Martin Luther’s rallying cry for the Protestant Reformation was sola fide: Faith alone! Faith is all that is required for salvation. But you could ask: faith in what? And although that should be obvious, given who Martin Luther was, clarification is necessary in the face of humanity’s never-ending search for loopholes. (In fact, we can look at the apostle James’ epistle as a response to this self-same trait of humanity rearing up its ugly head in the early Church.) So, we clarify the declaration by adding sola scriptura, solus Christus, sola gratia: Scripture alone is enough, Christ alone is enough, Grace alone is enough. How can four things “alone” be enough? Sounds like dicey arithmetic. The answer is: They are inseparable.

To an honest listener, that is, one who is not trying to find a loophole (like the teacher of the Law who asked Jesus, “But who is my neighbor”?) the call to believe can only mean one thing: to trust and believe in the Jesus of Scripture. I cannot invent my own Jesus and then say he is worthy to be followed.

And if I ask, “but what Scripture?”, meaning that maybe the Bible is not a trustworthy record of Jesus, then I prove myself disingenuous because Jesus declared the Bible to be the foundation of who He was and of everything He came to do. We know this from the Sermon on the Mount…

Matthew 5:17-18 Think not that I am come to make void the law or the prophets; I am not come to make void, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Until the heaven and the earth pass away, one iota or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law till all come to pass.…

And we also know it from His arguments with the Pharisees:

John 5:39-40 Ye search the scriptures, for ye think that in them ye have life eternal, and they it is which bear witness concerning me; and ye will not come to me that ye might have life.

And if I wonder whether Jesus is enough, He Himself said it:

John 3:16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever believes on him may not perish, but have life eternal.

And if I wonder if Jesus is exclusively enough or if there is maybe some other way…

John 10:1-2, 7-9 Verily, verily, I say to you, He that enters not in by the door to the fold of the sheep, but mounts up elsewhere, *he* is a thief and a robber; but he that enters in by the door is [the] shepherd of the sheep… Jesus therefore said again to them, Verily, verily, I say to you, I am the door of the sheep. All whoever came before me are thieves and robbers; but the sheep did not hear them. I am the door: if any one enter in by me, he shall be saved, and shall go in and shall go out and shall find pasture.

John 8:23-24 And he said to them, Ye are from beneath; I am from above. Ye are of this world; I am not of this world. I said therefore to you, that ye shall die in your sins; for unless ye shall believe that I am, ye shall die in your sins.

And if I ever think that I somehow merited being one of the sheep that He saved, that – somehow – I was good enough, that I deserved this, it is enough to remember how Jesus called me:

Matthew 4:17 From that time began Jesus to preach and to say, Repent, for the kingdom of the heavens has drawn nigh.

You see, it is impossible to follow Jesus, to choose to believe in Him, unless I have first repented. And repenting implies acknowledging that I was (and am) a sinner. Only sinners need a Savior and therefore I am only saved by Grace. All of us are saved by Grace. Even Mary, the mother of Jesus, acknowledges this in the Magnificat when she includes herself among those who needed saving. How was she then worthy of bearing the Messiah? By Grace; Gabriel said as much.

And, of course, Grace is inseparable from Jesus:

John 1:15-17 (John bears witness of him, and he has cried, saying, This was he of whom I said, He that comes after me is preferred before me, for he was before me;) for of his fulness we all have received, and grace upon grace. For the law was given by Moses: grace and truth subsists through Jesus Christ.

So, in truth, Martin Luther had it right when he began: Sola Fide defines it all – if we admit who the object of our Faith is. Everything else follows logically. As the Spanish proverb says: To a good understander, few words are enough.

But today, I want to go beyond Luther’s declaration.

We need to go beyond, not because it is deficient but because of the difference between the audience he had then and our world today.

In his day, Luther was speaking to fellow believers. He was trying to wake them up to what Christianity really meant. And to the typical believer of his time, Luther’s emphasis on repentance, justification by Faith, and salvation by Grace were revolutionary. He argued that many of them only cared about getting into heaven; and since that could be had from buying an indulgence from the Church, all the duties that were supposed to come from following Christ fell by the wayside.

This is not our root problem today. In the Church (pick any denomination) believers have heard all about Faith and Grace, and (I hope) Repentance. (Ask them… they’ll tell you.) So, what are we missing? What has fallen by the wayside today?

I think Paul foresaw our day when he told Timothy:

2 Timothy 3:1-5 But this know, that in [the] last days difficult times shall be there; for men shall be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, evil speakers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, profane, without natural affection, implacable, slanderers, of unsubdued passions, savage, having no love for what is good, traitors, headlong, of vain pretensions, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God; having a form of piety but denying the power of it…

What is the common denominator that summarizes this deplorable state?

We no longer recognize what true Love is.

Think about it… Let me rewrite Paul’s words in terms of misdirected love…

• love of self
• love of money
• love of my accomplishments (boastful)
• love of my superiority (arrogance)
• love of my opinions and my absolute freedom to express them, regardless of whom they hurt (evil speaking, blasphemous, slanderous)
• love of my self-determination, forgetting to whom I owe who I am (disobedient to parents)
• love of my self-importance…which is why I deserve all the good things I get (ungrateful)
• love of my human glory independent of God’s standards (profane, unholy)

Is it any wonder that we…

• are incapable of loving others (without natural affection)
• are unable to show lovingkindness=mercy (implacable)
• see nothing wrong in badmouthing our “enemies” (slanderers)
• see nothing wrong in whatever we want (unsubdued passions, without self-control)
• see nothing wrong in hurting the defenseless (savage)
• have no love for what is good (because, if we acknowledged it, it would condemn us!)
• are ultimately lovers of only one person: Me. Therefore, I owe no allegiance to anybody or any law because I am a law unto myself (traitors)
• are reckless (headlong) because what matters above all is what is in it for me right now
• are puffed up almost beyond human recognition (vain pretensions)

The bottom line is, we have made pleasure our god… And we have the gall to claim God is on our side.

Isn’t this almost a paradox? That there would be people who unflinchingly claim to know God, claim to have Faith, claim to be Christians saved by Grace, who unerringly point to you chapter and verse of Scripture (usually the Old Testament) to tell you why they condemn and fight against “those sinners out there”, and yet don’t realize that they have lost sight of the Love of God.

You see, Sola Fide, Sola Scriptura, Solus Christus, and Sola Gratia are nothing without Love.

Solus Amor

Paul the Apostle saw full well this danger. Yes, he warned Timothy about the end times, but he saw the danger happening in his time all too clearly. That is the origin of one of the most famous passages in the New Testament, often read at weddings, I Corinthians Chapter 13.

1 Corinthians 13:1-3 If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And if I shall dole out all my goods in food, and if I deliver up my body that I may be burned, but have not love, I profit nothing.

This is a bold beginning to that passage.

Imagine you met someone claiming to be a Christian who could not only speak supernaturally in human tongues but also in the language of the angels, a person who could explain to you perfectly any passage of Scripture you had questions about and even tell you accurately what God’s will is in any situation you are facing, a person with so much faith that his prayers literally could accomplish the seemingly impossible (the sick get healed, you find a new job, your family gets reconciled to each other), a person who is so fearless that he can give huge amounts of his money away to the poor and even face opposition from the world without flinching… You would think here is the Super-Christian!

But Paul says, do not be fooled and do not even wish to emulate him for if that person does not have Love, he is nothing, nothing but noise.

And don’t miss the severity of Pauls’ final condemnation: “I profit nothing”. It may sound innocuous, but it is deadly serious: He is there reminding us of Jesus’ warning:

Mark 8:34-37 And having called the crowd with his disciples, he said to them, Whoever desires to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me. For whosoever shall desire to save his life shall lose it, but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s shall save it. For what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his soul? for what should a man give in exchange for his soul?

There is one requirement to follow Jesus:

Deny myself, pick up my cross, and follow.

What cross is Jesus talking about? Do you have a cross to bear, and I have mine? Are they different for everyone? Does that cross represent the troubles of this life, the things that get in our way, maybe even the attacks of the enemy because we have chosen to follow Christ?

NO.

There is only one Cross: The cross of sacrificial Love.

Sola Crucis

That passage in Mark I quoted above follows a crucial event in the life of Simon Peter. Let me cite it from Matthew:

Matthew 16:13-17 But when Jesus was come into the parts of Caesarea-Philippi, he demanded of his disciples, saying, Who do men say that I the Son of man am? And they said, Some, John the baptist; and others, Elias; and others again, Jeremias or one of the prophets. He says to them, But *ye*, who do ye say that I am? And Simon Peter answering said, *Thou* art the Christ, the Son of the living God.

And Jesus answering said to him, Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona, for flesh and blood has not revealed [it] to thee, but my Father who is in the heavens.

Peter had understood; he had listened to the Voice of the Father, and he understood that Jesus was indeed the One promised that would accomplish the Father’s will for the restoration of humanity. That is faith. And because he understood – and with his leadership, the other disciples would too, and so eventually, the Church – Jesus added:

Matthew 16:18-19 And *I* also, I say unto thee that *thou* art Peter, and on this rock I will build my assembly, and hades’ gates shall not prevail against it. And I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of the heavens; and whatsoever thou mayest bind upon the earth shall be bound in the heavens; and whatsoever thou mayest loose on the earth shall be loosed in the heavens.

Wouldn’t you have liked to have heard this said of you. To know that you “got it”, that you had proven yourself faithful, to know that you all have been commissioned to carry out, to continue, the work of the Son of God?

Matthew 16:20 Then he enjoined on his disciples that they should say to no man that he was the Christ.

Now, I wonder what they thought about that. Especially Peter… I mean if Jesus is the Messiah, the One that will bring Israel back to its glory, why keep it hidden? Shouldn’t we start recruiting our army of faithful believers now?

But you see, just because they knew He was the Messiah does not mean they understood God’s Plan… and, specifically, they did not understand God’s timing of that Plan. For just as there are a host of prophecies about the Messiah best described as the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Conquering Messiah, the One who comes to finally destroy God’s enemies, there are also a host of prophecies about the Suffering Messiah, the lamb of God who would die to take away the sins of the world.

Which one do you think Jesus came to be? Which one was the purpose of the Incarnation?

The prophet Isaiah knew: The Incarnation was all about the Prince of Peace. And so, Jesus started to make it plain to his disciples:

Matthew 16:21-22 From that time Jesus began to shew to his disciples that he must go away to Jerusalem, and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and the third day be raised.

And Peter taking him to [him] began to rebuke him, saying, [God] be favourable to thee, Lord; this shall in no wise be unto thee.

What’s going on here? Peter cannot believe his ears. To him there is only one Messiah: The Conquering Hero of Israel; the One who brings Judgment on all the enemies of God (that is, all my enemies too… since I am on God’s side.) How can the Victorious Messiah be killed? “You got it wrong Jesus! We love you; we can’t let this happen to you… This cannot be God’s plan for you!”

Have you ever heard similar words? “What is this bit about suffering? What is this misguided idea about not taking over as King? Listen, if you trust me, if you bow down to me, I will give you the Kingship over the whole Earth right now! Listen, I’ll even get all of Israel to follow you: Just drop down from the pinnacle of the Temple so that they see that God’s angels rescue you and confirm you as His Chosen One.”

Yep… the words of Satan in the wilderness. Is it any wonder that Jesus reacted this way?

Matthew 16:23 But turning round, he said to Peter, Get away behind me, Satan; thou art an offence to me, for thy mind is not on the things that are of God, but on the things that are of men.

To make it all absolutely clear, Jesus then tells them plainly:

Matthew 16:24 Then Jesus said to his disciples, If any one desires to come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me…

What cross is Jesus talking about?

There is only one Cross: The cross of sacrificial Love.

If indeed we have chosen to follow Jesus, then we must be walking in His footsteps; the footsteps He walked while He was here on Earth as one of us.

Sure, He ascended into Heaven and He will return one day as King and Judge. But that day has not come.

When He called us, He called us as the suffering Messiah, the one rejected by His people, the one mocked and beaten by the world. That is the One Who called us to follow. And when He called us, He declared that there is no greater love than the one He would show: that one should lay down his life for his friends.

We have a choice in this life, as children of God.

It is an absolute Either-Or:

to Love or to Judge.

Yes, the Messiah will do both. But He is the Messiah; I’m not.

And I know which one my Messiah called me to do.

Sola Fide, sola Scriptura, solus Christus, sola Gratia…

They are inseparably connected to solus Amor and sola Crucis. They are all, in a sense, one and the same thing: the definition of what it means to be a follower of Christ.