Michael Reeves
Appearances
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
God is not one who builds on our foundations. He creates life out of nothing. And it meant that instead of looking to God for assistance, but ultimately relying on self, Luther was turning to rely entirely on Christ, in whom all righteousness is achieved.
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
With heaven in the bag, might they feel we can continue in sin, that grace may abound? Couldn't they argue, I like sinning, God likes forgiving? And that was just what many Roman Catholic theologians wondered when they heard the Reformer's message. And ever since, it's not just been Roman Catholics who've felt the dangers.
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
In the 20th century, surrounded by a people and a church that had so easily capitulated to Hitler, the Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer felt it was a wrong attitude towards grace that was partly to blame. And on the eve of the Second World War, Bonhoeffer wrote a scolding attack on what he called cheap grace.
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
The cheap grace he believed had allowed such moral spinelessness on the part of the church in facing the Nazi regime. Now Bonhoeffer defined this cheap grace and called it grace without Jesus Christ alone. For grace without Jesus Christ was the problem in Bonhoeffer's day. But grace without Jesus Christ was precisely what the Reformers were stepping away from.
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
With the Reformers' message of grace alone, they were not offering more of grace as stuff, as spiritual fuel. They were offering Christ. In other words, salvation by grace alone is just another way of saying salvation by Christ alone. Luther wrote, Through faith in Christ, Christ's righteousness becomes our righteousness. All he has becomes ours, or rather, he himself becomes ours.
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
And that puts a world of difference between the message of grace alone and cheap grace. It remains simple. Nobody can receive the Christ who justifies without receiving the Christ who makes us holy. That means holy living is not an awkward small print of the gospel, the catch hiding behind the good news of grace alone. Now, this is wonderful good news.
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
Through this gospel, God acts to free us not only from the horrifying future penalty of sin, but also from its present enslaving power. Grace alone is the most potent message of liberations. Total and absolute liberation from hell. And gradual liberation even from its foul but addictive foretastes.
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
Not a single eyebrow was raised among all the inquisitors in Rome. And why not? Because Martin Luther the monk was still then upholding Rome's own theology. He was loyally teaching standard medieval Roman Catholicism that salvation is by grace. Now, eyebrows might not have arched in Rome, but yours might have done.
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
which is why Paul can write in Titus 2, the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, to live self-controlled, upright, godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works. Because true grace is never grace without Jesus Christ, It means the apostle has no intellectual difficulty in putting free salvation alongside good works.
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
Ephesians 2, he writes, For by grace you've been saved through faith. This is not your own doing. It's the gift of God, not a result of works so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works. which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them, there's no difficulty. For that is the only true life.
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
The life for which believers are freely saved to be freed from the captivity of sin, to know God and share his good, pure life. and holy life. And there is a consistent testimony down through the centuries. Those who have accepted that God saves by His grace alone have found the message to be one of unutterably sweet liberation.
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
Martin Luther wrote, I felt I was altogether born again, then to paradise itself through open gates. And so it remains today. The reformers tenacious insistence on grace alone is no relic of the history books. to be looked on with embarrassment as the sorry squabble of pernickety theologians. It remains as the only message of ultimate liberation.
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
The message with the deepest power to make humans unfurl and flourish. For by grace alone, all those who know themselves as failures can know not just a bit of enabling from God, helping them to do a little better, they can know a wholly new and victorious identity in Christ. They can know assurance, relief from guilt, and sweet intimacy with an almighty Father who cares for them.
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
And knowing that, they begin to find a hearty desire rising up in them to follow the one who is the source of all grace and every good. See, once they would have attempted holiness out of the desperate desire to earn eternal life. With this gospel, They do so out of a heart transformed to want Christ, to see the beauty of His kindness, His goodness, His generosity, and all His holy ways.
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
For it wasn't the whole point of the Reformation that medieval Roman Catholicism falsely taught salvation by works. And that certainly is how many see it. But that idea actually fails to grasp quite how things were. And more importantly, it fails to grasp the true wonder and acuteness of the Reformers' message. So let's see a comparison.
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
Let's compare grace in medieval Roman Catholicism to grace as the Reformers understood it. First then, what did Martin Luther the monk before the Reformation mean when he taught salvation by grace? He could teach that salvation, I quote, is not on the basis, said Luther, of our merits, but on the pure promise of a merciful God, which all sounds very reformational, until he goes on to explain that
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
Luther said, as a monk, the teachers correctly say that to a man who does what is in him, God gives grace without fail. To a man who does what is in him, God bestows everything gratis and only on the basis of the promise of his mercy, although he wants us to be prepared for this as much as lies in us.
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
So according to this, God does save by grace, but that grace is given to those who are prepared for it, who do what is in them to be fit for grace. Or as the teachers of his day like to put it, God will not deny grace to those who do their best. Romans chapter 5 verse 5 is perhaps the single most helpful verse for understanding this view of salvation by grace. And we'll return to it a few times.
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit given to us, writes the Apostle Paul. So instead of being read as a verse about the transformative work of the Spirit in those who Romans 5 verse 1 have been passed, have been justified by faith. That's the context of Romans 5 verse 5. It's talking to those who have been justified.
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
Romans 5.5 was taken in medieval Roman Catholicism to be an account of salvation, meaning that God pours his love and grace into our hearts, transforming us internally, making us holy, ultimately holy enough to merit heaven. And our problem, according to this theology, is that while God is holy, we're lazy and And only holy people belong with a holy God in heaven.
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
But while here's our problem, while we might recognize we really ought to be holy, we really can't be bothered. Not quite enough. We don't seem to be able to muster up the energy that we need to be holy. But don't worry, said the Roman Catholic theologians, God in his kindness gives us grace. And so grace here was a bit like a can of spiritual Red Bull, an energy drink.
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
So I find myself, I can't be bothered to pull myself together and get holy, and God gives me grace. And I suddenly, I take in this grace, and I find myself a lot more eager and ready to go out and be holy. This then, it was a theology of salvation by grace. So without the grace... We could never become the sort of holy people who belong in heaven.
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
But it was absolutely not a theology of salvation by grace alone. Here, grace provided the necessary boost, the fuel we need to earn eternal life, but it didn't actually give or guarantee eternal life. The Red Bull of Grace would be given to those who want it, who pursue it, and it only saved insofar as it enabled people to become holy and so win their salvation.
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
Luther's Reformation message of salvation by grace alone that he came to later could hardly have looked more different to that old pre-Reformation teaching of his about salvation by grace. This is how Luther began to talk. Luther said, He is not righteous who does much, but he who without work believes much in Christ. Here, said Luther,
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
Grace is not about God building on our righteous deeds or helping us to perform them. No, God is not one who builds on our foundations. He creates life out of nothing. And it meant that instead of looking to God for assistance but ultimately relying on self... Luther was turning to rely entirely on Christ, in whom all righteousness is achieved.
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
He wrote, the law says, do this, and it's never done. Grace says, believe in this, and everything is already done. And here Luther found grace. a message so good it almost seemed incredible to him. It was good news for the repeated failure. It was news of a God who doesn't come to call the righteous but sinners. See, deep in our psyche is the assumption that we will be more loved
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
when and only when we make ourselves more attractive, both to God and to others. And into that, Luther speaks words that just cut through the gloom like a glorious and utterly unexpected sunbeam. Luther wrote, the love of God does not find, it creates that which is pleasing to it. And rather than seeking its own good, the love of God flows forth and bestows good.
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
Therefore, sinners are attractive because they are loved. They are not loved because they try to make themselves attractive. There's the counter-cultural, counter-intuitive, glorious message of the Reformation that we need again today. And for the rest of his life, Luther took this message as good news that needs to be continually reapplied to the heart of the believer.
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
Because from his own experience, he found we are so instinctively self-dependent. that while we'll happily subscribe to salvation by grace, our minds are like rocks drawn down by the gravitational pull of sin away from belief in grace alone. And so he would counsel his friends. Here's a letter he wrote to one friend. saying, my dear brother, learn Christ and him crucified. Learn to pray to him.
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
And despairing of yourself, say, you, Lord Jesus, are my righteousness. I am your sin. You've taken upon yourself what is mine, my sin, and given to me what is yours. You've taken upon yourself what you were not and given to me what I was not.
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
Now there is far, far more than first meets the eye standing between the Roman Catholic idea of salvation by grace and the Reformation's message of salvation by grace alone. And the fact that just one little word alone distinguishes them can make you feel like this is a difference only the fussiest theologian can notice.
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
But the difference actually involves even more than where we should look to for confidence before God. In reality, the very meaning of the word grace is different in each. See, in Roman Catholicism we've seen grace was seen as a thing. A force or a fuel like Red Bull. And so Catholics would pray, Hail Mary, full of grace. Because Mary's got a lot of this grace in her.
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
She's wired with spiritual caffeine. And that was nothing like how Luther and his fellow reformers saw grace. For them, grace was not a thing at all. It is the personal kindness of God by which he doesn't merely enable us, but by which he rescues and freely gives us himself. or to be even more precise, there is no such thing as grace. There is only Christ, who is the blessing of God given to us.
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
And that being the case, Luther actually tended not to talk that much about grace in the abstract, preferring to speak of Christ himself.
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
For example, he said, therefore faith justifies because it takes hold of and possesses this treasure, the present Christ, the Christ who is grasped by faith and who lives in the heart of the true Christian righteousness on account of which God counts, asks righteousness, and grants us eternal life.
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
Years before the Reformation, in his days as a monk, Martin Luther had begun lecturing on the Bible at the University of Wittenberg. And there, years before the Reformation, he taught his students that salvation is by grace. I quote, he said, Not because of our merits. Salvation is given out of the pure mercy of the promising God. No alarms went off.
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
In other words, the grace and righteousness we receive in the gospel is not something other than Christ. I quote Luther again, Christ is the divine power, righteousness, blessing, grace, and life. So for Luther, God does not give us some thing other than Himself. In His grace, He unites us to His Son by His Spirit that we might share the life and righteousness of the Son.
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
Instead of throwing out some enabling blessing, Christ makes Himself ours. and so totally that we may plead what is his as ours. Now, what difference does it make living under grace alone? We've seen a very different understanding of grace, but what difference does it make?
Renewing Your Mind
The Grace of God
Now clearly, anyone who can know that they are accepted and loved by God because of Jesus, and not because of how well they feel they've done, they can know a confidence as secure as Jesus Himself. In Him they have an unsurpassable righteousness that is, like Him, the same yesterday, today, forever. Might that lead them to be a little too confident?
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
God saving people out of his sheer loving kindness sounds wonderful, but people needing to be saved because they are otherwise helpless in their sin sounds less pleasing, and we don't like hearing bad news.
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
And the important thing he emphasized in that book for a Christian was keep the rules, do your duty, like a good Christian soldier. For Luther, on the other hand, the church is first and foremost like a family. Knowing God, the Father, is what matters above all. And so sin is not just substandard behavior, dereliction of duty, it's worse. Sin is despising God.
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
The act of sin has its roots in the heart of sin. and reveals that something other than God has become the true object of the heart's desire and adoration. And when played out in real life, the difference between those two visions becomes very obvious. See, if right behavior is the goal, and if that's a goal that everyone can achieve if they simply exert themselves properly,
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
well then the church can run just like an army. Pastors can serve as the sergeant majors, drilling their troops into line. Because after all, as Erasmus believed, everyone is capable of getting into line. Why aren't the people more holy? Because they're not trying hard enough. But,
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
If, as Luther saw, we're made for a deeper purpose, to love, to glorify, to enjoy God, and if we cannot naturally love Him because we're enslaved to sin, then merely to order people to do what they can't is cruel. In other words, anyone who holds to Luther's deep view of sin must find their compassion swell and build. Because people are not just naturally lazy, they are helpless.
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
They need their very hearts to be dealt with, not simply their performance. Above all, they need the one thing with the power to turn and liberate their hearts. The gospel. Luther asked, how shall a work please God if it comes from a reluctant, resisting heart?
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
If hearts are enslaved to the charming lies of sin, if they're to be won to God, then the glory of God in the face of Christ must be made known to them. Christ must be shown to be better, more desirable than sin. And that was how Luther would minister to people. And so compare Erasmus' stern counsel of try harder with this from Luther.
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
Luther wrote, I could not have faith in God if I did not think he wanted to be favorable and kind to me. This in turn makes me feel kindly disposed towards God personally. And I'm moved to trust him with all my heart and look to him for all good things. He goes on, look here, this is how you must cultivate Christ in yourself.
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
Yet while he knew that sin is a severe problem, he didn't think it was a very deep problem. It was a view that chimes well with today's cheery optimism about ourselves and our culture. For today... In our culture, we know we do wrong things, but the suggestion that we might be rotten deep down strikes our society today as utterly repellent nonsense.
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
Faith must spring up and flow from the blood and wounds and death of Christ. If you see in these God is so kindly disposed towards you, he even gives his son for you, then your heart in turn will grow sweet and disposed towards God. He saw because sin is a slavery, an addiction, Luther saw he couldn't simply hector or order people out of it.
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
That might bring about such a bullying pastor could bring about behavioral change. You can enforce that somehow, but that will only reinforce a deeper self-dependence. No, ears need to be opened. to the message of Christ and Him crucified. Eyes need to be opened to the unfathomable kindness and glory of the living God, and only in that gospel light can true humility, goodness, and charity grow.
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
You see, the Reformation's deep view of sin goes all the way down into the hearts, enslaving us. It looks initially unattractive. But if sin is not much of a problem, Christ is not much of a saviour. And we don't need much grace. Only if I see my plight is so bad I cannot fix it myself, only then will I turn to Christ and depend on Him instead of myself.
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
Only then will I despair of my efforts and look outside myself for hope. And that's what we see in the Gospels, isn't it? In the Gospels, it's the one with the great debt cancelled who loves most. In Luke 7, it's the forgiven prostitutes and tax collectors who weep with joy, give away their wealth and love Jesus. It's the Pharisees, those who think they are something in themselves.
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
think they have something in themselves on which they can depend. It's them. They are the ones who never find that liberation, that transformation. And historically too, times of church reformation and revival have consistently been marked by a radical view of sin.
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
It was on the lips of the preachers of the Great Awakening, men like George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, as much as it was in the mouths of the reformers. For such men knew that calls for social improvement and better morality, while good things, do not touch the heart of the human condition. Corrupted all the way down. We cannot fix ourselves.
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
Our hearts must be renewed, and that can only happen through the gospel being preached and the glory of God being revealed. The Reformation's radical view of sin is why we sinners would throw ourselves on God's grace alone.
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
Most believe today we are good people muddling through. And, of course, we slip up every now and again. Sin is seen as a small problem, easy to fix. And what Luther came to see, surprisingly, is that such sunny stories of how basically good we are, so attractive in their cheeriness, are actually terrible, enslaving lies.
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
Now, in Luther's day, it was the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle who summed it up and whose message was so widespread. Aristotle said, "'We become righteous by doing righteous deeds.'" "'We become righteous by doing righteous deeds.'" or we become just by doing just acts. It was a self-help, fake it till you make it message.
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
So if you work at outward righteous acts and keep doing them, it claimed you will actually become a righteous person. And for years, Luther lived by the maxim, we become righteous by doing righteous deeds. As a monk, he desperately did all the righteous deeds he could imagine, fasting, praying, pilgriming, monkery.
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
And what he slowly came to realize was the dream of becoming truly righteous by some simple change of behavior was just that, an elusive dream. Holding its reward ever just out of reach, it consistently promised righteousness without delivering it. All the time exacting a heavier and heavier behavioral demand. In other words, by dangling the hope of becoming righteous ever.
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
before him while repeatedly giving more deeds to do, that idea gradually enslaved him. Worse, while doing all those outward acts of righteousness, he found it wasn't making him upright in heart, full of love for the Lord.
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
Quite the opposite, as he's doing all these apparently, he thinks, righteous acts, he found resentment snowballing inside him for the God who demands so many deeds, trying to sort himself out and become righteous by his own efforts was driving him deep into slavery, despair, and hatred of God. Sin, he began to see, was not so easy a problem to whisk away.
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
It went deep down in him, deeper down than he could reach himself. And so it was in 1517 that Luther decided to challenge Aristotle. And so a few weeks before posting his more famous 95 Theses, Luther posted his 97 Theses. And in them he wrote this. Hear how he's directly taking on Aristotle? Luther wrote, we do not become righteous by doing righteous deeds.
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
Rather, having been made righteous, we do righteous deeds. That is, our sin is not, he saw, something we can sort out by ourselves by adjusting our performance. If we are to be righteous, we have to be made righteous. So how does that work? Well, Luther continues. He said, the grace of God makes righteousness abound through Jesus Christ because it causes one to be pleased with the law.
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
In other words, what we cannot do, the grace of God does. The God in his kindness is able to reach down where we can't reach into our hearts and change not just the superficial layer of our behavior, but our very hearts, causing us to actually desire to be pleased with what is righteous. And that uprightness of heart is the only true uprightness.
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
Now this is just where many would part ways with the Reformation. God saving people out of his sheer loving kindness sounds wonderful. But people needing to be saved because they are otherwise helpless in their sin sounds less pleasing. And we don't like hearing bad news. And it was the same in Luther's day.
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
In the early days of the Reformation, there were many who were vaguely sympathetic to the Reformation. They saw the need for some sort of change, some sort of reformation in the church. They wanted the corruption, the mismanagement cleaned up. And they saw someone like Luther and thought, he's the new broom who can come in, step up to the task and clean things up a bit.
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
And one such admirer was Erasmus. at the time the most celebrated scholar in the world, the man who'd published the Greek New Testament that had converted Luther. And yet, Erasmus' idea of reformation was like his view of Christianity. He believed that what the Roman Catholic Church needed in his day was a few improvements. It was dirty and needed a wash.
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
but nothing more radical or essential needed changing. I'm likewise with us all, Erasmus felt. He thought we could do better, we should do better, but that doesn't mean we're enslaved to sin. We just ought to try a bit more. And so in 1524, Erasmus wrote on the freedom of the will, arguing that sin is not something that affects us so deeply or powerfully that it actually enslaves us.
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
Luther saw this as an assault on the very vitals of the Reformation, and he responded with a blistering argument on the bondage of the will. Now the title that Luther gave his work, written the next year, on the bondage of the will, commonly throws people. For people think, I make free choices, don't I? Is Luther saying I can't do what I want? This idea of the bondage of the will?
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
But that's a complete nonsense, they say, for I do what I want every day. My will seems very free. And actually Luther would agree. We do always do what we want. But you do not choose what to want. For underneath our wills, directing and governing our choices, lie our hearts with their inclinations and desires. Proverbs 16 verse 9, in his heart, a man plans his course.
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
And that is why we choose to sin. We do not go through life neutrally weighing the odds of each decision. Should I go with the righteous option now or the sinful option? And then just sensibly choose between them neutrally. No, no. We choose sin because that's what we want. We are carrying out, Ephesians 2, the desires of the flesh. We naturally, John 3, love darkness.
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
And so, James 1, each person is tempted when he's lured and enticed by his own desire. And then desire, James writes, when it's conceived, gives birth to sin, and sin, when it's fully grown, brings forth death, James 1, 14 and 15. What Luther had seen then is that the problem of our sin goes as deep in us as it possibly could, all the way down into our hearts, shaping what we want and love.
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
And as a result, we never naturally want God. So we freely choose to do the things that we want, and that includes we have the ability to live a life of outward morality and respectability. We can do that. But left to ourselves, we will never choose God because we do not naturally want him. Now, Erasmus had taken it that our problem as sinners is God. Basically sloth.
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
We are spiritually sluggish and sleepy. That's our problem. And what we need if we're to be righteous is pull ourselves together. Put in the proper effort. And then you can do it. Luther's own experience had given the lie to all that. left him saying after years of monkery, I did not love, I hated the righteous God. I was angry with God.
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
We're going to look now at the question of sin. and see how differently sin can be understood and how different views of sin have profound practical consequences. Now, Martin Luther grew up with a little view of sin. It wasn't that he refused to take sin seriously, quite the opposite. Sin, he knew, is the weight that will drag us to hell. It is the cause of all misery. Its wages are death.
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
And with that in his heart, Luther had found he could strive as hard as he wanted and yet only find himself further than ever from actually fulfilling the law by loving the Lord his God. Luther knew an outward appearance of righteousness he could achieve. But it would be nothing more than a hollow sham made of self-dependence, self-worship, self-righteousness.
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
He saw he was like a rotten tree producing rotten fruit. And sin was in his roots, in the very grain of his deepest self. And what Luther needed, what he saw all sinners need, was a radical renewal, a new heart that would freely love and be pleased with God. And that, he saw, would only come about through the love of God being spread abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit. He put it like this.
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
The heart must be made glad. It must grow warm and melt in the love of God. And then praise and thanksgiving will flow from a pure heart. He's saying that it is when someone tastes the love, the grace, the glory of God through the gospel, then their eyes are opened and their hearts are turned. And only then will they love God from a pure heart.
Renewing Your Mind
The Sinfulness of Man
Now the difference between Luther and Erasmus meant they ended up with two very different visions of Christianity. A superficial view of sin and a deep view of sin ended in very different places. For Erasmus, the church is most like an army. And one of his best known works was entitled The Manual of the Christian Soldier.
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
You will not love God unless you know He loves you first. You will not love Him unless you know a security in which to enjoy Him. And therefore, justification by faith alone must be the very foundation stone of healthy Christian living.
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
Verse 6, just as David, also speaking of the blessing of the one to whom God counts righteousness apart from works, and he quotes Psalm 32, blessed are those whose lawless deeds are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man against whom the Lord will not count his sin. And so the blessed person here, in Romans, is not a person who has no sin.
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
The blessed person is the one whose sins are not counted against them. This is legal language, meaning, to use Luther's shocking phrase, The Christian is simul justus et peccator, simultaneously, at the same time, just or righteous by status and a sinner in themselves. And you know, in fact, there was no support for the use of the word justification as a process.
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
That's not what the word justification means today. And it's not what it ever meant. That misunderstanding arose because of a bad translation of the Greek New Testament into the Latin that the Roman church was using. Because there is a perfectly good set of Greek words the New Testament could have used if it wanted to speak of making us righteous rather than God declaring us righteous.
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
There's a set of words you could use if that's what you wanted to say. That's not what the New Testament says. And this, in fact, is now granted by many Roman Catholic scholars. Take, for example, Leslie Rumble who writes, Now it is quite true that Paul made use of a word which in the Greek language had the technical meaning of legal acquittal.
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
And if the word can have no other meaning than the one, that would scarcely dispute the interpretation of justification as implying no more than to be counted as righteous or not guilty in the sight of God. which makes it sound like he's saying Luther's right. But, he goes on, alas, Luther had not the advantages of modern scholarship. Ah, modern scholarship.
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
He belonged to an age, he writes, when it was thought that the real meaning of the New Testament could be best ascertained by discovering the exact sense of the Greek language in which the books were originally written. Oh, Luther.
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
But while acknowledging that the meaning of the New Testament supports Luther's understanding, Rumble rejects this on the basis that, I quote, the whole religious outlook takes precedence over the fine print. So the whole religious outlook takes precedence over the actual words of the Bible. Justification was the matter of the Reformation, and through it,
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
Both Rome and the Reformers now and then believed and taught justification in some sense. both held that God justifies by His grace through faith, which sounds like and has been taken to mean real agreement on this first and keenest subject of controversy. But justification
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
God was glorified as utterly merciful and good, as both supremely holy and compassionate. And therefore, people found they could find their comfort and delight in this God. Here, the Reformers saw is a God who loves failures first, not one who simply approves those who've sorted themselves out. And so the glory of this God became the root of true satisfaction and joy for believers.
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
It became their guiding light, their ultimate goal. And so here is how Luther, remember the man who once said he hated God? Here's how he would come to speak of God in his glory and love. Luther wrote, The love of God does not find but creates that which is pleasing to it. The love of God loves sinners, evil persons, fools, and weaklings in order to make them righteous, good, wise, and strong.
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
Therefore, sinners are attractive because they're loved. They're not loved because they're attractive. He's showing how all this still matters because you will never love God and lean into the Christian life without it. You will not love God unless you know he loves you first. You will not love him unless you know a security in which to enjoy him.
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
And therefore, justification by faith alone must be the very foundation stone of healthy Christian living. Without it, you will not have a life of joy and integrity before God. But with it, you can say this with Luther, When the devil throws our sins up to us and declares that we deserve death and hell, we ought to speak like this. I admit I deserve death and hell. What of it?
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
Does this mean I shall be sentenced to eternal damnation? By no means, for I know one who suffered and made satisfaction in my behalf. His name is Jesus Christ. the Son of God, and where he is, there I shall be also. For no sin is greater than the blood of this Lamb, and we are clothed in him.
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
Justification by faith alone, this declarative act, means that we who know we are a sea of failures can approach a holy God with with absolute honesty and absolute boldness. Absolute honesty about our failure and boldness because of Christ and not anything we've done. It's hard to do both, isn't it? To have both honesty about our failures, our sinfulness before a holy God and boldness.
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
That is what justification by faith alone gives. We can approach a most holy God with absolute honesty and absolute boldness because of Jesus.
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
is a prime example of a doctrine that is susceptible to very different readings and which therefore needs to be closely defined. So let's start with the understanding of justification Luther was brought up with before the Reformation. And to get it, you really need to go back to the great 5th century theologian Augustine.
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
who believe that if you want to understand justification, you need to turn to the book of Romans, which you might have been expecting. But chapter 5 and verse 5, which says, God has poured his love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit he's given us. Now, that is a lovely biblical truth, but it's not justification.
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
But as Augustine understood it, what happens in justification is that God pours his love into our hearts, internally transforming us, making us more and more loving, more and more righteous, more and more just, deified. I'm internally transformed. I'm more and more inherently righteous and holy, more and more personally worthy of heaven as I'm transformed.
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
And so justification was a process of internal transformation. What do you think that does to you if you believe that? Well, the very clear takeaway for Europe was a lack of assurance before a holy God. So one of the charges made against Joan of Arc at her trial in 1431 was just this.
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
At a trial, the judges proclaimed, "'This woman sins when she says she's certain of being received into paradise.'" Seeing on this earthly journey, said the judges, no pilgrim can know if he is worthy of glory or punishment. And that judgment made complete sense within the logic of the system.
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
If we can only enter heaven because we have, yes, by God's enabling grace, become personally worthy of heaven, of course nobody can be sure. By that line of reasoning, I can have as much confidence in heaven as I have confidence in my own sinlessness. And that is why during a thunderstorm in 1505, the 21-year-old student Martin Luther screamed with fear.
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
when a thunderbolt smashed him to the ground. It hit so close he was knocked to the ground. The air was pushed out of his lungs, and he screamed the words, listen carefully to the words, St. Anne, help me. I'll become a monk. He cried, but not to God. But he had never in his life prayed to God. For he did not dare to speak to a holy God. Poor man. Terrified. of his fate.
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
He couldn't even cry out to God because he had no assurance of how he stood before him. And so he puts a good word in with Anne, who's the mother of Mary, hoping Anne will speak to Mary, who'll speak to Jesus, who'll speak to the Father. And he thinks that entering a monastery to earn his salvation is going to help. And that's what he did.
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
He did become a monk, and for the next ten years or so, through his monkery, sought to climb what he saw as a steep, slippery ladder to heaven, and said after that, though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience, and I could not believe that God was placated. I did not love, I hated God who punishes sinners.
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
And secretly, if not blasphemously, murmuring greatly, I was angry with God. Because as he saw it, God must be the sort of monstrous being who makes you earn his love. And he started wrestling with Romans chapter 1, verse 17, and particularly that phrase, the righteousness of God, that you find there in that verse. And Luther hated that phrase, the righteousness of God.
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
They couldn't understand how Paul could say that the righteousness of God is gospel, good news. For he thought, how can that be good news? If God is righteous, that's not good news for me because I am unrighteous. And if he's righteous, that just means he's going to judge me. So the righteousness of God is pure bad news for me. And then, hammering away that text in his cell,
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
He wrote, I began to understand the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous live by a gift of God, namely by faith. And in that tower experience, Luther discovered an entirely different God who relates to us in an entirely different way. A God who loves us first. Before we ever love him. He saw the righteousness of God is something he shares with us.
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
The righteousness of God is something he shares with failures like you and me. What a discovery to explain to the world. It transformed his life and the next year or so he devoted to writing fast to explain this. And when he came to explain his discovery, it wasn't to Romans that he turned. It was to the book of Song of Songs, the story of a romance.
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
For, he believed, you can best understand the gospel if you understand it like a marriage. And so Luther told the story of a king, a perfect and wealthy king, representing King Jesus. And a poor girl, in fact a prostitute, representing us. And there is nothing that girl can do to make herself the queen. For the king and his love woos her.
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
And at their wedding day, she gets to say to him, all that I am, I give to you. And all that I have, I share with you. And so she shares with him what? Debts, shame. But he's so wealthy, he can take all her debts. And then the king turns and says to her, my darling, all that I am I give to you and all that I have I share with you. And with those words, that poor girl is the queen by status.
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
All the kingdom is hers. All that I have, I share with you. And that is the great marriage swap of the gospel. Saul Luther, the joyful exchange, our great bridegroom, has taken all our sin, borne it on the cross, and drowned it in his blood. And then he has given to us all his righteousness. all his blessedness, all his status before the Father.
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
And so, said Luther, the sinner can confidently display her sins in the face of death and hell and say, if I've sinned, my Christ in whom I believe has not sinned. And all his is mine now. No, mine, my sin is his. That girl... She'd not learned the ways of the court, how to be queenly, but she was the queen by status.
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
We come now to the wonderful doctrine of justification, the matter of the Reformation, the matter that made the Reformation the Reformation. As John Calvin put it, the first and keenest subject of controversy between us. Now justification is perhaps the ultimate example of a doctrine that quite different Christian traditions can hold to and understand in completely incompatible ways.
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
Just so, the Christian is at one and the same time sinful in themselves, in their habits, in their lifestyle, but by status now, united to Christ in that joyful exchange, righteous. sinful in herself and righteous, absolutely righteous by status with the righteousness of Christ. That is the joyful exchange. And do you see how much stronger this is than simply being forgiven?
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
Sometimes people talk about justification, saying that it means it's just as if I'd never sinned, which is half helpful. It's what I believed when I first became a Christian. That's what I was taught about justification. And I thought it sounded good for a bit. I thought it was lovely to have my slate wiped clean when I became a believer, but I messed it up again rather quickly.
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
So what do I do with the sins I've committed since I was justified? Do I have to be re-justified now? What I hadn't grasped is that justification involves not only my transferring all my sin to him, but not only are my sins counted to him, he's positively given me, imputed, counted to me all his righteousness. I do not just have a blank slate as a believer.
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
My sin is counted to him, his righteousness is counted to me. So justification, Luther saw, is a legal term, not a transformational term. It fits into the idea that man stands before God the judge in the cosmic courtroom. And we are justified when God pronounces the verdict that we have a righteous status before him.
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
And so in the Bible, the righteous person is not the person who's never sinned, not the person who's done plenty of good works. The righteous person is the sinner on whom God has pronounced the verdict righteous. Romans chapter 4 from verse 3 reads, For what does the Scripture say? Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness.
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift, they're his due. This is the most extraordinary verse, verse 5. To the one who does not work but believes in him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness." Isn't that amazing language?
Renewing Your Mind
Justified by Faith
To the one who does not work but believes in the one who not justifies the one who's sorted himself out, not justifies the one who's been through a process of internal purification, God who justifies the wicked, the ungodly. This is our God. He goes on.
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
What did the Reformers mean when they argued that the Scriptures authenticate themselves? They meant the Bible proves itself to be what it claims to be, the Word of God.
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
In chapter 7, he argues, Scripture authenticates itself. And this, he says, is stronger evidence than all external proof. In fact, he writes, they who strive to build up firm faith in Scripture through disputation, through argument, are doing things backwards.
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
Even if anyone clears God's sacred word from man's evil speaking, he will not at once imprint on their hearts the certainty that piety requires. You hear what he said in chapter 7. Here's chapter 8 now. He goes on to say, so far as human reason goes, sufficiently firm proofs are at hand to establish the credibility of Scripture.
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
And he lists some of them, the antiquity of the texts, their coherence, miracles, fulfilled prophecy. So how does that fit with what he said in chapter 7, that those who strive to build up firm faith in Scripture through argument are doing things backwards? When we see there are other firm proofs to establish the credibility of Scripture. Well, he writes, those arguments...
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
not strong enough before to engraft and fix the certainty of Scripture in our minds, they become very useful aids. In other words, we'd be fools to base our trust in Scripture all on such external arguments. Firm faith can only thrive on the foundation of God's Word. But having affirmed that Scripture is from God, with utter certainty, these external arguments show us we're not out of our minds.
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
This is entirely reasonable faith. But we don't have that faith primarily because some bright scholar has convinced us. We have that faith because of God's Word proving itself. Scripture is the solid foundation of our faith. External arguments are not to be confused with that foundation, but they are useful in showing the reasonability of our faith.
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
And this doctrine of Scripture's self-authentication is vital for healthy missions. Because God's Word by itself, because by its nature it proves itself to be the Word of God, it means we can give people Bibles in their own language. And we can have confidence God's Word can prove itself. Lastly, a bit of clarification.
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
How is the Christian claim that our Scriptures are self-authenticating different to similar claims made by other religions about their holy books? So let me take two, the Qur'an and the Book of Mormon. First of all, the Qur'an. Like Christians, Muslims argue the Qur'an is self-evidently divine. But what a Muslim means by this is very different to what we've been speaking of.
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
Well, Luther had the audacity to say that Scripture alone is the supreme and inerrant authority. While popes and councils err, Scripture alone does not. And so what distinguished the Reformers from Rome was their claim that as important as tradition is, and they thought tradition was very important, tradition is not without error. only God's Word is.
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
The Muslim will speak of the divine beauty of its word choice and poetry. It is good quality Arabic literature. But that is not what Christians mean. by the Scriptures. The divine quality of the Bible is not detected in the particular beauty or arrangement of the words, for multiple human authors speak in quite different genres and styles, from poetry to history to personal letters.
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
No, it is the meaning, it is the message that is conveyed through the words that evidences itself as heavenly. through all those different genres, the multifaceted glory of its message shines through. And practically, as a result, this means real confidence in Scripture, such as the Reformers had, will not come through simply staring at a page or rereading a favorite Bible verse again and again.
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
Now, real confidence in Scripture will come and it will build through a broad reading of Scripture so that you see the whole more clearly. You see the glory of the whole. Second, other, holy book to consider, the Book of Mormon. Now, when Mormons speak of knowing that the Book of Mormon is true, it is the witness of the Spirit that is key. But it is entirely subjective.
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
For Mormons, the Spirit witnesses that the Book of Mormon is true when you've prayed and you get this overwhelming feeling of happiness and you just know it's true. Again, that's very different to what Christians mean by self-authentication of the Scriptures. The Spirit does not give us assurance that the Bible is God's Word through some mystical experience.
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
What we mean when we say that the Spirit opens our eyes is that the text we are now seeing evidences itself. And because the authentication is found in the text, it means we can argue it out with the Mormon. It is the demonstrable meaning of the text that is glorious in one book and inglorious in another. It is not through confidence found in intense religious experience.
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
It is through the Word evidencing its own nature as you read it. Now, we've only just scratched the surface, but I hope this reformational doctrine of Scripture, its supreme authority founded on nothing else, will give you great and life transforming confidence in God's glorious word.
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
And because Scripture is the entirely trustworthy Word of God, Scripture alone is the church's ultimate authority, sufficient for faith and practice. Now, the question of authority was critical in the Reformation. so critical, it was the very heart of Luther's early key debates in the very first years of the Reformation.
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
So round one of the Reformation, Sylvester Prioreus was the Dominican theologian appointed by Pope Leo X to make the first response to Luther's theses. And Prioreus Quickly saw the location of final authority was the real issue at stake. And so Prius wrote in his dialogue concerning the power of the Pope, he said, Round two. Round three.
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
Cardinal Cadgeton then weighed in, arguing that Scripture must be interpreted by the Pope, who is above not only councils, he argued, the Pope is above Scripture itself. Luther replied, his holiness abuses Scripture. I deny that he is above Scripture. And that was very much the early debates of the Reformation in a nutshell. Roman theologians insisted on the infallibility of the papacy.
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
And the more they did so, the more Luther relied on the authority of Scripture. And Luther summed up his position when he said, the saints could err in their writings and the sin in their lives, but the Scriptures cannot err. And that establishes and outlines the Reformational theological method in contrast to the Roman Catholic method.
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
For still today, the Catechism of the Catholic Church states, both Scripture and tradition must be accepted and honored with equal sentiments of devotion and reverence. In contrast, the heirs of the Reformation hold the Bible is our only chief, supreme, and ultimate authority. And that is the meaning of sola scriptura.
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
Sola scriptura is not the same thing as nuda scriptura, that we should have no creed but the Bible. Now, Sola Scriptura acknowledges there are other important authorities for the Christian, authorities who should be listened to and followed.
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
We respect the authority of church elders, of great theologians, of creeds and confessions, but Scripture alone is the authority that rules over and governs all other authorities. All other authorities are to be followed only insofar as they are subservient to Scripture, which alone is our supreme authority. Scripture alone is supreme, and Scripture alone is a sufficient authority.
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
The Bible provides believers with all the truth they need for faith and godliness. And there would have been no Reformation without Scripture. this truth. And you can see that when you compare Erasmus with Luther. Erasmus was the great scholar who'd provided the Greek New Testament through which Luther had been converted. But Erasmus wasn't considered the first reformer.
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
He was the man who'd made the Scriptures available But while providing the coals for the Reformation, his possession of the Scriptures and his deep study of the Scriptures changed little for the man himself because of how he treated them. Erasmus buried the Scriptures under convenient assertions of their vagueness. And he accorded the Scriptures little practical, let alone governing, authority.
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
And the result was that for Erasmus, the Bible was just one voice among many. And so its message could be tailored, squeezed, and adjusted to fit his own vision of what Christianity was. And to break out of that suffocating scheme to achieve any substantial change and reformation, it took Luther's view that Scripture is the only sure foundation for belief.
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
The Bible had to be acknowledged as the supreme authority and allowed to overturn and overrule all other claims or else, Luther saw, it would itself be overruled and its message would be hijacked. In other words, a simple reverence for the Bible, an acknowledgement that Scripture has some authority, would never have been enough to bring about the Reformation.
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
Sola Scriptura was the indispensable key for change. But how can you know that the Bible is this trustworthy Word of God? How can you be sure? Is it that you need to turn to the Pope who can assure you that this Bible is trustworthy? Is it that you need to turn to scholars?
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
Well, according to the Reformers and the Reformation tradition, you can know that the Bible is this supreme, trustworthy, authoritative Word of God first and foremost because it authenticates itself as such. There are other supporting reasons why you can have confidence in it as the Word of God, but first and foremost you can because it proves itself to be what it claims.
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
Now let's get some clarity here. What did the Reformers mean when they argued that the Scriptures authenticate themselves? They were going further than the claim that the Bible is the Word of God. They weren't simply arguing that the Bible claims it is the Word of God.
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
They weren't making what people often dismiss as a weak circular argument that we trust the Bible is the Word of God because it claims it is the Word of God. No, they meant the Bible proves itself to be what it claims to be, the Word of God. Here's how John Calvin put it. And this is from the beginning of Book 1 of Chapter 7 of the Institutes. He said, "...Scripture's authority..."
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
may be established as certain. And to banish all doubt, indeed, Scripture exhibits fully as clear evidence of its own truth as white and black things do of their color or sweet and bitter things do of their taste. The sacred Scriptures breathe something divine." Others in the Reformation tradition would use similar arguments.
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
The Puritan John Owen argued, Scripture speaks of itself as a lamp and a light. 2 Peter 1, 19, and we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed to which you would do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts. Now, says Owen, only what is not light needs light to make it known. but he says light manifests itself.
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
You don't need to shine light on light to know what it is. Light requires no other testimony for its evidence. It proves itself by what it is. And this belief was essential to the Reformation project. The reformers believed they could preach the scriptures to all because the Scriptures can be understood by all.
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
And they were no longer then the preserve of the educated elite, for God's Word brings its own enlightenment, for it is a lamp and a light. Now, of course, you could object, and people did, and say, well, if Scripture is so self-evidently the Word of God, why isn't everyone a Christian? Why doesn't everyone know the Bible is the Word of God? To which the answer is 2 Corinthians 4, verse 4.
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
God of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ. And so, Calvin and others would speak of the need for the witness of the Spirit. Calvin wrote, even if Scripture wins reverence for itself by its own majesty, It seriously affects us only when it is sealed on our hearts through the Spirit.
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
Now, it's important to understand what Calvin does and doesn't mean here. This throws many into a spin, those who want confidence in the Bible. By the witness of the Spirit, Calvin is not saying the Spirit gives people some additional information. that proves that the Bible is divine in origin. We're not waiting for some voice in our heads telling us, believe it, this is God's Word.
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
Rather, Calvin is describing an internal work whereby the Spirit removes our natural blindness to see what is already there. in Scripture for anyone with working eyes to see it. So the Spirit doesn't add to Scripture. He opens our eyes to see its self-evidencing light and divine quality. But why is this important? Well, Calvin got straight to the point when he addressed the issue for his day.
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
In this session, we're going to look at the different views of Scripture held by the Roman Catholic Church and the Reformers. Now, when Luther began his protest just over 500 years ago, he was addressing a church in Rome that affirmed Scripture's authority and inspiration. So what was it about Luther's thought that was so different, so offensive to the Roman church?
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
He said, it is a wicked falsehood that Scripture's credibility depends on the judgment of the church. Scripture, he said, has its authority from God, not from the church itself. Calvin saw if the Scriptures require something else to give them their authority, then that other thing becomes the supreme authority. And that was why self-authentication was important for the first Reformers.
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
It was part of upholding the supremacy of Scripture and its message. In other words... I don't have to rely on the Pope to tell me that Scripture is God's Word. And I don't have to rely on some scholar, some apologist, or even my own reasonable arguments. Like light, Scripture does evidence itself. It enlightens me to know a glorious God I would never have dreamed of.
Renewing Your Mind
The Authority of Scripture
It enlightens me to know myself. It diagnoses me like nothing else with a perception I never had. It makes sense of the world as only the creator could. Now, Calvin has two related chapters on this in book one of his institutes, chapters seven and eight. I wouldn't normally give this detail here, but it's important how they work in his argument.