Five hundred years ago the world was a very different place. Much of it was ruled by the Holy Roman Empire and the Roman Catholic Church, monoliths of power and dictating the lives of millions of people. But that was all about to change as one man made his way to the University Church in Wittenberg, Germany and nailed a piece of paper to the door.
Like the small tremor that sets off a huge avalanche, the nail that Martin Luther hammered into the church door, set off a chain of events that changed the world forever. The piece of paper was his 95 Theses and they contained rediscovery of the Biblical truth that salvation is the free gift of God received by faith alone.
While the church at the time did all it could to resist and oppose Luther’s ideas, the genie was out of the bottle. Within a few years the Bible had been translated into German and the people were reading for themselves the truths that Luther had rediscovered in its pages.
Human pride will always steer us towards the belief that we can earn our own salvation, but the heart of the Gospel has and always will be that eternal life is God’s gift to us.
