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Al Mohler on His Historical Hero: Martin Luther

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In this video, Al Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and TGC Council member, explains the power and impact of Martin Luther as his historical hero in the faith.


I don’t think we know who we are apart from our heroes and heroines. And in church history I can easily look to the one individual who has probably given me more personal encouragement than any other, and that’s Martin Luther.

And it’s fun now to think about the 500th anniversary of the Reformation as we date it to October 31st in 1517 when Luther famously, as a young Augustinian monk, nailed those 95 theses to the door of the castle church there in Wittenberg. But what’s so wonderful about Luther is that we know so much about him. He was a man in full. As the British would say, he was a man of parts. He had interests that were wide-ranging, his life was one of the most epic ever lived in human history, and he talked. And as a matter of fact, he was so warm in conversation that his students and others famously wrote down his Tischreden, his “Table Talk.”

We have Luther across a range of emotions. We have Luther in the moments of his height. We have Luther honestly in his Anfechtung and those horrible pits of despair into which he sometimes fell. We have Luther before the gospel, Luther in the gospel, and Luther the great defender of the gospel. We’ve got Luther the married man who was desperately in love with his wife Katie. We have Luther the father who so dearly cherished his children. We have Luther the reformer, Luther the pastor, and Luther the neighbor. And, of course, Luther was far more.

I can find so many heroes and heroines in the history of the church, and frankly I don’t want to give any of them up. But the one that I probably feel that I turn to more than anyone else for encouragement is Martin Luther, hands down.


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