“The Truth Will Make You Free”Main point: Justification by faith is the sure foundation for the freedom Jesus promised us.INTRODUCTIONThen Jesus said to [those] who had believed in him, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” John 8:31-32I have one question for you this morning: Do you feel free? In the circumstances of your life, do you feel free?Today we celebrate Reformation Sunday. The Reformation in the early part of the 1500s began as a protest to theological and spiritual abuses of the medieval Roman Catholic church. The key figure of the Reformation in our Lutheran tradition is, of course, Martin Luther. Luther had such a deep experience of internal freedom when he uncovered the good news about Jesus Christ that his experience launched a revolution that spread across Europe and beyond.Justification by FaithWhat was that good news that he found? The kernel of the gospel that would sprout into a tree of renewal in the western Church was found while Luther was translating our first reading from Romans. In it he found this phrase: the just will live by faith. “Justification by faith” became the banner for the Reformation. In this word of Good News, Martin Luther and so many others found the freedom Jesus promised.Justification by faith: Technical definition - Though we are not righteous and cannot obey God perfectly, the righteousness and goodness of Christ is applied to us though faith.In simpler terms it basically means this: Because of God’s work in Christ, God is not mad at you. God is not threatening you with damnation. God is not watching your every move in such a way as to catch you doing something you shouldn't do. Sin, that is all the stuff that is contrary to Life, has been taken care of by Jesus.So now, we can live in freedom in this life. Freedom from feeling like God is mad at us. Freedom from hypervigilance about the morality of everything we say and do. Freedom from the threat of burning in hell because we aren't good enough, or we didn't say our prayers the right way, or we didn't do enough good stuff during this life.God’s PromiseIf you are here this morning, and you are afraid that God is mad at you. I say to you, by the promise of God, Jesus has made you clean, God has already forgiven you, and you don't have to worry about whether you are okay with God. When the worm of doubt creeps into your mind and tries to tell you that you aren't good enough, that you are unlovable because of what you have done, that God is against you because you have made God mad,... You can tell that worm of doubt: it was never about me being good enough in the first place. Christ is good enough. And because of Christ's faithfulness to me I am now okay with God. God doesn't love me because I have made myself lovable. God loves me because I am 1) created by God and 2) made lovable by Jesus Christ. Our Starting PointI want to be really clear about this, because this is our starting point. If we think God is out to get us, we are doomed before we begin. If we think God will only love us if we try harder, and perform better, and earn that love by doing good stuff, then we will always be on shaky ground. If we think God is like an over-demanding parent, either mother or father, who we can never please, then we are never going to feel like we can bring our whole self to God. We will always be trying to hide our imperfections. We will always be afraid that God will find out our secrets. We will always wonder when adversity comes into our life if we didn't actually deserve it because of something we did. 

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