Knowing, Loving, and Living Our Reformation Heritage (2): Sola Gratia and Sola Fide

This is the second of four installments of a lecture given on the five “pillar-watchwords” of the Reformation.

Sola gratia—”grace alone”—is the second great watchword of the Reformation. Luther and his successors have all clustered around this great pillar of grace alone. The great watershed that bespoke irreparable cleavage between Roman Catholicism and the Reformers hinged on this second great watchword, grace alone.

The issue was clear-cut for Luther: Does man initiate and assist in divine forgiveness, or does God provide, initiate, affect, and complete the fullorbed salvation of lost sinners so that glory must be attributed solely to sovereign grace? In response to Erasmus’s Diatribe, Luther’s Bondage of the Will unequivocally sides for divine grace. Luther, and in his wake foliowed all true Reformers, insisted that a sinner was both unable to provide a saving remedy and unable to take hold of one provided. Luther saw vividly that the only approach that could shrivel the ponderous Roman Catholic system of indulgences, pilgrimages, idol-kissings, penances, fastings, purgatory, Mariolatry, etc. was to strike at the root of the controversy: free grace versus free will. Indeed, even a responding Erasmus was compelled to confess: “You and you alone have seen the hinge on which all turns and aimed for the vital spot: free will versus the grace of God.”

Free grace is the church’s crying need of the present hour. Grace alone needs to be the supreme call of the church in our day. Not a human decision, not a human manipulation, not the secular methods of modern man to gain man-made converts, but the old-fashioned gospel method of sovereign grace alone is the message that captures and transforms the hearts of sinners by the power of the Holy Ghost. Dr. J.R. Beeke is pastor of the First Netherlands Reformed Congregation of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

My friends, do you love sola gratia? When visiting an elderly parishioner in a nursing home some time ago, I noticed that she had nothing on her walls but one 3”×5” index card. On that card she had typed, vertically: GRACE. Next to the letters, the words read:

G od’s

R iches

A t

C hrist’s

E xpense

When questioned, she confessed, “This means everything to me because I live only by grace. That’s all I need, God’s riches at Christ’s expense.”

Now, my friends, if we learn to love grace; if we really learn to love grace alone, that means we have learned something of total depravity, does it not? Because if we have not learned our sin and misery, we are enemies of sola gratia; we are prone to rebel against the concept of grace alone because we want our works, efforts, and righteousnesses to mingle with salvation.

I once had a college professor who said, “You know, the Roman Catholic system is the most humanly, psychologically sound system there is. It caters to exactly what the human heart naturally wants—faith and works, grace and free will mixed together.” But the Reformers confessed grace alone and they were loving that doctrine because they had learned that only by that doctrine could they be saved. They had learned to know themselves as lost, corrupt sinners, totally depraved, dead in sins and trespasses, and thus it was either grace alone or no salvation at all.

My dear friends, do you live, do you love grace alone? Your friends, your peers, your family—do they see this watchword in living embodiment through you? Sovereign grace is far easier to mouth with our lips than to experience in our hearts and manifest in our lives. Have we learned experientially that grace must internally call us (Gal. 1:15), regenerate us (Rom. 9:16), justify us (Rom. 3:24), sanctify and preserve us (Tit. 3:7)? Have we learned that grace not only must do everything for us, but also must give everything to us? Have we been brought by the Spirit to need pardon ing grace to forgive us, restoring grace to return us, consoling grace to heal our broken hearts, up-holding grace to strengthen us in trouble and spiritual welfare, preventing grace to keep us from sin, accompanying grace to go with us every moment, and following grace to pursue us to the grave?

The old-fashioned gospel method of sovereign grace alone is the message that captures and transforms the hearts of sinners by the power of the Holy Ghost.

Thirdly, we must come to know, love, and live sola fide—”faith alone.” You know the story of Martin Luther well. You know the struggles he went through, the fastings, the sleepings on cement, the denials that he cast upon himself—even sometimes drawing blood, so determined was he to find a way from human works to God. But one day the Lord showed him in the simplicity of using the means of grace that salvation was by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and that Jesus Christ was the whole righteousness of His people. The righteousness of God is by faith alone. “The just shall live by faith.” When Luther experienced this, he later wrote, “Immediately I felt myself to have gone through open doors to Paradise.” Luther saw that it was via the hand of faith, the pipeline of faith, the gift of faith, that God enabled him to grasp the righteousness of the Lord Jesus Christ. Faith is the instrument that unites with Christ, that lives out of Christ, that causes the soul to partake of Christ. Christ must be presented and preached, but since, by nature, a veil is between our hearts and Christ, we don’t know what lies behind the veil. It is only faith that enlightens our eyes to see, that gives us eye-salve; it is faith that rips away the veil and enables us to behold Christ with the spiritual eyes of beauty, to see in Him all that a sinner needs for gracious salvation.

Faith alone is the way to God. Faith means to touch the hem of Christ’s garment and be made whole. Faith means to abandon human reasoning and human effort in the way of salvation and to cast ourselves naked at the feet of the Lord Jesus Christ. Faith says, “Lord, we have fished all night and caught nothing; nevertheless, at Thy word we will let down the net.” Faith means, as Luther once said, to go lost at the feet of Jesus—not just to go lost, but to go lost at the feet of jesus.

The more Luther struggled and the more the Reformation progressed, the more he was built and based on this grand doctrine—faith alone. In his latter days he wrote these words: “I see that the devil is continually attacking this fundamental article and that in this respect he cannot stop or slow down his attacks. Well then I, Dr. Martin Luther, unworthy heralder of the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, do confess this article that faith alone without works justifies us in the sight of God and I declare that in spite of the Emperor of the Romans, the Emperor of the Turks, the Pope, all cardinals, bishops, priests, monks, nuns, kings, princes, nobles, all the world and all devils, this truth shall stand forever.”

My dear friends, do you love, do you live sola fide? Are you walking by faith? Do you find faith to be that which makes God’s Word come alive in your hearts? Is it faith that brings divine graces into exercises? Have you learned to love faith because faith is that precious gift that springs out of the ruin of self and looks outside of self to Jesus Christ as the grand source of God-given deliverance? Is your faith, my friends, Christ-centered? Have you learned to distrust yourself? Have you learned to be stripped of all your own righteousnesses? Have you learned to lose faith in self? Have you learned, as the Puritans would say, to be “shut out” of all ways except Spirit-wrought faith in the Lord Jesus Christ? Do you love true, saving faith? Can you say with Martin Luther, “Faith gives me Christ and love from faith gives me to my neighbor”? Does faith, as another one of our godly forefathers said, “set all the other graces of God into motion” in your soul? Does faith do for you as John Flavel said, “All other graces like birds in the nest depend on what faith brings into them”? Faith finds a promise for every shadow, a comfort for every sorrow, an escape for every doubt, a song for every deliverance. Faith cleanses the heart. Under the application of the Holy Spirit, faith pervades the entire life of the believer and confirms that works without faith are dead works, while faith without works is dead faith.

Do you have this faith? Do you love the exercises of faith? Do you know times and places in your lives where faith has surmounted obstacles, yes, where faith has ridden over insurmountable mountains of sins and guilt and has brought you face to face with an Almighty God of unconditional grace? Does faith make you watchful? Does faith make your prayers more prayerful? Is faith the heartbeat of your spiritual devotion and your private life with God? Have you learned to walk by faith and not by sight? Are you men and women of faith? Oh, my friends, if we claim to be sons and daughters of the Reformation, we have to know experientially, sola fide!

Have you learned to love faith because faith is that precious gift that springs out of the ruin of self and looks outside of self to Jesus Christ as the grand source of God-given deliverance?

EARTHEN VESSELS

The Master stood in His garden,
Among the lilies fair,
Which His own right hand had planted,
And trained with tend’rest care.

He looked at their snowy blossoms,
And marked with observant eye
That the flowers were sadly drooping,
For their leaves were parched and dry.

“My lilies need to be watered,”
The Heavenly Master said;
“Wherein shall I draw it for them,
And raise each drooping head?”

Close to his feet on the pathway,
Empty, and frail, and small,
An earthen vessel was lying,
Which seemed no use at all;

But the Master saw, and raised it
From the dust in which it lay,
And smiled, as He gently whispered,
“This shall do My work today:

“It is but an eanhen vessel,
But it lay so close to Me;
It is small, but it is empty—
That is all it needs to be.”

So to the fountain He took it,
And filled it full to the brim;
How glad was the earthen vessel
To be of some use to Him!

He poured forth the living water
Over His lilies fair,
Until the vessel was empty,
And again He filled it there.

He watered the drooping lilies
Until they revived again;
And the Master saw with pleasure
That His labor had not been vain.

His own hand had drawn the water
Which refreshed the thirsty flowers;
But He used the earthen vessel
To convey the living showers.

And to itself it whispered,
As He laid it aside once more,
“Still will I lie in His pathway,
Just where I did before.

“Close would I keep to the Master,
Empty would I remain,
And perhaps some day He may use me
To water His flowers again.”

Dr. J.R. Beeke is pastor of the First Netherlands Reformed Congregation of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Deze tekst is geautomatiseerd gemaakt en kan nog fouten bevatten. Digibron werkt voortdurend aan correctie. Klik voor het origineel door naar de pdf. Voor opmerkingen, vragen, informatie: contact.

Op Digibron -en alle daarin opgenomen content- is het databankrecht van toepassing. Gebruiksvoorwaarden. Data protection law applies to Digibron and the content of this database. Terms of use.

Printen