Reformation Reflections: Your Work Matters

In honor of the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, I'm taking some time to reflect on what the Reformation means today. If you'd like to learn more about the Reformation, see my post "Protestant Amnesia: What's So Important About the Reformation?"


At the time of the Reformation, there was a strong divide the “religious” and the “secular” person. There were those who had experienced the call (or been forced into it), and there were regular folks. There were priests and monks and nuns—and then there were the butchers, the bakers, and the candlestick makers.

There was a shared belief that those in the religious life were doing important spiritual work and had their entire existence set apart for God’s service. Everyone else was bogged down by responsibilities, shackled to earthly things like family and work. They could never aspire to be as holy as those in the religious life, and they were dependent on them, as people who were closer to God than they could ever be.

The Reformation turned this paradigm on its head. Monks and nuns were being called to leave their cloistered lives—and to marry. (Please do not underestimate how scandalous this was.) The early leader of the Reformation, Martin Luther, a former monk, married Katherina von Bora, a former nun, who escaped her convent hidden amidst old fish barrels. They were “tied down” with family life, with children, with guest lodgers, with scraping together an income. Instead of a lesser station, the Reformers saw family life, particularly the raising of children, as a godly and noble undertaking.

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The same was true of our work. At the time, “vocation” was used to describe the sacred calling of monks and nuns. But Luther extended it to include normal, ordinary people, who also had a vocation—a calling—in their work. The work of the every day Christian—the plowing, the diaper-changing, the shoe making—matters.

The commonplace details of our lives aren’t to be escaped or retreated from. They are sanctified as we use them to better love and serve our neighbors. This love of neighbor is what glorifies God—not whether or not our work is explicitly religious.

Luther would say:

“The prince should think: Christ has served me and made everything to follow him; therefore, I should also serve my neighbor, protect him and everything that belongs to him. That is why God has given me this office, and I have it that I might serve him. That would be a good prince and ruler. When a prince sees his neighbor oppressed, he should think: That concerns me! I must protect and shield my neighbor....The same is true for shoemaker, tailor, scribe, or reader. If he is a Christian tailor, he will say: I make these clothes because God has bidden me do so, so that I can earn a living, so that I can help and serve my neighbor.”

So, my friend, if you go to work today with an awareness that your work is a calling, that through your normal life you can glorify God, you have the Reformation to thank. 

If you find yourself subtly thinking that your “secular” work is less-than or a distraction, that the most important work is the explicitly “sacred” work in full-time ministry—I invite you to embrace what the Reformers reclaimed for us. That our God is one of the ordinary. That our work matters. That work is a sacred opportunity to fulfill the greatest commandment to love God and love our neighbor. That all of our existence is worship and an opportunity for ministry. That all of it can be made holy. 

Soli Deo Gloria.

Protestant Amnesia: What's So Important About the Reformation?

My friend recently posted on Facebook about this year’s 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. It was short, sweet, simple. 

Someone commented calling the post gibberish and my friend a history nerd. 

It was all in good humor—a friend teasing another friend—but I was shocked. I was shocked because the words were coming from a fellow Christian, and a fellow Protestant Christian, and she had no sense of the Reformation’s significance. 

I know she isn’t alone. 

It’s been said that Christians have very bad memories. (I would say this is generally true of humans.) We easily forget where we’ve come from. We forget our history. We forget that our present was birthed from the past. We are heirs of the ideas and decisions of the people and cultures that came before us. We did not emerge from nothing, ex nihilo. We are irreparably tied to our history.

History matters—not because of nerdiness and not for obsession with fact-collecting. History matters because it reminds us who we are. 

How does this relate to the Protestant Reformation? 

At the time of the Reformation, there was one Church in Western Europe—the Roman Catholic Church, and one Church in Eastern Europe—the Eastern Orthodox Church. It’s hard to imagine today, when we’re accustomed to a variety of church traditions. In my hometown and its surrounding township, for example, there are dozens of churches, and I can’t begin to list the various denominations these churches represent.

If you attend a church of any tradition aside from the Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox churches, you are a child of the Protestant Reformation. (In many ways, Western history as we know it, including my native United States culture, is also a child of the Reformation, but that goes beyond the scope of what we can talk about here.)

This year marks the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. In honor of the occasion, I’ll be taking the next few weeks leading up to "Reformation Day" on October 31 to reflect on how the Reformation speaks to us today. But first, we need to cover some basic history.

Martin Luther and Reformation Beginnings

The Reformation started with a monk named Martin Luther. He was obsessive and anxious, hyper-aware of his sin and fearful of God’s judgment. As a professor at Wittenberg University, Luther threw himself into the study of Scripture.

As he studied and lectured, he gradually began to see the Bible's teaching differently. God's righteousness, like it's talked about in the book of Romans, isn't about God waiting to smite us. It's about God's gracious gift in making us righteous because of the death and resurrection of Jesus. He gives us His righteousness, bringing us to a place of right relationship, adopting us as His children. And He does this not because of our own merit or worthiness or action but merely by His grace, through our faith in Christ. 

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For any of us who grew up in a Protestant church, this probably sounds like old news. But for Luther, it was revolutionary. He “rediscovered” this presentation of the Gospel, which now sounds so common to us. It was his reformation breakthrough.

The trouble started when Luther wrote and posted the Ninety-Five Theses in 1517. At the time, traveling preachers were selling indulgences. They told townspeople, often poor peasants without money to spare, that if they paid money for an "indulgence," one of their loved ones would be released from Purgatory. They even had an advertising jingle: “As soon as a coin in the coffer rings, the soul from Purgatory springs.” 

Luther was a concerned pastor. He saw a practice that was taking advantage of poor churchgoers, a practice that was theologically suspect in suggesting people could buy salvation, a practice that was conveniently funding a grandiose building project in Rome. So, he wrote ninety-five objections to the practice and publicly shared them for scholarly debate. 

The Ninety-Five Theses circulated widely and quickly, and controversy erupted. The next few years were a whirlwind for Luther. He wrote furiously, explaining the theological views that had slowly been forming during his studies. He publicly debated church leaders and stood before religious and secular councils. He was eventually declared a heretic, excommunicated from the Catholic Church, and made an outlaw. But the “damage” had already been done. The Protestant Reformation was taking Europe by storm. 

Reformation Basics: The Solas

I will not take the time to explain all that Luther did and taught for the rest of his life. And I will not detail his followers and the various early fragmentations of the Reformation. If you’re interested, this information is readily available elsewhere. Instead, I want to simply explain the Reformation distinctives, these significant shifts that revolutionized the expression and theology of the Christian Church. We call them the “solas.”

Sola Scriptura: Scripture alone is the highest authority.

This was the starting point of the revolutionary shift of the Reformation. No longer did the judgments of popes or church councils or the traditions of the church bear the authority of what was true. Scripture alone was the judge and standard of truth. It is the authority for our faith and doctrine, and everything must be interpreted in its light.

Solus Christus: Christ alone is our only mediator to God.

We could not come to God on our own, and we needed Him to reveal Himself and come to us. Christ alone is the way for us to be in right relationship with God and know what He is really like. Our salvation was accomplished once and for all by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. He is the only way of salvation. 

Sola Fide & Sola Gratia: We are saved through faith alone, by the grace of God alone. 

It is impossible for us to save ourselves or work our way into God’s favor. Our salvation is entirely by His grace, not by any works or good things we have done. We do not add to the saving work of Christ—He has already fully won our salvation. We receive this salvation and are made right with God by responding in faith to what Christ has already done. In a “great exchange,” the penalty of our sin was paid by Christ on the Cross, and we are given His righteousness, declared to be right with God. The simple statement of the Gospel, which we have inherited from the Reformation is: Justification (we are made right with God), by grace alone, through faith alone, because of Christ alone.

Soli Deo Gloria: Glory to God Alone

God alone receives glory from our salvation and our lives. Because salvation is entirely His work, and not our own, He receives all the glory and praise from it. The whole of our lives should be lived for His glory.

Luther never wanted to break from the Catholic Church. His intention was always reform—to call the Church back to its roots, back to the basic teachings of the biblical Gospel. But the reformation turned into a break, and produced a new branch of Christianity. This year, we mark its 500th birthday.

Patrick: The Slave and the Missionary

As a child, it’s fair to say what I knew of classic literature came from “Wishbone” and what I knew of church history came from “Adventures in Odyssey.” Each afternoon after school, I was transfixed during the thirty minute audio theater-style broadcast. I remember the dramatic episodes that introduced me to St. Patrick, the young slave boy whose faithfulness to God would change the face of Ireland. 

Patrick grew up in late 4th century Britain, the son of a wealthy deacon. By his own account, he ignored the religion of his family. When he was about 16 years old, he was captured by Irish raiders and taken back to pagan Ireland as a slave (circa 405). For six years, he was enslaved and worked caring for his master’s herds. Far from home and surrounded by a pagan culture, Patrick clung to the Christian faith he had previously shrugged off. He later attributes this season of his life with his coming to the Lord. Alone in the fields, he spent the majority of his time in prayer. After a dream instructed Patrick to leave and return home, he escaped and fled. A long dangerous journey led him home to the safety of his family. 

Shortly after his return to Britain, Patrick had another dream. I’ll record it in his own words.

“There, in a vision of the night, I saw a man whose name was Victoricus coming as if from Ireland with innumerable letters, and he gave me one of them, and I read the beginning of the letter: ‘The Voice of the Irish’; and as I was reading the beginning of the letter I seemed at that moment to hear the voice of those who were beside the forest of Foclut which is near the western sea, and they were crying as if with one voice: ‘We beg you, holy youth, that you shall come and shall walk again among us.’ And I was stung intensely in my heart so that I could read no more, and thus I awoke.”

I can only imagine. Violently captured, stolen from your family, enslaved in a foreign land—your youth lost in slavery. The last place I would want to return would be to the land of my captivity.

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Francis of Assisi

He was born Giovanni Francesco Bernardone. His father was a successful cloth merchant. His childhood and adolescence were by all accounts carefree, marked by the ease and education of relative wealth. He was a sometimes-benefactor of his friends’ rowdy adolescent forays. As a young man, he was captured in battle and spent a year in a damp prison cell. Upon his return, he sobered up, and began spending long times in prayer. In one such time he had a vision in which he heard Christ asking him to “go repair my house, which, as you can see, is falling completely to ruin.” Although at the time, he began by repairing the dilapidated church in which he had been praying, his followers would later come to understand this as his call to reform the worldly and corrupt practices of the church. 

His merchant father was furious at his change of behavior and had him brought before a local bishop, complaining that his son had thrown off all his responsibilities. In response, our young friend stripped off his clothes—which represented his wealth and position—and put them at his father’s feet. He said, “Up to today I called you ‘father,’ but now I can say in all honesty, ‘Our Father who art in heaven.’” With these words, he abandoned his place in his father’s house and went out to live as a hermit. His work would leave a mark on Christians for generations to come. History would come to know him as St. Francis of Assisi. 

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The Real Valentine

It was 3rd-century Rome. Emperor Claudius was engaged in deadly and unpopular military campaigns. He needed a strong fighting force, but in this time of political turmoil and crisis he was having trouble recruiting and keeping people in his army. Married men made bad fighters, he reasoned, since they were concerned about the wives and families they left behind.  His logic: Unmarried men=Better warriors. So, he outlawed marriages and engagements for young people in Rome.

Enter Valentine.** This young priest believed marriage was a God-ordained sacrament and important for God’s purposes in the world. He wanted to preserve God’s picture of men and women committed in a marriage relationship for life. So, he began performing illegal marriages for the young people in Rome. In these secret marriages, he was upholding what he believed was important in the faith, at the risk of betraying the emperor and his government. Marriage was that important.

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