On October 31st, 1517, when Martin Luther, a German monk, posted 95 theses for debate on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, an unimaginable reformation had been set into motion – a reformation – the consequences of which we still observe today.
The theses were about matters of love and forgiveness, but the reason he wrote them, he explained, was because if these matters were not dealt with, it would ‘make Christians unhappy’.
Martin Luther was concerned with people’s happiness. In fact, he would come to believe that he had found the secret of happiness. And that, at its heart, was what the Reformation was all about. Not moralizing. Not self-improvement. It was a discovery of stunningly happy news – news that would transform millions of lives and change the world.
Caught in a sudden storm while walking to his university in Erfurt, Germany, a lightning bolt knocked him to the ground. Terrified, he cried out ‘St. Anne, help me! I shall become a monk!’ The young Martin Luther survived, he upheld his vow, and he began A monastic life.
In a sense he loved it. Luther’s deepest fear was of dying and having to stand before God his judge. But becoming a monk gave him what he saw as a golden opportunity: he could make himself more attractive to God and so – hopefully – earn His love.
And he went for it. Every few hours he would leave his tiny monastery cell and make his way to a service in the Chapel, starting with mattins (prayers) in the middle of the night, then another at 6:00 in the morning, another at 9:00, another at 12:00, and so on. He often took no bread or water for three days at a time and was quite prepared deliberately to freeze himself in the winter cold in the hope that he might please God. Driven to confession, he would exhaust his confessors, taking up to six hours at a time to catalogue his most recent sins.
Yet the more he did, the more troubled he became. Was it enough? Were his motives right? Luther found himself sinking into an ever-deeper introspection.
He began to sense that his moral dirtiness and lack of attractiveness to God went deeper than his behavior. He came to see himself as a man curved in on himself and fundamentally selfish. All his good conduct and religious behavior was only disguising the problem not solving it.
Worse, he was coming to see God as a loveless tyrant who demands perfection and gives nothing but punishment. ‘Though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt that I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience,’ he later wrote. ‘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.’
And in that dark place he made his happy discovery.
Studying the Bible in a cell, he was struggling to understand what the apostle Paul meant in his letter to the Romans: “For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed – a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: ‘The righteous shall live by faith’” ( Romans 1.17).
What on earth could that mean? And what exactly is the righteousness of God?
Is it that God is perfect and I am not? So I cannot be with Him? That is what Luther had thought. But ‘I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous person lives: by a gift of God.’
It was as if his whole world had flipped inside out. God, he saw, is not asking us to earn His love and acceptance in any way. God’s righteousness is something He shares with us as a gift. Acceptance before God, forgiveness and peace with Him is received by simple faith or trust.
Here in the Bible, Luther found, what is truly good news: a kind and generous God who does not ask people to make themselves attractive before He loves them, but who loves first.
Instead of trusting in his own efforts to be good, Luther saw simply that he could accept God’s word of promise. Then all his struggles and all his anxiety could be replaced with happy confidence and peace.
‘Here’ said Luther ecstatically, ‘I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.’
The discovery that brought Martin Luther from despair to delight was this: ‘failing, broken people are not loved because they are attractive, they are attractive because they are loved.’
Maranatha!
(mar-uh-nath-uh – “Our Lord Comes”)
Pastor Steve can be reached at PastorSteve@MaranathaBibleChurch.org