The justification of sinners is received as God’s gift, not because of religious or moral activity. Justification is a legal term, appropriated by the Apostle Paul to express God’s great gift.
In this great, narrative sentence, there is one subject and a countless number of direct objects. Let us begin with the objects of the subject.
Faith in God is essential. Without faith, we are like ships tossed about on the waves. But if Christ was not raised from the dead, our faith is futile.
Luther wanted unity in the Church, but not if it meant sacrificing the very truths that upheld that Church. Three memorable, Latin slogans that came out of the Lutheran reform movement can help us determine when we are parting from Christian truth.
The force of Luther’s writing up to this point is that the German reformers and the church in Rome held to the same basic, credal beliefs.
When we confess that we “believe in God,” we are saying that we believe in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.
With the Nicene Creed, Luther confessed that God the Father is eternal, that the Son is eternally begotten of the Father, and that the Holy Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son.
Luther begins with the beginning: that God is that One God, the Only God, who has created everything. This beginning includes the great mystery of the Christian faith...
Oh! the dawn of that glorious Day! When Jesus returns, what need will there be of Councils? Every knee will bow before him and his word will be enough for all.
We busy ourselves with a kind of mundane yet exuberant piety, the machinations of religion, so that we might deceive ourselves (and others, I suppose) into thinking we are holy and righteous.
All those things that Luther denounced were outward displays. They ought to be fixed, but dealing with those outer matters neglects the more important things, the inner matters that end up improving the outer.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. The old adage rings as true today as it seems it did in Luther’s day.
It was after Jesus saw the desolate villages, the “sheep without a shepherd,” that he called the twelve disciples. God equips his Church with a variety of vocations...
The Spirit of God often uses new situations to change our perspective, to bring us to repentance. We are all sinners, so we are all in need of daily and constant repentance.
God uses his Word and Sacraments to grow our faith, and increase and unify the Church. Nevertheless, his Word and Sacraments are distributed by the work of his Spirit through people.
Luther is still speaking primarily of the fanatics, the schwärmerei, those who used Luther’s words to their own ends. They twisted his teachings, bringing division to the church instead of reform.