Knowing, Loving, and Living Our Reformation Heritage (4): Concluding Application on Causes of Shortfall

Allow me some words of application. My friends, if we don’t know our Reformation heritage, ignorance will lead to indifference and indifference to relinquishment. May I urge you with all the love of my heart to saturate yourself with the writings of our godly forefathers. Know your Reformation heritage.

If we don’t love the Reformation heritage, we may know it with our minds but it will lose its authenticity and its elasticity in the outworkings of our lives. It will lose the very fiber of Christian faith itself. If we don’t love our Reformation heritage, don’t show love for these five grand pillars, the ungodly world will look at us and not be jealous of our lifestyle — for true peace, joy, and humility will be lacking.

And if we don’t live the Reformation heritage, we may claim to know and love it, but are only living dead orthodoxy. We will be no shining light; we will be no salt in the earth and when the salt has lost its saltiness, it is henceforth good for nothing but to be cast out, trodden underfoot of men.

Oh, my friends, let us not be afraid of walking and living the Christian life! Let us not buy into the modern theme of the Christian-sanctifying movement, which advocates that the Christian sanctifies the sins he touches. The end will then be “Christian” rock music, “Christian” dancing, and even worse forms of immorality and worldliness, packaged with a “Christian” label. No, my friends, let us walk a separate path; let us live our historic Reformed faith by grace; let us believe that secular Christianity is no real Christianity at all. It is not the Christianity of the Reformation. We need to live the historic Reformed faith. And why aren’t we living it more?

I want to close with suggesting to you three reasons why we are not living our Reformation heritage more. May these reasons be bound upon our hearts.

The first reason is because we are poor petitioners for Reformation truths. A secretive power behind the Spirit’s Reformation, I firmly believe, was the prayers of the Reformers.

Luther, above all, was a man of prayer. It is well-known that he spent three hours daily on his knees. “Meditation, temptation, and prayer make a minister,” he once wrote. To Melanchthon, he once said, “I must rise from bed two hours earlier than usual tomorrow, for the more I must do the more I must pray.” Is it any wonder that Melanchthon, being astonished when overhearing Luther petition God (he always prayed aloud to stave off Satan), exclaimed: “Gracious God! What faith! What Spirit! What reverence! Yet, what holy familiarity!”

Queen Mary was more afraid of the petitions of John Knox than the swords of thousands of soldiers.

John Welch, the God-fearing son-in-law of John Knox, prayed seven or eight hours daily. He often humbly confessed, “I wonder how a Christian could lie in his bed all night, and not rise to pray.” It was his custom to keep his robe close to his bed because a night seldom went by in which he did not rise to supplicate with his God. Often his wife would find him weeping on the hard floor after midnight hours, ask the cause, and receive this answer: “Oh, my dear wife, I have the souls of three thousand to answer for, and I know not how it is with many of them!” On another occasion, following him into a room into which he had withdrawn for fear he would catch cold, she heard him pleading in broken sentences: “Lord, wilt Thou not grant me Scotland? Lord, wilt Thou not grant me Scotland?”

Apart from the mother sin of unbelief, the visible church’s greatest pitfall in our day is worldliness, but the invisible church’s greatest obstacle is the lack of secret prayer. Tragically, the living Church of God today miserably fails to utilize heaven’s greatest weapon. Its prayer life is more like a toy Satan sleeps beside than a missile of war crushing satanic powers or a weapon with which the throne of grace is stormed so that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence.

How often our prayer life is “closed for repairs” though no repairing work gets accomplished! Good intentions surface from time to time, but, as Luther said, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Good, but unfruitful, intentions lead to further deterioration.

When prayer life is boarded shut, everything is closed. How can we daily live to God outside of the closet when we seldom meet Him inside the closet?

In our blindness we often mistake prayerless praying for prayerful praying. We forget that both can come with empty hands to God’s throne. Prayerless praying, however, comes with listless hands, while prayerful praying, reverently speaking, clings with one hand to heaven’s footstool and with the other to Calvary’s cross, stirring up itself “to take hold of God” (Is. 64:7). Prayerless praying freezes before reaching heaven. Prayerful praying pierces heaven, warms the soul, and is the thermometer of spiritual life.

Why do the giants of church history dwarf us so easily today? Is it only because they were more educated, more devoted, more faithful, and led further in exercises of grace? No, but the priority item separating them from us is that they were prayerful men of prayer, possessed with the Spirit of grace and supplication. They were Daniels in the temple of God.

Let us seek grace to despise Satan’s counterfeit religion. Seek grace to be numbered by God among the true Reformed wrestlers, as Luther, Knox, Calvin, and hundreds more, truly were. Settle not for the shell and husk of form religion; refuse by grace to relinquish the inner prayer chamber, for here true reformation will be established or broken. Cultivate the twin graces of holy fear for, and childlike obedience to, the Name of the Lord. Bow your knees this very evening; ask the God of reformation to grant you to pray in your prayer for the revival of His work, for reformation in every sphere of life.

Secondly, the church’s reformation takes place so sluggishly at best in our day because we are such poor “lovers” of the truth. Unlike the Reformers, how few of us can claim zealous love for sound doctrine! How few of us would respond to the question asked one of the Reformers, “What three things does the church need most?”, with his answer: “Doctrine; doctrine; doctrine!” How few of us have experienced Martin Luther’s simple, yet profound, exclamation: “Doctrine is heaven!” How few of us are searching the Word of God, engaging in serious reading of reformational truth, and begging the God of grace to make doctrine heaven in our hearts also! How few, for example, have prayerfully read through John Calvin’s Institutes, which, next to Scripture, has been the most influential doctrinal work in the history of Reformed truth! My friend, if you haven’t read it, buy it and read it. You can’t expect to love doctrine that you don’t know. Unknown is unloved. Seek to know it, but also pray that you may be lovers of the sovereign grace truths of God Triune.

Thirdly and finally, we need to be “livers” of the truth. We fail so terribly because our lives do not testify that we are willing to “buy the truth, and sell it not” (Prov. 23:23), at any price. Dangerous indifference, gross backsliding, Laodicean richness multiplies the “unreformedness” of our lives. How unreformed we often are in practice despite the soundness of our orthodox doctrine! How often our own name is placed above and before the Name of God! How far we are from the lifestyle of Martin Luther! When he placed in large capital letters for many years the name, JESUS, as the heading of every letter he wrote, it was not pen-work only. Nor was it merely pious talk when he wrote to another professor: “I should like to know whether your voice, tired of its own righteousness, is learning to increasingly trust in the righteousness of Christ.”

Our great indebtedness to the Reformers, for their delivering us by God’s grace from the bondage of Roman Catholicism, imparts to us solemn responsibility. Miserably we are failing to practice what we preach; rapidly we are becoming unreformed in practice and thought; desperately we need a renewal of Reformation history, doctrine and application! But who takes it to heart? Where can we find secret intercessors, wrestling for the church’s welfare? Where are the pillars of the church today? If God complained to Hosea, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge,” what must He think of us who lack both knowledge and application?

Desperately we need a renewal of Reformation history, doctrine and application!

Before it is forever too late, let us seek wrestling grace to pray for divine Reformation! “Almighty, Reformation God! Save us from ourselves. Grant true renewal of Reformation history, doctrine, and application. Make us petitioners for the truth, lovers of the truth, ‘livers’ of the truth. Make us live in and out of the fivefold truth: sola scriptura, sola gratia, sola fide, solus Christus, soli Deo gloria. Conquer us with sovereign, reforming grace. Grant us wrestling grace. Revive Thy work. In wrath, remember mercy.”

May I leave you with this question: “Are you authentic sons and daughters of the Reformation? Albeit with many shortcomings, do you know, do you love, do you live, sola scriptura, sola gratia, sola fide, solus Christus, soli Deo gloria?”

Dr. J.R. Beeke is pastor of the First Netherlands Reformed Congregation of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Self Examination

Let us examine ourselves to see if we possess spiritual life. Is there an inner fervor and willingness in you to serve God in your life? Paul declares: “Yield yourselves unto God, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God.”

The unbeliever can also have some stirrings toward serving God, but it is temporary. With the believer it remains, because it is wrought from within.

Is there an inner strife against sin? Do you make an attempt to drive out the corruptions that still prevail in your heart? Do you struggle against it? Do you know the inward warfare of the spirit against the flesh?

But, someone may say, “If the ungodly have their strife, how may I know if my fight against sin is the good fight of faith?” There is a great difference between the strife of the godly and the ungodly. The fear of unbelievers proceeds form threat of punishment. The godly fear sin by the influence of the new life. Because the law of God is written in their heart, they love to keep God’s law, and they hate sin.

Therefore, let us set aside part of the time of our life to give to God — lest it be spent profitless — separating ourselves from the restlessness of this world to meditate in peace and quietness on the concerns of our salvation; for when the mind is concerned with the business of the world, or with vain, perishable affairs, God will have no place in our heart. Therefore, withdraw yourself for a few hours to speak with God. All time spent in vain will be of no comfort when death comes. All will be lost. Only that time spent in serving God is time well-spent and will be a comfort and witness in our conscience. “Be zealous, therefore, and repent” (Rev. 3:19).

– Rev. Theodorus a Brakel

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