Welcome back to another episode of five minutes in church history. We are again

making our trek through Luther's life and we are again on location and we are in

the town of Vittenberg. We are raising the question of what Luther would want us to know.

And to answer that question, we're going to look at the final month that Luther

spent here in Vittenberg, the month of January 1546. At the end of this month he

will travel to Ice Laban and tomorrow we will also travel to Ice Laban we will

consider the last four sermons that Luther preached there, and we will consider the last moments leading right up to the time of his death in Ice Laban.

Luther, of course, was born in Ice Lableben and he died there and in between he spent most of his time here in Vittenberg.

And so let's think about this month of January.

Luther was preaching as he always was.

He started preaching here in 1512,

and in this month, this would be the last year of preaching.

In his sermons, he was encouraging. we might even just simply want to say, chastising

his congregation for already feeling the temptation to slip away from the gospel and go back

to the old practices.

So one of the things that Luther would want us to know

is that we can never lose sight of the gospel.

We must always, as the saying goes,

keep the main thing, the main thing thing and we have to say that because

apparently it's easy for us to let the main thing not become the main thing and at

the center of the church is the gospel and we must proclaim the gospel and preach the gospel or

otherwise we should pack it up and go home. The other thing Luther wants us to

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