This Much

When I survey the wondrous cross...-Isaac Watts

And can it be that I should gain?-Charles Wesley

What Christian could look upon this or meditate on it and not think of God's amazing grace and love?

On the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Reformation, I have been reading the life of Luther, "Here I Stand," by Roland H. Bainton.

You know what stands out the most for me about Luther's life? You might say it is his courage or his faith or his dedication to preaching the Word.

But Luther's fear is the thing that strikes me as I read his story.

His terror of God's wrath that drove him to the monastery. That drove him to mortify his flesh. That compelled him to desperately seek some way, any way to make himself (sinner that he knew himself to be) acceptable to his Holy and Just and All-powerful God.

He finally found it. In Romans 1:17 (the righteous shall live by faith).

Faith alone. And that faith a gift from the God Luther so feared.

We are Luther's heirs. Beneficiaries of the doctrine forgotten for hundreds of years but recovered by Luther and all the other Reformers.

Not much fear of God today, it seems.

Even in His Church, we wink at our sin and even that of others though I will admit that it's easier to give my sin a pass than someone else's.

The hymns I've mentioned speak beautifully of God's amazing love. The love that placed Christ upon the cross in my place and yours.

What it must have been for the Son, eternally loved of the Father to take on my sin and yours, to become the thing the Father hated, to experience the hell of forsakenness.

Psalm 103 speaks of God's steadfast love as well... "to those that fear Him."

Luther was well aware of God's hatred of sin, and finding himself to be a sinner, feared God to the depth of his being.

What would my life look like, what could my witness to the Gospel be if I lived in "reverence and awe" of the living God?