8/6/23 1 Peter 2:4-10 “Jesus, Luther and You”

04 Aug 8/6/23 1 Peter 2:4-10 “Jesus, Luther and You”

8/6/23    1 Peter 2:4-10          “Jesus, Luther and You”

You may not know this about me but I’ve always liked to read and be a student of great people.  I think it is really interesting to read about some of the great religious leaders of the past and present.  I think that Billy Graham was a fascinating man.  He did so much to further the word of Jesus Christ in our world today and his son, Franklin continues.  John Wesley was a great preacher and changed the world starting in the 1700’s.  We can study John Calvin, Ulrich Zwingli and others of this period and find many fine Christians and leaders.  But today we are going to take a quick look at Martin Luther who turned the Roman Catholic church on its ear.  Let’s take a look at what made Luther tick and reform.  We are going to look at the first letter of Peter and see if we can tie it to what Martin Luther did 1500 years later.  With any luck we will be able to apply all of this to our present situations or your situation.

Alan Smith tells this wonderful little story which comes from Sermon Central.  It is a story about Sparta in ancient Greece.  The king of Sparta boasted to a visiting king about the mighty walls of Sparta.  Well, the guest looked around and he looked around but he didn’t see any walls anywhere.  Finally the bewildered visitor said to his host, “I’d like to see those walls.  Show them to me!”  The Spartan ruler pointed with great satisfaction and confidence to some well-trained and well-disciplined troops, which were a part of Sparta’s mighty army and said, “There they are!  Those are the walls of Sparta!”

You see, this mighty king thought of each one of his soldiers as a stone or a brick in the mighty wall that protected the country.  In a sense he thought of them as living stones.  This is what Jesus is talking about in our passage from Peter today.  God says that we are all living stones.  We are living stones that make up the spiritual house of God.  Each one of you is that special and important for the overall good of the house of God.  I would like each of us to have some comfort from this thought.  You are that special.  You are that important to this church.

Before we begin, I would like to tell you a little bit about Martin Luther who founded the Lutheran Church.  Martin Luther was a Roman Catholic monk who lived in Germany right around 1500.  He was a rather educated man for those days and he was also smart.  He could see things that many others didn’t see.  Or maybe they saw these things, but Luther was not afraid to say that things weren’t right in the Catholic Church.

A couple of the things that Luther did was that he read the Bible and pray.  Things happen when we read the Bible as many of you know.  If you have never done this, I highly recommend that you do so.  At the very least you might find yourself with a little different perspective on things.  This is what happened to Luther.  He studied the Bible and found that what the Catholic Church had been doing was not really Scriptural.

We also have to understand the Catholic Church of those days.  It was nothing like it is today.  They were basically a government.  If a person got too far astray from the faith, the Church could have you executed.  They would raise armies and put down uprisings.  They were probably only a little better dictator than the various kings of the time.

But one of the most interesting things that they did was that you could go to the church, pay them some money or goods and your sins would be wiped away.  You could buy what they called ‘indulgences’ from the church and your sins were supposedly forgiven.  How would you like this to happen today?  You could pay a third of your crop and your sins were gone.  I don’t really know what the percentage was but it wasn’t cheap.  I think we can very easily see today that this is really a bad practice.  Our government is corrupt enough without giving them the right to steal everything from us.  And the reason the church did this was to raise money.  They needed new buildings in Rome.  They needed money to pay armies so they could fight the neighboring countries that disagreed with them.  As we can see this system was corrupt.  This whole thing had gone on for centuries and it wasn’t until Luther came along that anyone said much about it, that we know of anyway.

One of the reasons that Luther got away saying things against the church was that he was a long way from Rome.  We see the same type of thing happen in the time of Jesus where the people who lived farther away from Jerusalem were strong Christians or converts early on in the faith.  Anyway, Luther said that these indulgences and corrupt practices had to go.  He posted his 95 Thesis which were 95 things that had to change.  After he had called the emperor naked, so to speak, he had to go into hiding as he and others feared for his life.  God was working in many ways to keep Martin Luther alive during all of this because the Catholic Church was wrong about indulgences.  Anyway, that is just a quick thumbnail sketch of the times of Luther.  Luther was persecuted for interpreting the Bible correctly.

Today’s passage from Peter has some great words that apply to Martin Luther and you.  The first thing we see here is that Jesus is the living stone and we are to be like living stones.  Peter might have written this because the Christians were being severely persecuted.  He needs to remind the people in our reading that the buildings are not the church.  We have talked about his before and here it is again.  We are the church.  You are the church and Peter is reminding everyone that Jesus is the very foundation of the church.  Jesus is the foundation of all we do.  In return for having this beautiful, wonderful foundation, we are to be the individual stones for the church.  Peter is comparing our faith with the actual constructing of a building so the people would understand.

Martin Luther would see that this was happening to the people of his time.  The huge difference is that the people in Luther’s time were being persecuted by their own church.  This is not different than the United Methodist Church persecuting pastors of the Global Methodist Church for being pastors.  It happens in other denominations also.   According to the church, it was more important for the people to know the church than God.  Wow!  Does this sound familiar!  I know this is a huge statement, but you were to bring everything to the church and they would take care of God for you.  There was no personal relationship.  Then we have Luther, who studied the Bible, saying that we are to go to God first and then the church.  We are to be God’s living stones on which our faith is based.  Everything is to be based on God and not the church.  This completely upset the applecart!

I really don’t think that we are far from this in today’s world either.  I think that both Luther, John Wesley and other early church founders would turn over in their graves if they could see where their churches are today.  Today, we have decided that the church is to be run by what is happening in the world.  We are supposed to change God so that He fits into the world.  We know that this will never work but many church officials think that it will.  Maybe it’s time for another Luther or Wesley to step up and say, “Read your Bibles!  Follow the Bible!  Things can be better!”

Anyway, I don’t want to chase that any further today so we will move on to the second thing I want us to notice here.  Peter tells us the Jesus Christ is precious to those who believe in Him.  The people that Peter is talking to are a people in trouble, a people of persecution.  They need something to believe in.  They need Jesus Christ.  Peter is reminding them of their faith.  Jesus does so much good that He is precious.  He is also telling them that for the people who are against Jesus, there will be a time of reckoning.  Justice will come for those who don’t believe in Jesus.  This applies to us today also.

In the time of Luther, this was a forgotten message.  It had been forgotten for so long that the people would have to be reeducated.  Luther’s people had relied on the church for so many years that they thought the church was precious and not so much Jesus.  It would be up to individuals like Luther and later Wesley to bring the people back to Jesus.  They needed to learn that being a Christian was all about a personal relationship with Jesus.

As I just stated, this is also what is happening today.  We have raised a generation that doesn’t know Jesus.  We have most of the people in this country, denominations who feel that we can change certain parts of the Bible so that it fits our society better.  We have many people who feel that they can define who Jesus is.  There are many other examples of not following Jesus but I think you get the point.  We have a generation that not only doesn’t think that Jesus is precious, but they think that He is just another man.  It is up to us to be the new Luther’s and Wesley’s.  I know we can do it if we just follow the Bible.  Once again we read where everyone will not be saved.  There is a hell but we have Jesus and with Jesus people can be saved.  This should be more than enough motivation for us.

The last thing I want us to notice here is that Peter tells his people that they are the chosen race.  They have been chosen by God and are God’s own people.  This is almost beyond Good News.  These people are extremely oppressed and yet they are told that they are the chosen people and their persecutors are not.  These people were firm believers in God.  They loved God and now their faith in Jesus was being tested.  Now Peter reminds them of just how special they really are.  Plus, you are that special too!

This was also the job of Martin Luther.  His people were persecuted and down trodden by their own religion.  It was up to Luther to help his people to know that they were the living stones of the church of Jesus Christ and not the Roman Catholic Church.  That is why he posted those 95 Theses and then he stuck to his guns.  He was right in doing this.  He was right in starting a new denomination called the Lutheran Church.

Have you ever seen something start in this part of the world while the same thing starts in another part of the world and there is no connection between them?  It has happened many times in history.  This is what happened when Luther started his church.  Other people were starting new denominations in other places.  Ulrich Zwingli was starting another very similar denomination in Switzerland at the same time Luther was working in Germany and there was no connection between the two.  The Roman Catholic Church had pushed everyone so much that people were now pushing back and they were right in doing so.

This is the place where we are at today.  We have so many people telling us that God would do this or God would not do that.  I would say that most of these people who know more about God than everyone else, have not read the Bible.  I have challenged people to do this.  I had a fellow tell me that the Bible was full of errors.  I didn’t have much time to talk with the fellow but I asked him if he had ever read the Bible.  I wanted to ask if he relied on some television channel for his information he quoted, but I didn’t.  Anyway, he said he hadn’t read the Bible and I asked him to read a couple of books of the Bible.  All I could do is plant a seed.  That is all I ask anyone to do.

We need to get better at planting seeds.  You know what you do best.  You know that you do some things better than others.  Then do your best in the name of Jesus Christ.  As a matter of fact, do everything in the name of Jesus.  And for those of you here today who don’t know Jesus, I ask that you confess your sins to Him and ask Him to live in your heart as your Lord and Savior.  This will be the beginning of a new sense of freedom for you.  You will be able to read the Bible with a whole new outlook.  Your prayers will be so much better.  You will never regret making this decision.

Jesus Christ came to us to start a movement.  Today, we call it Christianity and it has been around for about 2000 years.  It really began in the Old Testament and it can be summed up something like this: Love the Lord God with all your might and love your neighbor as yourself.  Jesus recruited 12 disciples to help Him at first and this number grew greatly.  After Jesus died, He recruited Saul, who became Paul, to carry the message to the Gentiles.  After centuries of corruption, Jesus recruited Martin Luther to straighten the message out.  Because of Luther, many others also tried to reform the church to be more Bible like.  Today He is recruiting you to go forth with this message of love.

The reason He does all these things for you is because of the tremendous love He has for you.  He wants you to have the best life possible.  This begins with your accepting Jesus as your Savior.  But this isn’t the end of the road for you.  You in turn need to be the arms and legs of Jesus in this world and take this message to all you meet.  You are the building blocks of the church.  The church isn’t an end in itself; it is a tool to help you stay focused in Christ and for others to strengthen their walk with Him.

This plan that Jesus has is not all that complicated.  You just need to love Jesus and let Him do the rest as He works through you.  I praise the Lord the day I finally saw the light and came to Him.  My life has been infinitely better after this happened than before it happened.  And thank you, Jesus, for first loving us.  Let’s pray.