Sermon Tone Analysis

Once upon a time, many years ago, there lived a farmer who owned a mule.

With that mule the man did all his plowing and cultivating.

On Saturdays he would hitch his mule to the wagon and go into town for groceries and necessities.

But the farmer, being the frugal man he was, grew increasingly concerned over the rising price of the oats and hay that he fed his mule each evening.

He decided upon a simple plan.

In order to save money, he would substitute sawdust for some of the oats, and straw for some of the hay that he fed his mule.

So that evening, instead of giving his mule a full gallon of oats, and half-a-bale of hay, the farmer only gave him three-quarters of a gallon of grain, the remaining one-quarter gallon being sawdust.

He also replaced a third of the hay with straw.

It worked.

The mule didn't seem to mind the leaner meals.

Well, over the course of several months the old farmer began to substitute more and more sawdust for oats, and more and more straw for hay.

He was, of course, pleased with the money he was saving in oats and hay.

Everything went fine for a long time.

The mule became satisfied with sawdust and straw.

The problem was that the poor ‘ol mule eventually dropped over dead of starvation.

What’s the moral of the story?

The same leanness can happen spiritually to the Body of Christ.

The changeover from /truth/ to /error/ in the Church is sometimes a slow, but gradual process, and the Body of Christ doesn't always perceive the change in spiritual diet.

They become satisfied with the error that has replaced the truth.

But, before they know it, they're dead.

This is what happened to the Church in Europe.

Between A.D. 400 and A.D. 1,500, church leaders gradually exchanged truth with more and more error, so that one the eve of the Reformation, very few professing Christians actually knew what the Bible taught, and that much of what they were being taught by their priests and bishops simply could not be defended Scripturally.

The Gospel had essentially been lost.

In the centuries before Martin Luther and the Reformation there had been periodic attempts at reform, but all had been squelched.

The crucial question of the Middle Ages was, /“How is the sinner justified before God?”/

Over the course of centuries, the Roman Church had appropriated that power to itself.

This power was located in the seven sacraments that the Church administered to its adherents.

Theologians taught that God had bestowed His grace to the Church.

The Church, then, became the /custodian of grace/ and had the authority to mediate it to the faithful by means of the sacraments.

There could be no salvation apart from the Sacraments.

As a result, people were in bondage to the Church, because what the church could ‘give’ it could also ‘take away’.

The Gospel was distorted, if not actually lost, by this incorrect teaching.

October 31, 1517, is a landmark date that will forever be a day of monumental importance as long as church history is studied and the gospel of Jesus Christ is preached.

It was on that date that an Augustinian Monk name Martin Luther nailed 95 bullet points to the door of the local church protesting the abuses of the Roman Church—particularly in the selling of indulgences.

Before he knew it, Luther’s students had copied down his protest, printed it via a brand new invention called the Printing Press and distributed it throughout Germany and then all of Europe.

It was a ‘flashpoint’ in history.

The result was the Protestant Reformation.

The Reformation was a Spiritual Revolution that monumentally changed the course of Western culture.

More than anything it was a /reformation/ of the preaching of the Bible, and a /reestablishment/ of the Gospel of Jesus Christ—that a sinner is saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, according to the Scriptures alone!

The Reformation was essentially a /'back to the Bible'/ movement.

The Reformers sought to restore the church to the pristine teaching of Scripture in a variety of areas, most importantly /'the doctrine of salvation'/.

The emphasis of the Reformation was encapsulated in popular slogans that made it easy for the people to remember.

These slogans are known as the five solas of the Reformation; /Sola/ being the Latin word for /'only'/.

The five slogans that became the heart-and-soul of Protestant and Evangelical faith are:

* /Sola Scriptura/—that is, that the Bible alone is the final authority in faith and practice.

Scripture, as opposed to church tradition or ecclesiastical authority, is the final authority for the believer.

* /Sola Fide/—that is, we are justified by faith alone, not faith plus works.

* /Sola Gratia/— that is, we are saved by God's grace alone, freely given to us, and not because of anything we have done, or deserve.

God, out of a heart of mercy, confers His grace on sinners.

The Church can neither confer grace nor take it away.

* /Sola Christus/—that is, we are justified by the substitutionary atonement of Christ alone.

We are saved through the person and work of Christ; not Christ plus the sacraments or Christ plus good works, but by Christ alone.

* /Sola Deo Gloria/—that is, all things are to be done to God's glory alone.

Sadly, each of these solas is under attack today, and not just in liberal churches, or in the secular world.

We would expect these doctrines to be discounted in the secular world, but they are being undermined even in the evangelical church today.

Studies reveal that 35% of evangelical seminarians deny that faith alone in Christ alone is absolutely necessary for salvation.

/If we lose these solas, we lose robust, biblical Christianity, because without them we lose the gospel itself.

That is why we're looking at each/.

We've already examined Sola

Scriptura, Sola Fide and Sola Gratia.

This morning, we're going to see that In Christ alone our hope is found.

He is our Cornerstone, and our Solid Ground.

!

I. IN CHRIST ALONE WE ARE ABLE TO KNOW GOD

* /"For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.

For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him.

He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy.

For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him,”/ (Colossians 1:13–19, NIV84)

#. like a lighthouse that shines its light out into a stormy sea to warn sailors of dangerous reefs and shoals, so the Apostle Paul shines a light onto the falsehood and error that had crept into the Church at Colossae

#. he does that by reminding us of the /preeminence/ of our Lord, Jesus Christ

#. the passage of Scripture I just read to you is perhaps the greatest /Christological passage/ in all the Bible

#. meditate on this passage for any length of time and it will simply take your breath away!

#. through it, the Apostle lays a solid foundation for our faith and the life of the Church

#. it is a foundation to which we can anchor our souls in full assurance of faith

#. the New Testament writers—as well as our Lord, Jesus Christ—warned of deceivers who would try to dupe those who are followers of Christ

#. the 1st century was full of /charlatans, spiritual quacks/, and /religious schemers/ who shrewdly manipulated truth and half truths in order to persuade believers to follow their perverted version of the gospel

#. the passing of centuries has not changed the deceptive intentions of scheming men

!! A. A WARNING OF IMMINENT SPIRITUAL DANGER

* /"See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ."/

(Colossians 2:8, ESV)

#. through the preaching and teachings of /Epaphras/ a fledgling congregation had begun in the city of Colossae

#.

Epaphras had been saved under the preaching and teaching of the Apostle Paul, and had returned home preaching the same Gospel to his family and friends

* \“We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, because we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love you have for all the saints— the faith and love that spring from the hope that is stored up for you in heaven and that you have already heard about in the word of truth, the gospel that has come to you.

All over the world this gospel is bearing fruit and growing, just as it has been doing among you since the day you heard it and understood God’s grace in all its truth.

You learned it from Epaphras, our dear fellow servant, who is a faithful minister of Christ on our behalf, and who also told us of your love in the Spirit.”/

(Colossians 1:3–8, NIV84)

#. in time a vibrant, growing, Christ-honoring Church was planted in Colossae

#. the Colossian church—like many churches—began well because the faith of the congregation was /rooted/ and /grounded/ in the saving gospel of Christ the Lord

#. but deceivers had come to Colossae whose goal was to /spiritually kidnap/ these believers

#. in fact, one modern-day translation of Col. 2:8 says, /See to it that no one kidnaps you through philosophy which is characterized by empty deception

#. the church in Colossae faced a particular form of strange doctrine/

#. it was a mixture of /Greek philosophy, mystery religions/, and /Jewish legalism/

#. the Apostle Paul emphatically warns these believers, /See to it that these deceivers don't take you captive with this different gospel

#. no Christian ever intends to be deceived or taken captive by a different gospel/

#. but countless genuine believers have been and are being caught off-guard and swept into grievous error

#. examples of /spiritual deceivers, false gospels/, and /errant teachings/ abound in our own day

* ILLUS.

As far back as 1982, Robert Schuller planted the seed for what has today become the wholesale undoing of the Reformation.

In his apostate book, Self Esteem: A New Reformation, he attacks the very core of “Reformation Theology” by saying that it “failed to make clear that the core of sin is a lack of self–esteem” and that the reformers were “rampantly reckless in assaulting the dignity of the person” by insisting on the depravity of man’s character.