I am working my way through the writings of D. Broughton Knox, a 20th century minister in the Anglican Church of Australia and came across this short talk that he gave in 1977 which serves as a helpful reflection on Reformation Sunday. I commend it to your benefit.

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Last week was the 460th anniversary of the Reformation. On the eve of All Saints’ Day, 1517, Martin Luther, a monk, a doctor of Divinity and Professor of Theology at Wittenburg in Germany, nailed up on the door of the castle church (which was the town noticeboard) his 95 theses, and invited discussion on these short statements of doctrine. They were about indulgences which were being sold in the town to raise money for the building of St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome. An indulgence was a way of seeking forgiveness from punishment due to sin. Tetzel, the monk who was selling them as the Pope’s agent, was saying that when the purchase money hit the bottom of his collecting box, the soul flew out of Purgatory of heaven. The Reformation started with Luther criticizing these popularly held notions about Purgatory.

In a nutshell, the Reformation may be said to be about this question of how to obtain forgiveness from God. It may not seem very relevant these days as most people don’t feel the need for forgiveness; they have forgotten that God is their creator, that he sustains their life moment by moment, and that he has fixed a judgment day (Acts 17:31). For those who are aware that they will have to give an account of their lives to God on the awful day of judgment, the question of forgiveness is a very important one. Many people think that being sorry for the wrong they have done is not much of an advance on those who don’t think there is any need of forgiveness at all, for both have too shallow a view of wrongdoing and sin. Sin cannot just be ignored or obliterated by a moment’s compunction. To those, who think thus, Anselm the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1100 AD, rightly warned, “You have not considered the exceeding gravity of sin. It is better that the whole world should perish than that any of God’s creatures should even momentarily disobey His will.” Sin is serious. Is there any way to avoid its consequences of condemnation and punishment? How can we be forgiven? The natural answer is “By trying very hard in the future”, and the church in Luther’s day added, “By bearing voluntarily now some of the punishment which sin deserves and having the rest forgiven through the sacraments”. Indulgences were part of this thinking. By paying money towards the building of St. Peter’s, the purchaser relied on the Pope to substitute the merits of the saints for his own sinfulness.

Martin Luther saw that the Bible had a very different and much more wonderful way in which the guilty conscience could be sure of its forgiveness. He had come to realize, as he read the Bible in his monastery, that the Bible taught that we are forgiven solely for Jesus’ sake. Jesus’ righteousness in his life and in his sin-bearing death is completely sufficient for the forgiveness of all. How good we are—even how good we are with his help—can never be the grounds for God’s forgivness for us; only Jesus’ goodness and our relationship to him through faith is sufficient. When we acknowledge him as Lord, as indeed he is, we are incorporated into him, and in Christ God sees not us but Christ’s merits, which are perfect. Put another way, from the moment we turn to Christ, we are completely forgiven for his sake. And since Jesus has promised that no-one will ever pluck us out of his hand (John 10:28-29), we know that we will always be approved by God, now and on the day of judgment. An important consequence follows: we have the joy of the knowledge of our forgiveness. This is not possible in the old system of seeking forgiveness partly by Christ and partly by our own merits, for we can never know whether these are good enough. There is always uncertainty and fearfulness as to what the verdict will be. But it is God’s purpose that we should know that we are saved—that we should rejoice in his friendship and live for him with all our efforts, not in order to get to heaven, but because we are already there in spirit through the complete forgiveness of our sins for Jesus’ sake and for his sake only, not for anything in ourselves. 

This is the message of the Reformation—that we are forgiven now and on the judgment day only by the merits of our Lord and saviour Jesus Christ. And since God has promised it, we know it is true and rejoice in its certainty. God has promised forgiveness to all who believe in Jesus as Lord, and believing in him, we know the promise is true for us. We experience, as a seal of God’s approval and forgiveness, the presence of his Spirit in our lives. We know it is true because he has promised, and we know it has come true because he has given us his Spirit when we believe.

CERTAINTY OF SALVATION

Every Christian should know that he is saved and that his eternal inheritance is secure. It is God’s intention that we should know this, for this knowledge brings great joy. Thus, St. John writes in 1 John 5:13, “I write this to you who believe in the name of the Son of God that you may know that you have eternal life”.

The way of salvation is clear and simple. St. Paul wrote in Romans 10:9, “If you confess that Jesus is Lord and believe that God has raised him from the dead, you shall be saved”. In Acts 16, when the apostles Paul and Silas were asked by the jailer at Philippi, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?”, they replied, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved and your house” (Acts 16:30-31). Our Lord told Nicodemus in John 3:16, “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life”.

Now, it is a very simple matter to know whether or not we fulfil these conditions of salvation. Are we ready to acknowledge Jesus as Lord? Do we believe that he died and rose again for our sins, and that he is coming again to bring in his kingdom? How do our hearts stand with regard to Jesus? Every one of us can answer this question for ourselves, even though we are not in a position to answer it with absolute certainty for anyone else. At least we can know whether we have taken Jesus Christ, the Son of God, as our Lord and saviour. If we have, we know God’s attitude towards us, for he has declared it very plainly and very frequently in the Bible: “Whoever has the Son, has life”, says the Scriptures (1 John 5:12).

If we are not conscious that our sins have been forgiven, it is either because we do not know God’s promise in Scripture, or we have not brought ourselves within the scope of these promises by acknowledging Christ as Lord. But if we can humbly and honestly say that Jesus is our Lord, if we acknowledge him as God and saviour, and if we are seeking to serve him, there is no room for doubt as to God’s attitude towards us, as he has made it so clear. To doubt his forgiveness of our sins is to dishonour him and his word. The knowledge of God’s gracious attitude towards us is the grounds for Christian joy and confidence in the future. 

There are many passages of the Bible in both the Old and New Testaments which speak of the believer’s assurance of his salvation. For example, the well-known psalm, Psalm 23, begins, “The Lord is my Shepherd” and concludes with the calm assurance that “I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever”. In Psalm 73:24, 26 we read, “Thou shalt guide me with thy counsel and afterward receive me to glory … My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.” Job (in chapter 19) knew that his Redeemer lived and that in his flesh he should see God (Job 19:25-26), and the New Testament is full of similar joyous assurance. Thus St. Paul, writing to the Romans asked, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” (Romans 8:35) and in 2 Timothy 1:12, he stated, “I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day”. The first epistle of John, as we have seen, was written in order that the readers might know that they had eternal life, because they had believed on the name of the Son of God (1 John 5:13). In saying all this, the apostles are simply following the teaching of our Lord who told his disciples in John 10 that none could pluck his sheep out of his Father’s hands. These are clear words of strong assurance, and there are innumerable verses of a similar strain in the Bible. 

As we read the Bible, it is clear that God’s purpose for us is that we might know that we are saved, in order that we might have the joy of this knowledge and the strength to persevere in times of difficulty, knowing that God has received us for Christ’s sake and that there is laid up for us the crown of life. Christ is able to save completely all who come to God through him because he is at the present moment praying for us (Hebrews 7:25). We are weak, but our future is in very strong hands.