My subject is Luther and his message for today.
I confess freely that I am immensely encouraged at the sight of this congregation.
I have a feeling that you've come together to demonstrate,
that you've come together to make a declaration,
and that is that unlike so many others at this present time,
you're not ashamed of the Protestant Reformation.
There are many people today who are ashamed of it.
There are many who keep quiet about it.
It's very interesting to have observed during the last fortnight
that the secular press has appeared to take a greater interest in this
than has the Christian Church in this country.
We can understand that.
They're afraid of calling attention to Luther and the Reformation
because they have ideas in their minds
and plans and purposes which they're putting into execution,
as we've just been hearing,
which are traveling in the exact opposite direction.
So, as one who knows at times what it is
to understand the feelings of Elijah under the juniper tree on that famous occasion,
I am glad to find that if not exactly 7,000,
it is at any rate 2,000 who have not bowed the knee to bear,
and I am immensely encouraged
and I feel sure that the same applies to all of you.
Now this great event which we are commemorating this evening,
that first step which led eventually to the Protestant Reformation,
is not something to be hidden.
It was not done in a corner,
and it has made itself known in the history of the world ever since.
It is something to glory in.
It is something to boast of.
And if you and I tonight are true followers of Martin Luther and the Reformation,
well, we must thank God for his exceeding grace to us.
Now this is an event and occasion which merits attention and commemoration
for many, many reasons.
If we have no other reason, quite apart from the great religious reason
that brings us together tonight, if we haven't even got that,
we have to admit, everybody has to admit,
that this thing has changed the entire course of history.
The historians are granting that.
As I say, the secular newspapers are granting this.
History has been different ever since,
and you really can't understand what is generally called modern history
apart from the Reformation.
You can't understand the history of this country.
You can't understand especially the history of the United States of America.
They would never have been pilgrim fathers
if there hadn't been a Protestant Reformation.
And so, you see, it has been something very vital
in connection with the whole history of the human race.
Not only that, it's affected profoundly the modern view of politics and of law.
Prior to the Reformation, the Church governed politics,
controlled emperors and kings and pertinets,
and it governed the law of lands, all that has been changed.
But not only that, it's changed literature.
It is very true to say that Martin Luther, in a sense,
created the German language as it has been known to us,
and that you can't understand literature in general,
particularly German literature apart from him.
And do you know when you come even to the realm of science,
this thing which is being worshipped today,
you would never have had modern science were it not for the Reformation.
All scientific investigation and endeavor prior to that
had been controlled by the Church.
There was no liberty of investigation,
and any conclusions might arrive at which didn't tell you
when the philosophy of the Aristotelian and Thomist philosophy
controlling the thinking of the Church was rejected.
Now, now, it's the Protestant Reformation that gave liberty for scientific investigation.
It's just sheer ignorance of history that makes so many modern scientists
regard Protestantism and the true evangelical faith
as being something that is opposed to true science.
And so on. I could go on telling you of other effects
that this great event has had on the history of mankind.
Perhaps nothing is more important than the way it brought to the forefront
the sovereignty of the individual conscience.
Now, I know that things happened at that time
and things were done by Luther that seemed to militate against us.
Nevertheless, his fundamental assertion laid down once and forever
the right of the individual to his conscience
and his right to follow the dictates of his conscience.
So you see, many men who talk lightly and glibly about liberty
don't know and they don't realize that they owe what they're enjoying
to this great event.
Well, now then, what is it?
What is it that we are trying to remember together this evening?
Well, we are going to look at an event which took place 450 years ago.
Most authorities would say that it happened on October the 31st,
so that last night would have been the exact anniversary.
And I'm told, unfortunately, I was in Manchester
and on my way back from there that they even stole Luther's hymn last night,
but I'm going to make you sing it again tonight.
And they thought that they were right in doing that
because October the 31st was the day when Luther nailed the 95 Theses
on the door of the Castle Church at Wittenberg.
But, you know, there are historical authorities who argue,
and it seems to me with a considerable degree of urgency,
that the actual date was November the 1st.
So, after all, we may be all right, and I'm entitled to my hymn.
And I thank even some of these academic historians at Inuit for that contribution.
Well, now, what was it that happened?
Well, most of you, I'm sure, have been reading recently about what did happen.
What happened was that a man took 95 propositions
and nailed them to the door of that church.
Now, the door of the church in those days was used as we now use notice boards.
You know, in any university or college, there's always a notice board.
If you want to call attention to something, you put a notice up on the notice board.
Now, that's exactly what this man did.
He nailed his 95 Theses or propositions to the door of that particular church.
And he did that in order that he might call attention to what he was saying there
and in order that that might lead to a public disputation concerning these matters.
He was primarily addressing his fellow members of the faculty of the university,
but he was also addressing anybody else who had the ability to understand what he was saying.
He'd written it in Latin.
And it was meant primarily and most essentially as a kind of academic discussion.
Now, who was this man?
Well, his name was Martin Luther.
He was a monk.
He was a lecturer also in theology.
And he was a preacher.
And he was preeminently perhaps a preacher.
At that time, he was 34 years of age.
What was he doing?
What was he saying in these propositions, these Theses?
What was his object?
Well, it's very important that we should realize that he was not sitting out to break with the Church of Rome.
That was not in his mind at all at that time.
Indeed, he was most anxious not to do that.
I'm making a point of this for a reason that you'll see later on.
He said, no crime or abuse can justify a schism.
It's not surprising he said that.
He was speaking out of a background of 12 centuries at least of this rigid Roman system and this idea of the one church.
All he was proposing to do was to call attention to a grave scandal that was taking place at that time in the church
in connection with what was called the sale of indulgences.
That's all he proposed to do.
But nevertheless, in doing that, he was unconsciously taking the first step that led eventually to the Protestant Reformation
and to the formation of a new church, the Protestant Church.
Now, what is this question of indulgences?
What was he really doing?
Well, indulgences meant this.
They were certificates given under the authority of the Pope,
which allowed people not to carry out the full penalty that had been imposed upon them because of their sins.
This was a system that had gradually come into being in the church in connection with what the Roman Catholic Church calls the sacrament of penance.
When a man fell into sin, at first it was the church in general that decided what form of penance he should take.
He had to do certain things to atone, as it were, for his sin.
He had to bear a certain punishment and the church decided what it was.
But the church had the power, if it chose, later on to remit a certain portion of the sentence, and that was called an indulgence.
Now, at first, this was done by the church in general.
But after a while, the power to do this was taken from the church and was taken over only by the priests.
They took it from the people, as they took so many other things, and they said they alone had a right to do this.
But, of course, that hadn't gone on very long before the Pope came in and said that this was really his prerogative.
So it was taken even out of the hands of the priests into the hands of the Pope himself.
This was the idea that the priest had power to give a man absolution for his sins.
But, though a man had had absolution, he still had to bear certain consequences for his sins in this world and, indeed, even in the next world.
At that point, they'd introduced their doctrine of purgatory, which says that even the souls of the redeemed have to go to this place they call purgatory
and there endure certain elements and aspects of the punishment of their sins.
And then they gradually work through that and eventually go to paradise.
Well, now indulgences, you see, came to mean this.
That the Pope had it within his power to shorten or to lessen this punishment that those whose sins had been absolved should suffer in this world and also in the next world in purgatory.
And the Pope claimed that he'd got this power to do this.
And he said that he had got this power because there was in the possession of the Church a great accumulation of righteousness.
Where did this come from?
Well, they taught that it had come partly from the Lord Jesus Christ himself.
But they did teach that, in addition, it had come from the lives of saints in the Church.
That these saints had lived such good lives that they had not only done sufficient and produced sufficient righteousness to cover themselves, they had produced a superabundance.
This was called the work of supererogation.
So they've got a great reserve of grace, as it were, in this way, which was in the charge of the Pope.
And he could give all that to anybody whom he chose.
He would give a certificate of indulgence.
Now that's the real meaning of this term, indulgence.
Of course, the Pope sometimes did this for nothing, but not very often.
He generally did it on the payment of a fee.
It really began and became quite a business in connection with the Crusaders.
Any man who took part in the Crusades was automatically given an indulgence.
But after the end of the Crusades, it was gradually extended to other people.
And so it became eventually something that anyone could obtain on the payment of a fee.
Now the price varied tremendously.
It varied from half a florin to twenty-five florins.
But this is where the real scandal came in that led to the action of Luther.
As the years passed, this practice became more and more of a scandal.
But it really became an acute scandal in 1507.
Luther, remember, was born in 1483.
In 1507, Pope Julius II, he decided now to rebuild the famous Church of St. Peter's in Rome.
And it was to be done magnificently.
If you've ever been there, you've seen it.
And you've seen how magnificently it was done from the artistic point of view.
But it cost a tremendous lot of money.
So he decided that he would issue a great mass of indulgences in order to help to rebuild the Church of St. Peter's at Rome.
And he allocated that a certain amount should be gathered in this way by the payment of indulgences in different parts of the world.
And in that part of Germany in which Luther lived, the sum allocated to them for collection for the rebuilding of St. Peter's was fifty-two thousand florins.
So, you see, it meant that this had got to be done very thoroughly.
There was a man who had become Archbishop twice over at the age of twenty-three, a man of the name of Albert of Knights.
And, of course, he had to pay for these great offices.
And he'd had to borrow from a famous banking firm in order to pay the Pope for these offices.
So now an arrangement was arrived that between this Pope and the bankers, the fugitives, and this Albert, twice over Archbishop,
that half the money collected for the payment of indulgences should go to Rome to rebuild St. Peter's.
The other half was to be divided between Albert himself and the bankers to whom he was in debt.
And a notorious man of the name of Tetzel was appointed to go around preaching and preaching indulgences and telling people what wonderful bargains they could have.
And amongst the other things which he said was this, that souls leapt from the flames of purgatory as the florins rattled into his coffer.
Even beyond that, and had the effrontery and the arrogance to say that even if a man had committed a foul sexual assault upon the Virgin Mary,
that he could get an indulgence if he paid the appropriate fee even for that.
Well, now, this had become a terrible scandal.
And in this part of Germany where Luther lived.
And Luther was constantly meeting this problem. He could see that the people were relying on this for forgiveness of sins.
He was concerned as a pastor, as a preacher.
He could see that the people were being deluded.
And it all came to a crisis in this way.
There was a great festival to be held in Wittenberg.
The festival was in connection with a kind of exhibition of relics that was held periodically by the Elector of Saxony under whose jurisdiction Luther led.
He claimed to have relics of the cross and of various other things.
You're familiar with this idea of relics in the church.
And he used to have this kind of exhibition of relics.
And it was to be held on this November the first.
And Luther knew that people would be coming from all directions.
They could get indulgences even for visiting the relics.
But at the same time, he knew that many of the people were traveling to listen to the preaching of this terrible man, Ketzel.
And Luther was disturbed in his soul.
And it was this that really led him to nail his ninety-five pieces to the door.
He said, something must be done about this.
This is a scandal. This is an offense.
Now let me again emphasize that that really was his motive at that point.
He really wanted to call attention to and to correct this terrible abuse.
We've got to be accurate, my friends.
And so I have to remind you that Luther at that time, at that point, did not object to indulgences as such.
As a Roman Catholic, one brought up in Catholicism, he believed in indulgences as long as they were done in the right way.
This, he says, is abuse.
So his whole object was not so much to attack the Church as a whole, nor her teaching,
but to correct this terrible abuse in connection with this matter of indulgences.
And yet, and this is the thing that is so interesting for us and from which I trust we shall learn certain lessons together tonight.
Though his primary object was to deal with and to correct the abuses in connection with indulgences,
he did that in such a way that inevitably it led to the reformation of doctrine and the separation from the Roman Church.
Now, before I come to deal with that, let me just give you some indication of the character of these theses.
This is exactly what he's nailed up on the door.
Out of love and zeal for truth and the desire to bring it to light, the following thesis will be publicly discussed at Wittenberg
under the chairmanship of the Reverend Father Martin Luther, Master of Arts and Sacred Theology,
and regularly appointed lecturer on these subjects at their place.
He requests that those who cannot be present to debate orally with us will do so by letter.
That's his introduction. Then follow the 95 theses. They're quite short.
I only wish I'd got time to read them all because they're fascinating, but I'm going to pick out some of the more interesting ones.
Here's the first. And you see in the very first thesis, his theology comes through.
Here it is. When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, repent, he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.
You see, the teaching of indulgences was that once you paid your money and got your indulgence, all was well.
You finished your repentance as far as that was concerned at Inuit.
He throws down the gauntlet in the very first.
When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, repent, he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.
Then take number 32, which is an interesting one.
Those who believe that they can be certain of their salvation because they have indulgence letters
will be eternally damned together with their teachers.
Now, remember, he wasn't really setting out to deal with theological issues.
And yet, in spite of that, you see, out it comes.
36, any truly repentant Christian has a right to full remission of penalty and guilt even without indulgence letters.
What an attack on the Pope without intending to do it.
Then let's go on to 37.
Any true Christian, whether living or dead, participates in all the blessings of Christ and the Church.
And this is granted him by God even without indulgence letters.
He's rubbing it home, isn't he?
45, Christians are to be taught that he who sees a needy man and passes him by,
yet gives his money for indulgences, does not buy papal indulgences but God's wrath.
And they were doing it.
They felt, you see, they must have forgiveness.
It could be bought in this way.
So instead of giving their money to some poor pauper or some starving person,
they took the money and paid it in order to get the indulgence.
That's his comment upon their practice.
46, Christians are to be taught that unless they have more than they need,
they must reserve enough for their family needs and by no means squander it on indulgences.
This is what they would call today strong stuff, isn't it?
And yet, remember, his concern was to correct abuses.
But let's go on.
62, the true treasure of the Church is the most holy gospel of the glory and grace of God.
He's preaching to the Pope at this point.
This is the true treasure of the Church,
not some supposed accumulated treasure as the result of supererogation of the saints and so on.
75, to consider papal indulgences so great that they could absolve the men
even if he had done the impossible and had violated the mother of God is madness.
I quoted that to you just now.
There he puts it quite plainly.
But let me come to the last one, 92 to 95.
Away then with all those prophets who say to the people of Christ,
Peace, peace, and there is no peace.
Away with those prophets who say to the people of Christ,
Cross, cross, and there is no cross.
Christians, says 94, should be exhorted to be diligent in following Christ their head
through penalties, death and hell and the lost
and thus be confident of entering into heaven through many tribulations
rather than through the false security of peace.
And the false security of peace of course means the peace that these core ignorant people
obtain as a result of paying their money in order to obtain these indulgences.
Well now then, that's the thing that we are actually celebrating.
The nailing of these 95 theses to the door of the temple for discussion amongst the faculty.
But as I've been enjoying, however they kept on creeping through
these propositions which were primarily meant to deal solely with indulgences,
something else, something deeper, something bigger,
something that in a sense sparked off the Protestant Reformation.
What was it?
Now here is the thing to me that is most fascinating.
The answer is the story, the spiritual pilgrimage of this mighty man, Martin Luther.
He was born on November the 10th, 1483.
He was a young man of great abilities.
Father put him to the law intending him to be a law and he might very well have been a law.
Were it not that on a certain day in the year 1505 he was very nearly killed by a thunderbolt
that struck him to the ground during a terrifying thunderstorm.
And he was terrified and he prayed saying, help me Saint Anne.
He was a Roman Catholic, if you remember.
Help me Saint Anne and I will become a monk.
He came face to face with death and he wasn't ready for it.
And he was terrified and convicted deeply and he never forgot it.
In a sense the Protestant Reformation starts with a thunderbolt.
You remember the conversion of the Philippian jail, earthquake.
You know my friends, when the world becomes so mad that it won't listen to the preaching of the gospel,
God has got other ways of calling attention to the truth.
A thunderbolt.
What will this generation to which you and I have to meet I wonder?
But let's take heart brethren, whatever they may do with us as preachers,
God reigns and he rules the thunder and the lightning and the storms and the winds.
And those men were struck to the ground and the great process began as the result of a thunderbolt.
The result of this was that he became a monk and entered an Augustinian monastery at Erfurt
and was under a very great man called Staupitz who played quite a part in his life.
I haven't the time to tell you the story. I'm picking out the salient features.
In 1507 he celebrated his first mass as they called it and still call it.
But you know the very act of doing that got him into trouble.
He felt he was unworthy to do this.
Who was he to offer what he thought was the body of Christ?
Who was he?
Who was he to approach this God to whom he was making the offering?
He was troubled about this. He was unhappy about his soul.
In 1508 he was sent to the University of Wittenberg.
Staupitz felt that Luther was an intellectual and that it would be good for him perhaps to go to the university
and there engage his great mind and get rid of what he regarded partly as a kind of morbidity and a tendency to introspection.
In 1510 he visited Rome.
Now there are stories about this but one gathers from the historians that we mustn't believe all the legends that we've been accustomed to.
Doesn't matter. His conversion did certainly not take place in Rome in 1510.
In 1512 he was made the prior of an Augustinian friar and at the same time he was appointed lecturer or professor in theology.
But during the whole of this time he'd got a great problem and this was it.
How can I find a gracious God?
He knew about the righteousness and the justice of God.
He knew of the terrors of God's law.
How can I find a gracious God?
This was his problem.
How can I get assurance or forgiveness of my sins?
An authority has put it like this.
What Luther really cared about from 1505 to 1515 was not the reform of the church.
It was Luther, the soul of Luther, the salvation of Luther.
Nothing more.
It was intensely personal.
Here was a man under conviction of sin and who couldn't find peace.
Here was a man looking for forgiveness and nobody could tell him how to obtain it.
This was the agony of his soul all these years.
This man Staupitz advised him to read the mystics and he did so.
He read Saint Bernard.
He read a great preacher that had appeared in Germany of the name of Paolo.
He read a wonderful little volume.
It was the first thing that he ever printed called Theologia Germanica.
German theology, a kind of mystical theology.
You can still get it.
He read this and he did something for it and for a while he thought this was going to be the way out.
But after a while he saw that he'd never find peace by way of mysticism.
He'd already seen that he couldn't obtain it by his own words.
But he found out that mysticism also is a very subtle form of works.
He had to strive for self-surrender.
And it's a most terrible task.
To try and surrender yourself or to get rid of yourself is very much more difficult even than the performance of external acts of righteousness.
So he saw that mysticism left it all with him again and he was striving and struggling for this self-surrender and absorption in God.
And he couldn't do it.
So he came back again to the Bible.
And this is the fascinating thing about it.
He lets us know that it was his very preparation of his lectures for his students and his sermons for the people that really brought him to see the truth.
His own preparation was the very means of his conviction.
From 1513 to 1516 he lectured on the psalms.
From 1515 and 1516 he lectured on the epistle to the Romans.
And as he studied this and was preparing for it the truth very slowly began to dawn upon him.
Another factor came in.
There had been a revival of interest in the writings of the great Saint Augustine.
It had started about 1509.
And Luther, like others, began to read him.
He read the Confessions of Saint Augustine.
He read his famous two volumes, The City of God.
He read him on true religion and Christian doctrine.
He read him also on the psalms and on Romans.
You see, in preparing his own lectures he said, how can Augustine help me?
So he consulted Augustine on the psalms and on the epistle to the Romans.
And gradually he began to understand and to believe Augustine's teaching on justification by faith.
It wasn't what Luther himself taught later.
It wasn't what he and I believed.
But he did see the principle at any rate of justification by faith.
There was error mixed up with it, but in essence he seems to have got help.
Another thing that helped him was that Erasmus, that great scholar and humanist,
had produced his New Testament Greek, his edition of New Testament Greek, in 1560.
And all these things helped Luther together.
But it's very wrong to say, as I read in the leading article, I think it was in the Baptist Times last week,
that the Reformation really is the outcome of the Renaissance.
It isn't.
It helped a little bit in producing this good text, but as Luther himself said, these are his words,
It is very certain that neither study nor intelligence can give us insight into holy writ.
There is no master interpreter of the divine words except the author of the word.
They gave a certain amount of help, but they were not the means of bringing him right through to the truth.
Now here, yes, he's beginning to see it.
His own studies of the Psalms and of the Epistle to the Romans are bringing him nearer and nearer
to this great saving doctrine of justification by faith.
But it took a particular experience to bring him to it.
And he had that experience in the tower of the monastery in which he lived.
It's referred to generally as the tower experience.
Now there's great argument as to when this happened.
I've tried to go into this as best I can.
I am quite satisfied that it happened before this important event in 1517 when he nailed his thesis to the church door.
But this is how he puts it.
Here he is, you see, in this tower.
He's reading, he's meditating, he's praying.
I'll either diligently and anxiously as to how to understand Paul's word in Romans 1.17,
where he says that the righteousness of God is revealed in the Gospel.
I sought long and knocked anxiously for the expression the righteousness of God.
Blocked the way.
As often as I read that declaration, I wished always that God had not made the Gospel known.
He interpreted that, you see, as meaning the righteousness that God demands of us,
a righteousness that we've got to produce.
And this he said blocked the way.
I couldn't do it.
And he says I wished that that declaration that God had not made that declaration
and that the Gospel had not been made known.
But once when I was meditating in the tower of the monastery in Wittenberg,
when I saw the difference that law is one thing and Gospel another, I broke through.
And as I had formerly hated the expression the righteousness of God,
I now began to regard it as my dearest and most comforting word
so that this expression of Paul's became to me in very truth a gate to paradise.
What did he see? Well, what he'd seen was this.
That the righteousness of God in Romans 1.17 is not a righteousness
that you and I have to create and attain and to abide by means of indulgences.
It is a righteousness that God gives us.
It's a righteousness that he clouds us with.
It is the free gift of God by grace through faith.
The righteousness of God by faith.
The just shall live by faith.
He broke through, he says.
And this expression which had so terrified him became now his dearest and most comforting word
so that this expression of Paul became to me in very truth a gate to paradise.
Now then, all that I drew your attention to in the thesis was the result of that.
He'd come to see this.
This is the way of forgiveness.
And yet these people are believing still that they can die it.
That it's in the gift of the Pope.
It's in the gift of the priests.
And they can purchase this and buy this.
And he knew this was wrong.
Now this was working in him unconsciously.
It was the scandal that drew his attention and yet behind it he was really questioning and querying
the whole notion of indulgences.
The whole idea of penance.
Indeed the whole question of the way of salvation.
But it wasn't his intention to do this.
He simply put up the thesis to get a discussion on the scandal.
What happened?
Well he sent a copy to the Elector of Saxony where he lived.
But you know God was in this.
Other people got hold of these theses which were in Latin.
They translated them into German and they printed them.
And in a few weeks hundreds of copies of these theses were available.
And it spread like wildfire. It became a best seller.
He never intended it and at first he was really quite annoyed about it.
But whatever he might think about it that is what happened.
And then of course he was attacked by this man Quetzal.
He was reported to his superiors.
He was reported to this Archbishop.
He'd sent a copy of it to him.
And he was eventually reported to the Pope.
The result of this was he had to appear on trial several times.
There were discussions with a famous disputer called Eck.
And this is what happened.
The more they tried to criticize his thesis and the more they attacked him.
The more they drove him back to the Bible.
The more certain he became of his ground.
The clearer he saw these great doctrines.
So that their very opposition by 1519 had made him write this.
That the Pope is veritable Antichrist by 1519.
And soon he came to see that the entire Roman Catholic system was opposed to the Gospel.
And completely wrong.
But now I want to emphasize that this was something that happened to him gradually.
He didn't see it all in a sudden flash.
He did have this flash in connection with justification by faith.
But not about all these other doctrines.
He went on from step to step.
He says himself, like Augustine, I was one of those who progressed by writing and by teaching.
His very preparation, as I say, convinced himself.
I did not learn my theology at a single stroke.
I had to bury myself in it ever more deeply.
And this was the phrase, God led me on.
God led me on.
Eventually by 1520, which was one of his great years.
When he published a large number of most important publications that are still available for us to read.
By then he had really seen all the great fundamental evangelical principles of the Christian faith.
They were clear to him.
This was not a mere speculative theology that he was interested in.
He was always interested in God's holiness.
God's love, man's sinfulness, law, Gospel, Christ, faith, justification.
And all this brought him on to see the centrality of the scriptures.
That the scriptures alone are our authority.
Solar scriptural.
Not the tradition.
Not the teaching of the church.
In these disputations that he had, his opponents were always quoting the teaching of the church and some councils and tradition.
And he kept on saying, but what does the word say?
What do the scriptures say?
Always bringing them back to the word.
Tradition and the teaching of the church, he said, are not equal to the scriptures.
The scriptures alone are our authority.
And furthermore, he said, the church is not the sole interpreter of the scriptures.
The Roman church had taught that. She still teaches it.
You know the Roman church now is encouraging people to buy Bibles and to read them.
But she's very careful to tell them that she alone can interpret them truly and authoritatively.
She was saying it then. She is still saying it.
Luther, on the other hand, said that any man with a spirit in him can read and understand the scriptures.
He began to assert the universal priesthood of all believers.
He rejected this division into clergy and laity.
He said, there's no such thing.
He said that a poor serving girl sweeping a room with a brush is in as good a position as the Pope himself,
if necessary, to understand these things if she's got the spirit.
He did away with monks and orders and all these false orders that had come into the life of the church.
At the same time, he came to see the true view with regard to the sacraments.
Sacraments, he said, don't act in and of themselves, ex opere operato.
They're not magical. They don't act in and of themselves.
No, no. There's no such thing as the mass, he said.
This was a figment of the imagination, the creation of men.
There is no such thing.
And at the same time, he denounced the doctrine of transubstantiation.
Now all this, I say, it happened by 1520.
He put a great deal of it into a book which he called The Babylonian Captivity of the Church.
Now, my friends, there is the history for you in its essence.
I mustn't keep you.
We are here to call attention primarily, first and foremost, to Luther and that action which he took.
It's right, you know, to praise famous men.
There is a kind of piety that seems to think that this is wrong.
I dissent from that completely.
Martin Luther is worth looking at.
Would that there were more like him at the present time.
God uses men.
Don't forget that.
He creates the men, as I'm going to show you.
But they're very wonderful men and Luther was a wonderful man.
And it's worth how I'll just have a look at him for a moment.
He was an outstanding genius.
There's no other word that can describe him.
He was not only able, he was a genius.
The next thing that strikes us about him is his honesty.
His scrupulous honesty.
And then his amazing courage.
There are those who say, and I think they're quite right, that if he hadn't been led along the way he was by God,
he probably would have been one of the great musicians of all time.
He was very fond of music.
He wasn't very interested in art, but he was passionately fond of music.
And he could compose music, as you know.
The only word I find that's adequate to describe this man is this.
He was a volcano.
He was a great mountain.
But he was a mountain on fire.
And he erupted.
And he threw out the most precious things.
But he also threw out a lot of dross.
It's all right, I say, to look at men.
But when we do it truly, and when we face all the facts,
we see that the best men are fallible.
But he was God's men for this occasion.
The right men.
Others, you know, before Luther had said many of the things that he said.
Let's not forget in this country that John Wycliffe had said many of them.
And John Wycliffe had influenced that man called John Huss, or Huss, long before Luther.
And yet, you see, these men didn't lead to this great Reformation.
Why not? Well, Luther himself, I think, answers the question.
In us, he says, attacked and castigated only the Pope's evil and scandalous life.
But I have attacked the Pope's doctrine and overthrown him.
And that was the essential difference.
Though he began to deal with abuses and what he calls the scandalous life and the evils and so on,
oh, he was on a deeper level at the same time.
He attacked the Pope's doctrine and he overthrew the entire edifice.
This volcanic man, this outstanding genius, was the man who thus was led to instigate the Protestant Reformation.
But you see, great though he was, he couldn't have done it as a man, he couldn't have done it alone.
We see the action of God.
It's the only explanation.
Luther, as I've told you, was a great man. He was a true genius.
But he's, of all men, I sometimes think, the one that is most comforting to the preacher.
He's not only comforting to the preacher, he's a comfort I'm sure to many of you who are here tonight.
Genius, brilliant brain that he was.
He was subject to attacks of depression.
He could get terribly depressed.
He was very human.
Not only did he suffer from attacks of depression, he was a great hypochondriac.
Imaginary ills and diseases, particularly of his bowels.
And he talked a lot about it, that's why I mention it.
Not only that, if ever a man was attacked by the devil, it was this man.
We are told that the story of the ink pot isn't true.
Well, I don't know. But whether that is true or not, that he was attacked by the devil is beyond any question.
He had veritable onslaught of Satan upon him.
And he had to face difficulties and problems.
I say this again for the comfort mainly of my brethren in the ministry.
In 1521, he had to spend a number of months in the Wartburg castle to be saved from his enemies.
And he was not in contact with the church and affairs of Wittenberg.
And after he got back to Wittenberg, after this incarceration as it virtually was in this place,
when he got back to Wittenberg, he found that all sorts and kinds of things had happened.
Any man in the ministry knows what that is.
Church members are like children. And when the parents are away, they tend to do certain things.
And the poor parent comes back and finds the church in awful trouble.
All sorts of things have been happening in their absence.
Poor Luther comes back and he feels that the whole of the Reformation has been lost.
And he was cast down, but not for long.
God would always raise him up. It's the only explanation.
In spite of his natural depression and morbidity.
In spite of this weakness with regard to illnesses and so on.
And in spite of the devil, he wasn't down for long.
He'd rise up and he cleansed the whole place again.
And he went on doing that through his extraordinary life.
So what I see above everything here is the action of God.
Don't you see it?
Look at the preparation for Luther and the Reformation.
Wycliffe and Huss and other men.
Look at those mystics I've mentioned.
They were all produced by God.
It was a part of God preparing for this mighty event that he knew was coming.
Then the Renaissance.
The rediscovery of Greek culture.
The work of Erasmus and others with this Greek New Testament and so on.
It is part of God's preparation.
Indeed there was even a political preparation.
Many of these governors and rulers in Germany were getting very restive about all this money that they had to be sending down to Rome constantly.
They wanted to use it in their own way.
But they were vassals of the Pope and they were restive.
There was political unrest.
Now some of you modern infidel historians think they can explain the whole of the Protestant Reformation in political terms and economic terms.
That of course is sheer nonsense.
But it did come in and God was behind it.
And then, perhaps most important of all, the discovery of printing.
Just at the right time.
Oh my dear friends, we are worshippers of a wonderful God.
How perfect is his planning.
How perfect is his timing.
He does a thing there and you feel that's only political.
That's only economic.
He does another thing here.
You say this is only a matter of erudition or of culture.
But no, no.
The great planner.
He sees it all.
And he prepares parts and portions and he'd been doing this and then the moment struck he brought them all together.
And he brought them all together in this astounding men Martin Luther.
You don't get reformations through an Erasmus.
It's through a Luther.
This is about the only men I've ever read of in history who could have done it.
Any other men would have been crushed.
Nothing could crush this man.
God knew his men.
He'd made him.
He'd prepared him.
And he'd filled him with his spirit.
And he'd raised him up.
Didn't matter what happened.
No, no.
Your dry as dust theologians, your scholars, they never lead to reformations.
And that is one of the things that's so obvious about this ecumenical movement.
It's a movement of professors very largely in that wrong sense.
They lack this volcanic element.
This living element.
This experimental element.
This experiential element.
Which is the very heart and center of the story of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation.
How do you explain him?
How do you explain what he did?
To me there's only one explanation.
Here it is.
We read at the beginning of the Gospels.
In the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea and so on,
the word of God came to John the son of Zacharias in the wilderness.
And that's what happened in 1517 and just before.
The word of God came to Martin Luther.
It's God from beginning to end.
Listen to the way he puts it himself.
He said, God led me on like a horse whose eyes have been blindfolded
that he may not see those who are rushing toward him.
That's all he said. God led me on.
I was like a horse who had been blindfolded
so that he couldn't see the enemies that were coming to attack him with their chariots and their spears.
I couldn't see but God could and he led me on.
He did it.
I but read and I but expanded and I but preached, said Luther.
It was God that did it. The word did it. God led me on.
It's the only explanation and that is our comfort this evening
so that I want to apply what I've just been saying to our present state in just a few words.
What does all this teach us?
It's good, I say, to read history.
It's good to study the lives of these men whom God has raised in the church from time to time.
But not as a mere antiquarian essay.
Not merely because of our historical interest.
But in order that we may learn certain great spiritual lessons.
What are the lessons then that we draw from Luther and the Reformation?
And these seem to me to be the answer.
The first is this.
The vital importance of the starting point.
What I mean is this.
When you are confronted with a church in trouble as the church is today
and you are concerned, what can we do about it?
There is nothing more important than your starting point.
Or if I may vary that.
The lesson of Luther is to me the lesson of this.
The importance of your first question.
It's the first question that matters.
If your first question is wrong, you'll probably be wrong altogether.
Or if I may put it in another form, the great lesson is this.
The distinction between the religious motive and ecclesiasticism.
Now let me translate this.
What do we learn?
First, what is the first question that we should ask at the present time?
I answer, it is not.
How can we have one territorial church?
That is not the first question.
It wasn't Luther's first question.
He'd got that.
That must never be the first question.
I feel the whole tragedy today and especially the ecumenical movement
is that it asks the wrong first question.
They start with the conditions as they are and they say,
how can we get one territorial church in each country
and then get them all to be in fellowship together?
It's the wrong question.
Or I can put that in another way.
It is a wrong question to start with, to ask,
how can we have unity and fellowship?
Now unity is all important.
Our Lord has commanded it, but it's not the first question.
You mustn't start with unity.
You mustn't start with fellowship.
Thirdly, you mustn't start by asking,
now how can we find a formula that will satisfy men of diametrically opposed views?
Now I'm mentioning the very questions that are being asked at the present time.
These are the questions of the ecumenically minded people.
They are seeking for formulae which will satisfy men whose views are diametrically opposed.
Let me give you two illustrations of what I mean.
There has been considerable rejoicing in a certain section of the Church in this country
during this present year over the fact that they have now found a formula
concerning the question of prayers for the dead.
Why are they so jubilant? I'll tell you why they're so jubilant.
They say that the formula that they've at last evolved
satisfies both the Anglo-Catholic and the Evangelical.
The same words, they say it's marvellous.
The Anglo-Catholic reads it and says, this is praying for the dead.
The Evangelical looks at the same words, he says, it is not praying for the dead at all.
But you see, this is wonderful. We've got a formula that holds the Church together.
Everybody can accept the formula, the magic formula, or take another one.
Take this question of the notorious service of reconciliation, as it's called,
in connection with the Anglo-Methodist proposal for the reunion of those two churches.
And this is the position. They've arrived at a formula.
The Anglo-Catholic reads it and says, this means that this Methodist minister is being re-ordained.
The Methodist ministers, many of them, most of them probably, read it and say,
this does not mean that we are being re-ordained.
But they say it's marvellous, we're all agreed.
We've got a marvellous formula.
And though we are fundamentally opposed in our doctrine, it satisfies both sides of getting unity.
Now that is what happens when you start by saying,
how can we find a formula that's going to hold us all together?
And you're bound to ask that question if you start with the notion of a territorial Church.
If you start with unity and uniformity, in a sense, and fellowship, instead of the true questions.
What then are the true questions? Oh, there's no difficulty in answering it.
Martin Luther answers it. How did he start?
How did he become the man he was? What led to the Protestant Reformation?
Do you know the answer? Here's the first question.
And here is the first question that the Christian Church so-called needs to ask today.
What is a Christian? That's the question.
What is a Christian? Is he only a man who objects to atomic bombs?
Is he just a man who objects to a party?
What is a Christian?
Luther, I feel, is thundering down the ages to us, to this very night,
and he's saying to us, ask that question.
What is a Christian? Don't start about organisations and institutions.
Don't start about territorial churches or getting all together.
Ask the great question which the scriptures raise.
What is a Christian? And then the second.
And, oh, how vital it was to Luther.
How does one become a Christian?
How does one become a Christian?
How does one get forgiveness of sins?
Is it because I'm christened as an infant?
Is it because I'm born in a particular country?
What makes me a Christian? How do I become a Christian?
Do I get pardon and forgiveness by paying or by doing good works?
How does one become a Christian and get this assurance of being reconciled to God?
That led to the Protestant Reformation.
It was this intense personal experience of salvation.
And these are still the fundamental questions, and they lead to the next.
What is a church? Is she but an organisation?
Or is she the gathering of those who have this experience of salvation and sins forgiven
and who know God, who are born again and have the Spirit witnessing within them?
What is the church?
What is the church?
Before you begin talking about amalgamations and unions, let's ask the first questions.
What is a church?
And I'm here to suggest to you that if we start with those questions,
we shall inevitably find ourselves following precisely the same path as was trodden by Martin Luther.
It is inevitable.
Why? Well, for these reasons.
To a man who knows this experience, to a man who has his own authority in the scriptures,
there is no possible compromise with, first of all, the Church of Rome.
No possible compromise.
The man who asks these questions and finds the scriptural answer
finds, as Luther found, that it is impossible to come to any agreement with Rome.
It is another gospel.
It is entirely different.
There is no compromise with sacerdotism.
There is no compromise for the evangelical with those who say that a bishop is of the essence of the very essence of the Church.
There is no compromise for the evangelical with a man who says that unless you've received episcopal ordination, you're not truly ordained.
It is impossible.
There is no accommodation between the evangelical and the blasphemy of the mass.
There is no possible compromise for the evangelical with a belief in baptismal regeneration.
It is impossible.
Luther found it impossible.
As he went on studying, preparing his lectures on Romans, sermons on the Psalms, Galatians, it became impossible.
And so the break was inevitable.
But not only is compromise with such people impossible for the evangelical,
it is equally impossible for him to be yoked together with others in the Church who deny the very elements of the Christian faith.
These men who seem to deny the very being of God, who talk about the Lord Jesus Christ as a homosexual.
There is no agreement. It's light and darkness.
And that you should desire to hold such groups together in one territorial Church, my friends, it is a denial of the Christian faith.
It is guilt by association.
If you were content to function in the same Church with such people, the two groups I have mentioned,
you are virtually saying that though you think you are right, that they also may be right.
It is a possible explanation.
And that I assert is a denial of the evangelical, the only true faith.
It is impossible.
But someone would object at this point and say, but aren't you forgetting that Rome is changing?
Aren't you yourself falling back to the 16th century?
Aren't you being carried away by Luther?
Are you forgetting that you're living in 1967? Rome is changing.
All right, let's examine the change.
The Church of Rome is not identical with the Church in Luther's day. Why not?
Well, since then, you see, she has propounded infallibly the doctrine of papal infallibility.
It wasn't propounded at that time.
What else? She has propounded the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.
She has propounded the doctrine of the Assumption of Mary.
And there has been a terrible increase in Mariolatry.
The only difference between the Church of Rome then and now is this, that it's even worse now.
Oh yes, it's true to say that they've dealt with the question of the abuse of indulgences since Luther's day.
But what they have also done is to degenerate in doctrine and to make it even worse than it was in his day.
Let's not forget this. But people say, what about this new attitude to the Bible? Let's face it.
Did you know that the new attitude to the Bible in the Roman Church is mainly a higher critical attitude?
And what is coming into the Roman Church is modernism, liberalism, higher criticism, not evangelicalism.
Don't be delimited, my friends. Those are the facts concerning the Roman Catholic Church.
But wait, says another. Surely you ought to be concerned about these people in the Church of Rome who are beginning to feel unhappy.
We were told about them by one of the speakers this afternoon.
And it's right. There are many in trouble. They say, now, surely you should be concerned about them and be anxious to help them.
I agree. We should be very concerned. We should be praying for them, for their conversion. But how are we to help them?
Are we to help them by saying to them, you know, after all, there's not very much difference between us.
We also have been moving. And you know, we are coming much nearer together.
And the step you'll have to take when you leave Rome and join one of our Protestant churches is a comparatively smaller one.
Is that the way to help them? God forbid.
If you want to help a troubled Roman Catholic, show him the true doctrine.
Open the scriptures to him. Show him the error under which he's been brought up.
Show him how the things to which he's been trusting are denials of the Gospel, even as Luther did in his day and generation.
And I can tell you this. You take a stand on the scriptures and on the truth.
And you will find that you are the very men of all men whom this troubled Roman Catholic will be most anxious to see.
He'll respect your honesty. He'll say this man knows where he is and what he believes.
This is the man who can help me, not your compromiser who is prepared to give up most of what he stands for in order to help somebody else.
No, no. This is true psychologically. It's been true historically.
There is a strange attraction in opposites.
And if you really want to help these people, very well then I say be certain of what you believe.
Don't apologise for it. Expound it in love and urge upon them the importance of giving it a wholehearted allegiance.
So I close with an appeal.
The position around and about us is developing rapidly.
The ecumenical movement is advancing day by day and it is travelling in the direction of Rome.
You needn't take that from me.
A great Methodist scholar who is not an evangelical at all, Professor Norman Smith, said that in print recently.
It is heading toward Rome and of opposites.
Very well then my friends.
What do we say in the light of all this?
For it's not only heading to Rome, it's heading also to an amalgamation with the so-called world religions.
And will undoubtedly end as a great world congress of faiths.
Anything in order to hold on to power and authority and the tyranny of the minds and the lives of the people.
Let us realise that. Let us realise also that one territorial church in each country is only possible by compromise of evangelical principles.
The idea that evangelicals can infiltrate any established church above all the church of Rome and reform it and turn it into an evangelical body is midsummer madness.
No institution has ever been reformed. This is the verdict of history.
Neutrality at a time like this is cowardice.
It is temporising where it isn't sheer ignorance and unawareness of the facts.
What are we as evangelicals then to do in this situation?
I reply by saying we are to heed a great injunction in Revelation 18.4.
Come out of her my people. Come out of her my people.
That he be not partakers of her sins and that he receive not of her claims.
Come out of it, but come together also.
Come into fellowship. Heed the appeal of Mr. Ben-Dos Samuel.
Come into this fellowship of churches, this council of churches that stands for the truth and against compromise, hesitation, neutrality and everything that but ministers to the success of the place.
The plans of Rome and the ecumenical movement.
Come out. Come in.
And then look back at old Martin Luther and say with him, here I stand.
I can do no other.
So help me God.
And trust in him what a numbers matter.
What a sarcasm and scorn and derision matter.
What's it matter that we be despised and laughed at?
A man said the other day that everybody believes in the ecumenical movement.
Everybody. We are nobody you see.
Let them say it. Let them say it.
This one man was enabled by God to stand, as it were, against the whole church and against those centuries of traditions.
And you and I will be enabled to do it.
Let's use his words, God's word, for all their craft and force.
One moment will not linger, but spite of hell shall have its course.
It is written by his finger.
And though they take our life, goods, honor, children, wife.
Yet is their profit small.
These things shall vanish all.
The city of God.
Remaineth.
Do you belong to her?
Zion, city of our God.
When everything else is gone, the city of God remaineth.
God grant that all of us here present tonight and all whom we represent may know of a surety that we are members and citizens of this city.
Amen.