LCMS Convention Proceedings St. Louis, Missouri — 1967, Page 52

Transcription machine transcription, uncorrected

⤓ Download .txt · copy text

52 CONVENTION SERMON

Kathie” and Christian scholars have named “the Magna
Charta” of Christian liberty. Our theme, by which we
should like to strike the keynote of our convention, is:

Called unto Liberty, Let Us Serve
One Another in Love

I

“Brethren,” says the apostle, “ye have been called
unto liberty.” And what is this liberty of which he
speaks? Luther answers, it is that “spiritual and true
freedom which makes our hearts free from all sins,
laws, and commands . . . and as heaven is more ex-
cellent than earth, so is this freedom more excellent
than all other external liberties.” ‘May Christ,” he
said, “give us this liberty both to understand and to
preserve.” And Christ did give us this liberty. He has
told us how to preserve it when He said, “If ye con-
tinue in My Word, then are ye My disciples indeed,
and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make
you free.” Free from sin, that is, for He adds: “He that
commits sin is the slave of sin, and the slave abides
not in the house forever, but the son abides forever.
If therefore the Son shall make you free, ye shall be
free indeed.” And the Son has made us free. Lifted
up on the cross, He has taken away the sins of the
world, and we are free from them.

It is this liberty of which Luther spoke when he
said, “He has died for me. And if He takes my sins
upon Himself, then I do not have them any longer,
and I am free.” So his heart and pen could sing, “A
Mighty Fortress is our God, A trusty Shield and
Weapon; He helps us free from every need That hath
us now o’ertaken.” And this freedom is ours too by
His grace through faith. For the Scripture says, “The
man who is just by faith shall live.”

Liberated by faith, then, let us stand fast in this
liberty wherewith Christ has made us free, and let us
not ever be entangled again with the yoke of bondage.
Don’t let men make your Gospel liberty uncertain by
insisting that rituals of the Law or the commands of
the church or the fruits of faith are necessary before
we can be free from sin. Don’t let them confuse the
fruits of faith with the roots of faith — Christ. For we
are justified by grace not cheap grace but free grace.
For Christ has made us free.

And, brethren, there is power in liberty. When a
staff officer during one of the dark periods of the Revo-
lutionary War said to George Washington, “General,
we are lost; everything is lost,’ Washington replied,
“Sir, you do not know the resources and the genius
of liberty.” When in these dark days of testing some of
you lose heart and fear that the cause of our Lord’s
church is lost, then we say to you, “Sirs, you do not
know the resources and genius of Christian liberty.”
For there is power in the freedom of God’s Gospel.

Look what this freedom did for Paul! It sent him
out into the world to conquer it for Christ. He braved
persecution and stoning, danger and death in order

that the dear Gospel might be told to all people of all
nations. And see what the liberty of the Gospel did
for Martin Luther! It set him free from the legalism
that had encumbered the whole church. It liberated
him from fear and sin, death and hell. It gave him
courage to stand for God before the powerful leaders
of church and state. “Here I stand, I cannot do other-
wise,” his liberated heart cried out to them and taught
his followers to sing, “And take they our life, Goods,
fame, child and wife, Let these all be gone, They yet
have nothing won; The Kingdom ours remaineth.” And
look how the testimony of this free man of God has
reached even to our generation, even into Rome so
that a leading theologian of hers recently declared that
he preferred the doctrine of justification as taught by
Luther to that of Thomas Aquinas.

I

Oh, there is power in this glorious liberty of the
Gospel if we but use it. In our text St. Paul tells us how
to use it when he says, “Brethren, ye have been called
unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the
flesh, but by love serve one another,” and “they that
are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with its affections
and lusts.” And the lusts of the flesh are “adultery,
fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, and
sorcery.”

Idolatry is the sin of casting God aside. Therefore
we are guilty of idolatry when we set aside Christ.
For He is more than merely a Palestinian Jew of the
first century. He is the Son of the living Lord and the
sinless Son of Man, in whom dwells all the fullness of
the Godhead bodily and whose every word is true. “God
has in these last days spoken to us through His Son,”
and to reject the message and person of His Son is to re~
ject God Himself. That is idolatry, the work of the flesh.
And we have renounced it.

It is idolatry to pervert the Holy Gospel. St. Paul
therefore warns: “If anyone, if we, if an angel from
heaven proclaim any other Gospel unto you than that
which we have proclaimed unto you, let him be ac-
cursed.” However, the Gospel comes to us with much
more than the simple letter of forgiveness. It comes
to us with all its articles of faith as they are treated in
the Augsburg Confession, defended in the Apology, and
explained in the remaining Lutheran Confessions. These
articles of faith, which deal with creation, the Fall, sin,
faith, good works, the Trinity, and others, are so vitally
involved in the Gospel that to err in them is to err in
the Gospel. And each in turn is so founded and
grounded in Holy Scripture as its source and norm
that to attack the Scripture is to attack them and the
Gospel itself. And it goes without saying that extra-
biblical studies and the conclusions of scholars drawn
from them, however valuable and informational they
may be, can never supersede a single canonical word
of the Holy Scriptures, for to permit that would be to
permit idolatry.

Other works of the flesh listed by the apostle are
“factions, splits, and divisions.” Some seem to think