From The Beginning It Was Not So #3 - Bill Shiley

Lesson Transcript

Well, I set up the dominoes, and let's see how they fall over. So I think about the message this morning. The words of the psalm writer come to me. He says, "The lines have fallen unto me in pleasant places. Yea, I have a goodly heritage." That's King James. And I feel very much that way this morning as I think about why in the world am I up here.

Not because I'm sort of a guru or an authority on it, but because especially from the family and the background I came from, the fundamental independent Baptist churches or independent—I don't remember how they did that—but I could very well be in the shoes of many of the people that are under the teaching and the deception that I'm going to talk about this morning.

And I feel extremely privileged not only to be taught and have learned many of the things that I'm sharing this morning, but to be personally be able to be mentored by many godly men, men who have worked hard to equip us with truth so that we can truly, in a powerful way, live out God's kingdom and be part of that coming to earth again. So this is the third message in the series and probably the final one, at least for now. The series I've called From the Beginning It Was Not So.

The title for this one is A New Face to the Same Compromise. The first message was establishing a paradigm. We looked at how originally when Jesus started and taught his apostles about his kingdom, the measure of who was a follower of Jesus was if they lived a humble, obedient life like Jesus that simply followed his teachings. All the judgment scenes in the New Testament, that is the test.

And the last time we looked at how that paradigm not only shifted, but actually was turned upside down, was introverted over the time of the church councils and the Constantine's revolution there. He gets blamed for it. I think it was more the church's fault. And it became about having the right ideas. And actually, you could live a godly life, but if you didn't have the right ideas, you were a heretic and would be punished.

And then man's rationale then therefore determined what those ideas were and began to explain away the simple teachings of Jesus. So this one, we're going to be looking basically at the Reformation and some things that came out of it. So a lot of the reason I started this series was to address the question. People say, "So what's the big deal about the early church? Why are y'all so hung up on the early church? Why do we talk about it all the time? Aren't you following men?" and different things like that.

And hopefully, I'll answer some of those objections pointedly at the end. So again, just a little bit of review, some introductory frameworks, some ways we want to adjust our minds about this talk and also history. One, again, this is not in any way intended to be a comprehensive history lesson, but a lesson from history. So there is going to be a lot that could and probably really should be said about many of these happenings that there's just no way to do it in a 45-minute message, let alone an hour and a half.

And the purpose of this is actually to encourage you to dig more into it, to own the story. And this is also just—I'm just telling you, this is what I've found. This is what I've learned. These are some things that have stood out to me and have changed the way I think about the world and about Jesus and his teachings and following him. The goal is to alert people to the changes that have happened in history and to spark your curiosity into learning more. Oops, there's a ditto.

And also to ground against false teaching by knowing that from the beginning, it wasn't that way. That, to me, has been a big end of arguments many times. So you can take a passage and hash it around and, "Well, I look at it this way. Well, but you could say this." But when you realize for the first several hundred years of a faithful witness, nobody understood it that way, is very grounding. We want to avoid making heroes or villains.

So we don't want to deify anybody or set them up on a pedestal as some perfect person, put a halo around their head. And we also don't want to take people and just because they made many mistakes, say they were just children of hell and make damning or overly critical comments like that. We want to look at this in humility and contrition. And I especially have a burden for that today because I'm going to say a lot of negative things about some very prominent men.

And so personally, I want to approach this not just today, but also as I go on through life with humility because I personally, speaking for myself and my personality, I could become very much like some of the men that we're talking about today, except for the teaching of Jesus and holding myself accountable to that and allowing him to change my heart through that. We looked at these pictures here. Does the fish know he's wet?

To help us understand how this happens, that we end up in situations and we're in an environment and we think things that that's just the way it is because that's all we've ever experienced. And so that's part of the goal with these messages is to help us realize it wasn't always this way. And personally, if you could say, "Since I've been dried off or started drying off, I'm realizing more and more and more how many times, how many different things are wet." A little more of that at the end.

And also this one here that we say, "Well, we just need to just—we need to rely on scripture and we need to build on scripture." Well, that's true. But the problem is none of us is looking at it with a clear lens. There are presuppositions. So ahead of time, we already think this is the way it is. And we've been taught to view certain passages in certain ways, even just practices about reading that we're not taking a clear, fresh view. And actually, the lenses are very clouded, very tainted, very distorting.

So just a little bit of review. We kind of already went over this. Originally, the measure of a follower of Jesus was if a person's work mirrored Jesus' life and teachings, if that was seen in their life. And then after, generally, the period of the beginning of the fourth century there, the 300s, there was a shift towards man's reasoning and ideas, and that became the focus and could actually turn upside down clear biblical teachings.

We could explain them away where they actually didn't mean anything or meant the opposite. The measure of a man's Christianity instead was if he confessed right belief terminology, whether or not he was following Jesus. And then even if a man—so if a man didn't confess the right belief terminology, he was still branded heretic, even if he was a very Christ-like person. So the whole thing was turned upside down. So what's your view of the story of church history, however much you know?

This is a picture timeline here. A picture is worth a thousand words. So I put a lot of energy into this. I told my students don't ever try that on a research project. But so some icons. So obviously, it started with Jesus and his death and resurrection, the day of Pentecost, and the life of the apostles. And many of them were persecuted, were killed. Their lives were snuffed out, most of them by the 60s. It was a time—many people think of it as a time of a lot of persecution.

You have the simple, the code language because Christianity was this thing you had to run and hide, and you never knew you were trying not to get caught. The early church fathers writing, trying to encourage people through persecution and through the persecution. And the background there is red because it's a time of a lot of—we often think of it as a lot of persecution, a lot of suffering.

And many people have the impression the church was just kind of weak and just kind of just trying to survive and hang on through that time period. Then the day dawned with Constantine here. He sees the high and the row and the clouds there and this sign, conquer. And later on, there's the church councils. Augustine here is one of the prominent churchmen who wrote and explained and created all these formulations of doctrine and stuff that sadly contradicted the clear, simple teachings of Jesus.

We have the Roman—notice the background starts turning gray there because the Roman Empire was deteriorating. This is the Vandals sacking Rome in 476. The establishment of the papacy, the popes and the Roman Catholic. Originally, Catholic meant universal. And so it was the Romans' version that was dominated by the pope and the head of power in Rome was established and actually took over through the time period between there and Pope Gregory in the 600s. We have kings becoming Christian, like Charlemagne there.

And the great contest between who's more powerful, the pope or the king, with Gregory VII and King Henry IV there, where he was made to stand outside the castle gates for three days to show his submission. And in the meantime, there's this system of the monastic orders. So the people who really wanted to be spiritual or really wanted to be holy went apart from the rest of society and lived this very humble, simple, sometimes destitute lifestyle. Weren't allowed to marry.

We have things like the Crusades that happened during that time in the 1200s, the Bubonic Plague, some very difficult times towards the end of what's called the Dark Ages. But this was this cloudy time when the church was the system of oppression by the Roman Catholic system. And with that, the whole feudal system, the system of kings and castles and everybody worked. You had lesser lords that worked for the king and then the peasants who just basically worked for their daily bread.

All those things worked together to make this tension building up towards the end of the Dark Ages. And then there's the Reformation. And we have Martin Luther and John Calvin and Zwingli. This is the likeness of Luther and John Calvin and Zwingli here. And they brought us out of the Dark Ages and restored Christianity and brought freedom and all that kind of stuff. That's a lot of people's picture of the story. The question is, is that how it went?

Is that really what came out of the Reformation was a freeing and a restoration of the good old days? This is an enemy tree. I would like to call it a family tree, but it's not really. Of denominations from the Reformation, you have the Catholic Church, meaning the universal church, which became Roman, became headed by Rome. And then there's the great schism where that split. And I'm not going to spend a lot of time with this.

But then in the Reformation in the 1500s, there were several different main leaders that kind of started different branches. So you have Lutheranism, which obviously was headed by Luther. And you have Anglicanism, which this is the Reformation that happened in England. You have Calvinism, which was teachings headed by John Calvin. And John Calvin had a lot of influence in England. For those of you who know a little bit, the term Anglican is English, Anglish. It's all kind of derived from the same thing.

So when you think Anglican, you think English. So John Calvin influenced a lot of what happened in England and many of the groups that came out of that. And then there's the Anabaptists that also split off of the Roman Catholic Church during this same time. And we're going to be looking mainly at these four right here. Just for your interest, thinking about the effects in the world today, when you drive through town and you see all these church names, who is behind some of this stuff? So don't get too lost here.

You have radical reformers, which we're familiar with. Radical actually means I learned this from Conrad the other day. It actually means going back to the roots. It gets used many different ways. But so they're the reformers who really tried to go back to the roots. And we're familiar with these groups, the Brethren, the Mennonites, Hutherites, the Amish. And then you have the Lutherans, which these groups came out of that, which aren't a lot of them that we're real familiar with.

Then you have the reformed groups. And many of these would have been affected by Luther's or by Calvin's teachings. So we have the Baptists and the reformed churches, the Presbyterian Church by John Knox, who basically built on Calvin's platform. So these groups right here especially were affected a lot by John Calvin's teaching. So backing up and just reviewing, setting the stage a little bit here.

During what's called the Dark Ages or the reign of the golden age of the Roman Catholic Church, there were many false doctrines and practices that developed. The worship of images and relics or so in other words, here's a piece of Peter's arm or here's a piece from the cross. And people thought they had healing powers, praying and worshiping images, prayer to Mary and the saints.

With that, a big thing I'm not really going to talk about much other places, but it's a huge thing in this is this concept that you could do enough good works that you kind of owed God something and he had to keep this cash of good works. And other people could, like you would do enough works to do more than what was expected of you.

Purgatory, which was the belief that what I mean about purgatory is that in this intermediate state between life and the final judgment, it was this time where you could pay for your sins and then get out again. Forced celibacy, in other words, that you had to stay single if you were one of the clergy or the church leaders. Selling indulgences. We'll talk about that one later. That you could buy forgiveness for your sins by buying this little ticket. Pilgrimages.

So that you could pay for your sins or rack up brownie points, so to speak, by making these trips and visiting these sacred sites, kind of connected to the worship of images and relics. The elevation of power of the clergy. Clergy always means ordained people, church leaders. And so that they're above the rest and especially in spiritual power and things like that, there's this elevation. And often you can't—the rest of the people can't interpret scripture or anything. We have to do whatever they say.

A duplicity of Christian living in the monastic order. So what I mean by that is there's two different levels. There's the people who are serious and they sell all their possessions and they dress modestly and they serve and all that kind of stuff. And they spend time in prayer and devotion to God and helping the poor and missionary work. And then there's the rest of us that live like everybody else and take advantage of your neighbor and go to war and are immoral.

And we go to confession on Sundays and go to mass, take communion. And that makes us good enough. We'll still get to heaven. That double level of being a Christian, you could be a Christian in either camp. Infant baptism, believing that that initial act saved you. And if you weren't baptized an infant, that you were damned. So if your baby dies of the plague before you can get into the church to get baptized, too bad. And I turned the last one, the magical Eucharist.

What I mean by that is that you could live a life of sin and carelessness, but you could come to church and take communion, and that would fix the problem. It would give you new life regardless of a life of repentance. Probably in a lot of ways, the Catholic Church didn't necessarily—their official doctrine wouldn't have necessarily said that all those things were okay or that's the way it should work out. But that's the way it played out.

That's the way the effect of many of those practices and teachings led to that. We'll notice that later with some other ones. What's missing though on that list? I thought about this after I got done with it. Okay. Church and state. Those are a lot of doctrines or ideas about things, but we didn't even start talking about what that made okay in people's daily lives. That war and being dishonest and things like that kind of got swept under the rug.

The sad thing that happened with the monastic orders is they were—it seemed like it was always a cycle of them falling into horrible corruption because technically they weren't married, but they could have concubines and stuff like that and still be part of this holy order and terrible things happen. But yeah, we want to be careful we don't focus on the doctrines and we realize it's the practice that it affected that really made the problem. So there were different efforts to return.

Early on, there was the Donatists who, through kind of an unfortunate but fortunate set of events right over the time of Constantine, realized the direction the church was going and tried to hold their ground and maintain a simple obedience to Jesus. There's different of the monastic reforms. Okay, something's not responding and all of a sudden it's going to burp a whole bunch of things out here. There we go.

Many times in the monastic movements, or what I mean by that is this thing of the monks and nuns living in a monastery off by themselves in this really strict lifestyle. Like the Cluny reform in the 8, 900s, there were individuals that led reforms like Bernard of Clairvaux. There was actually a song we sing, "Oh Sacred Head Now Wounded." Jesus, the very thought of thee with sweetness fills my breast. Those are songs that we sing a translation of the lyrics of those.

Francis of Assisi, he's famous for leading a reform that he wanted to very simply follow the teachings of Jesus. And he was working within a system, and maybe there's some questions about some of the stuff that happened, but they were honest desires within that system to return to a simple obedience to Jesus. There's groups like the Waldensians from France that, again, were a group who for a long time were persecuted because they followed Jesus' teachings about loving your enemies.

And sadly, were corrupted by the reformers later on. And then there's John Wycliffe, who's considered the morning star of the Reformation in the, I believe it was the late 1300s. And his followers were called the Lollards, not perfect, but were a group of people who tried to return to a simple obedience to Jesus.

And we can't stop without remembering the Moravians, a group that's a challenge today for their dedication to a simple obedience to Jesus and their missionary efforts, their dedication, their martyr, their testimony. They're remembered for being a group of people who would send out missionaries and they all died. They wouldn't come back until they wouldn't come back until they were dead. But it was considered a death sentence. Tremendous dedication to a simple obedience to Jesus.

So in all that, there's so much of the story that we can't cover this morning. I encourage you to read it yourself. I'm going to point you to some sources later on. But onto the scene in the 1500s, steps a man named Martin Luther. So we're going to look at how Martin Luther introduced a new set of lenses under the—I don't want to say this. Supposedly, it was a return. It was a return to scripture and only scripture.

But we're going to look at how he didn't really return, but he created a new set of lenses, a new way to read scripture that polluted it in a different way. So he was a monk from Germany. In other words, there's no relation for you children. There's no relationship between a monk and a monkey, okay? They're completely different.

A monk was a man who would live separate in a place, and he would study the Bible and spend time in prayer and wore very drab clothes and things like that and dedicated his life to spiritual things. And his spiritual journey leads him to a disillusionment with the Roman Catholic system of penance. So disillusionment means you don't see any light there. I think that's actually what it means. The whole thing is no longer—you don't see any hope there. It's confusing, and it's just, this is not going to work.

That's the idea there. And the Roman Catholic system of penance was this thing that you had to pay for your sins. So if you lied to somebody, you should fast or go on a pilgrimage on your knees or had to pay to the church, often smaller things like that. You'd pay a sum of money to the church, and then your sins would be forgiven you. If you did lots of big things, if you cheated with your neighbor's wife, you might have to do something bigger.

If you called the pope a bad name, then you would—well, I don't know if you could get out of purgatory for that. And so Luther lived a life of a lot of struggles. He had a lot of problems with immorality. And he was trying to pay for these sins, and he would just fast until he was nearly a skeleton and stay up all night praying and trying to make up for his wrongs. And I should stick with my slides here.

There's a system of penance, was a set of works which were not works that Jesus commanded that you were supposed to do to make up for the penalty of your sins. And Luther got all wrapped up in that whole thing and his guilt trying to make up for that. And that was part of his journey. And then on top of that, he sees the church out making money off of this. So John Tetzel, Johann Tetzel, was a man who the pope hired to raise some money to build the fancy buildings down there at the Vatican. And that's him up here.

Here is his likeness up here. He's got a paper up here. And they're selling these tickets that if you pay a certain amount of money, it'll forgive a certain amount of sins. If it's a real big one, you might have to buy several. And essentially, he's raising money for the pope's projects. He had this little jingle in German.

It said something different, but it went like this: "As soon as a coin in the coffer rings," with a little bowl, "a soul from Purgatory Springs." And ironically, he was robbed one night by a young man who he had sold an indulgence to earlier in the day. And the young man bought an indulgence so he could be forgiven for the robbery he was planning on committing later that night. And so Luther is famously known, is considered the beginning of the Reformation when he couldn't stand this going on.

And so he posts this list of 95 objections to the selling of indulgences on the castle door in Wittenberg. Wittenberg, if you're German. This was not vandalism like some people. I had the idea originally it was like it was vandalism. It was just like people around here will post yard sale on the telephone poles or on a bulletin board in a business place. It's just that was the way they did things. It was a bulletin board there. It's how you posted stuff. They didn't have Facebook.

And of course, that didn't get him in good standing with the pope. And he was chased around and hauled before several councils. And it was never martyred, almost miraculously, through it all.

But one of the things that Luther really, his foundational teachings in this whole thing of fighting back against the Catholic system of penance, these works that are made-up works, not things Jesus told us to do, that are to try to pay off for your sins, is he switched then and he finds out, "Oh, we're saved by faith." And it says in Romans, and I think it was just last Sunday, Brother David talked a little bit about that, that the just shall live by his faith.

And so he gets all caught up and goes off on this bandwagon about faith. And then he does like most of the reformers do, and like we as humans are tended to do, he jumps in that ditch and says, "It's by faith alone. It has nothing to do with your works." I mean, he actually adds that word alone to his translation of the Bible. And when he was confronted about this, the Catholics weren't cool with that. And he had some very nasty things to say back to them about that.

So what came out of that, though, whatever Luther intended, was that he made righteousness the villain of the Christian rather than the prize. So works and all that was something bad. You shouldn't even think about that. Don't even try that. He actually said that later on. I got a quote later on about that. It's all something God has to do. And so he made works, righteous behavior, the villain rather than the prize. It was the effect of his teaching, whatever he intended.

He made imputed righteousness into an abstract cover for a life of failure rather than God's trust in a contrite believing heart who hasn't had time to demonstrate change. So he made it that this thing of imputed righteousness means no works have to happen at all your whole life. God puts this covering and he just looks at what Jesus does instead of you. And it doesn't matter what you've done anymore.

Rather than what a straightforward reading of the passage shows, especially from the story of Abraham, that God just—he's a God of mercy and a God of understanding. And he sees a person says, "I'm done. I want to change. I want to allow you to run my life." And God doesn't expect them to have—does he get everything straightened out right away? He basically trusts them and then looks to see that trust followed up with change. Luther changed that.

The term the faith of Jesus Christ that's said several times in Galatians, but this term about being saved by the faith of Christ got turned into this thing that it's all about what Jesus did. It has nothing to do with what you do. It's all what Jesus does. And you actually shouldn't even think about that your good works are anything that God would be pleased with. One I should have put in here is his use of the term from Jeremiah that all our righteousness is his filthy rags.

Totally took that out of context there. That's talking about a group of people who were horrible and there was abominations going on all the time. And they're finally just recognizing it. We're just—we stink. And he took that and applied that to the Christian and the Christian following Jesus and said, "Anytime you try to follow Jesus, that just—that reeks to God." So he made this into some abstract thing that's Jesus gets pasted over us.

So it doesn't really matter how we live rather than us choosing to follow in the faithfulness, a like life of faithfulness like Jesus lived. This is quoting from Luther, a letter he wrote to one of his closest colleagues, Philip Melchington. I don't know if I said that right or not. It's a hard name to pronounce. "If mercy is true, you must therefore bear the true, not imaginary sin." So if you're really going to have mercy, you have to have real sins to have mercy on, right?

God does not save those who are only imaginary sinners. Be a sinner and let your sins be strong. That's often quoted today. Sin boldly. But let your trust in Christ be stronger and rejoice in Christ who is the victor over sin, death, and the world. We will commit sins while we are here. For this life is not a place where justice resides. We, however, says Peter, 2 Peter 3:13, are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth where justice will reign.

It suffices that through God's glory we have recognized the Lamb who takes away the sin of the world. No sin can separate us from him, even if we were to kill or commit adultery thousands of times each day. Do you think such an exalted Lamb paid merely a small price with a meager sacrifice for our sins? Pray hard, for you are quite a sinner.

And that teaching is through just about everything that calls itself Christian in America today, that we're all just sinners and Jesus' blood just covers all that and it doesn't matter how you live. This picture of Christians as people who just—yeah, we're just bumbling, helpless fools that make a big mess and God just somehow likes it all and turns it into something that he's pleased with, rather than people who repent and begin to change.

They grow like children who obey their father and honor their father and become like their father. So while Luther himself may have cared about holiness, the message that came across was, "Don't do anything about changing your behavior," and that is what people did. Again, I'm not judging Luther, his intentions, or his salvation, but I'm just saying that from his relying on his own understanding, this is the effect that it had.

And he himself bemoaned at the end of his life, and the witness of Germany was that it would become a more ungodly country through people following Luther's teachings. Some other things about Luther and just his own life. So he had all these ideas, right? But then in his own life, he directly contradicted and lived against Jesus' teachings. He was very arrogant and would just rail on people. He called the pope or the Catholics donkeys because he could interpret scripture better than them.

And so arrogance and railing is fine if the other side is wrong. Ruthless murder is fine if the peasants are rebellious. So the peasants were rebelling against the German nobles, and Luther gets in there and says, "Stab, kill, destroy them, slaughter them without mercy because they're rebellious." And hatred and violence towards Jews is fine since they rejected Christ.

If you go to the Holocaust Museum down in Washington, DC, and you go in there in the main lobby and get your ticket and stuff and go upstairs, the film that you watch before you go into the museum, this is one of the things they cite. And I'm sitting there watching this thing, and I'm like, "Don't look at me. I'm not his kind of Christian." He was not following Jesus, but they cite that as one of the Christians led to the anti-Jewish attitudes that fueled the Holocaust.

And Luther has a lot of terrible things to say about them and teaches people to treat them terribly. A lot of the things that the Gestapo began doing and that Hitler encouraged at the beginning of his attack on the Jews was actually things that Luther encouraged, like forbidding them to be able to run their shops and things like that, or actually burning their synagogues and their books. Those were things that Luther actually encouraged.

I feel sort of bad to stop there, but the point of this is to bring out how things changed. And I wish I could take more time and say more good about Luther. God always does good things through whatever happens. And God did do some good things through Luther's teaching. One thing is he translated the Bible, and so people had the opportunity to read scripture. But the problem is, in his preface to that, and even in the wording like we looked at earlier, he changed things.

And he handed people, rather than one of his slogans, Sola Scriptura, only scripture, he didn't hand them only scripture. He handed them scripture and then a set of glasses that was going to make them see this blurry inside-out type of Christianity. So moving to John Calvin, he was a Swiss reformer that was born in France. And he built his new Zion, this ideal city, ideal society of the kingdom of heaven, supposedly, in Geneva, Switzerland.

And like the other reformers, he built on the view—now, I'm ahead of myself. He built on the view that Jesus came to fulfill the sacrificial laws of the Old Testament, but did not institute a higher morality. So he basically took care of the blood of bulls and goats and the ashes of a heifer, like Hebrews talks about. So we don't need to do that anymore. But Jesus didn't teach a higher level of morality, like loving your enemies instead of just not killing them and things like that.

And so he basically created a replica of old Israel, the time of David, where there's laws, but he kind of tweaked some of them to New Testament things. But I'm not sure how he made all those distinctions. So that's where the world comes from. The Puritans were from England, and the separatists, we call them the Pilgrims, that came to America that settled in Massachusetts, so like Salem and all that up there. They had built on a lot of Luther's or Calvin's teachings about this.

And that's why you would get put in prison for not—or fined, at least, for not being in church on Sunday. And the dark side of that is things like the Salem witch trials or the hangings of the Quakers, where this concept that used force in a government to make people behave, to oppress wickedness, comes from Calvin. And so he established the movement of a militant church government.

Like I said, that was just a big part of it, was the church and the state together as a government to enforce, to make sure people behaved. And he had these agencies that were to go out and check and make sure people were doing these certain things they were supposed to be doing. And he influenced John Knox and many English movements and thereby early American Christianity. We'll talk a little bit more about his doctrine.

The sad thing that came out of this was is then Calvin himself starts—then what happens whenever you say that it's okay to use violence? If the circumstance is right, then it's up to you to decide if the circumstance is right. And so then you start having people who are supposed to be followers of Jesus, and they're burning other guys at the stake because they don't believe some of the right ideas.

Pardon the poster, but so while John Calvin is looked at as this super spiritual man who wrote all these great teachings, he also was a man who sat there and decreed and encouraged burnings and torture and things like that on people who did not follow his teachings.

Completely opposite to Jesus, not only Jesus' life and example, but his teachings about loving your enemies and his parables that taught like the dragnet, that this was a time to let the wheat and the tares grow together, and God would separate that in the end. He's also famous for the five points of Calvinism, which was summarized in his teachings later on. I'm just going to run through them quickly here. They're often remembered by the acronym TULIP. T stands for total depravity.

U stands for unconditional election. L stands for limited atonement. I stands for irresistible grace. P stands for perseverance of the saints. And he built on a lot of Augustine's rationalizations where he reacted to some other teachings by the Plagiants. And the sum of this, though, these teachings is that we have no personal choice. It's all something God does. And so therefore, there's no motivation from love toward God. And there's no assurance that you're one of the elect.

And Luther had teachings or Calvin had teachings that would kind of help some of that out a little bit, but that's the end result for most people, the end result of it. And so you have people who are doing what they're doing because it makes them better than other people. And again, you see this kind of thing in the early American New England Christianity a lot. Luther and Calvin's impact today.

So I know probably these guys wouldn't have taught and didn't desire this, but these teachings, I'm going to pull a few concepts that, from my experience anyways, I feel like have permeated Christianity. You just see them and hear them everywhere. And again, I'm just realizing more and more how much I have been wet, the more dried I get out from some of this stuff.

I'm seeing it in songs and things that are written in books and just terminology, memes that are posted, and that we have these ideas that we've gotten from them. Salvation by grace through faith alone. You hear that one a lot in verses like Ephesians 2:8 and 9 are quoted. And I always have to put verse 10 in there with it because that balances it out. We're saved by grace. By grace are you saved through faith. It's the gift of God.

It's not of works, lest any man should boast, because we're created in Christ Jesus unto good works that God planned all the time ahead for us to be living that way. The last verse balances it out. It's all what God does. And so people say, "Well, I'm waiting for God to change me." And part of this, I think, influences the revivalist mentality that we're waiting for God to pour out his Spirit down on us, and we're waiting for God to do something rather than that God is here.

His Spirit is here, and he's waiting for us to become devoted. Brother Justin preached a good message about that probably a year and a half ago, that the key to revival is people are devoted and choosing to sacrifice and take steps of repentance and simple obedience. Those are some things from Luther. And from Calvin, we get this predestination thing. "Well, God made me this way. I can't help it. So it's actually his fault that I have this problem.

He understands, and he'll just forgive me anyways." And then the doctrine of unconditional eternal security. Again, Calvin didn't necessarily teach what a lot of people do today, but a lot of Christians have kind of merged this hodgepodge of different of these teachings together, especially if they're laymen. They get a mixture of these concepts, and it really produces some very bad fruit. Again, were these fruits Luther and Calvin's intentions? Well, definitely not.

But that's what happens when we lean on our own understanding, and we build these constructs and these ideas that's different than Jesus. And the fruit, we can never foresee what the fruit is going to be of that. I want to move on in the story a little bit here to another reformer, Ulrich Zwingli. We say these words so bad, but Ulrich Zwingli from Zurich, Switzerland. There's a picture of a statue of him.

And if you'll notice on the statue, I don't know how well you can see it, but up here, he has a Bible, and here he's got a sword. And he's remembered for that, for wanting to try to keep an arm around both. He wanted to follow scripture, but also participate in government and actually use government. He wanted to try to keep the two together. And he began preaching against unscriptural Roman Catholic practices in Zurich, in the church that he was pastor of.

And he built on the foundation of Augustine still and many of those rationalizations that justified war and swearing of oaths as long as it was a certain situation. And the Constantine church-state hybrid never got off of those ideas and those pictures of Christianity. And he began to compromise his loyalty to scripture to keep the favor of the city council.

So he would make reforms and say, "Well, yeah, so scripture teaches this, and we should look at communion this way, and this is what we should do about different other things like that." But the city council is not okay with that because they have to deal with how the rest of the canons or the states in Switzerland are going to relate to that, and they're all run by the Catholics. And so he drug his feet and decided to hold back. He actually led the Waldensians away.

It was one of the people who met with them and convinced them to compromise and begin to think that it's okay to disobey Jesus. Jesus' teachings only meant that for this situation, that kind of stuff. And sadly, he died as an army chaplain in a battle against fellow Christians, quote, around him. Part of the story, though, is that there was another movement that grew out of that. It began with the students of Zwingli, was called the Anabaptist movement, and probably most of us are familiar with that.

It began or is kind of considered that really took off. It was brewing before this, but took off with the stand of these three young men here, sort of barely more than college students, Felix Manns, Conrad Grebel, and George Blauroch. And they began as students of Zwingli. But when he began to compromise, they withdrew, and they continued praying and studying together and discussing what it meant to follow Jesus.

And on January 25th of 1525, they got to the point they were convinced that baptism as a responsible believer was necessary for salvation, and they rebaptized each other, which was against the decree of the city council. And because of that, that iconic action of simple obedience, they were termed Anabaptist, which was originally a negative term, a mockery. But that was just an icon.

That issue of baptism was just an icon or a representation of what they were willing to suffer to, in a very simple, practical way, obey Jesus. One of the sad things is that they were condemned to death in the very district where their former mentor, Zwingli, lived and had influence. Some Anabaptist distinctives were a simple life, simple obedience from an interchange.

So they were very much about an interchange of surrender of life and heart to Christ and loyalty to his teachings, but that that always had to work itself out in life. You couldn't have faith without works that followed, like Luther was teaching. Joyful suffering. So the church was nearly slaughtered for quite a few years after that as the movement grew. And that's part of why it grew.

And zealous evangelism, even amidst those times, they were very zealous and active in sending missionaries out and in evangelizing their communities. And they had a strong emphasis on living together as a restored human community of brotherhood. That was a big thing. They actually called themselves the Swiss Brethren. Y'all have been learning a lot of that story through history or through Sunday school.

I'm not going to spend a lot of time on that, partly just because I don't want to sit here and toot our horn and say, "Yeah, the Anabaptists, woohoo." I am extremely thankful, especially from my background, for that kind of testimony and example that has leaked down through history or through time and still around today that has been a beacon to draw many of us back to a biblical, a Christ-like life.

It has been fraught with many, many problems, many splits and splinters, and a tendency to become reclusive, to avoid persecution, and an emphasis on externals and forgetting about the N-word, and many things like that have happened in different groups throughout time. But I'm thankful for the zeal and the dedication of those early men to take a stand so that today we can have a fresh set of glasses introduced to us. So I bent back to this view of the story again.

Instead of viewing it as the light dawned in the Reformation, I look at it a little more like this. And we have a big explosion, and the reformers take over. And Jesus up here, the Sermon on the Mount, and simple obedience, there's Dirk Willems, and the suffering obedience of the persecuted Pilgrim Church, they are kicked out. And what was replaced is a whole menagerie of different ideas. And everybody's saying, "This is what it means.

And well, it means this." And what separates all these churches, to a large extent, is doctrine. They're having the right ideas. And it's not that those don't matter because ideas have consequences. That's one of the big things we've been talking about is if you have the wrong ideas, it brings wrong fruit. But the test is always, "What fruit is it bringing?" And that was just disregarded. And many of them brought forth lots of bad fruit, fruit that was not what Jesus taught, was not Christ-like.

Now, lest I portray this image that nobody else out there is a Christian or anything like that, there have always been people throughout time who have sought God and, within their systems and the realm that they knew, have out of a heart of loving obedience and humility, childlike humility, striven to serve and honor Christ. And God's presence has always been with that, and his kingdom has come in small ways through those times.

But many of these systems of denomination and of theology have actually dismissed and excused away and blinded people to what true obedience to Jesus is. I want to look quickly here at some trends that have happened or still among us from this time period. One is Newton's law of theology. So Reformation theologians often created an equal or greater evil by reacting to an error that was great than the error that they created was greater than the original error.

This is Brother David's terminology spun off of Newton's cradle, where Newton's law of inertia, where every action has an equal and opposite reaction. So if you pull one ball back and let it hit, one goes the equal distance the other way. If you do two, it's the other way. And people have done that. One of those things is these reactions of using terms like alone or total. Here's a list of solas or onlys from the Reformation, sola gratia or grace alone. Well, we're not saved just by God's grace.

We're saved also because we follow that grace and we become obedient. Sola fide or faith alone. Well, we're not saved by our faith alone. You can't separate faith and works. The two go together. It's like the front of the horse and the back of a horse. If you cut him in half, all you have is dead meat. Christ alone, glory of God alone. Often we see in their writings that it was about me being right, not only Christ. That one's not really a teaching.

But in the last one, their sola scriptura, we talked about that a little bit earlier. It wasn't so only scripture. It was my interpretation of scripture. And if you don't follow my interpretation of scripture and these explanations that you have to have in order to understand scripture, you're an error. You're a heretic, and you should be burned to purge the earth. Another one is taking verses out of context. I ran across this one. I thought you might enjoy it.

This lady is saying, "When I get a headache, I take two aspirin and keep away from children, just like the bottle says." The bottle does say that, doesn't it? It says, "Keep away from children." But I mean, does anybody do that? Maybe Amelia Benelia. But we understand that the one is directions about what to do with the stuff, and the other one is directions about how to take it. It's taken out of context.

And that is a huge problem that has produced a lot of these things, is verses that are simply not being read in their context. And many of the things like Calvin's doctrines, actually this week was just going through Finney-Caravilla's talks on that. And many of them, if you just look at the extended passage, it's obvious. For example, Jesus says to the 12, he says, "You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you and ordained you that you should bring forth fruit unto eternal life." It says it right there.

Well, who's standing there? He's talking to Judas as well. He's not talking about predestination unto eternal life. He's talking about, "I chose you to be my disciples." And obviously, one of them could choose not to accept that call. If you just look at it in the context, it's very clear that's not what it's teaching. So this is a big thing to look out for. I used to tell my students at school, "Don't quote verses." Now, that's a reaction, okay? But my point is, quote a passage.

This passage talks about this, but just be aware of that thing of grabbing a verse because often I find it myself, and I'm like, "Oh, there's a verse that says that." And I go back and read it, and it's like, "Whoops." Next subject because it didn't mean that at all. A gospel for the poor. That's Jesus came and he preached a gospel for the poor.

But sadly, starting back with the church councils in Augustine and in the Reformation again, it became a Bible that could only be read and interpreted and applied by the highly educated or trained. And that's not what Jesus started. Jesus actually says this. He says at that time, Jesus answered and said, "I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and prudent and have revealed them to babes.

Even so, Father, for it seemed good in your sight." Now, he's not talking there about people who think and use their heads, but the wise and prudent, or like it says, they saw the apostles that they were unlearned and ignorant men. He's talking about in their schools of theology. So they hadn't been pre-programmed by all this stuff. They'd been with Jesus. And 1 Corinthians chapter 3 talks a lot about that, that when we are stuck with looking at things our own way, we actually can't figure out God's way.

We have to lay that down and become simple and straightforward, lay down our excuses. So some people might say, "Well, aren't I doing the same thing right now?" I'm saying, "You can't understand scripture unless you read the early church, right?" Well, I'm sorry if it sounds that way.

But what I'm trying to do is to remove the complicated glasses that you probably have picked up, I know I did, by the highly educated theologians and try to encourage you to have that recalibrated to a simple, straightforward reading and application. One of the mistakes, the reformers of the reformers is that they each came up with their own new interpretation rather than researching the historic faith handed down from the apostles. None of them really did that.

And most of them would have had Luther for sure had the abilities and the availability to read the early church writings and understand what Jesus passed down through the apostles. But they chose not to. They chose to rely on their own interpretations. A few notes about using the early church, and I hope I'm representing our attitude towards it as a group here. So they didn't do everything right. We're not saying that they are pristine examples. We're not holding them up to the level of Christ.

We compare their practices to scripture as we would any other humans. And if we see something that's contradicting it or off on a limb, we don't follow that. We don't take all their personal ideas on equal level to scripture. I had somebody say that, "Why didn't you read?

There's one place Tertullian says this about this and this and this." I'm like, "Well, yeah, but that's his idea about world conditions and population and all that." And just like any of us, if we write a book on science, we're going to be proved wrong sometime. So we don't just follow all that kind of stuff. The primary benefit is as an interpretive lens. So letting how they viewed a passage where Jesus speaks affect how we decide to view that.

And when they all understand a passage to mean the opposite of what we do or what we hear taught, we should do some serious second-guessing. Scripture alone, guided by the Spirit and read simply in context, is a safe guide. The problem is that most people are already reading it through a lens and a very polluted and distorted lens. So an example of that would be if somebody, some nomad in the tundra of Russia or Siberia would happen to get a Bible and start reading it, the Spirit is going to guide him.

He has a relatively clear lens, likely. That's what I mean there. And so it's not like you can't understand it simply. It's that most of us have been preconditioned to think certain things that are not correct. Just a little statistics here about this. Who would understand Jesus the best? So I tried to be very, very reasonable here. So the 12 apostles were with Jesus three years. I'm just going to figure 300 days a year just to say sometimes they went home or weren't there.

And we're just going to count 10 hours a day. That comes out to 9,000 hours with Jesus. To read the gospels, it takes easily 9 hours. You can easily do it in 9 hours. Most people could. So that's a 1 to 1,000 ratio. They had 1,000 times more interaction and learning and hearing Jesus speak. I think about that when after the resurrection, it says he was with them for 40 days teaching about the kingdom of God. We missed out on some things, except we hear it through them as they speak later on.

So here is a pie graph comparing how much we hear from Jesus compared to how much the apostles heard from Jesus. Now, in case that makes you feel bad, hold on to your seats. John says this. We got to think about something else. That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon in our hands of hand. We hugged him. We held him. We bumped shoulders with him. He washed our feet. They had not just text coming at them, but they had the whole spectrum.

And they say that words are only 7% of communication. So now you got to take that little sliver, that one out of 1,000, that 0.1% of that pie graph, and you have to do this to it. So you have to shrink. This is like a cross-section of that pie. Now your piece is only 7% of the whole thing. Is that making sense to you? So that 1% or that one-tenth of a percent of words was only 7% as communicative, as seeing and hearing and being with him through everything.

Now, maybe the statistics aren't maybe it's not quite that bad, but I want to make a little bit of a point here. Also, then, if you're starting to feel bad now, just hold on. Think about language barriers and trying to understand the ideas in a different language because every language says and just has different ideas and ways they think about things and trying to work that out. And cultural barriers.

So the way things are here and the way they are in Guatemala, but not just Guatemala, but then Guatemala 2,000 years ago. So I didn't even try to factor any of that in. Besides the graphics, I can't start making that small of things. We do have the Holy Spirit. And so I'm not in any way indicating that we can't understand scripture. We can't understand truth. But the Spirit does not fill in for our squandering of resources he has given us.

Why wouldn't we make use of a perspective on scripture from when the church was unified, had a testimony of world-changing power through simple obedience, spoke the same languages, lived in the same culture during the same timeframe, was led by men mentored by the apostles or their immediate successors? I'm going to close with this verse more or less here. For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men, teaching us.

In other words, it just makes sense then that denying ungodliness and worldliness, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present age, looking for the blessed hope and glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from every lawless deed and purify for himself his own special people, zealous of good works. Speak these things, exhort, and rebuke with all authority. Let no one despise you.

And my eyes tear up for Jesus because you hear his heart in there. He came and he lived, and he gave himself to produce a group of people who were excited and zealous and dedicated to living the good way he made them to live. And we want to be very careful, not only that we don't distort that or ruin that prize that he gave himself for, but that we pursue it and we do everything we can to bring that desire to a reality. I went over these before. I highly recommend reading Brother David's books.

If you want to test a book, give it to high school students. And I have had six of his books that my high school students read, and they all enjoyed them and said they made sense. So they're very easy to read. I highly recommend anybody who can to read them. Not all of us. I have a hard time reading the early Christians sometimes. It's like, "What the hell?" And I have to say, "Well, I think sort of this and move on, okay?" But there are those who can.

And those of us who can teach, who can read them, need to make sure that we do that. And those who can't as much can learn from those who can. Another course I highly recommend is The Historic Faith, which has a lot of Brother David's teaching, has some by Brother Dean Taylor. The courses that we're going through in Sunday school right now on Anabaptist and church history are on there. The course I mentioned earlier by Brother Finney is on there on Calvinism.

It's $10 a month, so there's little costs, but we pay more than that for a Spotify subscription after taxes. So these are some simple ways that you can listen to things and become informed and have your glasses adjusted. The biggest lesson people don't learn from history is to learn from history. And so the closing challenge to me and to each of us is the next page of history is blank. What will you write on it? Let's bow our heads for prayer. Thank you, Father, for your love and your mercy. And thank you, God.

We live in such exciting times. There's so much going on in the world that is creating hunger and so much truth that you've exposed us to. And I pray, Father, that we could live in humility and in fear and trembling lest we fall into the same errors and create the same kind of fruit in the world that many others before us have. Help us rather to be humble and to take advantage of the opportunities that you've given us to learn from the apostles and their successors.

Help us to be willing to do the hard work of denying ourselves and taking up the cross and following you so that your will can be done and your kingdom can come here just like it does in heaven. In Jesus' name, amen. I'd like to open up for comments or corrections. Please do. If there's something I said that was not right, please do correct it. Appreciate your time. Thought I had. I was not sure how to communicate correctly, but there's something that stood out to me about these men that impacted our history.

And it seems like I don't know what came first, but when you see a man that actually lives much of his life ungodly or he does such terribly ungodly things, I don't know if it's because they intentionally wanted to create a false gospel, if you will. But I wonder sometimes if they couldn't bring themselves up to the obedience and the standard of Christ.

So they by default created something way less of a way for them to be able to somehow reconcile themselves to God in a way that ended up destroying a bunch of themselves and everyone else in the form of deception. But on the other side, what man has lived a godly life and created and ended up writing or coming up with terrible theology to justify himself? It almost doesn't happen. The people that walk in righteousness don't end up doing that.

And yeah, at the end of the day, I think a test is a life of righteousness. We don't want people to look and read about our life down the road that we have to—I mean, there's nothing worse than a man who promotes himself to being godly, and then you end up hearing, "Oh, he actually wasn't." There's a lot of whatever that comes out of that. And so it's just an encouragement that are we living righteously? And let's aspire to that.

And if we are, I don't think we're going to be pursuing a bunch of stuff that doesn't make sense. I don't know how much communication we've talked about. It really stood out to me in listening to what he said. Yeah. I think that's very right. I really appreciate the history. I know that I went to Bible college and never heard about the Head Covering. And if it weren't for history, I wouldn't have seen it as something that was even a biblical thing. It was completely erased from history in a very short time.

And I never knew about it as a Christian. I mean, I read it, but it was just thrown away. And so I'm just saying this because even though this kind of lesson could seem like, "Why are we learning this?" it's very important that we understand the history of what went down. Otherwise, things will just be thrown away, and we won't even know it. The next generation won't know it. It's very good to go back through this. I'm thankful that you're going through this. Thank you for sharing with us. Yeah, thank you.

As a teacher, that was one of my—one of the things that energized me is if I can somehow help them get a hold of something sooner than I did and start off on a better foot. And I hope that the message this morning can be a little bit of that to somebody. All right. Well, thanks for your attention. And I guess we can close with a song.