A Quick Study on Law and Gospel, Thesis 7, May 27, 2018

This quick study on Law and Gospel was given at the end of service at St. Peter–Immanuel Lutheran Church in Milwaukee, WI, on May 27, 2018. The text of the study is included and you may play the audio of the study here.


 Thesis seven begins like this: you are not rightly distinguishing Law and Gospel in the Word of God if you first preach the Gospel and then Law; or first sanctification and then justification; or first faith and then repentance; or first good works and then grace. Now, all of this is true. Remember that the Law must be preached first. It has to being a sinner to their knees. It must make them despair of their sin so that they might find themselves repenting of their sins. Then the Gospel may be preached to them, that they would not despair of life, but find it in the person and work of Jesus Christ. There’s an order to things. This isn’t to say that, when speaking in a sermon or Bible study it’s like 50% Law THEN 50% Gospel. And it’s not say that the sweet, good news of the Gospel cannot precede the Law in any way. What it does say is that in preaching, in applying God’s Word to life of a person, the Law must be preached into them, spoken in the authority of the Word of God, so that the Gospel may follow. The Law would accuse them, the Gospel would free them. If you do this the wrong way, you are telling people, well, go earn your salvation and then God will add in all the rest. Or it’s to say, well, go do good works and then God will save you. Or it’s to say, go and be holy and then God will make you holy. You see, it doesn’t work right, does it? Instead, we need to say, you have failed to good, but God has been good to you. You haven’t done good works perfectly and without fail, but God in Christ has given to you all perfection. It’s to say, God has made you holy through the death of the Son, now you can go live out lives of holiness. You get the order wrong and you can fall into the trap of pietism, where, by your won efforts, you are processing in holiness and earning the favor of God. You can get trapped in the error of Antinomians, who taught grace had to preached first, then repentance, and the Law really had no place in the Church. You don’t want to fall into either error, but you want to shoot straight down the middle so that you can preach, deliver the Word rightly to those who need to hear the right thing. If you can’t get this straight, the sad part is that error easily slips in. We’ve been, in the Lutheran church, fighting this war for 500 years. We’ve not been fighting externally, but we’re fighting with ourselves, and that’s because we are forgetting to rightly divide Law and Gospel or we divide it in the wrong order, in the wrong way. And when a pastor, when a Lutheran pastor, falls into this error, their sermons become little more than hot air, which only tends to chase away those in their care. That is why many have fallen away, never to return to the Church, and why many pastors will be judged harshly by God. But it is a lesson well learned for us as well, that we must speak and reach into people’s lives with Law and Gospel and make sure that we are doing for them that which is right, in the right order, and at the right time.