Why were these ideas so transforming? What were these ideas? And how do they apply to us today? To understand them, let’s go back to the time before Luther arrived on the scene.
Isaiah 26:7-15; Psalm 96:1-13; Romans 3:9-12, 20-30; John 1:9-14
In the late middle ages, there was only one recognized church in Western Europe. That was the Roman Catholic Church and you belonged, or you were a dangerous subversive revolutionary. And also in that time, the church had fallen prey to the lure of political power. Not only did the Pope’s representative crown the rightful kings and princes of Europe, but the Pope himself directly ruled most of central Italy. And because of that political power, the church had taken control of much of the economy – and had become distracted from its core mission of saving souls.
(Note: Today's Roman Catholic Church has substantially reformed from Luther's time. Catholicism today is much different than the Church I'll describe here.)
Monasteries and abbeys owned a sixth of the land of England and with it also controlled the people who worked those lands and the revenue from the production of the land. Much of that money flowed to Rome, where beautiful churches were built, and much art work was created. We call this time the Italian Renaissance.
(I am indebted for much of this information to Dr. Philip Carey and his course Luther: Gospel, Law, and Reformation.)
All land throughout Europe was owned by someone who owed a tribute or tax of that land to someone else at a higher level. For example, a peasant owed labor and rent to a knight, the knight owed service and rent to an earl, the earl owed service and tribute to a king. And the king owed his kingdom to the Pope’s support.
Much of the land was owned by the bishops and arch bishops. But bishops and archbishops and priests were not supposed to marry or have children, although many did. But this meant that when they died, their land was given to someone else by the Pope. The common custom had developed that the first year’s rental income for the land was given by the new bishop to the Pope. And this meant much more money flowed to Rome.
But in the countryside, in the towns and cities and villages of the rest of Europe, communities were still in recovery and death was everywhere. About a hundred and fifty years earlier, in 1348, the Black Death, bubonic plague, had come to Europe and killed between a third and half of the population. Because they cared for the sick, 80 to 90% of the priests were killed. Entire villages were deserted and left to grow back into forest where bandits lived and robbed and killed the survivors traveling. And the plague kept coming back. By 1500, the French population was just then recovering to where it had been in 1300 before the plague.
In the east, the Turkish Moslems were threatening the Christian nations of Austria and Hungary. In Spain, the Christian kings were in a death struggle with Moslem states, a struggle that wasn’t won until 1492. Meanwhile, Moslem pirates ranged from bases in North Africa to raid the Mediterranean as well as the Atlantic coast up to Ireland and Britain, taking captives of entire villages. And in the north, an unusually cold period disrupted harvests and led to famine, a time known as the Little Ice Age.
The average person in Europe became obsessed with death. War, plague, starvation, slavery – death was all around.
Reading your Bible was not much help because Bibles were rare and expensive materials. Copied by hand, they cost the equivalent of a hundred thousand dollars in today's money. Few churches had a copy – and almost no private individuals. It was as if there was a single copy of the Bible kept in a central cathedral for each million worshipers. And thus, the new priesthood, in general, was sorely lacking in education. The new Gutenberg printing press was just becoming used, but it was sort of like the condition of the computer in 1960 – it was something only a few people had any use for.
Holy Communion, with its expensive wine and bread, was generally taken by most people only at Easter. The priest performed the Mass, but said the service in a mysterious language, old Latin, which many priests learned by rote and did not understand. In fact, the moment when the magical words, hoc est corpus meum – Latin for "This is my body" - when these words were said was said to be the point when the bread magically transformed into the actual body of Christ. It is from this we get hocus pocus.
And people prayed to the saints rather than to Christ or God, for the people considered that only the priests were good enough to pray to God or Christ, for the priests understood the sacred words, were entrusted with the body and blood of Christ, and had the power to excommunicate you, to cut you off from Holy Communion, without which you had no chance, for according to doctrine, you needed Communion and Baptism given by a priest to avoid Hell. And the priesthood was not just a position in the Church, the priests were the church – the average person was not considered part of the church.
If you were evil or excommunicated or were not Catholic, you died and went to Hell, a place of no hope, complete with the devils and pitchforks. If you were saintly, such as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary who was the patron saint of miners, you were in a perfect state of grace with God, and when you died you went to Heaven to be with God and Christ. But if you were the average, normal human being who accepted six of the seven sacraments of baptism, confirmation, communion, marriage, penance, and the anointing of the sick – holy orders being reserved for the saintly – you would end up in Purgatory. Normal Christians went to Purgatory, a place to work off your sin debt, to cleanse yourself so one day you’d be allowed into Heaven.
While official doctrine said that Purgatory was a place of purification, the common theology held that Purgatory was "Hell, Junior", a place once again of punishment - except there was hope that one day you would be released from Purgatory to Heaven.
In Confession, required before receiving communion, the priests of the day were trained to ask questions to encourage the individual to deeply find and confess all sins, thinking deeply about every evil they’d committed, every sin they had done or even thought about. Confessions were difficult, stressful times, which is probably why most people only went through the ordeal once a year so they could receive Communion at Easter.
And so, people walked out of church at Easter, forgiven yes, but acutely aware of how much they had done wrong, knowing that they were barely avoiding Hell and anticipating hundreds, if not thousands of years in Purgatory. There was a lot of emphasis on the Law of Moses, upon the Crucifixion, but little about the Resurrection.
The worst terror for most people was sudden death. You see, with an ordinary death, a person had time to confess, to conduct penance, and be forgiven and perhaps be in state of grace upon death. But in a sudden death, you had all these unconfessed, unforgiven sins which would extend your time in Purgatory – or, if one of the seven mortal sins lie unconfessed and unatoned for, you would be sent beyond all hope to Hell.
Life was bad, but dying might even be worse. While the fear of Hell kept the occasional person from a life of crime, it kept the rest of the population incontinual dread and fear for their immortal soul after death. Life was bad, but dying might even be worse.
On July 2, 1505, Martin Luther was riding on a horse down a road back to college. Martin’s grandfather had been a poor peasant farmer. Martin’s father worked hard and acquired some copper mining leases, so he was better off because of his mines, but Herr Luther wanted his eldest son Martin to be a wealthy lawyer. So father had sent Martin to expensive schools – very tedious, according to Martin, who also compared his schools to Hell and Purgatory. (Some things don’t change.) This particular day, Martin was riding down the road, when a storm began to move in. A lightning storm. Martin quickly took shelter under a large tree with his horse.
You can now imagine the effect on Martin. A lightning storm offered the possibility of sudden death, and Martin had not been a saint. Suddenly a lightning bolt struck near the tree Martin had taken shelter under. He yelled out a prayer: “Help! Saint Anna, I will become a monk!”
And to his credit and his father’s anger, he entered an Augustinian monastery two weeks later.
In the late middle ages, there were recognized essentially three types of holy people who made up the Church. There were the priests who lived among the people. The priest’s primary job was to say Mass every day or even several times a day, for in the Mass the bread was turned into Jesus’ literal body and the wine became Christ’s literal blood and they were sacrificed once again. Although Scripture was read and a homily might be said, it was not the important part. The sacrifice - the Eucharist (or Communion) - was the important part.
And people paid priests to say a Mass for them or their dead loved ones, because, it was thought, this was a way to get out of Purgatory sooner. Some rich men died and left enormous sums of money to ensure that priests would say Mass for them for centuries to come. The priests served God in this way by conducting these regular sacrifices.
But if you really wanted to get close to God, you became a monk or a nun. Here, you would leave the world behind, the doors would be closed, you’d take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience and then follow the rules and the orders of whatever group you had joined. You would spend your life attempting to do what God wanted done. You would continually confess your sins, pay penance for them and, ideally, stop committing new sins.
Many monks invented new ways of paying for their sins. Some continually wore coarse wool shirts. Others walked up stone steps on their knees. Some repeated the Psalms over and over. Others whipped themselves or had others whip them. These acts of penance were considered very godly by many people.
Luther realized that, while being a monk was a good thing, he had broken the commandment to honor his father and mother to become a monk. To save himself from Hell, Luther had sinned and broken the commandment when he became a monk.
In the monastery, Luther was a model monk. He prayed and read scripture. He read other books on theology. He went on pilgrimage to Rome and walked on his knees up 162 steps, praying at each step. And he saw how corrupt the Romans were and he saw the wealth that was accumulating in Rome. And when he returned to Germany, this laid heavily on his mind.
After a few years, in 1512, he was asked to be the chair of Theology at the University of Wittenberg, and then in 1515 was also asked to be responsible for the eleven monasteries in Saxony. Martin Luther was a man now of respected position – head of the Theology department at a major University and the administrative head of a group of Monasteries.
Meanwhile, a new Pope had taken over in Rome. Pope Leo X wanted to build the great church of St Peter’s that we have today in Rome, the huge church building we see whenever today’s Pope speaks on television, and this new church was going to cost a lot of money.
A bishop near Luther’s area, Albert of Mainz, was deeply in debt because he had negotiated with the Pope to expand his lands by absorbing some other territories. So Bishop Albert made a deal with the Pope. The Pope would send a friar named Johan Tetzel, a traveling monk and priest, to the area to sell indulgences.
An indulgence was the latest idea in church fund-raising. Here’s how it worked:
Friar Tetzel would come into the village. He’d have pre-printed sheets of paper with a declaration by the Pope that whoever’s name was written on the blank line would receive a thousand or five thousand years off their time in Purgatory, depending upon how much money was given to Tetzel. For more money, you could get a plenary indulgence, one that wiped out all of your time in Purgatory. Imagine! For every dollar you donate, you get out of Purgatory a year sooner! Or, perhaps your dear mother Hilda gets out sooner because you have the money and you’ll buy an indulgence paper for her. It’s like a get out of jail free card!
Indulgences had been sold for centuries, but in the past, they were usually limited to negotiated sales to dukes or kings. Friar Tetzel took it to a whole new level. He sold indulgences to peasants. And this began to get the attention of Martin Luther.
Martin began to notice an increase in people needing church support. When he investigated, he found out that many people had taken their savings and bought the indulgences out of their fear of Purgatory and Hell. And this made Luther angry, because he remembered the wealth of Rome and contrasted it to the poverty of the people he saw paying for the indulgences.
But Luther had other issues going on, too. He had been deeply reading his Bible, particularly his New Testament ever since he had entered the monastery, sinning by going against his own father’s wishes in an attempt to save his own soul from Hell.
By 1516, Luther had developed a serious problem with the idea that a person could do good deeds and thus become good enough for Heaven. Here is his argument – it is a bit different from anything you’ve heard, so listen carefully:
If doing good is the way to get right with God, then the better you are, the more likely God will let you into Heaven, right? That’s the who idea, right?
So what does it mean to be good or do good deeds?
Isn’t it fair to say that being selfish is being bad and being self-less is being good?
So isn’t a desire to avoid Hell and get into Heaven selfish? Trying to go to Heaven makes you selfish – a bad person!
And isn’t the most self-less thing you can do is to go to Hell? Trying to go to Hell would make you self-less – a good person.
So shouldn’t you stop working hard to be good enough for God and instead become the ugliest, evilest-acting person there is so you can self-lessly be sent to Hell by God? Isn’t that the best way to actually be a good person?
Well, it may be logical, but I think that pretty much everyone agrees that there is something terribly wrong with this strategy to get to Heaven. Even Luther quickly rejected it.
But Luther had found a serious problem with the entire idea that your own goodness gets you right with God. Trying to be good enough for God means that you do good deeds for the most selfish of reasons. And thus, if you are trying to be good enough for God, you are a bad person, deserving of Hell.
And we have to recognize something else. God doesn’t need us to be good. God doesn’t need us to be bad. Because of God’s power and wisdom and majesty, it really doesn’t matter how we act as far as God is concerned, because we are like fleas on the back of ants in comparison to God. God doesn’t need us to be good. God doesn’t even need to notice us.
Meanwhile, in 1517, Luther had begun to read and teach from the Book of Romans in earnest.
And there, Luther found something very different in Paul’s writings. He found something very different from what regular Catholic teaching of the day was.
You will notice that up until this point, I’ve said very little about the role the worship of Jesus Christ played in the Catholic church of Luther’s time. That’s because the focus wasn’t on Jesus Christ – the focus was always on what “I’ve” done or what “I” haven’t done.
This was the key thing that Luther found in Paul’s writings. It was a focus upon Jesus Christ and what Jesus had done.
(I want to say at this point that most of the things I’ve mentioned about Catholic belief are the beliefs of the average person in 1500 – what you might call “popular theology”, in many cases not the theology of the deepest Catholic thinkers of the day. And today, the Catholic Church has mostly reformed itself, particularly since the series of councils in the early 1960’s called Vatican II. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that Catholic belief today is what I’ve just talked about. Most of this is what the average Catholic in the street believed in 1500.Times have changed. In fact, within 5 years, Tetzel was fired and the Pope laid out clear guidelines that curbed the abuse of indulgences. Today, they are not sold, but are still occasionally issued.)
So Luther found in the Book of Romans, John's Gospel, the Book of Galatians and the Book of Hebrews something completely different than what everybody believed in 1517. Luther found a focus upon Jesus Christ and what Jesus had done for us all.
Here is what Luther found:
He found that what we do doesn’t really matter. What Jesus said and did makes all the difference.
Let’s look at this. We know from the Bible that God doesn’t lie, that God keeps God’s promises, that God has great integrity, and that God is truly good. Thus, if we know that if God has spoken something, we know that it is true and good.
And Jesus said certain things.
First, Jesus claimed repeatedly to be God’s Son, speaking on behalf of God, doing the things only God could do. Jesus was claiming to be one and the same as the Father. In John 10:30, Jesus even said, “I and the Father are one.”
A bold claim, right? Jesus is God.
We know that Jesus died on the cross, and we are told this not only by the Four Gospels, but Paul’s writings, Peter’s letters, the book of Hebrews, and John’s letters, and even Jude and James assume that Jesus died on the cross and then was resurrected and spoke to the disciples after His resurrection. So the New Testament is clear about Jesus’ death and resurrection as being historical facts. And Jesus surely would not have been resurrected if He was lying about being divine, right?
And Jesus said, “If you follow me, you will have eternal life” and Jesus also said that those who follow Jesus will be with Him in Heaven and other similar statements. These are promises made by the divine Son of God.
Now let me change gears a minute.
In Confession, required before receiving communion, the priests of the day were trained to ask questions to encourage the individual to deeply find and confess all sins, thinking deeply about every evil they’d committed, every sin they had done or even thought about. Confessions were difficult, stressful times, which is probably why most people only went through the ordeal once a year so they could receive Communion at Easter.
And so, people walked out of church at Easter, forgiven yes, but acutely aware of how much they had done wrong, knowing that they were barely avoiding Hell and anticipating hundreds, if not thousands of years in Purgatory. There was a lot of emphasis on the Law of Moses, upon the Crucifixion, but little about the Resurrection.
The worst terror for most people was sudden death. You see, with an ordinary death, a person had time to confess, to conduct penance, and be forgiven and perhaps be in state of grace upon death. But in a sudden death, you had all these unconfessed, unforgiven sins which would extend your time in Purgatory – or, if one of the seven mortal sins lie unconfessed and unatoned for, you would be sent beyond all hope to Hell.
Life was bad, but dying might even be worse. While the fear of Hell kept the occasional person from a life of crime, it kept the rest of the population incontinual dread and fear for their immortal soul after death. Life was bad, but dying might even be worse.
On July 2, 1505, Martin Luther was riding on a horse down a road back to college. Martin’s grandfather had been a poor peasant farmer. Martin’s father worked hard and acquired some copper mining leases, so he was better off because of his mines, but Herr Luther wanted his eldest son Martin to be a wealthy lawyer. So father had sent Martin to expensive schools – very tedious, according to Martin, who also compared his schools to Hell and Purgatory. (Some things don’t change.) This particular day, Martin was riding down the road, when a storm began to move in. A lightning storm. Martin quickly took shelter under a large tree with his horse.
You can now imagine the effect on Martin. A lightning storm offered the possibility of sudden death, and Martin had not been a saint. Suddenly a lightning bolt struck near the tree Martin had taken shelter under. He yelled out a prayer: “Help! Saint Anna, I will become a monk!”
And to his credit and his father’s anger, he entered an Augustinian monastery two weeks later.
In the late middle ages, there were recognized essentially three types of holy people who made up the Church. There were the priests who lived among the people. The priest’s primary job was to say Mass every day or even several times a day, for in the Mass the bread was turned into Jesus’ literal body and the wine became Christ’s literal blood and they were sacrificed once again. Although Scripture was read and a homily might be said, it was not the important part. The sacrifice - the Eucharist (or Communion) - was the important part.
And people paid priests to say a Mass for them or their dead loved ones, because, it was thought, this was a way to get out of Purgatory sooner. Some rich men died and left enormous sums of money to ensure that priests would say Mass for them for centuries to come. The priests served God in this way by conducting these regular sacrifices.
But if you really wanted to get close to God, you became a monk or a nun. Here, you would leave the world behind, the doors would be closed, you’d take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience and then follow the rules and the orders of whatever group you had joined. You would spend your life attempting to do what God wanted done. You would continually confess your sins, pay penance for them and, ideally, stop committing new sins.
Many monks invented new ways of paying for their sins. Some continually wore coarse wool shirts. Others walked up stone steps on their knees. Some repeated the Psalms over and over. Others whipped themselves or had others whip them. These acts of penance were considered very godly by many people.
Luther realized that, while being a monk was a good thing, he had broken the commandment to honor his father and mother to become a monk. To save himself from Hell, Luther had sinned and broken the commandment when he became a monk.
In the monastery, Luther was a model monk. He prayed and read scripture. He read other books on theology. He went on pilgrimage to Rome and walked on his knees up 162 steps, praying at each step. And he saw how corrupt the Romans were and he saw the wealth that was accumulating in Rome. And when he returned to Germany, this laid heavily on his mind.
After a few years, in 1512, he was asked to be the chair of Theology at the University of Wittenberg, and then in 1515 was also asked to be responsible for the eleven monasteries in Saxony. Martin Luther was a man now of respected position – head of the Theology department at a major University and the administrative head of a group of Monasteries.
Meanwhile, a new Pope had taken over in Rome. Pope Leo X wanted to build the great church of St Peter’s that we have today in Rome, the huge church building we see whenever today’s Pope speaks on television, and this new church was going to cost a lot of money.
A bishop near Luther’s area, Albert of Mainz, was deeply in debt because he had negotiated with the Pope to expand his lands by absorbing some other territories. So Bishop Albert made a deal with the Pope. The Pope would send a friar named Johan Tetzel, a traveling monk and priest, to the area to sell indulgences.
An indulgence was the latest idea in church fund-raising. Here’s how it worked:
Friar Tetzel would come into the village. He’d have pre-printed sheets of paper with a declaration by the Pope that whoever’s name was written on the blank line would receive a thousand or five thousand years off their time in Purgatory, depending upon how much money was given to Tetzel. For more money, you could get a plenary indulgence, one that wiped out all of your time in Purgatory. Imagine! For every dollar you donate, you get out of Purgatory a year sooner! Or, perhaps your dear mother Hilda gets out sooner because you have the money and you’ll buy an indulgence paper for her. It’s like a get out of jail free card!
Indulgences had been sold for centuries, but in the past, they were usually limited to negotiated sales to dukes or kings. Friar Tetzel took it to a whole new level. He sold indulgences to peasants. And this began to get the attention of Martin Luther.
Martin began to notice an increase in people needing church support. When he investigated, he found out that many people had taken their savings and bought the indulgences out of their fear of Purgatory and Hell. And this made Luther angry, because he remembered the wealth of Rome and contrasted it to the poverty of the people he saw paying for the indulgences.
But Luther had other issues going on, too. He had been deeply reading his Bible, particularly his New Testament ever since he had entered the monastery, sinning by going against his own father’s wishes in an attempt to save his own soul from Hell.
By 1516, Luther had developed a serious problem with the idea that a person could do good deeds and thus become good enough for Heaven. Here is his argument – it is a bit different from anything you’ve heard, so listen carefully:
If doing good is the way to get right with God, then the better you are, the more likely God will let you into Heaven, right? That’s the who idea, right?
So what does it mean to be good or do good deeds?
Isn’t it fair to say that being selfish is being bad and being self-less is being good?
So isn’t a desire to avoid Hell and get into Heaven selfish? Trying to go to Heaven makes you selfish – a bad person!
And isn’t the most self-less thing you can do is to go to Hell? Trying to go to Hell would make you self-less – a good person.
So shouldn’t you stop working hard to be good enough for God and instead become the ugliest, evilest-acting person there is so you can self-lessly be sent to Hell by God? Isn’t that the best way to actually be a good person?
Well, it may be logical, but I think that pretty much everyone agrees that there is something terribly wrong with this strategy to get to Heaven. Even Luther quickly rejected it.
But Luther had found a serious problem with the entire idea that your own goodness gets you right with God. Trying to be good enough for God means that you do good deeds for the most selfish of reasons. And thus, if you are trying to be good enough for God, you are a bad person, deserving of Hell.
And we have to recognize something else. God doesn’t need us to be good. God doesn’t need us to be bad. Because of God’s power and wisdom and majesty, it really doesn’t matter how we act as far as God is concerned, because we are like fleas on the back of ants in comparison to God. God doesn’t need us to be good. God doesn’t even need to notice us.
Meanwhile, in 1517, Luther had begun to read and teach from the Book of Romans in earnest.
And there, Luther found something very different in Paul’s writings. He found something very different from what regular Catholic teaching of the day was.
You will notice that up until this point, I’ve said very little about the role the worship of Jesus Christ played in the Catholic church of Luther’s time. That’s because the focus wasn’t on Jesus Christ – the focus was always on what “I’ve” done or what “I” haven’t done.
This was the key thing that Luther found in Paul’s writings. It was a focus upon Jesus Christ and what Jesus had done.
(I want to say at this point that most of the things I’ve mentioned about Catholic belief are the beliefs of the average person in 1500 – what you might call “popular theology”, in many cases not the theology of the deepest Catholic thinkers of the day. And today, the Catholic Church has mostly reformed itself, particularly since the series of councils in the early 1960’s called Vatican II. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that Catholic belief today is what I’ve just talked about. Most of this is what the average Catholic in the street believed in 1500.Times have changed. In fact, within 5 years, Tetzel was fired and the Pope laid out clear guidelines that curbed the abuse of indulgences. Today, they are not sold, but are still occasionally issued.)
So Luther found in the Book of Romans, John's Gospel, the Book of Galatians and the Book of Hebrews something completely different than what everybody believed in 1517. Luther found a focus upon Jesus Christ and what Jesus had done for us all.
Here is what Luther found:
He found that what we do doesn’t really matter. What Jesus said and did makes all the difference.
Let’s look at this. We know from the Bible that God doesn’t lie, that God keeps God’s promises, that God has great integrity, and that God is truly good. Thus, if we know that if God has spoken something, we know that it is true and good.
And Jesus said certain things.
First, Jesus claimed repeatedly to be God’s Son, speaking on behalf of God, doing the things only God could do. Jesus was claiming to be one and the same as the Father. In John 10:30, Jesus even said, “I and the Father are one.”
A bold claim, right? Jesus is God.
We know that Jesus died on the cross, and we are told this not only by the Four Gospels, but Paul’s writings, Peter’s letters, the book of Hebrews, and John’s letters, and even Jude and James assume that Jesus died on the cross and then was resurrected and spoke to the disciples after His resurrection. So the New Testament is clear about Jesus’ death and resurrection as being historical facts. And Jesus surely would not have been resurrected if He was lying about being divine, right?
And Jesus said, “If you follow me, you will have eternal life” and Jesus also said that those who follow Jesus will be with Him in Heaven and other similar statements. These are promises made by the divine Son of God.
Now let me change gears a minute.
Imagine that you are a woman and you want to marry a prince. You cannot marry the prince by your own actions. But if the prince says, “I do” and you say “I do”, then when the minister says, “You are husband and wife”, you are married. These mere words ARE the action – you can only be married by the promises. The action of kissing the prince doesn’t make you married to the prince. Even more extreme actions along that same line don’t mean you are married to the prince.
But if you don’t believe the prince when he says, “I do”, then you aren’t really married, are you? The relationship isn’t really there – you have a fake marriage. And no matter what you do, you’ll never be truly married until you believe the prince was sincere when he said “I do”.
In the same way, Luther realized that your actions mean absolutely nothing about your salvation. What is critical is that you believe that Jesus is truly divine, that when He spoke, he was speaking the words of God, and thus when Jesus talked about us joining Him in eternal life He was telling the truth. His promises can be trusted – and must be trusted. Will you bow before Him?
You see, salvation isn’t based on the number of people you’ve given food to, the amount of money you’ve donated to the church, the number of hitchhikers you’ve picked up, the clothes you’ve donated or the kind words you’ve spoken. It isn’t the number of times you’ve prayed, the number of times you’ve read the Bible cover-to-cover, or even the number of people you’ve brought to baptism that saves you.
According to Paul, according to Luther, according to John Wesley, according to Jesus Himself – what matters is whether or not you believe that Jesus is who He said He was, that His death matters, that He came back to life.
Do you believe what Scripture tells you?
If you believe these things, then you are naturally following Jesus, you have faith in Jesus, and God is pleased to have you join God and Jesus in Heaven one day. For you are focused upon and giving glory to God’s Son, which is what God wants. God has given you grace which you have accepted in faith because you believe what God’s Son Jesus Christ has said is true.
If you don’t believe that what Jesus said is true, if you don’t believe the accounts of His life, death, and resurrection are true, if you don’t believe in the existence of a loving God – then you are not following Jesus and don’t trust God the Father, and therefore, you will not be joining them in eternity, no matter how many good deeds you’ve done, no matter how many people you’ve baptized, no matter how big you’ve grown a church, no matter how nice your clothes are, and it doesn’t even matter if you gave every beggar you ever saw a hundred dollars. Your actions mean nothing unless you believe the story of Christ, the Good News of Christ, the Gospel, what Luther called the evangelon, which is the Greek word that became translated as Gospel.
Like a marriage – belief is enough, but belief is necessary in relationships.
Martin Luther, reading His Bible, found this out. Martin Luther believed that this faith was everything. Luther believed that the indulgences were a scam, the sacrifices weren’t necessary since Jesus had been sacrificed once and for all, the money didn’t need to flow to Rome, the church of the day was corrupt and the leaders were in it for the money and power and prestige and only faith was necessary. And Luther decided to have a debate over these issues.
Only faith was necessary. Sola Fides in Latin.
A great storm began to brew in Germany.
Do you believe? Do you have faith in what has been written in the Scripture?
Sola Scriptura – only Scripture. Sola Scriptura, in Latin.
The storm would be a titanic battle between the authority of the Bible and the authority of the Pope.
Do you believe? Do you have faith in the Scripture. Do you believe that God gives us salvation only by God’s grace, completely disregarding our attempted good works?
Sola Gratia. Only Grace. Sola Gratia, in Latin.
Many men had been burnt at the stake for challenging the beliefs of the Pope. Would God give Luther the grace to survive the storm?
Sola Scriptura, Sola Gratia, Sola Fides.
Only Scripture. Only Grace. Only Faith.
In Part II, we'll see what happened when Luther went public with his newly recovered ideas from the Bible.
But if you don’t believe the prince when he says, “I do”, then you aren’t really married, are you? The relationship isn’t really there – you have a fake marriage. And no matter what you do, you’ll never be truly married until you believe the prince was sincere when he said “I do”.
In the same way, Luther realized that your actions mean absolutely nothing about your salvation. What is critical is that you believe that Jesus is truly divine, that when He spoke, he was speaking the words of God, and thus when Jesus talked about us joining Him in eternal life He was telling the truth. His promises can be trusted – and must be trusted. Will you bow before Him?
You see, salvation isn’t based on the number of people you’ve given food to, the amount of money you’ve donated to the church, the number of hitchhikers you’ve picked up, the clothes you’ve donated or the kind words you’ve spoken. It isn’t the number of times you’ve prayed, the number of times you’ve read the Bible cover-to-cover, or even the number of people you’ve brought to baptism that saves you.
According to Paul, according to Luther, according to John Wesley, according to Jesus Himself – what matters is whether or not you believe that Jesus is who He said He was, that His death matters, that He came back to life.
Do you believe what Scripture tells you?
If you believe these things, then you are naturally following Jesus, you have faith in Jesus, and God is pleased to have you join God and Jesus in Heaven one day. For you are focused upon and giving glory to God’s Son, which is what God wants. God has given you grace which you have accepted in faith because you believe what God’s Son Jesus Christ has said is true.
If you don’t believe that what Jesus said is true, if you don’t believe the accounts of His life, death, and resurrection are true, if you don’t believe in the existence of a loving God – then you are not following Jesus and don’t trust God the Father, and therefore, you will not be joining them in eternity, no matter how many good deeds you’ve done, no matter how many people you’ve baptized, no matter how big you’ve grown a church, no matter how nice your clothes are, and it doesn’t even matter if you gave every beggar you ever saw a hundred dollars. Your actions mean nothing unless you believe the story of Christ, the Good News of Christ, the Gospel, what Luther called the evangelon, which is the Greek word that became translated as Gospel.
Like a marriage – belief is enough, but belief is necessary in relationships.
Martin Luther, reading His Bible, found this out. Martin Luther believed that this faith was everything. Luther believed that the indulgences were a scam, the sacrifices weren’t necessary since Jesus had been sacrificed once and for all, the money didn’t need to flow to Rome, the church of the day was corrupt and the leaders were in it for the money and power and prestige and only faith was necessary. And Luther decided to have a debate over these issues.
Only faith was necessary. Sola Fides in Latin.
A great storm began to brew in Germany.
Do you believe? Do you have faith in what has been written in the Scripture?
Sola Scriptura – only Scripture. Sola Scriptura, in Latin.
The storm would be a titanic battle between the authority of the Bible and the authority of the Pope.
Do you believe? Do you have faith in the Scripture. Do you believe that God gives us salvation only by God’s grace, completely disregarding our attempted good works?
Sola Gratia. Only Grace. Sola Gratia, in Latin.
Many men had been burnt at the stake for challenging the beliefs of the Pope. Would God give Luther the grace to survive the storm?
Sola Scriptura, Sola Gratia, Sola Fides.
Only Scripture. Only Grace. Only Faith.
In Part II, we'll see what happened when Luther went public with his newly recovered ideas from the Bible.
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