Welcome to the 2013 Shepherds
Conference. Here I stand, the courageous
preaching of Martin Luther, Steve Lawson. Martin Luther, this is
one of the greatest figures in all of church history, this great
Reformer who was the pioneer Reformer in the 16th century
whom God used mightily to really launch the great Reformation. As we look at Luther in this
session, I want the Lord to stir our hearts and for us to be like
Luther in this sense. The boldness of Luther is what
stands out to me. When I think of Calvin, I think
of his exegetical genius. When I think of Jonathan Edwards,
I think of his theological profundity. When I think of Spurgeon, I think
of his evangelistic zeal. And I would say the same for
George Whitefield. When we think of Martin Luther, to me what
comes immediately to mind is the boldness and the courage
with which he spoke. He was undaunted. And I believe
that in this hour, every one of us in this room needs an IV
hookup of boldness. The word boldness actually means
out of the Greek language, it means all speech. It's two words
that are brought together to form one word and it means all
speech. It does not have so much to do with the tone of one's
voice, meaning that you start yelling in order to become bold.
The idea is that you tell it all, that you hold nothing back,
that you proclaim the full counsel of God. that you speak those
truths even that are the hard sayings of Christ, those things
that are difficult for other people to hear. That was Martin
Luther. And boldness also speaks to when we find ourselves in
very difficult situations that we step forward and we speak
the mind of God to a particular matter. Now that does not give
us license to be ungracious or to be unkind, but it does demand
of us that we stand up and we speak up. And every one of us
in this room needs to be bold in the Lord. In the book of Acts
when they were filled with the Holy Spirit, they spoke the Word
of God with boldness. And so what we should take from
Luther is his extraordinary boldness. Now what I want to do is really
just have two main headings of thought. I want to first talk
about the life of Martin Luther and then second The preaching,
the bold preaching of Martin Luther. Let's take a moment just
to consider the life of Martin Luther. He was born in 1483 in
Germany. His father was a minor, M-I-N-E-R,
and had some resources to send his son to school. Martin Luther
was well-educated. He went to the University of
Erfurt where he received both a bachelor's and a master's. And one thing that we learn about
these Reformers is that they were brilliant men. None of them
were dummies. And not only were they brilliant,
they were well-educated. And Martin Luther was a well-studied
man. He entered law school. His father
wanted him to be a lawyer. And he entered law school and
he was there no more than one month when he was returning home
from a weekend...returning to school from a weekend. In fact,
was caught in a thunderstorm and it so scared him to death
that he cried out, help me Saint Anna and I will become a monk.
And in that moment, a crisis moment, he made the spontaneous
decision to enter into a monastery. Luther made good on his word
and he entered into the monastery and then he entered into the
Catholic priesthood at age 23. And being in the priesthood,
part of what was the driving motivation of his life was he
was seeking to become so self-righteous that he would find acceptance
with God. He had no concept of the gospel
of grace and he was trying to work his way up the spiritual
ladder to a point where he would attain to acceptance with God. He wrote, I tortured myself with
prayer, fasting, vigils and freezings. In fact, he would sleep outside
in the bitter cold and push his body virtually to the point of
death, all to try to show God how serious he was about finding
a state of righteousness before God. He said, the frost alone
might have killed me. What else did I seek by doing
this? But God was supposed to note
my strict observance of the monastic order and my austere life. I constantly walked in a dream.
In other words, just in a fairyland. and lived in real idolatry for
I did not believe in Christ. I regarded Him only as a severe
and terrible judge." And so he lived his life in just absolute
fear and panic and paranoia because he knew that he was not good
enough to be received by God. He continued to study and he
began to teach theology at the University of Wittenberg. He
started that in 1508. In 1510, he was sent to Rome
on a journey really because he had become so serious about trying
to work his way to acceptance with God, they sent him off to
Rome just on a trip that maybe this would caused him to be not
as strict with himself. And when he came to Rome, he
saw the abuses of the entire Catholic system. He saw the hypocrisy
of the priests. He saw the people standing in
line to look at relics. He saw the people crawling on
their knees up the steps of the pottered Noster. He sang the
Lord's Prayer the whole way up, those 28 steps, and it was said
that if you would crawl up these steps and repeat the Lord's Prayer
at each step, that you would free a soul from purgatory. And Luther said, I wish to liberate
my grandfather from purgatory, and went up the staircase of
Pilate, and when he got to the top, he looked back down and
he saw all of the people just ensnared in this religious superstition
of this Catholic idolatry. And he said, who knows whether
this is true. He went back to Wittenberg very
disillusioned. He received his Doctor of Theology
in 1512. He was a brilliant man and became
a full professor of Bible at the University of Wittenberg,
and he began teaching verse by verse the Bible at the University
of Wittenberg. He first taught Psalms, and then
Romans, and then Galatians, and then Hebrews. And this entire
time, he is unconverted and unregenerate. He began preaching and filling
the pulpit there at the college church in Wittenberg. And in
1517, a man named Tetzel began coming through Saxony, commissioned
by the Pope to raise money for the building of all of these
vast facilities in Rome. He was selling indulgences and
he would show up in a town and with a solemn procession, enter
in with papal coat of arms and a bull of indulgence and a gold-embroiled
velvet cushion with indulgences on these cushions and there would
be this parade into a town and he would set up and began to
preach. And he would say, don't you hear the voice of your wailing
dead parents? And others say, have mercy on
me, have mercy on me because we are in severe punishment and
pain. From this you could redeem us
with small alms and yet you do not want to do so. And then Tetzel
would say, open your ears to your fathers and to your mothers
who are crying out to you, we created you, we fed you, we cared
for you, we left you our temporal goods, why are you so cruel and
harsh to us? Why won't you buy these indulgences
and spring us out of purgatory? And the people began lining up
to give their money to Tetzel who would then send it on to
Rome. And when word came to Martin
Luther that forgiveness of sin was being sold on the open market,
though he himself was unconverted at this time, he could smell
a rat. And he was enraged, and rightly
so. And so he wrote out those famous
95 theses and took it and went to the front door of the castle
church and nailed it to the front door of the church, which served
as kind of a public bulletin board. And what he was wanting
was public debate, public disputation over the practice of the selling
of indulgences. A couple of these theses, number
one, our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, when He said, repent,
willed that the whole life of believers should be repentance. Number two, repentance cannot
be understood to mean sacramental penance, which is administered
by priests. He is unconverted at the time
that He nails these 95 theses to the front door. Some of them
are good, some of them are not good. He is in the process of
things coming into focus, but He's not all the way there yet,
and He's in the midst of a soul search. How is holy God going
to accept me, a sinful man? And in 1519, while he is lecturing
on the Psalms as the full-time professor of Bible at the University
of Wittenberg, he is in the tower of the college church when he
has his conversion experience. Listen to what Luther would write.
And that same year, 1519, I began interpreting the Psalms once
again. I felt confident that I was now more experienced since
I had dealt in university classes with Romans and Galatians and
Hebrews. I had conceived a burning desire
to understand what Paul meant in his letter to the Romans.
And he locked in on Romans 1 verse 17, for the righteous shall live...the
just shall live by faith. And he says, the righteousness
of God, he said, I hated that phrase, that righteousness meant
that God is just and by which He punishes sinners and the unjust. So when he heard the gospel that
the righteous shall live by faith. He felt that God was expecting
him to make himself righteous and only therein would God commend
salvation upon him. He said, I blameless muck that
I was felt that before God I was a sinner with an extremely troubled
conscience. I could not be sure that God
was appeased by my satisfaction. I did not love, no rather I hated
the just God who punishes sinners. In silence, if I did not blaspheme,
then I certainly grumbled vehemently and got angry at God. I said,
is it not enough that we miserable sinners, lost for all eternity
because of original sin, are oppressed by every kind of calamity
through the gospel? And that through the gospel,
God, You do continue to threaten us. I meditated day and night
on those words until at last by the mercy of God I paid attention
to their context, the righteousness of God is revealed in it as it
is written, the just shall live by faith. He said, I began to
understand that in this verse the righteousness of God is that
by which the just person lives as a gift of God that is by faith. I began to understand that this
verse means that the justice of God is revealed through the
gospel, that it is a passive righteousness, that by which
the merciful God justifies us by faith. He said, all at once
I felt I had been born again and entered into paradise itself
through open gates. And then he says, immediately
I saw the whole of Scripture in a different light. And he
now is...has entered into the kingdom of heaven by faith. He
believes in Jesus Christ to receive an alien righteousness, a foreign
righteousness that comes from outside of himself, that salvation
is not a reward for the righteous, it is a gift for the guilty.
And God has now granted the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ
to my life by faith. That was the pivotal moment,
perhaps in all of Western civilization, as Martin Luther now comes to
a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. He now is a dangerous man because
he now is equipped with the gospel of grace and with his potent
personality, he will be a force for God. That same year, in 1519,
he preached a sermon entitled, Two Kinds of Righteousness, and
by which he contrasts the self-righteousness of religious but lost sinners
who tried to work their way up to God by their own righteous
efforts, and then the righteousness of God that is given freely to
sinners. He understood the great exchange
of the cross. that all of our sins laid upon
the Lord Jesus Christ and His righteousness laid upon us when
we believe in Him. Luther began to preach this and
it began to reach the ears of the Roman establishment and he
was called out publicly to appear in public debates, public disputations. He appeared at Augsburg to stand
before Cardinal Cajetan in disputation and he was called to Leipzig
there to appear before Johann Eck, a distinguished Catholic
scholar. The disputation started before
Luther arrived and once he arrived, the question shifted to the issue
of papal authority. And Luther stated that papal
authority was of recent origin and contradicted Scripture. Well,
no one has the nerve and the boldness to say this publicly.
The last person who did was a hundred years earlier, John Hus, and
he was martyred. Luther said, I assert that a
church council has sometimes erred and may sometimes continue
to err, and that a church...nor has a council authority to establish
new articles of faith. A council cannot make divine
right out of that which is by nature not divine right. Councils have contradicted each
other. A simple layman...listen to this
sentence...a simple layman armed with Scripture is to be believed
above a pope or council. Neither the church nor pope can
establish articles of faith. These must come from Scripture.
For the sake of Scripture, we should reject pope and council. Game on. The next year, 1520, Luther writes
three treatises that are provocatively polemic. The first is entitled,
Address to the German Nobility of the German Nation. And in
this, he argues, well the Roman Catholic Church will not reform
itself. It will not correct their own
errors. So Luther calls upon the German nobility the upper
class to step in and to correct all that is wrong in these churches
in Germany. And he makes this statement that
all believers in Jesus Christ are priests unto God, that we
do not need a priest to give us access to God, but that through
the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ we may all appear before the
throne of grace. Two months later, in 1520, he
wrote the Babylonian Captivity of the Church in which he attacked
the sacramental system of the Catholic Church and the efficacy
of the Mass. And then that same year, he wrote
another treatise entitled Freedom of the Christian Man in which
he puts into print the doctrine of justification by faith alone,
And he says, even Antichrist himself could think of nothing
to add to the Pope's wickedness. This is a bold man. The Pope responded by issuing
a papal bull which is a letter of excommunication in which Luther
had forty days to repent. There were 41 charges of heresy
brought against Luther with this papal bull and Luther took the
papal bull, he gathered all of his students at the University
of Wittenberg, went to the outskirts of town and publicly burned the
papal bull. This is a bold man. So he is then issued an edict. to appear at the Diet of Worms
in Worms, Germany. Luther is so bold and he is so
courageous that as he travels from Wittenberg to Worms to make
his journey, he preaches his entire way there. He just goes
from city to city to city, to Hamlet, to village, and he preaches
the true gospel of Jesus Christ. It has been said it is the greatest
preaching journey by any preacher to this point since the missionary
journeys of the Apostle Paul. By the time he arrives at the
Diet of Worms, he is the hero of the people. If for no other
reason, someone has finally...has enough backbone to stand up and
to declare that what the Pope is saying is heretical. As he
walks into the Diet of Worms, there are the ecclesiastical
hierarchy of the day gathered, including the emperor of the
empire. Luther assumes that this will
be a public debate. He walks in very naively in that
sense. In reality, it was a heresy trial. There was a table in the middle
of the room. All of Luther's books that he has written are
on the table. The prosecuting attorney from
Rome steps to the forefront and asks Luther two questions. Are
these your books and will you recant? Luther understood the
magnitude of the moment as he is being called on the carpet.
He asks for a night to think this through because he knows
his head will be on the line. He appears the next day. Martin
Luther, are these your books and will you recant? Luther knew
he could not recant and he will argue, my books are full of the
Word of God. To recant of my books is to recant
of the Bible itself. So Luther issued these now famous
words. I am bound to the Scriptures,
I have quoted, and my conscience is held captive to the Word of
God. I cannot and will not retract
anything since it is neither safe nor right to go against
conscience. I can do no other. Here I stand. God, help me." And with that,
Luther drew a line in the sand. He thrust his spear. into the
sand, he was taking his stand on the Word of God. And the very
gospel of Jesus Christ is at stake. Wise is the man who knows
which hills to die on. Wise is the man who knows that
he must be willing to put his soul and his neck on the line
when the gospel of Jesus Christ is at stake. This is not a peripheral
issue. What is on the table here is
how can sinful man be accepted by holy God, what is the gospel,
and what is required by the terms of the gospel to receive its
grace. Luther was given some forty days
to get his affairs in order. He would be a wanted man with
a price on his head. As he left Worms, He was unexpectedly
kidnapped by some of his friends. They put a mask over his head.
He did not know where he was going. They took him to the Wartburg
Castle where there he was hidden in obscurity for the next nine
months. Luther is like a caged lion in
the Wartburg Castle. And as he sits there waiting
for some time to pass, he translates the New Testament into the German
language. He is a brilliant professor with
a doctorate. And by translating the Bible
into the German language, Luther puts the Bible into the hands
of the people. It was just earlier that Gutenberg
has invented the printing press. They're in Germany. And in the
remarkable providence of God, Luther now translates the Bible
into German and the printing presses begin to roll and the
common people of the day now have the Bible in their own language. And this would become virtually
a dictionary for the German language to standardize the spelling of
words in German. Luther becomes...when at once
released, he becomes a mighty Reformer, a mighty preacher of
the Word of God. He is a force to be reckoned
with as a man who is deeply entrenched in the Word of God. Erasmus was
the leading humanist of the day, a brilliant intellect, really
a part of the afterglow of the Renaissance, wanting to go back
to ancient manuscripts and to revive interest in ancient literature. And Erasmus himself had gone
throughout all Europe and gathered up ancient copies of Greek text
and Erasmus was the one who pulled together the first Greek New
Testament. It's been well said that Erasmus
laid the egg that Luther would hatch. He would take that Greek
New Testament...the Greek New Testament text and use it to
study and to exegete and to preach. Erasmus, wanting to hedge Luther
and put a stop to his ministry, came out with a book and directed
at Luther called The Freedom of the Will. Erasmus is a lost
man. Erasmus is just a humanistic
philosopher. He's a secular educator, if you
will. And Luther did not respond. Luther's
never not responded to anything. There was no answer from Luther.
A long period of time went and then Luther fired back with his
magnum opus, the bondage of the will. Luther begins The Bondage
of the Will by saying, oh Erasmus, with your towering intellect
and with your literary skills and with your commanding vocabulary,
all at your disposal to present your position is like serving
dung on a silver platter. That's how the book begins. And Luther systematically begins
to present the true saving gospel of Jesus Christ, but more than
that, he presents the case for sovereign grace, the doctrines
of election and predestination and monergistic regeneration. Luther says, oh Erasmus, I have
an embarrassment of weaponry at my disposal. I only need to
call two generals to the forefront and I now call the Apostle John
and the Apostle Paul to come stand at my side. And Luther
goes through the gospel of John, 1 John, he then goes through
Romans and Galatians and Paul's other epistles and he presents
an insurmountable case. for the bondage of the human
will and the sinner's total dependence upon the divine electing initiative
of God in salvation to call out and call to Himself all whom
He chose before the foundation of the world. Every time Luther
is challenged He responds heroically. He responds as a champion of
the faith. He responds in gallant fashion. There is no reverse gear in Martin
Luther. He is ready to storm to the front
lines of any battle and hold high the banner of truth. And
not only to declare what is true, but he will also refute that
which is in error. Titus 1 verse 9 says, and an
elder must be able to teach sound doctrine and to refute those
who contradict. It is a sharp two-edged sword,
is it not? It cuts both ways. We both build
up and we tear down. We both uproot and we plant. And Martin Luther was so bold
that he had this twofold ministry. Luther overwhelmingly won that
dispute. His books are being translated
and are being printed and they're being sent across the English
Channel and men are gathering at Oxford and they're gathering
at Cambridge and they are reading the works of Luther and they're
being passed down to Paris and to the University of Paris and
the elite universities of the day and young men with open minds
and well-trained thought processes They are reading the works of
Luther and the Reformation is being...the flame is being fanned
on university campuses and young men like William Tyndale and
so many other martyrs in the English Reformation, they came
to a saving knowledge of Christ through the writings of Luther. Luther in 1525. married Katie
Von Bora. He was 42, she was 26 and he
said as a priest that he married Katie Von Bora just to upset
the Pope. He probably didn't tell her that
on their wedding night, but he said, I wanted to make the angels
laugh and the devils weep. His influence is spreading far
and wide throughout Germany and students are now coming to Luther
and they're coming to Wittenberg and they're sitting at his feet
as well. In 1527, it was known as the
dark year of Luther's life. all of the pressures of this
emerging Reformation as it is literally Luther against the
world. He is known, he's being called
the Athanasius of the sixteenth century, Contra Manda, against
the world. There's not another church for
Luther to go to down the street to join. I mean, there's the
Catholic church and there is darkness. And Luther is standing
up to the entire ecclesiastical hierarchy of the day. In 1527,
he's beginning to suffer chest pains and dizziness and fainting
spells. At the dinner table, his family
is having to literally gather him in their arms and carry him
to the bedroom and just drop him in the bed and he will come
back to consciousness. The black plague is beginning
to spread through Europe and through Germany and one of the
great issues was, for Luther, do I stay in Wittenberg or do
I flee with everyone else? And Luther was so courageous
and so bold, he said, I cannot leave my flock. I cannot leave
those who sit under my preaching. And he chose to stay in Wittenberg
as the...as the black plague was spreading, his own son, two
years old. almost died. He converted his
house into a hospital to care for those who were dying. And the mounting pressure of
all of this in 1527, Luther could barely bear it. He read the Psalms. Romans gave him his theology,
but Psalms gave him his courage. Psalms gave him his boldness.
And as he read Psalm 46, He took pen in hand and he wrote his
most famous hymn, A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, A Bulwark Never Failing. He was in the midst of swirling
adversity on every side as he wrote this. He wasn't sitting
at Starbucks in an air-conditioned building trying to meet a music
contract and write a song. No, it was out of the intense
pressure that he was feeling that he became even all the more
anchored to God. His influence continued to spread
to virtually every city in Germany and he is now a one-man spiritual
SWAT team. By the preaching of the Word
and the writing of the Word and wherever he would travel, people
called upon him to preach. He became virtually a preaching
machine as well as a prolific author. He would go on to have
six children, three boys, three girls. And he just lived the
life of twenty men. He lived the life of thirty men.
Now one thing about these Reformers, they were industrious, they were
energetic, they were driven men. Luther's house that he lived
in had been the monastery, it was given to him and his students
would just move in with him. And every night at dinner, they
would gather around the dinner table and the more the merrier.
And they would just ask him questions to get him talking about the
Bible and theology and students began to write down his answers
and those answers are now in what is known as table talks.
as Luther just holds court at his dining room table and expounds
on the Word of God and the issues of the day. When he came to the
end of his life in 1546, he knew the end had come when
he came to write his last will and testament knowing he would
never return back to Wittenberg alive. He began his last will
and testament this way. I am well-known in heaven and
on earth and in hell." That's the way we need to be.
We need to be well-known in heaven. We need to be well-known on the
earth. And we need to be such a force for God that we are well-known
in hell as well. That was Martin Luther. And as
he was on his desk bed, his last words were, we are beggars. This is true. In no way was he
relying upon his own self-righteousness. In no way was he still embroiled
in a maze of self-efforts to commend himself to God. To the
end of his life, he understood, in my hands no price I bring,
simply to Thy cross I cling. That's just a brief overview
of his life. And I hope you picked up a thread that was running
through his life, whether he is standing in Wittenberg, nailing
his 95 theses to the front door, whether he is in public dispute
at Augsburg or at Leipzig, whether he is at the Diet of Worms, whether
he has been served the papal bull, at every juncture of his
life, he responds with heroic boldness. Men, I call upon each
and every one of us to be bold in our faith. We must be cloaked
in humility and we must be compassionate and tender-hearted, but we must
not be cowards either. And we must be strong in the
grace that is in the Lord Jesus Christ. And we must know what
it is to take a stand for the truth in this hour in which we
live. We need more of this Luther-like
spirit within us. In the time that remains, I want
to talk to you about the preaching of Martin Luther. Martin Luther
was a preacher of the Word of God. We think of these Reformers
as authors and theologians and exegetes and men of the pen. It's important that we note that
every one of these Reformers were first and foremost preachers
of the Word of God. They had a thundering voice and
they mounted the pulpit and they preached the Word of God with
great energy and passion. Luther preached two or three
times every Sunday in Wittenberg, as well as multiple times throughout
the week. It is estimated he preached some
six thousand sermons. during his ministry there. Even
in 1528 during the Black Plague and with all of his headaches
and dizzy spells, etc., he preached some 200 sermons that year. That's four times a week. He's
pumping it out, preaching the Word and pressing on. In 1529
he preached 18 times within 11 days. Luther said, often I preach
four sermons on one day. Let me give you some marks of
his preaching. Let me just give you some headings that will serve
as bullet points regarding the preaching of Martin Luther. First of all, and this is where
it has to begin, for any preacher worth his salt, number one, he
was a biblical preacher. When he stepped into the pulpit,
it was for one reason only, it was to open the Bible and to
preach the Word of God. He was probably the leading authority
of the history of preaching in this generation, writes, Luther
is always an expository preacher, close quote. Luther said, this
is the sum of the matter, let everything be done so that the
Word may have free course instead of the prattling and rattling
that has been the rule. We can spare everything except
the Word. In other words, he's saying,
I'm open to discuss anything that goes on in the ministries
of this church except for the preaching and the teaching of
the Word of God. That will never be up for debate. Luther said,
in my sermons I bury myself to take just one passage. and there
I stay so the hearers may say, that was the sermon." Did you
get that? He starts with a text, He stays
with the text, and when the people leave, well the text was the
sermon. How simple is this? Yet it's
what God has called us to do. He said a good preacher invests
everything in the Word. He said, the pulpit is the throne
for the Word of God. This is how God rules and reigns
in His church. It is with an open Bible and
in the preaching of the Word of God, it mediates the reign
of God in the life of the whole church. He said, every time the
church gathers, God's Word needs to be preached. In other words,
there's no reason for us to ever have a church meeting without
the Word of God being central and primary. He said, it is disgraceful
for the lawyer to desert his brief, it is even more disgraceful
for the preacher to desert his text. He said, the highest worship
of God is the preaching of the Word. Now Luther would say that
it is the preacher who is the worship leader. The other man
is the music leader. Whoever holds the Word of God
and preaches the Word of God, that is the highest form of worship
in the church. He said, we make a great difference
between God's Word and the Word of man. A man's Word is a little
sound, it flies into the air and soon vanishes. But the Word
of God is greater than heaven and earth. Yes, greater than
death and hell, for it has the power of God and endures forever. He was a biblical preacher. He
challenges all of us here today who have any kind of ministry
in the church or out of the church, we must be messengers of the
Word of God. Second, he was a well-studied
preacher. Luther was a brilliant man. He was a thorough student
of Scripture. He had a bachelor's degree, a
master's degree, a doctorate in theology. He was professor
of Bible. He was a prolific author of theology. He had a steel trap mind and
he used it in his sermon preparation. He was constantly reading and
studying the Word of God. He said, for a number of years,
I have now annually read through the Bible twice, meaning twice
a year. If the Bible were a large mighty
tree and all its words were little branches, I have tapped at all
the branches eager to know what was there and what it had to
offer." He said, I shake the whole tree that the ripest fruit
may fall. I climb the tree and shake each
limb and then each branch and then each twig and I look under
each leaf. He said, he who is well acquainted
with Scripture is a distinguished theologian. He was committed
to studying the Bible in the original languages. He was committed
to ad fontes, back to the fount, back to the source. He said the
languages are the scabbard that contains the sword of the Spirit.
They are the case which contains the priceless jewel. It was because
of his understanding of the righteousness of God that he came to the knowledge
of the gospel. He was committed to a literal
interpretation of Scripture in his study. He sought the plain
meaning of Scripture. He said, before I was acquainted
with theology, I dealt largely in allegories, which is a kind
of idle craft. He said, my best craft is to
give the Scripture its plain meaning. Calvin would say the
same. He would say the proper interpretation
of any text of Scripture is the simplest, the plainest, the most
normal meaning of the text. Granted, some texts are harder
to understand than others and we have to use cross-references
to gain a fuller understanding, but for the most part, these
Reformers were fiercely committed to the plain meaning of Scripture. He said, when I was a monk, I
was a master in the use of allegory. I allegorized everything. He
says, to allegorize is to juggle the Scripture. He said, allegories
are empty speculations and as it were, the scum of Holy Scripture. He said, allegories are awkward,
absurd, invented, obsolete, loose rags. He said, allegorizing is
a mere monkey game. He said, allegory is a sort of
a beautiful harlot who proves herself seductive to idle men. He said, the Bible treated allegorically
becomes putty in the hand of the exegete. In other words,
you can shape that wax nose into whatever form you so desire. You can make the Bible say anything
you want it to say if you go allegorical. He said, this is
the true method of interpretation which puts Scripture alongside
of Scripture. The analogy of Scripture that
Dr. MacArthur spoke of earlier today in the Q&A, that the greatest
interpreter of the Bible is Scripture itself, that the Bible speaks
with one voice, that the Bible never contradicts itself. That
was Luther's fundamental commitment. And he said that it is a book
that is written with perpiscuity, that means with clarity and lucidness. Rome said, no one can understand
the Bible, that's why we can't let you have one because you're
too stupid to understand it. That is why you need us in Rome
to tell you what the Bible says. There's no way you could read
it. Luther said, hogwash. He said, there is not a book...there
is not on earth a book more lucidly written than the Holy Scriptures. He said the Bible is to be read
and understood with a grammatical, literal meaning. At the same
time, he knew he was totally dependent upon the Holy Spirit
as he studied the Scripture. He said the Holy Scripture cannot
be penetrated by talent and study alone. He said, your first duty
in studying the Bible is to pray that God may graciously grant
you an understanding of His words. For no master of the divine words
exists except the author of these words. It says in John 6, 45,
they shall all be taught of God. He said, no one will make a doctor
of the Holy Scripture except the Holy Spirit. He was a diligent student of
the Word of God and that probably came out in the question and
answer period today as Dr. MacArthur and Dr. Mohler talked
about their hard labor in the study. Those two brilliant men
applying what God...the mind that God has given them to dig
into the Word of God and so must every one of us here today. We
must be diligent to present ourselves, a workman who needs not to be
ashamed, rightly dividing the Word of truth. It's hard work. It's been well said, it's as
much perspiration as it is illumination. Third, I would tell you about
Luther, not only a biblical preacher and not only a diligent student,
but he was a sequential preacher. And by that, we meant that his
sermons were virtually a running commentary on books in the Bible
and major portions of Scripture. He preached through Genesis,
Exodus, Deuteronomy, Psalms, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon,
Isaiah, virtually all the minor prophets. And Matthew 5 to 7,
11 to 15, 18 to 24, 27 to 28, major portions of the gospel
of John. In fact, he took a year and a
half just to go through three chapters of the gospel of John. I happen to have his entire set
known as Luther's Works. It's something like 56 volumes.
It's a massive. piece of work. And in the introduction
to volume 51, I came across this quote. Luther's preaching is expository,
not thematic or topical. Instead of a theme, the basis
is a text. And the aim of the sermon is
to help his listeners thoroughly to understand this text. Luther
announces the text and makes a connection with the last sermon
he has preached and comments on the theological importance
of the text and discusses its meaning in order to get it clear
from the start. This introduction goes on to
say, the goal is always that God may speak through His Word
to the congregation through the sermon. Old goes so far as to say Martin
Luther is the one who rediscovered the Bible sermon. It had all
but vanished from the scene. as the Mass is now in the center
place of the worship service and all of the rituals and all
of the just symbolism that had come with a Catholic worship
service, there was no sermon, there was no exposition of the
Word of God. Oh, there may have been a homily
in Latin, but that was just a little nothing thought. Luther is the
one who reintroduced the preaching of the Word of God as the central
place in the worship service. Calvin would take that and master
it with his expositions of the Scripture. But Luther was like
the icebreaker ship who goes ahead and plows up the tundra
for the other ships to come back in behind. What a champion of
the faith Martin Luther was. And fourth, he was a Christ-centered
preacher. He was relentlessly Christ-centered. We think of
Luther in the book of Romans, he spent far more time preaching
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John than he did Romans. In fact,
he preached more sermons out of the gospel of John than he
did out of the entire book of Romans. In fact, he preached
more sermons out of just three chapters in John, John 6, 7 and
8 than all of the book of Romans. Luther said a good preacher must
be committed to this, that nothing is dearer to him than Christ.
He said, I preach as though Christ were crucified yesterday, rose
from the dead today and is coming back to earth tomorrow. True preachers, he said, must
carefully and faithfully teach only God's Word and must seek
its honor and praise alone. In like manner, the hearers must
say." Luther is saying this in the last sermon he ever preached
in his life in 1546. He said, the hearers must say,
we do not believe our pastor unless he tells us of another
master, one named Christ. To the very end of his life,
he was holding up Christ and saying, don't listen to me, listen
to Christ. He was a plain-spoken preacher.
He was not firing over the heads of the people. He sought to be
understood. He said, when I stand up to preach,
I regard neither doctors nor masters of which there are in
the church above forty, but I have an eye for the young people,
for children, for servants, for the maidens. I direct my discourse
to those who have most need of it. He said, he who preaches
most simply is the best preacher. In other words, he's wanting
to be understood. He's trying to put the cookies
on the bottom shelf, if you will. He said, if you want a theological
argument, come with me to the classroom. But if you want the
gospel truth, hear me in the pulpit. Luther was a passionate preacher. That's number six, a passionate
preacher. Luther said, the gospel should
not be written, it should be screamed. He said, I am rough, boisterous,
stormy and altogether warlike. I am born for the removing of
stumps and stones, cutting away thistles and thorns and clearing
wild forests. That was Luther, he was a bull
in a china shop. And he was just...he was so passionate
that his heart was just open and he bled the truth out of
his very soul as he stood to preach. John brought us in his
book, Lectures on the History of Preaching, writes, Luther
is a notable example of intense personality in preaching. He was indeed an imperial personality. Those who heard Luther preach
not only listened to the truth, but they felt the man. Those
who merely read his writings in foreign lands feel Luther
as he preaches the truth, even through the printed page. He's
just oozing with fire and passion and fervency. Number seven, he was a bold preacher. He was a fearless preacher. He was bold as a lion. It's what
gave him such great power in his preaching. Luther, I found
in one of his sermons on Matthew 5, 1 through 2, an introduction
of sorts to his sermons on the Beatitudes said, The preacher
should open his mouth vigorously and confidently to preach the
truth that has been entrusted to him. He should not be silent
or mumble, but should testify without being frightened or bashful. He should speak out candidly
without regarding or sparing anyone. It is a great hindrance
to a preacher if he looks around and worries about what people
like or do not like to hear. or what might make him unpopular
or bring harm or danger upon him. As he stands high on a mountain
in a public place and looks around freely, so he should also speak
freely and fear no one." And then he says, the preacher should
not hold a leaf in front of his mouth. In other words, he needs
to be clearly understood and as he preaches, there should
be no filter and no screen. unadulterated, unvarnished truth. And Luther preached in such a
way while there was a price upon his head. He said the Pope and his proud
prelates Do not believe. We must not hold our peace but
must confess the truth and say the papacy is accursed, the emperor
is accursed, and according to Paul, whosoever is without faith,
the faith of Abraham is also accursed. He said from the year
of our Lord, 1518 to the present time, every Monday, Thursday
at Rome, I have been by the Pope excommunicated and cast into
hell. Yet I live." Every Monday, Thursday, all heretics
are excommunicated to Rome, among whom I am always put first and
chief. He says, this is the honor and
the crown of my ministry. Jesus did say, woe unto you when
all men speak well of you. A man is known not only by his
friends but also by his enemies. Luther said, I bear upon me the
malice of the whole world, the hatred of the emperor and of
the pope and all of their retinae. Well, on in God's name, saying
I am coming to the list, referring to the list of heretics, I will
fight it out. I know my quarrel and cause are
upright and just. Even if I were to lose my body
and my life on account of it, I cannot depart from the true
Word of God. I love this quote by Luther,
"'Burn me if you can and if you dare. Here I am. Do your worst to me. Scatter
my ashes to all the winds. Spread my ashes to all the seas. My Spirit shall pursue you still. Luther shall leave you neither
peace nor rest as he believed the truth endures.'" and that
His ministry was founded upon the truth of the living God."
One more quick heading, I've got time for one more. He was
a polemic preacher. Luther preached as if the sermon
was a battlefield, as he would protect his flock from the swirling
false gospels that were rampant all throughout Europe. Luther
said, if I profess with the loudest
voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of
God, except that point where the world and the devil are at
that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ. However boldly
I may be professing Christ in other matters. Where the battle
rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved, and to be
steady on all the battlefields besides his mere flight and disgrace
if he flinches at that point. Luther said a preacher must be
both soldier and shepherd. Calvin would say every preacher
must have two voices, one with which he speaks to the sheep
and one with which he speaks to the wolves. You, sir, must
have two voices. You must be both a shepherd and
a soldier. To bring this to conclusion,
Luther was once asked, explain the Reformation. How have you,
Martin Luther, brought all of Europe into consternation? How
have you shaken kingdoms? How have you scattered the hordes
of Rome? This is Luther's answer and I
close. I simply taught, preached, wrote
God's Word, otherwise I did nothing. And while I slept, the Word so
weakly, so greatly weakened the papacy that never a prince and
never an emperor inflicted such damage upon it. I did nothing. The Word did it all. May it be said of our ministries,
men, I did nothing. I just preached the Word and
went to sleep. The Word did it all. May God
make us bold. May God make us courageous. May
God make us audacious in this day as we stand for the truth. In an hour of church history
in which the truth is crumbling on every side, may we be men
who stand in the gap. May we be men who stand up and
speak up. May we be defenders of the truth
and guardians of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And may we be engaged
in the good fight, which is the fight for the truth of the Word
of God. And at the end, when we stand before the Great Shepherd.
He will reward His servants who have been bold and courageous
and heroic for the gospel of Jesus Christ. If you find yourself
in a difficult place in ministry, there are no easy places of ministry. There are no easy places. We must guard the truth no matter
what comes against us. Let us pray. Father, how we praise
You and thank You that Your grace, Your saving, sanctifying grace
was so powerfully at work in the life of Martin Luther, just
a heroic force for the truth and for the gospel. O Lord, these
qualities of Luther. instill them within us. May we
be imitators of our elder brother in the faith, Martin Luther.
May in this hour of history, may it be said of us that we
champion the truth, that we stood heroically, that we spoke up
boldly. And even in the face of opposition
and harassment, even at times by our own flock and by other
believers. If we have to stand alone by
ourself, God, then give us that grace to be strong and to stand
if need be against the entire world. Lord, if just the men
in this room this afternoon, if we all would stand strong
for Your Word, it would be such a force in this country and around
the world. We ask God that You would do
this. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.