In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
In our Gospel reading for this Reformation Sunday, we heard Jesus say, “everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin” (Jn 8:34). Martin Luther knew what it meant to be a slave to sin. He knew that every day he committed sins and that no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t free himself from those sins. No matter how much he struggled, he couldn’t stop sinning. And it was a great burden to him because he knew that since God is holy, his own sin deserved God’s righteous wrath and punishment.
Luther wanted to escape his slavery to sin so much that he became a monk: thinking – as was typical in the Middle Ages – that the monastic life was somehow holier than our everyday vocations and that a life devoted to work, prayer, and self-denial would somehow get rid of his sinfulness.
Now, even though doing our God-given work in the world, praying regularly, and denying ourselves the creature comforts we covet to help to keep our sinful flesh in check to some degree and are good spiritual disciplines if rightly understood, the truth is that things didn’t get better for Luther.
In the monastery, being constantly reminded of the demands of a righteous God only caused him to feel the burden of his slavery to sin even more. Owing to the false teaching about how man is justified before God that the Medieval Church had taught him, his attempts to be righteous before God by his own works and merits became torture for him. “Everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin.”
In our time, we tend to experience the exact opposite of Luther’s struggle. We’ve become so de-sensitized to sin that we often don’t give much consideration at all to God’s holiness … to our personal sins … and to the wrath of God that we truly deserve on account of those sins.
Our lack of consideration for God’s infinite holiness, and our dismissiveness of the fact that God has given us moral absolutes – that is, the 10 Commandments … to show us what we should and shouldn’t do – has led our generation into a spiritual permissiveness that thinks we’re free to do whatever we want. And it’s this supposed “freedom” that actually ends up making us slaves.
The daily sins that each of us have promise us freedom and happiness, but in reality, they only trap us, bind us, and enslave us. It’s very easy for our desires and our passions to end up ruling over us because it’s our nature to rebel against our heavenly Father when He says ‘yes- do this’ or ‘no- don’t do that.
Greed enslaves us to our possessions. Gluttony enslaves us to food and drink. Lust enslaves us to pornography and fornication. Laziness enslaves us to pessimism and excuse-making. Pride enslaves us to the façade of our self-image. And our lack of love enslaves us to impatience and anger.
“Everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin.”
No matter how hard we attempt to be a “good person”, it will never be sufficient to make us right before God. God says, “I am the Lord your God. Consecrate yourselves therefore, and be holy, for I am holy” (Lev. 11:44). Yet, it’s clear from the slavery we have to our personal sins that we’re woefully far from this standard.
So, if we can’t live up to the standards of God’s moral Law, then why did He give it to us? Today’s Epistle Reading answers that question: “whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God.” In other words, God’s Law shows us our sins and our desperate need for God’s forgiveness.
And God doesn’t leave us in the knowledge of our sins without hope. Luther re-discovered that hope and proclaimed it far and wide to troubled consciences. And that hope is this:
“[we] are justified by [God’s] grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith.”
That’s what grace is: an undeserved gift of love. Even though we don’t deserve it on account of our sins, God justifies us, declares us righteous, and sets us right with Him based solely and completely on the work of Christ.
And what is that work of Christ? He redeemed you. He bought you back. He paid your ransom. He came to you who were enslaved to sin, death, and the devil, and purchased you out of your bondage to sin with His holy precious blood and with His innocent suffering and death.
By His death and resurrection, Christ was victorious over our masters of sin, death, and devil. In Christ you are truly free, forgiven, and given newness of life. “If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed”, as we heard in the Holy Gospel.
By the grace of God, Martin Luther and the other Lutheran Reformers restored the centrality of this Gospel truth to Christ’s Church. As Luther wrote in his Large Catechism:
“[Christ] has redeemed me from sin, from the devil, from death, and from all evil. For before, I did not have a Lord or King, but was captive under the devil’s power, condemned to death, stuck in sin and blindness. For when we had been created by God the Father and had received from Him all kinds of good, the devil came and led us into disobedience, sin, death, and all evil. So we fell under God’s wrath and displeasure and were doomed to eternal damnation, just as we had merited and deserved.
There was no counsel, help, or comfort until this only and eternal Son of God – in His immeasurable goodness – had compassion upon our misery and wretchedness. He came from heaven to help us. So those tyrants and jailers are all expelled now. In their place has come Jesus Christ, Lord of life, righteousness, every blessing, and salvation. He has delivered us poor, lost people from hell’s jaws, has won us, has made us free, and has brought us again into the Father’s favor and grace. He has taken us as His own property under His shelter and protection so that He may govern us by His righteousness, wisdom, power, life, and blessedness.” (LC II.2)
In God’s Holy Word, Luther found the freedom from our slavery to sin in the person and work of Jesus. Because of the errors of the Medieval Church, Luther thought that the righteousness of God meant God’s righteous demands on us – what we must do to get into God’s good graces. But in God’s Word to us in the Epistle to the Romans, Luther learned the truth of the Gospel where St. Paul wrote: “I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes … For in it the righteousness of God is revealed” (Rom 1:16-17). God gives us the gift of His righteousness so that through faith in Christ we are made clean and guiltless in God’s sight.
That pure Gospel of our free salvation in Jesus Christ changed everything for Luther and the Reformers and they worked tirelessly to restore the Gospel to its rightful place in the Church: a blessed heritage which we should likewise hold fast to … and strive to preserve and proclaim.
We often summarize Christian faith with the four “solas” of the Reformation: Grace Alone, Faith Alone, Scripture Alone, and Christ Alone. Our salvation is a pure gift of God’s grace alone, apart from anything we have done. We receive that grace by the gift of faith alone, and our God-given faith is in Christ alone.
And God brings us to faith and keeps us in the faith through His life-giving Word alone and not by any decision or spiritual effort that comes from within us. The glory for our salvation belongs not to us, but to God and His abundant mercy as Scripture declares: “we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law” (Rom 3:28).
God’s promise to you is that you’re set free in Christ. This is the first and chief article of the Christian faith: justification by grace through faith for Christ’s sake.
But also remember what you have been freed for: You’re freed from slavery to sin so that you might have new life – a Christ-centered life in the household of God. As Jesus says, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples” (Jn 8:31).
The way we ‘abide’ in Christ’s Word is to continue to receive it in all the ways that Jesus has instituted for that purpose: living in the gift of our baptism, where the Word of God was applied to us with simple water, drowning our old sinful selves and raising us to newness of life. We abide in Christ’s Word when hear faithful preaching and teaching that proclaims the saving truth of His Gospel. We abide in Christ’s Word by receiving absolution, by which the Word is applied to us personally and its gifts of life and salvation are given to us according to Jesus’ own Word of promise.
And we abide in Christ’s Word when we receive the Holy Supper of Christ’s body and blood for the forgiveness of sins and the strengthening of our faith as He promised on the night when He was betrayed.
Our freedom from slavery to sin is freedom for life in communion with God and a life of love and service to God and neighbor: a freedom won for us by the all-availing sacrifice of Christ as the ransom for us all.
Abide in this … continue in this … trust in this – by God’s grace – and you are indeed Christ’s disciple. “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free”– free children of God who will abide in His house forever.
And the truth is this: you are “justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith.”
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.