked.
We want people to think that we're nice and that we're polite.
We need to be kind to people, and we need to be the most loving people in all the world,
so loving that we're willing to tell people the truth.
And that we would speak the truth in love from God's Word about sin, about God's wrath,
about the condemnation that is upon our sin so that we might tell them about the gospel.
That we might tell them about the true hope and the true peace and the true joy that they
can have in Christ forever.
Paul says, "I'm not ashamed of the gospel," though the world thinks it's foolish, though
they ridiculed him and laughed at him on Mars Hill.
Paul says, "I'm not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God to salvation to
everyone who believes," to everyone who calls in the name of the Lord, to whosoever believes.
It's to everyone, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.
But Paul said that the gospel is the power of God, and we can't miss that.
Notice what Paul didn't say.
He didn't say the gospel simply contains information about the power of God, or that the gospel
tells us where to find the power of God, or how we might access the power of God through
other means, but that the gospel is the power of God.
It is that story, that good news that God has ordained, be the vehicle through which
the Holy Spirit might invade and conquer and regenerate hearts and make those stone, rebellious
wretched hearts His own.
It's through the proclamation of good news of all that God has done, that our God reigns,
that He gets all the glory, that He is sovereign, that He is gracious and that He is not only
the creation of our own souls, He is the author of that which saves our souls.
"I'm not ashamed of the gospel," Paul says, "for it is the power of God to salvation to
everyone who believes."
And then Paul quotes a portion of Habakkuk 2:4.
He says, "For in the gospel, in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed."
How we get the righteousness of God, that's what Romans is all about.
That's what the Bible is all about.
How that we, a bunch of wretched rebellious sinners at enmity with God, how we can obtain
the righteousness of God.
And Paul, pulling from Habakkuk 2:4, says "The righteous live by faith."
The just shall live by faith, from beginning to end, from first to last, from faith to
faith.
We don't start by faith and then end up trying to earn heaven or earn the righteousness of
God by works.
It's God who begins a good work in us, and it is He who is faithful to fulfill it in
us.
And so, as God leads us to faith, as He leads us to repentance, as Paul points out in Romans
2:4, even as Luther understood that it's repentance from beginning to end, as he stated in his
first thesis of his ninety-five, "When our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, called us to
repentance, He willed that the entire life of a believer be one of repentance."
That we don't just look back upon a time when we were first justified, when we first got
saved, and say, "I repented then."
No, that we would live an entire life of repentance, that we would live an entire life at the foot
of the cross, trusting Christ, throwing ourselves upon the righteousness of Christ, resting
in His righteousness and not our own.
Luther understood this, and as he read this and he had this first tower experience there
in 1513 and 1514, as he came face-to-face with the grace of God and how it is this righteousness
from which we are delivered is God's own righteousness that He gives to us, a righteousness that
is outside of ourselves, a righteousness that comes from someone else, a foreign and alien
righteousness that God takes all those righteous deeds and righteous works of our Lord and
Savior Jesus Christ and places them upon us, imputes them to us, taking our sin and placing
them upon Christ.
That's why the wrath of God was poured out on Christ, not because of His sin, but because
of our sin He died.
And that's why His death is a perfect substitutionary sacrifice for our sin.
Luther saw this, and it was at that moment by his own testimony, by his own account that
he believed he was born again by the Holy Spirit.
The Spirit came rushing in and regenerated his dead, stony heart, and Luther said, "It's
as if the gates of heaven were flung open wide to me."
He realized it couldn't be his own righteousness.
It had to be the righteousness of Christ.
As we celebrate the Reformation rightly, as we remember what God did through Luther, as
we remember what God did through Calvin and the other Reformers, it is absolutely fundamental
that in living in light of the Reformation, we live in light of the gospel.
That we live in light of the good news of Jesus Christ for our souls.
And that means, dearly beloved, that we would be a people who are proclaiming the gospel,
living the gospel in our own hearts, as we are repenting of our sins and trusting Jesus
Christ, as we live in light of the gospel.
That means we're going to live a life of freedom, a life of grace, a life of love.
That we, as God's people, would be known by a people of love.
And that doesn't mean putting aside the truth; it means contending for the truth.
And in contending for the truth, we would also be a people that would be always striving
eagerly for the bond of peace in the church of Jesus Christ, that we would be a people
who are defined and known by the world as loving people, speaking the truth in love
and speaking the gospel of grace of the Lord Jesus Christ until Christ returns.
That we would be a people, when they see us they don't see us pointing at ourselves, they
don't see us as a people trying to gain glory for ourselves.
They see us as a people who are pointing to our Triune God, saying, "To God alone be the
glory."