Doug McMasters: Well, tonight we've gathered to celebrate the Reformation, not just as a historical marker, but as a spiritual awakening.
Doug McMasters: And we've eaten together as a taste of that glorious eternity that we'll share.
Doug McMasters: And Isaiah 25 says that the best of meats, the choicest of meats, will be served in that eternal banquet.
Doug McMasters: Well, our brisket and ribs are only a little bit of a taste of what that's going to be like.
Doug McMasters: But we've sung hymns that delight in our Savior.
Doug McMasters: We've listened to Scripture.
Doug McMasters: We've heard four of the five solas that continue to root and give us form as a body of Christ.
Doug McMasters: And I want us to turn this evening back to the Reformation, not from a particularly theological point of view.
Doug McMasters: Sometimes in our Reformation celebrations, we've had sermons on particular passages.
Doug McMasters: We've had talks about the Reformation in Germany, for instance, from Christian Andresen, who came from Berlin for us.
Doug McMasters: Tonight I want us to look at some of the effect of the Reformation in society, even in our society to this day.
Doug McMasters: And in order to begin to do that, I want to take you back to a quiet town in Germany, October 31st, 1517.
Doug McMasters: And there a monk by the name of Martin Luther walked up to the castle church door in Wittenberg and with a parchment in his hand.
Doug McMasters: He wasn't trying to start a revolution.
Doug McMasters: He wasn't looking to start a reformation.
Doug McMasters: He wasn't trying to be the head of a church other than the one that he grew up in.
Doug McMasters: He wanted to call the church back to truth.
Doug McMasters: And he wrote in Latin 95 theses or 95 statements that were a call for debate among fellow scholars.
Doug McMasters: He wanted to talk to them about what he saw as the abuses of indulgences.
Doug McMasters: He wanted a conversation.
Doug McMasters: He wanted to bring clarity.
Doug McMasters: And that request for debate was largely ignored by his fellow scholars.
Doug McMasters: But it did catch the attention of some people in the town.
Doug McMasters: One of them, particularly, was a printer.
Doug McMasters: And that printer took those 95 theses, translated them into German, and began, without permission from anyone, to print them and distribute them around the town, and they took off.
Doug McMasters: And the match of Luther's call for reform struck a pile of dry wood and a fire began to spread.
Doug McMasters: And that moment, grounded in Scripture, born out of the conscience of one man, became the turning point of history.
Doug McMasters: And the Reformation began as a theological awakening, but its influences reached and reacher still to our generation.
Doug McMasters: Its effects spread into education, into politics, into economics, into culture, as well as church reform.
Doug McMasters: It shaped people's spiritual understanding, of course, and we'll see how.
Doug McMasters: And that's why Luther translated the Bible into German.
Doug McMasters: And that's why Tyndale risked his life to bring the scriptures into the English language.
Doug McMasters: And that's why Calvin, when he preached, didn't preach in Latin but preached in the language of the people.
Doug McMasters: They believed that the authority of Scripture demanded accessibility.
Doug McMasters: The accessibility required literacy.
Doug McMasters: Tyndale once said in England to a clergyman, if God spares my life, before many years I will cause a boy who drives the plow to know more of Scripture than you do.
Doug McMasters: Now, Tyndale wasn't boasting there, and he wasn't trying to taunt this man either.
Doug McMasters: What he was was saying that he was determined for the Bible to take root in every strata of society.
Doug McMasters: That it didn't need to stay in the towers, it needed to be in the trenches.
Doug McMasters: And it wasn't just the reserve of the priests, it was meant for all the people, including the plowboy.
Doug McMasters: And he had a determination to see a world where the word of God shaped the minds and the hearts of ordinary people.
Doug McMasters: Farmers, mothers, merchants, children.
Doug McMasters: Everybody needed the Word of God and needed to read the Word of God.
Doug McMasters: Michael Horton, a theologian, wrote the Reformation of the 16th century was founded upon the authority of Scripture, and it set the world aflame.
Doug McMasters: And so their dependence upon Scripture was not a retreat from culture, it became a catalyst for the transformation.
Doug McMasters: And so the Reformation had alongside of it a literacy movement.
Doug McMasters: Schools began to be founded.
Doug McMasters: Catechisms, which people in a lot of our day think are simply those in some denominations.
Doug McMasters: But in the Reformation, they wrote these catechisms so that even the children might know the scriptures.
Doug McMasters: And the printing press became a pulpit itself.
Doug McMasters: The idea that every person should be able to read was rooted not in civic life, but started out of a spiritual root, the route to the Reformation.
Doug McMasters: Now we take it for granted now in our generation and in our society, an expectation that every child should be able to read, but that is a fruit of the Reformation itself.
Doug McMasters: Martin Luther urged the political figures of his day, the magistrates, to establish schools so that children might be taught the scriptures.
Doug McMasters: John Calvin formed the Academy of Geneva, which became a center for learning.
Doug McMasters: Because the Reformers believed that literacy was not just a civic good, it was a spiritual necessity.
Doug McMasters: And their educational methods were reflected in their theology.
Doug McMasters: Sola Scriptura demanded that every believer be equipped to read and understand the word.
Doug McMasters: And that meant children and lay people.
Doug McMasters: And so for them, catechisms became key.
Doug McMasters: For adults and church leaders, confessions of faith served as summaries and even for some standards of doctrine.
Doug McMasters: Out of the Reformation grew Luther's small and large catechisms, Calvin's Geneva Catechism, the Westminster Standards in England.
Doug McMasters: The Continental Reformed tradition adopted the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Canons of Dort, all tools that helped shape a generation of believers.
Doug McMasters: The Reformation also transformed universities.
Doug McMasters: Medieval scholasticism gave way to biblically founded theology.
Doug McMasters: The translations of Scripture elevated all the vernacular languages and accelerated linguistic studies in Greek and Hebrew.
Doug McMasters: And so places that were already formed, like in Wittenberg and Oxford, became transformed, as did newer universities that grew up in Zurich and Heidelberg and Edinburgh.
Doug McMasters: And when the Puritans came over to New England, they brought this educational vision with them.
Doug McMasters: And in 1640, Harvard was started.
Doug McMasters: And a founding statement declared that they started it because they feared, quote, an illiterate ministry to the churches.
Doug McMasters: They wanted the ministers founded in the Word of God.
Doug McMasters: And today, International Mission still carries that.
Doug McMasters: You can go to Wycliffe Translators, or you can even go to our mission wall and see Kevin and Sarah and Matt and Sharina, who are working to establish a school in the very place where they're preaching the gospel.
Doug McMasters: And so the Reformers didn't just recover doctrine, they recovered a responsibility to hear the word as well as live it and know it.
Doug McMasters: Another aspect that reverberates into our age is the priesthood of all believers and the rise of conscience, a social conscience.
Doug McMasters: Listen to these words out of 1 Peter.
Doug McMasters: You're a chosen race, a royal nation, a holy nation, a people.
Doug McMasters: Sorry, let me start over.
Doug McMasters: You're a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.
Doug McMasters: Now those words, chosen race, royal priesthood, holy nation, a people for his own possession, those verses don't describe a select few number.
Doug McMasters: They describe every believer, the whole church.
Doug McMasters: Whether you're young or old, educated or untrained, if you're called to Christ, you have been made one of his chosen race.
Doug McMasters: You've been made one of the royal priesthood.
Doug McMasters: You've been made a part of the holy nation.
Doug McMasters: You have become one of the people for his possession.
Doug McMasters: And this truth was central to the Reformation.
Doug McMasters: Luther taught that every Christian has direct access to God through Christ Himself.
Doug McMasters: He did not and she did not need to rely upon a priestly mediator.
Doug McMasters: There was no spiritual hierarchy that could stand between the believer and the throne of grace.
Doug McMasters: And so this teaching didn't just change church structure.
Doug McMasters: Think about it.
Doug McMasters: What it transformed was how people saw themselves.
Doug McMasters: I can go directly to God.
Doug McMasters: Right?
Doug McMasters: And it gave dignity to the ordinary person, it gave weight to their personal conscience.
Doug McMasters: And it taught that every person was also accountable to God alone.
Doug McMasters: And that accountability also led them not only to careful responsibility, but also to courage.
Doug McMasters: And so at the Diet of Verms, Luther stood before the emperor and said to him, My conscience is captive to the word of God.
Doug McMasters: Now that wasn't defiance, that was conviction.
Doug McMasters: It was conviction that God and God alone is the one to whom he should give his mind and his heart and his behavior, not to the dictates of men, even if it meant suffering.
Doug McMasters: And it elevated the conscience not in the way that we have been taught in our day, as it is your truth and your conscience, and it is autonomous, but rather it is responsible to God who's made us all.
Doug McMasters: The conscience must be formed by scripture and bound by truth.
Doug McMasters: Paul said in Galatians 5:1, for freedom Christ has set us free.
Doug McMasters: Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.
Doug McMasters: You see, freedom is not license, as we're told these days.
Doug McMasters: Freedom is responsibility.
Doug McMasters: But this doctrine, as it grew, helped people to realize that they had the freedom to live under God's authority and not to give themselves to human manipulation.
Doug McMasters: And that bore fruit in democratic participation.
Doug McMasters: It bore fruit in the insistence that governments must respect the agency of their citizens.
Doug McMasters: And it also gave birth to the idea that truth cannot be coerced, it must be embraced.
Doug McMasters: And so the reformers, in teaching this doctrine, also helped to see a change in society because believers began to live like they were, priests before God.
Doug McMasters: They were able, again, to speak truth with conviction and to follow Christ with a clear conscience.
Doug McMasters: Whatever you do, do it heartily.
Doug McMasters: As for the Lord and not for men, Paul said in Colossians 3 23.
Doug McMasters: Paul, there, when he was speaking, wasn't just speaking to ministers and to missionaries.
Doug McMasters: He was telling us that this doesn't just apply to the clergy, it applies to the carpenter.
Doug McMasters: It applies to teachers and nurses and accountants and parents and business owners and those whose realm of service is in the home in which they live.
Doug McMasters: The reformers understood that work was not a distraction from spiritual life, it was the arena of their worship.
Doug McMasters: Ephesians 2.10.
Doug McMasters: We're his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God beforehand prepared, that we should walk in them.
Doug McMasters: The effect of that, as it grew root into the churches that came out of the Reformation and move even to churches in our day, is for us to understand that our work and our labor is not random and it is not meaningless at all.
Doug McMasters: Everything we do is a part of God's design.
Doug McMasters: And the Reformation helped us to recover that truth.
Doug McMasters: The reformers rejected the idea that was common in their day that only religious work was sacred.
Doug McMasters: They saw all work as worship.
Doug McMasters: Luther taught that the milkmaid and the magistrate both served God in their daily duties.
Doug McMasters: And Calvin emphasized work as a calling and not just a career.
Doug McMasters: Richard Sibbs, an English Puritan, wrote, the whole life of a Christian should be nothing but praises and thanks to God.
Doug McMasters: Work for God, talk for God, live for God.
Doug McMasters: And that vision reshaped how people approached their jobs.
Doug McMasters: What it helped them to understand was that in their work they were to be diligent, and in their work they were to show integrity, and in their work they were to act as stewards in all that they did.
Doug McMasters: And it challenges this idea that somehow our success is measured by our status, or our success is measured by our bank account.
Doug McMasters: It establishes the idea that our success is measured in our Christ-centered faithfulness.
Doug McMasters: And so if you never get known or never get rich, but are faithful in the work that you do and you do it heartily as to the Lord, then you will enter into the glories of heaven with joy and not shame.
Doug McMasters: This is the foundation of what some have called the Protestant work ethic, which is not meant to be a drive for wealth, but a commitment to excellence, a commitment to responsibility, a commitment to service.
Doug McMasters: And so work became a way to glorify God and a means by which you could bless other people.
Doug McMasters: And that quote echoes Luther's own imagery, doesn't it?
Doug McMasters: And it reminds us that God works through ordinary people doing ordinary tasks.
Doug McMasters: And that truth still bears fruit today.
Doug McMasters: I wish I could have stopped my car and written this down, but in 2011, I was driving my car in London, which demanded more than enough of my attention.
Doug McMasters: And I was listening to the BBC.
Doug McMasters: And on the BBC was uh a talk, a radio talk about a documentary titled Civilization Is the West History by a man by the name of Neil Ferguson.
Doug McMasters: And in that radio talk, uh Neil Ferguson was talking about some factories.
Doug McMasters: And I, if you're from China and I say this wrong, please correct me.
Doug McMasters: Winzhou, China.
Doug McMasters: Is that close enough?
Doug McMasters: Anybody?
Doug McMasters: And there was some there was a factory work, a factory owner there who noticed that there were some differences among a particular group of people that were working in his factory.
Doug McMasters: They were unusually honest, they were unusually diligent, and they were unusually cooperative.
Doug McMasters: They were giving more than the others were giving.
Doug McMasters: And he was curious as to what was going on.
Doug McMasters: And he approached these particular uh workers in his factory and found out that they were Christians.
Doug McMasters: And found out that they were reformed Christians.
Doug McMasters: And their work ethic that was marked by integrity and also by joy stood out clearly among the rest of the workers in the factory.
Doug McMasters: And he found out that as these men worked and these women worked, that the factory was actually producing more.
Doug McMasters: And there was for him some residual benefits, profits.
Doug McMasters: But he wanted to know what made them so different.
Doug McMasters: And Neil Ferguson in this radio broadcast went on to say that some government officials began to discover that this one factory was producing more than other factories were.
Doug McMasters: And that factory owner and those government officials went to Europe with this question: tell us more about the Reformation, because we want to know what it is that made that make these workers do this.
Doug McMasters: They saw a difference.
Doug McMasters: They saw the fruit of the gospel and how these people valued productivity, about how they found meaning in the midst of their labor, and how they approached their jobs, not just as a duty, but as an expression of their discipleship before the Lord.
Doug McMasters: Royal and I have sung it for years, and uh it's probably best it's kept to just Royal and me when we sing it.
Doug McMasters: But little is much when God is in it.
Doug McMasters: Labor not for wealth or fame.
Doug McMasters: There's a crown, and you can win it if you go in Jesus' name.
Doug McMasters: The fourth way the Reformation has affected our society today is through political realignment and the rise of religious freedom.
Doug McMasters: Let me begin with a verse.
Doug McMasters: Romans 13:1.
Doug McMasters: Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there's no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.
Doug McMasters: Now, this verse reminds us that government is not a human invention, it's a divine provision.
Doug McMasters: God has given it to society.
Doug McMasters: He gave it to society so that we might live an ordered and peaceable existence in this world.
Doug McMasters: But it also raises for us a question and creates for us a tension.
Doug McMasters: What happens when the earthly authority contradicts the divine authority?
Doug McMasters: The apostles answered that in Acts chapter 5 and verse 29.
Doug McMasters: We must obey God rather than men.
Doug McMasters: And that's a tension, isn't it?
Doug McMasters: It's a tension between submission and conviction.
Doug McMasters: And that was attention not only in our day, but back in the Reformation itself.
Doug McMasters: And when Luther stood before Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms, he wasn't just challenging church doctrine.
Doug McMasters: He was standing against a system in which religious authority and political power were intertwined.
Doug McMasters: And his refusal to recant was based in his theological fidelity, but it also began to fracture this political connection to the religious authority of his day.
Doug McMasters: And what it began to do is it began to allow nations to redefine and to define on their own their religious identity.
Doug McMasters: That the rulers would be able to choose for themselves the realm's religion.
Doug McMasters: And beyond that, it began to breed the idea that dissenters, even of that religion, had rights.
Doug McMasters: And so out of the Reformation began the beginning, began religious pluralism as we know it.
Doug McMasters: It's part of the very fabric of our nation's beginning.
Doug McMasters: It was the idea that a conscience should not be coerced, that faith shouldn't be demanded but embraced.
Doug McMasters: That governor governments and governors must respect the spiritual convictions of their citizens.
Doug McMasters: One historian, Alec Briy, wrote this.
Doug McMasters: He said, The Reformation taught people to think for themselves, to challenge authority, and to take personal responsibility for their beliefs.
Doug McMasters: We see the fruit of that doctrine in our day in constitutional democracies, in the principle of religious liberty, in the conviction that the church is not to be a tool of the state, but rather a witness of the truth of the gospel.
Doug McMasters: And so the reformers rediscovered a principle.
Doug McMasters: Yes, that Christ alone is Lord.
Doug McMasters: He alone is Lord of the conscience and Lord alone of the church, and no earthly power should ever take its place.
Doug McMasters: The last one, and we looked at this a couple years ago, so I'll keep this one rather brief, is the cultural renewal of music.
Doug McMasters: Let the words of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your hearts to God.
Doug McMasters: Colossians 3 16.
Doug McMasters: A people who are shaped by the truth, a people that are gathered in worship, a people whose voices and hearts together are lifted up in song.
Doug McMasters: You may not know this, but prior to the Reformation, singing in church was largely confined to the clergy or to trained professional choirs alone.
Doug McMasters: The laity were silent.
Doug McMasters: Worship was something they watched, not something they participated in.
Doug McMasters: The music was in Latin, the melodies were complex, and the congregation was at a distance.
Doug McMasters: The Reformation changed all that.
Doug McMasters: The first congregational singing in centuries happened because of the Reformation.
Doug McMasters: What we did this evening.
Doug McMasters: Happily singing.
Doug McMasters: They believed that the church worship was the activity of all of God's people, not just a select few.
Doug McMasters: Martin Luther himself, a gifted musician, composed hymns in the language of the people with simple melodies that all the congregation could sing.
Doug McMasters: He wanted the truths of scripture to be carried by the church, not just in their minds, but in their hearts and in their mouths.
Doug McMasters: And he wrote this: he said, Next to the word of God, music deserves the highest praise.
Doug McMasters: He called music the handmaiden of theology.
Doug McMasters: And so his hymns were not just beautiful, they were, but they were also doctrinal.
Doug McMasters: They taught the gospel and they gave voice to faith and they helped people to know that they shared the act of worship together as God's people.
Doug McMasters: And the Reformation moved the congregation from passive listeners to active participants.
Doug McMasters: And it allowed the people to take these melodies to their homes and to sing them among their families and to sing them in the fields in which they worked or walked.
Doug McMasters: And it also took them to the places where they suffered.
Doug McMasters: The Reformation, this renewal of congregational singing, also brought into our society the rise of scripture in our poetry and prose, our literature peppered with the word of God.
Doug McMasters: Because the word of God spread as literacy spread, and people began to read and to learn to read the Bible as they learned to read.
Doug McMasters: And as they sang, they sang the scriptures.
Doug McMasters: And so when they began to think and to write and to give it, whether be it poetry or prose, the language that was there from their earliest awareness was the language which they put into the things that they themselves would bring to other generations.
Doug McMasters: We've walked through five ways, very briefly, mind you, of how the Reformation has shaped our world: conscience, vocation, governance, culture, and worship.
Doug McMasters: But at the heart of it is this one conviction the word of God is alive and active.
Doug McMasters: Let me remind us of what Luther said.
Doug McMasters: I simply taught and preached and wrote God's word.
Doug McMasters: Otherwise, I did nothing.
Doug McMasters: God's word did everything.
Doug McMasters: It is the heartbeat of the Reformation because the Word did the work.
Doug McMasters: And it's the heartbeat of who we are.
Doug McMasters: The word is central because it reveals to us our God.
Doug McMasters: And it reveals to us his plan and purposes for this world and for eternity.
Doug McMasters: Reveals to us that he is a God who graciously saves the undeserving, receives them to himself because of Christ who gave himself up for sinners.
Doug McMasters: The Reformation wasn't meant to be more than just a conversation among one scholar to a few others, but it lit a match that has flamed all the way into our day.
Doug McMasters: It was a movement of truth and a movement of grace and a movement of renewal.
Doug McMasters: And we don't want to just remember that.
Doug McMasters: We want to reconnect to it.
Doug McMasters: We want to connect to it by affirming ourselves that the only authority to which we bow is that of Scripture alone.
Doug McMasters: That the only Savior that we count in this world is Christ alone.
Doug McMasters: That the only means by which we might have hope is by grace alone.
Doug McMasters: And that the only response to God is one of faith and faith alone.
Doug McMasters: And that we do so for the glory of God alone.
Doug McMasters: And so we're a church that will sing that truth and live that truth and speak that truth with courage and joy until the Lord calls us home.
Doug McMasters: May it be so.
Doug McMasters: Let us uh now hear a scripture reading Solido Gloria.