Lived: 1483 to 1546.
The man who changed church history forever spent hours meditating on a particular piece of scripture. It is clear from his own words that God spoke to him through it:
As I meditated day and night on the words as it is written, the righteous person shall live by faith, I began to understand that the righteous person is by the gift of a passive righteousness, by which the merciful God justifies us by faith. This immediately made me feel as though I had been born again, and as though I had entered through open gates into paradise itself. God accepts Christ’s righteousness, which is alien to our nature, as our own. So, God does not actually remove our sins-we are at the same time righteous and sinful- he no longer counts our sins against us. And now, where I had once hated the phrase, the righteousness of God, I began to love and extol it as the sweetest of phrases, so that this passage in Paul became the very gate of paradise to me.
Saddened by the state of the faith and church leadership, Luther nailed ninety-five theses on to the door of the church in Wittenberg, sparking the Reformation and the creation of the Protestant church.
Luther said, the church does not need any head other than Christ because it is a spiritual body, not a temporary one.
Although Luther did not understand the New Covenant concept of Righteousness (that the righteousness of God is imparted to us and the sin nature is removed in the new birth) He understood the Old Covenant concept of righteousness, where it was put on their account and this revelation changed his life and the church and was part of the beginning of the restoration of the church.