It was October 31st, 1517 in Wittenburg, Germany.

Martin grasped a hammer and a long piece of paper covered with his writing. He walked out into the street and straight over to the castle church door. It was here that community messages were often posted.

Martin nailed his 95 points of discussion on the door. He only wanted to lay out his newly discovered views of the Bible to other church leaders in the Medieval Catholic church. He thought he was free to do so even though his thoughts were radical. After all, he was an Augustinian monk and a professor of theology at the university.

Young Martin Luther called himself a “stinking bag of maggots,” and certainly did not dream of being a leader in a revolution of thinking in Germany and across Europe that shaped history in a powerful way. But God had determined something far bigger than the monk Martin Luther expected when he penned those 95 Theses.

Before he knew it, someone had printed his words and distributed copies (the printing press was new), and his arguments became the primary topic of discussion among all classes of people, from the farmers, to the business men meeting in the pubs, to around the supper table at home. Very quietly the Protestant Reformation had begun.

What was the Protestant Reformation all about? What did Luther and others protest? The protesters were seeing something new (or old) about how a person is accepted by God. It was new to them, but dripping all over the passages of Scripture. They protested that the church had been teaching the wrong view about the most important issue of life. They discovered that the Bible says we are not accepted on the basis of our religious deeds, or even our good deeds added to our faith, but rather that we are accepted before a holy God only through faith in Jesus the Christ. While people may want to work their way to God, they cannot, and thus God worked His way to us.

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