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Three Angels Fellowship SDA Church

The Five Solas

Garhett Morgan

Why Protestant?

The Protestant in Me

Sola Scriptura

Sola Gratia

Sola Fide

We started this journey about a week ago, and we are looking at the 5 solas of the Reformation.

And if you don't know what those are, you will very soon.

Last week, we began to unpack what it means to be a Protestant.

As Seventh-day Adventists, we include ourselves in the Protestant denomination, just like our Baptist friends and our Lutheran friends and our Methodist friends, but more and more, it's becoming unclear of what it means to be a Protestant.

And so we're going to be getting into that this morning, kind of a part 2, if you will, but before we do that, let's go ahead and have a word of prayer, and then we'll dig into our Bibles.

Father in heaven, Lord, we thank you again for your goodness.

We thank you that you love us despite the things that we so often do.

Lord, I ask that you would be with us this morning as we look at a topic that's rather heavy.

It's not really 1 that we want to hear, and it's not really a popular 1 today, Lord, help us to not lean on our own understanding, but may we lean upon you.

So, last week we took a look at when we are looking as Christians at the most important doctrine that we have, everything pales in comparison to asking the question of how does someone get right with God?

How does 1 know that you are saved or that we as individuals are saved?

But as time went on past Jesus, when he was on earth and was crucified and resurrected, it was very clear in the early Christian church of how 1 became saved and how 1 got right with God was very clear and Jesus said it in John 3 16 right for God so loved the world that he gave his only forgotten begotten Son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but that all should have everlasting life.

However, as time went on, past when Jesus was on earth, that became less and less popular.

So, the church began to form around itself different beliefs and ideas into what it meant to be born again, what it meant to be saved as a Christian.

So if you would turn with me in your Bibles to 1 Corinthians chapter 2 and verse 14.

This was a verse that I thought of recently this week.

I don't know if any of you saw this, but there was a big fuss that was made on the internet with the opening of the Olympics.

I don't know if you saw that or not, but there was lots of different opinions on what took place there.

The official word was that it was opening because of the Greek mythology and because, you know, the Olympics are Greek.

That opening scene was giving tribute back to the pagan gods, of which the Olympics do a lot of tribute to that, so we shouldn't be surprised.

And then some of the people that were involved in this depiction said, well, it really looked like the Last Supper, and they made a mockery of that.

And then the Christian world got ahold of this and there was an outrage, right, at making over the Last Supper of Jesus.

Thank you so much for our fearless sound team in the back.

But I'd like to read 1 Corinthians 2 here, verse 14, and I'll read out of the ESV here today.

The natural person, now natural person is 1 that is unconverted, right?

The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are a folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned." So what that verse is simply saying is the things that Christian people hold dear to us that we see as important and the seems think the things that make sense to us for the unconverted mind it doesn't matter right it's looked at as foolishness is looked at as a folly It's looked at as maybe even superstition.

So friends today, when Christianity is sometimes in maybe your mind made fun of, or Christianity in maybe your mind is being picked at, Don't get angry about it.

We shouldn't be defensive about these things.

Because we are who we are as Christian people.

We know what the world thinks of God and whether they make fun of it or they don't, whether the scene of the Olympics was making fun of it or not up for discussion.

But we know in the last days that the opinions of God are going to shift, right?

And they're going to change and we shouldn't be surprised.

How many of you are familiar with the Thomas Jefferson Bible?

The Thomas Jefferson Bible was kept a big secret by the Jefferson family.

Thomas Jefferson, of course, 1 of the founding fathers of this nation, believed in God, but he didn't believe in the God of the Bible.

Thomas Jefferson was a deist, and to put it very simply, he basically believed that God created the world and then stepped back and wanted to see how the experiment went.

Thomas Jefferson believed that Jesus existed, but wasn't the son of God, but taught some really valuable moral teachings.

And so Jefferson was very interested in the New Testament, but he didn't believe that the New Testament was at all the word of God.

Of course, in the 1700s, when most people were predominantly Christian, this would have been quite a scandal that Thomas Jefferson didn't believe in the New Testament as it was written.

And so he kept this very much under wraps and he took a Bible, well, took 4 Bibles.

He took 1 in Greek, he took 1 in French, he took 1 in English, and he also took 1 in Latin, and he made his own Bible.

This is probably 1 of the first parallel Bibles because there's 4 sections in it all in the different languages, right?

So when you look on a page, it's the same chapter and they're all in those 4 languages.

He made this Bible, but in doing that, what he decided to do was make this Bible only about the things that he agreed with.

So he took his New Testament there and the 4 different languages, and he started to read through the Bible.

And when there was a piece that he agreed with, he would take a razor blade and he would cut out that piece, and then he would paste it in his Bible.

So this is what's known as the Thomas Jefferson Bible.

Not many people knew about it at all, except a few people started to study Jefferson and they noticed that there was these works that he referenced in his diary often called the Morals and Teachings of Jesus, which is what he called his Bible.

And it turned out that a like a great granddaughter of Jefferson had it.

And you can actually view the Jefferson Bible today.

You can look it up online and you can see the Thomas Jefferson Bible in all the different languages and the sections that he took.

Now, being a very scientific man, Jefferson didn't believe in any of the miracles of Jesus because those were fanciful and probably fables in his mind, And so none of the parables of Jesus are in there.

Now, most of the moral teachings of Jesus are.

So for instance, like when Jesus says, if you have a disagreement with your neighbor, right, carry his coat, right?

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Those things were included in Jefferson's Bible, but he decided what was right and what was wrong.

And so he created his own Bible based upon what was in his mind and not what was within the Scriptures.

And the reason I chose this example today is because during the Enlightenment period, the Reformation, like in Martin Luther's day, shifted quite a bit.

Last week, we took a look at what happened in Luther's day, and we saw that the reason that the Protestant Reformation rose up was not to protest the Catholic Church but it was to protest the message of salvation being muddied and impossible to understand.

They weren't necessarily protesting a Catholic Church.

They were trying to say the message needs to be simple.

The message of salvation needs to be simple.

The message of salvation shouldn't be about how much money you give us.

The message of salvation shouldn't be about so many how our fathers and all these different things that you have to do, but the message of salvation is this, accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior and you will be saved.

That's what the Protestants were fighting for and was all but non-existent in the days of Martin Luther.

Last week we also saw that even in current Protestant denominations, the pure message of salvation that should be simple is becoming about as clear as mud.

It's not just Catholicism anymore that is making salvation difficult to understand, but even Protestant churches are doing this very thing.

And might I add that far too often, we as Seventh-day Adventists have made salvation far too difficult to understand.

So the message of the Protestants was not just against Catholicism, but it was deeper than that.

It was a spirit of making the message of Jesus understandable for the common man and the common woman.

But that Protestantism really isn't there today.

Martin Luther famously said once, because the Bible wasn't available to people back in his day.

And Martin Luther famously said once that, I will make the plow boy with a Bible more right than the Pope.

He's like, I want the common individual to know what it means to know Jesus.

And that was all but gone in the days of Luther.

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The Five Solas

The Protestant in Me

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