So why remember Martin Luther, this extraordinary man, an Augustinian monk of relative obscurity?
This man, brilliant, a lawyer, a scholar with a massive ego, coarse, hugely industrious.
But why remember him five hundred years later?
Or Calvin, who was a generation ahead of Luther?
Luther would've been a father figure to John Calvin.
One of the curious things of the Reformation is that Luther did not speak French, and Calvin
did not speak German.
And Calvin never really left Switzerland once he had vacated France, and Luther never really
left Germany.
And so the two had very little correspondence, but Calvin writes that we ought to be thankful
for Luther because he gave us back the gospel.
He rediscovered it and rediscovered it in such a dramatic and personal way, almost reflecting
the very way the Apostle Paul had discovered the gospel in that so-called breakthrough
experience, the so-called tower experience, the cloister experience, discovering that
the righteousness of God that God demands of us and that he had tried so very hard to
discover in himself, that righteousness of God which was a thoroughly intimidating doctrine,
was a righteousness that God provides through faith alone in Jesus Christ alone.
A passive righteousness, as he first called it, a righteousness that is all together outside
of ourselves, extra nos.
And there, just in that insight alone, he had rediscovered the gospel and brought it
back to us again.
Why remember Luther?
And let me try and answer this question along two lines of thought.
First, the message and secondly, the method, the message and the method.
The message, first of all.
What did Luther say that is important for us five hundred years later and will be equally
important if the Lord tarries a thousand years later?
Well, the five solas, they don't specifically come from Luther, but the roots of all five
lie in Luther's rediscovery of the gospel.
Sola fide, by faith alone, apart from the works of the law, apart from any obedience
or contribution on our part, apart from the sacramental treadmill of medieval religion,
through faith as an instrument, empty hands grasping hold of the grace of God offered
to us in the gospel.
And of God, therefore, and none of us.
Sola gratia, by grace alone.
For, as Luther discovered, the more he tried to acquire the righteousness of God, to perform
the righteousness of God, the more sinful he became in his own estimation so that the
good that he would do he did not, and the evil that he would not do he did, and wretched
man that he was and discovered himself to be.
God is a God of grace and mercy offered to us in Christ and in Jesus Christ alone, apart
from the contributions of the Virgin Mary, apart from the contributions of saints past
and present, apart from the contribution of the prayers of those who have gone into purgatory
or wherever.
Solus Christus, in Christ and in Christ alone.
And all of it on the bedrock of Scripture as Luther, as we heard earlier, forced by
Eck to pronounce that declaration, "Here I stand, I can do no other.
So help me God!"
Because our conscience is not safe unless it is rooted and founded upon that which God
says.
And where does God say it?
In Scripture, in the Bible alone and nowhere else.
And to the glory of God alone, soli Deo gloria.
We remember Luther for the five solas.
We remember Luther for little Latin phrases that open up a world of theology, extra nos,
outside of us.
And how that simple phrase helps us on a day-to-day basis that the grace of God, the forgiveness
of God, the life of God is to be found outside of ourselves, casting ourselves upon His mercy
and embrace.
Theologia crucis, a term that Luther used because he saw a tendency in the human being,
in the human frame to exalt himself.
And true theology lies in being well crucified and being brought low, in making ourselves
nothing and God becoming everything.
Simul justus et peccator, at the same time justified and a sinner, that at the same time
we are justified, but we sin still.
And the method.
How did Luther promulgate the gospel?
And he did it in two ways, two principal ways.
One, publishing.
Luther published over six hundred titles.
Some of them were just pamphlets, and some of them were lectures that he gave, but there
are extant some six hundred pieces from Martin Luther.
Some of them are definitive.
As a very young Christian, I had only been a Christian for about a year or so.
In 1972, I picked up on a book table a copy of The Bondage of the Will, a fairly sizable
tome and not terribly easy to read and written in a sort of dialogue and discursive fashion
and argument that he was having with Erasmus, the Dutchman, the humanitarian, humanist of
his day.
Erasmus said after reading only a few pages of The Bondage of the Will that he hated this
book because Luther saw that at the heart of the gospel was the absolute necessity to
take no glory for ourselves.
And if our wills are free, if there is one residual free molecule in our will, then we
get the glory.
He understood that our salvation is not entirely of the Lord.
It is also partly cooperative with grace on our part, and we therefore take some of the
glory.
And if God is to get all the glory, we must recognize that our wills are in bondage, bondage
to sin.
It was vital for Luther to understand that in terms of the very gospel itself.
Think of the German Bible.
Why remember Luther?
Perhaps the German Bible, the importance of a Bible in our hands.
We forget we have Bibles everywhere.
I have dozens of Bibles, Bibles in the office, Bibles in the car, truck, Bibles on my phone,
on my iPad.
But in the sixteenth century it was still a relatively new idea, the thought of a Bible
translated into your native language and that you could read it apart from priests and the
church interpreting that Scripture for you, that you could read it for yourselves.
People have died to give us the Bible.
They've burned in flames, bodies drawn and quartered and thrown into the river in ashes
for giving us the Bible, Luther's Bible.
The Freedom of a Christian Man, a book that Luther wrote in the 1520s, in which he said
every believer, every Christian is free from all law and subject to none.
And every Christian is bound to all of God's law and obliged to keep it.
And it's the beginning of a discussion that Paul has in Galatians and in Romans and that
Luther had in the Reformation and that we have today between law and gospel, how the
gospel justifies us and sets us free from obedience to law and yet brings us into union
with Christ that obligates us to keep that law.
He wrote in response to his barber.
His barber asked him one day for help on prayer, "Teach me to pray."
So he wrote a little book, A Simple way to Pray, to help his barber pray.
Galatians, an epistle on which Paul had written and Luther had lectured on in the 1510s and
then returned to it later.
He called it "my little letter."
He said about it, "I am married to it.
It's my Katie von Bora," his wife.
He loved this epistle because at the very heart of Galatians is the gospel, the gospel
of free and sovereign grace that had saved him and that Luther believed we need to preach
to ourselves every single day.
The method: publishing, writing books, tracts, and preaching.
He preached over four thousand sermons that we know about, although he was never technically
a pastor.
Two thousand three hundred of those sermons still survive.
He was once asked about his method in preaching.
Who did he preach to?
He said, "I preach to Hansie and Betsy," little children.
So the diction that he chose was simple.
The concepts that he tried to elucidate, though absolutely profound, he endeavored to simplify.
He expounded the text, and although Luther is not perhaps on a par with John Calvin as
an exegete, yet there are times especially in his exegesis and sermons on John's Gospel,
for example, where he has the profoundest thoughts.
When Luther died, he died in the place he was born.
He was a man of some sixty or so years.
He had lived an incredibly full life and turned Europe around, brought the gospel back.
His wife had told him not to go, but he went.
He preached that Sunday and then on Monday he became ill, and over the next few days
became sicker.
The day before he died, he wrote his confession of faith, his assurance of faith, made a statement
that he was fully assured of forgiveness of sins and of peace with God, and that he would
go to heaven when he died.
It was important that he do that.
In the medieval world, you needed the absolution of a priest and Roman Catholicism had criticized
Protestantism for the doctrine of assurance.
So, it was important for him to do that before he died, to tell the world that this gospel
had given him assurance.
When he died, they had to send his body back to Wittenberg in a metal coffin of some kind.
The story goes that they couldn't straighten his hand.
It kept going into this position as though, as though he was holding a pen or a quill,
as though he had more to say than he had already said that had turned the world upside down.
Though dead, Luther still speaks to you and to me, and he points us to the gospel, and
he points us to Scripture, and he points us to Jesus, and he points us to the possibility
of true and full assurance of sins forgiven by faith alone in Jesus Christ alone, apart
from the works of the law.
For that reason and that reason alone perhaps, he is worth remembering five hundred years
later because it is still the same gospel for you and me today as it was for Luther
in the sixteenth century.
Why remember Luther?
Because, as Calvin said, "He brought the gospel back to us."