Archive for October, 2017


Oct 31

Reformation Day

2017 | by Ryan Kelly | Category: The Church,Worship

It was 500 years ago.

In the year, 1517, in Wittenberg, Germany, a Catholic monk named Martin Luther had been studying and lecturing on Paul’s letter to the Romans. He became fearfully captivated by one word near the beginning of Romans: “in [the gospel] the righteousness of God is revealed” (1:17). Luther later explained that he hated that phrase “righteousness of God,” for God’s righteousness, he thought, surely meant God’s righteous punishment of all unrighteous sinners. Knowing himself to be a sinner, he wrestled with “a fierce and troubled conscience” and “beat upon” the text to know what Paul meant.

At the same time Luther had another concern, but this one with increasing clarity. The Catholic Church had for many years sold indulgences. For a fee, one could pay-off the guilt and payment of sins. A new salesman of indulgences, Johann Tetzel, was creatively and aggressively making a bad practice worse. Luther had written against Tetzel’s tactics before, but now Tetzel was coming to Luther’s town of Wittenberg. So on October 31, 1517, Luther nailed to the church door Ninety-Five Theses meant to engender academic debate about such indulgences. At the time, no one could have anticipated—not even Luther himself—the reverberating effects of this moment. While many events, documents, and people were used of the Lord to bring about the Protestant Reformation, for 500 years the church has looked back to the nailing of Ninety-Five Theses upon the church door as a pivotal moment towards the recovery of the gospel.

While Luther’s concerns for indulgences grew in conviction and clarity, he continued to struggle with his own guilty conscience and how God’s righteousness could be good news (a gospel) for sinners. The “righteousness of God” in Romans 1:17 was of no comfort to him until the context made it clear: “the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, ‘The righteous shall live by faith.’” Like a lightning bolt, it hit him: God’s just-righteousness was a gift from God to those who believe; God’s just mercy is revealed in the gospel of Christ’s substitutionary sacrifice. “Immediately I saw the whole of Scripture in a different light,” he wrote. “I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise through its open doors.” That word which Luther once hated—righteousness—had now come to be the source of all his hope and joy. In Romans, he later attested, there is the “very purest gospel; …every Christian should know it…[and] occupy himself with it every day, as the daily bread of the soul. It can never be read or pondered too much, and the more it is dealt with, the more precious it becomes and the better it tastes.”

This is the essence of the Reformation. It’s what we celebrate today.

Oct 6

Guest Preacher This Sunday – Michael Lawrence

2017 | by Asher Griffin | Category: Announcement,Sermon Preview,This Sunday

From time to time, DSC has been blessed to have guest preachers who bring the Word to us on Sunday mornings. This Sunday morning, we will joined by Michael Lawrence, where Michael will be preaching in our services from 1 Kings 10.

We’ve been grateful to host Michael for most of this week, as he’s been one of the speakers for the Simeon Trust Workshop on Biblical Exposition hosted by DSC for many regional pastors.

Some of his written works are his contributions to the 9Marks Journal, Christian History Magazine, Boundless, and Preaching Today.

He’s contributed to books like Why I am a Baptist, edited by Tom Nettles and Russel Moore, and Sex and the Supremacy of Christ, edited by John Piper and Justin Taylor, and It Is Well: Expositions on the Substitutionary Atonement, with co-author Mark Dever.

He has also written Biblical Theology in the Life of the Church, Perspectives on Christian Worship: Five Views, and most recently, Conversion.

Michael comes to us from Portland, Oregon, where he is the Senior Pastor at Hinson Baptist Church. He earned an MDiv at Gordon-Conwell and a PhD from Cambridge University in 2002. Michael is married and has five children.

Hope to see you on Sunday at DSC at either 9AM or 10:45AM!