REFORMATION AND REFORMATIONSROMANS 15:4

Everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance taught in the Scriptures and the encouragement they provide we might have hope.

What is your gut feeling about our celebration of the Reformation? Obviously it is meant to be a joyful time, an occasion for remembering and rejoicing. But is there something more, some emotion or feeling lurking in the background that colors our celebration? As I observe worshippers on this day, it sometimes seems that way to me.

Sometimes I think we’re somewhat embarrassed by it, that we almost consider the Festival of the Refor-mation to be a sectarian celebration. True, other church bodies have it on their calendars, but nobody cel-ebrates it like us Lutherans! Maybe we feel a little self-conscious, thinking we’re out of step with the rest of the holy Christian church on earth!

Sometimes I think we view Reformation as kind of a judgmental observance. With our celebration of what the Lord did through Martin Luther, it may feel like we are bragging about how good we are while condemning everybody else as! Sometimes, I think we look back 495 years and wonder if the Reforma-tion is all that important in our day and age. If there were mistakes made then, we should let bygones be bygones and move on.

Truly, today is worth noting, it is important. It does reflect special blessings we have received as its heirs. It is but one sign that we are different from many other Christian church bodies in our world in a very good way. But the real emotion that should fill us this morning is none of the above. It is encourage-ment. We should be encouraged that there is reformation and that there are reformations.

Reformation, the dictionary tells us, is the act of reforming, that is, making changes in something in or-der to improve it. It is a re-shaping, a re-making of something that already exists. The fact that all hu-man beings need reformation indicates that there is something within us that needs changing, something that is born misshapen and needs improvement.

Simply put, what needs to be reformed in us is our concept of how God and man can be at peace with one another now and forever. Our idea of what it takes to accomplish this is out of whack with reality. It’s been in bad shape from the moment of our birth. That’s not to say that our natural knowledge of God and our inborn conscience don’t tell us a lot about the Lord, a lot that is good, stuff that’s 100% right on the mark.

Natural knowledge and conscience correctly inform us that there is a God who is powerful and wise. They correctly tell us that God made us, thus making us responsible to him for the way we live our lives. They correctly tell us that God has a very specific set of expectations for us, and that our level of obedi-ence brings consequences, either good or bad.

They correctly teach us that at our hour of death, we will stand before the Lord our God for final judg-ment and receive his everlasting determination of where we will spend eternity. Now, up to this point, we’re doing alright. But it is precisely here that our corrupted human nature and conscience fail us. They do not correctly tell us what we must do next to please God and receive the gift of eternal life in heaven with him.

Sin has messed up our understanding of this important subject. We need to have our thinking reshaped, reformed. For our reaction to all the truths we know by nature is always dead wrong. We think that be-cause we have sinned, we can make things up to the Lord with our non-sins, our good works. We believe that because we have wandered away from the Lord, we have the ability to come back on our own.

We mistakenly think that we can and we must do whatever is necessary to get into God’s good favor. We approach the problem of our eternal life as if we, alone, have the solution! Most commonly, we think that if we do as much good as we do evil that things are balanced off and we’ll be okay. We believe that is enough to satisfy the Lord.

A commonly held variation of that belief states that we need only try hard to be good, and that will be enough. Still another slant would have you believe that we have only to be better than most other people, and that will be enough. Whatever it takes to get into heaven, however, is always to be found in us and what we do. That’s the method of salvation Paul described in our Second Reading as law.

The law relies solely on the words and actions of human beings. What we ignore when we use the law to gain salvation is God’s demand that we keep the law perfectly, without exception. Mostly good is not enough. Merely trying hard is not good enough. Being better than others is not good enough. Only per-fect is good enough, and that is simply not possible for any natural born human being.

Besides which, everything good we do must be done in love for God, or it doesn’t count! So, if we do something to save ourselves, the good we think we’ve done ceases to be good because it is done in love for ourselves. There is no way any of us can be saved by the law. Nevertheless, it is such an ingrained part of us, we cling to it with all our might. We need to be reformed!

Thanks be to God he has reformed us, he has corrected our futile way of thinking. The reformation he works in us is accomplished by the gospel. It is a hard reformation to carry out, even for the Lord, be-cause the gospel doesn’t make any sense to our human reason. The gospel decrees that God still loves us, despite our ongoing lives of sin. We are saved by grace, alone.

The gospel tells us that God loved us so much that he sent his one and only Son to live a perfect life for us and then to suffer and die for our sinful lives. We are saved by Christ, alone. The gospel says that all our sins are forgiven, and we receive the blessing of forgiven sin by trusting him and setting aside every other method of salvation we might consider. We are saved by faith, alone.

And all of that, the gospel, is revealed to us in the Bible. Only there does the Lord comes to us and com-municate his words of life. We are saved by Scripture, alone. How thankful we may be on the day of Reformation that the Holy Spirit has worked this reformation in our hearts and minds! This inner refor-mation brings us life with God in a peace that surpasses all human understanding.

And as we consider our personal reformation, how thankful we may be for the bigger and more obvious reformations we see in his earthly church. Sometimes, in the history of the earthly church, man’s natural reasoning and his inborn ideas rise up and take hold of the church, as an institution. The law infiltrates places where only the gospel belongs and Christian denominations become corrupt.

Two such examples are set before us this morning. Our Old Testament reading took us back to a time when worship of the true God by the Jews in Jerusalem was badly broken. They carefully did everything God demanded of them. They observed the proper days and made the appropriate sacrifices.

But they didn’t do it in love for the Lord. That was law. The Lord, in his mercy, used King Josiah to re-form the church and bring it back to the gospel. In more modern times, greed within the earthly church led leaders to offer the forgiveness of sins for a fee! By so doing, they denied that Christ’s sacrifice was powerful enough to pay for all sins!

Pious Christians were told not to trust solely in Jesus, but to pray to saints for extra good works they could use as their own. A place between life and heaven was created where unforgiven sins would be purged from sinners. Martin Luther was born into this tangled web of law. But through the Scriptures he was led to see that only Christ and the grace of God could offer the forgiveness that comes to all who have faith.

What we now know as the Lutheran church began as a place where the gospel would thrive and bring comfort to one and all. How thankful we can be for these reformations and others! In the midst of our celebration this Reformation Day, we do well to remember the words of Romans 15:4: Everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance taught in the Scrip-tures and the encouragement they provide we might have hope.

The danger of the law taking over a church body is not over. It can happen in any generation and has hap-pened more often than the 2 examples we heard about. As long as sinful man carries the law along with him in his heart, reliance on the law may creep into the earthly church. At any time, human desires may push aside God’s will. The gospel message may be corrupted and its power to save may be weakened.

We have written records of the past to teach us that we always need to be on our guard against this dan-ger. We need to persist in trusting God’s Word as the only source of anything that counts in the matter of our salvation. We may be encouraged that in the past, God’s truth has prevailed over human lies. The gospel is still believed and proclaimed!

The day of Reformation is truly an occasion to celebrate. Sinful hearts have been reformed. By the Lord’s guidance, the earthly church has always been reformed, whenever necessary. Reformations of both kinds continue to be provided. The saving gospel will always be proclaimed for the salvation of all who believe. Amen.