Today is the 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Reformation. Very quickly from a simple act of placing a document on a door, written in Latin wanting a scholar debate, Luther accidently started a movement that was both a revival and a reformation not just in his native Germany but right across the North of Europe.
Luther writes this of his own conversion:
'I greatly longed to understand Paul's Epistle to the Romans and nothing stood in the way but that one expression "the justice of God" because I took it to mean that justice whereby God is just and deals justly in punishing the unjust. My situation was that, although an impeccable monk, I stood before God as a sinner troubled in conscience and I had no confidence that my merit would assuage him. Therefore, I did not love a just and angry God, but rather hated and murmured against him. Yet I clung to the dear Paul and had a great yearning to know what he meant.
Night and day I pondered until I saw the connection between the justice of God and the statement that "the just shall live by his faith." Then I grasped that the justice of God is that righteousness by which through grace and sincere mercy God justifies us through faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into Paradise. The whole of Scripture took on a new meaning. Whereas before "the justice of God" had filled me with hate, now it became inexpressibly sweet in greater love. This passage of Paul became to me a gate to heaven.'
Taken from Here I Stand- Roland Bainton (emphasis mine).
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