By Faith Alone

By Faith Alone

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

October 15, 2017

Scripture: Romans 3:21-24; Philippians 3:4b-14

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

According to popular legend at least, on October 31, 1517, a German monk and professor of moral philosophy named Martin Luther posted a document known as The 95 Theses, or as Disputation on the Power of Indulgences, on the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg, Germany. He didn’t intend to start a new church, much less a whole new branch of Christianity. He wanted to help the Roman Catholic Church, the only church there was at the time in western Europe, to clean up some bad theology and some bad practices that Luther believed (correctly I think) were harming ordinary Christian people. At the end of this month we will mark the 500^th anniversary of that event, which turned out to be monumental in the history of the world though Luther had no reason to believe that it would be any such thing at the time. Luther posting his 95 Theses on that church door 500 years ago is seen as the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. We’ll only see the 500^th anniversary of the beginning of our kind of Christianity once, so for the next three weeks, starting today, I will give three sermons on three of the defining characteristics of Reformation Christianity. Today I’ll talk about the Protestant belief that we are saved by faith alone. Stay tuned for what the other two sermons will be about. So here goes. By faith alone.

Though he lived at the very beginning of the modern age, Martin Luther was a thoroughly medieval man in at least one important respect. He agonized over the eternal fate of his soul. He agonized over the fate of his soul because he believed himself to be a terrible sinner who God would and could neither love nor save. The eternal fate of souls was the major preoccupation of medieval Christianity in western Europe. The Church taught and people believed that the eternal fate of most souls was to spend eternity being tormented in hell. Luther was a man of his time, and he feared deep in his soul that eternal torment was going to be his fate too.

So he tried to do everything the Church told him he had to do to be saved. Basically the Church taught that to be saved you have to do “good works,” and by good works it meant doing whatever the Church told you to do. That’s what Luther did. He prayed really hard every day. He confessed his supposed sins all the time. He beat himself. He deprived himself of many of the pleasures of life, neither marrying nor having children for example. He became a monk. He read the Bible, studied the faith, and even taught it at the university. He tried and tried to do enough to make God forgive him and save him. It didn’t work. He still believed himself to be a wretched sinner who deserved nothing but eternal damnation for his sins. The poor man must have been miserable. He knew his Christian faith as his church taught it inside and out. He did everything the church told him to do. Yet following the beliefs and practices it taught him did nothing to relieve his dread of eternal damnation as well-deserved punishment for his sins. Just what he thought his sins were I don’t know, but he sure thought he had them. And he thought he had to overcome them through good works if his soul wasn’t going to spend eternity in hell.

One day Martin Luther reread Paul’s letter to the Romans and changed the world. Luther read passages in Romans like the one we just heard. It’s worth hearing again:

But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. (emphasis added)

Righteousness, that is, being in right relationship with God, comes from God’s grace through faith in Jesus Christ. Luther read lines from Paul like these and finally got it. He couldn’t put himself in right relationship with God through any good work, through any act of charity or self-deprivation. The bad news was he couldn’t do it. The great good news was that he didn’t have to. Justification or righteousness (for our purposes they mean the same thing) didn’t come from good works. They came through faith in Jesus Christ. By faith alone. That’s what Luther found in Paul. That our salvation comes from God’s grace through faith and not through good works was the major insight of the Protestant Reformation. So as we approach the 500^th anniversary of Luther’s act that started that Reformation let’s consider just what that major Protestant confession means for us today.

The first thing that this great confession means for us is that we don’t have to worry about the eternal fate of our souls the way Martin Luther did before he reread Romans. Paul’s major insight, the one Luther found in him, is that salvation does not come through good works. That’s why Luther called the book of James in the New Testament a “book of straw,” for it says that faith without works is dead. Luther read that line as meaning salvation comes through works. It’s possible to read it as meaning something else, but Luther rejected anything he thought confirmed the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church of his time that salvation comes through the good works that we do. No, he said. Salvation comes from God’s grace, and we live into that salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. We don’t have to work to save our souls. God has already done that in Jesus Christ. Our salvation doesn’t depend on us. If it did depend on us we’d all be lost, but salvation comes from God not from us. We know that we are saved through faith, not because we think we’ve done enough good works. Thanks be to God!

That salvation comes from God’s grace through faith has great meaning for how we live a Christian life. It means we don’t have to live in fear for our souls the way Luther did before the great insight he found in Paul. God has given us salvation in and through Jesus Christ. In other words, God gives us God’s grace; and God gives grace as a free and unmerited gift to everyone. Neither Paul nor Luther is entirely consistent on this point, but underlying the theologies of both of them is the idea that God effects our salvation through Jesus Christ. Our role in the economy of grace is recipient not cause. We don’t bring about our salvation. We receive our salvation from God in Jesus Christ. Once we really understand that profound truth we no longer have to live in fear. We don’t have to fear hell. One twentieth century Catholic Pope, Paul VI, said it pretty well when he said that believed that hell exists but he wasn’t sure anyone is in it. If God’s grace is truly grace and not an earned reward then indeed if hell exists no one’s in it. No one’s in it because we all stand in God’s forgiving grace. At least at times both Paul and Luther caught sight of that truth. Thanks be to God!

Once we get it that salvation comes from God and not from our own actions we are freed from excessive concern with ourselves. We don’t have to worry about our eternal fate because God has already taken care of it. When we don’t have to worry about ourselves we are free to live out of our selves for God, God’s world, and God’s people. We are freed from a fear grounded in our awareness that we can’t save the world, for we know that saving the world isn’t our assignment. We don’t save the world, God does. But God does it at least in part with and through people like us. Because we stand always in God’s grace we are free to risk ourselves for the benefit of others. Because we stand in God’s grace we can give to others with no demand or expectation of reward. We already have our reward. Our reward is God’s grace, and it is a reward that comes first not afterwards. It is a reward we can never lose because God gives it freely to everyone.

When I’ve preached and taught that we don’t have to do anything to earn our salvation because God has already given salvation as a gift of grace I’ve gotten the objection that I’ve taken away people’s incentive to lead good lives. It certainly is true that the Christian church in all or at least most of its incarnations has told people they have to behave or they’ll go to hell. How people who stand in the Protestant tradition can believe that has always escaped me. We are not saved by what we do or don’t do. We are saved by God’s grace, and we know that grace through faith. And really, neither I nor Paul or Luther takes away our incentive to live good lives, we just change what that incentive is. We don’t live good lives in order to be saved, we live good lives because we know that we are saved. We don’t act to earn grace, we respond to the grace we receive from God through Jesus Christ.

We don’t have to respond in order to be saved, but if we truly know in our hearts the great blessing of God’s salvation how can we not respond with lives lived the way we know God wants us to live them? That’s what Paul said. That’s at least implied in what Luther said. When we really get “by faith alone” we strive to live good lives not out of fear of a harsh, judgmental God but out of love for a gracious, forgiving God. And also out of love for the people that gracious, forgiving God loves.

“By faith alone” is the most liberating, enabling, empowering truth that we learn from Protestant Christianity. Luther discovered it in Romans. He proclaimed it as the foundational truth of Christianity. When he did he changed the world. Today, 500 years later, we are the beneficiaries of his great, revolutionary insight. We are not saved by our good works. We are saved by God’s grace made known to us through our faith in Jesus Christ.

Frankly, I can’t imagine living by any other truth. Not by works but by faith alone. When we know that truth everything else falls into place. When we know that truth everything else begins to make sense. That’s how it was for Martin Luther. That’s how it can be for us too. So as we celebrate 500 years of Protestant Christianity let’s know that truth. Let’s live into it. Let’s live out of it. We are not saved by our works. We are saved by faith alone. Thanks be to God. Amen.