Reformation Sunday

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10.25.09
Jeremy Coenen preached.

Ezekiel 11
Theme: The Lord will cleanse his people and give them a new heart, for his glory.

What is Reformation Day?
The church is a group of people created by God to be his own. The church has been more or less pure from its very origin. But even from the Garden, the Lord has been working to call to himself this people. He has been the one to make right what we have messed up. In the earliest centuries following the earthly ministry of Christ, the church was busy sorting out what is true and what is false. But, not only was doctrine important to the early church, living out the gospel was equally important. When the pagan families around the Christians had an unwanted baby, they left it out to die of exposure. Would the Christians allow this? No. Who cared for the outcasts of society? The church. Throughout the last several hundred years, try to think about the origins of hospitals and schools. These too came out of the church. Why did these early Christians have this kind of redemptive presence? Because they understood God’s love for sinners. They recognized they were unworthy except for the mercy they received from God himself. As a result, they showed love and mercy to their fellow man.
Now, this all sounds good, but the church surely has had its faults. Throughout the middle ages, the leaders of the church increased in wealth and power. As this happened, these leaders worked to solidify this prestige. Gone was the humble origins.
Now the church needed to fight for the truth and purity of the gospel. Through the 1400’s and into the 1500’s there was a sort of re-awakening to the text of the Scriptures. There are several important people we could mention here, but I’ll leave that for your own study. The main figure we mention at this point was Martin Luther.
On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk, preacher, and Bible professor at Wittenberg Germany, nailed his Ninety-five Theses on the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral. One of the main issues in the Ninety-five Theses was the common practice of the selling and purchasing of indulgences, which was said to reduce time in purgatory for the purchaser. By nailing the Ninety-Five Theses to the Cathedral door, he was simply stating the intellectual problems he had with Roman Catholic teaching and was calling for a debate on these topics. But, over time, the event has come to mark the beginning of a new era for God’s people. Over the centuries leading up to the Reformation, the Roman Church had clouded biblical truth with tradition and ceremony. In Luther’s day, some began reading the Bible according to the teaching of Augustine and the Church Fathers like him, and started to question church teaching as a result.
So, what did Luther and the later reformers rediscover? The sovereign grace of God. Just as that early church lived lives of grace to their community, so to did the reformers.
This point leads us to our theme for today. Grace. Grace is God giving us the blessings that we need, but do not deserve. Yet, don’t think of grace as just getting something from God; it is getting something we cannot earn for our selves.
I hope you will see this as we read from Ezekiel 11. Please follow along.

Read Ezekiel 11.
Notice first the perspective of those remaining in Jerusalem. They believed that they were in a strong position simply because they were in Jerusalem – God’s city. After all, who could have imagined that God would allow his city, his temple, his people to be destroyed. How did this people refer to themselves? The meat in the pot. What does that mean? They were the best. In relation to the food being cooked, where is the flame? Outside the pot. They were safe from the flames within the walls of the city / cooking pot. Those who were taken out earlier were the ones in trouble according to those in the city. Also, when you are cooking, what part of the meat do you discard? What we call offal, or waste. These twenty-five truly thought they were better than those who were exiled earlier. God’s perspective is that “these are the men who are plotting evil and giving wicked advice in this city.” And again see verses 5-6, “Then the Spirit of the LORD came upon me, and he told me to say: “This is what the LORD says: That is what you are saying, O house of Israel, but I know what is going through your mind. 6 You have killed many people in this city and filled its streets with the dead.”
What do these verses mean for us? It is a warning against having a false sense of security. Many of us are trusting in the blessings we have rather than the one who has given us the blessings. We attend a solid Bible-believing church. Many of us are fairly stable financially. We have many material and spiritual blessings. We feel secure. This is not unlike those who remained in Jerusalem after that initial wave of exiles left. Those who stayed thought they were protected. But, in reality they were about to be judged for their sins. If these people were sinners, how could they feel secure in God’s city? They believed God was absent or at least unable to see them. Flip back to Ezekiel 8:12. “He said to me, “Son of man, have you seen what the elders of the house of Israel are doing in the darkness, each at the shrine of his own idol? They say, ‘The LORD does not see us; the LORD has forsaken the land.’””
What of our ‘secret’ sins? Do we still have confidence in our religion that we will not be judged for what we do in private? On the exterior, everyone of us looks safe. How is this different than those who lived in the middle ages who trusted in the church or trusted in the relics or trusted in buying indulgences?
Did God actually forsake those who were deported to Babylon? Did they need to trust in the temple of God? Were they even able to trust in that? Think about the bigger picture. God stripped them of everything. All their idols. Their businesses. Even their legitimate religious things like the temple and the priests. In a sense, taking them out of the promised land was the best thing that could have happened to them. What did they have left? NIV Ezekiel 11:16 “”Therefore say: ‘This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Although I sent them far away among the nations and scattered them among the countries, yet for a little while I have been a sanctuary for them in the countries where they have gone.’” We tend to get hung-up on the created things that God gives us. Look at the church 600 years ago. They were hung-up on the things of their version of Christianity. The church of 2600 years ago was no different – “We are safe, we have the temple and we live in Jerusalem.” What about us? What are our hang-ups? What created thing is keeping you from fully trusting in the creator?
What is the solution to this problem? Let me give you a story from an analogous situation. As Sarah and I are attempting to raise Andrew as a child of the Lord, he is learning to obey authority. When he explicitly disobeys what we tell him to do, he gets a punishment of some sort. After his punishment we talk with him about what happened and give him a chance to repent. As we are talking he will often say, “It is so hard to obey.” Now, I think that is such a perfect line. You and I have more sophisticated ways of saying why we don’t obey the Lord, but wouldn’t we all say, “it is so hard”? What needs to change? How can we obey? How can we put our trust in God and not his created things?
Look on at Ezekiel 11:17. Who is in charge? The Lord. We understand that when we speak of the one true God, his name is, in English, the Lord. But Ezekiel and some authors often refers to him as the Sovereign Lord. This is significant. What does the word sovereign mean? We often think of royalty as being sovereign. But our God is no human king. He is the King of kings. Look at the word sovereign and look at how it is spelled. The one who is truly sovereign reigns over everyone else. God sovereignly reigns over us, even when we are seemingly far from him. Do you feel that you are in the far off nations? Do you perceive that God is distant from you? Does God say to you, walk back to me. Does he say pull yourself up by your bootstraps and commit yourself to me? No. The Sovereign Lord says, I will bring them back.
Why does Andrew say “it is so hard to obey”? Because it is. We have a divided heart. We say we want to obey God, but we often do otherwise. Read on at verse 18.
God will do that heart surgery that each of us needs. God will graciously take us back for himself. Everyone of us is born with a heart that is naturally unresponsive to God. In Ephesians, Paul wrote that we are ‘by nature objects of wrath.’ What God does is change who we are from the inside. On our own we cannot even believe in him. He inclines our hearts to him. A heart of stone is a cold dead heart, but a heart of flesh is alive and can pump blood. If God changes us, we can live. But then, what of our sins? Does God just simply forget about them? Earlier we read together that the Lord removes our sins as far as the east is from the west. But on what basis? For the exiles, it couldn’t be on the basis of their temple sacrifices right? They couldn’t offer sacrifices because they lived in Babylon. The OT sacrifices were effective as far as they could be, but really they were a symbol that pointed to something more real and permanent. They pointed to the final sacrifice that God himself would sovereignly provide – Jesus Christ. His death on the cross was what God’s people really need for forgiveness. We deserve to be punished for our sins, but Jesus was our substitute. He took our place. On that basis we are made right with God.
Do you have a heart of stone and need a heart of flesh? Or do you trust in the things God has made as opposed to God himself? The solution is the same for both. The Sovereign Lord needs to give us grace to return to him. Trust in God.

Calvin prayer.
Almighty God. Since we have utterly perished in our father Adam, and there remains in us no single part which is not corrupt, as long as we bear in the soul as in the body grounds for wrath, and condemnation, and death, grant that, being reborn in the Spirit, we may more and more withdraw ourselves from our own will and our own spirit, and so submit ourselves to you, that your Spirit may truly reign within us: And afterwards, grant that we may not be ungrateful, but considering how inestimable is this benefit, may we dedicate our whole life and apply ourselves to glorify your name, in Jesus Christ our Lord. — Amen.