Peter Waldo - John D. Martin | KFW 2019

Lesson Transcript

Dear Father, what a blessing that we can be together in this way. There are hearts here beating together. There is great love for each other here. We are humbled and blessed in Your presence. Thank You for the fellowship. Thank You for the testimony of lives that have blessed us. Thank You for the mutual contribution that we have been able to make one to another over the years.

Thank You, O God, that we are together in this time of worship this morning, and to see each other's faces and hear each other's voices, and sing these hymns together, and make these commitments with each other. We have a testimony yet we would like to hear about. I ask You to use Brother John to share this message with us. I ask You to bless his heart, his message, his ministry, his life, as he shares these precious words with us today. We ask in Jesus' name. Amen. Good morning.

I was sitting there thinking how in the world could we follow that message with anything that would add to it. But I have been asked to do that, so we will try to do that.

The title of my message this morning is "A Heritage Gained and Lost." I agree with a news commentator I heard once say, "There are no great eras in the history of men, only the story of great men." And Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said, "Lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime and departing leave behind us footprints on the sands of time." I have four points this morning, and I will try to make it quick because we are over time. But I do not begrudge one moment of what Brother Ernest did.

It was just a tremendous challenge. I will just tell you that I somehow do not understand why I was so privileged to be part of this great heritage. Many people, most people, never even come close to this heritage, never have a chance even to hear it. And I want to be faithful to that heritage. So I want to talk about a heritage compromised, a heritage gained, a heritage lost, and a heritage evaluated. So let us talk a little bit about a heritage compromised. I want to talk a little bit about the early church.

The early church existed at a time when there were no printing presses. The New Testament was not completed. They basically had the Old Testament scriptures. And there was one thing that characterized the early church, and that was a passionate devotion to the teaching and person and example of Jesus. Paul said, "That I may know Him, I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord. As ye have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in Him.

He that saith he abideth in Him, ought himself also so to walk even as he walked." And I noticed throughout the epistles - I am an old English teacher - and I noticed throughout the epistles the tremendous prepositional phrases: in Christ, unto Christ, to Christ, for Christ, after Christ, with Christ. Paul just laces his epistles with those prepositional phrases all through. Paul did not want anybody to misunderstand his belief that it all focused on the person of Christ and participation in who He is.

There was no printing press until 1439. But Paul was already seeing a threat to what I just told you. And one of the verses that really struck me some years ago as I was studying 2 Corinthians, "I fear lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtlety, so your mind should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ." Now, Paul in his day was already seeing people who were trying to improve the gospel. The first group that we have, believe it or not, did not attack his divinity.

There is a tremendous emphasis that we believe in the divinity of Christ, and I do not want to minimize that emphasis. But the first attack on Christianity was an attack against his humanity. The Gnostics said he could not have been a real human being because all material things, including the flesh, were created by an evil god, and Jesus could not have taken on real human flesh. Now, what is the implication of that? If Jesus did not take on real human flesh, then his call for you to follow him was a farce.

You cannot follow him. And you do not talk to some people very long about this subject until they say, "We cannot do that. He was God." How many have ever heard that? That was the first attack on Christianity, an attack on his humanity. That is why the Anabaptist had a particular emphasis on the humanity of Christ. And Paul was already seeing this in his day. The whole epistle of John is written to refute that heresy and passages from Paul as well.

Here is another scripture: "Beware lest any man spoil you." And that word spoil there means rob. "Beware lest any man rob you through philosophy and vain deceit." Now, immediately people think about worldly philosophies. But Paul was writing to Christians. What was he talking about?

"Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world." And listen to this: "And not after Christ." The philosophy he is talking about is the clever manipulations that people can do with ideas from the Bible to lead us away from Christ. He said that is how the world does things. They do it by logic. They do it by philosophy, philosophizing.

And you are going to see as we go down through this that one of the greatest enemies of true Christianity is theological, philosophical manipulations of spiritual ideas. And then you had scholasticism. We had Gnosticism, attack on his humanity. We also did have an attack on his deity. That is referred to in John as well. Those two things are very, very, very crucial. And then you had scholasticism, which tried to marry Greek philosophy with the teachings of Jesus.

I read one place that I think it was one of the theologians back in the early church that said he found every doctrine about Jesus in Aristotle except the resurrection. Well, that is a pretty bad omission because it happens to be the central theme of the gospel. And so you have these cultural pressures. You have the pagan culture. You have the Greek culture. Just like today, Brother Ernest was right on the mark. We are being pressured on every side by every possible means. And they had it back then.

But how did they fight it? They fought it with theology rather than Paul, who kept his focus on Jesus and obedience to Him. That is all we need, folks. Honestly, that is all we need, is to keep our focus on doing exactly what Jesus said. That will solve the problems that we have. So I just want to go down through a list of where the church went. And I am giving all of this as a backdrop to Peter Waldo.

So the church veered further and further and further and further from literal, strict, passionate obedience to Jesus' literal teachings. An example: somewhere in the third century, non-resistance got lost. And I would like to talk about that for a long time, but we do not have time. After Constantine's conversion, the church and the state united. Now you have the state using physical force to make people obey the church. AD 310, prayers for the dead and the sign of the cross.

AD 375, veneration of angels and dead saints. AD 593, purgatory established by Gregory the Great. And it was established by him because it did not exist before that and still does not. AD 600, prayers to Mary, the Mother of God. AD 788, worship of the cross, images and relics. AD 850 - see, this happened over centuries. Holy water mixed with a pinch of salt, blessed by the priest, could sanctify anything it touched. AD 998, fasting on Fridays and during Lent imposed. And then mass developed into a sacrifice.

AD 1079, celibacy and the priesthood decreed. AD 1090, the rosary or prayer beads introduced. And of course, you all know 1095, the Crusades, where Christians are now killing Muslims in Jerusalem. Now, the interesting thing about it is right after that list, we are now up to the 1100s. There was a tremendous sense in Europe that something was drastically wrong. And so you had wandering preachers wandering around the country calling people back to the example of Jesus.

Now, many of those groups we would call heretical. Some of them did not believe in the divinity of Christ. Most of them still practiced infant baptism. And I could go down through a long list of things that we would seriously theologically disagree with. But they had one thing in common. They were passionately committed to go back to the teachings of Jesus. The Waldensians was just that was just one group of them. All right?

I want to read a quote from someone in their day talking about these heretics and some of them we would have actually called heretics theologically. But this is what they said: "If you question the heretic not about his theology, but if you question him about his faith, nothing is more Christian than what he has to say. If about his daily converse, nothing is more blameless. And what he says, he proves by his activities. As regards his life and conduct, he cheats no one. He pushes ahead of no one.

He does violence to no one. Moreover, his cheeks are pale with fasting. He does not eat the bread of idleness. He labors with his hands and thus makes his living." Matthew 25 says nothing about the theologies that we are concerned about, and we should be concerned. I certainly have a problem with anybody who does not believe in the divinity of Christ. We should have a correct theology.

But Matthew 25 says, in the end, it will be, "How did you apply your faith to the needs around you?" That is going to be the final test. And these people, on that subject, passed with flying colors. And we will let God be the judge about their theology. But all of these groups faded away. Most of them were sort of Gnostic. They were sort of ascetic.

They lived a very abstemious lifestyle, starved themselves because they sort of had this idea that the flesh is evil and that the spirit is good, and so you just have to punish the flesh. Gnosticism took two forms. One was to do what they were doing. The other one was to say, "Well, the flesh cannot be redeemed. Let it live however it will." But this group took that other route, that the flesh had to be brought under. And so they were sort of extremist in that way.

And all of those faded away by the 14th century pretty much. But not the Waldensians, and that is why we are still talking about them. They have persisted down to the present. There are 50,000 Waldensians in the world today. Most of them are in Argentina. They are considered the mother of the Reformation sometimes. History is uncertain about them due to inadequate sources. Much of what is written about them was written about their enemies. And I am going to read one of those.

This was one written by the Inquisition in the 13th century: "The poor men of Lyon" - that is what they were called because Peter Waldo was from the city of Lyon in France - "The poor men of Lyon rose about the year 1170, founded by a certain man of Lyon by the name of Valdisius, after whom his followers took their name. The person in question was a rich man who abandoned all his wealth, determined to observe a life of poverty and evangelical perfection like the apostles.

He arranged for the gospels and some of the other books to be translated into the common tongue as well as some texts of the saints" - and he lists some of the saints there - "under titles which he called sentences and which he read with great zeal without, however, understanding very much" - that is his enemy's comment - "full of his own importance and with little education, he ended up by usurping the prerogatives of the apostles. He dared to preach the gospel in the streets" - is not terrible?

- "where he made many disciples, both men and women, and compounded his arrogance by sending them out in turn to preach. These people, ignorant and illiterate, went about through the towns, entering houses and even churches, spreading many errors everywhere.

They were summoned by the Archbishop of Lyon, who warned them against such defiance, but they refused to fall in line, cloaking their madness by saying, 'They must obey God rather than people,' since God had commanded the apostles to preach the gospel to every living creature. And thus they ended up despising the clergy, accusing them of being rich and living a life of ease, all the while boldly declaring themselves to be imitators and successors of the apostles.

Because of this disobedience and of this arrogant appropriation of a task which did not belong to them at all, they were excommunicated and expelled from their country." Now you must remember, there was no printing press. These people had an amazing command of scripture. I read an account where somebody reported back in the day that he met a Waldensian at the crossroads somewhere. And that Waldensian quoted to him word for word the entire book of Job. I do not know why he chose Job.

I often wondered what that had to do with his message. I would like to ask something. How many of you I debated whether I wanted to do this because I do not want to put anybody forward and anybody down. But I am just sort of curious. How many of you have ever memorized the entire Sermon on the Mount? Raise your hands high. Okay. Thank you. How many of you have ever memorized an entire book of the Bible? Praise God. Bless your hearts. These people had whole books and remember, there was no printing press.

If you were going to give the scriptures to somebody, you had to give it by memory. You might have had a little handwritten portion of it. They were passed around and people that is what they memorized from. But I just really want to challenge us. Valdisius was a man of exceptional vitality. I mean, this man could not be stopped. But he is pictured as a man of tremendous humility. He left no body of written materials. I have nothing to quote from like you have heard quoted from. He composed no precepts.

He did not create any organization. He issued no rules or any ordinances. He just chose to live out his faith and publicly testify why he lived as he lived. He was not a leader. He was not a self-appointed teacher or model. He was nonetheless to become a reference point for many generations of Christians who sought to live as biblical people live. Now, the story is that he was a man of tremendous wealth. He was criticized for lending his money at outrageous rates of interest.

And there are three accounts as to how he got converted. The most popular account was that after a mass in one of the Roman Catholic churches, a minstrel sang the story of Saint Alexis. Saint Alexis was a rich, spoiled member of a noble family who, on his wedding night, left his bride and family for a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. He returned to his city so disfigured that no one recognized him. He was ignored and left to die under a staircase. And it was only after his death that he was identified.

Valdisius was so touched by a man who would invest that kind of action into his faith that he asked the minstrel to come to his house and do the song again. And he came to believe that he should do something very similar. That is the first account. I tend to believe that there is probably some truth in all of these, that this is the same story.

The second account is as a rich merchant amid poverty and many of the people around him were poor, some of them because of him, Valdisius had a troubled conscience and sought out counsel at one of the cathedrals. The priest read to him from Matthew 19:16 to 22, where Jesus told the rich man to sell his goods, give to the poor, and follow him. And Valdisius believed he should do that. That is the second account.

The third account is that Valdisius was very upset over the death of a friend who was taken in a seizure at a banquet and died. He asked himself, "If death should overtake me, would my soul be ready for the journey?" After weeks of uncertainty, he decided to give up his former way of life and begin anew. This is the crisis of a medieval man who, in his own town, met the Christ of the gospels. It is a beautiful story.

His vow of poverty - he did give away all his wealth, made provision for his wife, and gave the rest away - did not lead him, as it did many people in his day, to the monastery. He chose to live out his life among the poor, not as an act of merit, but to challenge others to do the same. To the scoffers, as he distributed the last of his goods, he said, "Citizens and friends, I am not out of my mind as you seem to think.

I am freeing myself of those who were oppressing me and making me a lover of money more than of God. This act I do for myself and for you, for myself so that if from now on I possess anything, you may label me a fool, for you in order that you too may be led to put your hope in God and not in riches." Now, a small community formed, and they were determined to live out Jesus' teachings together.

And this is what they said, or somebody said at that time, "The decision we have taken is this: to maintain until our death faith in God and the Church's sacraments to preach freely according to the grace given by God to us. This we will not cease to do for any cause." They did not seek to start a revolution. They never left the Roman Catholic Church officially.

They were expelled, obviously, and persecuted, but they never he was not really trying to do anything spectacular except just live out the teachings of Jesus. He did not set up a religious order or name a leader. In fact, the archbishop in his town at first praised him for what he was doing. But he said this to him, "We bishops are here to do the preaching. It is part of the task laid down for us as the successors of the apostles." This was the only accusation against these people.

They had no problem with the way they lived. The monks went into the monastery and took a vow of poverty. I mean, almost everything they did as far as their lifestyle was concerned had been done in the monasteries, and there were always people who did those things. But the thing they did that could not be forgiven was that they dared to preach the gospel without anybody authorizing them to do it. I was thinking of that when you were talking last night, Brother Dean.

That was the distinguishing feature of these people that got them in trouble. They could have done everything else they did, and there would have been no trouble, but they were told to quit preaching. They said, "Preaching belongs to everyone who chooses to truly live as the apostles of Jesus." Now, he had the New Testament translated into the vernacular French, parts of it at least. He required or the people who followed him took on a vow of poverty.

They believed that salvation comes by faith and works of charity and identification with the poor. They continued to practice mass. They did not withdraw from the Roman Catholic Church. Now, he did take his case to the third ladder in council and asked the Pope to endorse what he was doing. He met with Pope Alexander III, who blessed him but said they could not preach. See, this was the issue. Without approval from the local clergy, they preached anyway. Later, Pope Lucius III declared them heretics in 1184.

This is just 14 years after he began. The ladder in council in 1215 also declared them heretics, and in 1184, the Inquisition was established to eradicate all heretics, including the Waldensians. In 2011, at Strausburg, more than 80 Waldensians were burned as heretics. But their doctrine spread rapidly through South Germany, Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Poland, and Austria, and the number was reported to be 80,000. That is probably a very conservative estimate.

Martin Luther at one point - I think it was Martin Luther - said, "One-third of the people of Europe either attended a Waldensian meeting or knew about the beliefs of the Waldensians." In other words, there were just many people affected by this. Now, everybody wants to they finally were driven out of France. I was always a little perplexed why their headquarters is in northwest Italy.

We actually visited Torre Police, which is their headquarters, two years ago, and I will tell you about that at the end of my message. And there we were told there were 50,000 of them still in the world, most of them in Argentina. One thing that perplexed me is the other Americans with us on that tour were Mormons. And they told us that the last Waldensians in America, for the most part, joined the Mormon Church. Now, you go figure that one out.

I will tell you a little bit about my interview with the leader we had at Torre Police, the headquarters in northwestern Italy. Everybody wants to claim them. The Seventh-day Adventists even say they were Sabbatarians, although that cannot be proven. Everybody wants to say, "We are the descendants of this heroic group." But their original beliefs do not identify them completely with any group. They emphasize the Bible as their only guide for faith and life, and that is still their creed.

That guide at Torre Police said, "All the other Christian groups, they have their creeds. They have their little statements. They have their statements of faith. We don't. We follow only the Bible." They laid particular stress on the words and example of Jesus, especially the Sermon on the Mount, often called Sermon on the Mount people. They rejected all killing, including capital punishment and war. They rejected the oath and government offices.

They formed an association of men and women who formally vowed to observe apostolic poverty and a life of discipleship. They were divided on the issue of baptism. Most of them continued to baptize infants. A few of them decided they should baptize adults. There was no organization regimenting these people to do what they did. All right? Their preachers were called barba, which means uncles. Their preaching was simple: repentance, faith, and obedience to Jesus.

Now, a lot of time has been spent trying to connect these people with the Anabaptists. We have no record that any Waldensian ever joined the Anabaptists. I do not know if we have any record they ever even met the Anabaptists. The Anabaptists were pretty much in northern Switzerland and, of course, in northern Europe.

They were making connections with Lyon, France, which is in southwestern France, and then they basically were driven out of France, and then they went into the Piedmont, the valleys of the Alps, over in northwestern Italy, and that is where you find their headquarters today. All right? So there was no connection. Now, there was a connection between the Waldensians and the Hussites. A Waldensian bishop ordained a Hussite bishop. So there was a connection between those two groups.

In fact, I am getting ahead of my story, but in that interview at the end, I said to him after he had described everything, and he did not describe the whole thing of nonresistance. And so I thought, "Well, I will not embarrass him in front of the group. I will ask him at the end." So I took him off to the side, and I had other questions.

But one of them I asked said, "Weren't they nonresistant?" He said, "Yes." I said, "Well, at the end, what happened to the ones who were nonresistant?" And he said, "I think they joined the Hussites." And somebody should research that. All right. Now, that is the heritage. People who would not quit obeying and preaching the clear, literal teaching and example of Jesus. That is where it is, folks. That is where it is. Now, I want to talk about a heritage lost.

So they were able to reclaim this wonderful heritage that Christianity began with that was just simply following Jesus in obedience, and that got lost through all the theology and all of the scholasticism and the pressures of culture and paganism. It got lost, and these people managed to regain it. I do not know how much they even knew about the early church. They just read the Bible. They just read the teachings of Jesus. It is a little bit like the Anabaptists.

We do not have much evidence that the Anabaptists knew anything about the early church. John Overholt always said the Anabaptists are the bridge to the early church. They recaptured that vision of just following Jesus. Well, they welcomed the news about Luther. This is 300 years later. This is amazing to me that these people kept a purity of faith without a strong organization, a strong doctrinal statement, and all those things we think we need to keep everything right.

They did not have almost any of those, and they kept a pure faith for 300 years. That is amazing to me. But then they heard about the Reformation, and in 1526, an assembly of Waldensians were eager to make contact with these people. "Oh, there has been a revival of true religion in Switzerland." So they sent two men to meet with Giamme Ferrel. Now, I do not know how much you know about Giamme Ferrel, but it was bad news for anybody to meet with him. He was a rabid Reformed theologian.

And the young man was convinced that the Waldensians should adopt the Reformation theology. The old man was not so sure. So they went back to their Alpine Valley to discuss this, and they decided they needed more information. So they sent two more barba uncles. This time, they sent a pretty astute theologian, which I think was a mistake, up to discuss with the Reformers. They met Bootser, Ockel and Patius, and the other Reformers at Strausburg and Bern and Basel. Now, this is interesting to me.

The Swiss Reformers knew about the Anabaptists, and the thing that concerned them whenever they heard these Waldensians give their testimony was it sounded Anabaptist to them, and they warned them against the perfectionist teachings of the Anabaptists. The Waldensians had held to a clear separation between civil power and Christianity. The Swiss told them the Swiss Reformers said, "You need to rethink your position. These men who have been teaching this are ignorant people. They are not theologians.

You need to become more biblical in your theology and join the mainstream Reformation." Now, the onrush of the Reformation was so rapid, these people did not take the time they should have to think. We are talking now about a meeting in one of the Alpine Valleys, the valley of near the little town in a meadow near Chanferan in 1532. Well, that is just seven years after 1525. So this is all happening very quickly. Ferrel and his colleagues interrupted their work at Geneva to make sure they were at this meeting.

The issue was some of the issues was the predominant place that the Bible should have in faith and practice, and they had no problem with that. Of course, that was the great theme of the Reformers. They limited the sacraments to two: baptism and the Lord's Supper. But the two issues that could not be resolved were, could a Christian rightly seek public office, and was it right to lend money at interest?

Ferrel insisted that all traces of Catholic piety you see, the Roman Catholic Church never left the idea that you should follow Jesus. They just simply surrounded it with a bunch of junk. But at the heart of Roman Catholic theology was, if you really want to be a Christian, you go to the monastery. You give up your money. You do not go to war. You live a life of poverty, and you obey Jesus in the monastery. They always respected that.

And so the Reformers did not like that, and they said, "These evidences that you have of Catholic piety, they have to be brought in line with the proper theology." Now, some of the Waldensians, when they came back, those two men came back. This was the second consultation they had. Some of them said, "Well, let us go slowly and maybe adopt some of the Reformation." Some of them wanted to go the whole way with the Reformation, and some of them just wanted to stay with the past. They did not trust this new movement.

Well, Ferrel convinced them that the Reformation was the fulfillment of their long struggle with an unfaithful church that they had waged for centuries. I mean, he was so happy to have these people that had waged almost not single-handedly, but alone much of the time, with a false church. This was a real trophy for him. And he tried to convince them to go with the Reformation, but the Waldensians still were not sure.

So they sent a few brethren up to talk to the Bohemian brethren, the old Hussite Eunus de Stratrum, and they gave them good advice. Some of those Bohemian brethren were nonresistant. Peter Czelszki, how many have ever read him? You should. They said, "Do not be hasty here. You are giving up a precious heritage. You need to reflect a long time before taking action and guard against extremism and novelty." But they held a second assembly at Chanferan, and there they decided to accept the Reformation.

I am almost finished. What were the things that they agreed upon at Chanferan? This whole thing is so tragic, it makes you cry. They decided now, I want you to notice the difference between obeying Jesus and philosophical, theological manipulation of spiritual ideas from the Bible. One of the decisions was, "A Christian may swear before magistrates without disobeying Matthew 5 because the magistrate derives his " this is theology. Well, we all have theology, but this is systematic deceptive theology.

"Because the magistrate derives his power from God, whether he is a Christian or not." I think that is very sloppy reasoning. So therefore, it is okay to swear before the magistrate. For your information, Jesus said, "Swear not at all." That is the clear teaching. James, we heard about at the beginning of these sessions, says, "Swear not at all." But this is what you do. Okay. So swearing is okay.

"No work is called good but what God has commanded, and no work is bad but what God has forbidden." So there are some things you can just simply do because God did not say anything about it. See, we are not looking at Christ anymore. We are not looking to get direction from him. We are reasoning. All right? Not all usury is forbidden by God. He only prohibits usury which damages one's neighbor because the law says that you should love your neighbor as yourself.

So as long as you are charging usury and you are loving your neighbor as yourself, it is okay. And of course, they had to get this in there. "All those who have been and shall be saved have been elected by God before the foundation of the world." There is your predestination. The next one. "The minister of the Word of God ought not to itinerate from place to place except it be for some great good of the church." So they wanted to limit these preachers wandering all around teaching that people should follow Jesus.

And lastly, "It is not a thing repugnant to the apostolic communion that ministers have some possessions for the welfare of their families." So that is how it was lost. It was that simple. "Join the Reformation. We are here to help you. Your suffering is ended." I stood in astonishment as the guide showed us what happened afterward. Their suffering was not ended. Now they have joined the Protestants or the Reformation, and they get involved in all those horrible wars, that 30-year war I talked about.

And a lot of his lecture was detailing these horrible wars these people got into and almost got exterminated because of the wars. And I stood there and I thought, "I would sooner be persecuted. I would sooner be persecuted than be involved in all of that." It did not end their suffering. So what happened? I am just going to summarize this, and we will try to close here. They turned away from a discipleship and obedience to Christ nourished by a literal reading of the Bible, especially the Sermon on the Mount.

They turned away from that. They turned to, "Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit." That is what that verse is talking about, exactly what happened here. They chose to replace nonresistance with participation in armed resistance. They accepted the union of church and state and abandoned their concept of the two kingdoms. They became participants in the protracted wars between the Roman Catholics and the Protestants that raged for centuries. And that is a horrible story.

I wish you could have all stood there and heard the recitation of that guide, of the horrors they got involved in. They finally were driven up into the mountains. Weren't even permitted to come down to the towns. They were up there in the Alps. They started a process of rationalizing the clear teachings of Jesus until they became just another expression of liberal Protestantism, and they finally united with the most liberal Protestant groups.

They lost the continuation of a heroic heritage that had stood successfully for 300 years, almost 400 years, against the false religion of their day. What should we learn from the Waldensians? I will summarize it in five statements, and I will be finished almost. Number one, the preaching of the Gospel to every creature is the non-negotiable priority for all Christians. That is what got them in trouble. If you were Waldensians, you would be preaching in the shops, on the streets, to every person you meet.

Someone at the crossroads, you would quote a whole book of the Bible to. You would just be preaching, preaching, preaching, preaching, preaching, and nothing could stop you because they believed that we were told to preach the Gospel to every creature, and that is a non-negotiable command. You heard it last night. Number two, true Christians are committed to obeying all of Jesus' teachings literally. These are the things that we can learn from them.

Number three, true Christians maintain a healthy suspicion of clever theological rationalization. Those of you who know me know that I say, "I am not a theologian." Our theology is what we believe about God, so I have a theology. But when I say theologian, I mean the clever manipulation of scriptures to come to predetermined conclusions. I am not a theologian. I have a deep suspicion of systematic theology. Number four, we can learn that a priority of true Christians is a thorough command of the scriptures.

These people did not have a written scripture to depend on. They had to have it memorized. And number five, Jesus' teaching about wealth should be taken seriously and literally. Distribution, not accumulation, should be the rule for the Christian. Now, I told you we visited Torre Polise. At the end of that interview, I asked about the nonresistant ones, and I already gave you his answer. He thinks they joined the Hussites. And then I asked him this question.

I said, "Throughout this entire lecture, you have told me that you folks obey only the Bible. So tell me, what do you do about homosexuality? What do you do about abortion? What do you do?" And I went down through some of these social issues, and he shook his head and said, "We do not do anything about them.

Whatever the state says is legal, the church accepts." And I did not say it to him because I did not want to be unkind, but I had enough to say, "So it is the Bible and the state." I closed with the verse that I have been talking about all along. "Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit after the tradition of men because that is how they figure things out.

After the rudiments of the world, that is how they go about it and not after Christ." So I think we are concluding where we have been the whole way through this. Let us go back to the clear teachings of Jesus, and let us just follow in obedience. It is not theology. It is discipleship. Shall we bow our heads for prayer?

Father, I thank you so much for the courageous example of these people who kept true faith burning throughout 300 years before the Reformation and provide for us a challenging example of their tenacity to the teachings of Jesus and their persistence in teaching them to others. O God, give us somehow whatever it was that they had. In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen.