Dr. Michael Reeves (0:00)

Christian bookstalls, both Catholic and Protestant, groan under the weight of all the how to guides. And we feel, why not? When life is so busy, it's relievingly simple to follow a five Steps to Better Spiritual Health manual. But there is such a thing as an outward performance that is spiritually hollow.

Nathan W. Bingham (0:29)

It can be easy to fall into the performance trap, isn't it thinking that by doing good we can earn God's favor? Well, there's nothing new about that. By the 16th century, the Roman Catholic Church had reduced Christianity to practice and rituals, in essence, a system of good works. Today on Renewing youg Mind, we conclude our time in Michael Reeves series Reformation Truths. So don't forget to request the DVD set. It's available for you as our way of saying thanks for your donation in support of renewing your mind@renewingyourmind.org but be quick as this offer ends tonight at midnight. Here's Dr. Reeves to point out the difference between ritualistic religion and genuine life in Christ.

Dr. Michael Reeves (1:20)

Where did the Spirit go in medieval Roman Catholicism? Not an easy question to answer, because really, the sacramental system and the clergy seemed effectively to replace the Spirit. The way things worked was God's grace was a blessing that would pour through the seven taps of the seven sacraments. The seven sacraments of baptism, confirmation, the Mass, penance, marriage, ordination, last rites, and the clergy were the ones with the power to turn the taps on and off. And with such a hermetically sealed plumbing system for grace, there was really nothing for the Spirit to do. And in many ways, the Reformation as a whole would be a fight for that line in the Nicene Creed. We believe in the Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of life. Because wrapped up in that affirmation is the belief that we do not have life in ourselves. We therefore need more than just a bit of enabling grace. We need life. As the Spirit hovered over the waters in the beginning, giving life to creation, so again we need the Spirit in order to have new life. Luther therefore wrote that the first thing that belief in the Spirit means is I quote, that by my own reason or strength I cannot believe in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to Him. But the Holy Spirit has called me through the Gospel. Salvation, in other words, he saw, cannot be a cooperative effort. God merely assisting weak sinners. It's a divine rescue. God raising the dead. Belief in the Spirit as the giver of life means belief in salvation by grace alone. Without the Spirit, then we would be incapable of doing more than altering ourselves. Superficially, if we're to have life, the Spirit must give us new birth into a new life, giving us new hearts that desire him and so turn to receive life from him. And contending for all that was right at the heart of the Reformation and meant that the reformers believed in the need for a radical from the inside out change as opposed to what Aristotle was recommending. We become righteous by doing righteous acts. Change from the outside in, this is change from the inside out. They saw stony hearted sinners need more than behavior modification. We need a deep internal reformation through the Spirit, opening our eyes to see who the Lord truly and beautifully is. We need our hearts to be overturned, our love of self to be eclipsed by a superior enjoyment of a superlatively lovely God. That is, the Reformers believed in being born again in God haters being won by the gospel not just to an outward act of obedience, but to love, desire and delight in God. Now the English Bible translator William Tyndale. He was one of the first reformers to make clear how different this belief in the living Spirit is to what he was brought up with. A superficial ritualism. And he put it like this. He said our problem is the heart with all the powers, affections and appetites wherewith we can only sin. And he said the only solution is the Spirit which looseth the heart. Only, he said, the spirit has the ability to so loose, free, liberate our hearts from their enslaving love of self and win them to the freedom of knowing God. Tyndale said unless the believer had felt the infinite mercy, goodness, love, kindness of God and the fellowship of the blood of Christ and the comfort of the Spirit of Christ in his heart, he could never have forsaken anything for God's sake. And this theology made for the most practical difference in Reformation circles. The Reformers saw the root of our problem before God doesn't lie in our behavior. It is not as if we've done wrong things and we need to start doing right things now. All our outward acts of sin are merely manifesting the real problem, the inner desires of our hearts. And therefore merely to alter a person's behaviour without dealing with those deep internal desires is simply to cultivate hypocrisy, the self righteous cloak for a cold and vicious heart. And this reformation insight meant that hearts must be turned evil desires eclipsed by stronger ones for Christ and for such fundamental change to happen, what do you need? The reformer saw the Gospel must be preached. Here's Tyndale again. He said when Christ is preached, hearts begin to wax soft and melt at the bounteous mercy of God and kindness showed of Christ. For when the evangelion, the Gospel is preached, the Spirit of God enters into them and opens their inward eyes and and work such belief in them. And when the woeful consciences feel and taste how sweeter thing the bitter death of Christ is, how merciful, how loving God is through Christ's purchasing and merits, then they begin to love. That's to say, our sin cannot be removed from our hearts simply by trying harder or scrubbing ourselves clean. The Spirit must transform us through the Gospel. And that is how the new life of the Spirit begins. And that is how the life of the Spirit grows. Tyndale put it enchantingly. He said, where the Spirit is there, it is always summer, for there there are always good fruits, that is to say, good works. Isn't that a beautiful image of the Spirit's work? Left to unnatural, selfish coldness, we can only spew forth self glorifying, sham acts of goodness. But the heart that stays continually enlightened, refreshed by the Spirit, can be warm, summery, fruitful. So the Gospel then cannot. It was never treated by the Reformers simply as a message for unbelievers, as the doorway into the Christian life. In order for Christians to grow, they too must be kept in the sunshine of the Gospel. Now it is very easy to miss how revolutionary this theology of the Spirit was. Medieval Roman Catholicism had been an essentially impersonal system of salvation. So grace was a thing God gives to help sinners along. That's what God gives, this thing called grace. As a young man, therefore, Luther wanted this thing called grace. But he'd never actually dreamed of enjoying direct communion with God. So he would make requests to the saints, but never to God himself. But communion with God is precisely what the Spirit brings us. Luther came to see. Luther wrote, God has given us His Son and His Holy Spirit in order to bring us to Himself through them, more than any other gift or thing, by His Spirit God gives us Himself. To know and enjoy God is the reward of the Gospel, and knowing him is the life for which we're made and to which we're saved. How different to grace as an impersonal thing. But if grace was an impersonal thing in medieval Roman Catholicism, so too was faith. Faith wasn't so much about personal trust in Christ. That would be called explicit faith in medieval thinking. And explicit faith was considered desirable, but superfluous to essential requirements. After all, it was thought, was it even possible for illiterate and feeble minded peasants to grasp the mysteries of the Gospel. No. Therefore it was thought the uneducated, the illiterate can make their way to heaven on the simpler path of what was called implicit faith, which meant turning up to church, receiving the sacraments. For Luther and the Reformers, such implicit faith was not true and saving faith at all. Such implicit faith assumed God will automatically accept and reward church attendance works of charity, as if God is not actually concerned with knowing us and being known. But in fact, Luther would argue such works of so called implicit faith amounted to nothing more than self dependent idolatry if they didn't flow from personal trust in Christ. Now, a century later, the great Richard Sibbes, one of the Puritan heirs of the Reformation, would write, of late these last hundred years, in the time of Reformation, there has been more Spirit, more lightsomeness and comfort. Why? Because Christ has been more known. Now note how he phrases it. He doesn't say some formula called the Gospel has been more known, though he would agree with that. He says Christ has been more known. And therein is an important difference. Belief in the Spirit meant the Reformers did not have simply some slightly alternative message. It meant people would personally know Christ. And when we consider who the Spirit is, it makes sense that he'd be about more than just enabling us to do good works. The Spirit is the one who's eternally enjoyed and empowered the Word as he goes out from his Father. Through the Spirit, the Father has eternally expressed his love for His Son. Through him, the Son has echoed his Father's love back. And when the Father and the Son share their Spirit with us, they share with us their own life, love, fellowship. Because of who he is. The Spirit must be all about planting a hearty love for God in us. Old news. And none of this has become any less important or less relevant down through the centuries. Still today, Christians display some strong gravitational pull away from knowing God. We can believe and proclaim some message called the Gospel. We can hold a high view of the Bible. We can go to church and live what we think are sort of holy lives and still not actually know God. Our Gospel can be a get out of hell free card that we've signed where knowing Christ is non essential. Our holiness is nothing more than a self dependent morality. This is precisely what sin does in us. It draws us away from keeping the greatest commandment that we love the Lord our God. And this is precisely why the Reformer's theology of the Spirit is so important for us today. And surely the Reformation also presents us With a challenge here. Ritualism, the notion that religious practices, rituals by their very performance bring grace, isn't something that's disappeared with the passing years. It's easy to spot it, perhaps in a different culture, but it's with us today. Christian bookstalls, both Catholic and Protestant, grown under the weight of all the how to guides. And we feel, why not? When life is so busy, it's relievingly simple to follow. A five Steps to Better Spiritual Health manual. There are many skills and practices that are enormously beneficial, but there is such a thing as an outward performance that is spiritually hollow. I can read my Bible, I can say my prayers, be the linchpin of my home group without treasuring Christ. I can preach, I can pastor, I can teach, I can lead without sincerely turning to him for aid. And so we need the reformer's theology of the Spirit to help preserve us from such empty formalism. For the Reformers, the Spirit not only gives a new heart, a new life, a new enjoyment of God, he also gives a whole new assurance. And the word Luther would most use to describe the Holy Spirit in his hymns was Comforter. That was the title he liked to use most often, comforter. We'll take John Calvin as an example. Calvin writes of the Spirit, the Spirit is called the Spirit of adoption because he is the witness to us of the free benevolence of God by which God the Father has embraced us in his beloved only begotten Son to become a Father to us. And he encourages us to have trust in prayer. In fact, the Spirit supplies the very words so that we may fearlessly cry abba Father. For the same reason the Spirit is called the guarantee and seal of our inheritance, because from heaven he so gives life to us as to ensure us that our salvation is safe in God's unfailing care. And that being the case, Calvin taught our faith, which he called the principal work of the Holy Spirit, is meant to be a certain thing, an assured thing. In stark contrast to the Roman Catholic idea of an implicit faith, here's Calvin's definition of saving faith. Calvin said we shall possess a right definition of faith if we call it a firm, certain knowledge of God's benevolence towards us founded on the truth, the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed on our hearts through the Holy Spirit for the comfort and the joy of God's people, the Spirit is given. See how wide ranging the importance of the Spirit is in Reformation thought? Deep heart metamorphosis instead of superficial behavior change, personal communion with God instead of abstract blessing, joy inducing assurance. Those were some of the vital benefits of the Reformer's theology of the Spirit. But in fact, the Reformer's view of the Spirit really permeated everything that they fought for. But if the Spirit is the giver of life, well then salvation must be by grace alone. If he, the Spirit of adoption freely unites us to Christ, salvation is by faith alone, in Christ alone. It must be about knowing God with the security of the Son, Christ alone, faith alone, grace alone. All flowing from this theology of the Spirit. In fact, John Calvin showed the Spirit even keeps us from placing any other authority over that of Scripture, so protecting the principle of Scripture alone. For he argued, we believe Scripture not finally because the Church tells us to, or because intelligent men persuade us that we can, but because the Spirit opens our eyes and witnesses to us. That Scripture is indeed God's Word. The fact that the Spirit is found in every doctrine that the Reformers fought for shouldn't actually be surprising. So wide ranging is the importance of the Spirit for the Reformers. But it shouldn't be surprising. For all the life giving truths of the Reformation are life giving because they're to do with him, the Giver of life. The Reformation was a movement of the Spirit and that means if we are to see the Church and our world Reformed, revitalized and made healthy, we need him, the Lord, the Giver of life.