Dear Friends,
By the 1400s, the church was overrun with layers of institutional corruption. Behind a transparent veil of piety, immorality and wickedness permeated the church. But even in the midst of its dominating corruption, the Lord was still redeeming His own and building His true church. Some churches existed and even thrived outside of Rome's authority. The Lord also used faithful men like John Wycliffe and John Huss to reject and repudiate extrabiblical Catholic dogma, to peel back its pious mask and expose the corruption within. Like the Puritans centuries later in England, these men did not seek to overthrow the church, but hoped to call it to repentance and help restore it to biblical orthodoxy. And for their efforts, both men were excommunicated and burned as heretics. Although the Catholic Church went to extreme measures to silence them, the truth they preached survived and paved the way for an earnest German monk, Martin Luther. Out of his fervent study of Scripture and through the illumination of the Holy Spirit, Luther came to a saving knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ and to a clear understanding of Rome's deviation from the truth of the gospel. October 31, 1517, was the day Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. Luther argued against the abusive traditions of the Catholic Church particularly the sale of indulgences to support the construction of elaborate structures like St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. Those Ninety-Five Theses ignited the Reformation. He finally understood what it means to be justified by faith alone, sometime after the posting of the theses. The truth that believers are justified by faith alone became the focus of the entire reformation debate. John Calvin, Ulrich Zwingli, Philip Melanchthon, Theodore Beza, John Knox, and many more shared that same conviction and fought the same fight on different fronts to rescue and preserve the authority of God's Word in His church against the tyranny of the pope and the heresies of the Catholic Church. The supremacy and authority of Scripture was the beating heart of the Reformation from which all its other core tenets flowed. In defense of his work at the Diet of Worms, Luther famously proclaimed his submission to Scripture alone. Five hundred years later, faithful men serve in the shadow of these great warriors of God and
work to carry on their legacy of biblical fidelity and gospel truth.
I
n Christ,
Pastor Peter Suhn
