Luther: Monk, Prophet, Outlaw - History Talks

You're listening to the road with Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.

And men and women, what Luther had discovered, what the Apostle Paul had discovered, what I hope many of you have discovered, is that when you put your trust in Christ, it's not your righteousness that makes you rise, it's his righteousness that makes you rise.

And through his work on the cross, it is somehow, mysteriously, and supernaturally bestowed upon you by your faith in him.

And you don't have anything to do with it.

Even the faith to believe comes from Christ.

Even the faith that brought you here this morning is because of the love and grace of Christ.

At The Road, our vision is to raise up wholehearted disciples of Jesus Christ.

For more information on The Road, visit theroad.org.

We hope you are encouraged by today's message from Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.

I want to talk about Luther this morning.

I want to talk about Martin Luther and the Reformation.

We wouldn't be having a Thanksgiving, by the way, if it hadn't been for Luther.

Matter of fact, we wouldn't even be singing in worship if it hadn't been for Martin Luther.

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

It was in his papal bull or his challenge to be excommunicated called ex serge domine that Pope Leo had issued.

And it starts off, the bull, the challenge, starts off with these words translated into English.

So what had caused such a strong response from the Catholic Church?

What had caused such a strong response from Pope Leo X, the most powerful man in the world at that time?

Well, on October 31st, which was All Souls Day Eve, where we get the word Halloween, on October 31st, 1517, the day before the relics, the relics of Duke Gregory, which I'll explain, Drew Frederick, I mean, in a few minutes, what that was, was to be opened to the public.

The church at that time, this would be the castle church in Wittenberg, Germany, had a door, large door that opened up into the main, I think we call it a nave, into the nave and into the sanctuary area that was like a bulletin board.

And on that bulletin board, you could you could announce things, you could announce stuff that was going on.

And on October 31st, 1517, 500 years ago, Luther wrote 95 theses, T-H-E-S-E-S, or disputations or arguments against Rome and against the Pope related to a controversy called indulgences, which again I'm going to explain in a few minutes, that was written in Latin, which was the trade language of the learned.

So only churchmen and those who had been to the top schools in the land could even read Latin.

So it wasn't meant for the masses.

It was meant to be an argument within the church.

But a strange thing happened.

This little Facebook ad started trending because someone, and no one knows who, translated the 95 theses from Latin into German.

And suddenly it went from just the upper echelons of academia into the masses of people.

And this spark became a conflagration that began to sweep across Germany, out of Wittenberg, Saxony, Germany, to the rest of Germany, and then suddenly all over Europe.

So who is this wild boar, this wild pig, one who, when I was doing research on many, there have actually been several books written that said that Martin Luther was insane.

He was out of his mind.

He was a looney-toon.

He was a lunatic.

He had panic attacks.

He had to think on Enfant in German, which means these panic attacks, this depression, that he had this relationship with his father, which was super weird, and it affected his medieval mind to such an extent that he became an Augustinian monk because he was losing his mind.

So who was he?

Well, he was born in 1483 to an enterprising peasant family.

So the idea has been for many years that Luther grew up poor and that he had this peasant family that he was a part of.

And nothing could be further from the truth.

Actually, Hans Luther was not, he was a peasant by the caste system of medieval, the medieval European times, but actually his father was an on-fire entrepreneur and a very committed Roman Catholic, which everybody was Catholic at that time.

And so he had taken the mining business, and instead of being a miner, he had started smelting ore, and as a result, he had become actually quite wealthy.

So he was very entrepreneurial.

He owned five or six different smelting works.

And so Luther, and this is interesting, only in the last year, because of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, there's actually been an archaeological dig done on his house, because we know where his house is in Germany where he was born, and they found artifacts that would indicate a pretty wealthy family.

So he grew up in a family like that, and Hans Luther had a passion for his son to become a successful lawyer because he hated them.

Okay, so he hated lawyers.

And the reason he hated lawyers was because they were always in his face about the rules that he was breaking in his smelting works.

And so he just wanted to keep expanding his business and he kept having lawsuits.

So he thought, here's my genius son, chip off the old block, who's gonna, I'm gonna put him in the best schools, he's gonna become a lawyer, he's gonna defend me and my family for the rest of his life, he's gonna get married, he's gonna have a ton of kids, and he's gonna take care of me in my old age.

That was the vision.

And so Luther followed in his father's graces through what we might call high school and then college, and he was a genius.

And so he went to the best schools in the land.

He had already had a master's degree by the time he was 21, and he was, he had bought this tome of a book, which was the law book of that time.

You didn't have law books, you had a law book.

It was one book, and he had bought it, and his dad had paid for it.

And it was very, very expensive.

And so he came home, visited with his family, had the book, headed back to law school.

So he's on his way to law school and suddenly finds himself in a lightning storm.

This massive, huge lightning storm where trees were split, the roar of the wind was in the trees, he's riding a horse, he's on his way back to school, and he becomes severely frightened and fearful, dismounts from the horse.

There's a lightning strike that hits so close that he had to touch himself to see if he was still alive.

And he was so fearful that he was gonna die that he cried out, Help me, Saint Anne.

I will become a monk.

That was his experience.

How many of you have cried out to St.

Anne?

Okay, St.

Anne is the patron saint of minors.

So he probably grew up in the medieval church at that time where you prayed to the saints.

Actually, people still do that, but it was everybody did it.

If you had any, unless you were an atheist, I guess.

But everybody who had any kind of church background prayed to the saints, and Saint Anne was the patron saint of minors, so he had grown up with that.

But but you got to understand the personality of Luther.

He was, I mean, there's these books that have been written about him being insane are not for not having evidence.

He he would make decisions, and when he would make decisions, folks, he was wholehearted, all in, burned the boats in everything that he did.

And so he gave up all of the hopes and the dreams that his father and mother had for him to become a lawyer, and in two weeks, he went into the cloister and became an Augustinian monk in two weeks.

Matter of fact, he had a uh he came back, told all of his student friends that we're gonna all go to law school together, and he was top of the class, and they did everything they could to convince him not to do this.

And he said, We're gonna have a farewell party for me.

And I'm gonna say goodbye and you'll never see me again.

Those were his last words to most of the students who he never saw again.

He was all in.

And in that moment, he committed himself to becoming a monk in the Augustinian order.

And there were a lot of orders at that time that he could have chosen, the Benedictine order and others like that.

But he chose the most strenuous, the most difficult, and the most disciplined of all the orders at that time, which was the Augustinian order.

And so he came and he presented himself to the order, and he was stripped of all his clothes, all his worldly possessions were taken away or given away, and he he was robed with the with the white robe of a novice, and so he became a novice monk.

His father was furious, his mother was furious, and his father said he would never talk to him again, and he didn't for many years, and so Luther becomes a monk.

Now, it's difficult to understand today because of the Protestant Reformation what was happening in medieval Christianity at that time, but there was a complicated view of how you found salvation.

It was a combination of tradition, canon, Catholic, canon law, it had little to nothing to do with the Bible.

You have to understand that the priest and the priest only could speak for the church, and the church, the Catholic Church and the Catholic Church only spoke for God.

There were no Bibles.

The Bibles that they had that were available were in Latin, and only the priests could read them, and half of them couldn't even read it.

Most of the Catholic priests at that time could not read Latin very well, but they could carry on the Mass.

So, so the weekly regimen of a medieval Christian at that time was to go to Mass and go to confession every day if you could, if you're really devout, but you went to Mass.

The Mass was in Latin.

And for the super spiritual, like all of you are, for the super spiritual that really wanted to go after God and find salvation, you became a nun, or you became a monk.

This kind of religious caste system created an atmosphere.

If you were really devoted and you were really a Christian, and you were really a disciple, you became a monk.

Or you became a nun.

And so Martin Luther gave himself to the canon law of the Catholic Church and the canon law of the Augustinian order to the letter.

Luther's overactive mind was constantly finding ways in which he had fallen short, that his sins were not forgiven, and so he gave himself completely to this idea that he had to keep confessing his sins and part of the Augustinian order and part of the Catholic canon law was that if you died in, quote, in your sins, you went directly to hell.

So you needed to confess, every time you did any kind of a sin, you needed to confess that as quickly as possible.

And so Martin Luther, following the letter of the law, would spend up to six hours a day in confession.

Several times a day in confession, believing that that was the only way that he was going to find salvation.

So what you did is you went to the priest.

I've never been a Catholic, by the way, I was a Lutheran.

So I don't know what it's like today.

But the way it was then is that you came in and you confessed your sins, as many as you could come up with, I guess, to the priest, and then the priest would give you an assignment for your repentance under the penal system of the canon law, which was so many Hail Marys, or so many our fathers, or give money to the church, whatever it might be.

Because here's the deal: it was it was built on a heavenly bank account.

It was called the merit system.

So the idea, now bear with me, okay?

Because I want to laugh, but I'm not gonna laugh.

I promise.

But it's it's ridiculous.

It's satanic, it's demonic.

But the idea was that there were these saints and these martyrs that had come before us, including Mary and Joseph and even Jesus, who were so good.

They were so good in their life that they never sinned, really.

And they built up merits.

They built up merits because they were so good, because of people like us, who are so bad and so screwed up and have so many problems, that we need help.

So this heavenly bank account was built up with what they called merits, and these merits were the extra stuff that came from the saints.

Like Saint Francis or Augustine or Mary or Joseph or the 12 apostles, and it was this big bank account.

And so when you came and you confessed your sins and you said, certain uh our fathers and Hail Mary's and so forth like that, you were, you were then given by the priest merit.

And this merit was going to forgive you of your sin because of what they did, because we're in the red.

But see, they were in the black.

And so it doesn't make, it's not fair that they were so good that we can't grab hold of some of their stuff and bring it down to help us with our messed up stuff today.

And so that's what they did.

Pretty, pretty cool system.

It's only going to get better.

We've only just begun.

And so Luther followed it all, and he confessed from the heavenly bank treasury of the merit system.

In 1510, he went to Rome, and you needed to make a pilgrimage.

That's another way to get forgiven of your sins, another indulgence that you could do, and I'll explain indulgences in a moment.

To touch the relics.

How many of you have heard of relics?

Anybody heard of relics?

Okay.

So the relics were things like the tooth of Mary, the elbow of Joseph, the um a sliver of the cross that Jesus died on.

Um, a sliver of the cross that has the blood of Christ stained on it.

That's a higher relic, by the way.

And there was there were millions of these, tens of thousands.

Um, Frederick, Duke Frederick, who was the who was the Duke or the prince over Saxony, Germany, had the best and the greatest and the coolest relics of anybody in Europe.

They said that he had the the Rome of Germany.

And on All Saints Day, the day after Halloween, he would open it up.

And if you went in and you observed or even touched a relic, that gave you an indulgence, that gave you merit that made you more holy and got you closer to yourself.

It never got you in all the way, because we haven't even touched on purgatory, but it got you closer to heaven than you were before.

And so these relics, so Luther goes to Rome in 1510, and he's so excited.

This is the holy Rome.

This is the head, this is the city of the Holy Roman Empire.

And he comes there and he sees the priest involved with prostitutes, and he sees the way in which Mass is just done so quickly.

When he did a Mass, the story goes that he was in the middle of the Mass and he heard a Catholic priest behind him say, get on with it, man! Because they would just go through these masses.

And the reason they did the masses was to accrue the treasury, which came from the offerings of the people.

And so they would line them up, sometimes up to 65 masses a day.

So he went and he went into where the relics were, and he went to where the martyrs were, and he and he saw this, and then he he crawled up the scala sancta, which is called the holy stairs, which was believed to be the actual marble stairs that Jesus had stood on in his trial with Pontius Pilate.

And he crawled to the top, and for the first time in his life, when he gets to the top saying, saying, Our fathers and our fathers and our fathers praying for the salvation of his relatives, he gets to the top, and for the first time in his life, he's got bloodied knees, and he goes, Is it really true?

There's a crack, a slight crack in his mind and in his heart about the law that he was following.

During this time, Luther began to be progressively affected by what we call in German Enfektung, which is depression, sense of hopelessness, deep fear in his life and in his heart.

And he would go for weeks under this depression and these pan, when I read about it, it sounded like panic attacks to me, just over him, and and it just emotionally down to a degree that those in the cloister, the Augustinian cloister, were really worried about him.

He did everything that he knew to do, and he said later, if ever a monk got to heaven by his monkery, it was I.

Johannes von Stoppitz was his mentor and the head of the Augustinian order.

And Johannes von Stoppitz was worried about Luther.

And so he introduced Luther to The Bible.

Can you imagine being a monk and you never study the Bible?

You're not even allowed to have a Bible if you are a monk.

So Von Stoppitz gave him his Bible.

And Luther began to read the Bible for the first time in his life.

And he began to study and study.

And he read it in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin.

Isn't it great that here in 2017 we're so much more educated than they were?

It's always exciting for my son to come back from DU and hear about all the things he's learning about transgenderism.

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

No German Bible at that time.

And as he did, he became enamored with the Apostle Paul.

He couldn't read Paul enough.

Von Stoppitz seeing the genius of Luther and so worried about his quest for salvation, told him about a new college town that had opened up in Wittenberg, in Saxony, Germany, that needed a German scholar to come in and teach the Bible.

And Stoppitz had been the one that uh Frederick had asked to be that, um, to be that theologian, but Stoppitz didn't feel like he had time.

He saw the genius of Luther.

So Luther was sent to Wittenberg.

And there at Wittenberg, he began to study in 1514 as professor of theology and Bible, but also made the preacher in the city church of Wittenberg.

And by the way, he was also the vicar general of eleven monasteries.

And stop it felt like I'm going to make this guy so busy, he'll quit worrying about his own personal salvation.

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

This is before the writing of the 95 Theses on the Wittenberg door.

It's called the Kloika experience, and Kloika is tower in German.

But it also means something else.

So let me read it to you.

What Luther said.

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 God 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 one place.

He's speaking of Romans 1 17.

We'll read it in a moment.

Most ardently desiring to know what Paul wanted.

The Holy Spirit gave me this art.

Now he uses the word art, but I think we might say experience.

The Holy Spirit gave me this experience.

Now this is important.

In the Kloika.

Or the word in German is off, which can mean in or upon.

The Kloika.

In or upon the Kloika.

Kloika can be translated as outhouse.

Here's what's interesting: the Kloika tower at the black cloister in Wittenberg, and you can see it today, is this huge tower attached to the main cloister, which actually became Luther's home, at the bottom had a toilet.

It had an outhouse.

And Luther, who had tried so hard with every fabric of his spiritual being to be right with God, it would be just like him.

As earthy and as crass.

And all you gotta do is read a little Luther to realize how crass he could be.

To say that he had his experience with God, where God came to him while he was on the can.

Here's why that's important.

That's important because nothing could have been more degrading to the merit system of the canon law of the Roman church to say that his actual life-changing experience had absolutely nothing to do with him.

As a matter of fact, he was in a pretty compromised position when God came.

So he wrote this, and many uh linguistic experts have said, hmm.

Now, when I read, I'll just say this, when I read the older book, the 1950 book, uh called Here I Stand, the Baton book, which is probably the seminal work on Luther, it didn't say this.

But in Metaxas' book on Martin Luther, the one I read in preparation for this, he mentions it because there's been a lot of new thought on Luther since then.

So turn in your Bibles to Romans 117, and let's just read what it was that happened on that fateful day in 1517 when he came to Romans 1.17.

I guess, maybe, while on the John.

And as Metaxus said, while taking a dump.

So because we laugh about it, but there couldn't be a more earthy real way for Luther to say, I didn't have anything to do with this.

It absolutely has nothing to do with my own righteousness.

For here's what it says.

For in it, the righteousness of God is revealed.

From faith to faith.

He's meaning the gospel of Jesus Christ in it.

Coming back to verse 16.

When it talks about being not ashamed of the gospel, he's saying, Through Christ, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith.

As it is written, the just shall live by faith.

And here's what he said.

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

Men and women, that's the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

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 the work of God that is what God does in us, the power of God, which He makes us strong, the wisdom of God, which He makes us wise, the strength of God, the salvation of God, and the glory of God.

And I extolled my sweetest word with a love as great as the hatred with which I had before hated this term, the righteousness of God.

Thus, that place in Paul for me truly was the gate of paradise.

And men and women, this was the earth-shattering insight that gave Luther the solid foundation from the Bible upon which to base what may well be reckoned the greatest revolution in human history.

He who had followed the Catholic Church's canon law perfectly, he who had followed the Augustinian order perfectly, yet had no peace and had no joy, it occurred to him that it would never be in his own righteousness.

Look at Romans 3.

Romans 3, 21.

Paul writing of his experience with this righteousness of God, explaining it to the Roman believers.

Luther got it.

But now the righteousness of God, apart from the law, put in their canon law, church law, Augustinian law, is revealed, being witnessed by the law and the prophets, even the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ to all and on all who believe, for there's no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

And men and women, what Luther had discovered, what the Apostle Paul had discovered, and what I hope many of you have discovered, is that when you put your trust in Christ, it's not your righteousness that makes you right, it's his righteousness that makes you right.

And through his work on the cross, it is somehow mysteriously and supernaturally bestowed upon you by your faith in him.

And you don't have anything to do with it.

Even the faith to believe comes from Christ.

Even the faith that brought you here this morning is because of the love and the grace of Christ.

And so Paul before him and Luther later came to understand that if you put his faith in Christ, that was all that was needed.

To put his trust in what God had done through his Son Jesus Christ, through his life, death, and resurrection, conquering sin, conquering the wages, the costs of sin.

And we take on his righteousness not around.

We are born again.

We are transformed.

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

And so Luther was born again.

This is when he became a true believer.

This is when his life was transformed.

Simultaneously, the Catholic Church is trying to figure out a way to pay for St.

Peter's Basilica.

Anybody familiar with St.

Peter's Basilica?

I've been there, been to their museum, been through their, I guess, museum and area there that was being built at that time.

And Pope Leo needed a cool way to raise a lot of money.

So they came up with this thing called indulgences.

Now, indulgences had been around for a while.

It had been developed during the Crusades, some believe.

During the Crusades, they needed some way to pay back or have some kind of a reward system by which anyone who went to fight against the hordes and the Muslims would get a payback to the family.

And so they came up with indulgences, which means that if you went and you did uh and you did great things for the church or you gave money to the church, there was somehow a merit that was given to you that was going to help you in the afterlife.

Well, there was another Pope in 1476.

Pope Sixtus IV came up with a really cool idea.

His idea was that why do we just do it with the living?

Why do we have a merit system of indulgences where you get stuff for sins and stuff that you're going to commit in the future?

Why don't we also make it for the dead?

Because there's millions of those.

And so let's not just do it with the living, let's do it with the dead.

What about, you know, Grandma Lucy?

And what about Aunt Joe and Hans, your uncle, who is just, you know, a beer-drinking loser.

You know, he's probably in hell, or maybe he didn't get to hell, maybe he's in purgatory, which is that in-between state.

So they came up with this idea that you could actually come in and pay money to get an indulgence to take time off the penal system of your dead relatives that are in purgatory.

So if you paid this amount of money, you could get a thousand years off of Aunt Lucy's purgatory experience.

And so they needed someone who was a really good salesman.

And some have said that Tetzel was the greatest salesman and the greatest preacher of the 16th century.

So they recruited this guy Tetzel.

Johannes Tetzel was a Dominican friar who went from town to town to raise money for the building of St.

Peter's Basilica through indulgences.

Indulgences were the first really kind of clear Ponzi scheme that we have wherein they could fake people out with Hail Mary's and our fathers to get the kicker, which is the merits that were accrued by these great saints of the past, somehow accrued to your account.

I have to tell you a funny story.

So this is a true story.

So Tetzel, and you have to read more about Tetzel.

He was kind of a showboat, but he was also kind of a jerk too.

And um and so nobody really liked him that much.

And so one time a guy came to him and he wanted this indulgence.

Here's the deal.

You're not just buying an indulgence.

Listen, this is important.

The indulgence is not just for the sins you've done.

An indulgence was for a sin you were gonna do.

So you could you kind of pay it forward, right?

So he would come in, this guy came in and he and he bought this.

You didn't tell him what it was for.

You didn't tell him you're, you know, you go down and see a prostitute in the evening or whatever.

You just got your indulgence.

And the indulgence was a piece of paper with these little dangly uh seals from the Pope on it.

So this guy buys his indulgence, and then the next day, Tetzel's leaving town with his cart, and this guy jumps out of the bushes and beats the smithereens out of him.

And he looks at him, and he's seen him before, and he says, That's what I bought my indulgence for.

Now that's a smart guy, you gotta admit.

That guy's going places.

So here's what Tetzel said.

Now, this is right on the this is right on the edge boundaries of Saxony, Germany, and this is one of, this is what we have in the records of what he would preach.

Listen now.

God and Saint Peter call you, consider the salvation of your souls and those of your loved ones departed.

Visit the most beloved cross erected before you and ever imploring you.

Have you considered that you are lashed in a furious tempest amid the temptations and dangers of the world, and that you do not know whether you can reach heaven, not of your mortal body, but of your immortal soul.

Make the contribution today.

Sounds like some TV preachers, right?

Okay.

Make the contribution today.

They're crying out, pity us.

These are your dead relatives, okay?

Pity us, pity us.

We're in dire torment from which you can redeem us for just a pittance.

Hear the Father saying to the Son, we birthed you, we nourished you, we brought you up, we left you our fortunes, and you are so cruel and hard that now you're not willing for so little to set us free?

Will you not stop the flames?

Remember that you're able to release them, folks.

For as soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.

So, Luther, remember, he's he's the priest of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, and people start coming to him for confession, and they said, I don't really need to be at confession.

I've got this indulgence now, and he showed him the piece of paper, and he got livid.

Because he's had the Romans 1.17 cloister experience.

He knows the righteousness of God in a whole new way.

He's been born again, and he sees this, and he becomes angry.

And he goes into his study, and for days he locks himself in there, and he writes these 95 disputations, these 95 arguments of which he wants to have a debate with the Catholic Church over related to indulgence.

But something strange happened.

The strange thing that happened was there was this some 75 years before the first movable press had been invented called the Gutenberg Press.

Someone took down or wrote down, we don't know which, the 95 Theses from the parchment that was on the Wittenberg door.

And by the way, we don't even know if it was nailed to the Wittenberg door or mailed to the Prince of Albert of Mainz, which is what it was addressed to.

Doesn't matter.

But someone got a hold of it and they translated it into German, and then it was like a fire.

Because finally, someone was standing up to the Roman Catholic Church.

Nobody'd ever done this before without losing their head or being burned at the stake.

Wycliffe had done it in England, burned at the stake.

John Hoos had done that in Bohemia, burned at the stake.

But here's a German.

This is not a Bohemian.

This is not this is not an Anglo-Saxon.

This is a German who's doing it.

And I mean to tell you, it just spread.

It was trending all over Europe.

And so immediately the Pope, not taking it very seriously, said, Oh, he's just a drunken German that when he gets sober, he'll get over it.

But it began to spread and spread into this wildfire.

So then what the Pope did, Pope Leo asked Frederick, the protective prince, the Duke of Saxony, to give up Luther to him.

And Frederick loved Luther.

They only met one time in their whole life, but they but they there was an incredible relationship that if it hadn't been for Frederick, Luther would have been burned at the stake.

But he wanted his theologian to stay there.

He wanted his church, Wittenberg, and his uh his seminary and college to flourish, and so he needed him.

So he said, Look, I don't know and I don't understand all this stuff about these disputations in this 95 theses, because I don't understand.

That's way above my pay grade.

But why don't we have a council?

Why don't we have a debate in Germany?

Because he knew that in Germany he could protect Luther.

So what ensued was a group of debates called the Heidelberg Disputation, the Diet at Augsburg, and the Leipzig Debate.

And in each debate, men and women, what it boiled down to really was one thing.

And that is that the Roman Catholic Church believed, and by the way, they still believe, that truth is derived from tradition, church councils, and the Pope.

And Luther was saying, no, truth is derived from Scripture and Scripture alone.

And it was at Leipzig that he really profoundly, for the first time, publicly said in German these words.

I assert that a council has sometimes had error and may sometimes err, nor has a council authority to assert.

Establish the articles of faith.

A council cannot make divine right out of that which by nature is not their divine right.

Councils have contradicted each other.

For the recent Lateran Council has reversed the claim of the councils of Constance and Basil, that a council is above the Pope.

Which, what he's talking about here is the councils had said before that the council, the theologues coming together and making an article of faith was higher than what the Pope said, and then they switched and said, Oh, actually, we think, actually, the Pope's higher than the council.

And here's what he said.

Listen to this.

A simple, this is important, a simple layman armed with scripture, is to be believed above a pope or a council without it.

Many women, you that are in college, you need to remember that.

You, armed with scripture, are more dangerous and more powerful than any professor without it.

As for the Pope's decretal on indulgences, I say that neither the church nor the Pope can establish articles of faith.

These must come from Scripture and Scripture alone.

So at that point, Luther goes nuts and just starts writing all these books that go out.

The first one is called a treatise on good works.

The second one, a treatise on the nobility of Germany.

The third, the Babylonian captivity of the church.

The fourth, the freedom of the Christian.

And so at that point, the Pope releases the bull, an attack on Luther, ex Sergei Domine, on June 15, 1520.

He has 60 days to recant or he'll be burned at the stake.

And so a diet or an argument or a debate is set up in Worms, Germany.

Luther goes there and standing before them is the Emperor of Rome, Charles V, all of the nobles of Germany, and the greatest theologian and debater of the time of the Roman Catholic Church, von der Ecken, to take him on, and they bring him there, and by this time Luther's a rock star.

So when Luther comes into town, 2,000 people celebrate, and they're throwing the proverbial confetti, and everybody's excited to see Martin Luther because they've read his disputations, they've read his books, and the Catholic Church is really getting worried and they're struggling and they're saying, Well, what's going on here?

And so one of his emissaries said, Here's the problem, sir, speaking to Pope Leo.

Nine out of ten people love Luther.

And the other one says, death to the Pope.

You've got a problem.

And so he comes in, and there before all these, and I've been there, and it's really cool the little room, but I mean it was just stacked with the most dignified theologues and secular rulers of that time.

Um, and they have a stack on this table of all of his books, and there were pamphlets and books and stuff, and so they come to him in Van Ecken after the argument says, Martin, you have not sufficiently distinguished your works.

Your plea to be heard from Scripture is the one always made by heretics.

How can you assume that you're the only one to understand the sense of Scripture?

Would you put your judgment above that of so many famous men and claim that you know more than they all?

You have no right to call into question the most holy Orthodox faith, confirmed by the sacred councils and defined by the church.

Martin, answer candidly and without horns.

Do you or do you not repudiate your books and the errors which they contain?

And then Martin Luther, scared, probably a bit fearful, said these words, and probably the most famous words that we have that Martin Luther ever said.

And this is really where the Protestant Reformation began.

Since then, your serene majesties and your lordship seek a simple answer.

I will give it in this manner, plain and unvarnished, and he's speaking in German, not Latin.

Unless I'm convinced by the testimony of the scriptures or clear reason, for I do not trust in the Pope or in the councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradict themselves, I am bound to the scriptures I have quoted, and my conscience is captive to the word of God.

I cannot and will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against one's conscience.

I cannot do otherwise.

Here I stand.

God help me.

Amen.

And he walked out.

And the Spanish soldiers that were there, because Charles V was Spanish, spat on him and ridiculed him.

And as he made it through that gauntlet, he came to his friends, his German friends, and it said that he raised up his hands and he says, I've come through.

I've come through.

And then I could tell you stories of how he was whisked away, actually kidnapped by his Duke, Duke Frederick, to the Wartburg Castle, where at that point he translated the New Testament into German.

Translated the New Testament in German in about six weeks.

Unbelievable.

Still the standard for the German Bible in Germany today.

And so thus began the Protestant Reformation.

And it swept all over Europe.

And the reason we're here today is because of a group called the Pilgrims and the Puritans, who were mightily touched by the Reformation soon after that.

Their relatives were.

And then came to our land.

The reason you sang worship songs was because Martin Luther began to write hymns, and he said, Music needs to be in the church.

Before that had been Gregorian chants and only done by the monks and the nuns.

So here I want to give you in closing my top ten influences from the Reformation.

There's 50, but I'll give you my top ten.

Number one, the belief that salvation is not from our own works or the canon laws of the church, but salvation comes to us by the grace of God alone, through faith in Christ alone, through the Bible alone.

Number two, the belief that not the traditions and creeds of the church nor the Pope are our standard for faith and practice, but the Bible and the scriptures alone.

Number three, the belief that everyone should have a Bible translated into their own mother tongue and be able to read it for themselves.

Number four, the belief in separation of church and state, that the secular government should not be separate, should be separate from the spiritual institution of the church, and that neither should rule over the other.

Number five, the belief that the worship service should be centered in the preaching of the word, involving the people through congregational singing, and the taking of bread and wine, bread and juice in communion.

Number six, the belief that your work, your job can be holy, just as holy as any monk in a monastery, if you do it to God's glory.

Number seven, the belief that the individual armed with scripture can be more powerful than a government or church without it.

Number eight, the belief that in the biblical boundaries of marriage and family, that marriage and sex is holy and beautiful and sacred.

Luther said of sex in marriage, a return to Eden.

So you can use that next time you, you know, you're with your husband or wife.

So let's return to Eden tonight.

He didn't say that.

I mean, I added a little something there.

Number nine, the belief that everyone should have access to education and spiritual training, regardless of race or socioeconomic conditions.

And number 10, the belief that every person need not depend on a professional priest for confession and access to God.

But as a result of a personal, intimate relationship with Christ, he or she is a priest of his or her home, work, and family.

You've been listening to The Road with Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.

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