Martin Luther: Outlaw to Revolutionary - Martin Luther

Hey, I'm Pastor Steve Hole.

I want to empower you today to walk in your true identity as a worshiper and warrior.

Today, embrace the power of God's Word and the Holy Spirit.

Welcome to the Born for War podcast.

Okay, so today's a really strange day.

It's on election eve eve, right?

And uh many of you probably your kids did Halloween, went around and got little candies and things like that.

I used to steal candy on Halloween.

I won't go into that story, but uh I was really, really good at it.

Um but October 31st is actually Reformation Day.

And um, and it was on that, the eve of All Saints Day, which is November 1st, that Martin Luther nailed the 95 Arguments or Theses to the Wittenberg door in Saxony, Germany in 1517.

And I yeah, I did this at the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, which was in 2017, but uh I decided today to do something different.

So I'm gonna I'm gonna celebrate, we're gonna celebrate Reformation Day because you have no idea.

Most of you have no idea that the way we worship, the church you attend, the democracy that we have, the revolution that was called the American Revolution, the first Great Awakening in the 1740s under Jonathan Edwards, the second great awakening in the early 1800s with Charles Finney couldn't have happened without the Reformation.

And so the Reformation is the greatest event that ever happened on the face of the globe other than Jesus Christ.

It's absolutely true that we would not be in this country, we wouldn't even have a free country if it were not for the Protestant Reformation.

Now, the Protestant Reformation never would have happened except by this depressed, wholehearted Augustinian monk named Martin Luther.

So we're gonna talk about Martin Luther.

Don't check out.

Do not check out.

You're saying, Steve's becoming a history teacher now.

I'm checking out.

I hated history.

I hope it's gonna be interesting to you.

And we have ushers with long poles that are gonna come along with a feather that's taped to the end of it.

And if they see you falling asleep, they're gonna tip your little nose and wake you up.

That's what the Puritans used to do in the 1700s, not 1600, 1700.

No.

So it is gonna be a little bit of a history lesson, but I felt like it was important, and I'm gonna download what's not taught in our schools anymore, so that I think you will have um a corner on the market of the history of the modern world, like those who don't know this information.

So I pray that it'll be interesting to you and hang with me.

And you may hear things that I can't go into because of time that you might want to just write down that name or write down that date, and you go do the research on it.

So I've only got so much time to cover a lot of stuff.

But I'm focusing on this Augustinian monk named Martin Luther.

He was called a wild pig by the most powerful man in the world at that time, Pope Leo X.

It was in the 1520 papal bull, which is like a charge from the Pope, called in Latin ex sergei domine, that he was excommunicated.

The bull or charge against Luther began with these words: quote, Rise up, O Lord, defend your cause, for there is a wild boar loose in your vineyard.

What had caused the Pope, the most powerful man in the world at that time, to be so upset by a little Augustinian monk in Saxony, Germany?

Martin Luther had just nailed 95 theses or disputations or arguments against the Church of Rome on October 31st, 1517.

And at first the Pope had thought nothing of it, and he even said, he's just a drunken German who will change his mind when he gets sober.

But something happened that no one expected.

Luther wrote the 95 arguments, the trade language of the learned of the church, intended just for the intellectual class, in a debate.

But the manuscript was soon translated into German, and all over Germany, the common people were able to read what Luther wrote.

And now, this small piece of parchment had turned from a little theological spark by an Augustinian monk into a conflagration, a blazing fire that was burning from a small town in Wittenberg, Saxony, Germany, all the way to Rome, the capital of Christendom.

Over the next 30 years, this man would be the most revered and most hated man in Europe at that time.

So who was this wild boar?

This wild pig from Saxony?

And what did he discover, or might we better say, rediscover, that made him the most loved and hated man in Europe?

Martin Luther.

Born in 1483 to an enterprising peasant family.

He grew up under a demanding father who wanted his son to become a successful lawyer, and he was sent to the best schools of that time.

Martin's father, Hans, was a man of great intelligence and talent.

And though he had started out as a miner, he had become a successful entrepreneur in the mining business and he owned several smelting works.

Luther, following the dreams of his father to become a successful lawyer, was sent to the best schools at that time, which after completing his master's degree began to study law.

But on one fateful night, on his way back to law school, he was caught up in a tremendous lightning storm.

In that moment, with trees splitting, rain pelting, thunder clapping, a lightning bolt hitting so close that he was unsure if he was dead or alive, the 21-year-old Luther shouted out, Help me, Saint Anne, I will become a monk.

And upon returning to college, he left law school and entered the cloister.

Tonight, he said, at the party they had for him, you will see me, but never again.

And even as those around him tried to dissuade him, Luther's mind was fixed.

The next morning he entered the Augustinian cloister and presented himself for holy orders.

What Luther would discover, the medieval Catholic Church, was that the God, the Father, and Jesus the Son were presented not as love, but as fierce judges.

The key aspects of the penal system of the medieval Roman Catholic Church was called sacerdotalism.

Sacerdotalism.

Sacerdotalism is the theological term given to the idea that the saving grace of Christ is conveyed to men through the channel of seven sacraments or mysteries administered by ordained priests and is found in now today the Catholic and Orthodox churches.

In Luther's day, the penal system that the church had worked out over the centuries was complex.

But what was clear was that the priest had the authority of the church, and the church had the authority of God to determine who was going to heaven or not going to heaven.

Four key aspects of the Roman Catholic Church at that time were, number one, confession.

First of all, one must go to confession every day and confess one's sins to a priest.

And it had to be an ordained priest.

Number two, penance.

Next, the priest would give the confessor penance or something he or she must do to be forgiven.

And this involved, hail Mary's and our fathers, that the sinful person must say.

Number three, merits.

A centuries-old theory of the church that there was a treasury of merit that came from the saints and Jesus.

The church taught that some special people who lived such holy lives had built up merits that were put in the treasury for people like us to gain forgiveness from.

So all the merits of the holy people, Jesus, the apostles, Mary, and then other so-called saints, were in this treasury that we could gain acceptance and forgiveness from God by giving ourselves to these merits, this surplus that our sins could be drawn upon.

Which led to, number four, indulgences.

The idea of indulgences came from this treasury of merit.

This was a scheme set up by the church where instead of doing penance for your sins, like doing a good deed for someone, you could purchase merits with money.

So you could pay for forgiveness of your sins, even for sins you had not committed, but you knew you were going to.

So you had the bone of Saint Peter's thigh.

You had the milk of St.

Mary's breast.

You had the stairs that Jesus has stood upon.

He made a pilgrimage in 1510, and he crawled the fabled steps of Scala sancta, which means holy stairs.

And it was there, after crawling the 28 stairs, saying our fathers, that Luther for the first time asked himself, What if this is not all true?

He didn't know what to do to untangle his guilt, his confusion, and his inner wrestling.

Depression overwhelmed him.

The agonies of his depression, what in German is called an Fechtung.

This feeling of utter hopelessness ruled over his mind.

He would later write of this hopeless search for perfection and forgiveness through the canon law.

If ever a monk got to heaven by his monkery, it was I.

In 1502, Frederick the Duke of Saxony had established a university in Wittenberg, Germany.

And he had asked his old friend Johannes von Stoppitz to teach theology there.

As Luther's mentor, Stoppitz, seeing the anxiety of Luther and the genius in Luther and his passion for the scriptures, ordered Luther to take a position in the new university in Wittenberg.

Studying the Bible was unheard of in medieval times.

There were no Bibles for people to read.

Not even the monks read the Bible.

They were not even allowed to own a Bible.

All authority, all knowledge was dispensed by the church and the priests, and there was no other access to truth for the people at that time.

But Luther, weary with the endless study in the monastery of Aristotle and other philosophers, was desperate to find God.

And he began to study the Bible in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin.

In 1517, there was an experience that forever changed Luther's life.

Months before the nailing of the famous 95 Theses to the Wittenberg door, wherein God showed his grace to everything Luther had been agonizing over, Luther wrote of the Cloica experience.

Though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt that I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience.

I could not believe that he was placated by my satisfaction.

I did not love.

Yes, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners, and secretly, if not blasphemously, certainly murmuring greatly, I was angry with God.

Thus I raged with a fierce and troubled conscience.

Nevertheless, I beat importunately upon Saint Paul at that place in Romans 1:17.

Romans 1:17

Most ardently desiring to know what Paul wanted and what he meant.

The Holy Spirit gave me this art in the Cloica.

So turn in your Bibles to Romans 1.

Let's look at the verse that changed Luther's life.

And I've already referenced this when we were in Habakkuk because the passage we're going to look at is quoted in Habakkuk 2.4.

And I gave you a little bit of an introduction into Luther at that time.

But look at Romans 1 and in the context of verse 16.

So I want to read verses 16 and 17.

And I'm going to unpack this more, and actually probably the next 20 verses or so in Romans next week.

Romans 1 16.

For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ.

For it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes.

For the Jew first and also for the Greek.

Now, verse 17 is where Luther concentrated his study.

For in it, meaning the gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, the just shall live by faith.

So Luther wrote of his revelation of Romans 1:17.

Romans 1:17

At last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of these words.

Namely, in it the righteousness of God is revealed.

As it is written, he who through faith is righteous shall live.

There I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteousness of God is revealed by the gospel, namely the passive righteousness with which the merciful God justifies us by faith.

Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.

Thus a totally other face of the entire scripture showed itself to me.

Hereupon I ran through the scriptures from memory.

If also found in other terms and analogy as a work of God, that is what God does in us.

The power of God with which He makes us strong, the wisdom of God with which He makes us wise, the strength of God, the salvation of God, and the glory of God.

And the lights came on for Luther, and he began to understand that what Paul was speaking of here was a righteousness that God in his grace was making available to those who would receive it passively, not those who would achieve it actively, but that would receive it by faith, not works, and by which a person could be reconciled to a holy and righteous God.

Luther discovered, and I'm gonna give you the Latin phrase here, justia alienum.

Justitia alienum.

An alien righteousness, a righteousness of God freely given to us when we put our faith in Christ.

You understand what I'm saying?

That the church taught that you could earn this righteousness through the sacraments, through what we would call sacerdotalism, this idea that we could make ourselves righteous by these works within the context of the canon law of the church.

And Luther had tried all that.

He had tried all the legal ramifications that go with following the canon law of the church.

So Luther called it alien righteousness, not something we can earn or learn, but a foreign righteousness from God bestowed on the believer when we put our faith in Christ.

So it's not us developing righteousness in our lives.

Can't do that.

We're still a sinner.

That God would give us his righteousness when we put our faith in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, the gospel.

Luther had discovered through his own artist's labor and sincere passion for holiness and rightness before God that he could never do it.

He was attempting everything and more, and it was impossible.

He had followed the Catholic Church's canon law.

He had followed the rules of the Augustinian cloister, yet he had no peace and no joy.

It occurred to Luther that this passage, Romans 1.17, wasn't talking about the righteousness of God by which God is righteous, but rather that the righteousness of God that has been provided to us graciously, freely provided to us if we'll put our trust and our faith in Christ.

Luther had discovered that faith in Christ and Christ alone releases the righteousness of God, the treasures of all of God's grace and salvation into the believer by faith.

Men and women, we put our faith in Christ, we put our trust in Christ.

God's righteousness comes over and into the believer.

Luther said, It broke upon my mind that my justification is not established by my own naked righteousness, which will always fall short, but it rests solely and completely on the righteousness of Christ, which I cling to by faith.

And so the hypocrisy of works, righteousness, and human righteousness was revealed.

Luther had exposed the fraud of thinking we can somehow earn God's favor through the ecclesiastical levers of the church.

Luther came to believe that our will was in complete bondage naturally.

We can't do anything, anytime, anywhere that can make us worthy of God's love and grace.

We can never earn his favor or do enough good to warrant heaven impossible.

It was this conviction that led to Luther's confrontation with the church's Ponzi scheme, known as indulgences.

Johannes Tetzel, who would probably have the number one podcast in the world today.

If he were alive today, was a Dominican friar who would have made a great salesman.

Some say he was one of the most persuasive preachers of the 16th century.

Remember, I mentioned merits and indulgences.

Well, merits could be bought as indulgences that were given to you with a payment to the church.

You could spend them any way you wanted.

So if you knew you were going to go commit adultery, you paid for an indulgence so you'd be forgiven of the adultery you're about to commit.

Your money, you could buy an indulgence for any sin that you thought you were going to commit even before you committed it.

Indulgences became a surefire income stream for the church.

And it even got better when Pope Sixtus in 1476 realized that the market for indulgences could also be extended beyond the living to those who were dead in purgatory.

Now, this was an untapped market.

You could buy your grandmother Lucy's salvation out of purgatory by how much money you paid the church.

So for a certain amount of money, you could get Grandma Lucy a thousand years off of purgatory and get her into heaven.

So in 1517, Tetzul had been tasked by Rome to raise the equivalence of billions of dollars for the church needed funds to build St.

Peter's Basilica in Rome.

The financial needs of the church were pressing.

No one better than Tetzel to raise the money.

And no one was better at getting people than Tetzel.

Here's a little phrase of his.

Amen.

And all this Luther said in Latin and in German, and the medieval world was turned upside down as the fire that came out from Verms, Germany, spread to all of Europe.

From a few nails and a piece of parchment on a door in Wittenberg to the highest halls of power, a revolution had begun.

Over the next 300 years, the transformation of Germany, Europe, and the New World would be monumental.

So what happened?

What's significant about the Protestant Reformation?

I want to give you five thoughts.

Five quick thoughts.

There's so many.

We would not be even worshiping this way if it were not for the Protestant Reformation.

You would not be in this church right now if it were not for the Protestant Reformation.

We would not have the form of government that we have if it wasn't for the Protestant Reformation.

And I want to say this that it's amazing what God can do anytime, any place, with a person who knows that they're a king and a priest in Christ.

That know that all the righteousness of God flows through them that can make such a difference.

Some of you have a heart to be entrepreneurs.

Some of you have a heart for politics.

Some of you have a heart for engineering.

Some of you are inventors.

Some of you here love kids and you want to be a teacher.

Some of you work on cars, some of you build houses.

Do it all for the glory of God.

Do it all.

That's your worship.

So here's five things.

Number one, a return to the true gospel.

A return to the true gospel.

It's hard to explain, but the gospel had been so covered up by sacerdotalism.

The gospel had been so covered up by the priesthood and by the church.

Salvation is not from our own works, tradition, or the canon laws of the church.

But salvation comes to us from Christ alone, by grace alone, through faith alone, from the Bible alone, to the glory of God alone.

Number two, the priesthood of all believers.

The belief that every person need not depend on a professional priest or clergy for confession and access to God.

But as a result of a personal relationship with Christ, he or she is a priest and a king of his or her home and work and all that you do.

The belief that your work, your job can be holy worship unto God.

To realize that Luther said as he heard the sound of the clanking of the blacksmith in the blacksmith's shop, saying, That is a more beautiful sound than anything coming out of Rome.

You see, he understood that there's beauty in who you are.

God gave you your talents.

Use them for the glory of God.

Number three, every Christian can be a biblical theologian, not just a pastor, priest, or seminary professor.

Everyone can read, study, and know God's word for themselves.

The belief that the individual, this is so important, the individual armed with scripture can be more powerful than a government or a church without it.

Isn't that appropriate right now to say that?

On the eve of the eve of the election, you men and women are more powerful with the truth of God's word than anything that happens in Washington.

But you gotta know it.

And you gotta believe it, and you gotta walk in it.

Number four, marriage and family are holy and beautiful and sacred.

Luther called it a return to Eden.

You see, it's hard to understand, but the holy, the holy people were monks.

The holy people were the nuns, not the regular people who married each other.

And he said, that's not right.

God meant marriage to be holy and beautiful and sacred.

And so Luther revived family life by himself getting married.

After leaving the monastery, Luther married Katrina von Bora, and together they had six children.

It was the joy of his life.

I don't know if you guys know the story of how he met Katrina, but they risked these nuns out of a nunnery.

They wanted to get out, and so they kidnapped him.

And Luther got him out, and then he lined up all his former monks with all the former nuns, and they started, you know, putting them together.

But Katrina, pretty strong-willed, I don't like him.

I don't want to, he's ugly.

I'm not interested in him.

I don't want him.

She said, Well, who do you want?

You're the only one left.

He said, I want you.

And so he went, Oh, I never thought about getting married.

And so he did, and he had a lively and beautiful marriage relationships to Catherine.

And then number five, citizens of two kingdoms.

You are citizens of two kingdoms.

In medieval times, there was an enmeshment of the government and the church.

Luther was the first person to see the roles of government and the church, both from God being different.

That we are citizens of two kingdoms.

Being a citizen of God's kingdom and being a good citizen in our own country, we're not meant to compete but to complement each other.

The belief and separation of church and state, that the secular government should not, should be separate from the spiritual institution of the church, not telling it what to do, or vice versa, and that neither should rule over the other was founded in the Reformation.

So it was Luther's preface to Rome, to the Romans, sparked other kingdom of God revolutions.

Luther's preface to Romans, faith, he wrote, faith is a divine work in us which changes us and makes us to be born anew in God.

Faith is a living, daring confidence in God's grace, so sure and certain that the believer would strike his life on it for a thousand times.

This knowledge 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 is the Holy Spirit performed by faith.

And it was in reading of the reading of this preface in a Moravian church at Aldersgate in London that John Wesley heard in May 1738, and his heart was strangely warm, and he was born again, and the great London revival along with George Whitfield exploded forth.

It was the Methodist revival through Wesley that led a young politician named William Wilberforce to the Lord.

It was from Wilberforce that slavery was eventually abolished in England.

It was the influence of Wilberforce that led to the abolition movement in America in the 1800s.

And it was a black Baptist pastor from Georgia, Michael King, who visited Germany in 1934, who named his son after Martin Luther.

Martin Luther King Jr., who brought the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

We could go on and on and on about the fact that you have the scriptures in your hand and they're in English.

That's from the Protestant Reformation.

The fact that we sing songs, beautiful songs, majestic songs of our day.

That's because of Luther.

Luther loved music.

There's some theories that he took uh tunes from the bars in in Wittenberg and then put them, put, put new words on them.

There's debate about that.

If you go to the ELCA website and say, nah, it never happened.

But if you go to others, they say it did.

Who knows?

But the point is that Luther wanted music and art to affect all of the culture and society.

He wanted to break out of the confines of the canon law of the church.

Thank you for listening to the Foreign for War podcast.

We hope today's message has empowered you to make a difference in your world.

To connect with Pastor Steve's sermons, books, and blog, visit Steve Holtonline.org.

God bless.