On October 31, many people will be focused on candy and things that go bump in the night. Protestants, however, have something far more significant to celebrate on October 31. It's Reformation day, which commemorates what was perhaps the greatest move of God's Spirit since the days of the Apostles.

This year, 2023, marks the 506th anniversary of the Reformation, if you mark Martin Luther’s nailing of his Ninety-Five Theses to the church door in Wittenburg as the start of the Reformation.

Five hundred and six years ago seems like a long time ago and irrelavant and inconsequential to our lives and culture, some may say! One of the main reasons for this sermon series is so that we will not forget our roots as a church. 

The church exists in a world of rapidly changing technology, a world in which almost everyone has been assimilated into the incessant chatter of social media and real-time updates on everything from world politics to what your friend had for breakfast this morning. If we are to be relevant, or so we think, we too must be a people of the new and the now.

The consequences of such ideas in the church are not good, and there for all to see. The people of Israel forgot the past with disastrous consequences. The medieval church forgot the past with disastrous consequences. But what do you do when you realize you’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere along your journey? You go back and seek to find the correct path. We should not view the past as something that is gone and therefore useless. We should look at the past more like the way someone on the second floor of a building looks at the foundation. The foundation was built before the remaining structure. It was built in the past. But the foundation is not something that can be discarded without catastrophic results.

This sermon series on 5 Solas of the Reformation, will remind us of the foundation of the evangelical faith. These five slogans capture well the points of emphasis of the Reformers preaching and teaching. It was a teaching that rocked the world and brought consequences far beyond what they could have imagined. Most importantly, it was a recovery of the gospel.  

This five week sermon series will highlight these solas both historically, theologically and in the context of the Protestant Reformation. Pray with me that through this series we will be equipped to be knowledgeable proclaimers and defenders of biblical truth. Pray that we will be eager to preach the gospel of God to the world and thereby spark a new reformation of church and culture.