- All teaching must be derived directly from the Scriptures, without any changes - in the name of building or improvement, as in Church and Change, Change or Die - slogans from the same skunk factory.
- The Word is never without the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit never works apart from the Word. As A. Hoenecke wrote, "That is sound doctrine." Unfortunately, it is also very rare today.
- The Bible is the Book of the Holy Spirit, one unified Truth, not a collection of verses to be sampled, isolated, or elevated above and against other parts of the Bible.
- The Word of God is always effective, whether it blinds and hardens, or enlightens and converts.
- The entire message of the Bible is to present Jesus, the Son of God, and to create faith in Him by the proclamation of the Gospel.
Everyone Loves Grace - Where Is It Found?
Romans 5:1 Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ: 2 By whom also we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God.
The basic rules of Biblical interpretation are outlined in the Background, above. I began doing that because I figured it would be good for 1500 Facebook friends to have some introduction, not to mention repeating what has been take for granted in the past but forgotten and opposed in the present days.
I can quote my expert against your expert, but the real issue has always been - what does the Word of God say? Most of the experts of the past have been forgotten, but we will return to the Scriptures, though they be "improved" to avoid challenging, disturbing, or converting us.
The issue for this Age of Darkness is - Where Is Grace Found? Everyone loves grace. "Amazing Grace" is played or sung on many occasions, even the burial of Spock in the Star Trek movie. In that film, the hymn brought a tear down the face of a young Vulcan lady.
Every denominational history is named Fifty Years of Grace, or One Hundred Years of Grace, or The Church of Grace.
The fact remains - When "Amazing Grace" is played on the bagpipes, goosebumps are pandemic.
The answer is simple about where grace is found. Paul responded in his summary of Romans 4 - because the opening of Romans 5 encapsulates the Romans 4 essay. And Romans 4 concludes Paul's essay on righteousness and where it can be found (through faith) and where it is never found (earned through works).
we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand...
Grace is the key word, because this includes God's love, mercy, and forgiveness. Grace is free, so it cannot be earned.
Sometimes people want to respond to a gift by paying for it. Do you pay for birthday and Christmas presents? But we are so conditioned to think about obligation and work that it is easy to get mixed up about grace.
One wrong side wants the assurance that comes from paying for grace. Therefore, adding works to make it complete is ideal, because they get included in God's action by contributing. Of course, that also means God has not done enough through Christ, so we must make up the deficit.
The other wrong side wants everyone forgiven and saved, because God is all love and forgiveness. That is their shriveled concept of grace. That Universalism quickly degenerates into Unitarianism and Atheism, both powerful forces in Europe and America.
But the best response to a gift came from a neighbor who was helping out, years ago, and was shivering in the winter cold. "I don't have a coat!" he said. I gave him my blue parka, right out of the closet, and he burst into tears. When we know how profound our need is, then getting the relief needed is overwhelming.
Sometimes people do not recognize their need for forgiveness, and that comes about many different ways, including society numbing our conscience. But when it does, there is no earthly cure for it, and the guilt we feel gnaws and plagues us.
I decided to emphasize pain in this message, because Luther knew so much about pain, the worst kind of pain, emotional pain.
Physical pain can be addressed with some ease, especially now, though there are limits, dangers, and no simple solution.
Emotional pain is often addressed with physical pain relievers, and then it is momentarily helpful, then addicting, then a matter of slavery.
Luther, in the monastery, and locked up in a lonely castle, knew all about the pain of being alone and tormented by doubts. He also had unusual intuition, religious and personal, so his mind would not let him rest.
The beauty of his writing does not come from his great intellect so much as his suffering. Kierkegaard wrote an essay about that, where the crowd says "Suffer!" because that produces such great beauty in your work.
Luther's suffering was relieved only by the comfort and grace of the Scriptures. The best answer to everything was trusting in what the Word of God plainly revealed - all help comes from God, and the Word activates that help.
"Jesus does not want to be forgotten." (Treasures)
Many sentences in Luther's Sermons are like thunderbolts that come from the Word, light up a huge area, crash and boom, in a shattering way. No one says, "What was that?" But - I must remember that statement from Luther - it explains everything.
Why the Lord's Supper? Because Jesus does not want to be forgotten. When we forget His teaching, His help for others, His death and resurrection, the old Harlot called Reason takes over.
The trouble with Reason is that it comes from man's intellect, and experience, but remains devoid of God's will and work. Reason is good for building bridges and buildings that stay up. But God's work is entirely different and apart from man's reasons. All the great religious follies come from man's reason.
Reason never offers comfort for our fears and guilt, nor hope for anything good and blessed.
The surest and best method of escaping these attacks is to live in the fear of God, to be earnest in prayer, and to love His holy Word. This is the true charm with which we can make ourselves secure from the attacks of the enemy. In that heart, in which the Word of God has its home, the devil cannot abide; he will trot off speedily. Thus the devil cannot make his home in the Church if Christ is there, and Christ has said: “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there will I be in the midst of them;” hence we say that the devil must vanish when Christ comes. It behooves us, therefore, to hear God’s Word willingly, to meditate upon it and to converse about it often and gladly. But where falsehoods, slanders and other sins prevail and the conscience is violated, there Christ and His angels depart.
Luther’s House Postils, Volume 2, p. 262.
No Christian has died of hunger.
I copied a lot of statements from the House Postils because of the questions and problems of members and readers. Yes, someone can be out of work and losing all his equity, but will he die of starvation? The Psalmist promises - No, he will not.
Many miraculous interventions occur. Human Reason wants to win the lottery, but that is not the divine answer. God provides and also lets us learn from shortages. And we are thankful.
Later in life we are more anxious about the intangible blessings than those things we collected before.
Luther's observation is that we should thank God every day if we only have one eye left, because many do not have two working eyes. Now we have tests that show us what glaucoma does to vision, down to little squares on a chart that say - you cannot see in that region of your right eye, and not in the other region of your left eye.
He said, "The walls of our homes should spit on us for our ingratitude."
In many ways, the problem of pain, when resolved by grace, makes us far more grateful than the absence of any trouble.
5:1 Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ:
Peace comes from God's declaration of complete and full forgiveness, because the Atonement message - the Gospel - creates and renews our faith. That happened in the beginning of our faith and continues to this day.
The angels gave the first sermon about Jesus, and it will continue to the end of time.
That struck me as I read it again. The sermon about Jesus is the source of faith. What is God like? We know exactly, though too many people divorce the Son from the Father, as if the Son is all love and the Father is all punishment.
Just as the right focus brings the words together on the chart, and we can read them, so we see the Father and Son correctly and plainly when we understand:
- The voice of the Son is also the voice of the Father.
- The gracious will of the Son is also the gracious will of the Father.
The angels came back to preach the Gospel as never before heard -
The Resurrection
The great anxiety of the angel to announce the resurrection of Christ to the disciples, who were nearly drowned in unbelief and tormented with an accusing conscience, is a certain indication that the Lord is arisen for the consolation of those who are weak in faith, or perhaps unbelieving, that they, in the end, might seek and find Him their help and defense.
If we, therefore, discover that we are afflicted with similar weaknesses, with sin and unbelief, we should not despair, nor suppose that Christ will not accept us, but should remember how, in behalf of such poor, weak and miserable sinners, the angels came from heaven and quickly dispatched the women to tell them that Christ was arisen, that thereby they might be comforted and rejoice. For, as we have already heard, the resurrection of Christ brings consolation, joy and a good conscience, since it banishes sin, death and the wrath of God from our sight.
Luther’s House Postils, Volume 2, p. 251f.
Who was more weak, fearful, and despairing than the disciples? Yet the angels and the risen Lord filled them anew with hope and trust in God's power and mercy.
They paid a terrible emotional price in losing their Savior and realizing how weak they were, but that contrast - before and after the resurrection - gave them such utter trust in God that most of them died in teaching the Faith. And that itself turned a brushfire into an unstoppable revolution across the world.
Nothing Happens, and Then Miraculous Abundance
Somewhere, in Thy Strong Word, is a quotation from Luther about preaching and teaching faithfully for 20 years and seeing no results, then suddenly something happens as if overnight, but without the normal, reasonable explanation.
I saw how that was true, because no Boomer pastor or layman really wanted anything to do with traditional Lutheran doctrine, hymns, worship, or Luther himself. The most favorable were 10 or 20 years older than the Boomers. The leaders of the Wrecking Crew in each synod - they were Boomers, gleeful, confident, full of themselves.
I came to expect nothing except the rare person or family who thought it should be better. That changed as people born 40 years later than the Boomers began wondering why the Lutheran Church was so decayed, no matter what the brand name.
I have worked on the Lost Dutchman's Goldmine (Luther's Biblical teaching), the Gems Mined from Luther's Sermons, and the Treasures of his Household sermons. Next will be the Pearls from his Galatians Lectures.
That is not accidental. The "money" words come from the Scriptures and the Reformation. They represent my shift from collecting great books to broadcasting the eternal wealth of the Gospel.
