500 YEARS AGO, on October 31, 1517, Martin Luther started the Protestant Reformation by nailing 95 theses to the door of the Castle church in Wittenberg. He rejected the teaching of the Church of Rome on penance. He asserted that men and women cannot get the forgiveness of sin by buying indulgences from the Pope, but only by personal repentance before God. Britain and Europe needed the Reformation in the 16th century. It was a great movement of the Spirit of God. Twenty-first century Britain needs Reformation now as urgently as she did then. The God who has blessed and delivered our nation so many times in the past is as ready to heal and forgive now as he was then. But Church and State must both turn to him, and submit to what he says. Five vital truths were rediscovered in the Reformation, and urgently need to be recovered today.
