Why Christians should embrace Halloween and knocking on doors

But on Halloween of 1517, an obscure German monk named Martin Luther would knock on a door so loudly that the sound still reverberates around the world today. On that day, Luther walked up to the Cathedral in Wittenberg and nailed his '95 Theses' to the church door.

His actions were in response to the preaching of Johann Tetzel, who, under the authority of the Pope, offered people the opportunity to buy a springboard into heaven. His message was simple enough. He famously declared, "As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul out of purgatory springs."

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Luther was incensed by this message. He wrote his 95 Theses to explain why the likes of Tetzel were dangerously wrong, and he nailed them to the cathedral door to make his reasons clear and public. His own story might help us to understand why he reacted so strongly.

Luther was a child of rare intellectual ability. At the tender age of 13, his father sent him to the University of Erfurt to study law, where he earned both his baccalaureate and master's degrees in the shortest time allowed by university statutes. Yet whatever grand dreams his father held for his bright young son were dashed in 1505 when Luther was trapped in a ferocious storm and watched a bolt of lightning hit the ground right next to him. Fearing for his life, he cried out, "Help me, St. Anne! I will become a monk!"

Luther survived the storm and good to his word, but much to his father's disapproval, he entered a monastery. Not one to do things by half, he strived to be the best monk he could. Yet the harder he strived to serve God, the more he saw his failures and shortcomings. Luther came to fear the righteous God, whom he had always been taught would judge unrighteous sinners. Seeing his personal unrighteousness, he imagined God could hold nothing for him other than condemnation. Until one day, he realised that real though his failings were, God offered something far better than what he had long been taught.

The scholarly young monk's breakthrough came when meditating on the Bible's letter to the Roman church and its assertion that "the righteous shall live by faith".

"At last meditating day and night... I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that through which the righteous live by a gift of God, namely by faith."

In other words. God shows his righteousness not so much in squashing unrighteous people for their failings as by making a way for them to be forgiven and counted as righteous in God's sight. This was not something that Luther or any of us could earn, but a gift of God that we receive by trusting in what he has done through the Lord Jesus.

Recounting his breakthrough, Luther exclaimed: "Here I felt as if I were entirely born again and had entered paradise itself through the gates that had been flung open."

Little wonder that when Tetzel came to town selling indulgences, Luther could not ignore it. Here was a man enslaving people to another form of earning their way into God's good books. Tetzel was selling an empty hope to people. One that pictured God as little more than an angry tyrant just waiting to judge unless you bought him off. It was a message a million miles away from the free forgiveness through Jesus that Luther had discovered when reading his Bible.

Thankfully 505 years ago, Luther knocked on that door and God answered by opening the way for his message of freedom and hope that continues to reverberate the world over today.

I, for one, will be celebrating this moment on Halloween.