What the 500th Anniversary of the Reformation Means for Christian Families

Tomorrow, October 31, people throughout the world will mark the 500th Anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. Although the seeds of the Reformation were planted long before, 1517 was when its green shoot popped up from the darkness of the medieval sod. Martin Luther’s nailing of his Ninety-Five Theses on the door of the chapel at the University of Wittenberg ignited the figurative underbrush of Europe, a spiritual forest parched of Living Water for centuries.

Dr. Luther’s Theses blasted away at abuses arising from the practice of selling indulgences, documents for purchase which certified forgiveness of particular sins. “Any true Christian…participates in all the blessings of Christ and the church; and this is granted him by God, even without indulgences letters,” proffered Luther. “Injury is done to the Word of God when, in the same sermon, an equal or larger amount of time is devoted to indulgences than to the Word.” Thesis No. 62 summarized best what Luther had personally discovered: “The true treasure of the church is the most holy gospel of the glory and grace of God.” These truths were sweet rain to a spiritually thirsty culture.

Still, 500 years later, it may seem a little strange that so much fuss is made about a German monk’s heady mumbo-jumbo discussing teachings that have long since been tossed alongside the theological wagon trail. What does anything Luther did five centuries ago have to do with anything we experience as Christian families today? Well, nothing…unless these kinds of questions ever come up in your day-to-day conversations with your children:

Does God love me? How can I know?

What do I have to do to please God? Does He still love me when I sin?

How do I go to heaven? Will I go to hell if I’m not good enough?

How can I know God? Does God know me? Does He even care?

Christian parents in 2017 can answer these questions clearly, confidently and definitively. But most Christian parents in 1517 couldn’t. Put yourselves in their shoes for a moment. In answer to your children’s spiritual questions, you point them to God the Judge, a Deity that demands their perfection to earn His approval. To give your children some solace in light of this bleak outlook, you teach them to ask help from Mary or the saints, since they can identify with the plight of humanity, more than the ascended Christ.

There is no “Jesus Loves Me This I Know” or “God is so Good” to sing with your young ones. There is no Bible to read, let alone to teach, to your children. Spiritual life consists of the mysteries of the Mass, a worship service conducted in a language neither you nor your children understand. There is no such thing as “Bible Study” or “Sunday School.” Your personal and familial devotional life is reduced to static rosaries, icons and shrines. And worst of all, the genuine spiritual concerns you have for yourself and for your children are cleverly exploited, not compassionately addressed, by a corrupt religious infrastructure. Indulgences are peddled like Girl Scout cookies, and relics are displayed with all the novelty of a “Ripely’s Believe It or Not!”

The Reformation changed that reality into our reality, the Christian home of the 21st century. The Bible is easily accessible (literally at our fingertips!) for family and personal devotions, as well as in corporate worship (where it is expounded for practical application). The Gospel can be clearly articulated, understood and believed. Our children can know that God loves them, and they can know God through a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. They can know that God’s love is unmerited and lavishly given. They can know that their Intercessor isn’t Mary or some other fallible saint,” but the God-Man Christ Jesus, who can “sympathize with [their] weakness,” and who makes it possible for them to “come boldly to the throne of grace...” (Hebrews 4:15-16). Their devotional life is limitless, guided by the Holy Spirit through the “living and powerful” word of God (Hebrews 4:12). And even though  corrupt religious charlatans may still peddle their wares, your children need never be deceived—they can give each teaching the Berean Test, searching the Scriptures to see “whether these things [are] so” (Acts 17:10-11).

So yes, Luther’s 16th century Halloween Facebook post, and the viral world-wide fallout that followed, is incredibly relevant to today’s Christian family. Without it, most of the tools of discipleship that we take for granted today, including translations of the Bible in the layman’s vernacular, would simply not exist.

The question for us is whether or not we in the Western church will continue what Luther started. The world we live in is not so much different from the world of 16th century Europe. Natural disasters, the threat of radical Islam, political intrigue, societal unrest, and Biblical illiteracy are as real now as they were in Luther’s time. But the difference is that we have the equipment to engage the culture in ways that the Reformers never did. What we lack is their fortitude and their zeal. Despite the abundance of tools at our disposal, far too few Christian families are seriously discipling their children. The rediscovery of the truths of the Gospel created energetic conviction in the Reformers. Unfortunately, our overfamiliarity with them has bred a type of careless contempt, demonstrated by just how easily we back down from those truths in our culture today.

The kind of conviction Luther and the other Reformers possessed isn’t easily blown away by the winds of adversity, but it also isn’t formulated in a bed of roses. As recent Luther biographer, Eric Metaxas, has observed, it was Luther’s own relentless pursuit of the Gospel that made him so indomitable. Pressed by his own despair at the inadequacy of himself to satisfy the just demands of a holy God, he finally found the peace he craved in the promises of God. And with those promises he was ready to withstand the onslaught of the world, the flesh, and the devil. “My conscience is captive to the Word of God,” declared Luther at the Diet of Worms. “Thus I cannot and will not recant, because acting against one's conscience is neither safe nor sound.”

And so, the 500th Anniversary of the Reformation is both a celebration for the Christian family, but it is also a charge. Our homes are where the legacy of the Reformation must daily continue. It’s time to experience with our children the same joy as Luther did at the treasure of the Gospel. Luther observed that parents “can do no better work and do nothing more valuable either for God, for Christendom, for all the world, for themselves, and for their children than to bring up their children well.” No doubt, for Luther, bringing up children “well” is to disciple them in the Gospel, and to teach them to make their own consciences “captive to the Word of God.”

Armed with those spiritual weapons, our children may just turn the world upside down for Jesus—just like Martin Luther.

Photo by chop1n in creative commons 

Saved from What?

It’s not often I read sermons (like most people, I usually listen to them), but I recently read one given this past Christmas Eve. It was contemplative, and gave much to consider in regards to the incarnation of Jesus, the coming of God in the flesh into our world. I appreciated the pastor’s thoughtfulness; she touched on aspects of Christ’s infancy that I’d not considered. (You can read the entire sermon here). But her sermon took an unexpected turn when she described the “salvation” that the Baby in the Manger had come to bring:

You see, we need the child to save us. We need the baby Jesus to transform the world, change us from a family that chooses violence, war, and suffering into a family that responds with peace, love and justice. From his swaddling clothes, resting in the crook of Mary’s arm, looking out at a confused world, we need this Jesus to save us…

Jesus, on this night, and throughout the rest of his life, asks for only one thing. Jesus asks us to love him and then share that same love with one another…

[God’s] love is the only thing that will save us. Tonight, you have gathered around the manger. Tonight, you have gathered up the infant Jesus into your arms. Tonight, you become part of the salvation of the world…

There is no denying the incredible power of the love of God, and its capacity to redeem us. But there is great spiritual danger in the pastor’s conclusion. She indicates that mankind’s problem is chiefly in our relationship towards one another. Her analysis is that our greatest need as human beings is to be saved from ourselves. Her solution to our problem is to adopt Jesus’ example of love and follow it. By doing so, we can save ourselves from ourselves. But this is a misdiagnosis.

While the pastor describes the brokenness of relationships among mankind, she says nothing about the brokenness of mankind’s relationship with God.  That vertical brokenness is a direct result of our sin. And therein lies our greatest need: to be saved from the just punishment of God for our sin against Him. That sin has earned us an eternal sentence of separation from God in Hell, frequently referred to in Scripture as the “wrath of God.” We justly deserve this punishment, in the same way that a criminal justly deserves the punishment for his crime.

Jesus entered the picture, not to improve mankind’s earthly condition (though He certainly did that), but to become our substitute, to take upon Himself as a truly perfect sacrifice all the just wrath of God for our sin. The Apostle Paul put it this way:

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. (Romans 5:6-9)

For those who trust in what Christ has done, God no longer holds their sin against them. Instead, He accounts their sins as “paid in full” because of Christ’s sacrificial death and considers them righteous, no longer under impending, eternal judgment in Hell. This is the salvation of which the Scripture speaks.  And it has been done because of the great, great love of God for us.

Those who are saved from God’s wrath by faith in Christ are indeed transformed, and the love of Christ fills their heart. These people become a new kind of incarnation of Christ, the “hands and feet,” as it were, of the Savior. Through them, the world is bettered in innumerable ways. But the primary impact they bring is through the heralding of the Good News of salvation to those who have not yet heard it or believed it.

If those unbelievers among us only have their lives improved by the temporary benefits of Christian love and charity, then such “saving” is pointless because ultimately, the “saved” will spend an eternity in Hell. We do well to remember that every person who encountered Jesus at His first coming—those  He taught, those He loved, those He healed, even those He raised from the dead—eventually all died and faced eternity.  Their true salvation was conditional upon their response to Jesus’ exhortation to repent and believe. His call to this salvation continues on until He comes again.