Do we not stand in urgent need of such teaching as Luther here gives us—teaching which humbles man, strengthens faith, and glorifies God—and is not the contemporary Church weak for the lack of it? The issue is clear. We are compelled to ask ourselves: If the Almighty God of the Bible is to be our God, if the New Testament gospel is to be our message, if Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, to-day and for ever—is any other position than Luther’s possible? Are we not in all honesty bound to stand with him in ascribing all might, and majesty, and dominion, and power, and all the glory of our salvation to God alone? Surely no more important or far-reaching question confronts the Church to-day (Johnson and Packer’s introduction to Luther’s Bondage of the Will).
The urgent need of the Church is not more methods and more activities, but instead it needs more of God. Those are words that are easy to say and easy to type, but to have more of God is something beyond the power of man. That is precisely what Luther teaches and that is what most everybody in our day will deny. Men want to leave something for themselves to do and some sufficiency in themselves to carry out what they have left for themselves to do. They want to define love and many things in the Bible in order to leave for themselves one little corner to carry out what they have left for themselves to do. Nevertheless, Jesus did say that “apart from Me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). Apart from love there is not one thing we can do to please God (I Cor 13), yet there is no love but that which comes from God (I John 4:7-8).
In Luther’s Bondage of the Will he goes after the sufficiency of man to do anything. He shows how helpless man is to contribute the smallest part of his own salvation and that salvation is by sovereign grace alone. He shows how that for human beings to bow and receive sovereign grace we must be thoroughly humbled and broken. This is simply another way of saying that the urgent need of the Church today is to preach the depths of man’s inability and impotence before a holy and sovereign God. There is no salvation apart from a deep humbling and brokenness of the soul because grace will have no helpers or enemies in the soul it saves. Saving grace delivers a soul from its pride and self-sufficiency or the soul cannot rest in grace alone. This is why it is an urgent need in the professing Church to teach as Luther did (and all the pioneer Reformers) that the soul must be deeply humbled and broken in order to rest in grace alone.
In the professing Church of today we have a lot of talk about the responsibility of man. That is just one way to sneak in the idea of man’s ability, though the word can be used apart from that. Nevertheless, the ability of man is relied on in what is called the “preaching of Christ” in so many places. The Gospel of grace alone is virtually unknown in the modern times because the humiliation of the soul is virtually unknown. Luther taught that the Gospel of grace alone teaches that God must empty the soul of itself and then bring the soul to itself by grace alone. If we claim that we believe in the inability of the soul, then we must teach that to people and how that is necessary to look to grace alone. Today there is a weak hybrid of those who claim to believe the Reformed teachings who also teach the responsibility of man in such a way that it leaves man with the ability (at least in their own minds) to come to Christ when they please and how they please. Until the Church gets back to preaching the Bible as Luther taught it will always have that weak hybrid as long as anyone tries to claim to be Reformed.
The urgent need of the Church is to discover once again the New Testament Gospel as proclaimed by the Reformers in all of its parts. Part of that seamless Gospel is the utter inability of man as taught by Luther in The Bondage of the Will. It is the true humbling of man that is so desperately needed by the Church in our day. Apart from the humbling of man there is no faith unto salvation and also no strengthening of the Church by faith. Apart from the humbling of human souls there will be no desire for the glory of God out of love for God. The natural man can seek the glory of God in name but in reality be seeking self in some way. Apart from the total inability of man in our preaching of the Gospel there will be no total glory of God in our preaching of the Gospel. As long as we leave some power in the soul we have not sought the humbling of that soul to the degree that it needs to be saved to the glory of God alone. I Corinthians 10:31 tells us that whatever we do we are to do to the glory of God. Part of that is to preach in such a way that the glory is God’s alone in the Gospel. Apart from preaching the total inability of human souls there will be no preaching of the Gospel of grace alone to the glory of God alone. In other words, there will also be no true preaching of faith alone either. This is an urgent need.
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