O Lord, have taken ... what is mine and given me ... what is yours.

Therefore, my dear friend, learn Christ and him crucified. Learn to praise him and, despairing of yourself, say, “Lord Jesus, you are my righteousness, just as I am your sin. You have taken upon yourself what is mine and have given to me what is yours. You have taken upon yourself what you were not and have given to me what I was not.”⁶

Beware of aspiring to such purity that you will not wish to be looked upon as a sinner, or to be one.⁷ For Christ dwells only in sinners. On this account he descended from heaven, where he dwelt among the righteous, to dwell among sinners. Meditate on this love of his and you will see his sweet consolation.

Accordingly you will find peace only in him and only when you despair of yourself and your own works. Besides, you will learn from him that just as he has received you, so he has made your sins his own and has made his righteousness yours.

If you firmly believe this as you ought (and he is damned who does not believe it), receive your untaught and hitherto erring brothers, patiently help them, make their sins yours, and, if you have any goodness, let it be theirs.

Thus the Apostle teaches, “Receive one another as Christ also received you to the glory of God.”⁸

And again, “Have this mind among yourselves, which you have in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, [did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped], but emptied himself,” etc.⁹

Even so, if you seem to yourself to be better than they are, do not count it as booty, as if it were yours alone, but humble yourself, forget what you are and be as one of them in order that you may help them.

Cursed is the righteousness of the man who is unwilling to assist others on the ground that they are worse than he is, and who thinks of fleeing from and forsaking those whom he ought now to be helping with patience, prayer, and example. This would be burying the Lord’s talent and not paying what is due.¹⁰

If you are a lily and a rose of Christ, therefore, know that you will live among thorns. Only see to it that you will not become a thorn as a result of impatience, rash judgment, or secret pride.

The rule of Christ is in the midst of his enemies, as the Psalm puts it.¹¹ Why, then, do you imagine that you are among friends? Pray, therefore, for whatever you lack, kneeling before the face of the Lord Jesus. He will teach you all things.

Only keep your eyes fixed on what Christ has done for you and for all men in order that you may learn what you should do for others. If Christ had desired to live only among good people and to die only for his friends, for whom, I ask you, would he have died or with whom would he ever have lived?

Martin Luther, LW, Vol. 48: Letters I.

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⁶ This is one of the main ways Luther tried to express the mystery of salvation. In his First Lectures on the Psalms (see p. 18, n. 3) he made the following statement: through faith Christ and the sinner are, so to speak, initiated into a marriage. The sinner is described as the prostitute who had been cleansed and rehabilitated through this marriage; see WA 4, 130 f.; WA 3, 141. Later Luther developed this idea; in the 1520 treatise, The Freedom of a Christian (see p. 180, n. 2), he gave this understanding of faith its finest formulation; see WA 7, 22 ff., 49 ff.; LW 31, 343 ff. See also WA 2, 742 ff.; LW 35, 49 ff.

⁷ For a similar statement, see p. 282.

⁸ Rom. 15:7 (Vulgate).

⁹ Phil. 2:5–7.

¹⁰ Matt. 25:18; 18:28.

¹¹ Ps. 110:2. See also p. 252, n. 12.