As I look back I realize that how a community communicates her theology is as important as her theology itself. For the first time in my life I longed to be with God’s people. I never despised the Lord’s worship, the difference is that now I was eager to learn from ordinary people. I was pursuing a college degree in pastoral studies but I was the student.
It didn’t take long before I succumbed to the beauty of infant baptism and covenant theology. The whole Bible became a consistent story of redemption. The God of redemptive history covenanted with his people and drew us near by the blood of the covenant through the efficacious death of Jesus Christ for his people.
Almost 15 years have passed since that recognition. Since then my theology has “refined,” or as some of my old friends might kindly ask, “What in the world has happened to you?” I have learned, grown, and hopefully increased in knowledge and wisdom.
There are so many lessons, but I think a few come to mind as I celebrate 15 years of Reformed enculturation and as the world celebrates 499 years of the Protestant Reformation:
First, we begin living by affirming that our first identity is not Reformed, but Christian. While we believe that the Reformers were most faithful to the Bible and while we affirm that the theological system developed by the Reformers most reflect the reality of God and his salvation, we need to remember that our identity is first and foremost a Christian identity. We are Christians first, and Reformed second.
Second, we must remember that “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” If our Reformed heritage is causing us to love ourselves, our systems, our ways over everything and everyone, we have made an idol out of our theology, and we need to properly repent. Reformed theology is winsome theology which causes us to listen more carefully to those who disagree with us rather than lord over others because of our supposed superiority.
Finally, never forget that the Gospel of Grace is the beauty of what we believe. It is the gracious, marvelous, overwhelming gift of God that we should breathe when we deserved to die. It is his pleasure that we should be called sons and daughters of God. It is his perfect purpose that we should sing his praises in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.
The mighty fortress of Luther’s pen is our mighty fortress. Were we to trust in our own strength, the Reformation would have been a temporary movement that would have died with the showers of a Wittenberg afternoon in Germany in 1517. But the grace of God knew that history needed more than some showers to cool the day, but a storm to shake the world of lethargy. Indeed the world continues to shake and may it continue to stir for the Reformation did not die with an Augustinian monk, it continues in all of us who believe that the sovereignty and grace of God in the hearts of sinners and history is a message worth telling and singing:
Did we in our own strength confide, our striving would be losing;
Were not the right Man on our side, the Man of God’s own choosing:
Dost ask who that may be? Christ Jesus, it is He;
Lord Sabaoth, His Name, from age to age the same,
And He must win the battle.
