This quick study on Law and Gospel was given at the end of service at St. Peter–Immanuel Lutheran Church in Milwaukee, WI, on July 4, 2018. The text of the study is included and you may play the audio of the study here.
We are continuing our talk on Thesis 9 from Walther’s Law and Gospel that basically boiled down to this: when someone is suffering under the Law, don’t point them to their feelings, their works, their prayers, or their struggles to get them back into a state of grace. Instead, point them to the Word and Sacraments. We talked last week about how you cannot trust your feelings to tell you your status with God; you need something outside of you and those never change.
You also should avoid a few other things, too: the idea that God has opened the door and you then only have to walk through it, God has done His share now you have to do yours, that the Gospel isn’t necessarily freeing but is a new set of instructions, and that faith is what improves a person. The reality is that we want to depend on ourselves to be right with God. It’s part of our fallen nature; we desire to self-justify or co-justify with God in the work that saves us. But, that’s not what the Scriptures tell us to do.
Walther points out a couple of times that when the people ask what they must do to be saved, and the answer is believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, this is the same thing as saying, “Nothing, there is nothing you need do. It has already been done for you. You are saved. Receive what Christ has done.” But, we have a hard time with that. It’s why we come up with all different kinds of bad ideas and heresies about God and His saving work for us. Whether it’s Mormonism and Islam, which teach that we have to work as hard as we can and then, hopefully, God will make up the rest, whether it’s Roman Catholicism that teaches we have to try to be perfect in Christ in this life, and if we’re not we have to go to Purgatory to have the rest of our sins burned away, whether its Pietism, which teaches that we must agonize over our sinful state and weak-hearted repentance in order to approach grace, we come up with all kinds of strange ideas to justify ourselves in God’s eyes. When we do this, we miss justification completely and move straight over into false teaching because we’re relying on ourselves and what we go through and not Christ and what He has endured.
Do you see what’s missing from all of these? It is the means of grace that come from outside of you. The Word of God cannot change because it comes from outside of you; it’s not dependent on how good your eyes are or even how well you understand it. The Supper doesn’t change; it is always Christ, given for you, under the bread and the wine. Baptism doesn’t change; it’s always water and the Word, granting you salvation, washing you clean from your sins. Even the Absolution doesn’t change, for the preacher, as sinful as he is, as much as you may not like him, absolves by the command of Christ, the command to so given once and never to change. All of these come from outside of you, never from the inside, and ask you to take and see, taste, smell, eat, hear. These things are tangible, they are objective, they don’t depend on you but depend on the command of Christ. That’s why we place our hope in them, for, with the command of Christ, they are literally Christ in our ears, on our tongues, in our mouths, on our skin. Christ is in His means of grace; He has not deceived us in that.
In fact, we can go so far as to say that God does not want to deal with you in any other way than through the spoken Word and Sacraments. He doesn’t want to find you in your feelings. He doesn’t want to find you in your praise. He doesn’t want to find you in your excitement, or in a still, small voice, or in a move of wind, or in omens or bargains. He wants to find you where He’s told you He’ll be: Word and Sacrament. God has always been a tangible, objective God, the pillars of cloud and fire, the sacrifices, the blood, the bread, the wine. Nothing has changed. God wants to make sure that you are believing Him, depending on what He has given you, not on what you think you might find Him in. He has given you His ways and commands us not to add to them. And so we shall not and reject all errors that teach differently. We are a sacramental people, for we have a sacramental God, coming to us in ways that we can understand, and ways that He has promised.
No comments:
Post a Comment