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

by Eric Metaxas

It is sufficient for your grace earnestly to pray once or twice for her. For God has promised that whatever you ask for, believe that you will receive it and you will certainly have it (Luke 11:9–10). In contrast, when we pray over and over again for the same thing, it is a sign that we do not believe God and with our faithless prayer only make him angrier. True, we should regularly pray, but always in faith and certain that we are being heard. Otherwise, the prayer is in vain.

It is as though we were to bribe a kindhearted policeman who is already trying to help us, or as though we were to bribe our own dear parents.

Just as no one can die for us, no one can have a relationship with God for us, and therefore no one can take full responsibility for how we read the Scriptures.

Faith is a divine work in us which changes us and makes us to be born anew of God.

Faith is a living, daring confidence in God’s grace, so sure and certain that the believer would stake his life on it a thousand times.

This knowledge of and confidence in God’s grace makes men glad and bold and happy in dealing ...

And this is the work which the Holy Spirit performed in faith. Because of it, without compulsion, a person is ready and glad to do good to everyone, to serve everyone, to suffer everything out of...

Thus it is impossible to separate works from faith, quite as impossible as to separate...

how we are to become free from our sin, obtain a good conscience, and win a peaceful and joyful heart. That is what really counts.”

Luther always had respect for authority, even when it was in the wrong, and he believed that going to war with the powers that be would be far more destructive than constructive.

“Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God.”

Indeed, our leader, Jesus Christ, says in Matthew 7 [5:44] that we should bless those who insult us, pray for our persecutors, love our enemies, and do good to those who do evil to us. These, dear friends, are our Christian laws.

God had created the physical and the sexual as good, and he had redeemed them from their broken fallenness via marriage.

Luther thought unnatural celibacy to be of the devil and natural and healthy marital sex to be something that glorified God.

Dear God, we see daily the effort it costs to live in a marriage, and to keep the marital vows. And we try to promise chastity as if we were not human, had neither flesh nor blood.

The reason is the following: begetting children is as deeply rooted in nature as eating and drinking.

The mode of life, too, while, indeed, humble, is, nevertheless holy and more pleasing to God than celibacy.

Thus our ideas of shame are mere social constructs.

Indeed our ideas of sin and even our ideas of what is good and true and beautiful are merely social constructs and inventions.

So we have a purely materialist view of sex and the human person which holds that we are not spiritual beings—capable of falling away from God or being redeemed back into his presence—but purely physical beings for whom Go...

What Luther had done was something else entirely. Far from saying there is only this material world, he said God originally created this material world as good and had suffused it with his presence, but in Eden we fell away from that union with God. Thus the split between the “material” and the “spiritual” is the wound at the heart of the universe, and only Jesus can heal it. Therefore let us now allow him to do so by inviting him into this world.

He came to Bethlehem and died on Calvary, but we must invite him into our hearts and must accept him so that he can do in our lives what he came to do. When we do this, everything is restored. So whatever we do in our humble, daily lives—whether having sex with our spouses, or raising our children, or working at our jobs—we may now do unto God’s glory and may therefore redeem in him.

Luther was saying that for people who live like this, there is no longer a world in which officially religious and spiritual people only do religious and spiritual things. There is now a new world in which everyone can partake of God’s goodness, in which every person is a “priest,” in which every person can live fully loved and a...

It is an invitation into the supreme health of a life fully redeemed in Jesus Christ, one that says yes, we can be born again; we can reenter God’s good graces and again be as little children; we can take what the world and the devil would call dirty and make it as clean as soap.

Christ had come to set us free. All we need do is believe in him, and we are freed from sin and death forever and irreversibly.

We are under no obligation to do anything at all to save ourselves; indeed we cannot do anything, and it is vitally important that we perfectly understand that we can do nothing. Nothing.

without Jesus to save us utterly, we are utterly lost. With Jesus, we are saved.

How it happened that the bread and wine became Christ’s body and blood was as beside the point as how the Holy Spirit fertilized Mary’s egg or how Jesus’s corpse became alive or how he walked through walls and ascended into heaven.

Thus was everything that God had made redeemed by faith in Christ. On the one hand, this had happened fifteen centuries earlier, but it was as if the money had been put in the bank then and no one knew it was there, or soon forgot it was there. So no one had made a withdrawal and spent it, which was the point of the money.

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.

By inviting everyone to partake of the Christian experience in a way that had previously been impossible, Luther was really only opening the shades and the windows and letting the fresh air and the sunshine in. Both were meant to be free and to be freely enjoyed. More than that, they were essential for life. There were always risks in doing this. Sometimes insects would come into the house, and sometimes people would get sunburned, but living in a world without sunshine and fresh air was too high a price to pay to avoid these problems, so he was willing to take the risk.

The spiritual darkness sometimes felt so strong that he said he was sure they were dealing not with mere demons but with the prince of demons himself.

At one point, he told Bugenhagen that he didn’t have enough faith and needed Bugenhagen to speak some of the promises from God’s Word to him, to declare them over him in faith, because his own faith was weakened.

“This is what God thinks: What am I going to do with this man? I gave him so many outstanding gif...

As a result they live like simple cattle or irrational pigs and, despite the fact that the gospel has returned, have mastered the fine art of misusing all their freedom.

What is it to have a god? What is God? Answer: A god is that to which we look for all good and in which we find refuge in every time of need. To have a god is nothing else than to trust and believe him with our whole heart. As I have often said, the trust and faith of the heart alone make both God and an idol. If your faith and trust are right, then your God is the true God. On the other hand, if your trust is false and wrong, then you have not the true God. For these two belong together, faith and God. That to which your heart clings and entrusts itself is, I say, really your God.

Let us therefore now rejoice with all assurance and gladness, and should any thought of sin or death frighten us, let us in opposition to this lift up our hearts and say: “Behold, dear soul, what are you doing? Dear death, dear sin, how is it that you are alive and terrify me? Do you not know that you have been overcome? Do you, death, not know that you are quite dead? Do you not know the One who says of you: “I have overcome the world?”

But the terrible jostling and jangling of the wagon on the bumpy winter roads somehow must have caused the stone blocking his urinary functioning to be jarred free and as with the fabled rock struck by Moses at Horeb, the dammed-up waters at last found egress.

The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. I love her very much. . . . In the last thousand years God has given to no bishop such great gifts as God has given me (for one should boast of God’s gifts). I am angry with myself that I am unable to rejoice from my heart and be thankful to God, though I do at times sing a little song and give thanks. Whether we live or die, we belong to God.

Here was the very wound at the heart of human existence: even when we know as much as or more than anyone else of the truth of God, we are nonetheless sufficiently mired in the fallenness of this world so that we are unable fully to comprehend what we know to be true.

But resist him. He who is with us is greater than he who is in the world.

Still, the main question remains: How is it that someone so very focused on the love and grace of God for so much of his life could come to say things that seem to contradict what he said earlier in life?

It almost beggars belief, but because we have the texts and cannot avoid them, these writings force us to ask whether a person’s life can be seen as a whole or must be taken in parts, as though we were not one person who can be perceived as a single person throughout our lives, but can be some concatenation of persons spread throughout our lifetimes.

If there is the slimmest silver lining in all of this, it might be that we are because of these vilest writings less inclined to make a hagiographic idol out of Luther.

So if people wish to see Luther as any kind of run-of-the-mill anti-Semite, they must be disappointed. He rightly lays the blame for Jesus’s Crucifixion not on the Jews but on every one of us and on himself, as well he should.

Why don’t you do it now? You have Christ in your neighbor. You ought to serve him, for what you do to your neighbor in need you do to the Lord Christ himself.

what for him was the central message of his entire life, and the central message at the heart of humanity, that God in Christ offers himself freely to us while we are still sinners.

We could not be ethereal sprites unmoored from this earth or our own earthiness, literally or figuratively. From the ground we were made and back to the ground we would go, but God had seen fit in filling us creatures of earth with the very breath of heaven, with the wind of eternity. So it was not the devil who had the last laugh but us—and God. We who were made from the mud of Eden and who would be devoured by maggots as we returned to the soil would be resurrected on the Last Day, would fly in the air to meet with the loving Lord and King who made us, and both of us would have bodies, young and fresh—eternally young and beautiful.

That is redemption: to make from these fleshly containers of blood and bile and excrement something so extraordinary that we could never ourselves be so free as to truly imagine it and appreciate it.

Perhaps if we do not risk losing, we cannot actually win.