Quotes from Martin Luther

Ascribe both to God alone, and look upon the person administering it as simply the vicarious instrument of God, by which the Lord sitting in heaven thrusts you under the water with his own hands, and promises you forgiveness of your sins, speaking to you upon earth with a human voice by the mouth of his minister.

The Law dispels all self-illusions. It puts the fear of God in a man. Without this fear there can be no thirst for God's mercy. God accordingly uses the Law for a hammer to break up the illusion of self- righteousness, that we should despair of our own strength and efforts at self-justification.

Thus mankind cannot approach the waters of salvation but can only be prepared for them. For Prov. 16:1 says: "It is the part of man to prepare the soul." But human nature was prepared in this way by the law of Moses, because the Law prepared but did not give, just as a boy is prepared by the tutor to be fit for his inheritance, but it is the father who gives it. Therefore Christ or the faithful people in the Law already seeks to enter into grace and the church of Christ.

Christ also said, "For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also" (Matthew 6:21). We pursue what we love. We talk about it because that is where our hearts and thoughts are. Augustine came right to the point when he said: "Whatever I love is my god.

Through this perversion of things it has happened that the knowledge of Christian grace, of faith, of liberty, and altogether of Christ, has utterly perished, and has been succeeded by an intolerable bondage to human works and laws; and, according to the Lamentations of Jeremiah, we have become the slaves of the vilest men on earth, who abuse our misery to all the disgraceful and ignominious purposes of their own will.

God alone can create and preserve faith in us. God creates faith in us through the Word. He increases, strengthens and confirms faith in us through His word. Hence the best service that anybody can render God is diligently to hear and read God's Word.

To turn one's eyes away from Jesus means to turn them to the Law.

We should give heed to what has been said by the heathen poet: "Do not yield to evils but proceed more boldly against them."15

For the word of God cannot be received and honoured by any works, but by faith alone. Hence it is clear that as the soul needs the word alone for life and justification, so it is justified by faith alone, and not by any works. For if it could be justified by any other means, it would have no need of the word, nor consequently of faith.

This is enormous folly, and ignorance of Christian life and faith, when a man seeks, without faith, to be justified and saved by works.

One must be careful to hold fast to the fact that God makes promises and defers the things promised, and that He tries us with a scarcity of available things in order to instruct us in faith in the promise and in order that this faith may be strengthened and may learn to believe God not only in prosperous times, when things are available, but also in adversity, when things are lacking.

We are saved by faith alone, but the faith that saves is never alone.