Text: Romans 3:19-28
Dear saints in Christ, grace and peace to each of you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
The hymn “By Grace I’m Saved,” which we just sang, has become one that I am really quite fond of recently. I imagine it as a triumphant proclamation or reminder of that Reformation truth (which really predates the Reformation and goes all the way back to God’s promise of salvation in the Garden of Eden to Adam and Eve) that we are saved by God’s grace, not our works. I want to draw your attention in particular to the third verse:
“By grace! Oh, mark this word of promise
When you are by your sins oppressed,
When Satan plagues your troubled conscience,
And when your heart is seeking rest.
What reason cannot comprehend
God by his grace to you did send.”
I love that this verse brings our conscience to mind and want to take some time today to talk about our conscience and what this good news that we are saved by grace alone means for our consciences.
The Reformation all started with a young man’s guilty conscience. Martin Luther was a young man with a seemingly bright future ahead of him. His father, a burgeoning entrepreneur in the mining business, sent him, his oldest son, away to university so that he could get a proper education and return to be groomed into the family business. Luther studied at the University of Erfurt and was an excellent student. It was expected that he would move on into higher levels of education and study law, much to his father’s delight. Something, however, was not right.
Despite all the successes and the promising future that lied in from on him, Luther’s conscience was plagued by guilt. Inside himself Luther did not see a young man with a bright future, a good student, or anything else positive for that matter. Inside himself Luther saw only one thing: sin. And he wasn’t wrong about that. Everything he did, every thought of his heart and mind, Luther realized, fell short of the glory of God. He didn’t know much about the Bible at the time, but he knew enough to know that this was a bad situation. He knew enough to know that God punishes sinners and he knew, as he looked inwards at his own heart, that he was a sinner. As he studied away at university the guilt festered.
If you’ve ever had a guilty conscience (and who hasn’t!) then I imagine that you can relate to young Martin Luther a little bit. A guilty conscience, a conscience that is keenly aware of our shortcomings and failures, can be crippling, it can bring life to a halt. When guilt seizes us we all of a sudden see threats and danger all around us and we begin to live in fear. All of a sudden it feels like everyone else is out to get us. That is what happened to Luther, nearly driven mad by his guilt, this smart, successful, young man having all the opportunities in the world laid out before him, saw death and danger at every turn.
While returning to university after another trip home to visit family a thunderstorm broke out. Luther was there, on the road, in the midst of the thunder and lightning with no shelter from the storm to be found. While that would be a frightful situation for anyone, Luther’s conscience only magnified the fear. In the thunder and in the lightning Luther saw the anger and wrath of God reaching down from heaven to bring an end to his miserable, sinful existence. In the midst of the storm of fear and guilt raging inside of him Luther called out for help, “Help me, Saint Ann, I will become a monk!” he shouted. Now we could say something here about praying to saints, but that is a conversation for another day. More importantly for us right now, the storm ended, Luther survived, and he went back to Erfurt and made good on his promise. He became a monk.
Now, becoming a monk would seem like a good thing for someone like Luther with a guilty conscience to do. Dedicating oneself to praying, studying, and living a holy life would seem like a cure for a conscience that could not find peace anywhere else. Luther probably thought so too. For Luther, however, things only got worse.
In the monastery Luther only became more and more aware of how bad his situation really was. The more he tried, by his obedience and dedication, to lead a godly life the more he realized how much he failed. He disciplined himself, beat himself, slept outside in the freezing cold of winter, deprived himself of good and healthy food, and did pretty much everything else a person could possibly do in his quest to find peace for his conscience, but every “good work” he did was matched with hundreds, if not thousands, of sinful thoughts, words, and deeds. Even as Luther read and studied the Bible his conscience only grew worse. There in the words of Scripture all he could see was an angry God who would punish anyone who did not live up to the lofty standards of His Kingdom.
Then it happened. When Luther had moved on to become a professor and lecturer at the university in Wittenberg, God the Holy Spirit finally broke through the thick, German skull of young Martin Luther one day and brought the grace of God to bear on Luther’s troubled, guilty, sin oppressed conscience. For Luther it happened in the words of Romans 1:17, but these words from our epistle reading today say it even more clearly:
There is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith.
All have sinned and all are justified, made right with God, by grace. Grace is the key word here. Grace is the undeserved favour and love that God shows to sinners like us for the sake of Jesus. By grace, by the undeserved favour and love of God, sinners are justified, made right with God, through the redemption, the payment for sin, which is in Christ Jesus.
Just like that, with this understanding of God’s loving and forgiving grace revealed to him by the Holy Spirit through God’s Word, Luther’s guilt was gone. He said that it was as if the gates of heaven had been opened to him then and there. That’s the difference that grace makes.
Now, I haven’t taken the time to share this story about Martin Luther (a story which you have perhaps heard many times before) just to meet some quota for Martin Luther references on Reformation day or to show you how much I know about Martin Luther. No, I have taken the time to talk through this part of Luther’s life with you because there is a lesson for us in it.
Like Martin Luther each of us has a conscience. Our conscience was put there by God who has written His law on the hearts of every single human being. Our conscience guides and directs the thoughts, decisions, actions, and words of our day to day lives. Our conscience is also, however, a battlefield.
Our conscience is a battlefield on which Satan rages against God and His Word and tries to steal us away from our God and Father. Like I said, our conscience was given to us by God. It was put there in the beginning and ordered around His Word so that we would know what is good and pleasing to Him. Satan, however, works day and night to destroy us and our consciences. First he twists our consciences away from their roots in God’s Word and causes us to see things backwards, evil becomes good and good becomes evil. Then, through a constant onslaught of temptation, he dulls our consciences to the point that we hardly feel our sin anymore. And finally, when our consciences are ripe for the picking he throws our sins in our face and heaps up the guilt in order to lead our consciences into despair. For Martin Luther that happened to him pretty much every day of his life. For you maybe it might not happen until you are on your deathbed. But make no mistake, it will happen.
Like he did to Luther, Satan accuses us in our sin (that is what the name “Satan” means, accuser) and seeks to convince us that our sins are so many and so grievous that we are beyond the scope of God’s love and forgiveness.
It is undoubtedly true that we are all sinners deserving the wrath of God, God’s Word plainly says so. In our text today it says clearly, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” All. Everyone. You and me. We have all sinned and fall short, but the sentence doesn’t stop there. Yes, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” but God’s Word is clear that all are also “justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.”
In the battle for our conscience God has a weapon that Satan cannot understand or overcome. That weapon is grace. In the hymn “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” which Martin Luther wrote and we sang at the beginning of the service today it says this,
“Let this world’s tyrant rage; in battle we’ll engage. His might is doomed to fail; God’s judgement must prevail! One little word subdues him.”
No one knows for sure what that “one little word” is that Luther says subdues the devil. Some say it’s “Jesus” others say it’s “faith.” I’d suggest to you that it is “grace.”
Satan can’t understand grace. He’s a book keeper, an accountant, who keeps close tabs on our sinfulness and the debt we owe so that he can accuses us. He doesn’t understand grace or forgiveness.
Grace robs Satan of the power He holds over us. When God announces to us that we are forgiven for the sake of Jesus, when God tells us our sins, our guilt, is gone, Satan has nothing left. He stands there empty handed, powerless, to do anything to us. Grace, the grace of God, subdues him.
Martin Luther’s conscience plagued him throughout his life. Even after coming to a realization and understanding of God’s grace as revealed in the Scriptures Luther still struggled with guilt. Satan does not give up easily. Standing firm in God’s grace, however, Luther was able to give some sound advice for times when Satan seeks to drive us to despair. Martin Luther said this,
“When the devil throws your sins in your face and declares that you deserve death and hell, tell him this: “I admit that I deserve death and hell, what of it? For I know One who suffered and made satisfaction on my behalf. His name is Jesus Christ, Son of God, and where He is there I shall be also!”
Thanks be to God that He has won the battle for our conscience overcoming our guilt by His grace! Amen.