The Righteous: Reformation

Habakkuk 2:2-4        2 And the Lord answered me: “Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so he may run who reads it.  3 For still the vision awaits its appointed time; it hastens to the end—it will not lie.  If it seems slow, wait for it; it will surely come; it will not delay.  4 “Behold, his soul is puffed up; it is not upright within him, but the righteous shall live by his faith.

 As a young man, Martin was plagued by his shortcomings.  He was afraid that he never could live up to his father’s expectations, and he knew he could never live the perfect life that God expected of him.  Every sermon, lesson, and moral given him by every priest compounded in his heart and mind that he failed God, and would continue to fail.  He could make penance, confession, work, strive, and even deny himself every major and minor luxury, but God still had every right to condemn him.

Martin tried to give up sin.  He even gave up on life itself, gave up his studies in law, gave up the ambitions of his father, and became a monk to get closer to God, to live a purer life, to strive for perfection.  Martin even became an Augustinian monk, known for their vows of poverty, study, and absolute suffering to kill the sinfulness inside themselves.  Martin, however, found no security or peace in his suffering for God.

Johann Staupitz, Martin’s superior, saw his dedication and pushed him to train for the priesthood, and then to be a professor for other priests.  Martin studied, preached, taught, and studied more, but still he found little peace in working slave hours and driving himself to exhaustion.

Martin’s life changed, however, when he was preparing a class on the prophets.  While reading through the prophet Habakkuk, Martin found the passage printed above.  After being told all his life that the believer works to please God, after so many years of physical, mental, and spiritual torture to earn a place of favor with God, and after endless days of knowing that he could never merit any favor from the Almighty, Martin found this little verse in this “Minor” prophet that flipped the whole of creation on its head.

“The righteous shall live by his faith.”  It is not what we do that gives us life.  There is no magic incantation, no special list of good things, and no grocery list of perfect deeds that we must check off to give us certainty that God will smile on us and call us His children. 

 We cannot begin to work our way into the Father’s heart.  Righteousness, the state of being right, whole, just and perfect, in His sight comes by faith.

We live because we cling to what Jesus has already done for us.  We live because our heavenly Father has given us the faith to believe in all His promises fulfilled in Christ.  We live because God has captured us from the world and adopted us into His family by Jesus’ work.  It is not because of what we have done, that we have life, but over and against what we have done.

Martin Luther was right in his heart, he could never work hard enough to earn a place in heaven.  All of his thoughts, words, and deeds were ashes and dust in the eyes of God.  Our Father, however, gives the gift of faith in Christ.  It is through Jesus that we become perfect in God’s sight.  It is through Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection that we are declared just and innocent.  It is by faith in Him that we have life.  In Jesus, we are made righteous, by faith, and faith alone.

In His peace,  

Pastor Red