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For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths
2 Timothy 4:3-4 ~ NAS
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Nothing but the Word !
March 10, 1522.
It was a Monday, and Martin Luther was the preacher of the hour.... On this particular Monday, Luther had a problem on his hands, and the problem was his seminary students. As the Reformation had made its course—starting in Wittenberg and spreading throughout Germany—he had attracted to the university an enormous group of young men who were training for the ministry. They were fervently committed to the ideals of the Reformation and to the doctrines of the Reformation. They had zeal, but they had zeal without knowledge, and Luther had a problem. You see, on the previous weekend they had been going into the houses of the German nobility who were still practicing the Catholic private mass. These students had forced their way into the homes and destroyed the altars. They were right in terms of their theological judgment on the abhorrence of the bloody mass. They knew that it was contra-biblical and undermining to the gospel. A travesty. A horrible thing. And yet Luther knew he had a problem, because the Reformation was going to hit some pretty rough reefs if the students went in the houses of the nobility and tore up the altars. But he knew that this pragmatic problem was of less significance than the theological problem it betrayed. He gathered his students together—March 10, 1522. He had them before him as he preached in the chapel and he raised the whole issue of the mass. He said, “Students, you are right to see the abhorrence of this mass. You are right to label this as heresy and as an abomination in the eyes of the Lord. But you are wrong to go into private homes and tear out the altars. Why? Because the Reformation cannot come by force—it can only come by the Word of God.” He said, “You can tear up the altars and even pull people away from the altars by their hair, but as soon as you leave them, they will put the altar back and to the altar again they will go.” He said, “We should preach the Word, but the results must be left solely to God’s good pleasure.” Luther went on. He said, “Certainly to hold the mass in such a manner is sinful, and yet no one should be dragged away from it by the hair. For it should be left to God, and His Word should be allowed to work alone without work or interference. Why? Because it is not in my power to hand or to fashion the hearts of men as the potter molds the clay and fashions them at my pleasure. I can get no further than their ears. Their hearts I cannot reach. And since I cannot pour faith into their hearts, I cannot—nor should I—force anyone to have faith. That is God’s work alone who causes faith to live in the heart. Therefore we should give free course to the Word and not add our works to it. We should preach the Word, but the results must be left solely to God’s good pleasure.” He said..., “If you preach the Word and trust the Word, the Word will sink into the heart and do its work. Thus, he will become convinced and acknowledge his error and fall away from the mass. Tomorrow another would do the same, and thus God would accomplish more with His Word than if you and I were to merge all our power into one heap.” Continuing his instruction and exhortation to his students, he said this: “The Word must do this thing and not we poor sinners.... I opposed indulgences and all the papists, but never with force. I simply taught, preached, and wrote God’s Word. Otherwise, I did nothing, and while I slept the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses upon it. I did nothing. The Word did everything.”... To my brothers who are the graduates of this class, you know not where you may be sent. You may know where you’re going now, but you know not where you may be sent. And when you leave here tonight many of you will never see each other again on this earthly sphere. Some of you may be martyrs for the faith. Some of you may live out your life serving the Word, preaching the Word in a place virtually unknown, off the map. Wherever you go, whatever the Lord calls you to do, wherever He puts you, may those who know you say, “He accepts nothing but the authority of Scripture. We labored with him, we tried to persuade him, we tried to attract him to something else, but he will not depart from the Scriptures. He accepts only the authority of the Word.” I don’t know if today you’re concerned about your epitaph if ever anyone should raise a monument in your memory, but what a fitting epitaph that would be: “We labored with him, but he accepts only the authority of Scripture.” And if the Lord should allow you to live long enough that you can look back on the course of your ministry, I pray that you will look back with these words: “I did nothing. The Word did everything.” The true test is what you do when you stand in the pulpit and you pick up the Word of God. Will you preach it? Will you apologize for it? Will you compromise it? Will you abandon it? No, I have confidence you will preach it—in season and out of season—to the glory of God.
“I did nothing,” Luther said. “The Word did it all.”
1689 Baptist Confession of Faith
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