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Hendersonville Seventh-day Adventist Church, NC

David Wright

Indulgences For Sale

Well, today I want to talk a little bit more about Martin Luther.

I know last week we did this Pale Horse Rides, and that was very interesting.

It talked about a lot of the background, the underpinning, some of the shoulders that Martin Luther stood upon, and that type of thing.

But I want to talk a little bit more this morning, because this is a big deal.

Boy, it seems like they were just talking about this in school yesterday, makes me feel old.

And I want to address towards the end of this message the idea that some people are trying to say the Reformation is over.

And when you stop and think about all that went into the Reformation, the people that were willing to give up at all costs their life To say that it's over, to say that it's no longer necessary, that's a big statement.

And so I just wanna briefly look, now that we can talk about Martin Luther for a long time, there's a lot that could be said, and I'm not sure I'm gonna be able to give him justice this morning, but was he born with a silver spoon in his mouth?

Did he have extra opportunities that other people didn't have?

They think this is the likeness of his parents, and that's a younger Martin Luther.

And he knew what poverty was like, he knew what it meant to scrape and to try and get by.

His father, did he work in the mine, is that right?

And so I imagine that Martin grew up doing a lot of those types of things as well.

And his father was very reasonable, he's a very practical man, and he had his doubts about the church and whether or not it was legitimate.

And so he really warned his children, if you will, to be very careful of the then-known church.

Well, as time went on, Martin wanted to practice law.

And he got a fair ways in that endeavor until at 1 point, and maybe it was a gnawing on him, I don't know, But he got caught in a horrible thunderstorm and you've heard this story before so bad Has anybody been in a terrible thunderstorm where it's just clapping and you just you know after the fact you chuckle and you say oh I was fine.

But if you're in a major storm, it can really grab your attention.

And so this grabbed his attention, and he felt like he needed, as a result of that, to forget law, to abandon that.

This happened in 1505, and to join the monastery in response.

Of course, this made his father very upset, very furious.

He'd already put a lot of money and different things into his schooling to practice life.

Thought it was a waste of his education, a waste of his life.

And so it was actually 2 years before he and his father were even reconciled.

Because he so frustrated his father by joining the monastery.

At age 22, this is a picture, if you go on this Martin Luther tour over in Europe, supposedly this is the door that Martin Luther would have first entered the monastery into.

And here is this Augustinian monastery in Erfurt.

This is the monastery there where Martin Luther began his life as a monk and as a priest.

And he was really laboring during that time, trying to figure out how he could be close to God, how he could be in right relationship to God, how he could suppress all of his temptations, all of his thoughts, all of these things, and if I could just isolate myself a little bit better, a little bit more, then I can somehow appease, in so many respects, this angry God that doesn't want good for me unless I can toe the line.

And so this created a fair bit of guilt for Martin Luther.

Well 1 day in the library he discovered a Latin Bible.

For the first time he looked upon the whole of God's word.

I mean this was a marked time in his experience.

I mean this is a little bit crazy for us to think about because how many Bibles do each of us have in their totality, right?

And we just take for granted the fact that we have God's word all right here in a language that we know and that we understand, but there Martin Luther found, here's a book and it's in Latin, But this is the entire Bible.

And so he started spending every waking moment reading and studying so curious what is in here and learning new things all the time that are in God's word.

In fact, some sources say the Bible was chained to the wall but he would come and study.

I imagine people got to where they knew, right?

Studying that big Bible that was chained to the wall.

How many of you have to go to another place to study your Bible that's chained to the wall?

Every moment that he could that could be spared from his daily duties, he employed and studied, even robbing himself from sleep and meals, and sleep wasn't that comfortable, and meals there weren't that good.

So maybe it wasn't so big of a sacrifice, I don't know.

Now I understand that Martin Luther was not perfect in any respect, and I'm not trying to make him out to be perfect, but that's a quality in him that I think it'd be good for us to replicate wouldn't it to have a hunger for God's Word.

I Mean we don't have the same issue that they had back then that the church Controlled the Bible and you couldn't have your own copy and all these types of things We have so many copies, but now the devil controls our time.

He controls our schedule He controls where we go and what we do all the time and fills it with all this busyness so we don't have time And so in a sense God's Word is still hidden it's just hidden next to our bed it's just hidden beside the couch or other places and we study it maybe some how many of you could study God's Word over your lunch break how many could spare some of your daily duties to study God's word more.

But Martin Luther, he wanted to know the totality of God's word.

That's another thing that we oftentimes do.

Pastor, I wanna understand this better, will you study with me?

Now I'm not opposed to studying with people, but how did Martin Luther learn?

And I'll tell you, it's 1 of the joys for me to study with people that are self-taught.

When people are so anxious for the word, in fact I was talking to Jack Henderson, he met somebody at Lowe's, now Jack is on fire, if you don't know Jack Henderson, you better watch out.

He was in the light bulb section, and he found this man named Joseph, and he says, do you know, oh I don't work here, or something, I don't know exactly how it went.

Before long, Jack did what he does best, he started talking about the word of God.

And this man got excited about what he heard, he got excited about what the 10 Commandments have to say, and how they're repeated there in Hebrews, and how we need to continue to follow and study.

And so he went to his Bible study group on Sunday that was studying through the 10 Commandments and Moses and all those types of things and he started to raise some questions and ask some things to the pastor and the various ones that were leading out.

And the pastor said something along the lines of, you've been hanging out with the Seventh-day Adventist, haven't you?

He says, I haven't been hanging out with Adventists, I've been studying the Word of God.

And even to this, even now, and he's not here today because he's not feeling well, but he's at home and he's, I've talked to him since and Jack's talked to him since, we've told him about sabbathtruth.com And he is just eating this stuff up and so we throw out a resource and he eats it up and he eats it up And he eats it up self-taught why because he has a passion for the Word of God When do we ever want to lose our passion for the Word of God When have we learned it all I Don't know.

I'll continue on I'll stop I like this quote from Martin Luther, to pray well is the better half of study.

How about a simple prayer, and I'm gonna study.

And then I'll pray at the end, it's called a conclusion.

No, but to pray well is the better half of study.

To really understand what God is trying to say, to apply it to my life, to labor with God, to pray the passage back.

Anyway, to pray well is the better half of study.

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