Freely Justified
Romans 3:19-28; John 8:31-36
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Romans 3:23-24 23 For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.”
Dear fellow redeemed in Christ our Lord… The 16th century world of Martin Luther’s day and the 21st century world of our day are obviously quite different. His was a time dominated by princes and popes and the widespread fear of purgatory when a person died, not to mention very little if any accurate teaching about God and Christ and salvation. That is why the indulgences being sold by the church were initially such a huge success; people were sincerely afraid of God’s judgment, and they were willing to be duped and scared into buying their way out of it. Their worldview was very much focused on finding a way to be good enough to be saved from the punishment their sins deserved. The promise that indulgences could free people from that was an extremely appealing solution for many.
On the other hand, ours is a time dominated by notions of freedom and equality and the assumption that almost everyone will have a nice afterlife. Fear of God’s judgment isn’t what drives things anymore; self-fulfillment does. The god most people conceive of today isn’t the God of the Bible, but just sort of a nice, generic, supernatural force. And while people certainly still may not like the thought of dying, the belief at least on the surface is that unless you’re a super evil person, you’ll end up in heaven. If you want proof of that, think of how many funeral visitations you’ve been to where the standard conversation is to say that the deceased is in a “better place.”
So, we can be tempted to think that the things that Luther and the Reformation were about – things like sin and hell and the cross and reconciliation with God – while they may have been important at one time, are no longer that big of a deal. The world has changed.
All too many people think that the church needs to move on to other things and address more contemporary and relevant questions. A gross example of that Pope Francis’ approval of same-sex civil unions this past week – further evidence indeed that the office of the papacy is that of the Antichrist, as our Lutheran Confessions correctly confess.
But in truth what ails the church today is that the problem Luther faced has ceased being our problem. Technology has advanced, times have changed, but the fallen sinful human nature hasn’t. We need to learn to start asking the right questions again, chief among them being, “How can we be rescued from the slavery of our sins and the bondage of death and the very real judgment of God?” For Luther, the question was very personal: “How can a sinner like me be redeemed? How can I find a God of mercy?”
Dear friends, we ought not be drawn away by the self-absorbed “God questions” of our age: How can I find a God who can make my life better? How can God give me a life of purpose? How can I be happy and fulfilled? Notice in those questions that God is nothing more than a means to an end; He’s just a way of getting where I want to be. But God is never merely a means to an end. God IS the end; He is the goal we seek: the God of mercy. Our desire is to be with this God; that is what heaven is. He is Himself the fullness of the life that we are looking for. Part of the problem, then, is that we have stopped asking the right questions. God’s Word is not about meeting our needs; it is about giving us needs worth having.
Here, then is the diagnosis of our need from God’s Word; from the Epistle: “Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God. Therefore, by the deeds of the law no flesh will be justified in His sight, for by the law is the knowledge of sin.” Since God’s Law declares all to be guilty and condemned before Him, our greatest need is to escape that and be delivered from it. And the Law itself cannot help us. All the Law can do is point the finger at us and tell us to shut our trap. We have nothing to say in our own defense – no excuses, no justifications, no “but I did the best I could.” “Just zip it”, the Law says. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” There’s nothing we can say to help.
For Luther, the typical way to try to escape God’s wrath was through human effort, things like his duties as a monk, his life of self-denial, his attempts to list and repent of every single sin in confession and to do proper penance to pay for and make up for those sins. But none of that satisfied him or gave him any peace.
Luther had been given a gift by God: the gift of a tender and strong conscience. Today, we might call that a curse. The key to success in this world, and even sometimes in church hierarchy, is compromise. But with each compromise, the conscience is deadened a little bit more, and God’s Word is set aside a little bit more. With each compromise you and I make, we have to tell ourselves, “The warnings of God’s Word don’t really apply to me.” Deluding ourselves that it is for a greater good, it is easy to set aside what we have learned from Scripture until, ultimately, it no longer bothers us at all.
But Luther’s conscience would not let him stop being bothered, which was a very good thing. Hebrews 12:29 says, “Our God is a consuming fire.” These things are not trifling matters. The fact that we do not tremble more often at God’s Word is a sign of how we have compromised our own consciences, as well as how much we have taken God’s Word of Law and Gospel for granted.
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What made the Reformation finally occur was when the pure light of the life-giving Gospel shone through clearly and began to lift the burden of the Law from Luther. That didn’t happen through some mystical experience or an emotional conversion or a commitment to obedience; it happened through a rediscovery of the Scriptural teaching about God’s righteousness and mercy.
This is what that teaching is: What God demands in the Law under threat of punishment, He gives by pure grace in the Gospel, as an undeserved gift. In the Law, God condemns our unrighteousness, but in the Gospel, God freely gives us His own righteousness. As Paul says in Romans 1:16-17, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes. . . For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, ‘The just shall live by faith.’” In other words, the Gospel makes known the righteousness of God, not as demands on us but as a gift to us.
God isn’t saying, “See how righteous I am; now you better measure up and be like Me,” but rather, “Here, take My righteousness, wear it as your own; it’s yours, bought and paid for by Me.” In His Word God reveals and gives us His righteousness, so that through God-given faith in the Gospel, we are 100% holy and guiltless in His sight. These words of Scripture revealed the answer to Luther’s terrifying question: “How can I find a God of mercy?” It’s all there and given in Jesus, given in God’s mercy in the flesh.
St. Paul writes in the today’s Epistle, Since, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” we are “justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” Pay close attention to those words. You are justified freely by His grace: no strings or conditions attached. That is what grace is, an undeserved gift of love. You don’t have to justify yourself, you don’t have to look for loopholes, you don’t have to prove yourself, you don’t have to build yourself up by what you do. In fact, you can’t do any of those things. God Himself justifies you. God Himself declares you righteous. God puts you right with Himself solely and completely based on the works of Christ Jesus His Son. And it is all yours when you believe it by justifying faith.
And here in particular is what Christ has done for you: the Epistle says that the Lord Jesus redeemed you. He bought you back out of your slavery to sin and Satan and the grave. He purchased you with His holy precious blood and with His innocent suffering and death. He traded places with you and allowed Himself to be enslaved, captured, and condemned on the cross as if He were the sinner, as if He were guilty of every wrong that has ever been done and every failure to do what is right.
He took your place in the chains of death to set you free, so that you would take His place and be with Him in everlasting life. Through His sacred death, Jesus broke your bonds and conquered your slave masters so that they have no more eternal power over you. In Christ, the Son of God, you are truly free, you are truly released, you are truly and totally forgiven and you are truly alive. Jesus Himself said, “If the Son makes you free, then you shall be free indeed” (Jn 8:36).
That merciful release and freedom given only in Christ is what Luther needed; it is what we need; it is what every age needs. It doesn’t change with the times. Whether in the middle ages or this postmodern age, this unchanging truth remains: God’s wrath against sinners has been completely turned away through Christ’s suffering and death on the cross. He did that for you. God doesn’t hate you, He loves you in Christ. He has chosen you as His own and brought you out of darkness, so that you may live under Him in His kingdom in everlasting righteousness, innocence, and blessedness. You are no longer slaves, you are beloved children in the household of God. That is the good news of the Gospel of Jesus.
So if we really want things to be put right again and be renewed in our Christian faith, then let us always keep the Reformation question central to our own theology and belief: “How can I find a God of mercy?” And hearing the answer in God’s Word – that we are justified and declared righteous “through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” alone, given by grace alone in preaching and the Sacraments, received through faith alone – then we will always be on the right track. Then we will be freed to do truly good works, works performed not out of fear of punishment or to acquire our own salvation or to work off our sins, but works performed in the sure confidence that we are already saved in Christ. Then our works become those done in gratitude to God for the good of our neighbor as we live out the callings God has given us in the home and work and state and church. This is the Scriptural, Reformation flow of good works: not us to God, but God to us and then through us in love to our neighbor in the world.
One final thought: The Epistle reading said that boasting is excluded. That is an important thing for us to remember at a Reformation celebration. It is not just that we shouldn’t boast in our own good works (since they are all from God), it is also that we shouldn’t boast in our Lutheranism for its own sake in some sort of puffed up and self-righteous way. If we do that, then we are denying our own confession of faith. We are not justified by being Lutheran. Martin Luther didn’t save anyone. We are freely justified by faith in Christ alone, and even that faith is a gift of the Gospel. That’s where the focus must stay: always on Jesus and His Word. As Paul writes (Gal 6:14), “But God forbid that I should boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
And as our Lord Himself says, “If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
Come, now, to the altar to receive the true body and blood of Jesus – the One who has justified you freely by His grace.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
