Let's turn in our Bibles to Jeremiah chapter 6 and verse 16. Jeremiah 6, 16. Today is the celebration of the Protestant Reformation. And the Protestant Reformation is about the gospel. the pure message of salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. And there is a danger of that message being corrupted in every generation, every age of the church. The gospel has to be defended against the false gospels that are out there. Our annual Reformation celebration is about remembering the pure gospel that was preached by Christ and the apostles and was delivered unto us, the faith that was once for all, as Jude says, once for all delivered to us. Now a passage, let's read this portion together from Jeremiah chapter 6. Thus says the Lord, stand by the roads and look and ask for the ancient paths where the good way is and walk in it and find rest for your souls but they said we will not walk in it there's only one way of salvation only one way of eternal life the way of the gospel Now suppose I made a wager with Tyler Dogrell, there he is, that I would take my 2019 Honda Pilot and race his Mustang to see who would get there, get to Jacksonville, Alabama first. But as you're cheering us on and we leave the parking lot, Tyler goes down to the intersection here and he turns right, he turns south on 431. And I have to tell you that no matter how fast his car would go, no matter how skillful a driver he is, I will still beat him to Jacksonville, Alabama because you can't get to Jacksonville going south. You see, what I'm saying is that the right road leads to the right place. Only the right road leads to the right place. Now, look carefully at this passage. Notice the five imperatives. You know what an imperative is? It's a verb that has the mood of a command. Something that is given as a command. And so notice the five imperatives here. I put them in bold. Stand, look, ask, walk, find. And find, though it is an imperative, is intended as a result, a result. Let me read it again for you. Thus says the Lord, stand by the roads and look and ask for the ancient paths where the good way is and walk in it and find rest for your souls. The only way to find rest for your soul is to seek the ancient path, the good way. the direction that comes from God, and that direction is the Word of Life, the Word of God, which is the Word of Life. So Solomon says, my son, be attentive to my words, let them not escape from your sight, keep them within your heart, for they are life to those who find them. Jeremiah instructs the people to take time here, to look, to observe, to get their bearings, to ask the Lord for wisdom in order to see the ancient paths. The Hebrew here is literally from eternity, the paths that are from eternity, that stretch back before time. Ask the Lord, where is the good way? And the way is good, not that it is easy, but it leads to what is good. It leads to rest for your souls. But to complicate things more, there are many who would misdirect us, as there were in the days of Jeremiah the prophet. There are many with false landmarks, and many with false teachings, and they will misdirect you. They will turn you out of the way of the Lord. And so Jeremiah gives this warning. I see it's not showing up on our slide, but it's in Jeremiah 18.15. but my people have forgotten me. They have made offerings to false gods. They made them, these false gods, made them stumble in their ways in the ancient roads and to walk into side roads, not the highway. So let's consider it one more time. Let me read it one more time. Jeremiah 18, 15. But my people have forgotten me. They make offerings to false gods. They make them stumble in their ways in the ancient roads and to walk into side roads, not the highway. There is a highway that is the right way that leads to rest for our souls. It is the ancient path. But the idols of this world are deceitful. They make us stumble. They deceive us. They lead us astray. And whether it is materialism, naturalism, hedonism, evolution, or even that most popular idol of individualism, right? That self-idol that we worship. And it leads to so many paths of self-love, self-satisfaction, self-actualization, self-centeredness, self-exaltation, right? These are the self-sins that come from worshiping that idol that stands in every heart and is a grave danger to us, the worship of self. Don't let the world deceive you. Jeremiah 21a, behold I set before you the way of life, God says, and the way of death. And the way of life is the way of the gospel. The way that leads us to rest for our souls is the way of the cross. It is the way of our Savior's death and resurrection. Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except by me. This is the way of justification by faith, the way of redemption by substitution. You remember Leviticus chapter 1 and the first five chapters of Leviticus all describe the sacrifices, the protocols for the priest, and how the sacrifices were to be offered. And there in chapter 1, as well as other places there, you have a person who brings a bull or a lamb for a sacrifice. And they have to lay their hands on the head of that lamb. And they have to confess their sins over this substitutionary sacrifice. Do you see the gospel in it? They lay their hands on the head of that lamb. They place their sins, as it were, symbolically upon this innocent lamb. And then they have to kill. Yes, not the priest, but the worshiper has to kill the lamb. And it was our sins, you see, that nailed Jesus to the cross, that took the life of the Lamb of God. It was my sin, and they have to kill that Lamb. And the priest would catch the blood, and he would sprinkle the blood on the altar, and he would burn the body of that Lamb on the altar as a whole burnt offering unto God, pleasing to God. This is the way of salvation. It has always been the way of salvation. These ancient Israelites believed the gospel represented in the sacrificial system because the Lamb represents Christ. He is, as John the Baptist said, the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world. And he is that innocent lamb represented by that innocent lamb who was the substitute for the sinner. Now to walk in the ancient path, the highway from before time, means to believe in the Lamb of God who was slain before the foundation of the world. To walk in the good way is to trust in the Savior, the Messiah, the seed of the woman, the promised seed of Abraham, the son of David, the righteous branch that Jeremiah, Zachariah speak of. And what is his name? The Old Testament tells us, the Lord our righteousness. What is the name of that branch of the Lord that brings salvation? The Lord our righteousness. We cannot trust any other way. There are no other roads. You cannot trust in the keeping of commandments to save you. Do not trust in the church to save you. Do not trust in baptism or the gifts of the Holy Spirit. No preacher can save you. Your parents cannot save you. It is only Jesus Christ, the Son of Mary, the Son of God. That's right. He is man and He is also God. He is the Son of Mary and He is the Son of God. And your faith must be in Christ alone because He is the only all-sufficient Savior. This is the ancient way that David speaks of in Psalm 16. He says, you make known to me the path of life. And Solomon in Proverbs 12 28, in the path of righteousness is life and in its pathway there is no death. And so I'm giving you just a brief exposition of this verse here in Jeremiah. to lead up to the conversation, the preaching of the doctrines of the Reformation and the Gospel way. I want to tell you just a little bit about that. The Protestant Reformation is a story that we need to hear again and again. Dark ages come from dark hearts that lack the illumination of the Gospel. Nations, communities, entire people groups live in darkness because they do not know the gospel. They are in darkness because there's no message being proclaimed to them. They are trapped in darkness without the gospel. Acts chapter 8 tells the story of the Samaritans and how the gospel penetrated the darkness of that people group. In the days of the early church, the Samaritans were under the spell of a magician named Simon, Simon the sorcerer. and he did all these demonic miracles so that people thought he was something great and they honored him and he had power over their lives until Philip the evangelist left Jerusalem and came to Samaria and preached the gospel of Jesus Christ and the power of the kingdom of God that we are not under the reign of Satan but that Christ sets us free and brings us into his kingdom. So he preached the kingdom of God and the gospel of Jesus Christ. And that good news saved many of them. They believed and they were baptized. The gospel sets us free from the wicked lies of our generation just as it set the Samaritans free. And religious darkness is the worst kind. It puts people in bondage. And it can be moralism, Pharisaism, it can be any kind of legalism, but it puts people in bondage. And all people, listen, all people are either enslaved to the worship of idols, or they are Christians and worship the true God, Jesus Christ the Lord. There is no group in between that. We are either idle worshipers or we are worshipers of the triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There's no middle ground. Only the grace of the gospel can set people free from the idols of our culture, from superstition and the false ideas that blind us to the truth of God. Satan does the work of blinding people to the truth of the gospel, lest they should behold the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. And only the preaching of the gospel and the power of the Spirit can open blind eyes. The Middle Ages, the times of Martin Luther and the Reformers, were marked by religious superstition and fear. The church wielded fear, fear of death, fear of hell, fear of purgatory, fear of demons and goblins. They were a means of tyranny over the lives, not just of peasant folk, but kings and princes were afraid of the church withdrawing its blessing. Many people could not read. Many people had no access to the Bible. Now Martin Luther, he lived during this time of superstition and fear. And in fact, he became a monk because of fear of death that gripped him during a thunderstorm. A lightning bolt struck near him and knocked him to the ground. The thought of what awaited him in purgatory terrorized him. He made a vow to Saint Anne, the patron saint of those caught in thunderstorms. She was also the patron saint of miners. His dad was a miner. And he promised in the fear of that moment, I will become a monk. So it was fear that drove him deeper into the arms of Roman Catholicism. He had been taught that becoming a monk guaranteed his salvation. His life of monastic devotion in the Augustinian order was very disciplined. They had chapel services before dawn, chapel services again at 6 a.m., chapel services again at 9 a.m., once more at noon. And there were rules, lots of rules that you had to keep. And he was lapping it up because he was thinking that he was earning salvation by all these things that he was doing. Yet his conscience remained stricken. So they had rules for when and how to bow. Rules for how to walk, how to talk, where to look, and when. Rules for holding one's eating utensils. And besides this, they were to come daily for the confession of sin. But Martin's conscience was so tender and so stricken with guilt that sometimes he spent six hours in the confessional. He wore the priest out that heard his confessions. And they would say, why don't you go out and kill someone? Because then you'd have something really to confess instead of these trivial things. But he was burdened that he was singing songs in the chapel service and was singing them insincerely. So he's confessing those sins. He was burdened that he had some thoughts about this brother over here that were kind of angry. He was confessing, he was trying to confess every sin in order that he could receive forgiveness and absolution. But what good was it? He could not receive it. He had no peace of conscience. The only thing they offered was the general admonition to do good and try harder. And brothers and sisters, that message is preached in hundreds of churches, Protestant churches, hundreds of churches in this county. There are more than 400 churches in this county. And I can tell you that on this morning, many people will come to church and instead of the good news of forgiveness in Christ, they will hear the legalistic gospel of be good and try harder. Be good and try harder. You see, Roman Catholicism treats God's grace as a boost that gets you started. You just can't quite reach the first rung of that ladder that will take you to heaven. And so grace in Roman Catholicism is a little help, help you up there to that first rung. continue that and you can fall. Yes, you can fall all the way back down and start all over. That's what the whole thing is about. sacrament of penance is about. Their view of salvation, as Ron told us this morning, is synergistic. It is God plus human effort. It's always possible that you can lose what you think you may have gained. They believe in faith, but not faith alone. They believe in Christ, but not Christ alone. They believe in grace, but not grace alone. And of course, because it is not alone, it means that I can make God my debtor by doing these things. He owes me salvation. That is a false gospel. In the true gospel, the glory goes to God alone. You can see the solas over there. And the last one, glory to God alone. Sola Deo Gloria. That glory goes to God alone. So when I am saved by the true Gospel, I know that I had nothing to do with it. I'm just a beggar whose trembling hand received the gift of salvation. In 1507, Luther was ordained as a priest. This meant that he was now going to be appointed to pastoral ministry. He was given a position in Saxony and he was made a professor at the University of Wittenberg. And though he had read the Bible seriously the last few years, I don't think he saw a Bible before age 20. But though he had read the Bible since that time, it was now that he began, about age 22, to study the Bible in earnest. And in 1511, his religious superior sent him on business for the Augustinian order to Rome. Michael Reeves, a great historian, has written many good books. He wrote that book that I mentioned, The Unquenchable Flame, which is out here on the table. He describes this pilgrimage as the opportunity of a lifetime. This is what he says. For a monk who increasingly knew himself to be spiritually bankrupt, it was like winning the lottery. In Rome, the pilgrim was closer to the apostles and saints than anywhere else. The place was so crammed with their relics, each one conferring various spiritual benefits, and it was a veritable gold mine for the soul. When he caught his first sight of the Holy City, he prostrated himself on the ground. Then on arrival, he dashed from holy sight to holy sight, clocking up merit at each. His one regret those happy days was that his parents were still alive. Had they not been, he could have freed them from purgatory with all the merit that he was earning there in Rome. But it was there, in that throbbing heart of Christendom, that the tiniest seeds of doubts were sown in Luther's mind. Rome had become a spiritual marketplace and salvation was for sale. For instance, people paid money to have masses said for their loved ones and in order to get them out of purgatory because you have to finish Christ's merit only gets you to the place of salvation. And then it's up to you. And any sins you commit after baptism, you will have to pay for. They're a debt you'll have to pay for in purgatory. It's a Christian hell, as it were. And so they would sell the saying of masses for people who had died, usually parents or grandparents. In order to get them out of suffering, they would say masses for them. And so they have all these lines of people who want to get their parents out of hell. And they are so busy, they're doing two masses at a time in certain churches. And because they're so busy, giving out salvation because they're being paid to give it out. And they are so busy that they're saying the masses so fast that people cannot understand what they're saying. Even though it was Latin and probably a lot of people didn't know what they were saying. And so this was what Luther was confronted with. In fact, that's where the expression hocus pocus comes from, right? Hoc est meum corpus, in the Roman mass. This is my body, that's the Latin. But you say it fast enough, hoc est meum corpus, and you get hocus pocus, which is the words that they thought, they said when they transformed the bread into the actual body of Christ. There's nothing darker than the darkness of religious legalism. Luther, now a preacher and a professor, was making spiritual progress. He had a copy of the Word of God in Greek, something that those before him might not have had. His earnest study of Augustine taught him that salvation is by God's sovereign grace alone and not by human merit. He came to understand Paul's phrase, the righteousness of God, in Romans 117, that it meant the free gift of righteousness, not the righteousness of God that punishes the sinner, but God's free gift of righteousness in Christ bestowed on the sinner by which he is forgiven of his sins and declared righteous before God. He learned that faith is not merely agreeing with church teachings, but it is trusting and resting in the person and work of Jesus Christ. In 1515, Luther encountered a real controversy. The selling of indulgences. And these were sold in order to get your loved ones out of purgatory. These were bought because you wanted to get your loved ones out of purgatory. They were sold in order to finance St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. Purgatory is a false doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church, a place of suffering for sins committed after baptism. Indulgences were first introduced, I think about 800, AD 800, and they were introduced as a mercy. So if you were an old person and Someone said, and you went to the priest to confess your sins, and he said, well, for your penance, you have to crawl on your knees up the church steps and say the Lord's Prayer on every step. But you're 80. and your knees are not good, you couldn't even get down and get back up again once. Just impossible. And so they came up with a system of indulgences that if you could not perform the penance that was required, you could pay money and receive a paper saying that your penance was fulfilled and so you were forgiven of those sins. But within A few hundred years, the church then began to teach, began to declare that you could purchase salvation and Tetzel in his preaching of indulgences said you could receive forgiveness for sins you hadn't committed yet. And so the indulgence situation became a means of not only purchasing salvation, but a money-making scheme for the Roman Church. Listen to Ned Needham. He says, in 1515, Pope Leo X authorized the sale of a special set of indulgences in Germany. Their purpose was to bring in cash to finance the building of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, and the papal agent selling the indulgences was a Dominican friar named Johann Tetzel. Tetzel's indulgence preaching was an overpowering act of emotional manipulation. The Dominican promised his hearers that as soon as they bought one of his indulgences on behalf of a dead relative, God would instantly set the poor relative's poor soul free from purgatory. He used a little rhyme. As soon as the coin in the money box rings, the soul from purgatory springs. And Tetzel, of course, he even said in his efforts to manipulate people, that you could buy an indulgence to be forgiven if you had raped Mary, the mother of God, is what he said. And so you can just imagine, one man approached Tetzel, and he said, can I purchase an indulgence for a sin I have not yet committed? And he said, yes, you may. And the man bought a huge indulgence. He paid a tremendous sum for it. And later that day, as Tetzel was traveling through the woods, he robbed him and took all the money from the indulgences. But no problem, he had already been forgiven for it. because he had purchased it, he had the paper to prove it. Luther's pastoral concern for his flock, he did not want his people exposed to this and they were going across the river and buying indulgences and this is what led him to nail his 95 theses to the church door at Wittenberg on October 31, 1517. He was announcing 95 things that he wanted to talk about regarding the sale of indulgences. And he was going to meet any advocate of selling indulgences the next day. That was the idea. The next day he would be there to debate anyone. He had not yet broken with the Catholic Church. He still supported the Pope. You can read lots of positive things he says about the Pope in the 95 Theses. But his knowledge of the Gospel of Grace was advancing and he was starting to proclaim. He was believing and he was proclaiming the Gospel of Grace. And he did not want his people to be manipulated by religious merchants selling salvation. The 95 Theses were written in Latin. Their criticisms were penetrating. People read them. The students read them. Professors read them. They could read Latin. But they took them then and translated them into German and took them to the printing press. Would the Reformation have even happened without the printing press? They printed hundreds, thousands of copies of these spread out over Germany and beyond. And it was their reading of these things that gave people pause about whether they were being misled. The controversy is how does a person receive forgiveness in Christ? How does one receive the forgiveness of sins? How can I be right with God? It was a gospel question. And Luther, more and more, was depending on the authority of the Bible to answer the question. It was what God's Word had to say, not popes and church councils that determined the truth. So it was that Luther angered the pope. Curia there in Rome because he found the authority of the scriptures contradicted and condemned the authority of the church. And so on the authority of scripture Luther taught that a sinner by merely trusting Christ could have his or her sins entirely forgiven and stand in confidence before God as accepted, not because of their righteousness, but because of the righteousness of Christ. Luther had discovered this gospel by reading the Word of God. And the light of salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, for God's glory alone, was now shining in Wittenberg. No, it was beyond that. It was shining throughout Germany. More, it was shining throughout the Holy Roman Empire. The famous medieval artist Albrecht Durer, he described Martin Luther, listen to this, he described Martin Luther as that Christian man who has delivered me from my anxieties. That Christian man who has delivered me from great anxieties. See, only the gospel can speak peace to the conscience. Only the gospel, because the gospel says authoritatively, you are forgiven. So John writes to the Christians in his first letter and he says, little children, your sins are forgiven you for his namesake. That is the message of the gospel. That was the message that was emerging out of the preaching of Martin Luther and the reformers. The gospel of salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, for God's glory alone. That is, listen, that is the ancient path that must be diligently followed. It must be courageously defended. It must be carefully preserved in the true church. in every generation. We must remember the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. And one of the ways that we are strengthened to remember these things is through communion. Because the Lord Jesus told us, this do in remembrance of me. Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.