The Task Unfinished – The Present State of the Lord’s Testimony – Introduction

I had a thought this week and remembered something I had forgotten. The first term paper I ever wrote in college, and I don’t know why I wrote on this. I don’t know why I was inclined this way, but as best I can remember, it was a term paper on a fellow named Pope Innocence, and I think it was 13th, but I think I’m wrong, and the persecution of the Waldensians…and I wasn’t even saved.  Don’t ask me why I did that, but it was a harbinger of things to come. By the way, I was 15 years old when I wrote that paper, and my professor was a Catholic. It’s hard to explain how corrupt things were. When Constantine left Rome and moved to the city he built, called Constantinople, the last person he said goodbye to was a bishop of Rome named Sylvester, who was later appointed as the next bishop of Damascus. And after him, shortly thereafter, was an emperor in the west called Maximus. All I can tell you is things got political. They got powerful. The church and the government were not separated. But there was a gentleman.

Folks, it always starts with a man, and whether we like it or not, it’s supposed to. We don’t always know their names, but his name was Priscillian, and he lived in Spain. I don’t know what Priscillian did. He’s almost a vapor, a ghost. We can see so little of him. All we know is that he drew many people to him who were very dissatisfied with what was happening to the church as it became institutionalized. He was the first to protest, and he was the first to die.

I want you to remember Priscillian, but I want you to remember something else. Somebody explain this to me. They lived for another hundred years. That means that there were very ordinary people who carried on their…use a word, their righteousness, their devotion, 100 years after Priscillian was dead. The group was never large, and their followers died early on. He was beheaded somewhere in Belgium in a city that starts with a T. His strongest followers, there were six of them, were banished from Spain and Belgium and were taken to a strip of islands called the Scilly Isles, which sit at the very bottom of Great Britain. There’s a little string of them, most not any bigger than this room, and they were just disembarked there, put off there, and left to die. Still, they lasted a hundred years. I don’t know how; all we know is one thing. They were the only thing keeping the faith alive the way it ought to be.

Now, maybe somebody in this room is going to be a doctor. Good. You go be a doctor, and you get a lot of patients. Then you live, and you die. This is what most people in America are going to do. What are you going to do? I don’t know those people’s names, but I can tell you that they lived on for a long time. They lived on long enough for a man to sneak into a church every night, take blank paper, and copy off an entire Old Testament. He got caught after he finished it, and it went to trial, and the judge’s verdict was that the “calf belongs to the cow.” He lost his Old and New Testaments, and they had to give them to the church he copied them from. Oh, was he angry…

Now, something that you need to understand, that I don’t understand either, is that these kinds come by really rarely. I don’t know anything about this man, but already at that time, when he was fairly young, there were at least 12 men whose lives he influenced to the point that they could get in a boat together and paddle, and he said, “We’ll stop the first time we can’t see Ireland.” Because that’s where he lost his “calf.” And they rode, and they rode, and he kept looking back. They hit the shore of an island that’s about a mile square, somewhere around the middle of the 500s. The nice thing about Great Britain is that the Roman Catholics got there last, and they didn’t have to fight as the Priscillianists did. They got off that boat, and they built a community, and they referred to themselves as priests, not from the viewpoint of Roman Catholics but from the viewpoint of the priesthood of the believers. These were evangelical Christians.

Columba died, and they buried him there on the island, somewhere around 600. What in God’s name kept him alive? It was a little island without any trees, and there were no Roman Catholics to stop them. They went to Scotland and evangelized those Picts. Who else were those people called at that time? Well, anyway, the Scots, the world’s greatest horse thieves. Well, it’s true. They brought the gospel to them, and they died; they preached, and they moved on to Great Britain; they built their communities, and they took the gospel… it was what we call an evangelical gospel. They took it to Britain. They took it to Scotland. They took it to Europe. And they built whole towns. They never got near the cities. They went to the cities, but they built their communities outside of them. You can still visit their ruins across Great Britain and in Europe. They even got so far as to build a community in northern Italy. Then the pope sent somebody over there called Augustine, not St. Augustine, but another one, and brought the Catholic Church and brought an army. The Celtic church lasted until about 600. I don’t know how they did that. I don’t know how they lived that way. They lived and raised sheep and goats. I don’t know, but it took some special people.

Then we come to…if we built statues of these people, they would have to be faceless, because we don’t know who they are. I will tell you this, nobody paid a greater price than they have. They called them Bogomils, the Paulicians, and the Cathars. He was one of their leaders. There are only two or three people whose names are known to have survived for about 300 years. Does anybody know what their names are? They were in Armenia. They were in the… can you ever figure out the difference between the Baltics and the Balkans? I do not either, but I think he comes from the Balkans. They were all over the Balkans, and they were systematically killed off, and there are others who came after them. Their leaders are forgotten and unknown, but they last for 300 years.

I want us to stop and appreciate those people for just a minute, and then we have to take our hats off. If someone would give me one book that I once held in my hand that I don’t have, I can tell you what it was that fast. I was reading it in the library at the Rüschlikon Baptist Seminary in Rüschlikon, Switzerland. I don’t know where the book came from. When I went back to get it, I couldn’t find it, and I guess it was missing. But it told two or three remarkable stories I’ve never heard anywhere else. I’m going to tell you that story.

We don’t know where the Waldensians began, but I can tell you what I read. There’s a Roman Catholic church in the Italian Alps that kept a record… like other churches do… of people, the community, and their baptisms. He wrote a little note, and, as far as I know, that note still exists somewhere in northern Italy. He made this statement in 600 AD. He said there is a group of people living among us here in the hills who claim to have come here during the persecution of Nero. That would have been in 64 AD.

The Waldensians will not make that claim today. They went to seminary, and they learned they’re not supposed to make claims like that without proof. All I can tell you is that when Peter Waldo was raised up, out of which came the word the Valdes or Waldensians or valley people, he came along in 1200. When he died, and I say it again, we’re going to take our hats off. They never acknowledged the Roman Catholic Church, and they were very biblical. The Catholics hate them because they couldn’t put a label on them. And they did something incredible; when the Reformation came along, they joined it. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the biggest mistake they ever made. But they said they were Christians and they would not denominate themselves. That’s our word, not theirs, among any people. They sent folks out in twos and sometimes threes. Two older people and a kid, or one older person and a kid, to train the kid to preach the gospel. They were all thinkers…their term…in that day.

They built a room made out of stone slate. It doesn’t have any walls. It’s just stone. You can see through it. It’s there in the Italian Alps, and the men who would go out to preach the gospel referred to themselves as uncles, to separate from fathers, you know, holy father and father this and father that. They said, “Who is your uncle?” They lived in that room until they could quote the entire New Testament in their Waldensian Valley. They were walking bibles.

There’s no place they didn’t go. I think they never got to England. And there were some places where they were so strong that they actually were in control of some towns. One of those named towns was Alba. And because they were called Waldensians, they were, in this case, called Albigensians. So, it was Albigensian. And the Pope sent an army against that city. And the general cried out, “Kill everybody in it.” And someone else called out, “But some of those people inside that town are good Catholics.” And the general cried out, “Kill them all. God knows his own.” And they slaughtered the Albigensians.