Credo 2026 | Sola Gratia with Rev. Werner Ramirez

0:33 You've gotten to hear from Jonah, from Chris, from me today. Next week, because of the chapel reopening, there is a podcast with Mr. Austin Appelbach doing Faith Alone. Sola Fide. And just a quick plug for our podcast. If you haven't checked out the Crossroads podcast, they're amazing. There's great conversations with people on the staff, but Jamie has done such a good job curating so many theologians from around the country that can't necessarily come to New York City, but can hop on a podcast really quickly. I highly encourage you to check out our podcast. But today we are starting with Sola Gratia by Grace Alone. And I want to begin with an exercise, and Austin will be Vanna White for me today. I want to make a list of things Christians do or things that Christians don't do that you that they might that Christians might find sinful and I want you to be really stereotypical about this I want to make a list of about five to ten so for instance when I was in high school teenage drinking was a no-no if you were a Christian and you drank as a teenager you are sinning all right help me out with this list? What are some things Christians stereotypically do or do not do?

1:55 They don't drop F-bombs. So no cursing. what else? They sing. Worship. Christians go to church, they worship. Bonnie. Christians pray. Kristen show kindness especially when we're driving right What else?

2:31 Yeah, Carol? They serve. Joanna? No more than kissing. How do I have a baby then? I don't know. Christians are supposed to forgive.

2:54 Dennis? Charities. Giving money. All right, how about some more do nots? Christelle. Christians read the Bible. They don't go to pool halls. So no bars. oh my gosh I think I might be going to hell Bonnie they don't take the Lord's name in vain how many for some of you grew up with no dancing oh yeah we got a few of you okay let's do one more Ellen love Christians love all our neighbors we do that really well Okay, thanks, Viana White. Appreciate it.

3:48 Let's roll that back. All right, we're going to come back to this list later on in our lecture. But have you ever felt like you weren't enough spiritually, morally, or even just as a person? The question, am I enough, have I done enough, is not new. It's one of the questions that help ignite the Reformation. Now, I want to be clear about something. The church, the Catholic church, absolutely believed in grace. But grace was often understood as something that was distributed through the sacraments, required human cooperation, and connected to systems like confession and sanctification. Salvation in practice often felt like a process you had to complete well enough. Grace was real, but it wasn't necessarily free.

4:44 and there was always the problem of assurance most ordinary christians lived with a deep anxiety have i confessed enough have i done enough penance what happens after i die if i didn't complete these things and honestly these things still happen today as a teenager i i grew up in the presbyterian church but had a little bit more of an evangelical feel um and so i would go to summer camps. And at summer camp, one time I dedicated my life to Christ. And I was told, if you do this, you will be saved. You will go to heaven. But then another year would go by, and I felt like I sinned too much. And every year when they would do the altar call, I'm like, oh my gosh, am I actually saved? Maybe I should rededicate my life to Christ just in case it didn't work the first time before. so there's the problem of assurance and then that led to indulgence as well famously preached by john tetzel the idea of indulgence was something you could purchase from the catholic church that would decrease your time in purgatory purgatory is this idea that after you die before you can go to heaven there is this this this place called purgatory where you are being purified to me to be as perfect to be in heaven. So if you bought an indulgence, you could cut down some years for yourself in purgatory or for some of a loved one that you have. So we're going to watch this quick video from this movie. Have you guys ever seen a movie called Luther about Martin Luther? I highly recommend it. It is like usually Christian movies are not very good. They have bad lighting and bad acting.

6:27 This movie is actually pretty good. So I don't know where it's streaming, but this clip I did find on YouTube of John Tetzel selling indulgences and how that made Martin Luther feel. Good people of Jutteberg, have you ever burned your hand in the fire? Even one finger made raw by the flame will torment you throughout the night, is it not so? Yeah, yeah.

7:10 Imagine then, your entire body burning. Not for one sleepless night, not for a week, But for all eternity are we to be spared the fires of damnation on the judgment day. Tonight, your Pope, the Vicar of Christ, sends you a gift, a gift to save you from such fires. A special indulgence granted for the building of St. Peter's Church in Rome, where the bones of the apostles lie mouldering, exposed to wind and rain. desecrated by wild animals. Take heed the words of your Holy Father who says, Lay a stone for St. Peter's, and you lay the foundation for your own salvation and happiness in heaven.

8:15 How? With this indulgence. When? Tonight. And only tonight. Seek the Lord while he is near. Here is your wrath. Take hold! Gentle mother, when the time comes, make certain your crippled child can run to Jesus. These learned monks are standing by to write down your name or the name of a loved one, dead or alive, on this. Your passport to the celestial joys of paradise.

9:10 The first thing you believe is to preach it to a horse, but if we cannot sing the Christ of the Gospels to our people, what do we offer them? Dr. Martin! Please, please. Thank you. I did this for granted. Issued by the Archbishop of Mainz. Where did you get this? Udeborg. I bought it in the church. It's just paper hammer.

9:50 These words mean... It's no good. You must put your trust in God's love. Save your money. To feed Greta. So grace was real in the Catholic Church, but it wasn't free. I got my resident Catholic. I see Sean in the background, who's a resident Catholic, and I'm like, What is he going to say over here?

10:41 But this really troubled Martin Luther, especially because he questioned that for his own life. Is he enough? He had this intense confession and fasting discipline that he was doing in order to prove himself that he was a man of faith. And then when he was studying the book of Romans, he discovered that the righteous shall live by faith. Luther realized righteousness is not something that we achieve, but it's something that God gives. This insight would ignite Martin Luther's reformation, knowing that grace comes for free, and by grace alone we are saved.

11:24 So what does by grace alone mean? First, grace is the source of salvation. God is the one who invites salvation, not us. This is nothing that we do, but God invites us into salvation. That is grace. Grace is unearned. It's not a response to our goodness. It is something that God gives freely. It doesn't just offer help. It actually saves us. God doesn't just make salvation possible. God accomplishes salvation through Jesus Christ. We have seen grace throughout scripture. We see it even in the Old Testament. Where do we see grace in scripture too? I want to say that Sabbath, Sabbath rest is a tangible way that we experience grace. A lot of us think of Sabbath rest as a job well done for working. You work all week, you work for the weekend, and then on Saturday you get rest.

12:26 It's something that perhaps we deserve. But Sabbath rest turns that upside down. If you look at Genesis 1, God creates the world in how many days? Six. On what day does God create human beings? on the sixth day. And what does God do on day seven? God rests. The first things humans experience is God's rest. The first thing they experience is grace. Work for them is not, rest for them is not a job well done for the work they do. It's the first thing that they experience. So when we worship on Sundays, when you rest, may you experience that as grace. We also experience grace through the sacraments. In the Presbyterian church, our two sacraments are baptism and communion. In the Presbyterian church, we believe they are a sign and seal of God's grace. A sign points beyond itself. In baptism, it points to cleansing, to new life, to belonging in Christ. And in the Eucharist, the bread in the cup it points to Christ's body and blood given for us it is a sign for that but it's also a seal because it confirms grace for us it's something that we can touch and see and taste and this is something that's freely given to us it is grace it's nothing that we do they reinforce that we don't earn grace we receive it even in worship we are not the primary actors God is In baptism, you don't baptize yourself.

14:15 God claims you. In communion, you don't feed yourself spiritually. Christ feeds you. It is Christ's table, so Christ turns no one away. We get to experience, see, and touch grace through the sacraments. There's a story of Sarah Miles. Sarah Miles is an Episcopal priest. and before she converted she was known for being a secular left-wing journalist. She was not raised in the church. She was not searching for Christianity and at the age of 46 she randomly walked into St. Gregory's of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco. If you're ever in San Francisco go to this church. They have a beautiful mural of the cloud of witnesses in their sanctuary that is just breathtaking. But by her own account, she walks in and she's curious. She has never said the Lord's Prayer. She had never heard a gospel reading. She had no intention of becoming a Christian. She simply came out of curiosity. Then something unexpected happened. During the service, she went forward and received communion, the bread and the wine. She later described this as the moment that it knocked her sideways and changed everything.

15:30 She had a literal conversion because of grace received in communion. She converted not after a catechism, not after belief, not after repentance or doctrinal clarity. Grace came first. From there, she kept coming back. She eventually was baptized and became part of the church and started a food pantry that fed hundreds. and she explicitly connects the ministry to that Eucharist. The food pantry was modeled on what she experienced at communion, radical open welcome and grace. Now, I love this story because it invites us, because it is assumed that often first we believe, then we understand, then we clean up our lives, then we receive grace. But her story changes it. First we receive grace, we experience grace, then we begin to believe and then be transformed.

16:29 Grace alone we are saved. What did grace alone look like for some of the reformers? For Martin Luther, it emphasized justification as a gift. We are justified in God's eyes because of grace. It is the gift of God. For John Calvin, it emphasized God's sovereignty and salvation. that God is a sovereign God, the one who is all-powerful, and because of God, that's who we are saved. For Swingley, God infuses grace into our souls, kind of like spiritual enlightenment. They weren't reinventing grace. They were just interpreting it in different ways. The reformers were not saying good works don't matter. They were saying good works are not the basis of our salvation. Good works comes out of God's grace. We respond to it with our good works. We are saved by grace alone through faith, not by anything that we're done.

17:29 So what does scripture say about this? Oh, that's smaller than I thought. But we're going to read this passage from Ephesians 2, 1 through 10. As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the rulers of the kingdom of the air the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient all of us are lived among them and at one time gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts like the rest we were by nature deserving of wrath but because of this great love for us god who is rich in mercy made us alive with christ even when we were dead in our transgressions it is by grace that you have been saved and god raised us up with christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms of christ jesus in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace expressed in his kindness to us in christ jesus for it is by grace that you have been saved through faith in this not from yourselves it is the gift of god not by works so that no one can boast for we are god's handiwork created in christ jesus to do good works which god prepared in advance for us to do okay let's go back to this list is a list like this helpful to you on how to be a christian the fuller youth institute thinks that about 50 percent of youth they grow up in the church once they graduate high school about 50 percent stay with the church and about 50 percent leave and a lot of it is because they have been given a gospel that looks like this when i was in high school there was this hardcore band in my in my high school that's like the heavy metal with the screaming, and they were just super devout Christians. Their name of their band was called Paid in Blood, and they were, they loved a checklist like this. In fact, one day,

19:40 the guitarist gave me and a friend a ride home. We went to different churches, and the guitarist said to this young woman, hey, are you going to youth group tonight? And she said, oh, I can't. my parents are divorced, and I'm with my dad today. And he said, but did your dad die for your sins? You should come to church instead. But then what happened to that band is for some reason in the summer going into their senior year, they discovered the party scene. And they started doing heavy drugs, they started drinking, started doing a lot of the don'ts. And then they completely disappeared from the church. It's like they pulled a 180. Do you guys know what a Red Bull is? What is a Red Bull? It's an energy drink, right? What do energy drinks do?

20:32 They sugar you up, you get a lot of energy, and then you crash. The people at the Fuller Youth Institute consider a list like this a Red Bull gospel. It might help you make good decisions at first but the Red Bull gospel doesn't lead to a faith that sticks and this is something that I can relate to there was a time when I felt that living a Christian life was a life of not sinning I knew early on that no one was perfect and that we always make mistakes but what God truly wanted for me was to avoid sin and to be honest at times I felt superior to others when I did not do things on the list that other people did. Yet the opposite was true. Whenever I did something that I perceived as a sin, anytime I did anything wrong, I felt worthless. I felt like I had no self-control, and worst of all, I would even question my salvation. The hardest time for this was when I was a youth intern in my home church. I was 20 years old, and I just wanted to be the perfect example of a Christian for these teens. And not only would I try my hardest not to sin, I think I made some people feel ashamed of the things they had been wrestling with.

21:48 And I was also a really annoying Christian using phrases like, be blessed my friend, and hate the sin, love the sinner kind of thing. It was bad. And it was bad because it wasn't who I was. When I was trying to lead a life of just not sinning, I wasn't being goofy Werner. I wasn't loving Jesus and loving these kids in the way they should. I was being an image of what I thought a good Christian looked like. In this letter, Paul was dealing with a congregation that was deep into a Red Bull gospel. So let's do a little Bible study. What words or phrases does Paul repeat? This is an open question. Grace.

22:41 Transgressions. by grace you have been saved Christ Love. What else? Saved. rich christ one of my favorite words in here is handiwork it's in verse 10 for we are god's handiwork in the greek that is a word called poiema can you say that with me i probably said it wrong but poiema it could also be translated god's work of art you are god's creation if you are God's creation God's handiwork God's work of art how is that different than just being a good person if you are God's work of art how is that different than just being a good person being special you are God's special one yeah An intentional creation.

24:00 dignity Beauty. perfect design maybe grace itself yes there are things we do to follow jesus but they're not at the heart of the gospel the heart of the gospel is grace alone again when i was in my 20s i had just transferred to my undergrad doing a youth ministry program. And one day, a professor bluntly told the classroom, you have to remember that you are forgiven. You cannot be hard on yourself for your sins, because if you cannot accept God's grace, then it will be impossible for you to show that to your teenagers. And it was some of the best news I had ever heard. Something changed after that.

25:09 After that, I no longer tiptoed around the world trying not to sin, but instead I looked up. I was able to look up and see the teenagers, and not shaming them, but I saw them as someone worth Jesus loving. this anxiety about who we are and are we enough is something that people dealt with in the medieval times and we still do that today today it shows up as achievement culture as perfectionism as moral pressure or even spiritual performance where do you feel like you've had to earn your worth where do you feel like you've had to earn your worth but grace interrupts that story friends you often hear me say that you are loved and by the grace of god you are enough i say that not as a tagline but because i believe that grace wins you are loved and you are enough because of christ's grace by grace alone