The History Of The Protestant Reformation: An Overview

Zach Mabry : 2 Timothy 3:7-17 : Fall Retreat

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

The history of the Protestant Reformation is helpful to understand so that we know that it’s vital for the Church to hold fast to the Word of God. Teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, like purgatory and penance, have no Scriptural basis. Reformation was desperately needed in the Church during the time of the reformers. Knowing the history surrounding the Reformation allows modern-day Christians to see the beauty of the movement that God used to preserve Scripture and save the Gospel from perversion.

Transcript – History Of The PRotestant Reformation

All right, okay, so we’re gonna talk about the Protestant Reformation. Mainly, right now, what I wanna do is I wanna give you just some historical context for the Reformation. We talked a little bit about it last night, but what we wanna talk about this morning is we wanna talk about one, the importance of history, and then talk about the importance of the Protestant Reformation. And how God used crazy situations to bring about this change.

Because we’re gonna look at four or five guys and we’re gonna see the way that God brought them to faith in Him and how in these crazy, what looks like impossible situations, God uses them to advance His purpose in the world, which is crazy. We know this can happen because God’s in control. God’s working this all together. In fact, the fact that the Protestant Reformation took place It was a culmination of God bringing things together in history all at the same time. You know, not just these guys, this group of people, men and women who were born at the same, about the same time.

They were born at the same time as the Renaissance, when people were going back to focus on education, and not just education, but education in the original languages, and then also the production of the printing press. If you guys, I mean, you guys remember that right before the Protestant Reformation took off, the printing press. This is crazy. Gutenberg made the printing press to make the shred of information possible quickly and efficiently. Because before that, if you wanted to get a message out in print to people, you had to hand write every copy, hand write over and over and over.

Well, the way that the information spread through the Reformation wouldn’t have been possible. Before the printing press. But the generation of these guys coming to age is when we have the printing press come out. I mean, it’s crazy. It’s God just working things together, and God was working things together to rescue his Gospel.

He was rescuing the Gospel from the church, right? So first, the importance of history. It’s important for us to study history for a couple of reasons. One, because a guy named George Santayana said that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Right?

So it’s important for us to study history because, and we’re seeing it right now. In fact, in the United States right now, there is a sentiment that’s pushing towards more socialistic policies. You guys probably realize that. But what we’re failing to realize is that in every country where the socialistic experiment has taken place, that it’s failed miserably. But we’re still like, no, let’s not think about that.

Let’s think about what about now? What if everybody had everything? Isn’t that awesome? You know, you’re gonna run out of that money. Because it’s not going to exist anymore, right?

We’ve seen it happen. I mean, countries, in your lifetime, it’s the first time we’ve seen countries declare bankruptcy, right? So anyway, we’ve got to remember the past so that we don’t repeat it. And that’s especially important when it comes to teaching about God, and theology, and teaching about salvation and the Gospel, right? Because there have been so many so many heresies that have taken over in the church that we will try to slowly adopt back because we don’t understand history and we don’t really understand after that, we don’t really understand the Bible and then realize that most of the Bible is history.

You know, the Old Testament, most of the Old Testament is history. And even in the New Testament, most of the New Testament is history. The guy who wrote the most in the New Testament is not Paul, it was Luke. Paul wrote more books. Luke just wrote two books, but it takes up more of the New Testament than anything else.

And it’s Luke, the Gospel of Luke, telling the history of Jesus and then Acts, the Acts of the Apostles, telling the history of what happened afterwards. So history is really important. Then we see in Scripture over and over that we’re to remember, to remember. All right? So now, in light of that, what can we learn as studying the Protestant Reformation?

And so as we look into it, remember there was a need to reform. I’m not going to go into a lot of this because we talked about it last night on how the Bible was only in Latin. And we talked a little bit about, you know, the false teachings that had creeped in. But you guys have to understand that when we lost the Bible, when people couldn’t understand the Bible, when the Bible wasn’t regulating the teaching, then it opened up to all sorts of these traditions that were just unbiblical. Like we talked about last night a little bit.

We talked about the understanding of Mary and of saints. But then also this idea of penance that you could pay off your sin. That’s crazy. They even came up with this idea where you could pay off your sin by doing things they called that penance, like acts of penance. And then there were indulgences.

And an indulgence was when you could actually purchase your salvation with money. What? Isn’t that crazy to think about? That you can buy your salvation with money? And again, you know, we talked about this, because what happened was, When the Bible no longer could be the authority because people couldn’t understand it, the practical authority became the priest.

Remember what we were talking about last night? And I forgot to mention, remember that time I read through that thing in Latin last night? I was reading the Latin Vulgate, John 3:16 in the Latin Vulgate. That was crazy and it sounded like a bunch of gibberish to us, right? So what happened instead of the Bible holding its place in authority?

The priest then started to have authority. And then the pope, who was like, you’d have priests, and then you’d have bishops who’d be over like a town, and then you’d have archbishops that’d be over like a region, and then you’d have the pope who was over all of the Roman Catholic Church. And they said that the pope would speak for God. And this was easier to do, right? It’s easier to trust a man who’s speaking a language that you know than a than a Bible written in a language you don’t understand.

And what happened was they elevated the tradition and the church so high that they never could back down from that. Because even today, when you look at the actual teaching, if you go through the, you can buy it, you can buy a paperback copy of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, it costs you about five bucks, and you read through it, you’re still gonna see in there where the Pope will speak for God. You’ll still see that there are indulgences, and you’ll still see in there teaching of purgatory. You guys ever heard of Purgatory? You know Purgatory they believed was a place where you would go when you die and you would have to pay off your sin before you went to heaven.

Now, we don’t have that in your churches. We don’t believe that in your churches. The reason we don’t believe your church doesn’t believe that is because your church believes the Bible. Right? I mean, because you guys, do you guys know the verses that talk about Purgatory?

No, you can’t. There aren’t any. Right? But they, but what happened, this is where we need to be very careful. You know, for every one of us, you all hold some beliefs about yourself, about God, about mankind, and you hold them really firmly.

And you need to make sure that you have a reason from Scripture to believe that. Because if you hold that so long, it becomes tradition. And even in a lot of our churches today, even in our churches that we go to, we need to, maybe we need to question some of our traditions and hold them against Scripture. Because that’s what happens, if we don’t do that, then what are we doing? We’re elevating, to quote Jesus, we’re teaching as doctrine the traditions of men.

Right? And so we’re looking at an extreme example of that because they’d lost Scripture and we need to make sure we don’t fall into that. Because we have Scripture, right? And so you get all kinds of false teaching, you get unqualified priests, bishops, and popes, and then you get the just outright abuse of the pope’s power. I mean, the pope would, like we said last night, he would threaten excommunication.

We actually see a picture of that with a guy named Ambrose who was an archbishop, and he called out the emperor. Because the emperor had made Christianity, all of the Institute students will know this because we talked about this, pretty awesome, in our classes. But there was this, let me tell you a story real quick. This is crazy. Okay, so the emperor had made Christianity legal.

This is in the 300s. He’d made Christianity legal, right? Not just legal, but everybody had to be a Christian. Okay, then he decided he was going to make every standard in the Bible the law. So he outlawed homosexuality.

Okay, are you guys tracking? And so then there was this big chariot race in the Coliseum, and one of the charioteers had been convicted of homosexuality. And so the mayor had him put in jail. Seems, because it was against the law to be homosexual, so he has him put in jail. Well, then by the time, you know, whatever, Race day came, the people were so upset that they stormed the jail and killed a bunch of people to let this guy free.

Well then the emperor gets mad and the next race day comes, he barricades this Coliseum and has a couple thousand people killed because of their rebellion. Alright, obviously we wouldn’t, none of this is prescriptive, right? Don’t do this, right? Well, so now you’ve got the emperor who had condoned this, and then you have the bishop who says, okay, until you repent, I’m not gonna give you the Lord’s Supper. I’m not gonna hear your confession, and you can consider yourself out of the church, which is out of heaven.

Whoa, right? So then this bishop winds up having more power than the emperor, because he’s not just holding, you know, his job against him or his freedom. He’s holding salvation against him. Isn’t that crazy? And so the emperor winds up coming before the priest on his knees begging his con his repentance.

And then who gives him that the forgiveness? Not God. The priest. Whoa. See how this is a bad situation?

Yeah, absolutely. Because who forgives sins? God alone. Not a man. Right?

And so then we get to where we. I’ll call this the last straw. This is where this where Martin Luther. This is the final straw that pushed Martin Luther over the edge and said, We’ve got to do something about it. Right?

So what happened was there was Pope Leo the 10th. He was obviously a pope and he was building a church in, he was building St. Peter’s Church or St. Peter’s Basilica, this fancy Latin word for church. And he was running out of money so they had a building campaign. You guys, your church has probably gone through a building campaign. This one’s a little different because he’s like, Man, I need, I need to, I don’t, we run out of money because he’s having the Sistine ceiling.

Painted by Michelangelo, who you guys know, right? That’s right. Nunchucks, orange bandana.

He was also painted. And it was weird employing turtles at the time, but whatever, anyway. But it was expensive. Michelangelo was expensive. They couldn’t afford to finish painting the Sistine ceiling, so the pope is like freaking out saying, We don’t have enough money, so let’s raise some money.

So he gets this guy named Albert who wants to have another Bishop Rick is what they called it, like another area that he can be a bishop over. And so he says, I’ll raise the money for you if you promise me to be the bishop of Maine’s. And so he gets this guy named John Tetzel to come along and help him raise money. And he raises money by selling indulgences, by selling basically get out of purgatory free cards as if he had the authority to do this, as if he won, as if purgatory existed. And that he could give you a piece of paper that would say, oh, you don’t have to go to purgatory.

Now, for most of us, we think, oh, this is crazy. I would never fall for that, right? Obviously, because we have the Bible. But they were taking advantage of people because they didn’t understand Scripture, and they’re saying, When you die, you’re gonna spend 6,000 years in purgatory paying off your sin unless you give me $1,000 now, and then when you die, you’ll go straight to heaven.

Yeah, unbelievable, but that’s exactly what was happening. And so this guy goes and he turns into like a sleazy salesman and he’s got jingles and everything and he says, As soon as the gold in the casket rings, the rescued soul to heaven springs. Because he wasn’t just trying to sell people their salvation, he was then trying to emotionally manipulate people. To pay money to get grandma and grandpa out of purgatory. Man, this is dirty.

Can you see? This is dirty. Do you realize how dirty this is? Underhanded, deceptive, demonic. Do you love your grandma?

Well, yeah. You know, she’s been dead for five years. She’s paying off her sin in purgatory right now. You know, she still has another hundred years that she’s going to be in purgatory. What kind of grandchild are you?

You’re not going to pay money to get your grandma out of purgatory? You have it in your power to give your grandma salvation. Well, if you don’t know any better, that’s a deal, right? Is there any amount of money that you wouldn’t give to have your grandma go to heaven? Of course not.

It’s underhanded and dirty. And that’s when Martin Luther said, Forget about this. We’re stopping it. That’s when he, on October 31st, 1517, he took these 95, he had 95 topics of discussion, he wanted to start a debate so that he could talk about the Pope’s abuse of power specifically with indulgences and nailed them to the door, the church door in Wittenberg, so that he could start a debate. But it did more than start a debate.

It started a movement because these 95 theses written, he had them, he wrote them in Latin because that was like the academic language of the day. But he also wrote them out in German and took them to a printing press and had them go all over the country. So now everybody was reading in their own language this guy showing how the church was abusing the power and going against the Bible. What? That’s awesome.

I mean, this is now the opportunity to do this. Okay, so let’s look at these four guys. We’ll look at Martin Luther, Zwingli, John Calvin, and Thomas Cranmer. So Martin Luther, look at him, handsome devil. I’m going to tell you, I’ve got some quotes from Martin Luther that remind us that even really godly people say really dumb things.

Okay? So let me read two quotes. If there’s any part of this talk this morning that you’re going to forget, this is what you can forget. But I dare you, because it’s going to be really hard. He said this.

Whenever the devil harasses you, seek the company of men and drink more. Or joke or talk nonsense or do some other merry thing. Sometimes we must drink more, sport and recreate ourselves, even sin a little to spite the devil. This guy’s, he’s German, he drank way too much. He says, so that we leave him no place for troubling our consciences with trifles.

We are conquered if we try too hard not to sin. So when the devil says to you, ‘Do not drink,’ answer him, ‘I will drink and write freely just because you tell me not to.’ yeah. And then he said this, this he thinks is solid logic but it’s not. He says, ‘Whoever drinks beer is quick to sleep.’ Whoever sleeps long does not sin. Whoever does not sin enters heaven thus.

Let us drink beer.

Alright, Marty, you’re losing me. But he, okay, but he also said this, and this is awesome. He said this, this is super serious, really good. He says, so when the devil throws your sin in your face and declares that you deserve death and hell, you tell him this, I admit that I deserve death and hell, what of it? For I know the One who suffered and made satisfaction on my behalf.

His name is Jesus Christ, Son of God, and where He is, there I shall be also. And that is awesome, right? Okay, so we all have faults. And Martin Luther’s got his faults. Martin Luther was crazy.

He was tormented by so many things emotionally. He really felt the weight of his sin in ways that most of us don’t, which is in some ways is such a good thing, because a lot of us will sin casually and not realize that we violated a holy God. But let’s look at his life real quick. He was born in 1483. And his family were miners, and so they wanted more for him, so his dad saved up and said, you,’re going to law school, so he goes to law school.

All right, and on his way back from law school in 1505, he’s coming home to visit, and he has a terrible thunderstorm, all right? This is where it’s just, to me, it’s just, it’s hilarious, because Martin Luther, I mean, studying to be a lawyer, starts freaking out because there’s thunder and lightning. He thinks he’s going to die. And so because his family were a family of miners, he’d grown up praying to Saint Anne, because Saint Anne is the patron saint of miners, people who dig, not people under 18. And so he cries out, Saint Anne, save me and I’ll become a monk.

He’s praying to St. Anne. Does St. Anne have any ability to help him at all? No. Is St. Anne going to mediate between God and him? No.

But now keep in mind, he’s not a Christian. He’s not a believer. He’d been raised up in church following their traditions so much so that when he needs help, he prays to a saint, right? But he’s a man of his word. So then he goes, he joins a monastery and he studies and he studies.

He becomes, he gets a doctor in theology, a doctorate degree in theology and he’s, and he becomes a, a pastor. He’s preaching and he’s teaching, but he’s not a believer. Isn’t that crazy? Because he turned the study of the Bible into an academic work. In fact, the more he studied the Bible, the the more he hated God.

Because when he studied the Bible, he saw that God was holy and that God was righteous. And he realized that he wasn’t holy and he wasn’t righteous. And do you know what changed him? The Bible. Listen to this quote.

He said this. This is his words. This is in 1515. This is three years after he attained a doctor of theology who’s a professor in school. He’s studying the book of Romans.

He says, At last, by the mercies of God, meditating day and night, I gave heed to the context of the words. This is in Romans 1. Namely, for in the Gospel, the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, the righteous shall live by faith. There I began to understand by studying Scripture. There I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous lives by a gift of God, namely by faith.

And this is the meaning, the righteousness of God is revealed by the Gospel, namely the passive righteousness with which the merciful God justifies us by faith. Okay, let me explain what he’s saying here, because he’s using a confusing way to say something really awesome. He’s saying that he finally realized that the righteousness of God that we need is only in Jesus. And he’d been trying to earn that and he couldn’t earn that. And then he realizes that this, the only way to have this is by faith in Jesus.

And that faith is a gift of God. This is what we’re gonna talk about tonight. Faith alone, grace alone, right? Because there’s no way that he could get an active righteousness. That means he can’t earn righteousness.

The only righteousness that he can get is a passive righteousness where Jesus gives us his righteousness. Whoa. Because then it changes his mind. ‘Cause he used to hear righteousness of God and hate God for it. Right?

Because it’s an unattainable standard. But now he hears righteousness of God and he loves God for it because God gives it. And that’s what he says here. He says, Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates and I extolled my sweetest words with a love as great as the hatred with which I had before hated the words righteousness of God. He used to hate it so bad now he loves God for his righteousness.

He says, that place in Paul for me was the very gate to paradise. And once the Bible through God’s spirit saved him, then everything changed. Everything, because then he started looking at everything that the church was teaching, that the hierarchy of the church, the tradition of the church, this idea of Mary and the saints, and he started realizing this isn’t in the Bible and he couldn’t handle anymore. So it was two years after this, he nailed the 95 Theses on the wall and then and then that got the attention, remember that went everywhere, he starts writing like crazy. Martin Luther wrote so much, he just started writing and writing and writing, and then there was a printing press that could just manufacture and send it everywhere, until in 1521, not only did he get the pope, because the pope got mad at him, the pope got mad at him and instituted this letter, gave him this letter, it was called a Papal Bull, I have no clue what that means, but he had this letter that said, you,’ve got like 40 days to recant, And then you won’t get kicked out of heaven.

The greater excommunication. It says you need to recant of all your works and burn your books. And you know what he did? Because he’s a jerk. He took that letter and instead of burning his books, burned that letter in front of everybody.

He said, Bring it on, you know? So the pope’s mad at him. Well, the pope’s real good friends with the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. And so Charles V brings him before him, 1521, in the Diet of Worms, it’s not a diet of worms, very confusing. And they actually would pronounce the W with a V, so it’d be worms, yah. Yah, like Volkswagen, you know, doesn’t your love the Volkswagen?

And, no, whatever. Anyway, so brings him before there and says, you, have to recant, recant what you wrote. And he said, I can’t recant what I wrote. There’s all sorts of, I’d have to check everything in there to see whether or not, I’m sure I’ve made mistakes. He said, People make mistakes.

And they said, no, you have to recant. You’ve got to recant. Otherwise, you’re going to be convicted as a heretic. And so he says this, Unless I’m convinced by Scripture and plain reason, I do not accept the authority of popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other. My conscience is captive to the Word of God.

I cannot and I will not recant. That’s awesome. ‘Cause what’s he realizing? Is the Pope the authority that he should be afraid of? Is the church the authority to be afraid of?

No, it’s God’s word, the words of God. And so he gets, they basically say, all right, you’re done. You know, they rule against them, so now he’s scared, terrified. And so on the way home, he actually gets kidnapped, plot twist, by his friends. Because he’s a wanted man, people want to kill him.

So if his friends kidnap him and go put him at a castle in Wartburg, where he does the best thing that he could possibly do for the Reformation was he translates the New Testament into German. And this is high treason. Remember, they’d killed people for translating the Bible into other languages. And what he does, he translates the New Testament into German, and then they get it run off the printing press so that the God’s Word gets spread all throughout the German-speaking world. It’s huge.

It’s awesome. The next guy I’ll look at real quick is Ulrich Zwingli. Ulrich Zwingli, he came to faith as a young man. He was a soldier and he was a priest and he was following along in the tradition of the Catholic Church until he went to this He went to this dinner where they were serving sausage.

I know. So Martin Luther, God used a thunderstorm and him crying out to a saint. Ulrich Zwingli goes to a sausage dinner. Now most of you are thinking, that’s still really weird, right? Well, he was a priest.

And this, and he was hanging out with these folks during Lent. The 40 days before, you guys have heard of Lent. A lot of you have heard of Lent. It starts on Ash Wednesday. People put the ash on their forehead to show that they’re mourning, right?

And so the tradition in the Catholic Church is if you were a good Catholic, you would fast during those 40 days. And it then turned into just really fasting meat. And so you wouldn’t eat any meat, but then They decided because it was like some fish companies were kind of going out of business they decided it was oh, it’s okay. Maybe you can have fish on Fridays It’s a very loose thing. It’s kind of like with the Mormon Church when they they bought a lot of Pepsi and then said we know maybe carbon maybe caffeine’s not too bad youd guys can have caffeine now cool.

And that’s what happens with man-made religions is that they change like that and And so he’s a priest and these guys are serving sausage during Lent and he says, I can’t do that. I’m a Christian. I’m not going to eat meat during Lent. And then for some reason he went home and he was like, Is that right? I’m just picturing him, you know, like sitting down thinking, no, I didn’t eat that tonight.

And that was the good thing, right? It was, this one, I’m not supposed to do that because it says in the, where does it say that in the Bible? You know? So he got out his computer and he went on Blue Letter Bible and he typed in Lent and he’s like, Lent’s not in here. It wasn’t like that.

He spoke German.

But yeah, I mean could you imagine how confused he was when he’s like, Wait a second, I haven’t been eating meat. For 40, I mean that’s terrible. We had sausage this morning. It’s delicious. Thank you Lord.

And it’s crazy because God used that. I mean that was the turning point. Because then he started thinking, are there other things that we’ve been teaching that aren’t in the Bible? There are.

I mean, I mean it’s crazy, it’s like a light bulb went off. Purgatory, indulgences, penance. Confession to a priest, wait a second. And then so then you know what he decided to do? He’s like, well, I’m gonna preach.

And so he preached a sermon on the freedom for Christians to eat whatever they want. And then it didn’t stop there. Then he started in a book called Matthew and decided, I’m just gonna preach through the whole New Testament. And whatever the Bible says, we’re gonna believe that. That was enough.

That did it. The next thing I want to look at is a guy named John Calvin. John Calvin’s a little bit later than those other two. And this is, he had come to faith in Christ, a brilliant mind, right? Studied the Bible and in studying the Bible came to faith in Jesus and sort of realizing the Catholic Church shouldn’t be exercising the control that they were.

And he was living in France at the time and France was a Catholic nation which meant that there was no separation from church and state and that the religion of France was Catholicism. And if you disagreed with that, they’d kick you out. So John Calvin got kicked out, kicked out of France. And it’s crazy because Calvin loved the French people so much that he never stopped trying to spread the Gospel back into France. In fact, he wrote a book, it’s 1535 maybe, yeah, 1536.

1536 he wrote a book called the Institutes of the Christian Religion, which he then expanded on about eight more times afterwards. It used to be able to fit in your pocket and now it can’t really fit in a book bag. But he wrote this and he wrote the a letter in dedication to the king of France saying, you need to accept this Protestant faith because you’ve messed up the Bible. And so he got kicked out. And so he decided, you know what I need to do?

I need to be an academic. I need to write. I need to write and teach. But what’s crazy is he’s on his way through Geneva. And there’s a pastor there.

His name is Will Ferrell. Huh? I know. It’s the craziest thing. It was right before he moved to the North Pole.

You know what I’m talking about. Took a road trip to New York.

He found the greatest cup of coffee ever made. America’s best cup of coffee. Anyway, congratulations. You did it.

This guy’s name is actually Pharrell. Will Pharrell, he sang a song about being happy.

I just want you guys to remember these people’s names. It’s very helpful because this guy, he was convinced that Calvin needed to stay there and preach. Because he was on his way to a place called Strasbourg where he was going to work at a university. So William Pharrell said to him, May God curse your studies if now in a time of need you refuse to lend your aid to his church.

Okay. So he rethought it and he said, okay, let me just stay here. I could probably just preach here, you know, that’d be good here. And what’s crazy is that, and they said, he started preaching, same thing. He just started preaching the Bible, preaching the Bible, and people started realizing that they’d been held under this corruption in the Catholic Church.

But then they, the elders of the city freaked out, so they kicked him out. And then a couple of years go by and they realize, no, we need you back here. So he goes back there and spends the next 20 years of his life there. He starts this academy. He trains a guy named Theodore Beza who takes on the academy.

And what they’re doing is they’re training pastors. They just trained pastors. In fact, they trained pastors and his favorite place to send pastors was into France because he loved the French people so much. They’re saying, It looks like that in the 20 years that they were doing that, that they started 2,000 churches in France. 2,000.

How awesome is that? He had such a concern for the Gospel to go back to his home country that was underneath the corruption of the Roman Church. And then the last two people to look at are Henry VIII and Thomas Cranmer. Henry VIII and Thomas Cranmer. There we go.

Hey. He’s got a rectangle face. And the thing, what’s interesting about this is the British, the English Reformation was totally different. Than the European Reformation. But what’s crazy is it’s happening at the same basic time as if God had planned for all of this to come about in the same way.

And so we’ve got a guy refusing to eat sausage, a guy scared to death in a thunderstorm, a guy who got kicked out of his country for being a Christian. And then in the English Reformation, what God used to bring the Reformation to England was a king who wanted a divorce.

What? Yeah, isn’t that crazy? Henry VIII was so obsessed with having his royal line continue, so for his royal line to continue, he needed to have a son. Well, his wife, Catherine, He had like seven Catherine wives and 14 Anne wives. That’s not true.

He did. He just. He married women named Catherine and Anne. And so. But he was Catholic, right?

And Catherine of Aragon, which is, you know, like Spain, they were also really Catholic. And the Pope wouldn’t let him get a divorce just because she’s had. She’d had a daughter. But. So what’s he gonna do?

He’s got a daughter. It’s not going to continue his line. He wants his line to continue. He’ll do anything for that to take place, but the Pope won’t let him do it. Again, isn’t that crazy?

The Pope who doesn’t even live in England, right? He’s in Italy and he’s controlling the King of England. So the King of England, you know what he said? He pulls the ultimate, you know, I’m taking my ball and I’m going home card, right? He says, oh yeah, well I’ll start a new religion.

So there and that’s exactly what he did. They broke from the Catholic Church and became the Anglican Church. And Thomas Cranmer, who’s the archbishop at the time, he helps him along and he helps him along so that he can give him his divorce. Now, again, let’s remember, Christians in the past, none of them are perfect, right? Martin Luther saying all sorts of weird stuff about drinking beer so you don’t sin.

Not good. And then you’ve got Thomas Cranmer, who allows the king to break away so that he can grant him his divorce. But then what he does, is he takes that opportunity to put Protestant teaching into the churches. He writes a book of common prayer and has it in every one of the churches. He writes a book of sermons and has them in every one of the churches.

So then, and then it’s, and during this, that then after that they’re able to get the Bible in English. Awesome. And you know where they put it? In every one of the churches. And that God uses frail, faulty, sinful people.

To bring this about. And what’s crazy is that then it kind of goes back and forth because it becomes an Anglican church. Now, the Anglican church was a little bit, it was removed from Catholicism and was pushing towards having Protestant theology. But then after Henry died, his son Edward took over, who was Protestant. But then after he died, you remember that first lady, Catherine, who he’d had exiled?

When he got his divorce, well, she had a daughter named Mary who then became the queen and we call her bloody Mary no, we, you know, we call her bloody Mary because she killed Protestants I Mean, she killed hundreds, hundreds of Protestants, maybe thousands She killed so many Protestants that a guy named John Fox wrote a book called Fox’s book of martyrs to talk about all the people she was killing because they were Protestants Isn’t that crazy? But then it kind of balanced back and then Elizabeth, after Elizabeth became queen, she was Protestant but not as Protestant as Edward had been. And so, but she kind of said, she published the 39 articles which basically paved the way for the Protestant church in England, which for those of us who are Christians in America, most of the denominations we are a part of were brought over from England. And so we need to thank God. We need to thank God that he used a king wanting to get a divorce to bring the truth of Christianity back to England.

Now, that seems crazy, right? But the truth of the matter is, is that God is totally and completely in control of what’s happening in world affairs and that he will use sinful people making terrible decisions to bring about his will. You look at the end of the book of Genesis, right? You guys remember in Genesis where Joseph? Had been sold into slavery because of his jealous brothers, which was the catalyst that God used to help make him the second most powerful person basically in the world, and used him to store food away so that the world would continue and that his family would then come there seeking food and have a– and the Israelite people who God had promised right?

You’re going to continue? Now they’re able to continue because otherwise they would have died in famine. And so Joseph says, oh, what man intended for evil, God’s used for good. And so we get to see that on a global scale. And that’s why 500 years later, we’re still reaping the benefits of what God did 500 years ago at the Reformation.

And so what we see is that they rescued the Gospel. That they, in elevating Scripture again, they restored the church, they reformed the church, they brought back the Gospel, and then we have those five solas, which we talked about two last night, Scripture and Christ, and then tonight we’ll talk about grace and faith, and then tomorrow morning we’ll talk about the glory of God. So pretty cool, you know, I mean, I want to encourage you guys to take through some of this, take these things seriously, and I think the one thing that every one of us needs to get from this is that we need to make sure that whatever we believe about us or God or the world, that we have a reason for that in Scripture. In Scripture. Because when we start to elevate our own teaching, our own ideas, our own opinions above Scripture, we’re in a world of hurt.

Right? So let me do. I’m going to pray for us, and then we have stuff that we’re going to do, right? We’re opening. We’re opening up the three men in the zip line.

Whoo! We’ll do that till lunch, lunch is at noon, and then we’ll play more after lunch. So let me pray for us. Gracious Lord, we love you and we praise you. We pray that you will be exalted in our lives, and we pray that you will help us and our churches to point towards Scripture, to point towards you, to point towards your truth.

We love you and praise you in the name of Jesus. Amen.