By Grace Through Faith

In Ephesians 2, we see a Scripture passage that shows the basis for our salvation and the proper
relationship between saving faith and certifying works:
8 For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God,
9 not of works, lest anyone should boast.
10 For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.

Happy Reformation Day!  We celebrate today the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, and we can concentrate not only on the historical underpinnings of this dramatic moment in Church history, but on the internal workings of the Holy Spirit to reform our lives - reformation means change, and God wants to change us day by day.  We have already been given a new heart and declared to be new creations through salvation in Christ; now He wants to produce more and more of His nature in us.

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On this day when Christians around the world are celebrating the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, the day when the monk Martin Luther nailed to a door in Wittenberg, Germany, 95 theses, pointing out areas of concern in the Church to which he adhered.  This became the basis for a sea change regarding the practice of religion and devotion to Christ.

I have made the point that we all need a personal reformation.  There is the story in the 8th chapter of Acts that depicts such a reformation.  It involves two men: a powerful preacher named Philip, whom we find effectively proclaiming God's truth to the "multitudes" in Samaria, as the Scriptures say. Then, he was sent to one man along a desert road between Jerusalem and Gaza.

We read in Acts 8:
27 So he arose and went. And behold, a man of Ethiopia, a eunuch of great authority under Candace the queen of the Ethiopians, who had charge of all her treasury, and had come to Jerusalem to worship,
28 was returning. And sitting in his chariot, he was reading Isaiah the prophet.
29 Then the Spirit said to Philip, "Go near and overtake this chariot."

Philip found that the man was reading the book of Isaiah, a passage that pointed to Jesus, the Messiah - Philip helped him understand the Scriptures, and the man replied:
34 "I ask you, of whom does the prophet say this, of himself or of some other man?"
35 Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning at this Scripture, preached Jesus to him.
36 Now as they went down the road, they came to some water. And the eunuch said, "See, here is water. What hinders me from being baptized?"
37 Then Philip said, "If you believe with all your heart, you may." And he answered and said, "I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God."
38 So he commanded the chariot to stand still. And both Philip and the eunuch went down into the water, and he baptized him.

This picture reminds us of the so-called "five solas," which were truths embraced by the Church reformers and described by John Piper on the Desiring God website:

The five solas were their attempt to summarize biblical teaching on salvation. That God makes us alive and is completely for us: By God’s grace alone, on the basis of Christ alone, received through faith alone, to the glory of God alone, with Scripture alone as the only, final, decisive, authority on truth.

I wanted to present this story because it is related somewhat to an op-ed piece that ran on The Commerical Appeal website from a Church of God in Christ minister who is a professor at McCormick Theological Seminary.  His name is Dr. David Daniels.

He claims that in 1517, Luther had become fascinated with Ethiopian Christianity.  Daniels writes:

As an ancient church with direct ties to the apostles, the Ethiopian Church conferred legitimacy on Luther’s emerging Protestant vision of a church outside the authority of the Roman Catholic papacy.

As a forerunner of the Protestant Reformation, the Church of Ethiopia embodied the gospel message more robustly and faithfully.

In 1534, Luther met with a Ethiopian minister, Michael the Deacon. Daniels writes:

Recalling the dialogue with Michael the Deacon, Luther later stated: “We have also learned from him, that the rite which we observe in the use of administration of the Lord’s Supper and the Mass, agrees with the Eastern Church ... For this reason we ask that good people would demonstrate Christian love also to this (Ethiopian) visitor."

For his part, after having Luther's Articles of the Christian Faith interpreted to him, Deacon Michael proclaimed: "This is a good creed, that is, faith."

Daniels also states:

His reforms were based on more than the early church of his imagination. For Luther, the Church of Ethiopia was the historical proof that his reform of the Church in Europe had a clear historical and biblical basis.

The revelation that Ethiopian Christianity possibly had links to Protestant Reformation is a game-changer for what is generally thought to be an exclusively European phenomenon.

So, if things are as Daniels claims, it shows that Luther may have been influenced by a church that traces its roots all the way back to a passage in Acts.  Christianity Today reported in 2015:

Roughly two-thirds of Ethiopians are Christians. The majority of these belong to the ancient Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church; the rest primarily to Protestant denominations such as the Ethiopian Evangelical Church Makane Yesus (which recently broke ties with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America over theological concerns).

By the way, those concerns surrounded the ELCA's embracing of gay marriage, a bridge too far for the Ethiopian Christians.

The article states:

The Tewahedo church—like its Orthodox sister church in Egypt—celebrates its history of martyrdom. It claims descent from the Ethiopian eunuch converted by Philip in Acts 8, and dates formally to the preaching of Frumentius in the early fourth century and the acceptance of Christianity in A.D. 330.

This information can remind us of the growth of the Church throughout sub-Saharan Africa, a region that includes Ethiopia.  A Pew Research article from April of this year states:

If demography is destiny, then Christianity’s future lies in Africa. By 2060, a plurality of Christians – more than four-in-ten – will call sub-Saharan Africa home, up from 26% in 2015, according to a new analysis of demographic data by Pew Research Center. At the same time, the share of Christians living in many other regions – notably Europe – is projected to decline.

We can rejoice in what God is doing on the continent of Africa, as Christianity is spreading.

And, in a sense, we can trace a significant component of the spread of Christianity worldwide to a monk in Wittenberg, Germany who felt the church of his day had drifted from its Scriptural principles.  We can examine our own lives to see if spiritual drift has set in - are we attempting to live as a Christian based on our works, or by grace through faith?  Works don't save us, they are an outward sign of the inward change brought about by Christ.

Finally, as we consider the contention by this professor that Luther may have been influenced by a church that did not even reside in Europe, it can cause us to think about what influences us.  Certainly, our approach to matters of faith and life in general comes as the result of what we have allowed to influence us.  We have to make sure that in spiritual matters, that the Word is the measure. The Word, in fact, is the plumb line by which we measure ideas with which we interact and by which we measure how our lives reflect Christ.