1 Corinthians 14:8 - The Lutheran Reformation: A Clear Trumpet Blast - October 28, 2018

Martin Luther was neither the first nor the last person to point out the theological and moral errors of the Roman Catholic church. Nor were the Lutherans the only group to break away from Rome after she rejected calls for reform. And yet, while the names of protestant leaders like John Huss, John Calvin, and John Wycliffe are unknown to most people, even the secular world recognized Martin Luther as the 3rd most influential person of the last millennium. [1] What was Luther’s secret? It wasn’t Luther at all; it was the weapon God gave him! Sola scriptura – the principle that Scripture is the only rule and norm for Christian teaching and living. Based on Scripture alone, Luther’s preaching and teaching sounded through the confusion of his day like a clear trumpet blast – that not only defeated the man-made arguments of religious experts but spoke comfort and peace to the lost, the wandering, the suffering and the dying.

We are once again living in a morally and theologically confused age. We live in a time when it is legal for a woman to murder the unborn child in her womb but spanking a child is viewed as child abuse; when the gift of marriage God designed for one man and one woman has been redefined to include two women or two men…and only the Lord knows who or what else; when our own local public schools have bought into the lie that you can change your gender as easily as you change your clothes. [2] And even in the Christian church there is an astonishing amount of confusion regarding how a person is saved – with most churches teaching that it’s a cooperative effort between God and man. Because the confusion of our world constantly threatens to drown out the truth, it is all-important that we rededicate ourselves to the clear trumpet blast of sola scriptura – with God’s promise that his Word provides the only solid foundation for both morality and faith.

In the context of 1 Corinthians 14, Paul is admonishing the Corinthians for their practice of speaking in tongues (foreign languages) in the worship service. Paul doesn’t mince words, he says that if the church’s message is confused or compromised or unintelligible – it’s useless. He concludes: in the church I would rather speak five intelligible words to instruct others than ten thousand words in a tongue. (1 Corinthians 14:19) In Luther’s day, the church had lost the clear trumpet blast of the moral principles God had engraved in stone on Mt. Sinai. The Roman Catholic church had, instead, invented their own morality – a morality by which they hoped, and even worse, taught others to hope, to please God and earn salvation. For years, Luther himself believed that taking monastic vows were the surest route to heaven; that there was moral value in walking around barefoot – especially in winter; in starving and beating himself; in renouncing marriage and living in poverty. Do these things, he was told, and God will be happy with you. So he did it. He became a model monk who desperately tried to find peace for his heart by torturing his body. He said “I was a good monk, and I kept the rules of my order so strictly that I may say that if ever a monk got to heaven by his monkery, it was I.” [3]  

However, when God brought Luther into the light of his grace and opened his eyes to understand Scripture, he began to see the Law clearly. He learned the simple but profound truth that moral living is as simple as doing what God tells you to do in precisely the way God tells you to do it when he tells you to do it. Luther’s revolutionary discovery was that the only sure guide for human behavior is not the manmade laws of the church or society, but the Law of God found in the written Word of God. And Luther didn’t keep his discovery to himself, he passed it on to future generations – to us – in his catechisms.

Scripture alone – and nothing and no one else – fixes the moral limits God has established for mankind. And by God’s grace, Luther discovered, embraced, and explained these limits. The question is: does the written, revealed will of God establish the limits of right and wrong for us? Maybe an even more important question is: do we know the written and revealed will of God? When is the last time we cracked open the catechism? Can we all recite the 10 commandments and their meanings? If you don’t know God’s written, revealed, will by heart – how on earth could you ever follow it, and, just as importantly, how could you ever sound the clear trumpet blast of God’s unchanging will to others?

The fact is that our society is a moral wasteland. The world teaches a morality that is relative – that right and wrong are constantly shifting based on the situation, the person, the feelings and emotions involved. Relativism is no way to live – it leads only to constant uncertainty, doubt and contradiction – and eventually, hell. And, unfortunately, the world’s relativism has seeped into the church. Instead of asking what does the Scripture say? (Romans 4:3) many churches ask “what does the latest Christian best-seller say?” “what does your heart say?” “what makes sense?” “what is popular and acceptable to the world?” Basing morality on the wrong foundation is how we’ve gotten to the point that the “Lutheran” church down the street has a female pastor [4], that churches are consecrating homosexual marriages, that messages of equality and tolerance and climate change and social justice have taken the place of Law and Gospel in sermons.

If the church of Luther’s day needed a reformation, a return to the fixed moral standard established by God himself, the church of our day needs it even more – if in a little different way. By God’s grace Luther set the church free from a system of morality that was subject to the will of one man: the pope. The church today needs to be set free from a system of morality that is subject to the will of anyone and everyone. You’ve probably heard someone say that they are “spiritual but not religious.” What they mean is that they their moral basis is not the objective Word of God but their own subjective feelings. In other words, they base their morality on their own conscience. (Your conscience is that little voice in your head that tells you whether what you are doing is right or wrong.) Now, that sounds good – until you remember that since the Fall into sin, our consciences have been broken. (Jeremiah 17:9) Certainly Jesus promised freedom for our consciences in our lesson from John 8 – not freedom from God’s law but freedom from our sins against God’s law. In fact, Jesus said in Matthew: do not think I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. (Matthew 5:17-18) We are not free to choose our own moral standards, we are still bound by the moral will of our Creator. For all the faults of the Church in the middle ages, they at least believed in a fixed standard for right and wrong – even if it was the warped standard established by the pope. Today is much more like the time of the Judges in the OT, when everyone did as he saw fit. (Judges 21:25)

In the moral bankruptcy and confusion of our time, the church – our church – must once again be the trumpet that gives a bold and clear blast. We must boldly preach and teach that the only certain foundation for morality is God’s law – summarized in the 10 Commandments. A law that is good and perfect (Psalm 19:7), a law in which God himself, tells us what he demands of us, a law by which all people will be judged, a law that demands perfect obedience (not our best effort), a law that declares that the wrath of God and eternal punishment in hell is real for all who break it, even once.

Because only when the Law’s threats and curses are proclaimed clearly and faithfully will we see how far short we have fallen, only then will we despair of ever saving ourselves, only then will we fall on our faces and plead for God’s mercy – only then will we ask the most important question anyone could ever ask: How then can I be saved? (Matthew 19:25) Or as Luther put it: how can I find a gracious God? That’s the question that drove Luther – how can he obtain God’s favor? No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t find the answer to that question in the man-made rules of the Catholic church or in his own conscience and obedience. But he did find it in the Gospel and he shared his discovery with the entire Church. He became a trumpet giving sinners a clear and certain call – in providing hopeless sinners a firm foundation for their faith. Again, Luther’s brilliance lay in his simplicity. If you want to know how to be saved from your sins, if you want a solid foundation for your faith and a solid anchor for your hope – read the Bible. Sola scriptura is not only the only firm foundation for morality, it is the only firm foundation for faith.

In the Middle Ages, the church had lost the Gospel tune. More and more of the so-called theological experts had drifted away from the plain, simple meaning of Scripture because they were offended by its simplicity and thought that something so simple couldn’t possibly be divine. Instead, they tried to find a deeper, more important, more spiritual meaning – a meaning that lay hidden somewhere behind (or apart from) the black and white of Scripture. Your average Christian was told that only an “expert” with a wild imagination could really know and interpret what the Bible had to say. And when it became clear that this practice only led to confusion (and despair), the church invented the doctrine that only the pope could properly interpret and explain Scripture.

Here, too, Luther made a discovery that each generation must make their own: the Bible says what it means and means what it says. If you want to know what the Bible means, read the Bible. This does not mean that everything in the Bible is perfectly clear and understandable with just a quick reading. In fact, apart from the Spirit’s gift of faith it’s all foolishness! (1 Corinthians 1:18) But it does mean that if you can understand the words, you can understand what God wants you to know and believe. Scripture is clear and understandable – it is a clear trumpet blast. (see Psalm 119:105; 2 Timothy 3:14-17; 2 Peter 1:16-21) That’s why Luther translated the Bible into German – so that everyone could read it. That’s why next to worship, the second most important thing we can do is study the Bible – both here in Sunday school and Bible class and in our own homes.

But, as obvious as that may appear to be, it is again being lost in our time. It is being destroyed by those who tell us that there is a deeper meaning behind the simple words of Scripture; that the Bible contains God’s Word, but it also contains errors; that much of the Bible (especially the miracles) are just myths. But perhaps the single most destructive force is simply that many Christians don’t know Scripture because they don’t read the Bible. The result of all this is that the Bible has again become what it was in the Middle Ages – an unclear and mysterious book that very few people actually read and even fewer people believe. That is why today’s church is in need of a reformation just as much as the Catholic church was in the days of Luther.

Why? Why continue to sound the trumpet blast of sola scriptura in a world where everything is subjective and words don’t really have any meaning? Because our salvation depends on it. Because “Jesus loves me, this I know; for the Bible tells me so!” Nothing is more important than Scripture because Scripture is the only pipeline we have to our Savior, Jesus Christ. We know that God so loved the world that he sent his only Son to save the world – only because the Bible tells us this. We know that God credits Jesus’ perfect life to our accounts – only because the Bible tells us so. We know that Jesus has paid for all the times we followed our own standards for morality rather than God’s – only because the Bible tells us so. We know that when we die we will go to heaven – only because the Bible tells us so. We know that until then, Jesus is ruling and guiding all things in this world for our eternal good – only because the Bible tells us so. The only clear, certain, unchanging thing that I can pass on to Jude, that any of us can pass on to the next generation is what the Bible says, because even though the grass withers and the flowers fall…the word of the Lord stand forever. (1 Peter 1:25)

God grant that we may boldly continue in our Lutheran heritage: to sound the crystal clear trumpet blast of sola Scriptura to a confused and dying world – that we and our neighbors and our children may have a firm foundation for morality, for faith, and for the hope of eternal life. Amen. [5]

[1] https://wmich.edu/mus-gened/mus170/biography100

[2] https://www.mcfarland.k12.wi.us/district/Dist-NonDscrmntn.cfm

[3] https://www.rpmministries.org/2012/01/quotes-of-note-martin-luther-master-pastor-part-9/

[4] http://www.mcfarlandlutheran.org/index.php?com=ics_content&content_id=31

[5] Adapted from Reformation sermon by Siegbert Becker (The Word Goes On, p. 272-276)