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

by Eric Metaxas

Instead, Jesus freely suffered and died, and in doing so, he illustrated as eloquently as may be done that naked power was not the most powerful thing in the universe. On the contrary, truth itself was more powerful.

The idea that an all-powerful God does not use that power to compel us to believe in him or in truth had to wait until the death of Jesus to be illustrated in history, but that same idea needed to wait until Luther to be introduced into the actual workings of history, where it has lived ever since.

Power had to be leavened with truth and with grace and freedom.

Luther did not discover any especially new ideas. Nor did he discover the God behind these ideas. But what he did was rediscover the ideas, and pull them out from under centuries of accreted neglect.

The willingness on the part of the child’s mother to lose what is dear to her is a picture of God and his love. It is not enough simply to be right. That was the way of the Pharisee. The law of love and freedom was now in play too.

What that story and what Luther did so many years later showed was that there was something deeper and more important than merely being right or merely winning.

If I must win by the sword—or by any kind of force—then my victory is Pyrrhic and worthless. I must not only win but win the right way. I must not only aver the trut...

In the end, what Luther did was not merely to open a door in which people were free to rebel against their leaders but to open a door in which people were obliged by God to take responsibility for themselves and free to help those around them who could not help themselves.

No longer could we complain that we were forced to accept the poor spiritual or governmental leadership of those in authority over us.

On the contrary, we now had not only the freedom but the responsibility to take these things into our ow...

What this further did—as Luther foresaw and passionately hoped—was encourage people to depend the more on God, to deepen their relationship with him personally, and to increase their knowledge of his ...

He knew there was no substitute for this and that it was far better that someone try to understand God and truth with the possibility of getting some things wrong than t...

Freedom with God, with the possibility of growth and death, was better than the s...