Rescued from Despair
This year we are remembering that exactly 500 years ago in October 1517 the Protestant Reformation began. There was a separation from the Roman Catholic Church initiated by Martin Luther and continued by John Calvin and others. During the Reformation Martin Luther was put in a castle for his own protection. It was a very difficult time in his life because all kinds of things were going on that he was afraid of.
Luther understood life based on Psalm 46, “the Lord is our refuge and our strength and our fortress.” He wrote as a kind of signature hymn for the Reformation, “A mighty fortress is our God.” Luther wrote hundreds of hymns but this one survives because of its grandeur and its message, it is powerful, penetrating and it glorifies God.
In July of 1505, Luther, a twenty-one year old university student was walking along near Sutterheim, Germany when he was overtaken by a thunderstorm. He was struck to the ground by lightning and he cried out in his terror, “St Anne save me and I shall become a monk.” It is indeed interesting that a man who called out to a saint to save him would eventually repudiate the idea that we should pray to saints. And the man who would become a monk would eventually renounce his vows of monkhood and monasticism and he would in turn become one of the most famous men in all of history.
More books have been written about him than any other man who has ever lived except for the life of Jesus Christ and the apostle Paul. I have Catholic friends who say that Martin Luther was a traitor, he was a man with many flaws and that he began what is known as the Protestant Reformation because of some personal grievances. If you are looking for a man with flaws, indeed you should look at Luther. I surely do not agree with everything that Luther taught, said or did.
But at the same time whether you are a Catholic or Protestant, whatever you religion is, you and I need to appreciate the struggle that Martin Luther had and how it was eventually resolved. Luther struggled with depression or guilt or a sense of alienation from God, a disconnectedness, a disquiet of spirit. People sometimes call it an existential despair.
He wondered how he could please Almighty God. And so in honor of his vow there in the thunderstorm, he enrolled in the Augustinian monastery in Erferdt, Germany. And there was a beautiful church attached to it with beautiful windows. And it was in this church, next to the cloister, that Luther would prostrate himself on a slab of stone. And there he took his vows of celibacy, poverty and obedience.
Luther felt terrorized by God. He saw God, unlike many of us, as very holy. So when he performed his first mass, he trembled and later said, “I was utterly terror stricken, I thought to myself, in what way shall I address His majesty seeing that all men ought to tremble in the presence of even an earthly prince. Who am I that I should lift my eyes or raise my hands to the divine majesty? I am but dust and ashes full of sin, and I am speaking to the living and true God.”
Luther used all of the things that are made available in that monastery in terms of the facilities of the church. Nowadays it is not possible to see the actual place where Luther lived, it is a room but it is more like a prison cell, which you can see through a lattice. It is a solid stone floor, walls and ceiling. Luther slept without blankets so as to put to death the needs of the flesh. He sometimes fasted so long that people thought that he might die.
He begged for his food to humiliate himself. And in those days it was clearly believed that we had to be perfect to get into heaven. But how is that kind of perfection obtained? What do we need to do to satisfy Almighty God? It was believed that in a monastery you had some special consideration. But Luther knew no peace because he never knew whether he had done enough.
In those days the believe was that there are two kinds of Christians. There were the saints who go to heaven directly after death and the common person who died with too much sin to go directly to heaven. The Catholics still believe in purgatory, which is the place where one would be able to eventually be purged thoroughly enough to enter into heaven. But nobody knew how long purgatory was or how torturous the process might be.
Luther used the sacraments of the church. Of special consolation to him was confession. Sometimes he would begin by reciting the seven deadly sins and the Ten Commandments and then he would start, one time lasting seven hours. And then Luther would say to the priest, I think we should meet again because I forgot something. The priest became so exasperated that he said, when you confess, let it be for some big sin like murder, adultery or blasphemy but not for all these small little sins.
Luther was a better theologian than his contemporaries because he realized that the issue was not whether the sin was big or little. But the real issue was whether that sin had been forgiven or not. Because Luther understood, as many Christians today do not, that the slightest small sin may banish you from God’s presence forever and Luther understood that. The question was how do you do this?
But he got to a dead end, sins in order to be forgiven had to be remembered. If they were not remembered they could not be confessed and therefore cannot be forgiven. So could he trust his own memory? But the issue was even deeper than that. What if he did what God considered to be sin but he did not recognize them as sin. So when he looked into his heart he realized that his problem was much greater than all that.
He realized that his whole nature was corrupt and that he was a sinner even if he remembered all of his sins, even if he confessed all his sins. Tomorrow would be another day, and that tomorrow would be fraught with more confessions because more sins would be committed. And so the situation was like perhaps mopping up the floor with the faucet running.
So when does this all end and when can I have assurance that I have done enough for God? Luther was in despair. Now in the year 1511, he was transferred to Wittenberg where there was a new university, so he went there to teach philosophy. And as you enter into the university, passed the door you see a courtyard. That is where the confession priest met him one day and said, why don’t you teach the bible instead?
And so Luther began to teach Scripture, and that is when some understanding began to dawn. So he began to lecture on the book of Psalms. And then he came to Psalm 22:1, “My God. my God, why have you forsaken me?” And Luther thought, why did Jesus Himself experience that alienation? Why is it that Jesus went through this? He experienced what I have experienced. And so he began to understand that it was for all of us that Jesus suffered that.
And when he was lecturing on Romans he noticed that Romans 1:17 says, “For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, “The just shall live by faith.” Luther trembled when he read that word, the righteousness of God. Look at Romans 1:18 where it says, “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.”
Initially Luther thought that he would have a better chance of meeting God’s demands if He was not perfectly righteous. But how can you reach the demands of a God that has righteousness as one of His attributes? So Luther struggled with this and then he read Romans 3:23-24, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” We are justified freely by grace.
And in Romans 4:3 it said that “Abraham believed God and it was accounted to him as righteousness.” So Luther pondered this day and night and he finally saw the connection between the justness of God, which terrified him, and the statement that “the just shall live by faith.” When Luther understood what God said, he felt himself reborn, and that he now was able to enter into the gates of paradise.
Luther discovered what had been lost, through the centuries of tradition that we are saved by the righteousness of another, namely Jesus Christ. It is somebody else who gives us righteousness that we do not have. And it is received by faith. What he learned was that there is an attribute of God called righteousness, but there is also the gift of righteousness that God gives freely to those who believe the Gospel. No wonder that Luther felt as if he entered the gates of paradise. His search was over.
Meanwhile there was a Pope name Leo who needed some money. The construction of St Peter’s Basilica, regarded as one of the holiest shrines, located in Vatican City began in 1506 and was still unfinished. So Pope Leo decided to issue a new proclamation of indulgences. Now indulgences have been sold for centuries and it was a payment in the form of work or money that would shorten the length of time that you would experience in purgatory as the temporal consequences of sin.
The emphasis is on ‘temporal’, for example indulgences would never keep someone out of hell because those were eternal consequences. But indulgences would help in that it would shorten your time in purgatory. But these indulgences now were sold with a new twist. You not only could buy indulgences for yourself and your family, but now you could also buy it for those who have died and are presently in purgatory.
Across the river from Wittenberg was a man named Tetzel who was selling indulgences. And he would say to people, “Listen to your mother who is in purgatory, who is now saying, can’t you not give some money, and I would be out of this torment of fire.” So people paid a lot to buy these indulgences. And people from Wittenberg came to Tetzel and told Luther that they had purchased an indulgence for sins they had not yet committed but were intending to commit.
When Luther heard that he was very angry. At that point he was not against indulgences, but he was against their abuse. In anger Luther walked the half mile from the University to the castle church there in Wittenberg, inside the beautiful sanctuary. And he actually took 95 theses that he wrote out, and he attached those theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517
The original thesis were written in Latin, in fact today on a metal door you have all of them inscribed in Latin. And they were translated into German and they were distributed all through Germany. He was challenging the abuses of the church. As a result of this Martin Luther became famous. And this became a string of events that ultimately resulted in what we call the Protestant Reformation.
Now the real message of the Reformation is that when Jesus Christ died on the cross, “God made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us.” (2 Corinthians 5:21). So there were two transactions that happened on the cross. The first transactions was that our sin was credited to Christ. And it is very clear that Jesus himself is sinless. So our sin caused Him to be legally guilty of all our sins that are evil.
The other transaction is that His righteousness is connected to us, it is given to us as a free gift. We now become the righteousness of God in Christ. So Jesus was getting what He did not deserve, namely our sin, and we were getting what we do not deserve, namely His righteousness. We are getting His righteousness by faith. We are saved by His merit entirely and not our own.
This righteousness has several characteristics. First it is a free gift. Romans 6:23 says, “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Think of this, it has to be free. Can you imagine us as sinners buying our way into heaven? And giving God something we think in exchange for His righteousness? We learned from Romans that we are tainted and even the best of our works are tainted.
So if we are to receive righteousness it has to come from God, untainted by our own sin, and it has to be given to us as a gift. Luther says that we are like parched ground, we cannot insist on rain coming, but if the rain comes it falls on the ground as a free gift from above. So the real issue is not the greatness of our sin, God can save anyone as long as they put their trust in Jesus Christ.
Not only is it a free gift, but it is given equally to all who believe. Romans 3:22 says, “The righteousness of God, through faith in Jesus Christ, to all and on all who believe.” There is only one kind of righteousness that is perfect, that cannot be improved upon. So there is no division between “saints” who Catholics believe have more righteousness to enter heaven than the common people who believe. So Luther rejected purgatory, because that was based on the belief that saints had more righteousness than the rest.
This leads to the priesthood of the believer. In 1521 on Christmas Day something new happened in the church. First all the liturgy was in the German language instead of Latin. For the first time they heard something they could understand. For the first time people were able to participate in the Lord’s Supper together. 1 Peter 2:9 says, “But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people.” Now all believers, not just priests, have the same access to God.
Luther was hiding in a castle for 10 months because the Catholics had put a price on his head, and there he translated the Bible in the German language. He did the entire New Testament in 20 weeks. Eventually he translated the Old Testament also which took years. He wanted for the common person to be able to read the Bible. Look at the impact, centuries later of people now who can read the Bible to their children.
And lastly, the righteousness of God is given to us permanently. When was Luther actually saved? Jesus said we must be born again to enter the Kingdom of God. Was it at his baptism? No, baptism does not convert you. Was it during those times of confession? No. As Christians we confess our sins, but that is not how we became Christian. We need one act that permanently settles our relationship with God.
When we are born again, we belong to the family of God. Hebrews 10:11-14 says, “And every priest offers repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. 12 But Christ, after He had offered one sacrifice for sins forever, sat down at the right hand of God, 13 from that time waiting till His enemies are made His footstool. 14 For by one offering He has perfected forever those who are being sanctified.”
That single sacrifice is sufficient and when you place your trust in Jesus, all your sins past, present and future are forgiven. Jesus death on the cross was so well accepted by God, that if you believe in Him you become a child of God forever. Now in that context, confession becomes very important because that maintains our personal relationship with God. Our status is secure but we want to maintain a blessed relationship with God.
This does not mean that you can now sin without impunity. If you truly believe and God has given you a new heart, then you automatically will not think that. You will want to serve God to the best of your ability. It is free when you trust in Christ alone, not in Christ and works, not in Christ and anything else. Good deeds flow from our relationship with Christ, but are of no merit for salvation. The merit of Jesus only is complete and total.
Are you ready to receive Him in your heart and accept Him as Lord and ruler over your life just like Luther did 500 years ago? If you are, just pray with me in your heart, because this is just between you and the Lord, “Almighty heavenly Father, come into my heart and forgive my sin. I know I am a sinner. I want your cleansing and I know that you died for me and that you paid my penalty, thank you for your grace Lord Jesus. Amen.”
If you prayed that sincerely, God says you have stepped from darkness into light. Romans 10:9 says, “If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.” Praise the Lord.