More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
If folk don’t like you and me, The fault with us is like to be.
There is just one respect in which Luther appears to have been different from other youths of his time, namely, in that he was extraordinarily sensitive and subject to recurrent periods of exaltation and depression of spirit.
There is, according to Luther, something much more drastically wrong with man than any particular list of offenses which can be enumerated, confessed, and forgiven. The very nature of man is corrupt. The penitential system fails because it is directed to particular lapses. Luther had come to perceive that the entire man is in need of forgiveness.
Sins to be forgiven must be confessed. To be confessed they must be recognized and remembered. If they are not recognized and remembered, they cannot be confessed. If they are not confessed, they cannot be forgiven.
What a new picture this is of Christ! Where, then, is the judge, sitting upon the rainbow to condemn sinners? He is still the judge. He must judge, as truth judges error and light darkness; but in judging he suffers with those whom he must condemn and feels himself with them subject to condemnation. The judge upon the rainbow has
It is not that the Son by his sacrifice has placated the irate Father; it is not primarily that the Master by his self-abandoning goodness has made up for our deficiency. It is that in some inexplicable way, in the utter desolation of the forsaken Christ, God was able to reconcile the world to himself.
Then I grasped that the justice of God is that righteousness by which through grace and sheer mercy God justifies us through faith.
As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, The soul from purgatory springs.
“Remember,” he warned, “that Antichrist, as Daniel said, is to be broken without the hand of man. Violence will only make him stronger. Preach, pray, but do not fight. Not that all constraint is ruled out, but it must be exercised by the constituted authorities.”
For the first time in their lives the 2,000 assembled people heard in their own tongue the words, “This is the cup of my blood of the new and eternal testament, spirit and secret of the faith, shed for you to the remission of sins.
Give men time. I took three years of constant study, reflection, and discussion to arrive where I now am, and can the common man, untutored in such matters, be expected to move the same distance in three months?
Throughout history it is the saints who are despised and rejected, maltreated, abused, and trodden under the feet of man. Joseph, for example, for no
The Virgin had to be put to shame before she could come into glory. Joseph had to be humiliated by false accusation before he could become the prime minister and savior of Egypt.
he is hidden, and by direct searching we cannot find him out.
In God alone can man ever find peace. God can be known only through Christ, but how lay hold on Christ when his ways are likewise so incredible?
He can expose himself to those channels of self-disclosure which God has ordained. They are all summed up in the Word. It is not to be equated with Scripture nor with the sacraments, yet it operates through them and not apart from them. The Word is not the Bible as a written book because “the gospel is really not that which is contained in books and composed in letters, but rather an oral preaching and a living word,
All men are sinners. But they are not for that reason all rascals.
we cannot prevent the birds from flying over our heads, there is no need that we should let them nest in our hair.
the forgiven, unpretentious sinner has vastly more potentialities than the proud saint. The righteousness of the
“Good works do not make a man good, but a good man does good works.”
Unless a man is already a believer and a Christian, his works have no value at all. They are foolish, idle, damnable sins, because when good works are brought forward as ground for justification, they are no longer good.
a Christian must be a Christ to his neighbor.
The Christian man is so to identify himself with his neighbor as to take to himself sins that he has not personally committed.
Our expression “vocational guidance” comes directly from Luther. God has called men to labor because he labors. He works at common occupations.
As God, Christ, the Virgin, the prince of the apostles, and the shepherds labored, even so must we labor in our callings. God has no hands and feet of his own. He must continue his labors through human instruments. The lowlier the task the better. The milkmaid and the carter of manure are doing a work more pleasing to God than the psalm singing of a Carthusian.
The only way to make money is to work. Monastic idleness is a stench.
God’s behavior forces one to conclude that he is almighty and frightful. But this is the hidden God, and faith holds that at last his severities will appear as mercies.
“Teach us so to reflect on death that we may be wise.”
Music is a fair and lovely gift of God which has often wakened and moved
Next after theology I give to music the highest place and the greatest honor.
Experience proves that next to the Word of God only music deserves to be extolled as the mistress and governess of the feelings of the human heart.
Nothing on earth is more mighty to make the sad gay and the gay sad, to hearten the downcast,
He who does not find this an inexpressible miracle of the Lord is truly a clod and is not worthy to be considered a man.
“the hymns of Luther killed more souls than his sermons.
DISTINGUISHED ALIKE IN THE translation of the Bible, the composition of the catechism, the reform of the liturgy, and the creation of the hymnbook, Luther was equally great in the sermons preached from the pulpit, the lectures delivered in the class hall, and the prayers voiced in the upper room. His versatility is genuinely amazing. No one in his own generation was able to vie with him.
Crawling is something, even if one is unable to walk. Do your best. If you cannot preach an hour, then preach half an hour or a quarter of an hour. Do not try to imitate other people. Center on the shortest and simplest points, which are the very heart of the matter, and leave the rest to God. Look solely to his honor and not to applause. Pray that God will give you a mouth and to your audience ears.
You will most certainly find out three things: first, you will have prepared your sermon as diligently as you know how, and it will slip through your fingers like water; secondly, you may abandon your outline and God will give you grace. You will preach your very best. The audience will be pleased, but you won’t. And thirdly, when you have been unable in advance to pull anything together, you will preach acceptably both to your hearers and to yourself. So pray to God and leave all the rest to him.
If one now reads through his sermons of thirty years on a single theme, one is amazed at the freshness with which each year he illumined some new aspect.
there is no loneliness like the loneliness of a traitor since even his confederates give him no sympathy.
I understand that this is the week for the church collection, and many of you do not want to give a thing. You ungrateful people should be ashamed of yourselves.
If you don’t improve, I will stop preaching rather than cast pearls before swine.
As Luther’s sermons were often didactic, so were his lectures commonly sermonic. He was always teaching, whether in the classroom or the pulpit; and he was always preaching, whether in the pulpit or the classroom.
But Jonah was not yet ready to make a public acknowledgment. He let the sailors wrestle until God made it plain that they would all perish with him. No one would confess. They had to cast lots. Wounds cannot be healed until they are revealed, and sins cannot be forgiven until they are confessed.
When God’s wrath overtakes us there are always two things, sin and anxiety.
We must always remember that Jonah could not see to the end. He saw only death, death, death. The worst of it was that this death was due to God’s anger. It would not be so bad to die as a martyr, but when death is a punishment it is truly horrible. Who does not tremble before death, even though he does not feel the wrath of God? But if there be also sin and conscience, who can endure shame before God and the world?
we must always pray to God. If you can just cry, your agony is over. Hell is not hell any more if you can cry to God. But
had won. Cry unto the Lord in your anguish, and it will be milder. Just cry and nothing else. He does not ask about your merit. Reason does not understand this, and always wants to bring in something to placate God. But there just is nothing to bring. Reason does not believe that all that is needed to quiet God’s anger is a cry.
any consideration of what he did for others by way of allaying spiritual distress must take the form of the further analysis of his own maladies and of the remedies which
The content of the depressions was always the same, the loss of faith that God is good and that he is good to me.
an excessive emotional sensitivity is a mode of revelation. Those who are predisposed to fall into despondency as well as to rise into ecstasy may be able to view reality from an angle different from that of ordinary folk.
