The Christian and His Comfort Zone: Endurance, Reformers, and the Arena (Part 2)

And there’s a young man in England who asked for permission to make a New Testament in English. Otherwise, he would be burned alive for doing it. Well, he got tired of waiting. So, he went to Europe, and he met Luther in Wittenberg. Almost got himself killed in Cologne, Germany, because the printer who was printing his New Testament made a remark: I’m making a German… Luther’s New Testament…in English. Tyndale’s life was saved by about 10 seconds. He came in the front door, grabbed one sheet of drying paper, got to the back door as the front door opened, and he fled. So he went to Worms, which was even safer, and there he put out his New Testament. The New Testament was first printed in April of 1525, and in 1526 it reached England. The Germans really wanted this New Testament; they sacked it up with books. They put the New Testament in sacks. 6,000 of them, but the archbishop of Canterbury, I think his name was Wolsey, was so determined to make sure that they never were circulated. Does anybody in this room know how many of those 6,000 survived? 5,998 of them were burned. One of them survived because it never left Germany. You can see it in Stuttgart, Germany, and the other one belonged to the Queen of England. Her name was Anne Boleyn. I had the privilege of going to the Grenville collection, and they’ve got the Wycliffe New Testament, the first edition of Martin Luther’s New Testament, the Gutenberg Bible, and the only surviving copy of Anne Boleyn’s New Testament.

I spent a whole day there just staring at those things and more blood than you and I could ever imagine. There were 100,000 Tyndale New Testaments eventually printed. Eight survived. Eight survived. All the hell and hatred that England could afford went into Europe to find that man. He moved sometimes every day, sometimes every week. He finally ended up at a place called the English house, and there was an understanding that no one in that town would be protected. He was in Belgium. And now you’ll forgive me; I bring to you the greatest villain that I can think of. I don’t like this man. The only reason I don’t hate him is that I’m a Christian. I’m told not to, but I dislike him intensely. So intently, you can hardly tell the difference between my dislike and something else. He made friends with Tyndale. He came to Tyndale one day at the English house and said, “I’m about to go bankrupt if someone doesn’t sign a note for me.” Tyndale said, “I will sign it for you.” He said, “You’ll have to leave the house.” Tyndale said, “Fine.” went and signed the note for the man and was arrested. 500 days in the bottom dungeon of a prison in a castle. Nicole has been reading about his life, and she said, “Gene gets so angry.” She said, “Everybody talks about Tyndale and his New Testament and how much he loved the word of God.” She said, “This is simply not true.” She said he put out that New Testament because of his passion for Christ.

For 500 days, after collecting his reward for catching Tyndale, he sat outside the dungeon door right there so that any visitor who came to him afterward would have to spend time talking to Henry Phillips, who would undo anything that might be said positively to or from Tyndale. For 500 days, he sat outside that dungeon door. Before going into Europe, Tyndale met with a group of men at a pub… still there… in England called the White Horse Inn. 21 men… all of them… were part of what is called the English Reformation. Every one of those men went out and took a public stand. Preached, preached everywhere they could, passed out New Testaments all they could. They kept on finding those New Testaments for about 50 more years and burning them. 21 men who met every week at the White Horse Inn: 20 of them died at the stake. The 21st was Coverdale, and he is the man who put out the first total Old and New Testament printed in the English language. He carried out and finished the work of Tyndale. And there are the Lollards backing Tyndale’s Bible for 150 years. Did anyone figure out the exact days from the time he died? John Wycliffe died until the day of the New Testament? You’ve got 1384 to 1526; that’s got to be some number of years.

What I don’t understand is…it was…I just wrote this last week: when mapmakers made maps, they went as far as the explorations allowed them to go, so they couldn’t make the map any further. They’d write out on the map – beyond this, there be dragons. From 1517, for another 60 years beyond this point, there be giants. This letter survived. Has anybody here ever read it? Have you ever heard it? This is right before he’s executed. I’m looking for a voice I know that’ll carry across the room. Jerry, you’ve got a good voice. Oh, would you mind? He wrote that to the local bishop. This was sent to me via fax. Anyway, go ahead and take a minute to look at it, Jerry.

They took him out from the castle in Antwerp, Belgium, and they stacked the wood up to his neck, put him up against a stake, and then mercifully strangled him. Now he was in Europe, and the king of England was rejoicing in the fact that he had been caught and was going to be burned alive. He was Henry VIII. They strangled him to death. They lit the fires, and William Tyndale regained consciousness. It can’t be any more dramatic than this. While the fires burned and smoke billowed, they heard him cry out from the flames, “Lord, open the eyes of the King of England.” The King read the New Testament, which Anne Boleyn had, and he said, “This is a good book” – that old miserable buzzard. I don’t know if you know anything about him: He’s got to be one of the worst people who ever walked the stages of English history. If you don’t know that, then you just read him and challenge me on that, on anybody, on that subject. Anyway, two years later, in what was actually the only authorized English-language version of the Bible ever approved, he authorized a Bible. It was basically Tyndale’s and Coverdale’s Bible that came out two years after that. It’s called the Great Bible. You got it? The letter he wrote to the bishop soon before he died. The way he ends that letter is just unbelievable. And get a little bit of a view of what it must have been like in that cell.

Now, you may think I’m going to tell you what happened next. No, I’m going to tell you something else. The para movement. Here are men being burned at the stake. Here are people going to prison all over Europe. It’s happening in Italy. The Reformation never took root there. In Spain, there was a reformation, and they were all killed out. In Spain and France, the story is too long to tell. The Reformation was causing the greatest upheaval in the history of Great Britain and Europe, religious-wise, but there was another movement at the same time by religious people called the humanist movement, also led by Erasmus. It was there to talk the reformation to death. Anything but involvement. Anything but blood. Anything but Paul. Philosophers, hundreds of them, humanists, the humanist movement there to talk the reformation out of its power. Anytime the Lord ever does something, there’s another one of those things. Always. Now, one of the things that’s going through my heart and has been, where do these people come from? Sometimes my heart cries out. Well, you Henry Phillips kinds, you Woolsey kind, you Sir Thomas More type, Augustine of Italy against the Celtics. Some guy whose name was Henrique or something against the Priscillianists. They’re always there. But boy, they have been there ever since the reformation because before that, you had a religious monopoly. I think it was the Duke of Savoy who spent his entire life killing Waldensians. You’ve got to watch out for people like Peter Waldo and the Waldensians. They sent people out two by two all over Europe, and they even turned around and went down south into the very villages of Italy, preaching an evangelical gospel. Did you happen to find that sentence that I’m trying to locate? Go ahead, read it.

Audience: This book is less a history of Waldensians than an account of those men and women who remained true to the ideal lived in anxiety and under suspicion, often fearful and sometimes in blind terror. Theirs is a tale of people, great and small, proclaiming their faith timidly yet with an astounding, sometimes dogged tenacity. They hold a mirror to us today.

That’s not Paul’s and Peter’s; those are you. Now, the Waldensians moved up into the valleys. History says, but not strongly, that they fled up there into those mountains under the persecution of Nero. If that’s true, then they’re older than the Roman Catholic Church. They used to claim that, too, but they went to the seminary and learned that they couldn’t make statements without strong verification. Saints, there was one crusade after another, army after another army after another army, for 400 years, trying to liquidate, and they were never accused of heresy. They were known to be evangelical Christians adhering to the core of Roman Catholic theology, but their heresy was…and this is why they were trying to do genocide against them…they would not obey the Pope. I love this statement. “Fearful and timid but steadfast.” Just downright bullheaded in their quiet and gentle way.

Okay, we’ll go forward. Wesley’s movement. I’ve already mentioned the humanists. Have you ever heard of the Oxford movement? Wesley, almost, you know, Wesley, this is in the late 1700s, helped end slavery, all sorts of things. All sorts of English people got saved to the point that the English church was about to reform itself, and the Oxford movement started: a group of men who would not get their hands dirty, nor spill their blood, nor preach the Gospel, but would sit there in their armchairs and talk it to death. It was called the Oxford movement. During the reformation, it was, and I have to back up one, it was actually the Council of Trent. The Council of Trent met for 14 years with its great theologians and philosophers. They had only one decision to make: whether to reform themselves or stay exactly as they were. And for 14 years, they sat in chairs, philosophized, and then decided they would do absolutely nothing.

I have lived through two revivals. When Billy Graham came to the fore, the theological world was shaken to its foundations. I had the privilege of turning on my car radio when Billy Graham… and I must be the only person left alive who remembers this… was on a program in which Nemer and an entire group of philosophers were seeking to talk the revival that I was saved in, to death. To make sure it didn’t happen and do it, you know, and Billy Graham had nothing but a college education, nailed every one of those men to the wall. It was one of those moments when a man spoke beyond himself, his abilities, or his understanding. I’ve been in a second revival – 1968 to 1972, which scared the socks off the established church in the United States. So, they started a counter movement because these kids had literally left the institutional church. This never happened in America. I think I told you there were 2,000 Jesus houses. That’s when there were half a mile of hitchhikers in Santa Barbara, all on drugs. Everybody was hitchhiking. We’d go out there, and we’d start on this end to the other end, and we’d lead those people to the Lord. You could say Jesus saves, and 15 people get saved. It was unbelievable.

The institutional church had to do something. So, something called “Renewal” started. Now you can’t imagine Renewal. They had meetings, and they had conferences, and they had rallies, and the church is going to renew itself. So, there was one meeting somewhere within driving distance; it was supposed to be the leaders of Southern California who would attend this meeting and Renewal. This is that which is alongside what God does. This is the answer to ensure nobody has to spill blood or enter the arena. I went to it. (Excerpts from that meeting) – Well, now I’ll tell you what I feel about this… You know, someone else. Well, you know, according to Kierkegaard… Yes, but don’t forget what Pascal said… All of them Christians, all theologians, all quoting somebody and trying to put the Jesus revival in its proper category so that we could understand it. Council of Trent, the humanists, the Oxford movement. I don’t know how Nemer got his name on this, but whatever Nemer was doing… and renewal. At that time, the British had never had a national magazine like we have Christianity Today, so they named their magazine Renewal. This is a copy from about 5 years ago. The cover of it is Baan’s Pilgrimage.

Saints, I rest my case. Not only do they have the foolishness of God is higher than the greatest wisdom of men…Baan’s Pilgrimage…it never had fire. If you don’t have fire, you don’t ever have anything. I will not tell you this man’s name because I don’t want you to find out who he was, but let’s just put it this way: he was one of the great movers and shakers of the 1900s. He said, “You philosophers define the age you’re in, but the point is to change it.” Okay, now I’ll tell you who he was. His name was Karl Marx.