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On July 2, 1505, Martin Luther had an experience with God that helped spark the Protestant Reformation.
 Martin Luther’s father was a copper miner who prospered enough to allow his son to attend the University of Erfurt and graduate with a Masters Degree. Luther then began preparation to become a lawyer. But on July 2, 1505, while returning from a visit to his parents he was caught in a thunderstorm and cried out in terror, “Help me, St. Anne, and I will become a monk.”
Luther said about his experience, “Not freely or desirously did I become a monk, but walled around with the terror and agony of sudden death, I vowed a constrained and necessary vow.”
Luther practiced extreme asceticism, but found even the most agonizing attempt to gain assurance of salvation brought him no inward peace. He prayed and fasted and chastised himself even beyond the strictest monastic rules.
Luther said about his first Mass, “I was utterly stupefied and terror stricken. I thought to myself, ‘Who am I that I should lift up mine eyes or raise my hands to the divine majesty? For I am dust and ashes and full of sin, and I am speaking to the living, eternal and true God.’”
He said later of this time, “For however irreproachably I lived as a monk, I felt myself in the presence of God to be a sinner with a most unquiet conscience, nor could I believe that I pleased him with my satisfactions. I did not love, indeed I hated this just God, if not with open blasphemy, at least with huge murmuring, for I was indignant against him, saying ‘as if it were really not enough for God that miserable sinners should be eternally lost through original sin, and oppressed with all kind of calamities through the law of the ten commandments, but God must add sorrow on sorrow, and even by the gospel bring his wrath to bear.’ Thus I raged with a fierce and most agitated conscience, and yet I continued to knock away at the Apostle Paul (reference to Luther’s study of Romans 1:17) in this place, thirsting ardently to know what he really meant.”
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