Quotes from Martin Luther

28. God's love does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it. Human love comes into being through that which is pleasing to it.

For the Spirit blows where He wills (John 3:8), not where we will.

But God so governs His saints that even though they err and stray, the outcomes are nevertheless salutary or without great loss. For all things work together for good to the elect and those who believe (cf. Rom. 8:28), even errors and sins, and this is absolutely certain.

The human seed, this mass from which I was formed, is totally corrupt with faults and sins. The material itself is faulty. The clay, so to speak, out of which this vessel began to be formed is damnable. What more do you want? This is how I am; this is how all men are. Our very conception, the very growth of the foetus in the womb, is sin, even before we are born and begin to be human beings.

Returning to the subject which we had begun, I think it is made clear by these considerations that it is not sufficient, nor a Christian course, to preach the works, life, and words of Christ in a historic manner, as facts which it suffices to know as an example how to frame our life, as do those who are now held the best preachers

The world is a head of thistles; whichever way you turn it, it stretches the thorns about itself.

For my part, if I cannot fathom how the bread is the body of Christ, yet I will take my reason captive to the obedience of Christ [II Cor. 10:5], and clinging simply to his words, firmly believe not only that the body of Christ is in the bread, but that the bread is the body of Christ.

The world bears the Gospel a grudge because the Gospel condemns the religious wisdom of the world. Jealous for its own religious views, the world in turn charges the Gospel with being a subversive and licentious doctrine, offensive to God and man, a doctrine to be persecuted as the worst plague on earth.

Therefore no one who sees the iconoclasts raging thus against wood and stone should doubt that there is a spirit hidden in them which is death-dealing, not life-giving, and which at the first opportunity will also kill men, just as some of them have begun to teach.

So we are not sinners because we commit this or that sin, but we commit them because we are sinners first.

God will and can be known in no other way than in and through Christ according to the statement of John 1:18, "The only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him." Christ is the only means whereby we can know God and His will. In Christ we perceive that God is not a cruel judge, but a most loving and merciful Father who to bless and to save us "spared not his own Son, but gave him up for us all." This is truly to know God.

Nothing is prettier, better, or holier in the sight of men than idolatry and godlessness adorned with hypocrisy and a show of piety. An evil deed in the sight of God, however, is one that is undertaken without faith and the Word, by our own efforts, however good and beautiful it may appear.