Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World

by Eric Metaxas

He saw now what he had deep down feared but had desperately hoped could not be true: that the greatest minds of the church were genuinely unaware of having become unmoored from the rock of the Scriptures and were even indifferent to this.

He knew he would be putting himself in tremendous danger, but out of respect for his sovereign, and with full faith in the God whose truth he desperately meant to uphold, he would go.

This must at least convince any objective observer of this history that there were deeply principled and godly men on both sides of the great and coming divide.

A simple layman armed with Scripture is to be believed above a pope or a council without it. —Martin Luther

He boldly reasserted the idea that our own good works were nothing apart from God’s grace.

He had started with indulgences but was now confronting the thorniest of all issues, that of papal authority itself.

For Luther, it was faith (pace Romans 1:7) that created the Christian and the body of Christians, called the church.

Wherever faith existed in Christ, all followed, including beyond the Roman church, which is to say in the Eastern Greek church as well.

Therefore, by themselves, without faith, the sacraments and the church were empty and must n...

It was faith in Christ that was the foundation for the church, and this faith did not come from us, who were all broken sin...

So to bend the Scriptures to claim that the human institution of the Roman church was inevitably and undeniably divine wa...

Luther, incidentally, never took a pfennig for anything he wrote. He was happy his thoughts were finding audiences wherever they went, and indeed they went everywhere.

He thought, what do I have to lose? I am speaking the truth and therefore my life is in danger, so I might as well say what I can while I have breath in me.

Luther was in effect reestablishing the biblical idea that everyone who has faith in Christ is equal and that the church’s position that priests are somehow different from the people in the pews is wrong.

For him, the Scriptures established the idea of “a priesthood of believers,” and anyone who truly believed was a Christian equal to any other Christian, so why should only the priests take the wine at Communion?

To a faithful son of the church it felt like a stinging betrayal, and it made him wonder: What else was a lie?

He feared God more than death, and God would not allow him to be silent. This was a unique moment in history, and he would do what God called him to do. He had no excuse for hesitating, and he would not hesitate. God would see him through as God saw fit.

God had never separated priests from laymen. The whole idea of Jesus’s coming to earth was to forever smash these distinctions, to open the gates of heaven to all who had faith, and to call everyone to be a “royal priesthood.” All who were “born again” were part of his church, so the idea that one needed to be tonsured and ordained in order to serve God was a rank fiction.

He knew that God was with him in a way he couldn’t have known before, so his fear of Rome, if ever any had existed, had vanished.

The only ones instituted by Christ himself, he said, were Communion and baptism. Thus the other five—confirmation, marriage, ordination, penance, and extreme unction—were man-made and must be tossed outside the camp to rot.

A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.

In this final of these treatises, Luther spelled out the implications of sola fide (faith alone), which boldly declares that it is faith in Jesus that brings us salvation and not our own moral efforts.

Jesus did all that was necessary to bring us to heaven by his death on the cross, and we need only trust in him. But to try to add to what Jesus did with any works of our own is absurd, not to say offensive to God and heretical.

We cannot earn heaven by our acts, because Jesus has alread...

We need only accept his free gift. And if we see the magnitude of that gift, we are moved to do good things. But it is as gratitude for what God has already done in saving...

Once we receive God’s free gift of love in Jesus, we are properly moved to want to love him back...

When God in his sheer mercy and without any merit of mine has given me such unspeakable riches, shall I not then freely, joyously, wholeheartedly, unprompted do everything that I know will please him? I will give myself as a ...

Once we embrace Christ, we are instantly made righteous because of his righteousness, and not because of anything we have done or could do. So our good works do not earn us God’s favor.

That favor we already possess, even though we are sinners who sin and cannot help sinning. By turning to God in faith—as sinners who understand that we are sinners—and by crying out for God’s help, we do all we can by acknowledging our helplessness. At this point—in which our faith acknowledges the truth of our situation—we are instantly clothed with the righteousness of God.

And it is now our gratitude to God for this free gift of his righteousness and salvation that makes us want to please him with our good works. We do them not out of grievous and legalistic duty or out of a hope to earn his fa...

Our service to him is redeemed and transmuted into a free servitude. That is the power of faith in Christ. All that is base and dead can be...

Luther summed it up in this typically colorful image. “Is this not a joyous exchange,” he asks, “the rich, noble, pious bridegroom Christ takes this poor, despised wicked little whore in marriage, redee...

If we as hell-bound sinners are redeemed wholly, then every ugly and vile thing in this world can be transformed and redeemed.

So all that is in this world—including our bodies and every corporeal activity, including our sexuality—far from being things that must be escaped or transcended through our pious efforts, are things to be fully accepted with our open arms, and then with God’s open arms they are fully redeemed.

All things, rather than be lost forever or discarded away into despised oblivion, are joyously and in every aspect r...

For He who saved the three men in the furnace of the Babylonian king still lives and rules. If he does not want to preserve me, then my head is of slight importance compared with Christ, who was put to death in greatest ignominy—a stumbling block to all, and the ruin of many.

Later that evening, Luther met with Spalatin to talk about what he should say the next day.

Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly, for he is victorious over sin, death, and the world. As long as we are here [in this world] we have to sin. This life is not the dwelling place of righteousness, but, as Peter says, we look for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.

It is enough that by the riches of God’s glory we have come to know the Lamb that takes away the sin of the world. No sin will separate us from the Lamb, even though we commit fornication and murder a thousand times a day. Do you think that the purchase price that was paid for the redemption of our sins by so great a Lamb is too small?26

He must understand that in all that we do, we will doubtless sin—because we are sinners—but if our faith is in Christ, who has already defeated sin and paid for our sins on the cross, we are redeemed.

“For the Lord lives, whom you people—as is becoming to courtiers—do not trust unless he arranges his works according to your way of thinking, so that faith would no longer be necessary.”

God must do the work, and God cannot be stopped.

One only realized one could not climb to God and then via the miraculous door opened by faith, God came to you.

that the mark of someone who has encountered God or who is truly called by God is suffering.

If God called, God would protect him, and if God did not protect him, that would be God’s business. His business was to obey.

Men can go wrong with wine and women. Shall we then prohibit wine and abolish women? The sun, the moon, and stars have been worshiped. Shall we then pluck them out of the sky?

It is clear that when he knows he is in God’s will, he not only has no fear but has a tremendous boldness.

a summation of the entire Reformation to come: that we may not rely upon nor blame others for our relationship with God—and all things related—and must take our new-found freedom in this not as license, but as the gravest and most sacred of responsibilities.

One must be concerned for those who are not yet fully on board and must bring them along patiently.

Luther was saying that freedom and love must be at the center of Christian faith.