Matthew records the discourse between Christ and Satan after Christ fasted in the wilderness for forty days. When the enemy tempted Him, Christ responded profoundly by quoting Deuteronomy, declaring that man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God (Matthew 4:4, NKJV). Remember, the Jews wandered in the wilderness for forty years, and during that time, God upheld and sustained them by the word of God. Christ teaches us this same essential truth today. It is interesting, is it not, that Christ uses the Word of God to resist all the temptations of Satan? In God’s order, in God’s way, the Scriptures are what sustain the believer.

When we look back at the history of the church and desire to see reformation and revival in our personal lives, our families, our churches, and our country, we must recognize that the Bible itself is the ultimate catalyst. During the Protestant Reformation, the reformers made a vital distinction between what they called the Formal Principle and the Material Principle. The Formal Principle led to the great cry of Sola Scriptura—the Scriptures alone are the sole authority over the church and the believer. It is the beginning. It gives form and direction to everything we affirm as Christians. We believe what we believe because we find it in the Bible, not because of tradition or the decrees of men.

The Material Principle is the doctrine of justification by faith alone. What do we mean by this? Well, the formal principle directs us to the Word, and the material principle is the very substance we find there—the truth that a person must understand and believe in order to be saved. When the Bible says the just shall live by faith, it means those who have been justified by the grace of God now possess a living faith. They trust every word that proceeds from the mouth of God, and they live in accordance with that word. These two principles cannot be separated. The Bible is the foundation, and the gospel of Jesus Christ is the beating heart.

Often, when we think of the Reformation, we picture Martin Luther nailing his Ninety-Five Theses to the church door in Wittenberg in 1517. Truly, it is a beautiful story, but history gives to us the details that prove Luther was standing on the shoulders of many who came before him. What happened in the sixteenth century was the harvest of much plowing that started hundreds of years earlier. We look back to the thirteenth century, a period often called the Dark Ages, because Rome made a concerted effort to extinguish the light of the Scriptures. They purposefully kept the Word of God from the people. But God was already moving.

We see this in the Albigenses and the Waldensians, peaceful people who were brutally persecuted simply because they memorized large portions of Scripture and wanted to align their lives with the holy text. We see this in fourteenth-century England with John Wycliffe, the Morning Star of the Reformation, who trained his students to take the Word of God into the countryside. We see this in Jan Hus of Bohemia, who was burned at the stake in 1415 for preaching that the Scriptures alone were the final authority. As the flames engulfed him, he sang Psalms to his Lord. A century later, Luther read the sermons of Hus and was overwhelmed with astonishment that such a man had been executed. The blood of these martyrs was the seed of the Reformation, and their weapon of choice was always the Word of God.

Today, we face a very different crisis. We do not live in a day where a tyrannical church authority burns us at the stake for possessing a Bible. Instead, we willingly withhold the Word of God from ourselves. We put a premium on our entertainment, our children’s sports, our careers, and our hobbies. We make sure we eat, sleep, and update everyone on social media, but we do not spend time in the Scriptures. And then, we have the audacity to ask God to bless our families. If the Word of God is not transforming your mind, the world is conforming your mind to its ways. The Apostle Paul warns us in Colossians 2:8 to beware lest anyone cheat us through philosophy and empty deceit, according to the basic principles of the world, and not according to Christ.

This neglect is often fueled by the sin of rationalism. This occurs when we put our own human reason above the Word of God, acting as though the Scriptures must be submissive to our intellect. When we try to become the judge and jury over the Bible, determining which parts we will accept and which parts we will reject, we have sinned greatly. God did not give us the gift of reason so that we could put it above His Word; He gave us reason so that we could submit it to His Word.

If we desire true reformation, we must stand firmly upon Sola Scriptura and the absolute inerrancy of the Bible. We do this first because of who God is. According to Hebrews 4:13, there is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are naked and open to the eyes of Him to whom we must give account. God is not ignorant of anything in His universe, and He is a God who cannot lie. When He speaks on matters of salvation, and when He speaks on matters of history or creation, He speaks absolute truth. We also hold to this because of who we are. We are in no position to stand before the mind of God and suggest He has made a mistake. A person who truly knows Christ is humble before the Word of God.

Reformation in our nation and in our culture will not happen until it first happens in our homes and in our own hearts. Husbands and fathers, we must look at our responsibilities before God. We cannot allow our children to think it is acceptable to be ignorant of God’s Word and just live on gut intuition for the rest of their lives. We must give them a regular diet of the Scriptures. We must bring every single area of our lives—our families, our businesses, our civic duties—under the authority of the Word of God. The light of the gospel still pierces the darkness, and wherever there is light, the darkness must flee. Let us return to the Book, trust its promises, and live out its truths in a world that desperately needs to see it.