How to Pray on Reformation Day

On this day, we yearly celebrate the events of October 31, 1517, when Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk, nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the church door in Wittenberg, Germany. Troubled by the corruption and apostasy that had contaminated the church, Luther went to his study and penned his history-altering declarations.

If you find yourself, today, like Lot, grieved by the depravity and lawlessness of our world (2 Peter 2:7-8), consider the following statement by Dr. Martyn Llloyd-Jones in 1960:

“I am concerned about the present state of affairs which is increasingly approximating to the state of affairs that obtained before the Protestant Reformation: vice, immorality, sin were rampant. My friends, it is rapidly becoming the same again! There is a woeful moral and social declension…But it is not only a matter of moral and of social problems. What of the state of the church? We are going back to the pre-Reformation position. What about the authority of the church? What about the state of doctrine in the church? Before the Reformation, there was confusion. Is there anything more characteristic of the church today than doctrinal confusion, doctrinal indifference — a lack of concern and a lack of interest?”

How then should we pray on this Reformation Day?

Lloyd-Jones provides the answer:

“I suggest that perhaps the greatest of all the lessons of the Protestant Reformation is that the way of recovery is always to go back, back to the primitive pattern, to the origin, to the norm and the standards which are to be found alone in the New Testament. That is exactly what happened four hundred years ago. These men went back to the beginning, and they tried to establish a church conforming to the New Testament pattern. And so, let us be guided by them.”

Inspired by Luther and the reformers, as we look to the future, let us pray that Christ’s Church would be equipped and encouraged by the past to “hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful” (Hebrews 10:23).

References:

Lloyd-Jones, D. M. (2013). Knowing the times: Addresses delivered on various occasions 1942-1977. The Banner of Truth Trust.