Appreciating our spiritual ancestors

John Wycliffe’s followers became known as the Lollards and their formal statement is called “The Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards.”

When did Martin Luther put his Ninety-Five Theses on the door at Wittenberg? 1517. In 1390, the Lollard’s twelve conclusions were tacked up on the door of the Westminster Hall in London.

Luther’s theses didn’t say anything about getting out of the Catholic Church. They didn’t say anything about the gospel of grace. In fact, they didn’t even express justification by faith alone because Luther didn’t understand it then. It was some years after that that he actually came to understand it, says Richard Jordan.

The Lollards’ tract began, “We pray that God in His endless goodness reform our church all out of joint to the perfection of the first beginning,” and it talked about justification and the authority of the Scriptures; the things you and I would talk about.

My point to you is, this didn’t start with the Reformation. What happened at the Reformation is it got some public airing. Things had gotten so bad in the big visible church that when Luther and compadres began to raise the issue, there was momentum, but people like us were always there.

You ought to appreciate the fact that you’ve got ancestors. You ought to know something about your spiritual history back then.

Peter Waldo (1140-1205) is often called the forerunner of the Reformation. His followers were called the Waldensians. He caused the Bible to be translated into the dialect of France where he ministered and was one of the first to provide the Bible in what came to be called “the language of the people.”

From the 2^nd Century, we have copies of God’s Word translated into the languages of people. Listen, there’s something you’ve got to understand. When God wrote His Word, He provided it to be preserved, and part of the preservation process is to translate it into the languages of people and have the translation be as authoritative as the original language was.

In the Bible, that’s the way it treats translations; that’s the way God treats them. And when you have the proper text properly translated, it’s God’s Word and that’s where the spiritual power is.

From the very first, saints have been trying to get God’s Word into the languages of the nations because that’s exactly what Paul said the commandment of the everlasting God is-- that His Word would be made known to ALL nations.

As Waldo translates the Bible, right in the middle of the Dark Ages, that was the key to the growth of the Waldensian Movement. If you know anything about that period of time, the Waldensians are great enemies of the Vatican system.

Waldo, for his troubles, was carried off. His people were in the caves in the mountains of northwest Italy, where their church met. They had an underground Bible college where they trained preachers to study God’s Word and preach it and take it out into the communities of the world in which they lived, knowing that they were going to be martyred, and they did it racing to preach as much as they could BEFORE they were martyred. They knew that was going to happen to them, but they wanted to get it out as fast and as far as they could before they got caught and killed.

By the way, one of the first places in history you see water boarding as torture was in the Valley of the Piedmont (Piedmontese Massacre of 1655), where the papists were murdering, torturing, putting on the rack your ancestors; people who believe what you believe, persecuted for preaching it and teaching it. That was their “reward.”

I think about that: it was 1655 and old Waldo was back there in 1100. His followers for 500 years were still preaching what he preached. That’s the power of putting God’s Word in the hands of people and the value of life given over to the Lord Jesus Christ.

You see, it didn’t start with the Reformation. People like us, you see little glimpses of them. Where are we going to show up in church history? If you do, you’ll be a little footnote where somebody was mad at you and said something nasty about you and they wanted to record it so everybody knew you were a bad dude.

Wycliffe, who had a Latin Bible, was the first person to translate the Bible into Middle English, which is like if you try to read Chaucer with English you can’t read. Modern English is the language of the King James Bible and Shakespeare; that era. Before Middle English there wasn’t any English, by the way.

Wycliffe, called the “morning star of the Reformation,” was a scholar from Oxford, Cambridge. By the way, Wycliffe’s home and church is preserved in England. The church building is about half the size of this auditorium. The little manse he lived in is about the size of those pews right there.

This is not big powerful-looking stuff and yet they spread God’s Word, not just across England, but all across Europe. He was so beloved that four years after he died the papist came and dug up his bones, burned them and spread them on the river to get rid of him.

By then, it was too late to undo the knowledge of the truth. It was out. It wasn’t out widely like Luther did; he translated the Textus Receptus, the anti-Catholic Bible.

The Counter-Reformation, or the Catholic response at the Council of Trent, was to condemn anyone who used any bible text other than theirs. All the Protestant Bible texts were the bible text of the King James Bible.

The Catholics said, “Anathema on that one. We’ll use this one.” You know where the modern versions come from? That Greek text of the Catholics. The modern versions are a part of the Counter-Reformation. If you want to know where the Reformation went, you just found the answer.

This is bigger than, “I don’t like the way this ‘thee’ or ‘thou’ stuff is in the Bible.” It’s a bigger issue than that and it explains where some of this stuff has gone.

Jan Hus (1369 to 1450) was way before Luther and he was influenced by Wycliffe. Through the study of Scripture, he discovered on his own that salvation isn’t possible except through faith in Christ’s payment for sins at Calvary.

Hus preached against works-based salvation and was denounced as a heretic and excommunicated by Rome. They called him to the council in Constance, Germany to stand trial and he was found guilty and burnt alive at the stake on July 6, 1415.

If you want to celebrate a date, celebrate that one, when his executioners chained him to the stake . . . By the way, when they would catch these Lollards and put them on the stake, they would take their Bible and use it to light the fire. They did the same with Hus.

They chained him and asked him if he didn’t want to recant. He said, “My Lord Jesus Christ was bound with harder chains than this for my sake. Why should I be ashamed, picked to be dust to this rusty one?”

When the flames began to consume him, the Duke of Bavaria urged him to recant his faith in Christ; retract what he was preaching. Hus said, “No, what I’ve taught with my lips I will seal with my own blood.”

It was men like Hus that the poet wrote (in the 1873 hymn “Christ is All”), “I saw a martyr at the stake,
The flames could not his courage shake,
Nor death his soul appall;
I asked him whence his strength was giv’n;
He looked triumphantly to Heav’n,
And answered, ‘Christ is all.’ ”

Those are your spiritual forefathers, not a bunch of mossy-backed religionists running around in black robes with their collars turned backwards, arguing about some theological nitwittery. These are the guys who are your spiritual ancestors.