Reformation Night: John Wycliffe

All right, everybody, it's good to see everyone. If we can, I know most of you have, but if the rest of us can begin to find a seat. And we do have, I think, a pretty packed house tonight, so if you notice there's extra space in your row, if you can squeeze in so that we can all find a seat.

It's good to have you all, and we want to welcome you all to Bethany Baptist's ninth annual Reformation Night. And as we get started, just one announcement, I think, or no, two, after the biography tonight, there are shirts available with Wycliffe on them, I'm assuming, right, Gary?

Yep, so there's shirts gonna be available, bookmarks, things like that. And second thing, also related, we want to make sure that every kid gets a goodie bag. There are bags still in there, right, Steph?

So if one of your kids or several of your kids didn't get one, make sure they grab one on the way out. Or is that important for them to have during? Oh, sorry. Can you raise your hand, parents, if you have kids who need a goodie bag?

There's things in there that I think help them follow along and stuff. There, anyone else? All right, I want to open by reading a passage of Scripture from Hebrews 13, verse seven. And it's an exhortation to the church in all ages.

Remembering the Saints Who Have Gone Before Us

Hebrews 13, seven says, remember those who rule over you, who have spoken the Word of God to you, whose faith follow, considering the outcome of their conduct. And one of the ways we desire to honor that exhortation is by at least yearly remembering some of the saints who have gone before us in generations gone past, remembering their faithfulness, how they spoke the Word of God to us and how we are the beneficiaries of their faithfulness, many of them even unto death.

And so we want to learn and pray that God would encourage us tonight to be faithful in our generation as we learn from their example. And we're going to open tonight with a hymn. We're going to turn in the Blue Trinity Hymnal to number 281 for all the saints.

It's a hymn written about the saints who have gone before us and entered into the glory of the Lord and their rest. 281, if you notice that people are in need of a hymnal and you have extras, please share them around and pass them around.

But when you find that, let's all stand together and we're going to sing. Our Father, as we've sung and meditated on the glorious rest that those who have gone before us in the great cloud of witnesses have entered into, we pray that tonight as we think about that, it would spur us on to be faithful in this short life.

Christ has called us to take up our cross and to suffer for Him, to suffer for His truth. He has told us that we will be hated by all men for His namesake. We pray, Father, that You would grant us by Your Holy Spirit to fight nobly as those fought of old.

We stand on the shoulders of giants. We are the beneficiaries of their faithfulness, their lives, even many of them, given in the cause of Christ. And so, Father, we pray, let us not just be those who admire our heroes, but those who also seek to imitate their faith and follow in their footsteps as they followed Christ, who suffered for us and gave Himself up for us all to forgive us of our trespasses and to bring us to have peace with God.

We pray, Father, that the Gospel would be sweet to us, that it would nourish our hearts and that it would make, when we face suffering for His sake, that it would make it all the sweeter knowing that we are partaking and sharing in His sufferings.

Bless us tonight as we consider the life of John Wycliffe. We pray, give us, all of us, whether adults, whether children, give us attentive hearts to learn and to be spurred on in the faith. We ask in Christ's name, amen.

Wycliffe’s Early Life and Search for Salvation

Okay, tonight we are considering the life of John Wycliffe. How many of us have heard of John Wycliffe? Okay, many of us. John Wycliffe is called the morning star of the Reformation. He was not technically himself one of the reformers.

Just to give you kind of a timeline, he died 100 years before Luther was born, okay? So he lived and died in the 1300s, but he was that first morning star that God used to shine the light of His truth and the light of the Gospel into England and into much of Europe.

And so if Luther and Calvin are the fathers of the Reformation, Wycliffe is the grandfather. He was born in Yorkshire, which is in the north of England, near a town called Richmond. Some say around the year 1324.

Others put his birth a few years later and they think it's closer to 1328 or 1330. It's somewhere in that time. We know almost nothing about his childhood, but we do know much about the time and the things that were going on when he was born.

When he was born, the darkness of the Roman Catholic Church and the papacy overshadowed every area of life. There was almost no true preaching of the Word of God. The Mass was said in Latin, which people could not understand.

Most people never saw a Bible. If they did see a Bible, most of them could not have read it. And in fact, many in most towns could not even read at all. The common theology of the day that would have been given to the common people through the priests was that forgiveness could be earned through the system of sacraments in the Roman Catholic Church, teaching the common people that you could do penance, you could buy indulgences, you could go on pilgrimages, you could pray to the saints and bow to their images, and people lived and died believing that if they gave themselves enough to this system that hopefully it would be enough to be accepted by God.

Well, as a young man, probably around 25 or 30, Wycliffe goes to Oxford. And while he's there, the Black Death comes into England. It began in Asia and it swept west into England. In 1349, it reaches England.

And as you know, probably it's called the Black Death because of the black marks that it would leave on its victims. Around a third of the population was killed by the plague. Whole villages sometimes were wiped out.

And Wycliffe, about 25 or 30, seeing this, he was shaken to the core. One commentator said, this visitation of the Almighty sounded the trumpet of the judgment day in the heart of Wycliffe. Frightened by the death he was seeing around him, but frightened of his own death and not feeling that he had been made right with God, he began to earnestly turn to the Word of God and to prayer, seeking refuge from the judgment that was coming.

And he spent hours in prayer asking God what he needed to do with his life. And it was very similar to how Luther also was drawn by a fear of death to seek the Lord and to seek safety from His judgment.

He studies at Merton College in Oxford. First as a student, and then he becomes a teacher. And it's at Merton College that Wycliffe comes under the influence of a former professor by the name of Thomas Bradwardine.

He had taught the generation before Wycliffe. And he came into contact with Bradwardine's writings. Now, this is God's providence. Bradwardine, though he was not technically in the Augustinian order, he was thoroughly Augustinian in his theology.

He taught Augustine's theology of grace over and against man's works. And in fact, he had written a book against the Pelagians of his day. And that is the thing that begins to sink into Wycliffe's heart, that he begins to see that it's God alone by His grace that saves sinners, by sovereign grace, and that led Wycliffe to love the Scriptures all the more and to begin to study them all the more gladly.

He was a very intelligent man. He became well known as the brightest mind at Oxford. Even one of his enemies called him the flower of Oxford and in philosophy, second to none. An archbishop who later would hunt down Wycliffe's followers said, Wycliffe was a great clerk and many held him to be a perfect liver.

One who lived a perfect life. No one could charge Wycliffe with a disorderly life or an immoral life. He was an upright, godly man. He also was a great debater. He would debate monks, priests, the friars.

We'll talk about them. Whenever he would meet them, he wrote many short tracts against the errors of the church. His friends would copy these tracts and distribute them and pass them around. And lastly, he became a great preacher.

Like I said, there was hardly any true preaching of the Word of God in this day, and Wycliffe was blessed by God by having a certain plainness about his preaching and a sobriety about it that was very rare in those days and crowds would come to hear him.

Wycliffe’s Opposition to the Friars

Okay, so let me talk about here now the first thing that makes Wycliffe unpopular. The first fight, so to speak, that made his name famous was all of his debates and tracts written against the friars.

Okay, the friars belonged to orders like the Franciscans and the Dominicans. Friars went out among the people and they would preach, and as they would preach, they would make their living by begging. And the phrase, mendicant monk, mendicant comes from the word that means begging.

These were men who go around preaching in exchange for what they begged for if people would give them money and supplies and things like that. Now, they were supposed to be regarded as poor and humble servants of the Lord, and instead, they went all over the country and in Wycliffe's words, they quote, devoured England.

He had many names that he called them. He called them the sons of Satan, the emissaries of Antichrist, and these would push themselves into the houses of both poor and rich. They would take all the money they could get, and in fact, they begged so well that they became very rich.

And they wore fine clothes. They ate fine food. And they lived in idleness. Wycliffe, as you can imagine, wrote against them. He called them, quote, the pests of society, the enemies of religion, and the promoters of every crime.

And he explicitly identified their sin of requiring things to be given to them in exchange for the spiritual teaching as simony. And Wycliffe is well known for his work on simony. And as you can imagine, the friars are furious.

They don't like him. They want him put to death. In fact, we'll hear a story a little bit later. Even when he was almost dying, they never forgave the man. However, his preaching and his faithfulness also garnered the favor of some important people.

One in particular was King Edward III. This might be somewhat pragmatic on the king's part for why he liked Wycliffe, but every year the pope demanded money from England, and the king had to collect it and send it to the pope.

And Wycliffe taught that the king actually did not have to pay it, and that the church already had too much wealth as it was, which obviously pleased the king. And he made Wycliffe one of his chaplains.

Wycliffe’s Trials and Challenge to the Papacy

In 1374, Wycliffe was given the parish at Lutterworth. It's a small market town about 80 miles north of London. That's the place that's most associated with Wycliffe's name, where most of his pastoring was done.

Lutterworth. And there he made a powerful friend, John of Gaunt, who was the king's son and he was one of the most powerful noblemen in England. And just from a human perspective, that friendship with John of Gaunt is why Wycliffe died in his bed rather than dying at the stake.

Some of these friendships in the providence of God are what spared him. So, we're into the 1370s. The bishops are alarmed. Wycliffe, by this point, is speaking openly against the pope and the sins of the clergy.

And they are afraid that the people are beginning to believe him and embrace his teachings. And so on February 19, 1377, they summon Wycliffe to St. Paul's Cathedral in London to answer charges of heresy.

And a huge crowd comes to watch. Wycliffe walks in with two very powerful men beside him. John of Gaunt and Lord Percy, the Marshal of England. And the hearing had hardly even gotten started before it just breaks out in chaos and people are shouting at each other, hurling insults at each other.

The crowd joins in, and the meeting eventually just breaks up in an uproar. And Wycliffe and his friends slip out in the confusion, though he was given the charge not to preach anymore against the church.

And Wycliffe goes on preaching. The next year, 1378, he's summoned again, this time to Lambeth Palace. And this time he doesn't have any powerful friends who go with him, but he does have friends among the common people and a crowd of Londoners who love him surround the chapel and they force again their way into this meeting place to protect him.

And he tells the bishops plainly, quote, I am ready to defend my convictions even unto death. I have followed sacred Scripture and the holy doctors. And right in the middle of this uproar, just again in God's providence, a messenger from Joan, the mother of King Richard II, sends a messenger.

She actually very much admired Wycliffe. And through this messenger, she forbade them from condemning him. And she told them that he is not the wicked heretic that they say he is. And the bishops, hearing this messenger, are afraid to go on in seeking to condemn Wycliffe.

And so, they let him go again with an order to stop preaching. John Fox records this and says that Wycliffe laughed at the order and quote, going about barefoot and in a long gown preached more vehemently than ever before.

Now, things are just starting to come to a head for Wycliffe. That same year, 1378, by the way, he dies 1384, so a lot happens in his last years. 1378 is when the Western Schism happens. And suddenly, there are two popes.

Many of the same cardinals elected one, and then a little bit later elected the other. And now there are two popes over the Roman Catholic Church both claiming to be the Vicar of Christ on earth. And they both end up excommunicating each other.

And I know we laugh at that. This is really one of the key moments that just settled Wycliffe's conviction. There is something seriously wrong with the papacy. And it's interesting, until that point, he had not shrunk back from attacking the sins of the pope, but now he begins attacking the idea of the papacy itself.

As you know, the pope claimed to be the Vicar of Christ, the supreme ruler of the church on earth. Wycliffe said that claim is absolutely against the Scriptures. It's blasphemous towards Christ as the head of the church.

The only king and head of the church. And before long, Wycliffe is calling the pope anti-Christ. Now, there have been, before this time, some in church history who have referred to a bad pope as acting as an anti-Christ.

But as much as I could find, it seems Wycliffe is among the first to actually officially say that the office of pope is the anti-Christ. And he begins to speak very boldly and plainly about this. I said we'd talk about the friars again.

Friars hated Wycliffe. 1379, this is a year after the Western Schism, Wycliffe falls gravely ill to the point where it seemed in all likelihood Wycliffe is dying. And the friars heard the news and were glad, but they wanted one thing from him before he dies.

They want him to recant everything he said against the friars. And so the friars bring in four friars, one from each of the four orders. They come into his room, and they find him in bed weak but calm.

And they said to him, quote, you have death on your lips. Be touched by your faults and retract in our presence all that you have said to our injury. And they continued to tell him that if he died without recanting, if he died a heretic, God would sentence him eternally to hell.

And Wycliffe listened quietly to them, and then when they were done, he motioned to his servants to come and help lift him up. And they lifted him up, and he sat up, and he looked at the friars, and he said, quote, I shall not die, but live, and again declare the evil deeds of the friars.

And he's quoting Psalm 118. I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord. And the friars fled from fear out of the room, and God's mercy, Wycliffe did not die. He would have five more years, and they would be some of the most important years of his life.

Wycliffe’s Five Recoveries from Scripture

Okay, let me pause here and talk about what Wycliffe taught. I want to mention five important things. Groundbreaking things that Wycliffe recovered from the Scriptures. Number one, the Scriptures are the supreme authority over popes and councils and all church tradition.

Quote, these are quotes from Wycliffe. It is impossible for any part of the Holy Scripture to be wrong. In Holy Scripture is all the truth. One part of Scripture explains another. And when asked why is it that the Bible, the Scriptures, stand above every other book, he said, it's because its author is greater than every other author.

And he said, quote, just as one author is superior to another and so the merit of his book is superior to another, since Christ is infinitely superior to every other man, his book is superior. And so, for him, the Bible stands above pope, above councils.

Secondly, he taught very clearly that a sinner cannot save himself and that it is all of the grace of God. Quote, God makes sinful man and unkind men good men. And all the goodness of this comes from the goodness of God.

And then he goes on, he says, even man's faith is a gift from God. He says, quote, faith is a gift of God and thus when God rewards a good work of man, he crowns his own gift and this is of grace. Third, he taught that mercy is found only through faith in the blood and righteousness of Jesus Christ.

I will say, I'll say it here I guess and I might say it at the end. Wycliffe never came to as clear of a conviction on justification by faith alone as Luther and Calvin would. But he says things like this.

If, quote, if a man believe in Christ and make a point of this belief, then the promise that God hath made to come into the land of light shall be given by virtue of Christ to all men that make this the chief matter.

Fourth, he taught that Christ is the only mediator. He taught that it is idolatry to bow down to images or to saints or to offer worship or prayer to images or saints. And he quoted, there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.

And then lastly, fifthly, he spoke against the mass and transubstantiation. Now, this is an interesting and this is a lesson for us. This is one step that Wycliffe took that even for his friends was one step too far.

And many of his friends turned back from him at this point. He attacked the mass and transubstantiation. The Roman Catholic Church taught, still teaches, that in the mass, in the Eucharist, the actual bread and wine actually turn into the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ.

Wycliffe said things like this. Quote, he's talking to the priests. How can you, O priest, who are only a man, make your Maker? What, the thing that grows in the fields today? The ear of wheat which you pluck today?

Shall that be God tomorrow? As you cannot make the works which He made, how can you make Him who made the works? Woe to the adulterous generation that believes the words of the Pope rather than the words of the Gospel.

End quote. That cost him almost everything. Even his friends who were with him up until that point ceased to be at least openly supporters of him. The king no longer supported him. Many of the teachers and students at Oxford turned against him.

Even John of Gaunt came to him privately in person and begged him to be quiet. And Wycliffe would not be quiet because he had convictions of the truth. And he believed that truth is more important than friendships.

Wycliffe’s Pastoral Ministry and Training of Preachers

Ok, let's move on. We're getting towards the end of his biography and then I'm just going to close with a brief application. 1381, three years before he dies, the peasants rise in a revolt and they murder the Archbishop of Canterbury.

They blame Wycliffe, though Wycliffe was not responsible for it. And the new Archbishop was a man named William Courtney. He's the same Bishop of London who shouted at John of Gaunt at that first meeting where they called him to give an account for the charges of heresy in St. Paul's.

In 1382, William Courtney gathers the bishops, the doctors, and the lawyers in London to condemn Wycliffe's teaching. And they meet in the hall of the Blackfriars in a friar's own house. And Wycliffe was not present for this.

Early in the afternoon while they sit there, the ground begins to shake and an earthquake rolls across England. And church towers crack. At Canterbury, stones fell from the cathedral and men inside that meeting were terrified because many of them took it as a sign of God's judgment against them for seeking to condemn Wycliffe as a heretic and they wanted to stop.

Courtney would not let them stop. He told them this is a good sign. And he said that just as the earth shakes in order to throw out the foul winds that are shut up inside of it, so also now the kingdom must throw out its heresies.

And so they sat back down and they condemned 24 of Wycliffe's teachings, 10 of them as heresy. When Wycliffe heard, he read the sign the other way. And he said God sent the earthquake quote, because the friars had put heresy upon Christ in the matter of the sacrament and the earth trembled as it did when Christ was damned to bodily death.

And Wycliffe named it the Council of the Earthquake and that's the name that has stuck. That November, 1382, Wycliffe is called before a council at Oxford. This is the university that trained him. And it now turns on him.

He's an old man. He's worn out by trials, by sickness. But he continues to speak boldly against the errors of the church. And after he's done, when he was finished, he simply said, the truth will prevail.

And he turned and he walked out and no one dared lay a hand on him. Fewer and fewer people stood with him, but he continued to cling to God and the cause of his truth and no one laid a hand on him. Let me say something about his pastoral work.

I mentioned Lutterworth is the town most associated with his pastoral ministry. He was much loved by his people. I know we hear these quotes and you can get a certain picture that this is just a guy who's constantly hurling insults.

He was a very tender, loving pastor with his people. In fact, people would see him often walking through town on his cane with his paper Bible underneath his arm. And he was always ready to stop and speak the Scriptures with people and to pray with whoever had need.

Rich and poor were glad when Wycliffe came around. He was ready to comfort them, pray with them, instruct them. He said this, he said, this is how a minister ought to live. He said, quote, a priest should live holy in prayer, in desires and thought, in godly conversation and honest teaching, having God's commandments and His Gospel ever on his lips.

And let his deeds be so righteous that no man may be able with cause to find fault with them. And so open his acts that he may be a true book to all sinful and wicked men to serve God. For the example of a good life stirs men more than true preaching with only the naked word.

And even in his last two years, he was not only sick, but partially paralyzed. He kept writing, he kept pastoring. He continued to speak out against the Pope who was calling Christian to go to war against Christian.

While he was at Lutterworth, I want to mention two of the greatest works that come from Wycliffe's life, okay? Number one was not only his own preaching, but his influence on raising up preachers, okay?

The friars were the popular preachers of the day. And it's not even worth being called preaching. It was entertainment. Literally whatever they could say. They literally carried around a book called, I have it in here, Sleep Soundly.

Yeah, Sleep Soundly. That meant that the traveling preacher could sleep soundly the night before because he'd never have to worry that he'd run out of things to say as long as he sticks to this book. And it was mostly entertainment, just things that they could then pass the plate, get the indulgences sold, and then the friar goes on his way to the next place.

Wycliffe said of them, it is certain that such preaching of the friars in hope of temporal gain is in the sight of God, notorious simony. And he said that their preaching is like serving a meal without bread.

It had no substance. And so he trained preachers of his own. Poor men, they often went barefoot. They wore long cloaks with staff in hand, and they would go from village to village and preach wherever few or many would gather.

Churchyards, fairs, marketplaces, you name it. And this is his charge to his own preachers. He says, quote, to the people, the Gospel must be preached as God commands. Not comedies or tragedies, not fables or droll stories, but simply and solely the law of the Lord as Christ and the apostles delivered it.

He who preaches to the people without reading and explaining to them the Gospel gives them a meal without bread. And he told his preachers to keep it plain so that the people could understand. And he told them, make sure you preach from the heart.

And I'm going to skip long quotes here. He said, how can the Spirit own your preaching? How can it be full of power from on high if the truth which you speak does not come out of the sincerity of your own heart that has come to believe and love the truth?

These preachers began to be called lawlords by their enemies. That's probably a reference to how they were seen as being mumblers, reading the Scriptures quietly. And the movement of the lawlords spread so quickly that it was said that if you ran into two men on the road, it was most likely that one of them was a lawlord.

Wycliffe’s English Bible

That's the first thing that came out of Wycliffe's ministry is preachers. Secondly, is the English Bible. Now, before Wycliffe, there had been pieces of the Bible put into English, but never the whole thing.

And while the papacy said that the Bible belongs to the clergy, Wycliffe said it belongs to everyone. Quote, Englishmen learn Christ's law best in English. Moses heard God's law in his own tongue and so did Christ's apostles.

And so Wycliffe with a team of helpers translated the entire Bible from Latin into English. The New Testament was finished around 1380 and his friend Nicholas of Hereford worked on the Old Testament and it wasn't completed until about four years after Wycliffe died in about 1388.

Okay, now remember, no printing press yet. Every copy is copied by hand, word for word, and still copies of Wycliffe's Bible multiplied and the people treasured them. The church was, the papacy, the Roman Catholic Church was furious.

One man named Henry Knighton complained that Wycliffe had laid the Bible, quote, more open to the laity and to women who can read than it formerly had been to the most learned of the clergy. And in this way, the gospel pearl is cast abroad and trodden underfoot by swine.

So in his mind, the common people reading the Bible is casting the pearls of God's Word to be trampled underfoot by swine. Wycliffe obviously believed very differently. Okay, let's bring to a close here.

Wycliffe’s Death and His Influence on the Reformation

His death. 1382, he suffers a stroke that leaves him partially paralyzed. Two years later, while he is in his church at Lutterworth, a second stroke strikes him down and this one is the one that would end his life.

He cannot move, he cannot speak. He lives two more days and he dies calmly on December 31st, 1384. Right around the age, somewhere around 60. The Pope, the archbishops, the friars, and even most of his friends, as I mentioned, by the end, had turned against him.

And yet, you think about that, with all of his enemies, he still dies peacefully and calmly in his own bed. Proverbs 16, seven, when a man's ways please the Lord, he makes even his enemies to be at peace with him.

J .C. Ryle said of Wycliffe, he was immortal until his work be done. However, after his death, even though his enemies could not reach him while he lived, they sought to go after him after he had died.

In 1401, England passed a law for the lawfulness of burning heretics and that year, William Shawtree, a Lawlord, was the first man burned in England for following Wycliffe's teaching. 1408, it's made a crime to translate the Bible into English or even to read a translation in English without a bishop's permission.

You can read stories about other Lawlords who were put to death, burned at the stake for teaching their children the Lord's Prayer in English. Rome never forgot Wycliffe. In 1415, the church council condemned him as a heretic.

This is more than 30 years after he died. They condemned him formally as a heretic. This is the same council that burned Jan Hus at the stake. And in 1428, 44 years after Wycliffe has died, on the Pope's orders, they dug up Wycliffe's grave in the churchyard at Lutterworth and they burned his bones to ashes and they threw the ashes into the River Swift.

This is what Thomas Fuller said of that. He said, quote, they burnt his bones to ashes and cast them into the River Swift, a neighboring brook running hard by. Thus the brook has conveyed his ashes into the Avon and the Avon into the Severn, Severn into the narrow seas and they into the main ocean.

And thus the ashes of Wycliffe are the emblem of his doctrine which is now dispersed the world over. And that is exactly what happened. Already by that time, his teaching had begun to go well beyond the bounds of England.

Students began to carry his books from Oxford to Prague where Jan Hus would read them and be gripped by them. In fact, Hus preached Wycliffe's works and taught his work so closely that many times much of what he writes is simply just lifted from Wycliffe.

100 years later, Martin Luther reads Hus and finds that he agrees with Hus. And in fact, I didn't know this, I learned this this week. In 1572, you can look this up. From the year 1572, there is a Bohemian, somewhat similar to what we would call a hymn book.

And in this book, 1572, there's a picture and on the top, it's three pictures. On the top, it's Wycliffe striking a spark and then Jan Hus lighting a candle from that spark. And then the third picture is Luther holding up a blazing torch.

And it's printed on the page that celebrated the death when Jan Hus was condemned to death. And the Bohemian church realized that is how God worked in his providence. First Wycliffe, then Hus, and then it became a glowing torch by the time it reached Luther.

In fact, Wycliffe once wrote that he expected some of the friars, as God was pleased to enlighten them, to quote, return with all devotion to the original religion of Christ and build up the church as Paul did.

And Martin Luther was a friar. Wycliffe's prediction came exactly true. In England, the Lawlords never died out. For more than a century, they kept meeting in private, reading the Scriptures, teaching the Scriptures, copying them, and when Luther's books, a hundred years later, begin to be distributed and Tyndale's New Testament begins to be smuggled back into England in the 1520s, the Lawlords were there waiting to receive them.

It's amazing. I'm gonna close with application in just a second here. I think I say this every year. As I said, I know that Wycliffe never came to as clear of a doctrine of justification by faith alone as Martin Luther did, as Calvin did, but it is amazing how far Wycliffe reformed the church just reading the Scriptures and the leaps and bounds he made understanding and identifying the errors of the Roman Catholic Church and returning and calling the church back to the clear truths taught in Scripture.

Applications from Wycliffe’s Faithfulness

Okay, I wanna give us five brief applications here. We'll close and then we're gonna sing A Mighty Fortress. Number one, Christian, thank God for your Bible. Hebrews 11 speaks of those who have gone before us as those of whom the world was not worthy and Wycliffe was one of those of whom the world was not worthy.

You have your Bible because Christians who went before you literally gave their lives so that you can have it. Secondly, thank God if you belong to a church that teaches the Scriptures and the way of Christ plainly.

People today complain so easily about many things in their church and believe me, I understand there are some churches that are worthy of those complaints, okay? But if you have pastors who stand on the Word of God and want to lead you according to it and want to be courageous with the Word of God even to the point of telling you things that you do not like to hear because they are overseers of your soul who will give an account, you should not despise that.

You should be thankful for that, okay? They keep watch over your soul. Let them do it with joy so that it would be of profit to you. Third thing, this is a lesson to all of us. We need to be content to fill a small space, okay?

And I mean that thinking of this long tapestry of church history. Our lives are just gonna occupy this little part of it. We need to praise God if we serve but a small part in the overall tapestry of God's purpose, okay?