In light of the upcoming anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, we resume our overview of the life of Martin Luther and how God used him to bring about this reform. We will pick up here where we left off last week...
...The events that brought about this new venture in Luther's life were undoubtedly guided by the hand of God. Luther's desire to please his father had not altogether dissipated, but another desire had risen to a higher level of prominence in his eyes. That being, his desire to avoid the wrath of God. As we learned last week, Luther was a fearful individual, vowing an oath to join the monastery if God would save him from the thunderstorm in Stotternheim.
We learned, too, that Luther was a serious individual, in that he upheld his vow, becoming a monk. Once in the monastery, like in every endeavor of young Martin's life, he worked with obsessive diligence to achieve and to adhere to the rules as strictly as possible. Concerning his time in the monastery, Luther said, "I may say that if ever a monk got to Heaven by his sheer monkery, it was I. If I had kept on any longer, I should have killed myself with vigils, prayers, reading and other work." Martin was known to inflict severe physical punishment onto himself when he perceived any wrongdoing.
Martin was hopeful that this extreme penance would somehow bring him peace with God. It did not. He was tortured by his burden of sin, seeking to rid himself of it. But the harder he worked, the less peace he found. Martin wore out his confessors. So much so that they hated to see him coming and counseled him stay away until he had real sin to confess.
To his confessor, he is once known to have said the words, "I do not love God. I hate Him!" These words from Martin are a result of the frustration he had, which he directed toward God, of his own inability to attain to righteousness. It caused him to have an inner hatred toward God. This is understandable. If we were to work so diligently toward a goal, especially one of this magnitude, and are unable to find success, we just might be angry with God, too. Why will He not reward our efforts? Does He not see? Does He not realize how hard we are trying?
But Martin's problem was this...wrongly, even sinfully, Martin had placed the responsibility for righteousness upon himself. And the reason for his increasing frustration was that he was attempting the impossible. At this point, and understandably so due to the false teaching of the Catholic church, Martin did not know the saving work of Jesus Christ. He possessed no understanding of I Peter 3:18 where it says, "For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit".
But Luther's diligence to read the Scripture, coupled with glorious revelation from God's Holy Spirit, eventually led him out of darkness and into light. It was his intense study of Romans, specifically Romans 1:17, that turned on the light for him. It reads, "For in it [the gospel] the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”
Luther, later reflecting on his conversion unto faith in Jesus and the salvation that God granted to him, stated, "Night and day I pondered until I saw the connection between the justice of God and the statement, 'the just shall live by his faith.' Then I grasped that the justice of God is that righteousness by which through grace and sheer mercy God justifies us through faith. Thereupon, I felt myself to have been reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise."
I pray to God that you have come to the same realization that Luther did. We are saved only by the grace of God. Through faith in His Son, Christ Jesus.
Only Jesus saves!
Pastor Jeremy
