“I tortured myself almost to death in order to procure peace for my troubled heart.”
MARTIN LUTHER WAS A GERMAN PRIEST, MONK AND THEOLOGIAN who changed Christianity when he nailed his ’95 Theses’ to the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg in 1517, sparking the Protestant Reformations.
He had a new hope that the monastic life would save him and cause him to live a holy life. He quickly invited his close friends to a farewell party where he let them know of his intention. His friends were amazed; some attempted to change his mind. Luther’s father also was shocked and very disappointed. Luther said that his father nearly became mad concerning the forsaking of his good education. Hans Luther lost two of his sons to the plague, and he now considered Martin as “the monk of Erfurt who is dead also.” But Luther pressed on and did not allow his friends or his father to dissuade him.
He entered the Augustinian cloister at Erfurt the next morning, his new home where, he thought, he would be enabled to leave the sinful world behind him. Luther took the three vows of poverty, chastity, and of obedience. He began to live a highly regulated life under strict rules. In the cloister he would spend hours of prayer, mediation and fasting. He even would enter into other forms of self-denial to mortify the flesh.
As time went on however, Luther began to be exposed to much that was contrary to his ideal concept of the monastery. Degradation entered the walls of the monastery. Some of the monastic orders were becoming not places of poverty, but of wealth. Instead of living a lowly and obedient life, many monks had become powerful and vainglorious. Some of the monks and nuns that Luther had thought were holy and special as the “saints of God” had given themselves over to vices and immorality. But Luther remained undeterred, for he still considered that the monastic life was the way to heaven. “I made the vow,” he stated, “for the salvation of my soul. I entered the spiritual state for no other reason than to serve God and please Him in eternity.”
Luther later spoke on his life in the monastery, saying, “I was indeed a pious monk and followed the rules of my order more strictly than I can express. If ever a monk could have gone to heaven by his observance of monastic vows, I should have been that one. Of this all the friars who have known me can testify. If it had continued much longer, I should have carried my mortification, watchings, prayers, reading, and other labors even to death.”
It was not until the age of twenty that Luther, while browsing the books in the library, first came across the Bible. He declared, “O that God would give me such a book for myself.” Luther was given to study, and especially now, the Latin Bible captured his attention. He often would come to the place in the library where the Bible was chained to the wall in order to pour over its pages. He also began to study the languages of the Bible, both Hebrew and Greek. These became very useful to him later when he translated the Bible into German.
After Luther’s three years in the monastery, he was dissatisfied. He didn’t feel he was progressing toward true holiness. His conscience was not at peace. The more he endeavored, the more he realized he was a sinner. He expressed this in a verse:
I know that, when I try to be
Upright and just and true to Thee,
I am a sinner still.
Increasingly, it became clear to him that he could not appease God for his sins by his own deeds. In his desperate search for righteousness before God, he declared, “I tortured myself almost to death in order to procure peace for my troubled heart and agitated conscience; but being surrounded by thick darkness, I found peace nowhere. Every day I went to confession, but that was of no use to me….‘Look,’ explained I, ‘you are still envious, impatient, passionate. It profits you nothing, O wretched man, to have entered this sacred order!’”
Although Luther was descending lower in despair, God was operating. As we are told in the book of Romans, a person calls when he believes, and believes when he hears. Up to this point Luther had heard many things about God, but had not clearly heard the way of salvation. This was about to change. Since faith comes out of hearing (Romans 10:17), Luther needed someone from whom he could hear the way of salvation. That man seems to have been John Staupitz, an administrator in the Augustinian order.
Salvation was not far away.
To be continued in Luther’s Salvation