Most Lutherans are no doubt familiar with the story of Martin Luther’s Gospel breakthrough, when he was led by God’s grace to rediscover the marvelous message that righteousness before God is not earned but simply received. Salvation by grace through faith in Christ alone is rightly and wonderfully the heart of Lutheran teaching.
Less familiar but of enormous significance to Luther and his teaching was his other breakthrough, when he came to realize that the life of a Christian living in the truth of the Gospel was not aimed up at God but rather aimed out toward others. In other words, since God freely delivers to me all of His gifts and grace, including eternal salvation and all that I need to live and prosper each day, I need to do nothing to win or maintain them. This gives each Christian a great deal of free time—indeed a lifetime—to spend simply doing what God put that person here to do: serving the surrounding creation.
This basic teaching is often expressed with the language of vocation. It is God who gives me tasks and responsibilities based on where He places me in life (son, brother, husband, father, grandfather, professor, citizen, etc.), all of which are done not for God’s benefit but for the benefit of my fellow creatures. That’s the heart of Luther’s other breakthrough, which is simply the other side of the coin of God’s truth about humans. One side declares the Gospel of lavish forgiveness in Christ; the other side establishes the meaning and purpose of human life lived for the sake of the neighbor.
This twofold foundation at the core of faithful Lutheran teaching has enormous implications not only for the way we think about faith but for the way we understand our lives. We are reminded that Christianity is not just about believing the right things and maintaining a level of spirituality so that some day, one day, you can go to heaven. Rather, Christianity it is about rightly understanding everything about the universe and then living accordingly right now and for eternity. We live as recipients of God’s giving, and a critical part of what He gives is the centrality of our vocations for the direction and effort of our living.
Armed with Luther’s Spirit-led insight into God’s truth, Lutherans can dive in to the work of serving the needs of this temporal realm with zeal. Caring for fellow creatures is precisely the point of our lives. God created us for this purpose, so we should pursue that work with determined focus. It is the very definition and meaning of what it is to be human: We exist to serve the creation, we exist to fulfill our vocations, we exist to meet the needs of others.
Seen in this light, Lutheran believers should be among the most socially active of all Christians. That our history and our reputation don’t exactly reflect this emphasis probably indicates that we could do a better job of holding on to the enduring truth at the center of both of Luther’s breakthrough moments. Our neighbors need us to speak the Gospel to them, and they need us to do our vocations for their benefit.
All of this means that serving is not something that is a nice addition to our Christian lives or an activity to add to our lives or an event that happens on occasion. Serving is the very center and meaning of our lives. We live to serve. We serve in our vocations. And our vocations provide avenues and arenas of work and giving that are virtually limitless.
Luther expressed the fullness of his discoveries already in 1520 in his essay “The Freedom of a Christian.” In a handful of sentences, he expresses the essential twofold reality of Christian faith and life:
We conclude therefore that a Christian lives not in himself, but in Christ and in his neighbor. Otherwise he is not a Christian. He lives in Christ through faith, in his neighbor through love. By faith he is caught up beyond himself into God. By love he descends beneath himself into his neighbor.
(Luther’s Works, vol. 31, p. 371)
Those who know God’s grace by faith need also to know their neighbors’ needs and spend themselves meeting those needs. This is the Christian, the Lutheran, way of life.
The quotation from Luther’s Works is from Luther’s Works, American Edition, vol. 31 © 1957 by Augsburg Fortress. Used by permission of the publisher.