By Faith Alone in Christ Alone
Romans 1:14-17,
I am under obligation both to Greeks and to barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish. 15 So I am eager to preach the gospel to you also who are in Rome.
16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. 17 For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”
And it was this passage of God’s word that changed the life of Martin Luther. He lived from the year 1483 to 1546, and later in life he looked back and said of Romans 1:17,
“Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.”
And the story of that experience is the story I want to tell you this morning. We’re gonna look at Martin Luther in three parts: Luther’s World, Luther’s Wrestling, and Luther’s Breakthrough.
Luther’s World
So again, Luther was born in 1483 in Germany. He grew up in a town called Mansfeld. It was a mining town about 100 miles southwest of modern-day Berlin. It was surrounded by deep forests, and in the minds of most 15th-century Europeans, that was spooky.
This is something that can be hard for us to understand today, but Luther lived in a premodern world — what we could call an Enchanted World. People were very aware that reality was full of spiritual powers, and it affected people.
Today, at a cultural level, most people in our world live unaffected by the spiritual realm. Our mindset is what what one philosopher calls the Buffered Self.
This means that we tend to insulate ourselves from mystery. We love science and technology and explanation, and so we tend to reduce things from having deeper meanings. We kinda laugh at superstition.
It didn’t used to be that way. For example, in Luther’s village, people believed witches and poltergeists lived in the woods. And in general, people just carried around a fear of the spiritual realm. And it makes sense. Just 130 years before Luther was born, the Black Plague killed over one-third of Europe. This was an invisible sickness, with no explanation, and it killed over 25 million people. Death by disease was still common in Luther’s day.
It makes sense that these people were a little on edge, and superstitious — especially in a mining town. Mining was a dangerous industry, and the town’s patron saint was Saint Anne.
Now the whole idea of patron saints is strange — it’s not in the Bible — but Anne was supposedly the grandmother of Jesus, Mary’s mother, and she protected miners. So it was common for people from this town to pray to Saint Anne and ask her to look out for them.
But Luther was a good kid. He was raised in the Catholic faith; he was acquainted with the Bible; and he was smart. His dad really wanted him to be a lawyer, so he sent him off to college at 17 years old, a few years later Luther graduated, and he started law school in 1505. But he didn’t stay in law school very long. Other things had been on his mind.
That same year two of his classmates and two young lawyers had died by the disease, and reportedly, one of the young lawyer’s last words right before he died was “O, that I had become a monk!”
So all this had been weighing on Luther … and it happened that in July 1505, he had been home for a visit and then started traveling back to school. It was 53 miles between his home and his school, and when he got about six miles from school, all of a sudden there was a terrible thunderstorm.
I don’t know how scared we tend to get about thunderstorms, but 500 years ago they were horrifying. Luther is out in the open, in the midst of this thunder and lightning, and he thinks he is gonna die, so he collapses and cries out, Help me, St. Anne! And then he says: I will become a monk!
Well he survived the thunderstorm. But now he had made a vow. People took vows very seriously back then. Two weeks later Luther left law school and entered the nearby monastery to become an Augustinian monk.
And that brings us to Part Two: Luther’s Wrestling.
Luther’s Wrestling
Luther was a good monk like he was a good student. Later in life Luther said that by monk standards, he was the best. … Fantastic!
He said that if it were possible for any monk to get to heaven through his monkery, it would have been him. He prayed and fasted constantly; he kept vigils; he deprived himself of heat in the winter; he spent long stretches in solitude; and he confessed his sins for hours to his mentor and confessor, a man named Johannes von Staupitz.
We know at least once that Luther spent six straight hours confessing his sins. He would come up with all kinds of things to confess; he was constantly questioning his own motives. He looked for sins even behind the act of confessing sins, and when he couldn’t think of any sins, he confessed pride for not being able to. He just couldn’t escape. Luther had an issue with obsessive self-examination. And truly, he suffered from severe spiritual depression.
Now, I don’t speak German, but there was a particular German word that Luther used to refer to his depression and it doesn’t have a direct English equivalent. The word is Anfechtung.
Now you hear the word “fecht” in there, and that’s related to our English word “fight.” Anfechtung basically means to be attacked, but it’s spiritual. One biographer explains:
For Luther, [this Anfechtung] seems to have manifested itself as a widening hole of sheerest hopelessness, an increasing cacophony of devils’ voices accusing him of a thousand things … (Metaxas, 28).
It was anguish and despair that would assault him. Luther said the battles would often come late at night in the form of anxiety, terror, and temptation — and he believed he was literally fighting the devil.
But, because he knew that God was sovereign over the devil, he came to see the whole thing as a wrestling with God himself. Like Jacob’s wrestling with God in Genesis 32 — except Luther knew he was no match for God. (See Marty, 23ff)
He was convinced that no matter how hard he tried, he was never doing good enough to appease God’s wrath. He had no peace, so he’d just keep trying harder, and he’d keep complaining it wasn’t hard enough.
He wrestled and worried and wearied himself, again and again and again.
One day his mentor Staupitz got so fed up with Luther’s long confessions that he told Luther that his problem was not that God was angry with him, but it’s that Luther was angry with God!
Now imagine that moment. Has anybody ever told you something like that before? Have you ever been angry with God?
I want to be careful here … but many of us know something about what Luther was going through. It’s not super uncommon, especially not for the more introspective among us. Like: if you’re aware of God’s reality and you know yourself — if you’re convinced of God’s existence but not convinced of his love — your mind will get stuck here.
I know a man who had some Anfechtung when he was in high school. It was the Southern Baptist version though. He was worried sick that he didn’t pray the ‘Sinner’s Prayer’ correctly. He was worried sick that he had missed a word or said something wrong, and he was gonna be left behind.
Many of us know what it’s like to wrestle spiritually.
And if that’s where you are this morning, I need to tell you: don’t give up.
Luther has his wrestlings, but he also had a breakthrough. This is Part Three.
Luther’s Breakthrough
Luther was sent to the city of Wittenberg to become a professor of theology, and this is where Luther began to pour himself into the Bible. Beginning in 1513 he lectured on the Psalms, and then in 1516, he started lecturing on the Book of Romans.
This is where things began to change, thanks in part to Augustine (who we learned about last week). So Luther was an Augustinian monk which means he would have read a lot of Augustine, but we know for a fact he did.
And that’s because — this is pretty fascinating to me — in the year 1889, in a German library about 75 miles from the monastery where Luther lived, someone stumbled upon a stack of old books that turned out to be Luther’s books from when he was a monk. And there was a lot of Augustine.
His copies of Augustine’s On the Trinity and City of God were devoured. There were notes all in them that dated back to 1509, when Luther was 25. Which means, leading up to 1516 when Luther taught Romans, he had been steeping in the theology of Augustine, and especially Augustine’s teaching about the grace of God in our salvation. I think that’s key background information.
Understanding Romans 1:17
But Luther still couldn’t shake what he called an “extremely disturbed conscience.” And as he studied the Book of Romans, he really struggled with the righteousness of God. He thought the righteousness of God was only God’s justice to damn sinners — it’s that God judges impartially and it’s fair for God to condemn sinners like him. That’s true about God, but Luther resented it. Luther wrote later:
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 persistently upon St. Paul in Romans 1:17 most ardently desiring to know what St. Paul wanted.
Let’s take a look back at Romans 1:17 for a minute. I want us to understand Luther’s struggle. Let’s start in verse 16, Paul says,
“For I am not ashamed of the gospel” — Paul has full confidence in the gospel — “for” [or because] the gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.
That’s a big deal and we believe that with everything we’ve got: the gospel is the power of God to save. But why? Or: how exactly is the gospel this power?
Well that’s what verse 17 answers. Look at verse 17. Paul says the gospel is the power of God …
For [or because] — verse 17 — in it [in the gospel] the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.’’
We have to think: If the righteousness of God here means only God’s justice to rule the world and punish sinners, then how is that revealed by faith?
What does that have to do with our living by faith? And how is it good news?
Gate to Paradise
And this is where Luther began to see that the righteousness of God is not only an attribute of God — it’s not only God’s justice — but Romans 1:17 is talking about the righteousness that comes from God — this is a right standing with God that God gives as a gift to those who have faith!
When Paul says that the righteousness of God is revealed “from faith for faith,” he’s saying that God declares a person righteous solely through their faith — “from faith for faith” means beginning and ending in faith — it’s by faith and nothing else!
This is when lights came on! Luther was in his study, in his monastery, and he had been poring over Romans day and night, and then he saw it: the power of God in the gospel is that God, our Judge, is merciful and just to pronounce the verdict of righteous for everyone who has faith in Jesus.
Luther said about it later:
Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered into paradise itself through open gates. Thus a totally other face of the entire Scripture showed itself to me … And I extolled my sweetest word with a love as great as the hatred with which I had before hated the word “Righteousness of God.” Thus that place in Paul [Romans 1:17] was for me truly the gate to paradise.
And of course it was — and it is, not just for Luther, but this is paradise for everybody who realizes: you can never be good enough to earn a right standing before God — you can’t be good enough; you can’t work hard enough! We are sinners through and through.
Luther loved the image from Isaiah 64 when Isaiah says that our own righteousness before God is like filthy rags (Isaiah 64:6). The only way we are brought into right relationship with God is because God justifies us — God declares us righteous — through our faith in Jesus.
The hymn writer Isaac Watts put this in a song two-hundred years later. Goes like this:
The best obedience of my hands
Dares not appear before Thy throne;
But faith can answer Thy demands,
By pleading what my Lord has done.
Faith alone in Christ alone for the glory of God alone!
This truth will change a life … it did for Luther. It does today. And it can right now. If you’re in this room right now, and you’re tired of trying to save yourself … you can stop.
Put down your works and trust in Jesus and his righteousness. If you do that, it means you come into a faith-union with Jesus and God the Father declares you to be righteous like Jesus. It means you are forgiven for all your sins and you are brought into relationship with him.
Right now, trust Christ, and receive the gift he is for you … This was a breakthrough for Luther. It changed his life … and he lived happily ever after. No, he didn’t. Again, never works that way in this world.
Battles Continue
Luther had this breakthrough; he went on to write an amazing commentary on the Book of Galatians, where he explained and defended justification by faith. And this didn’t just change Luther’s life, but it changed the world, and we should be grateful.
But Luther also still had battles.
He had battles with a corrupt Roman Catholic Church, and he still had battles with Anfechtung. Luther had a great sense of humor and overall he was a jovial man, but he struggled with depression — and he called it fighting with the devil.
He had done so much of it when he was younger, that later in life, he counseled a lot of people who had similar struggles. And we have record of his counsel because of the letters he wrote. One of my favorite books ever is a book titled, Luther: Letters of Spiritual Counsel. It’s a collection of these letters Luther wrote to people going through all kinds of situations.
And one letter I want to tell you about. It’s one he wrote to his friend, a man named Jerome Weller. Luther mentored Jerome and influenced him to study theology instead of law, like Luther had done, and Jerome also suffered from Anfechtung. He had a tender conscience and struggled spiritually, and so Luther wrote him letters to encourage him.
Now I’m gonna read you an excerpt from one of the letters, and I want you to see how Luther is applying the reality of justification by faith to a practical struggle. Justification by faith is not a truth that you just ‘check the box’ with and move on. But it’s a truth, a fact, that we keep front and center.
For context in this letter, Luther has been telling Jerome what to do in the thick of his struggle — like in the thick of the struggle when Satan is attacking and tormenting him. Luther writes this:
When the devil throws our sins up to us and declares that we deserve death and hell, we ought to speak thus:
I admit that I deserve death and hell. What of it? Does this mean that I shall be sentenced to eternal damnation?
By no means.
For I know One who suffered and made satisfaction on my behalf. His name is Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Where he is, there shall I be also. (87)
That’s how we’re supposed to talk in our wrestling. Luther says that we should mock the devil with the gospel. We just keep remembering Jesus. We keep pointing to Jesus.
Because understand: that is justifying faith. Faith itself is not the hero. Faith itself is not what saves us — which is why weak faith does not undo you — Jesus is the one who saves!
And faith is simply the empty-handed, open-handed receiving of all that Jesus is for us. We look to him in our battles. Very practically.
Whatever you’ve got going on, look to Jesus. That’s how we apply our justification by faith. We know:
Our hope is built on nothing less
than Jesus’ blood and righteousness;
We dare not trust the sweetest frame,
but wholly lean on Jesus’ name.
Amen!
That’s what brings us to the Table.
The Table
At this Table, we remember and rest in the gospel of Jesus Christ. When we receive the bread and cup, we are saying that we receive Jesus — empty-handed, open-handed, we receive all that Jesus is for us. Brothers and sisters in Christ, let’s do that now.
