Well, tonight we're going to look at part two, and in this series we are calling the five solas, and our focus tonight will be sola fide, which simply means faith alone. And our historical focus will be none other than Martin Luther. The sheer magnitude of the task of trying to find a way to put some parentheses around the impact of the life of Martin Luther in 35 or 40 minutes is significant, but we're going to to have the privilege, because of our constraint of really drilling down and focusing on the highlights, perhaps we could say, of his effect, of the almost immeasurable effect that he had on the Christian church by God's providence during his life. Martin Luther was born to Hans Luther, later to be changed Luther and his wife, Margaret, on November the 10th, 1483, in Eiselben, Saxony, Germany. He, even at a very young age, manifest a brilliant mind. At the earliest of years, his educators knew right away that he had an unusual ability to comprehend and to shape and to thought the things of reason and logic that he was exposed to. His father was a copper miner and he wanted his son, especially having learned of his seemingly unusual mind, to become a lawyer. But Providence would have it otherwise. There's a fascinating account told by Luther himself that has been variously translated over the years of his pursuit of a law degree but to be riding home one day, one evening horseback when a storm blew up and there's talk of a lightning bolt and of being thrown from a horse and and his own discourse with an angel pleading God's mercy to save his life. All of that culminating in this. Luther believed that if God would grant him the grace to live, he would commit his days, all the rest of his days, to be a monk. And he followed through on that commitment. Luther joined the strictest of the monastic orders, which were the Augustinians. They were an interesting order of monks. While they did gather in cloisters and in homes and in monasteries, they really gathered only so they could sharpen their preaching skills. They were marked as preaching monks. They were to go out after their times together and study in prayer and preach and teach in the local villages and aid the local parish pastors. Luther again was recognized for his brilliance as he began to study and to go out and do his part to preach. He had a gift for language. And even though he would, he says of himself, preferred to have stayed back in the monastery and scrubbed the floors, his superiors recognized his gift. Some have said of him that he was a walking concordance. That's how well he understood what he read and in particular how well he could quantify what he read in Scripture. Now all of that was said of him before he had ever studied Scripture formally, before he had ever gone to a university. But Luther developed in those early years a burning concern which could be variously summarized, but we'll let him do it himself. This, he said, never left his mind. How can I stand before God as a sinful man? Hours upon hours Luther would spend in the confessional. He literally feared God and feared Him greatly. He wrote of those years that this was the result of his strife. He said, I lost touch with Christ, the Savior and Comforter, and made of Him the jailer and hangman of my poor soul. And even though his peers tried to affirm him and to point out that he probably lived a more upright life than any of them, he refused to accept it. They couldn't understand his fear. They couldn't understand his constant bearing on and trying to recognize every imaginable sin in his life. And this went on for more than a decade. He was often told, stop confessing, don't come back until you have something worth confessing. His skills and biblical knowledge began to earn him a repute. In 1507, he was ordained. In 1508, he was invited by von Staupitz to teach theology at the newly founded University of Wittenberg. And then, then came a trip to Rome. In 1510, he leaves the university with another monk. He considered it a privilege to have been chosen to take this trip. And they go to Rome and in so doing they arrive at the very heart, of course, of the Catholic Church. What Luther saw in Rome shocked him to his core. Priests overtly spending time with prostitutes. selling graces. In other words, offering forgiveness for confession, but only at a price. Luther, while having read of these things and having his own concerns already of the abuses of the church, he never imagined at the epicenter, at Rome itself, he would find such disgraces. There in Rome, the church had brought, presumably, 40 stairs from Jerusalem. Stairs that they said Jesus had climbed when he stood before Pilate. They brought the stairs to Rome, they reassembled them. They are still there today. Here's a picture of those stairs. And still today, pilgrimages are made to Rome and Catholics on their knees go up stair by stair, each step begging God's grace. Well, Luther, while he was in Rome, made that climb. Knee upon stair, knee upon stair, he finally arrived at the top. He stood up and he spoke these words out loud, recorded by his co-traveler. Who knows if it is true? Luther, recognizing the abuses, and despite his minimal, though highly developed, compared to his peers' understanding of Scripture, he was doubting to his very core whether any of it was true. Returning to Germany, he poured himself into the scriptures so that he could find answers. And that had a double effect in Luther's life. Number one, he began to learn pure truth, untainted by all the traditions of men. And number two, the truth that he was learning seemed to so clearly contradict the teachings of the church that he was now so actively involved in. He would say, loosely quoted, I was growing to love the Bible even as I grew to hate the truth that it declared. You see, Luther realized in his study that God demanded righteousness. He became convinced that God's incessant demand in Scripture for righteousness and holiness all the while knowing that no human being could ever be righteous, no human being could ever be holy. He grew to be convinced that this God was cruel, that He was vicious. Luther, in his careful study of Scripture, decided that he hated God most of all. A God who would demand righteousness and perfection that no one could ever give. And then finally, one day. And Luther says, in a moment, in one day. While studying Romans 1, this burst, he said, upon his understanding. This is what he was reading, Romans chapter 1, verse 16, where Paul writes, For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. Luther, heretofore, had found nothing but shame in the gospel. But yet here was Paul, a man, and only a man, who understood, surely understood better than Luther ever could, the demand of God for righteousness. Yet Paul is saying that that gospel emboldened him to salvation, that the very word of truth had liberated Paul, that same word of truth that was destroying Luther. And then, the next verse, verse 17. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, the righteous shall live by faith. In that moment, Luther recalls, this was the result. Then, finally, God had mercy on me. And I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous lives by a gift of God, namely by faith. And this is the meaning. The righteousness of God is revealed by the gospel, namely, the passive righteousness with which the merciful God justifies us by faith. As it is written, he who through faith is righteous shall live. Here, here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. Well, Luther seems to have settled the war within. Finally, he recognized that God's constant demand of righteousness was met by an alien righteousness, by someone else, by Christ Himself. But while the war within him began to settle, the war without him began to rage all the more. Now while we don't know the exact timing of what seems to be Luther's born again experience because Luther wrote about it late in his life without a real clear chronology. But what we do know is that war broke out all around him. In 1512, he was awarded the Doctor of Theology, and he would spend the rest of his career at the University of Wittenberg. He had everything that a young professor and pastor could possibly want. But as we already saw last week in our introduction, and Luther had already begun to see clearly in Rome, these were dark days for the church. It was then the impact of a document that Luther wrote that would that would elevate the war and make it an ever-present threat. It was on October the 31st, 1517, 500 years ago, that Luther would nail his 95 theses against the abuses of the church on that very door. That's a picture of the castle church in Wittenberg. It was a call to repentance, a call for the church to repent, but it set loose a battle that Luther could never have imagined. This is what he wrote, only a few of the points. He said, when our Lord and Master Jesus Christ says repent, he means that the whole life of his followers on the earth is a constant and continual repentance. He wrote, it is the preaching of human folly to pretend that at the very moment when the money tinkles in the strong box, the soul flies off from purgatory, which is what Tetzel was telling the common people. If you'll drop a coin in the box, then you can release one of your loved ones from purgatory. This much is certain, Luther wrote in the 95 Theses, as soon as the money tinkles, avarice and the love of gain arrive, increase and multiply. But the aids and prayers of the church depend only on the will and good pleasure of God. You can't buy God's pleasure. He had no idea, as I said, what was coming as a result of that. He had no idea the reverberations that would be sent literally around the world. Now understand this, and most of the time we miss this when we think back on these events. When Luther pasted those theses on the door, it was not a protest. It was an invitation. You see, that's where the scholarly community of the university would post invitations to scholarly conversations. He wrote those 95 theses in Latin. That was the language of the scholars. They were the only ones who could read those theses and really understand them. He wanted to have a conversation. He was not trying to exclude the church. He was not trying to go around the church. He wanted to sit down in the church. and talk about these concerns. But what happened? Some students saw them, understood at least a portion of them, copied them into German, and within two weeks, using the new printing press, they had circulated them to all the villages in the area. In fact, in the history of Reformation, here's how this period or this reaction is described. These theses spread with the rapidity of lightning. A month had not elapsed before they were at Rome. In a fortnight, says a contemporary historian, they were in every part of Germany, and in four weeks had traversed almost the whole of Christendom. As if the angels themselves had been the messengers and carried them before the eyes of all men, nobody can believe. What a noise they made. They were afterwards translated into Dutch and Spanish and a traveler even sold them at Jerusalem. Now at the heart of those theses, if you took the time to read them, was really the indulgences. The fact that grace was being proffered for a price. And it was all false. The church was traveling around selling people false hope, selling people false forgiveness. Forgiveness for their sins for a price, forgiveness for the sins of the dead for another price. All of those monies, of course, were targeted to go back to Rome to build larger and more ornate buildings for the church. But the protest had been lodged. And Luther would now be given opportunities, by invitation, to speak in many forums and to defend what was sounding to the ears of the listeners like a brand new gospel. Here, though, is how Luther responds, in his own words, to the best scholars and the best doctors that Rome sent to debate him. It's really pretty fascinating. I see that the devil is incessantly attacking this fundamental article, meaning salvation by faith alone, by the instrumentality of his doctors and that, in this respect, he cannot rest or take any repose. Very well. I, Dr. Martin Luther, unworthy evangelist of our Lord Jesus Christ, hold this article that faith alone without works justifies in the sight of God. And I declare that the emperor of the Romans, the emperor of the Turks, the emperor of the Tartars, the emperor of the Persians, the Pope, all the cardinals, bishops, priests, monks, nuns, princes and nobles, all men and all devils must let it stand and allow it to remain forever. He could spin a yarn. But the dogmatism with which he has now gripped what he knows to be the only answer to eternal life, that it comes by faith alone. He goes on to say, If they will undertake to combat this truth, they will bring down the flames of hell upon their heads. This is the true and holy gospel. and the declaration of me, Dr. Luther, according to the light of the Holy Spirit." He goes on to say, "...nobody has died for our sins but Jesus Christ, the Son of God. I repeat it once more, should the world and all the devils tear each other and burst with fury, this is nevertheless true. And if it be He alone who takes away sin, it cannot be ourselves with our works. But good works follows redemption as the fruit appears on the tree. This is our doctrine. We maintain it in the name of God. Amen. Well, Luther would also take the time to write 99 propositions, something most of us aren't familiar with. He did it to defend the doctrines of grace, which were now beginning to take shape as we know them today. and would really form the definition of the Reformation. And here's just a glimpse into those 99 propositions that Martin Luther wrote. It is true that man who has become a corrupt tree can only will and do what is evil. It is not true that the will, when left to itself, can do good as well as evil, for it is not free but captive. It is not in the power of the will of man to choose or reject whatever is presented to it. Man cannot naturally wish God to be God. His wish is that he himself were God and that God were no God. The excellent, infallible, and sole preparation for grace is the eternal election and predestination of God. It is false to say that when man does all he can, he clears away the obstacles to grace. These truths being shaped, not truths he had learned in his tradition, not truths he would be taught at any seminary or university of theology present in his day. Truths he was gleaning by reading his Bible. Truths that we still hold dear today. He goes on. In one word, nature possesses neither a pure reason nor a good will. On the part of man, there is nothing which precedes grace unless it be impotence and even rebellion. There is no moral virtue without pride or sullenness, that is to say, without sin. From the beginning to the end, we are not the masters of our actions, but the slaves of them. We do not become righteous by doing what is righteous, but having become righteous, we do what is righteous. And this we do by faith alone in the perfect righteousness of Christ. Luther, taking every opportunity, both in word and in writing, seizing upon a popularity that Germany had never seen the like of, continued to declare the truth that salvation comes to man by God's grace through faith alone. But for all of this, Luther would pay a heavy price. He writes of this period of his life, I began this affair with great fear and trembling. Who was I, a poor, miserable, despicable friar, liker a corpse than a living man? Who was I to oppose the majesty of the Pope, before whom not only the kings of the earth and the whole world, but also, if I may so speak, heaven and hell trembled? compelled to yield obedience to His nod, nobody can imagine what my heart suffered during those first two years and into what depression, I might say what despair, I was often plunged. It's a heavy toll to stand against the opposition of a power as great as the church that prevailed in Luther's day. Despite his insistence of a salvation by faith alone and the righteousness of Christ alone, Luther never lost his grip on the need for the believers to pursue, the believers' pursuit of his own righteousness, of good works. He would write this, indeed, no man who has any experience or any knowledge of Christianity needs this new proof of a truth of which he is fully assured, vis-a-vis, that the more we adhere to justification by faith, the more strongly we feel the necessity of works, and the more diligently we practice them. Whereas, lax views as to the doctrine of faith necessarily lead to laxity of conduct. You see, Luther was already facing the charges that the Apostle Paul faced when he preached this gospel. That if you provide that salvation comes by a righteousness not of your own, you will unleash supposed believers into all manner of unrighteousness, which we know by God's gospel truth, and I hope by evidence of your own gospel life, that's simply not true. The truth is, if you deny the doctrine of faith, you will lead to the worst conduct. And that is what Luther defended. He also took time to write on nearly every subject you could write on. One of which was prayer. We actually used this quote when we studied prayer here not too many months ago. When you pray, Luther said, have few words, but many thoughts and affections. And above all, let these be profound. The less you speak, the better you pray. Few words and many thoughts make the Christian. Many words and few thoughts, the pagan. That's a sentiment that Charles Spurgeon took up himself and we might mention in a couple of weeks, an insistence that brief prayers are the best prayers. In 1518, The battle raging around Luther began to move ever closer to Rome, closer to the Pope, who was at that time Leo X. And so Luther chose to write to the Pope directly. And here's an excerpt from the letter that Luther wrote. Wherefore, most Holy Father, I throw myself at the feet of your holiness and submit to you with all I have and all I am. Destroy my cause or embrace it. Decide for me or decide against me. take my life or restore it to me, just as you please. I will recognize your voice as the voice of Jesus Christ who presides and speaks by you. If I have deserved death, I refuse not to die. The earth belongs unto the Lord and all that it contains. Let him be praise to all eternity. Amen." You can see there a hint of something that is ordinarily lost in Reflections on Luther. He maintained a humility. Oftentimes he's criticized, lambasted even, for his sharpness, his anger, his runaway temper, at least it was suggested in most of his arguments. But he still submitted himself to the authority of the church. He was not trying to destroy and wreck what he believed God had appointed as the authority that prevailed over the gospel. But Luther would be declared a heretic by that church. and without any real trial. He'd been given a period of time to appear before his accusers, but the troublesome stir among the common people always made that dangerous and inevitably impossible. It gave the church fear. They didn't want to be seen moving too aggressively against Martin Luther. And finally, they just made a declaration without a hearing. They decided he was a heretic and circulated such. But a hearing would finally come. But it would only come with one goal in mind. To press Luther to recant. He speaks about that when Rome sent their representative, who was Devio, and here is what Luther said. In a word, I'm ready to do all that may be demanded of a Christian, but I protest solemnly against the course which is sought to be given to this affair and against the strange pretension of constraining me to retract without having refuted me. In other words, he was called a heretic and told to retract, but all he was wanting all along was for the church to prove him wrong. to open their Bibles and to show him where in any case around these doctrines he had erred. As I said, Devio was the representative from Rome. He had no intention of trying to defend the church's position. He had one task given to him, and he was going to complete that task. Here is what he said, Or if you don't, I send you to Rome to appear there before the judges entrusted with the cognizance of your cause. I excommunicate you, you, all your partisans, all who are or may become favorable to you, and I reject them from the church. Full authority in this respect has been given me by the Holy Apostolic See. Think you, your protectors can stop me? Do you imagine that the Pope cares for Germany? The little finger of the Pope is stronger than all the German princes. So you see the church of course most of you would know by your history the Holy Roman Empire was a marriage of the church and government together. And this became a real political matter as much as it was a theological matter. Well Luther would rightly fear for his life. He would fear to go to Rome and would resist doing that, even if an invitation had actually been issued, which it never really was. But instead, he chose to live, as it were, in a self-imposed exile. This is what he wrote. I resign myself to exile. My enemies are so ensnaring me on all sides that I can nowhere live in safety. In order that no evil may befall you on my account, I, in the name of God, abandon your territories. I will go wherever an almighty and merciful God wishes me to be. Let him do with me as seemeth to him good. And Luther's history here becomes filled with evidences of God's protection. Princes around Germany would take him in and keep him until a threat arise and then arrange for safe passage to another prince of Germany who would take him in and keep him. Supernatural interventions are said to have saved his life on more than one occasion. But this Reformation, this Reformation was growing and it was growing among the people and they would not let him go quietly into that dark night. He is to blame, the church at Rome would say, for all of this troubling. From the history of the Reformation now, I want to just give you a summary. This is fairly long, but you can follow along while I read, and it really does kind of give you a capsule of what the ground has been that Luther has covered so far in this battle with the church. The Reformation, which commenced with the struggles of an humble soul in the cell of a convent at Erfurt, had never ceased to advance. An obscure individual, with the word of life in his hand, had stood erect in presence of worldly grandeur and made it tremble. This word he had opposed first to Tetzel and his numerous hosts, and these avaricious merchants, after a momentary resistance, had taken flight. Next, he had opposed it to the legate of Rome at Augsburg, and the legate, paralyzed, had allowed his prey to escape. At a later period, he had opposed it to the champions of learning in the halls of Leipzig, and the astonished theologians had seen their syllogistic weapons broken to pieces in their hands. At last, he had opposed it to the pope, of course, in writing, who, disturbed in his sleep, had risen up upon his throne and thundered at the troublesome monk, But the whole power of the head of Christendom, this Word in Luther's hand, had paralyzed. The Word had still a last struggle to maintain. It behooved to triumph over the emperor of the West, over the kings and princes of the earth, and then victorious over all the powers of the world, take its place in the church to reign in it as the pure Word of God. And now the year was 1521. And the new Roman Emperor was the young Charles V. He ordered an imperial diet. And we're not talking here about Weight Watchers. A diet is an assembly of the deliberative and legislative body of the Holy Roman Empire. We might call it a court. And this assembly is called the Diet of Worms because it was held in worms. Never, historians write, had a church assembly ever been attended by so many princes. The reason? Luther was invited. And he was promised safe passage if he would only agree to attend. And on April the 16th, 1521, Luther arrived in Worms and was told that he would appear before the body on the following day. He spent the night, he said, restless and in prayer. On April the 17th, The presiding officer, Johann Eck, asked if a collection of books assembled there on a table were Luther's, and if he was ready to deny their heresies. He then had the stenographer, as it were, to read off the list of books. Twenty-five books were read off. Luther said, I need more time to answer. And he was given until four o'clock the next day. Two questions, remember. Did you write them, and will you deny the heresies they contain? On April the 18th, Luther returned. He said, they are all mine. But as for the second question, they are not all of one sort. What's fascinating, if you could read his response, we have a record of his response, but he went on to place those writings into three categories. Category number one, works written by me which were well received even by my enemies and I will not reject those. Category number two, works written by me that attack the abuses, the lies, and the desolation of the Christian world and the papacy. I will not and cannot safely reject those without encouraging those abuses to continue. To retract them, Luther said, would be to open the door to all the more further oppression. He said, in fact, quote, if I now recount these then I would be doing nothing but strengthening tyranny. And then there was group three, attacks he had written against individuals. He apologized for the harsh tone of these writings, but he said, I cannot reject the substance of them. If it could be shown, however, he said, from the scriptures that any of them contained error, any and all of these books, he would reject them. And then he concluded by saying this, Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures, or by clear reason, for I do not trust either in the Pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves, I am bound by the scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. May God help me. Amen. You've unlikely heard some version of that, and in all likelihood heard a different version of that, which has Luther saying before he says, may God help me, amen, here I stand. I can do no other. Unfortunately, there's no record of Luther ever saying that, and most biblical scholars and historians today would reject that it should be considered something he actually said. It's something he actually did, but it isn't something that he actually said. Well, private conferences were then held to determine Luther's fate while he awaited in his, they thought, room that they had provided. But in fact, Luther fled. He was warned that this wasn't going to go well and so he was given passage. He returned to Wittenberg and from there he disappeared. But the council made a determination. And an edict was issued. And this is the edict. For this reason, we forbid anyone from this time forward to dare, either by words or by deeds, to receive, defend, sustain, or favor the said Martin Luther. On the contrary, we want him to be apprehended and punished as a notorious heretic as he deserves to be brought personally before us or to be securely guarded until those who have captured him inform us whereupon we will order the appropriate manner of proceeding against the said Luther. Those who will help in this capture will be rewarded generously for their good work." But Luther would never suffer the conditions of the edict. In fact, the edict would never be enforced in Germany, though it was enforced in other countries. It seems the church still feared the common people, influenced already by this profound demonstration of the gospel. In 1523, Martin Luther was married. He was 41 and his wife, Katharina, was 26. They moved into an abandoned monastery known as the Black Cloister. They didn't have a lot, but Luther, speaking of his love for his wife, said he was the richest man in the world. They ran a dairy and they continued to teach and to train young men. She, famously, was a brewmeister and would make beer in their bathtub and sell it for extra money. Katharina bore six children. Hans was born in June of 1526, Elizabeth in December of 1527, but she died just a few months after birth. Magdalene was born in 1529. She died at the age of 12 in Luther's arms. Martin was born in 1531, Paul in 1533, and finally Margaret in 1534. Martin Luther also became a prolific hymn writer. We still sing, A Mighty Fortress is Our God, written by Martin Luther. From 1531 to 1546, Luther's health began to fade. On February the 15th, 1546, Luther preached his last sermon in his hometown of Eisleben. He would die three days later, on February the 18th, at age 62. piece of paper was later found on which Luther had written his last words. We are beggars. This is true. And because it is true, all of us can only hope and trust that God has been true. when he declares to us from the gospel that the righteous shall live by faith and that by faith alone. This is the core principle of sola fide. There is salvation in nothing other, listen, than perfect righteousness. And there is no perfect righteousness other than the righteousness of Christ. Therefore, we are saved by grace and not by works, except that we must admit it was Christ's works that saved us. And so, the righteousness we enjoy even today is the same righteousness that Martin Luther so struggled with in his own life. I hope you can fight by Luther's victory, the victory that he declared when he finally realized, bursting upon him in a moment, that the righteousness was not his own. He lived the rest of his days defending that gospel. He had some dark days. Much to be scrutinized and fairly criticized in the final writings and positions that Martin Luther took as it regards many issues including his position regarding Muslims and most importantly and most I guess we would say concerning some unusual and even, what shall I call them, dangerous teachings against Jews themselves. But there is no perfect man, right? Other than the perfect man. And next week, as we look at the life of John Calvin, we'll take a few minutes to get Calvin's perspective on Luther. And I think we must agree with him. God greatly used this man to rekindle fires that still burn today in the Christian church. You have been listening to Pastor and Bible Teacher Steve Wilson of Grace Community Church in Bowling Green, Kentucky. We trust you have been encouraged and challenged by this message. If you would like to listen to more of Pastor Wilson's messages or obtain more information on the ministry of Grace Community Church, you can go to our website at gccbg.com. That's gccbg.com or call 270-781-2595. Yeah.