It’s good to take our Bible’s into our room and not be seen for the rest of the day. It is good while there to speak gospel words to our selves. We need to hear and we need to hear the confession of these things from our own mouth.

It is said that when Martin Luther heard of his father’s death he took his Psalter and retreated to his room and was not seen the rest of the day. This news came to the great German while he was at the Castle Coburg during the Diet of Augsburg. We may wonder what such a great man did in the seclusion of his room with his heart full of emotion. And yet, we may know several things by way of the man’s habit and history.

Twenty years after Luther had been in the Castle Coburg his personal physician, Mathaeus Razeberger, visited the site.[1]  He made a point to visit the room Luther had used for his study.  There he discovered various texts written on the wall. For example, Psalm 118:17 is there and Luther even added musical notes for singing.  But this wasn’t all.  Matthaeus Flaccius, the Hebrew professor at Wittenberg in 1544 gleaned a collection of short sayings and thoughts from the time of Luther’s stay.[2] These he published in a pamphlet in 1550.

Not surprisingly, some of them have to do with the devil and the limitation of his power. Luther wrote, “Truly, God is very much stronger and more powerful than the devil, as I John 4:4 says, ‘He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.’”

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