Martin Luther Quotes

God wants man to fulfill his commands as a human being and with the quality peculiar to human beings.

Freedom requires virtue. Virtue requires faith. And faith, in turn, requires freedom. You can't have coerced state-sanctioned religion. It has to be utterly free.

Heaven is His choice for you. But He won't force you to go there if you don't want to.

Grant what thou commandest and then command what thou wilt.

God wills in man only that which is good, in the kingdom of his grace; where the free will yields itself up into the grace, there God wills that which is good in the will, through the grace.

My frustration has always been that I'm a Christian, but I don't buy into, never have bought into, the belief that Jesus and God are these men who just dictate that this is how you have to live your life or you are going to burn in hell.

Doing something because God has said to do it does not make a person moral: it merely tells us that person is a prudential believer, akin to the person who obeys the command of an all-powerful secular king.

If you have not chosen the Kingdom of God first, it will in the end make no difference what you have chosen instead.

To do my duty, I must obey God.

If God himself did not compel obedience, than no man should try.

Sure there's different roads from this to Dungarvan -- some thinks one road pleasanter, and some think another; wouldn't it be mighty foolish to quarrel for this? -- and sure isn't it twice worse to try to interfere with people for choosing the road they like best to heaven?

That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence.

Examine what is around you and see that princes and masters have power over your body alone, not over your soul, and always keep this in mind. Why when they order, say, to kill or to do something else, inappropriate, unrighteous and harmful for the soul, it is not proper to obey them, even though they torture your body. God has created the soul free and self-ruled, and it is free to do as it wills, good or bad

This idea of the transcendent power of the Supreme Being is essentially connected with that by which the whole duty of man is summed up: obedience to His will.

God's commandments are not given to limit or punish us.

Every person in every generation has a choice: to obey God or to do his own thing.

There is no slave but the creature that wills against its Creator.

If you believe that there’s a heaven and hell . . . how much do you have to hate somebody to believe that everlasting life is possible and not tell them that?

God orders what we cannot do, that we may know what we ought to ask him.

The preacher who is concerned with gaining a reputation, rising in his profession, is always in bondage. The itch for bigness is a dangerous thing. It has made a castaway of many a man whom God once richly blessed. A man should desire to be neither larger nor smaller than pleases God. Better than that, he should not bother at all about how large or how small but rather how faithful he shall be.

I think He made one law of that kind in order that there might be obedience. In all these other matters what you call obeying Him is but doing what seems good in your own eyes also. Is love content with that?

I've always believed free will is a birthright. God even allows us to choose whether to be led by the divine order

Free will is the liberty to choose what is right according to Gods law.

Only look to Jesus. He died for you, died in your place, died under the frowns of heaven, that we might die under its smile. Regard neither unbelief nor doubt. Fear neither sin nor hell. Choose neither life nor death. All these are swallowed up in the immensity of Christ and are triumphed over in His cross.

Your God person puts an apple tree in the middle of a garden and says, do what you like, guys, oh, but don't eat the apple. Surprise surprise, they eat it and he leaps out from behind a bush shouting "Gotcha". It wouldn't have made any difference if they hadn't eaten it.' 'Why not?' 'Because if you're dealing with somebody who has the sort of mentality which likes leaving hats on the pavement with bricks under them you know perfectly well they won't give up. They'll get you in the end.