The Protestant Reformation

Well, today is Reformation Sunday at Beacon, and this is the day that we are going to reflect upon the Protestant Reformation, which is dated from 1517, considered by many to be the greatest revival in history, and I have no reason to question that particular declaration. I am, however, concerned that there seems to be a general lack of appreciation for and understanding of this Reformation by many Christians in America today. It was not perfect, of course. Nothing in this world is ever perfect, so there are things that we can find fault with in the unfolding of the Reformation. But nevertheless, it brought great changes to the Western world for sure.

Primarily in Europe, but of course, as Europeans came to America, they brought with them many of the results of the Protestant Reformation. This Reformation broke the yoke of Roman Catholicism's dominance in Western civilization. Roman Catholicism in the West, Eastern Orthodoxy in the East, are rather divided between Europe and Asia. And so it was in the West, in in the in Europe primarily, that Roman Catholicism held dominant sway. But the Reformation broke the yoke of that absolute dominance.

It no longer existed when the Reformation had run its course, and the Reformation brought a true understanding of the Gospel of Christ, which had been almost entirely lost during the centuries of the Roman Catholic dominance. And so, it changed the course of history. And today, we're going to look at the causes of the Reformation. Confrontations to the Reformation, and corrections brought about by the Reformation. First of all, the causes, and of course, they're far more than we could consider today.

But Rome, Roman Catholicism, dominated in Europe from the time of the fall of the Roman Empire until. Fifteen seventeen, when Martin Luther posted those ninety-five theses on the chapel door in Wittenberg, Germany, more than a thousand years, Roman Catholicism dominated European religion. But there were many corruptions that were evident even in the days of its domination, and many. Attempts to correct it were made that were only partially successful. Until, in the providence of God, the efforts of Martin Luther became eminently successful.

But in regard to the causes leading up to the Protestant Reformation, I will divide them into two parts. First of all, what I will call institutional corruptions, and secondly, doctrinal heresies. And there are many institutional corruptions that we could consider, but I will begin with this one, namely, false claims to supreme authority of the Pope and of the Roman Catholic Church. Those claims were made. Those claims were insisted upon.

Those claims were imposed, but those claims do not, did not at that time, and do not in our day, find scriptural warrant.

Furthermore, there was a great deal of open immorality among the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church, even in the halls of of the Vatican in Rome. That's one of the things that began to trouble Martin Luther. He was a very earnest. Roman Catholic priest and monk, and he made a journey to Rome, expecting to be encouraged by that opportunity, and he came back very troubled by the immorality that he saw in evidence in Rome at the highest echelons at that time. Institutional corruption.

There was also very manifestly the. Contradictions of papal claims, and that I think had a lot to do with the erosion of the authority of Rome. Most people are not aware, but in 1309, a French pope, Clement V, moved the center of the of the papacy from Rome to France. And it was there for seventy-nine years. In 1378, Pope Gregory XI moved it back to Rome.

This is called in history the Babylonian Captivity because it was almost seventy years, sixty-nine, to be exact, that the center of Roman Catholicism was in France rather than in Rome. But here's what is so. Amazing about that, and astonishing and debilitating.

Some of the cardinals, cardinals are responsible to elect a pope when there's a vacancy, and some of the cardinals elected a different pope than the one that existed. And so, for 40 years, there were two popes: one in France, one in Rome, and at times three popes.

Now, when you consider the claims of papal superiority, papal authority, papal infallibility, and then you see this going on, who is the one we're to look to for this authority, for this infallibility? And that couldn't be hidden; it was out in the open. Nearly everybody in Europe was aware of what was going on. And you can imagine how much that undermined the claims to infallibility that were attached to the office of the pope.

So that was an institutional corruption. And I would finally mention financial abuses of many kinds, the lavish lifestyles of popes and cardinals. In one of Martin Luther's ninety-five theses, he asked the question: Why the? They were trying to raise money to build St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome, the largest church, the largest church structure in all the world, it remains so today, and was very expensive, of course, to build.

But why were they trying to raise money from poor people who couldn't really afford it, when the Pope was the richest man in the world? He would he would have been considered something like the Elon Musk of his day. Why doesn't he just build it? It wouldn't. He wouldn't even dent his riches to do so.

But of course, he wasn't willing to do that. The lavish lifestyles of Pope and cardinals in Rome was a financial abuse, evident for all to see. The sale of ecclesiastical offices. You want to be a bishop? For the right price, you can become one.

You want to become a cardinal? That's even higher. Take a few more shekels for that, but that can be accomplished as well. If you pay the price, you can become a bishop. If you can pay the price, you can become a cardinal.

Clearly, something's wrong with that. The technical name for that is simony, and that was going on very in great great measure during this time. But not only the sale of ecclesiastical offices, but what was perhaps even more concerning for many of the reformers, particularly Martin Luther, was the sale of indulgences. An indulgence was supposedly a church-authorized remission from the punishment for sins in purgatory.

Now that takes us into another realm, and I'll mention a little bit more about purgatory in a moment. But because virtually no Catholics were considered righteous enough to go to heaven when they died, there was the doctrine of purgatory, where souls went to to finish the purging process, so that they could be admitted into heaven. And how long a person would remain in purgatory. Of course, depended upon how many sins needed to be purged, and nobody exactly knew how many that was. But the church said, for a price, we'll sell you an indulgence that will remit your time, and or at least decrease your time in purgatory.

And it was the sale of those indulgences in Germany at the time of Martin Luther that raised. Luther's ire almost beyond, beyond controlling, and so many of the 95 theses have to do with the sale of indulgences, an obvious corruption in the church in those days. But in addition to institutional corruptions, there are many doctrinal heresies, and these, in many ways, are even more alarming, though they were not as well understood. And I'll just run through a list of of things. I can't give you detail in this.

I don't have time for that today. We could turn this into a series, but I don't intend to do that. But let's take the Roman Catholic doctrine of baptism. What is the Roman Catholic doctrine of baptism? Infants are encouraged to be baptized.

Although whenever anyone comes into the church, they'll be baptized at whatever age. But if a Roman Catholic couple has their child baptized, and they enter the church at infancy, and they are taught that baptism will cleanse that child or the person who's being baptized from original sin, the sin that we all inherit from Adam, and any other sins up until the time of the baptism.

So you get cleansed of original sin, you get cleansed of all sins, up until the time you're baptized, and then from that time forward, you have what we're a clean slate. If you sin after that, you have other ways to deal with it, but up until that time, your sins are all cleansed.

So goes the doctrine, Roman Catholic doctrine of baptism, and of course, nothing like that is in the Word of God at all. That's all contrary to Scripture. The Eucharist, the Mass, the Roman Catholic version of Communion, has many things that we could question about it, but chiefly this: the claim that the bread and the wine are turned into the actual body and blood of Christ by the priest when he pronounces the right formula over those elements. They are no longer bread, though it looks like it and tastes like it. It is no longer wine, though it looks like it and tastes like it.

It is now the body of Christ and the blood of Christ. And along with that is the claim that therefore Christ's sacrifice is being made all over again. His blood is being shed, as it were. His body is being broken afresh. And so, in Roman Catholic doctrine, Christ is crucified literally multiple thousands of times every day, as masses are conducted all over the world.

Purgatory. Purgatory is a mythical concept to be found nowhere in the Bible. But is part a very important part of Roman Catholic doctrine that nobody goes straight to heaven. Even popes don't go straight to heaven, so nobody does if the pope doesn't. But Catholics go to purgatory to have their remaining sins purged.

Now, right there, you see a problem, and it will will. Connect with with other problems that I'll mention in a moment, but what's going on here? I thought when we were when we believed in Christ, our sins were cleansed.

So why would there be sins to be paid for by the sinner in purgatory? Good question, but of course, the Roman Catholic doctrine of salvation doesn't believe. That doesn't teach that that a person's sins are cleansed away by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. That may be the beginning of a process, but there's a whole lot more that has to follow that for a person to gain salvation. And so, purgatory is the place that everybody goes to to finish atoning for their sins.

Don't you see the problem with that? The idea that sinners do something to atone for their own sins.

Well, I thought Christ's death on the cross atoned for the sinner's sins. Oh, you must you must be reading the Bible. You, but we'll interpret the Bible for you, and that's not not really the full story. You've got to atone for your own sins by your good works and by punishments that you have in this life and in purgatory. Indulgences.

I already mentioned those. Actually, written written forms that people could purchase. Originally, I don't think they were purchased. They were granted without cost. But it was too good an opportunity to pass up.

We've got we've got a lot of money. We've got to raise to build St. Peter's Basilica, and so indulgences were sold for. For the various amounts, depending on how much remittance you wanted to pay for, that would supposedly remit some of your suffering in purgatory. Prayers to the saints.

Roman Catholics are taught to pray to the saints. You you probably know that. That's a whole other story. There's nothing in the Bible to teach us to pray to the saints. In fact, everything that we're taught about prayer, the Bible tells us we don't pray to anyone but to the Triune Godhead.

We pray to the Father through Jesus Christ, the Son, in the power of the Holy Spirit, and that is the only one to whom our prayers are to be addressed. But Roman Catholics are taught to pray to the saints because the saints are now in heaven, and they can help you in certain ways that I'm not sure I understand fully. But that's another heresy of the Roman Catholic Church. It's funny that some of the saints that Catholics prayed to for years, maybe centuries, were determined after a while not to have been saints after all. Like do any of any of you remember those little statues of Saint Bartholomew?

I think it was no Saint Christopher, which was it? That used to be on dashboards of automobiles, or hanging from the mirrors. Maybe most of you aren't old enough to remember that, but I do. I do. And then one day they they, I guess there were enough questions raised about.

The life of Saint Christopher was it Christopher? I think it was that they decided maybe he wasn't a saint after also. Whoop! He's God. You don't pray to him anymore.

And here people have been praying to him for centuries and thinking they were getting help from him, and he wasn't even a saint according to Roman Catholic doctrine. That's another problem, isn't it? Their misunderstanding of who a saint is. And what a saint is! But I can assure you, friends, if you pray to one of the so-called saints, your prayer is not heard.

Nobody hears that prayer. Another heresy, and then maybe the supreme example of that is the adoration of Mary, the supreme saint, I suppose, in heaven, who is. Said to be a mediatrix, that is a mediator between the praying one, the the believer, and Christ. And because Mary is the mother of Christ, then she has more influence on Jesus than we do.

So. We we we get better results if we pray to Mary, and then she goes to Jesus and persuades him to answer our prayers. Where do you find that in the Bible?

Nowhere, of course. But the final doctrinal heresy that I'm going to mention, and I'm going to deal with this one more extensively, is the Roman Catholic doctrine of justification. And this is probably the most serious of all, because the doctrine of justification answers the question: How may a sinner become just before a holy God? How may a sinner be reconciled to God? How may a sinner have his sins dealt with?

In such a way that he is able to come into the presence of a holy God. In other words, justification answers the question: How can a person be saved? And though there are many aspects of salvation, justification deals with this particular issue: How a sinner can stand righteous in the presence of God. And it's not by his works. It's not by Being purged in purgatory, it's not by being baptized; it is, as we'll see, in a moment, in in the verses we read in Romans chapter three, by the free grace justification of a merciful and holy God.

But the the Roman Catholic doctrine of justification is not a once for all declaration that a person who believes in Christ is now justified. Freed from sin, judicially, even though we continue to sin, but our sins are all wiped away before the judgment bar of God in heaven.

So the the believer is both righteous and unrighteous at the same time, but in a different sense. Righteous before the judgment bar of God, unrighteous as we struggle with remaining sin here upon the earth, until we finally get to heaven where we'll be entirely sanctified. But in the meantime, the Holy Spirit is working within us, and we are being progressively and gradually sanctified, becoming more and more holy. But do not become perfectly holy until we die and are with the Lord in heaven. But the Roman Catholic doctrine of justification is actually a version of sanctification.

Instead of being a once-for-all declaration of righteousness, it is a progressive acquiring of righteousness. You start to acquire it at baptism. You acquire acquire more of it as you partake of the mass. You acquire more of it as you. Confess your sins to the priest and do penance.

Do the works that the priest prescribes for you to do to pay for those particular sins, and you continue on through life. And at the end, hopefully, when you're close to death, you'll have a priest that will come and do last rites, and then you die, go to purgatory, and are purged from whatever remaining sins, and finally go to heaven. In other words. The Roman Catholic version of justification is that nobody gets justified until they get to heaven, and you are acquiring a little bit more justification through all of these things that the church offers to you until you're at the end of your life. That's some of the heresies that are found in Roman Catholicism.

So I I leave the causes and I move to what I've called the confrontations. I'm just going to mention the names of several people that were used of God to confront these errors and abuses, but their efforts did not culminate in the burgeoning Reformation that happened in the days of Martin Luther. I start with Peter Waldo. He was a Frenchman born in.

Well, he died in 1217. Nobody knows for sure when he was born. But he became the leader, the founder of a group called the Waldenses, who were a group of Christians who, in essence, removed themselves from the Roman system. And preached the Bible throughout France and Italy and Switzerland. You can still find Waldensians, as they're called in Italy today, Waldensian churches, though they've become pretty much liberal instead of, instead of fundamental in their doctrine.

But nevertheless. He began a movement that confronted the errors of the Roman Catholic Church, and I'm sure there were some before that. But I'll start with him. I mentioned secondly John Wycliffe, born in 1320, died in 1384, and and ministered in England. He he, like all of these people, started out in the Roman Catholic priesthood, but removed himself from that.

And is called the Morning Star of the Reformation, and I won't say any more about that because you'll hear about him tonight. Come back tonight, and you'll hear a little bit about John Wycliffe. You'll hear a little bit about the third man. I will mention John Huss, thirteen sixty nine to fourteen fifteen in Bohemia. Bohemia is there is nothing called Bohemia today, at least not a country, but it is a western.

State, you might say, of Czechoslovakia, adjacent to Germany, and was a very important country in the days of John Huss, and he was Bohemian, and he protested the abuses of the Roman Catholic Church, and was burned at the stake. You heard about him if you were here when one of the one of the times when Dr. Panosian presented a A program on the life of John Huss. I mention also, Girolamo Savonarola, born in 1452 and died in 1498. He was Italian.

You'll hear more about him tonight.

Some people have the impression that there really was no Reformation movement in Italy. The truth is there was, but it was completely Suppressed successfully, suppressed so that most people are not aware that there was one, but there was one, and probably Savonarola was the first one to raise effective protest against the Church of Rome, his own church. He was a, he was a, I think a Dominican monk, and a very influential man in Italy. I mentioned number five, William Tyndall. 1494 to 1536 in England that he was contemporaneous with Martin Luther, and we'll hear more about him tonight.

Come back tonight; you don't want to miss the short snippets on these four biographical participants that led up to. The Reformation, which began under Martin Luther and his nailing those ninety-five theses to the chapel door in Wittenberg, Germany, in fifteen seventeen, and that mild effort, Martin Luther was not trying to. To change to to leave the church was not trying to. All he wanted to do was just deal with a few of the things that he saw that were wrong, unscriptural, and get them, get them changed to make the church pure. That was his idea.

He was a very loyal Roman Catholic, but he was also a professor at the University of Wittenberg, and he was nailing those 95 theses to the door, which was basically the University bulletin board, and he was putting that there and saying, "I'd like to discuss, I'd like to debate these questions with anyone who's interested." And in the providence of God, those were picked up, they were printed. The printing press was fully developed at that time; had been for several decades, and were distributed all over Europe within two weeks. I'm told his His 95 theses basically went went all over Europe, and people were reading them everywhere. And that is the beginning; is considered to be the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. And I've often wondered why did not Peter Waldo's efforts usher forth into Reformation.

Or John Wycliffe, or John Hus, or Savonarola, or William Tyndale. Although Tyndale's actually being contemporary of Martin Luther did seem to have that effect. But why did these other men, who were just as stalwart, just as committed, just as zealous for the truth, why did their efforts not produce a Reformation? And Martin Luther's efforts, which in some ways seem to be less zealous, why why did his succeed in producing the Reformation? And the only answer I can give is because that was God's determination.

He determined that the others would serve and make some small inroad, but nothing. Nothing of great significance, and then he determined God determined that Martin Luther's efforts were going to change all of Europe, and we're going to break the yoke of Rome, as indeed they did. In Martin Luther's life, we have the the date of fifteen seventeen, the Ninety Five Theses, the start of the Reformation, and we also have fifteen twenty one, the Diet of Worms. Where Martin Luther refused to recant any of the things that he had taught or written, and by this time he had written a number of books, and he was called to the Diet of Worms—that would be like a a council, a council of both political and church leaders. And they called him to give an account of himself, and they laid out his writings on a table, and said, "Are these yours?

Yes. Are you willing to admit that they're wrong and to recant what you have written?" And Martin Luther said, "Give me a night to think about it and pray about it." And he did, and he came back the next day. And here's the full statement of what he said. We all we've all heard heard that he said. Here I stand.

I can do no other.

So help me God. Which she may or may not have actually said, but we do know he said this. Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason, for I do not trust either in the Pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves. I am bound by the Scriptures. I have quoted, and my conscience is captive to the Word of God.

I cannot, and will not recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. May God help me. Amen.

Now the amazing thing is that he got out of that council alive. They, they. Promised John Huss safe passage to and back from a similar council in his day, but they broke their word, and executed him. Why didn't they do that with Luther? But God—that's really the only explanation.

God willed that he would survive. He had a patron, Frederick the Third of Saxony, a A duke of Saxony, who had promised that he would guard him, and he did. And when Luther left that council, there were people that were trying to track him down, and kill him. And and Frederick was was guarding him, and Frederick had his men rush in. They were in disguise.

Maybe this is where. The Reformation of October thirty first and Halloween of October thirty first coincide. They had hoods on their faces; they were masked, and they rushed in and kidnapped Luther. And nobody knew who had done it and where he was going, but they kidnapped him and took him to a safe palace that was well guarded, where he spent the next several years translating the scriptures and writing books. Before his life was over, Martin Luther had published over four hundred volumes.

Some were pamphlets. Many were books, sizeable books. One of the best known is the bondage of the will. Another doctrine for another day. But he was kept safe.

He lived to a ripe old age. He eventually married a Catholic nun who escaped from the convent. In fact, he helped. He helped Catherine Van Buren, or something. I think is her name.

To escape, along with I think six other nuns, seven of them escaped, and and they all had husbands lined up for them, and the other six all accepted the husbands that had been picked out for him. And Catherine took a look at hers and said, "No way." And Martin Luther was kind of in a jam because he'd promised that he was going to find a husband for this. Woman, and she was a pretty strong-willed woman, and she said, "Nope, I'm not marrying him." So, he said, "Okay, how about marrying me?" She said, "All right." So, so he married. Had I think six children. Not exactly Roman Catholic priest material here, but he left all that, and he lived a long life and wrote many books and had great influence.

And it's clear that God preserved and protected him, because it pleased God to do it at that time.

Now, let me deal with some of the corrections to the Roman Catholic heresies, and the main one, and this is the only one I have time to deal with, and I don't know if I'll have time to deal with it as thoroughly as I would like to. But the main doctrine I'm going to deal with now is the doctrine of justification. All those others I named and others that I didn't even name need to be confronted, and examined, and corrected. But we don't have time for that. But let's just zero in on justification, the biblical teaching of justification.

Contrasted with the Roman Catholic teaching, which I've already described, and this, for the person who asked me before the service began, will show you what the text I announced has to do with the Reformation. It has to do with the doctrine of justification. Justification is the doctrine that tells us how sinners are reconciled to God. It is the doctrine that is at the heart of the Reformation. It is the doctrine that is at the heart of the Gospel.

Get justification right, you'll probably have the Gospel right. Get justification wrong, and there's no way that you can have the Gospel right. It's wrong if justification is wrong. But the Bible teaches us that justification is a legal declaration. God, in the role of judge.

When he views the sinner who trusts in Christ, transfers the righteousness of Christ to that sinner's account. Think of your ledger in heaven with all the sins you've ever committed. For all of us, that would be a pretty big book. But all the sins that we have committed is on a ledger before God. And yet, Jesus Christ bore the judgment for all those sins upon the cross.

He paid. The price he paid the penalty. There's nothing left to pay. When Jesus said it is finished, it was finished. He wasn't saying, "I made a down payment, and now, as you are baptized and and go to penance and and go to mass and do all these other things, you can finish up the payment that I started." No.

The doctrine of justification, the Bible doctrine of the gospel, is that Christ paid for all the sins of those who trust in Him, and God, the righteous Judge, looking at the ledger and and imputing the righteousness of Christ to our ledger, doesn't see any sins there. They're all covered by the blood of Christ or covered by the righteousness of Christ. We have a perfect Righteousness in heaven, in our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. And so, it's a legal declaration that those who trust in Jesus have no more sins to be dealt with. They've been dealt with.

They were dealt with two thousand years ago.

So, justification. Biblically speaking, is not a process. It's a declaration, and it happens just like that. God declares the believing sinner just, and it's an irreversible declaration. God doesn't say today you're righteous and say, oh oh, tomorrow you're not righteous anymore.

But now yes, you you've done something else, and now you're righteous. Back and forth, back and forth. No, no. Justification is a one-time and Permanent declaration of the righteousness of those who are trusting in Christ.

Now, looking at the text in Romans chapter three, I will just quickly run down through a few things. This is one of the places that deals with justification in the Bible. There are many others, but I chose this passage. And in this passage, we learn that justification is not by keeping the commandments. We can back up to verse 19 and go to verse 21.

Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law that every mouth may be stopped and the world may become guilty before God. Therefore, by the deeds of the law, no flesh will be justified in His sight. For by the laws the knowledge of sin, not the cleansing of sin, the knowledge of sin comes by the law. But now the righteousness of God, of God apart from the law, is revealed, being witnessed by the law and the prophets.

So justification is not by keeping the commandments. In other words, it's not by works in any way whatsoever. It is. By contrast, obtained by faith, verse twenty-two, even the righteousness of God, through faith in Jesus Christ, to all and on all who believe. How is righteousness, the righteousness of justification, obtained?

Not by baptism, not by penance, not by mass, not by. Keeping the law, it's by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. We are justified by faith, and faith alone. It is all of grace. Verse twenty four: Being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, we're justified freely by His grace.

It's all by grace. The basis being Christ's vicarious death, verses twenty four and twenty five. I just read verse twenty four through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. Verse twenty five, whom God set forth as a propitiation, a satisfactory payment, by His blood, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness. Because in his forbearance, God had passed over the sins that were previously committed, to demonstrate verse twenty six at the present time, his righteousness that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.

Biblical justification satisfies both God's justice and his mercy. How can a holy God simply excuse sin? How can he forgive sin just? On no basis.

Well, he can't. It violates his character. You say, well, God can do whatever He wants to do.

Well, He can't violate His own holy character, and God's holiness demands that sins must bear their deserved punishment. But God's a merciful God.

So what did He do? He provided the sacrifice to bear the punishment and guilt for those who trust in Jesus.

So, His justice is not damaged in any way; it's satisfied. The penalty has been paid, but His mercy is also satisfied. He has mercifully provided the way for guilty sinners to be justified. Praise God.

Now I'll just mention two other things without even looking at the scriptures. But this text tells us that God's way of justification eliminates all human boasting. If anything in your concept of justification allows you to say, "But I did this, I did that, I accomplished this, I was better than so and so and that," that's not Biblical salvation—that's not biblical gospel. That's not biblical justification. When you understand biblical justification, you say, "Not a thing I can take credit for.

God did it all. Salvation is of the Lord." And it has always salvation has always been this way. If I had time, I'd go into chapter. For to show you, the illustration of Abraham being justified by faith, of David being justified by faith, in other words, Old Testament, New Testament, the way of justification has been the same. It's by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.

Amen.

Amen.

Now, let me wrap this up with a few lessons. Lesson number one. This should teach us the true nature of Roman Catholicism, and I'm I'm going to be very clear, specific, possibly offensive to some in what I say, but I'm confident that this is correct. Roman Catholicism is a false religion. Roman Catholicism does not represent a Christian denomination.

Roman Catholicism is filled with many, many errors. Roman Catholicism teaches a false doctrine of justification that is a false way of salvation, and is therefore not a Christian doctrine. is not a Christian institution. is not a Christian denomination. It is a dangerous counterfeit.

No one who trusts the Roman Catholic doctrine of justification is saved. Did you hear me? No one who trusts the doctrine of justification that is taught by Rome is saved, because it's contrary to by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. Whoever believes what the Roman Catholic Church teaches about salvation is. Trusting a works salvation, and that will not save you.

It is a false gospel. It is true.

Some may trust in Christ alone, contrary to what the Roman Catholic Church teaches, and remain in the Roman Catholic Church for a while. You say for how long a while? I won't say for how long a while, but I don't think anybody who is truly born again and starts to learn what the scriptures teach can stay in a system that is so riddled with so many heresies. But I will say this: the Christians should not embrace as Christians those who identify. With the Roman Catholicism, I said it is possible that someone can truly be trusting in Christ and be a Roman Catholic, but I can't see their hearts.

Only God can. He'll have to to sort that out. But if somebody is identifying themselves, in other words, a member of identifying themselves as a Roman Catholic, I have no biblical warrant to. Call them a fellow believer. I have no biblical warrant to identify them as a born again Christian.

If they want me to recognize them as a Christian, then let them come out of such a dangerous, heretical, false system of corrupted Christianity. The true nature of Roman Catholicism, but I add to that, we must also understand the true nature of liberal Protestantism. Mainline Protestant denominations in America are no more Christian than Roman Catholicism is Christian, for they have abandoned the gospel. Of salvation through faith in Christ alone, and substituted it for a social gospel that basically says, "Do good works, be a good person, help the needy and the poor, be loving and kind, and you'll be saved." Is that the gospel? No.

That's just as much a false gospel as the false gospel of Rome. Liberal Christianity is not Christian. It is counterfeit. Thirdly, mention the need for a modern-day Reformation. We had a great Reformation in 1517 and beyond.

I think it's time for another one. We need one today to confront the errors of Roman Catholicism. They're as false as they ever were, and yet I find many. Evangelical Christians embracing Roman Catholics who still believe and follow Roman Catholic teaching as Christian brothers and sisters in Christ. That's a result of of gospel light in so many churches.

Very little substance, very little doctrine. People don't know the difference. We need a modern-day Reformation to confront the errors of liberal Protestantism, not to embrace as Christians those who are trusting a social gospel that is not the gospel that makes no one a Christian.

Sound doctrine needs to be taught, and it needs to be taught in opposition with false doctrine, so people will know the difference, like I've done today. This is what Roman Catholicism teaches; that is false. This is what the Bible teaches; that is true. Please be informed. And I close by reminding you of the necessity of the new birth.

If you're going to heaven, you must be born again. And when you're born again, you're going to trust in Jesus alone for salvation. And when you're born again, your heart is changed and your life is changed.

So how do you know that you've been born again? Look for the marks of regeneration. With that, we shall close. Father, thank you for this brief examination of this great revival that you brought into Western civilization. How grateful we are for it!

O Lord, help us to stand upon to declare the truths that were recovered during this time. And may those truths spread across America, and indeed around the world, as we ask it in Jesus' name, Amen.