Word of Salvation – January 2026
God’s Word
Sermon by Rev. Bill Berends on 1Peter 1:23-25
(A sermon for Reformation Sunday)
Scripture Readings: Psalm 119:1-16; 1Peter 1:13-25
Brothers and sisters, you may be aware that in the seventh and eighth century there was a great challenge to Christianity with the birth of what eventually became known as Islam. Though new critical findings on the history of Islam suggest that in those early centuries the movement was not yet a religion, what is certainly true is that there were Arab raiders who conquered much of what was the Christian area of North Africa and Eurasia. When the movement gave rise to the Islamic religion it made it very hard for Christians to continue, especially as they were forbidden to reach out and build new churches
As it became increasingly difficult for Christians to worship, we see that the churches that were in Northern Africa by and large disappeared – with two exceptions. Christianity remained in Egypt and in Ethiopia. Why there?
Let me tell you something else. When missionaries started doing mission work in China, for the longest time they were not allowed to go into the interior provinces. They had permission to preach the gospel along the coast, but not inland. When at last permission came for missionaries to enter into the interior, to their surprise, they found the church was already there. Why?
At the time of great spiritual darkness in Europe, around the fourteenth, fifteenth century, there was suddenly an outbreak of Reformation which just spread like wildfire. Why?
What do these three stories have in common?
The common factor here is the availability of the word of God. You see, what had happened in Northern Africa is that, while there were Christian churches everywhere, the Bible was translated into only two of the languages there: the language of the Egyptian Christians, Coptic, and the language of the Ethiopians, Ge’ez. And because there were Bibles, the Church of Christ survived in those areas.
Let me look again at the question of why there were churches found in inland China where no missionary had visited. It was because the Word of God had already come. You see, traders from the interior had come and had picked up Bibles and had returned to their home areas. Here they began reading the Bible, shared it with their neighbours, and started Christian fellowships based purely on the Word of God.
And why is it that, in the sixteenth century, (that is, the 1500s), we suddenly see an outbreak of reformation? It’s because the word of God was translated and made available to everyone through a new invention called printing, and people were able to read the word of God for themselves.
At the end of last month, as we celebrated Reformation Day, we remember how Martin Luther pointed people back to what..? To the word of God. And with printing coming in and this new encouragement to follow God’s word, we see that the church of God was revitalised and set up in Europe once again.
Now I want to look at the word of God and what it does in terms of its vitality, its endurance, and its centrality in Christian life.
The first thing we see is that it is vital.
We are born again through the living word. I’m afraid that by the sixteenth century God’s living word had become a dead letter in the church of its day. It wasn’t taught that the word gives life, but in the Roman Catholic tradition at the time it was taught that you were given life through baptism. The word for beginning life is “generation”, and “REgeneration” means being born again. Rome taught baptismal regeneration, that when you’re baptised, you’re born again. So, only the church could give you this rebirth because only the church could baptise.
With this rebirth through baptism there was no guarantee of salvation, but you only received salvation if you continued to follow the teachings of the church. Those teachings said that you had to come and confess your sins to the priest so that he could give you absolution, provided you did penance. This meant that without a priest there was no salvation. You also needed the priest to give you the last rites, to help you into heaven. And if you had the money you could short circuit all this by buying an indulgence, which was a kind of free pass into heaven without having to go to purgatory.
It’s in this context that Luther came with the glorious gospel news that it is by grace alone that we are saved. And the wonderful thing is that the grace preached by Luther was not a grace that you could lose. No, because these living words came as imperishable seeds. Once you are born again, this life cannot cease and disappear. It is imperishable, and so we don’t need to rely on confessions and absolution from sin from priests, or last rites. No..! We rely on our direct connection with God in Christ because He who began the good work in us will also bring it to its completion.
The vitality of the word of God lies in the fact that the word is Christ Himself. John opens his Gospel with the statement that Christ is the Word. And perhaps how this works is best illustrated through the parable Christ Himself told us about Him being the vine and we being the branches. I don’t think you have to be a gardener to know what happens if you cut a branch off a vine. What happens to the branch? It dies, doesn’t it?
And why does it die? Because it no longer gets its nourishment. A branch gets its nourishment from the vine and then it can bear fruit, but when you cut it off from the vine, it doesn’t get that nourishment. And so, too, if we get cut off from Christ, if we were to be without Christ, then we would not get our nourishment because Christ is our nourishment. He is called the living bread, and He nourishes us through the word. He also nourishes us through the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.
Now the Reformation tradition really emphasises the fact that it’s so necessary for you and for me to read God’s word constantly. How often? How often do you eat? Is there anybody here who only eats once or twice a week? Well, I know lots of Christians who only read the word of God once or twice a week. How strong do you think they’re going to be in their faith? As strong as you would be in the body if you ate only once or twice a week. You would not be very strong, would you? We normally eat three times a day, maybe some of us fast a little bit now and then because when we eat too much it shows. But we all need food constantly. And if we don’t get it, we begin to feel faint. And if you keep on doing that, you get anorexic and all kinds of problems arise.
I think one of the reasons why the reformers made it a custom for people to read at the time they had their meal at the table was to remind people that even as food is important for your body, so God’s word is important as nourishment for your soul.
The second thing that Peter tells us here is that this word of God is enduring, and we see how it has endured despite attacks over history.
Now there are two main ways in which Satan likes to attack God’s word, by adding to it and by taking away from it, and he can do both at the same time. We see that happening before the Reformation.
We see how Satan had added to the Word with new doctrines. The traditional doctrines of the church had been defined by the Church in synods, or councils. The first three councils based their teachings on the word of God, and these explained truths about the Trinity and the human and divine natures of Christ.
But after that, more councils were introduced which no longer looked to God’s word for guidance, and these councils introduced practices like the veneration of the saints and the Virgin Mary who were represented by idols. These idols were meant to serve as an aid to prayer, but the practice led more and more to idolatry.
We find that these councils also introduced some errors like the doctrine of transubstantiation, which holds that the elements of the Lord’s Supper miraculously change into the actual body and blood of Jesus when the priest blesses it. A little bell was rung to indicate the bread had become flesh and the wine had turned into blood. Nothing like that is found in scripture of course, but these were added to the church’s teaching to give it more control over the people. On top of that, in the 1800s, the church decided that the pope himself could declare new doctrine without a church council. A statement of the pope that formulates new doctrine is known as a Bull, which I always think is quite an appropriate name.
But in these bulls, we find that new teachings were introduced like the immaculate conception of Mary, meaning that she was born without sin just like Christ was. That was in 1854. And then in 1950 the pope decided that Mary herself ascended into heaven just like Christ did.
Another way the Roman Catholic Church brought in additional teaching was by adding the apocryphal letters to their Bible. Here the books of Maccabees, for example, gave the foundation for their doctrine of purgatory.
Now these are examples of ways in which Rome added to scripture, but at the same time, Rome took away from scripture. They took away God’s Word by only making the Scriptures available in Latin, which is no good at all if, like most church goers, you don’t speak Latin. A Bible you cannot understand is worthless. Also the church service was done in Latin, so people had no idea of what was said. Translations were banned. If you were caught being in possession of a Bible translation, you would be burned, together with your translation.
And so we find that the preaching had been replaced by sacraments and liturgy. I’m happy to say there were many exceptions, that there still were many who worshipped God despite the false leaders and errors in the church. And it’s these exceptions that then led to the Reformation. But the official Roman Catholic Church had strayed far from the Word of God and people hardly had opportunity to listen to that Word.
Here I must also point out that this kind of heresy was not limited to the Roman Catholicism of the Middle Ages, but that we find the same thing going on in some churches that came out of the Reformation. We see that people have added to scripture and perhaps the most obvious examples are found in some of the sects. Think of the Mormons and the writings of Joseph Smith; think of Jehovah’s Witnesses and Russell’s teachings in the Watchtower publications; think of the Seventh Day Adventists with the prophecies of Ellen White, and so on. Most of the sects have some kind of supposed revelation of their own to guide them in their teaching. But it’s not just the sects. We also find it in the liberal wings of the church where people started to bring in all kinds of things in addition to the Bible.
For example, some brought in the supposed findings of science which are contrary to Scripture. Mainstream science often attacked the doctrine of a good creation and with that people began to deny mankind’s fall into sin. Secular history began to tell us that the whole story of Israel and Egypt was just a fantasy, some kind of myth, that there were never any Jews in Egypt and so on. And of course, there’s the media with all its attacks on Christian worldview and the new promotion of the ‘woke mentality’ with all the ethical problems that it brings. So, where such ideas are presented in the Sunday message they come as an addition to the scriptures. We also see it in some of the more charismatic wings of the church where people supposedly have private revelations to guide them and the church on what to do in life. This already happened fairly soon after the Reformation. In some of the Anabaptist churches new prophecy was accepted in addition to what God gave us in His word.
At the same time we see that, since The Reformation, there’s also been subtraction from the word of God. There’s a movement known as neo-orthodoxy, people who follow teachers like Karl Barth, who say God’s word is contained in the scripture. Now notice the difference between saying God’s word is the scriptures and God’s word is contained in the scriptures, because in the latter instance, the next question is: where? Does it include Genesis one, two and three? Here a lot of scholars said: no. No, that’s not part of scripture, because it conflicts with science. Does it include Romans one, where Paul talks about the sin of homosexuality? No. That’s not part of scripture, because it conflicts with the new worldview. What is God’s scripture then? Well, that depends on who you ask. Where people begin to put ideas into scripture they only get out of it what they put into it. And that’s not, of course, how scripture is to guide us.
Some people use rationalism as their basis for deciding what is God’s word or not, trying to define God’s Word on the basis of logic. They may argue, for example, that there are two creation stories in Genesis, one in chapter one another in chapter two. And since there are two, well, which one should we accept? Here they reasoned that neither should be taken as factual, as they did not present history, but poetry. Genesis one and two were poems that expressed wonderful ideas but not historical events.
Other people would, instead of rationalism, use empiricism. I’ll only accept what I can feel, see, hear, taste, and smell, and nothing else. And if you start with that approach, then, yes, you find a lot of problems with Scripture because then, of course, you have no room for miracles. You can’t smell or taste proof for a miracle, can you? And so these people will find lots of errors in the Bible and end up diluting the teaching of scripture to some kind of ‘we must love one another’ theology. Now I want to point out that, although people came with these new ideas that contradicted scripture, it did not take them very far.
In 1800, the French Institute in Paris listed 82 errors in scripture. Now today, all 82 are solved through tools like biblical archaeology and the finding in new copies of scriptures that took away some of the problems we had. For example, the Dead Sea Scrolls helped clarify a contradiction. There’s a passage in Is.7 where it says “you have increased the people and have not increased their joy, they will be joyful.” vWell, that’s a contradiction, isn’t it? But now we know that the word “lo” in Hebrew, can be spelled two ways. And the Dead Sea Scrolls showed it should be spelled the other way.
Spelled one way, the Word “LO” means “no”, and spelled the other way, it means “to him”. And we now realise it says, “You have increased joy to him, and they will rejoice. So no contradiction at all, but probably a simple dictation mistake from the time when Bibles were hand written by dictation. In many similar ways we have found answers to these supposed problems.
But what scripture does tell us is that men are like grass. They flourish one day and disappear the next. And that’s not just talking about their bodies, that’s also talking about their scholarship, their ideas, the things they believe. Just ask yourself, what did people believe a hundred years ago? They believed that the atom was the smallest particle of matter. Well, today we know the atom can be divided in all kinds of ways. They believed that the speed of light was constant and that’s now being questioned. In so many ways the people of the past were misled by the teachings of their day.
Probably the teachings that many of us have had to struggle with in our lifetime are the challenges of evolutionism. I know that I found it very difficult when I went to university over fifty five years ago. I went to study anthropology and the very first thing the teacher asked is, “Is there anybody here who still believes in Adam and Eve?” And in the class of 200 or so students, myself and one girl put up our hands. As you can imagine, there was a lot of laughter, and the professor said, “Don’t worry, we’ll soon cure them of it.”
Well, today we see how evolutionism itself can no longer can be defended. It faces all kinds of problems: The missing links have never been found, they’re still missing. Genetics now show us that random mutations cannot produce advances in life forms, but can only cause devolution through the loss of genetic material.
DNA, both the mitochondrial DNA from the mother, and that found in the Y chromosome of the father, shows that the world cannot be older than 10,000 years, and is probably quite a bit younger. This is based on the fact that, in tracing our common ancestry, we can count the number of mutations that have occurred since we had a common ancestor. Since we know the average number of mutations per generation this allows us to compute that the Y chromosome, the one men get from their father, does not go back further than the time of Noah and his sons, no more than 6000 years maximum. Our mitochondrial DNA that passes through the female line is slightly older as it goes right back to Eve. Both of them point to a much shorter existence of humans on earth than what evolutionism expected.
Now I could go to a lot of other examples from physics, biology, palaeontology, and so on which all show us that the Darwinian theory just no longer holds. Mainline scientists are now looking for something else to replace it because, well, don’t be surprised, not everybody wants to believe history as the Bible records it. They don’t want to adopt a biblical worldview. They want another lifestyle and so we’ve now come to an age where people have said, well, we’ll throw logic out of the window and truth is what you want it to be. Here you can set your own rules for how you want to live and so on – the whole ‘woke mentality’.
Now the third thing we want to notice about the word of God is that it is central to the Christian life. This was the word that was preached in the Christian church. In Acts 2:42, we read that the early Christians devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching. That was their bread and butter. That’s how they grew, and they would come together for fellowship and for breaking the bread in Lord’s Supper and for praying together, but it was the word of God that lay at the centre of that service.
Paul writes to Titus: God brought His word to light through preaching. Now as I pointed out, before The Reformation preaching had disappeared from the churches, and in the centre of the church was the altar where the priest did the miracle of changing the bread to flesh and the wine to blood. But when The Reformation came, these altars were taken away and it was the pulpit that was placed in the centre of the church. This was symbolic of the fact that the Word is what should be central in the church. God speaking to us, that is such an important part of our Christian worship service every Sunday morning. The reformation churches showed this in their architecture. Worship buildings were built to allow all attendants to look at the pulpit so that they could hear the word of God.
No longer were there little rooms and niches to the side where you could worship saints and so on. Now at the centre of all worship was the word of God. But sadly today, we do see that the centrality of the word of God is not always there in the church anymore. We see it where the pulpit has made way for music and musicians. Now musicians, don’t get me wrong, I think it’s wonderful to have these instruments here on stage, and I love the way you lead us to praise God and worship. But I am glad that you have not pushed the pulpit into a corner, and that your songs lead us into the preaching of the Word.
Sadly, I have been to churches where the musicians were out in front and the pulpit was somewhere way down in a corner. Here all the people could see the musicians, between clouds of vapour spread by machines placed there to create an atmosphere of mystery, but only the people seated in front could see the preacher. In fact, I remember one particular church service, where the same choruses were repeated for over an hour, with a message of five to ten minutes.
I’ve also been to a church where the pulpit was removed, and not only the pulpit, but all the pews with it, and a nice thick carpet was put out because this was the time of Toronto blessing. Here, when supposedly people were blessed and slain in the spirit, they fell on the floor, and began to bark like a dog or cluck like a chicken, and that was supposed to be a spiritual blessing. Here the word of God was wholly missing. I don’t think that’s how things ought to be. The Bible points us to the centrality of the word of God in worship.
But the Word of God can also be missing where there is preaching. But instead of concentrating on the word of God, here preachers talk about the latest headlines, such as how wonderful Trump is in what he’s doing in America, or perhaps how wonderful the WOKE mindset was for introducing the gender debates and upholding the fight against global warming. It doesn’t matter what side you’re on, these issues are not to be placed at the centre of worship. The centre of the worship is God’s word which alone can guide us in these issues. Yes, these issues may be addressed. But let us not begin with these issues as we find them presented in the media, we must begin with the Word of God.
When people preach, how do you know it is the word of God that is preached? When preachers preach Christ. Christ is the word of God, and Christ should always be at the centre of our preaching. Now some of you may know that when new pastors have completed their training for ministry, they have to go to a church Classis exam, and they have to pass this exam before they can preach their own sermons in the church. I don’t know what it’s like now that I am retired, but in the past many students did not pass their exam because they failed in their sermon presentation. And you know what most failed on? Neglecting to put Christ in the centre of their message! And so they were told: if you do not learn to preach Christ you cannot preach in our churches.
For most who failed their failure was a good lesson, so that from then on, they remembered to preach Christ. And it is so important, that if you, as a congregation, find Christ missing from the messages, make it known to the preacher, and make it known to the session, because what we are to preach is Christ and Christ crucified. That’s what Paul says in many places, but I’ll just read this one from 1Corinthians 2:1-2. “And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom, but I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.” Brothers and sisters, we preach Christ because Christ is the word; Christ is the one God gave us to make His will known. He is our revelation from God, and it’s in Christ that we find all the answers to our problems: to our sin. His Word shows how Christ lived for us, and how He died for us so that we may be righteous before God. He gave His life to make up for where we failed. And so we are encouraged to put Christ in the centre of our lives, that Christ may be all in all, and all the glory be given to Him. We thank you, Lord, for the wonderful message we have in your Word, Jesus Christ.
Let us pray.
Prayer:
Father in heaven, we do pray that where your word is preached, Christ may be at the centre of it. We realise that today, being Sunday, your words will be preached all through the world in many languages, languages that we wouldn’t understand at all. But maybe we would pick up one or two words. We hope we would hear the words Jesus and that we would hear the word Christ or Christus or however it’s pronounced because, Lord, this is indeed the most important part of the whole message. Help us to put your word central in our lives. We thank you for life, the new life we have in Christ through his word. In Jesus’ name, amen.