Five hundred eight years ago, a monk with a troubled conscience took a hammer, a piece of paper, a deep conviction that the Word of God must not be silenced and nailed a list of 95 theses on the church door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany. Martin Luther didn’t set out to start a movement or to divide the Church. He simply wanted clarity. He wanted the pure Gospel. He wanted the certainty that sinners are justified by faith alone in Christ alone apart from works, apart from indulgences, apart from human merit.
And what followed was not the peace and comfort that one would expect from the pure proclamation of the Gospel, but conflict and turmoil. The Reformation may have been intended as a polite academic debate, but it led to a period of violent upheaval, both spiritually and politically. The Gospel was restored to its proper place in a world that had long been held captive by human traditions and self-righteousness.
This should have come as no surprise. Hostility to the Gospel on the part of the world was nothing new. We might think the Reformation is behind us, that such battles belong to history books. The Reformation wasn’t just a 16th-century event. It is the daily reality of every Christian. The same Gospel that set Luther free is still under attack today. And this is precisely what our Lord Jesus describes here in Matthew chapter eleven.
Find out more in this sermon from St. John's Lutheran Church of Oakes, ND!
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