Martin Luther Quotes

“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 favor but out of sheer gratitude for the favor we already have. 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 redeemed by faith unto glory and life. 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, redeems her of all evil, and adorns her with all his goods?”
― Eric Metaxas, Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World

“All right,” he wrote, “if [the devil] devours me he shall devour a laxative (God willing) which will make his bowels and anus too tight for him. Do you want to bet? One has to suffer if he wants to possess Christ.”21”
― Eric Metaxas, Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World

“Much of what has been written about that moment homes in on the word “conscience.” Luther declared, “My conscience is captive to the Word of God.” He continued, “To go against conscience is neither safe nor right.”1 But so many historians have conflated our modern ideas about conscience with Luther’s very different ideas about it that we have accepted a deeply mistaken idea about what Luther meant, and therefore about what his stand at Worms meant. Of course Luther never said the English word “conscience”; that word is a translation from his German and Latin. The words he used, usually translated as “conscience,” cannot perfectly be translated as what we today mean by that word. The German word he used, Gewissen, really means “knowing.” And the Latin word, conscientia, means “with knowing.”
― Eric Metaxas, Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World

“Although I know full well and hear every day that many people think little of me and say that I only write little pamphlets and sermons in German for the uneducated laity, I do not let that stop me. Would to God that in my lifetime I had, to my fullest ability, helped one layman to be better!”
― Eric Metaxas, Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World

“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 with God and all creatures. 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 love and praise to God who has shown him this grace. Thus it is impossible to separate works from faith, quite as impossible as to separate heat and light from fire.25”
― Eric Metaxas, Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World

“A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.37”
― Eric Metaxas, Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World

“we will not strive to smooth out differences if by doing so we condemn the Word of God.”
― Eric Metaxas, Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World

“Instead of looking upward and outward toward the God who loved him, he zealously and furiously fixated on himself and his own troubling thoughts.”
― Eric Metaxas, Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World

“Luther was trying to call the church back to its true roots, to a biblical idea of a merciful God who did not demand that we obey but who first loved us and first made us righteous before he expected us to live righteously.”
― Eric Metaxas, Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World

“1516, Luther explained just how busy he was during this time: I could almost occupy two scribes or secretaries. All day long I do nothing but write letters. . . . I preach at the monastery, I am a lector during meal-times, I am asked daily to preach in the city church, I have to supervise the program of study, and I am vicar, i.e., prior of eleven cloisters. Plus: I am warden of the fish-pond at Leitzkau, and at Torgau. I am involved in a dispute with the Herzbergers. . . . I lecture on Paul and I am still collecting material on the Psalms. . . . I have little uninterrupted time for the daily [monastic] hours or for celebrating mass. Besides, I have my own struggles with the flesh, the world, and the devil. See what a lazy man I am!4”
― Eric Metaxas, Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World

“Christians were free, but he also made it clear that their freedom made them duty-bound to behave well toward others. Christian truth was eleven parts paradox out of ten. This was its essentially mysterious and glorious nature.”
― Eric Metaxas, Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World

“Therefore, by themselves, without faith, the sacraments and the church were empty and must no longer pretend otherwise. It was faith in Christ that was the foundation for the church, and this faith did not come from us, who were all broken sinners, but was a free gift from God. So to bend the Scriptures to claim that the human institution of the Roman church was inevitably and undeniably divine was itself heresy and an abomination. The more he stared at what was in front of him, so clear and so awful, the more he became convinced that the church had for four hundred years been in a kind of Babylonian captivity, just as Israel had been. And if he like a prophet did not point this out and call for the church to repent and return to God’s truth, he would himself be guilty. He therefore had no fear in doing so.”
― Eric Metaxas, Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World

“A simple layman armed with Scripture is to be believed above a pope or a council without it. —Martin Luther”
― Eric Metaxas, Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World

“According to this Reformation breakthrough, all the marmoreal and golden splendor of the Vatican was nothing more or less than a monument to mankind’s efforts to be as God—indeed was a monument to the very devil of hell. It was our attempt to be good without God, to impress God and be like him without his help. It was all far worse than excrement could ever be, for it pretended to be good and beautiful and true and holy, and in reality it was not just not these things but the very bitterest enemy of them.”
― Eric Metaxas, Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World

“In fact, we are not sick and in need of healing. We are dead and in need of resurrecting.”
― Eric Metaxas, Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World

“already done that for us. 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 us, not as a way of earning our own salvation. Once we receive God’s free gift of love in Jesus, we are properly moved to want to love him back and to love our fellow man.”
― Eric Metaxas, Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World

“But for reasons history will never understand, Cajetan and the church could not perceive the situation along these lines at all. They were oddly stubborn, and for this reason the Reformation, which might well have been averted, went forward.”
― Eric Metaxas, Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World

“Luther asserted the idea that only the Scriptures could be that inerrant standard to which everyone—including the church—must repair.”
― Eric Metaxas, Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World

“Since then your serene majesties and your lordships seek a simple answer, I will give it in this manner, plain and unvarnished: Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the scriptures or clear reason, for I do not trust in the Pope or in the councils alone, since it is well known that they often err and contradict themselves, I am bound to the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. I cannot do otherwise. Here I stand. God help me. Amen.17 In fact, we don’t know whether the most famous of those words—“Here I stand. I can do no other”—were actually spoken by Luther, although there is no reason to believe they were not. Those who recorded his words in the room that day did not write them, but they were put in the first printed versions of the speech, either as a correction from the transcribed version or as an incorrect addition. These are nonetheless the lapidary words that have been recited and inscribed in many millions of places over the last five centuries, and even if Luther did not speak them, they nonetheless perfectly encapsulate his position, which is surely why they have stuck.”
― Eric Metaxas, Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World

“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 already done that for us. 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 us, not as a way of earning our own salvation. Once we receive God’s free gift of love in Jesus, we are properly moved to want to love him back and to love our fellow man. 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 sort of Christ to my neighbor as Christ gave himself for me.”
― Eric Metaxas, Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World

“The events of the past year had drawn him out into lonelier and more dangerous theological territory, but there was a newfound freedom and a faith that bloomed in this situation. 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.”
― Eric Metaxas, Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World

“Luther was openly declaring that the Roman church’s monopoly on the spiritual must come to an end. 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. It is pure invention that pope, bishops, priests, and monks are to be called the spiritual estate, while princes, lords, artisans, and farmers are called the temporal estate. . . . All Christians are truly of the spiritual estate, and there is among them no difference except that of office. . . . Their claim that only the pope may interpret Scripture is an outrageous fancied fable.”
― Eric Metaxas, Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World

“Another of the characters who must now come into our story is the theologian Johannes Eck, whom Luther considered a friend until the unfortunate months of early 1518. The two had been introduced by the leading Humanist Christopher Scheurl when Scheurl was the rector at Wittenberg, but when Eck read Luther’s theses that January, he promptly let it be known that he desperately wished to debate Luther. In fact, he said he would gladly walk ten miles to do so. Eck then wrote and published a rebuttal of Luther’s theses, titled Obelisks. The typographic term “obelisk”—which referred to the four-sided monolithic stone monuments that taper upward and date back to ancient Egypt—denoted the small daggers that were even then used in the margins of manuscripts, indicating that the text nearby was perhaps of spurious origin. So Eck’s title must have seemed to Luther like the very thing itself, a poniard in the back of a friend. That a friend Luther considered a reasonable and educated man would attack him like this was certainly deeply hurtful. Nor was the attack measured, but vicious. In it Eck hurled boulders of invective Lutherward, calling him simpleminded, impudent, and Bohemian (which is to say, a heretic deserving of death, like the Bohemian Jan Hus) and a despiser of the pope, among other things. To Luther, it was a cruel betrayal. What might have sparked Eck’s emotion is hard to say, but surely part of it had to do with the fact that Luther was accusing the indulgence sellers of being greedy, and thereby somehow undermining the authority of the church itself. Even if there was truth to this, or if there was error to be reported, it seems Eck took greatest offense at Luther’s naked appeal to the anticlericalism so rampant at that time, which served only to make matters worse by undermining the church’s authority. In any case, Luther was wounded and disinclined to reply, but his friends insisted that he must. So he wrote Asterisks. Thus touché. The word “asterisk” is from the Greek for “little star,” and so asterisks were those marks in the margins of manuscripts that were the precise opposite of the pejorative downward-facing daggers.10 Asterisks were put next to text that was considered particularly valuable. So only six decades after the invention of movable type, Luther and Eck treated the world to its first typographic battle, waged with pre-Zapf dingbats.”
― Eric Metaxas, Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World

“for Luther the Bible was not a book like Aristotle’s Ethics or like a volume of Livy or Cicero. It was something entirely apart from every book in the world. It was the living Word of God and therefore could not be read like any other book. It was inspired by God, and when one read it, one must do so in such a way—with such closeness and intimacy—that one fully intended to feel and smell the breezes of heaven.”
― Eric Metaxas, Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World

“We know that immediately upon entering the monastery, Luther was lent one that was bound in red leather, for he recollected this often in his later years. It seems that Luther did not receive the book lightly, for he not only read it but almost devoured it. He read it over and over until he was inordinately and perhaps even peculiarly familiar with it. This would of course have everything to do with the events of his future and the future itself.”
― Eric Metaxas, Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World

“In the years 1889 and 1890, at the Ratsschul Library in Zwickau, about seventy-five miles east of Erfurt, someone came upon what turned out to be early fifteenth-century volumes that Luther had held and studied as a young monk. It was a spectacular find. Several of these books were works by Augustine. The marginal notes and other writing were confirmed as Luther’s own handwriting, so suddenly historians could know what he had underlined as he was reading.”
― Eric Metaxas, Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World

“Here was the central difficulty of late medieval Catholic theology: that one was brought to the place of understanding one’s sinfulness and one’s unworthiness before God but was not told what to do at that moment of understanding except to lie paralyzed with hopelessness, to confess and try harder. At some point, the sinner—and Luther chief among them—came to feel that he wholly deserved God’s fierce anger. For Staupitz, who had a remarkably healthy view of God for that time and place, God was someone who loved us and had mercy on us, but for Luther, God was still and only the harsh judge whose righteousness condemned us with withering fierceness. Staupitz saw Luther’s agonies and took a personal and fatherly interest in him. His importance in the life of Martin Luther cannot be exaggerated. He early on saw the genius and potential in Luther and wanted to do all he could to help him find his way.”
― Eric Metaxas, Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World

“This is the very thing that has driven people to suicide through the centuries. It is hopelessness made real, or to use Milton’s famous phrase, it is “darkness visible,”15 a description that the author William Styron used as a title for his own poignant memoir on depression.”
― Eric Metaxas, Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World

“Another reformer before Luther was the Bohemian Jan Hus, who was born in 1369 and became a theologian at Prague University. Hus was greatly influenced by Wycliffe and spoke strongly against indulgences and the papacy, specifically criticizing the pope for his use of military power, holding that the church could not wield the sword. Hus was condemned as a heretic at the Council of Constance and suffered burning at the stake in 1415. But his followers, known as Hussites, continued the movement long after his death.”
― Eric Metaxas, Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World

“John Wycliffe was born around 1328 in England, and in many truly remarkable ways he prefigured Luther and Luther’s eventual reforms. Wycliffe agitated for a vernacular translation of the Bible so that the people could read God’s Word, and he himself translated most of the New Testament into English—although of course in the fourteenth century it was not the so-yclept Modern English of our own time but the Middle English of Chaucer.* Thus John 3:16 was rendered as “For God louede so the world, that he Ȝaf his oon bigetun sone, that ech man that bileueth in him perische not, but haue euerlastynge lijf.” Wycliffe also worked with others to translate the Old Testament and was as passionate in his day as Luther would be in his own that everyone should know the Gospels in his own spoken language. “Christ and his apostles taught the people in that tongue that was best known to them,” he said. “Why should men not do so now?”
― Eric Metaxas, Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World