Theodore Beza is an unfamiliar figure today in the evangelical world. He has been much maligned by many historians and theologians who created the image of an austere man who turned Calvin’s theology into an arid scholastic system. This image is actually very far from the truth. So who was Theodore Beza really?

He was born in Vézelay, France, in 1519 in an affluent family of the minor French nobility. His life spanned almost the whole sixteenth century, and he died in 1605 at the age of eighty-six. By God’s providence, there were two clear turning points in his life.

The first occurred at the age of nine when he was placed as a lodger with a Lutheran scholar, Melchior Wolmar, who became his preceptor. He spent seven years with Wolmar, who taught him law, Latin, and Greek. Interestingly, one of Wolmar’s other students during that time was none other than Calvin, who was just ten years older than Beza. Wolmar gave Beza a first-rate education, and, like Calvin, Beza was likely more fluent in Latin than in French. More importantly, Wolmar was instrumental in his journey toward the new Reformed faith. It was through Wolmar that, sometime around 1535, Beza read a book by the Swiss Reformer Heinrich Bullinger and was converted. Years later, Beza wrote to Bullinger: “You made known to me true piety, and its purest source: The Word of God.”¹

However, Beza had a lot to lose if he disclosed his newfound faith. He received substantial ecclesiastical incomes through one of his uncles, who was an abbot, and this allowed him to enjoy a life of pleasure in Paris, dedicating himself to poetry and humanistic studies. For several years, he kept his faith secret, and he secretly married Claudine Denosse, the daughter of a Parisian Protestant merchant. Beza promised he would marry her publicly whenever they could find a truly Reformed church.

The second turning point of his life came in 1548 when he contracted the plague and came close to death. He took it as a clear warning from God and came out openly about his faith. Shortly after, he fled to Geneva. Theodore and Claudine were publicly married by Calvin himself, and they remained devoted to each other and to the cause of Christ until Claudine’s death in 1588.

After teaching Greek in Lausanne for a few years, Beza settled in Geneva permanently in 1558, mainly because of his admiration for Calvin. He lived there until his death, faithfully serving alongside Calvin and assuming his mantle as leader of the French Reformed church after Calvin’s death in 1564.

Beza’s legacy is immense and multifaceted, and it is difficult to summarize it in a few words. He was first and foremost a man of letters. One of his first tasks in Geneva was to complete the translation of the Psalms from Hebrew into French for the Huguenot psalter, a translation left unfinished by another Reformed poet at his death. Beza also published a critical edition of the Greek New Testament that was influential on the Textus Receptus, from which the King James Bible was translated. In fact, the 1565 edition was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth I. In many ways, this was Beza’s lifetime project. He tirelessly corrected and improved the text and published several editions, with the last major revision appearing in 1598. In 1559, he published a “Confession of the Christian Faith,” addressed to his father, to explain why he had embraced the Reformed faith. Although it was penned in a few days, it was hugely popular, as it was published at least thirty-five times during his lifetime and translated into Latin, English, German, and Dutch.

He consolidated Calvin’s legacy in Geneva by preaching regularly and teaching theology for forty years. We know from several sources that his teaching was greatly appreciated. For example, an alumnus wrote in 1578:

We listened to you with so much admiration and pleasure. Apart from your own personality traits, you combined Melanchthon’s penetrating insights, Calvin’s solid and direct common sense, and Vermigli’s abundant learning and method. ²

His voluminous correspondence of 2,792 extant letters reveals his important diplomatic activity, interacting with Lutheran and Reformed theologians and heads of state throughout Europe.

But his defining legacy was undoubtedly consolidating—and probably saving—the Reformed church in France. He famously stood before the king of France and the whole nobility and Roman Catholic cardinals at the Colloquy of Poissy in 1561, boldly setting out the main tenets of the Reformed faith. After Calvin’s death, when the French church faced increasing persecution, culminating with the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572, Beza provided the Huguenots with the strong leadership they needed. He also presided over the national synod at La Rochelle in 1571, which approved the Gallic Confession of Faith. Significantly, Beza also gave the Huguenot church a sense of identity by producing its history in his massive Ecclesiastical History of the Reformed Churches (1580).

How can we sum up the man Beza? He was essentially a poet and a scholar whom the vicissitudes of life in sixteenth-century Europe and God’s providence turned into a theologian and spokesman of Reformed Protestants. He was a man with an unshakable faith in Christ’s promise to Peter: “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18). When the wars of religion started in France, he exhorted his Huguenot brothers to restraint, but he also defiantly told the king of Navarre, who was wavering between Rome and Geneva:

Sire, it is true that it belongs to the church of God, in whose name I speak, to endure blows and not to inflict them. But it will also please your majesty to remember that she is an anvil that has worn out many hammers.³

Before John became the Apostle of love, he was known as a “Son of Thunder” for his zeal, which was often misplaced. How did this transformation happen, and what can his story teach us about following Jesus today?

In Derek Thomas’ new video teaching series, explore the life of a man shaped by the love of Christ. As we witness the Apostle’s transformation, we’re reminded that our Lord is still fashioning His people into servants marked by humility and love.

This teaching series is available to stream in Ligonier’s Grow app. Don’t have the app? Download it today.

In The Life of John, explore how the Lord shaped His beloved disciple into a man who desired to point others to the Savior. This study shows us what it looks like to grow in our love for Christ and others.

17 Messages, Including:

• A Galilean Fisherman
• A Son of Thunder
• A Prideful Protégé
• The Beloved Disciple
• A Witness to the Resurrection
• And More

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What was the matter with the Protestant Reformation? It might seem like a strange question. Some might say that there was nothing the matter with the Reformation, that it was the acme of spiritual recovery of biblical Christianity in church history and therefore was a sort of golden age of biblical faith. Others might say that the matter with the Reformation was that there was one at all, since it produced the largest schism in church history.

That’s not what I mean, however, when I ask about what was the matter with the Protestant Reformation. I’m not using the word matter in the normal way, which typically indicates that something is wrong. When we ask, “What’s the matter with you?” we are assuming that something is wrong or that we’re looking for fault. What I mean, by contrast, is this: What was the essence, the substance, or what is called in philosophy the material cause of the Protestant Reformation? Another way to ask it would be this: What was the chief issue that provoked such massive consequences as this split that occurred in the sixteenth century?

When historians consider the causes of the Protestant Reformation, they often use distinctions originally set forth by the philosopher Aristotle, and they distinguish between the formal cause and the material cause. The formal cause, the intellectual background to the issue, was a dispute over the seat of final authority that binds the Christian conscience. We’ll look at that under the heading of sola Scriptura. The material cause, however, the substantive issue that was the core point of dispute, was the doctrine of justification. The Protestant view of this matter is expressed in the shorthand of the Latin phrase sola fide.

This is the first of the Latin slogans of the Reformation known as the five solas. They are sola fide, justification is by faith alone; sola gratia, salvation is by grace alone; solus Christus, salvation is through Christ alone; sola Scriptura, the sole authority that binds the conscience of the Christian is the Bible alone; and then, finally, soli Deo gloria, to God alone belongs the glory.

Sola fide is shorthand for the central issue of the Reformation, the material cause, which was the question of justification. The Protestant Reformers set forth a doctrine that our justification is by faith and by faith alone without any mixture of good works or merit on our part.

To understand sola fide in its historical context, we have to understand something about the theological dispute based on the Roman Catholic understanding of justification. At the heart of this dispute was not a tangential debate over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin or a needless controversy over pedantic points of theology that only academics care about. Rather, this issue touched the very heart of the Christian faith because the question of justification is designed to answer this deeper question: How can an unjust person possibly survive the judgment of a just and holy God?

In our day, the doctrine of justification has been degraded in terms of its perceived importance. Historically, the differences among churches over how we obtain a right standing before God were considered significant; those differences have now been minimized as having no great weight. We’re living in a time of relativism, which says that there is no objective truth, and pluralism, which declares that there are many different approaches to truth and views of truth. Therefore, people assert, doctrinal issues should never divide us because what really counts are personal relationships, not doctrine. That notion is propounded even though the New Testament is replete with Apostolic concern about correct doctrine. Sadly, that’s not where the church is in this day and age, and sometimes we have to ask, Why?

Some people are in church Sunday after Sunday, are continually exposed to the preaching of the gospel, and are members of the church but have never really committed their lives to Christ. Such people, despite appearances, are under threat of the judgment of hell because they have not truly embraced the gospel of Christ. Those who reject the gospel of Christ stay in their sins and remain unjustified.

Think back to the Old Testament to David’s rhetorical question, “If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?” (Ps. 130:3). It’s rhetorical because the answer is obvious: no one. The promise of God that a day of judgment is coming—that all men will be brought into His courtroom and will be judged according to the bar of His perfect righteousness, and that those who are found wanting will be sent into the abyss of hell—is a doctrine that many in the church don’t believe anymore. If the church did believe it, it would preach it, and if it did believe it, justification would be just as much a theological issue today as it was in the sixteenth century.

If we are going to understand the upheaval that came about in the sixteenth century, we have to understand that the church at that time believed in the last judgment. The church at that time believed in the wrath of God. The church at that time believed in the justice of God. The church at that time believed in hell. That’s why the central question was, How can I be saved?

People nowadays often think of being saved in terms of relationships and dynamics in this world. We are saved from bad habits, addictions, social failure, psychological deficiency, broken relationships, and so on. We are so concerned about the relationships that we have in this world that we don’t even worry about the relationship that we have with a just and holy God. But the Christian faith ultimately is not the restoration of human relationships; the Christian faith at its root has to do with the repair of our relationship to God. At the center are these questions: How can a sinner escape the judgment of God? How can a sinner possibly be accepted in God’s judgment?

Something about the Reformation may come as a surprise to many Protestants. The Roman Catholic Church, in the sixteenth century just as now, believed that justification is by faith, by grace, and by Christ. Three of the issues that are captured in the essence of Protestant thinking are sola fide, by faith alone; sola gratia, by grace alone; and solus Christus, through Christ alone. Because of these solas, many Protestants think that the Roman Catholic Church did not believe in justification by faith or in justification by grace or in justification by Christ—but that’s simply not true.

Very early, the church had to combat the heresy of Pelagius, an Irish monk who challenged Augustine of Hippo and taught that people can be saved without grace and that people can achieve lives of perfect righteousness without any assistance from God. According to Pelagius, people don’t need grace and they don’t need the help of Christ; he said that grace and Christ facilitate salvation—that is, they assist in the process—but that they’re not absolutely necessary because we have it in our own power to live lives of perfect righteousness.

We must understand that the Roman Catholic Church has roundly condemned Pelagianism, time and time again. The Roman Catholic Church emphatically does not believe that people can be saved by their own righteousness without any help from God. Rather, the Roman Catholic Church teaches that faith is a prerequisite and does three things for justification. First, faith is what Rome calls the initium—that is, the initiation or the beginning of justification. Second, faith is the fundamentum or the foundation of justification. Finally, faith is the radix or the root of justification. To say that the Roman Catholic Church doesn’t believe that faith is necessary for salvation is simply slanderous.

Further, the Roman Catholic Church has always taught that grace is necessary as a prerequisite for justification and that without the grace of God infused into the soul through the sacraments, we’d be without hope, having to try to earn our way into heaven on the ground and basis of our own righteousness and our own merit. Finally, the Roman Catholic Church affirms the necessity of the atonement of Christ and of the work of Christ to help us in our justification.

Rome believes that justification is by faith, by grace, and by Christ. But Rome does not believe that justification is by faith alone or by grace alone or by Christ alone. Rather, justification involves other elements. In the Roman Catholic view, faith plus works gives us justification; grace* plus* merit gives us justification; Christ plus our inherent righteousness gives us justification. The Reformers strenuously objected to these teachings, saying that our works do not count toward our justification, that we have no merit of our own of any kind that we bring before God. As the hymn writer Augustus Toplady wrote in “Rock of Ages,” “Nothing in my hand I bring, simply to thy cross I cling.”

According to the Roman Catholic Church, justification begins with baptism. Baptism is called the instrumental cause of justification. We earlier mentioned the distinctions that Aristotle made between different types of causes, and to illustrate these distinctions he talked about sculpting a statue. The material cause of the statue is the stone out of which the statue is made. The efficient cause is the sculptor. The instrumental cause is the chisel and the hammer, the tools that the sculptor uses. According to the Roman Catholic Church, the tool or instrument that God uses to bring justification to sinners is baptism. The person who is baptized receives an infusion of justifying grace, or the grace of the righteousness of Christ. That is, in baptism, something happens inwardly—the soul is infused with divine grace. If the person who is baptized cooperates with that infused or poured-in grace in baptism and assents to it, then he is in a state of justification.

In the Roman Catholic system, justification does not necessarily endure forever, however. A baptized and justified person will remain in the state of justification until or unless he commits a mortal sin. A mortal sin is so called because it kills the grace that is poured into the soul at baptism. The person who commits a mortal sin must then be justified again—but not through baptism. Justification is restored through the sacrament of penance. This sacrament is defined by the Roman Catholic Church as the second plank of justification for those who have made shipwreck of their souls. The first plank is baptism, and the second plank is penance.

According to the Roman Catholic Church, then, justification is acquired instrumentally through the sacraments. The Reformers responded that the instrumental cause of our justification is not baptism or penance; it is faith in Christ. Faith and faith alone is the tool or instrument that links us to Christ and all that He has done for us and by which we are made just in the sight of God. ¹

Pastors are often asked about how to encourage men to be more involved in the life of the church. For a variety of reasons, the perception among men is that the church is not a place for doing manly things. Unless men take active leadership roles, the involvement of men in the church is often limited to attending a single service on Sunday. The absence of male service in the church is detrimental to the progress and health of the entire body. Perhaps the proverbial question, “Adam, where are you?” continues to be asked most often regarding men serving in the kingdom of God.

There appears to be a significant disconnect for men between certain activities that provide a sense of purpose and accomplishment—such as work, sports, and other recreational activities—and active service the church. Great encouragement is needed for men to view serving in the church as a critical component of their calling in this life. Such service is not merely personally fulfilling, but it builds up and strengthens the entire body of Christ. There is nothing more Christlike than a man laying down his life for his friends. This, according to Jesus, is true greatness.

There are many ways to encourage men to serve in the church. Sometimes, however, we think too highly about this question. It’s always important to begin with those things that seem insignificant to us. One does not have to be an ordained office bearer to do great works among us. In a word: Think smaller. It is in the little things that great things are achieved, even if it is taking a cup of cold water to someone in need. With these things in mind, what follows are five simple encouragements for men regarding how they might serve well in the local church.

1. Pursue growth in the Scriptures.

First and most important is the personal growth of the man himself. A great servant is not created by merely doing. It begins with the mind and the heart. A servant is formed, not coerced by guilt. The mind must be renewed by understanding the love of Christ for us, then our love for others becomes properly motivated. Becoming a servant happens by pursuing growth in the Scriptures. Yes, this requires heartfelt attendance to the means of grace in worship on Sunday. This is a top priority. But it also requires the weekly pursuit of our own development spiritually toward the end of helping others grow in the faith. Active involvement in Bible studies and other groups centered around the Word and prayer will help shape us to have the mind of Christ. Growing together with other men in study is an equipping type of service in the body that will result in cultivating fellowship, making us effective in serving the needs of others. Make use of these opportunities for growth.

2. Pursue the qualities of an office bearer.

Most men reading this article may feel unequipped or uncalled to ordained service in the church. The result is that men think they do not have the gifts for this high calling and so service in the body is often left to ordained men. This is certainly a wrong view of the basic calling of the Christian man. While the requirements for office bearers are described in passages such as 1 Timothy 3, this does not mean that these qualities should only be pursued by ordained men. All men should think about the use of these gifts even if they do not serve in an official capacity. In general, men ought to aspire to practice them. Opportunities abound such as reading the Scriptures to encourage the afflicted, visiting the sick, helping those in need, and praying for the body. Recognizing that these duties belong to all men is an important first step, then knowing the body and serving them is what follows.

3. Help the widow and orphan.

That our Lord loves the needy among us and values helping them should be a great encouragement toward this pursuit. In any given congregation there may be widows or a variety of those in need. Asking a widow about work needed around her home, or encouraging a distressed young person, or providing help to a sick person, all are opportunities for men to serve. A father and a son together, for instance, serving a person in need in the congregation is the kind of pure and undefiled religion the Lord loves (James 1:27).

4. Mentor a young man in the faith.

This is a great need but often a neglected practice in the church. The Scriptures exhort men to be good examples in the faith, especially to the next generation. In our days of youth crisis, one of the most helpful ways for men to serve is to shepherd an often confused and directionless new generation facing the unique challenges of life. Men who know the Lord’s deliverance and guidance in their own lives can be a great help to another young man in need.

5. Be present and engage the flock.

Too many men are disconnected from the body. Greeting the visitor on Sunday, showing interest in the lives of the saints, or making effort with other people in the church is how the fellowship of the church grows. Be involved. Pass out bulletins. Do not dash for the door. Showing interest in your brethren and serving them in the small ways made available to you promotes the growth of the whole body. Those servants who have been most effective in our lives are those who were present, interested in us, and ready to serve us. These kinds of servants make a massive difference in the life of the church.

Women are an indispensable part of service in the church. By God’s good design, men and women are equal in value and have both received gifts to build up the body of Christ:

As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace: whoever speaks, as one who speaks oracles of God; whoever serves, as one who serves by the strength that God supplies—in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. (1 Peter 4:10–11)

There is an abundance of ways women can and should exercise their God-given gifts to serve the church. Here are five:

1. Love Family (Titus 2:4)

Service in the church can’t be separated from serving our families. As women learn to love their husband and children sacrificially at home, they grow in the ability to love their fellow brothers and sisters in the church. When they exercise patience with their spouse and offer a kind word to their child, they are modeling the patience and kindness so vital for church members to exercise toward one another. When they learn to put another’s preferences above their own, they are practicing the selflessness so important for a healthy church family. To love and serve our church family well begins at home.

2. Teach What Is Good (Titus 2:3)

In accordance with sound doctrine, women are to teach other women how to live in a way that honors the Word of God (Titus 2:3–5). They can do this through teaching or writing women’s Bible studies, leading a women’s small group, mentoring a younger woman, or engaging in other discipleship opportunities. In addition to teaching women, there are also numerous opportunities to teach the children and youth of the church, whether in Sunday school, discipleship groups, or special events. Perhaps one of the greatest ways women use their gift of teaching, if they are mothers, is by instructing their own children in the Holy Scriptures (2 Tim. 1:5; 3:14–15). Many faithful mothers, like Timothy’s mother, Eunice, have raised sons and daughters who, by God’s grace, grew up to faithfully exercise their spiritual gifts to serve the church.

3. Do Acts of Mercy (Rom. 12:8)

Women are a vital part of serving in a myriad of ministries in the church, especially in mercy ministries. As Tabitha was known for doing “good works and acts of charity” (Acts 9:36), so too women in the church today are involved in serving the homeless, making meals for the sick, visiting the elderly, helping families care for children with special needs, engaging in prison ministry, and knitting blankets for crisis pregnancy centers, among other things. If women stopped doing acts of mercy, the church would quickly become anemic. Oftentimes it is the gentle and quiet spirit of a godly woman that God uses to reflect His own compassion to those in need of mercy.

4. Seek to Show Hospitality (Rom. 12:13)

We should not underestimate the importance of welcoming others into our home, especially fellow believers. As we faithfully and lovingly support those in gospel ministry, as well as those who simply need a word of encouragement or a place to rest, we will find joy in helping “fellow workers for the truth” (3 John 8). Young women need older women to invite them into their homes in order to model for them what it means to love their husband and children well or to be faithful to God as a single woman. Hospitality doesn’t always need to take place in our home. Sometimes it looks like meeting at the neighborhood park to encourage a woman while the children play together or taking a walk together with the intent to make her feel welcome in our presence as we comfort and encourage her.

5. Rejoice and Weep with Others (Rom. 12:15)

In the church, members might be experiencing great joy or deep sorrow, or more often a mixture of both. Women have the privilege of coming alongside others to share in their joy or their distress. This might mean helping organize a wedding or baby shower for those joyfully anticipating a special day. Or it might mean counseling someone, whether formally or informally, through the anguish of losing a loved one or the heartache of infertility. Regardless, to display a heart of compassion when someone is weeping or joy when someone is rejoicing is to reflect the heart of Christ Himself (Matt. 11:28–30).

Conclusion

If you are a woman in the church, be encouraged. There are a myriad of ways you can exercise your God-given gifts to serve the family of God. If you are a man in the church, encourage the women in your congregation to steward their gifts well. They are necessary to help fulfill God’s plans and purposes for the bride of Christ. By God’s good design, He has graciously given both men and women spiritual gifts “for the common good” (1 Cor. 12:7) and “for building up the body of Christ” (Eph. 4:12), so “that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 4:11).

What do the sovereignty of God, salvation by grace, justification by faith, and new life in union with Christ mean for the living of the Christian life? For Martin Luther, they carry four implications:

1. The Christian is justified and yet a sinner.

The first implication is the knowledge that the Christian believer is simul iustus et peccator, at one and the same time justified and yet a sinner. This principle, to which Luther may have been stimulated by John Tauler’s Theologia Germanica, was a hugely stabilizing principle: in and of myself, all I see is a sinner; but when I see myself in Christ, I see a man counted righteous with His perfect righteousness. Such a man is therefore able to stand before God as righteous as Jesus Christ—because he is righteous only in the righteousness that is Christ’s. Here we stand secure.

2. God has become our Father in Christ.

The second implication is the discovery that God has become our Father in Christ. We are accepted. One of the most beautiful accounts found in Luther’s Table Talk was, perhaps significantly, recorded by the somewhat melancholic, yet much loved, John Schlaginhaufen:

God must be much friendlier to me and speak to me in friendlier fashion than my Katy to little Martin. Neither Katy nor I could intentionally gouge out the eye or tear off the head of our child. Nor Could God. God must have patience with us. He has given evidence of it, and therefore he sent his Son into our flesh in order that we may look to him for the best.

3. The whole of the Christian life will be a cross-bearing.

Third, Luther emphasizes that life in Christ is necessarily life under the cross. If we are united to Christ, our lives will be patterned after His. The way for both the true church and the true Christian is not via the theology of glory (theologia gloriae) but via the theology of the cross (theologia crucis). This impacts us inwardly as we die to self and outwardly as we share in the sufferings of the church. The medieval theology of glory must be overcome by the theology of the cross. For all their differences in understanding the precise nature of the sacraments, Luther and Calvin are at one here. If we are united with Christ in His death and resurrection, and marked out thus by our baptism (as Paul teaches in Rom. 6:1–14), then the whole of the Christian life will be a cross-bearing:

The Cross of Christ doth not signify that piece of wood which Christ did bear upon his shoulders, and to the which he was afterwards nailed, but generally it signifieth all the afflictions of the faithful, whose sufferings are Christ's sufferings, 2 Cor. i.5: "The sufferings of Christ abound in us"; again: "Now rejoice I in my sufferings for you, and fulfil the rest of the afflictions of Christin my flesh, for his body's sake, which is the Church". (Col. i.24). The Cross of Christ therefore generally signifieth all the afflictions of the Church which it suffereth for Christ.

The believer’s union with Christ in His death and resurrection and its outworking in daily experience thus became, for Luther, the spectacle lenses through which the Christian learns to view every experience in life. This—the theologia crucis—is what brings everything into sharper focus and enables us to make sense of the ups and downs of the Christian life:

It is profitable for us to know these things, lest we should be swallowed up with sorrow or fall to despair when we see that our adversaries do cruelly persecute, excommunicate and kill us. But let us think with ourselves, after the example of Paul that we must glory in the cross which we bear, not for our sins, but for Christ's sake. If we consider only in ourselves the sufferings which we endure, they are not only grievous but intolerable; but when we may say: “Thy sufferings (O Christ) abound in us”; or, as it is said in Psalm xliv: “For thy sake we are killed all the day,” then these sufferings are not only easy, but also sweet, according to this saying: “My burden is easy, and my yoke is sweet” (Matt. 6:30).

4. The Christian life is marked by assurance and joy.

Fourth, the Christian life is marked by assurance and joy. This was one of the hallmarks of the Reformation, and understandably so. The Reformation’s rediscovery regarding justification—that, instead of working toward a hoped-for arrival at it, the Christian life actually begins with it—brought stunning deliverance, filling mind, will, and affections with joy. It meant that one could now begin to live in the light of a settled future in glory. Inevitably, that light reflected back into the present life, bringing intense relief and release.

For Luther, the Christian life is a gospel-grounded, gospel-built, gospel-magnifying life that exhibits the free and sovereign grace of God and is lived out in gratitude to the Savior who died for us, yoked to Him in cross-bearing until death is swallowed up in victory and faith becomes sight.

Perhaps, in 1522, as they sat listening to Luther preaching one Sunday in the church at Borna, some of his congregation wondered what lay at the heart of this gospel that had so excited, not to say transformed, Brother Martin. Could it possibly be for them too? Luther had read their minds. He had come into the pulpit well prepared to answer their question:

But what is the Gospel? It is this, that God has sent his Son into the world to save sinners, Jn. 3, 16, and to crush hell, overcome death, take away sin and satisfy the law. But what must you do? Nothing but accept this and look up to your Redeemer and firmly believe that he has done all this for your good and freely gives you all as your own, so that in the terrors of death, sin and hell, you can confidently say and boldly depend upon it, and say: Although I do not fulfil the law, although sin is still present and I fear death and hell, nevertheless from the Gospel I know that Christ has bestowed on me all his works. I am sure he will not lie, his promise he will surely fulfil. And as a sign of this I have received baptism.
Upon this I anchor my confidence. For I know that my Lord Christ has overcome death, sin, hell and the devil for my good. For he was innocent, as Peter says: "Who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth." 1 Pet. 2, 22. Therefore sin and death were not able to slay him, hell could not hold him, and he has become their Lord, and has granted this to all who accept and believe it. All this is effected not by my works or merits; but by pure grace, goodness and mercy.

Luther once said, “If I could believe that God was not angry at me, I would stand on my head for joy.” Perhaps that very day some of those who heard him preach responded and experienced the “confidence” of which he spoke. Who knows but some of the younger hearers later wrote to their friends in turn and told them that they had gone home and stood on their heads for joy?¹

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Martin Luther faced a major crisis in 1515. Luther was by then a doctor of the church and was teaching theology and biblical studies at the University of Wittenberg. He had recently finished a series of lectures on the book of Psalms and was about to begin a series on Paul’s letter to the Romans. While he was preparing for those lectures, he studied the verse in which Paul, introducing the theme of justification, said, “For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, ‘The righteous shall live by faith’” (Rom. 1:17). Luther naturally assumed that when it spoke about the righteousness of God, it was referring to God’s own intrinsic, inherent righteousness. This was the thing Luther feared most in all the world, because he knew that he was not righteous and God was. He couldn’t see much good news in a gospel that reveals the righteousness of God to people who aren’t righteous.

During the course of his preparations, Luther read some works by the patron of his order, Augustine of Hippo. On Paul’s use of “the righteousness of God,” Augustine wrote:

He does not say, the righteousness of man, or the righteousness of his own will, but the “righteousness of God,”—not that whereby He is Himself righteous, but that with which He endows man when He justifies the ungodly.¹

Luther said that, as he understood this insight from Augustine, light flooded his soul: “Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise.”² He had a profound existential experience where the burden of his unresolved guilt rolled off his back, and he realized that the only way he could stand before a just and holy God was to be cloaked in the righteousness of Christ, which Luther couldn’t beg, borrow, steal, deserve, or earn, but could only humbly receive.

When you look at the Reformation, there is a sense in which Martin Luther stood contra mundum—against the world. A man has to be unbelievably insubordinate, arrogant, or crazy to defy all of the authorities that Luther defied and refuse to budge from his position. Certainly, Luther was a stubborn man, but even the most stubborn of men ought to have been worn down by the relentless critique that he received from the authorities. Why wouldn’t he back down? He had fought too hard and long to gain peace with God to surrender to anyone. It was in that experience in his study that his conviction of justification by faith alone was awakened, and when he came to the rest of Romans after that insight from Augustine, the clarity of Paul’s teaching on the doctrine steeled Luther such that he wouldn’t negotiate it with anyone for any earthly reason.

I don’t think Martin Luther was crazy. I think he was perhaps the most honest Christian who ever lived after the first century. He understood something about the character of God, the righteousness of God, and the justness of God—and the more we understand how righteous God is, the less we can deceive ourselves about our lack of righteousness. We tend to evaluate ourselves by our own standard, hoping that God will grade us all on a curve. If we think He can find someone who’s more wicked than we are, we take solace or refuge in that, and we don’t focus on the standard by which we are to be judged.

But Luther saw that God’s standard is not a sliding scale; it is His own perfect righteousness. It was at that moment that Luther realized that the only righteousness that could ever save him could not come from himself; it had to come from God. At that moment, the seeds of the Reformation germinated.

There have been times in my life where I have been afflicted by melancholy. Particularly as a young student and a budding theologian, I used to find myself feeling depressed about things and discouraged. When I found myself in such a place, I would turn to Luther—not because I was looking for theological insights that I couldn’t find somewhere else, but because I could identify with him. He was so earthy. He had to fight these things all the time. He talked about having an ongoing, endless struggle with Satan himself where Satan would come at him with what Luther called an Anfechtung—an unbridled assault against him to take away his joy, his peace, and his comfort. Luther said that at such times he would rush to the gospel and rest upon it in order to refresh his understanding of the peace with God that was his in Christ. Luther embodied the struggle of every Christian to have peace with God, and in his victory we too can see the path to hope that is found in Christ.

In 2015, while traveling to Germany for the Frankfurt Book Fair, I took the opportunity to visit Strasbourg to trace the steps of a nearly forgotten giant of the Reformation. I first stopped on Rue Martin Bucer, where Saint Aurelia’s Church still stands—the first congregation that Martin Bucer pastored in that city. Then, walking through the cobblestone streets of this historic place where Johannes Gutenberg first imagined his printing press and where a statue still honors his legacy, I made my way to the imposing Church of St. Thomas.

Inside the austere sixteenth-century architecture—a striking blend of ninth-century Romanesque, thirteenth-century Gothic, and Baroque elements—two things stand out. One is the grand eighteenth-century organ once played by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The other, more modest yet more enduring, is a bust honoring Martin Bucer, the Reformer of Alsace. I was transported to the turbulent sixteenth century, to the time when Bucer became the pastoral heart of the Reformation. He was mentor to John Calvin and Thomas Cranmer, peacemaker among fractured Reformers, and above all, a shepherd of souls.

Standing there, one realizes that the Reformation was not sustained by theologians alone but by pastors. Few embodied that pastoral heart more clearly than Martin Bucer. But who was this man? And why should we remember him?

The Reformer You’ve Never Heard Of

“In memory of Martin Bucer, professor of holy Theology.” This simple metal plaque in St. Mary’s Church, Cambridge, placed there by Queen Elizabeth I in 1560, marks the final resting place of perhaps the Reformation’s most influential forgotten figure.

Martin Bucer exercised profound influence on John Calvin. He corresponded with Martin Luther, collaborated with Philip Melanchthon, debated with Huldrych Zwingli, and worked alongside Thomas Cranmer to shape the Book of Common Prayer. He produced at least ninety-six treatises, a complete Psalms commentary, and groundbreaking works on public theology (De Regno Christi) and pastoral ministry.

Yet today, his name barely registers.

Why? Perhaps because Bucer was never interested in building his own legacy. He spent his life taking on the challenge of uniting the different parties of the incipient Protestant movement.

From Monk to Reformer

Born in 1491 in Sélestat, France, Martin Bucer seemed destined for an ordinary life. The son of wine barrel producers, he entered the Dominican order at fifteen under pressure from his grandfather. By 1516, he was an ordained priest and expert in Thomistic scholasticism.

Then came 1518.

As a theology student in Heidelberg, Bucer heard an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther speak on the “theology of the cross,” one year after the fixing of the Ninety-Five Theses on the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg.

Luther’s discourse shattered Bucer’s scholastic certainties. He devoured Luther’s writings. Within three years, he obtained release from his monastic vows, and in 1522, he married a former nun and joined the Reformed cause.

But Wittenberg wasn’t in his future. On his way to study with Luther, Bucer stopped in Wissembourg and began preaching, and his Reformed preaching challenged the monastic system. The result? Excommunication and flight.

In 1523, he arrived in Strasbourg as a refugee. There he would serve for twenty-five years.

Forged as a Pastor in Strasbourg

Strasbourg welcomed him. On August 24, 1523, Bucer became pastor of Saint Aurelia’s Church, the very church I visited centuries later. In 1531, he moved to St. Thomas, where he would serve until the 1540s.

But Bucer’s vision extended far beyond his congregation. He dreamed of a united Reformed movement—Swiss, French, German, and English believers united under one confession of faith.

To pursue this seemingly impossible dream, he (1) attended the Colloquy of Marburg (1529), attempting to reconcile Luther and Zwingli on the Lord’s Supper, (2) helped draft the Confessio Tetrapolitana (1530) as an alternative to the Augsburg Confession for southern German Reformed cities, and (3) played a key role in the First Helvetic Confession (1536) to harmonize Swiss and German teaching.

In 1537, Bucer did something almost unheard of for sixteenth-century theologians: He published Retractationes, publicly acknowledging and correcting errors in his earlier positions on the Lord’s Supper. This humility unsettled some but revealed his character. Truth mattered more than reputation.

Luther encouraged him to press on.

Mentoring Calvin

In 1538, a dejected young Reformer named John Calvin was exiled from Geneva and arrived in Strasbourg. Bucer took him in.

For three years—which Calvin later called the happiest of his life—the young Frenchman lived under Bucer’s mentorship. In Strasbourg, Calvin wrote his Romans commentary, revised his Institutes, met his wife Idelette, and pastored French refugees.

Calvin’s assessment of his mentor?

Martin Bucer is a man who, on account of his profound erudition, his abundant knowledge of a wide range of subjects, his keen mind, his vast reading, and many other varied virtues, remains today unsurpassed by anyone, can be compared to only a few, and stands out from the great majority.

The towering John Calvin saw himself as Bucer’s student. What Calvin admired most was not merely Bucer’s intellect, but his pastoral wisdom.

But what made Bucer so exceptional wasn’t just his theological acumen; it was his pastoral heart.

The Heart of a Shepherd: Five Tasks of Soul Care

Of Bucer’s many writings, his work On True Soul Care (Von der wahren Seelsorge, 1538) best reveals what drove him. In it, he outlined five essential tasks for those who shepherd God’s people:

1. Evangelization: Lead to Christ and communion with Him those who do not yet know Him—whether trapped in the sins of the flesh or bound by false worship.
2. Restoration: Recover those who were brought to Christ and His church but were led astray by the flesh or false doctrine.
3. Discipline: Assist and guide to true reform those who, though still in Christ’s church, have fallen gravely into sin.
4. Edification: Restore to true Christian strength and health those who have persevered in communion with Christ but have become spiritually weak and frail.
5. Encouragement: Protect from all offense and continually encourage in all good things those who remain faithful in Christ’s flock.

This wasn’t mere theory. Bucer lived these principles in Strasbourg: He pressed civil councils to implement moral discipline, he created accessible catechetical schools, he organized godly elders to actively oversee the congregation’s spiritual life, and he argued that the church should be a living communion of regenerate believers who edify one another. The Ziegenhain Ordinance (1539), which he drafted, became a model of Reformed church discipline across Europe.

For Bucer, the communion of saints wasn’t an abstract doctrine. It was Christ’s kingdom made visible through the faithful care of souls.

Exile, Again

In 1541, Bucer’s wife died. He remarried the following year. But in 1549, the land that had sheltered him for twenty-five years turned against him. Political shifts forced him to surrender his positions and leave Strasbourg. At fifty-eight, Martin Bucer became a refugee again.

He went to England, where he served as professor of theology at Cambridge and assisted Thomas Cranmer with the Book of Common Prayer. His Censura contained some sixty proposals for Anglican liturgy, over twenty of which were adopted in the 1552 edition, particularly regarding the Lord’s Supper and church discipline.

On February 28, 1551, Martin Bucer died in Cambridge at age fifty-nine, far from his homeland. Queen Elizabeth I honored him with a memorial plaque. But his true memorial wasn’t bronze or stone—it was the souls he shepherded, the ministers he mentored (especially Calvin), and the theological foundations he laid for Reformed pastoral ministry.

Why Bucer Matters Today

Standing before his bust in Strasbourg, I realized I wasn’t just visiting a monument to history. I was encountering a challenge: Will we recover the true care of souls?

Bucer’s five tasks of soul care remain searingly relevant:

• Are we evangelizing those who don’t know Christ, or merely maintaining religious institutions?
• Are we restoring the wayward with patience and truth, or writing them off?
• Are we practicing discipline that reforms and heals, or turning a blind eye to sin?
• Are we building up the weak and weary, or assuming spiritual strength is their problem?
• Are we encouraging the faithful to press on, or taking their perseverance for granted?

Bucer understood something we often forget: Caring for souls requires doctrinal zeal, personal presence, and community structure working together. Truth without love crushes. Love without truth coddles. Community without doctrine drifts.

Thinking about our own times, in an age still marked by division, superficiality, and fragmentation, Bucer’s legacy remains urgent: a church rooted in truth; united in confession; structured for discipline; devoted to the patient, comprehensive care of Christ’s flock.

That is the true care of souls.¹

The Apostle Paul uses the imagery of a building and a body to illustrate the network of leadership and service in Christ’s church. The building is the new temple indwelt by God’s Spirit (Eph. 2:19–22)—not a static structure of stone and wood, but a dynamic community of people, made alive by their union with Christ, the life-giving stone (1 Peter 2:4–5). Consequently, alongside the picture of the church as building, Paul employs the body image to illustrate the church’s organic and interdependent life (1 Cor. 12:12–31). These images—body and building—together portray the interconnected framework of leadership and service that sustains the church’s life and mission in the world.

Today we are familiar with “body builders” who flex muscles and lift weights. Almost two millennia ago, Paul strikingly merged organic (body) and architectural (building) pictures, in order to reveal the link between leadership and ministry:

[Christ] gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. . . . Speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love. (Eph. 4:11–16)

Paul starts by listing five (or maybe four) groups of leaders: Apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers (or “pastors who are teachers”). These leaders communicate God’s Word to others. Apostles and prophets received special revelation by God’s Spirit and conveyed God’s very words to others, first in preaching and then in the written Scriptures. Because “the mystery of Christ . . . has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets” (Eph. 3:4–5), Apostles and prophets are the foundation of the church’s faith, for their writings testify to Christ Jesus, “the cornerstone” (Eph. 2:20). Subsequently, evangelists, pastors, and teachers now build on that foundation by explaining and applying the Bible’s timeless truths, both to unbelievers (evangelists) and to believers (pastors, teachers).

In other letters, Paul speaks of overseers (also called elders) and deacons (Phil. 1:1). Because these leadership positions involve responsibility for others and accountability to the Lord, they require noteworthy spiritual maturity. Men with good reputations as “full of the Spirit and of wisdom” were called by the church to oversee ministries of mercy (Acts 6:1–7). Likewise, Paul lists qualifications—focusing mainly on character—both for overseers/elders, who shepherd saints spiritually, and for deacons, who care for their material needs (1 Tim. 3:1–13; Titus 1:5–9; see also 1 Peter 5:1–4).

Some elders are gifted and called to “labor in preaching and teaching” (1 Tim. 5:17), so “teacher” fits their role well. But all elders must be “able to teach,” to speak the word of God (1 Tim. 3:2; Titus 1:9; Heb. 13:7), since it is by applying Scripture that they protect the flock and “care for the church of God” (Acts 20:28). Churches publicly acknowledge God’s call and gifting by ordaining these leaders, laying hands on them with prayer (Acts 6:6; 1 Tim. 4:14; 5:22).

In Ephesians 4, as we have seen, Paul begins with the leaders whom Christ gives to His church. But then he introduces the ministries of all believers, of every member of the body: “the whole body, joined and held together by every joint . . . when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love” (Eph. 4:16, emphasis added). In contrast to the medieval church, which generally viewed ordinary (lay) Christians as passive recipients of grace mediated through popes, bishops, and priests, the New Testament teaches that all believers belong to “a holy priesthood,” so we all offer spiritual sacrifices to God (1 Peter 2:5) and function as arteries to convey His grace to other members of the body.

How does this life-sustaining, growth-producing “circulatory system of grace” work? Leaders who teach the Word (today, pastors and elders) are “to equip the saints for the work of ministry.” Then, as the saints are equipped and serve each other, the result is “building up the body of Christ” (Eph. 4:12). God’s design is not for pastors, elders, and deacons to do all the work of the church while “ordinary” members sit passively in pews, absorbing but never exercising the capacities to care for others that God’s Spirit conferred when “grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift” (Eph. 4:7, emphasis added).

This interdependent ministry of all church members, from those with high visibility to those often unnoticed, is the subject of Paul’s deepest exploration of the church as the body of Christ (1 Cor. 12). His key points are as follows:

• The one Holy Spirit draws all believers—despite our diverse backgrounds—into one body (1 Cor. 12:12–13).
• This one Spirit gives us a variety of gifts, so we can use those abilities “for the common good” (1 Cor. 12:4–7).
• Believers with low-visibility gifts must appreciate how indispensable they are to the health of the whole body (1 Cor. 12:14–19).
• Believers with high-visibility ministries need to know how much they need what often-overlooked fellow Christians can supply (1 Cor. 12:21–26).

Recognized (ordained) leaders—pastors, teachers, elders, deacons—set the pace in teaching the Word, discipling the immature, and extending mercy to those in need. And by setting the pace, leaders motivate, recruit, train, and deploy all the members of the body, each with his or her own gifting from God’s Spirit, to engage in ministries of speaking, of discipling, and of mercy (1 Peter 4:10–11). Here are two examples:

1. In Jerusalem, the Apostles ordained seven men to minister mercy, so that widows would not go hungry (Acts 6:1–7). Later in Joppa, a disciple named Tabitha was “full of good works,” clothing widows through her skills as a seamstress (Acts 9:36–39). Deacons organized and motivated by example, while others who had no special office displayed the reality of their faith by caring for “orphans and widows in their affliction” (James 1:27; see Acts 4:32–35; 1 John 3:16–18).

2. Writing to the Colossians, Paul described his distinctive calling as an Apostle, authorized to preach God’s Word: “[Christ] we proclaim, admonishing everyone and teaching everyone in all wisdom” (Col. 1:28, author’s translation, emphasis added). Later, using the same words, he directed all the Christians in Colossae: “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, in all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another” (Col. 3:16, author’s translation, emphasis added).¹ Paul proclaimed Christ, admonishing and teaching others in all wisdom, so that they in turn could teach and admonish each other. The Apostle had equipped the saints for their work of service.

When both leaders and other members of the body together take to heart the countercultural example and instruction of Jesus, their Lord who came to serve (Mark 10:42–45), their synergy deepens the church’s beautiful unity and fuels its growth.

To understand the Reformation and its lasting influence, we have to imagine a very different world from our own. For one thing, the choices we enjoy in the twenty-first-century West were nonexistent. Life was controlled by financial constraints, geography, ignorance, and family ties. And then there was the church. The freedom to choose one’s own church was unheard of because before the mid 1500s, the Roman Catholic Church was the dominant religious force. In fact, in many parts of the world, it was essentially illegal to be anything but Roman Catholic or to read anything that didn’t agree with Roman Catholic teaching. Rome insisted that it alone could interpret and explain the Bible.

Over many centuries, the Roman Catholic Church also added teachings by way of tradition that weren’t in the Bible. One example was their teaching on purgatory, a place where departed souls, even the devout, spent countless years being refined by fire from residual sin committed during their lives. However, living relatives and friends of the departed could buy indulgences, which purportedly reduced the time the person spent in purgatory. So, if your mother had just died and was suffering agony in purgatory, you could buy an early release for her by dropping some coins into a box (or so they promised). This placed enormous emotional pressure on families, most of whom were poor and couldn’t afford indulgences. And of course, the whole idea was fictional.

These and other abuses were occurring throughout Europe until a German monk named Martin Luther dared to question the church’s teaching and practice. He decided to stand up to the forces of Rome by calling the authorities out and challenging their right to ask for indulgences. He did this by nailing ninety-five arguments to the door of his local Castle Church in Wittenberg. We might say his posting went viral, and it produced a major backlash. But by then, the spark had been lit. To many of the common people, Luther was a hero who had articulated everything they wanted to say but felt they couldn’t.

Luther’s revolt extended beyond indulgences and paved the way for the creation of what we now know as the Protestant movement, which spread all over Europe. It was characterized by three important features that differed from Roman Catholicism.

1. There was a rediscovery of the Bible as the final authority by which God could be known.

Luther quickly set about translating the Bible into the ordinary German language. With the invention of the printing press, Bibles quickly became available for common people to read. Protestants not only encouraged the reading of Scripture in their own languages but also taught that Scripture was its own interpreter, without the need for the Roman Catholic Church to dictate what it meant.

2. There was a rediscovery of what a simple faith meant.

The Roman Catholic Church taught that the only hope after death was the shortest possible time in purgatory. This could be achieved only if you obeyed their practices as devoutly as possible. Martin Luther, who started off as a monk, became deeply troubled by his continuous attempts to win God’s salvation by his own good works. But while reading the letter to the Romans, he was suddenly struck by the simplicity of the statement, “The just will live by faith” (Rom. 1:17). It dawned on him that, due to his sin, his salvation was never going to happen by keeping the church’s laws or by his attempts to keep God’s laws. Rather, God was offering forgiveness and peace as a gift to be received by faith alone in His Son who had died on the cross for his sins.

3. The Reformation brought about a return to simple Communion.

The Roman Catholic Church practiced the Mass, a ceremony in which the wafer was believed to be changed (or transubstantiated) into the body of Jesus. The Protestant movement rediscovered the simplicity of eating bread and drinking wine as pointing to the body and blood of Jesus. While there were varying views of how Christ is present in the Lord’s Supper among Protestants, they all rejected the view that the bread and wine substantially become the body and blood of Christ.

In rejecting the additional trappings of the Roman Catholic Church, the Reformers were not suggesting a free-for-all. On the contrary, they believed that the church was the context in which God’s Word was preached and people gathered for worship. But instead of church being a spectator event, in which ordinary people had to sit and watch priests and listen to choirs, they could now take part—by singing, listening to the Scriptures preached, and receiving the Lord’s Supper. Now, the Bible was being understood because preachers were allowing it to speak for itself. The people who were terrified beforehand of the prospect of thousands of years in purgatory were introduced to the gospel, where they could find instant forgiveness and assured peace with God.

In many of our churches today, we enjoy the simplicity of biblical worship, a Christ-centered gospel, and uncomplicated sacraments. These precious and simple blessings we often take for granted were not always accessible. They are a consequence of the courage of men like Martin Luther who found the joy of forgiveness not in the church’s impossible dictates, but by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, within the Bible alone, to the glory of God alone.¹

My grandparents were legally permitted to leave communist Russia in the 1930s, in an era when borders were sealed. Almost no one escaped Russia at that time. Humanly speaking, my father should have lived and died in Russia, probably without hearing the gospel. He should not have met my mother in America, and—if there were no God—neither I nor my children would have been born.

But God does exist, and Romans 8 and 9 describe His sovereign governance over all things. Specifically, since all men are sinners and none can redeem themselves, Romans 9 teaches that God graciously chose to redeem many, but not all, members of a rebellious race. Romans 9 develops this through comments on Israel’s history.

In Romans 9, Paul says that Israel is responsible for its persistent unbelief, since God gave them His covenants, laws, and promises. Many belonged to the nation of Israel but had no part in the real Israel (Rom. 9:6). And all humanity is in a position that is like Israel’s. We have enough knowledge of God and of right and wrong, but “no one does good” (Rom. 2:14–15, 3:10–23). All are sinners and all deserve condemnation, yet God graciously chooses to redeem many.

Romans 9:10–12 says that God’s choice of Jacob but not Esau is a striking case of divine election because the boys were twins and neither had a proper interest in the covenant at first:

When Rebekah had conceived children by one man, our forefather Isaac, though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad—in order that God’s purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of him who calls—she was told, “The older will serve the younger.” (Rom. 9:10–12)

Before the twins had done “good or bad,” God chose Jacob. Jacob was not morally or spiritually superior to Esau. Esau was violent and impulsive; Jacob was deceptive and scheming. Jacob defrauded his brother, deceived his father, tried to exploit his uncle, and showed superficial interest in God’s covenant. In Genesis 28, after Jacob tricked Esau, Esau swore to kill him, and Jacob fled. As he ran, God spoke to him in a dream and promised him land, descendants, and safety, adding “I . . . will keep you wherever you go” (Gen. 28:15). Jacob’s response was guarded and conditional: Notice his use of the word if. He said, “If God will be with me and will keep me . . . so that I come again to my father’s house, in peace, then the Lord shall be my God” (Gen. 28:20–21, emphasis added). Jacob promises loyalty to God if He delivers for Jacob first.

Esau was no better. He had strong appetites for food and pagan women and no interest in spiritual things. When he came home tired and hungry from a long day hunting, he traded his birthright for a bowl of stew. He “despised his birthright” (Gen. 25:29–34; 27:46).

Jacob especially wanted the material aspect of his father’s blessing. Jacob later changed when God wrestled with him. When he grappled with God face to face, he truly sought the Lord, saying, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” He did this, even though he knew he might die, because he now preferred to die than to live without God’s blessing (Gen. 32:22–30).

God’s “purpose of election” remained firm (Rom. 9:11) not because Jacob was ethical or sought God, but because God pursued Jacob. The Lord called Jacob and saw His call to its conclusion, not “because of works” by Jacob. The older son, Esau, served the younger, Jacob, as God decreed (Rom. 9:12).
Neither Jacob nor Esau deserved to receive their father’s blessing or God’s favor. But God gave Esau up to his sins (Rom. 1:24–28), and He chose Jacob and made promises to him. People sometimes say that God is unjust to give grace to Jacob but not Esau. Paul replies: “Is there injustice on God’s part? By no means!” God says, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion” (Rom. 9:14–15).

Some think that justice means everyone must be treated the same way. They think God is just if He distributes the same gifts to everyone. Clearly, God doesn’t do that. But in Scripture, God’s justice describes His character—He is always just and fair. This shines forth perfectly on judgment day. On that day, “we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil” (2 Cor. 5:10; Matt. 16:27). Alas, all will be ripe for judgment, but on that day, God will give His chosen people—all who believe in Him—better than they deserve. He will bestow mercy on them (see Rom. 9:16).

The proper response is not to ask, “Am I elect or not?” Let us think, “Since I have heard the gospel and He assured me of His mercy in Christ, I should call on Him” (Rom. 10). We have no right to demand that He grant the same mercy to all. On what basis would we demand mercy? And if we demand justice, all will be condemned, because none is righteous (Rom. 3:10).

So, the Lord never gives anyone less than they deserve, but He often gives more. Imagine that a lender had many debtors who could not repay. He wished to be gracious, so he canceled the debts of some. When he announced his decision, those still in debt cried, “That’s not fair.” But one replied, “No, he has treated no one unfairly. He asks of us only what we owe. Can we complain if he is generous to others?” Similarly, the Lord gives justice to many, and that is fair, but He is more than fair to those whom He predestined, called, and justified (Rom. 8:29–30).

The English word church comes from the Greek word kyriakē, which is a form of the noun kyriakos and means, that which is owned or possessed by the kyrios. So then, what does kyrios mean? This is an important word in the New Testament because it is the Greek word for “Lord” and it is the New Testament word that translates the Old Testament covenant name for God—Yahweh—and the Hebrew title adonai. When the psalmist says, “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” (Ps. 8:1), he is saying, “Oh Yahweh, our Adonai, how excellent is thy name in all the earth.” When the Greek translation of the Old Testament rendered the term Adonai, which means “the sovereign one,” it rendered it by the word kyrios.

Kyrios is used in three different ways in the New Testament. In a simple way, the term kyrios is the polite form of address corresponding somewhat to our word sir or mister. But the highest and most exalted use of the term kyrios is what we call the imperial usage of it, and that is the title that ascribes absolute sovereignty to the one who is kyrios. Paul used this form of the word in Philippians 2:10–11 when he writes “that every knee will bow and tongue confess that Jesus is kyrios,” that is, “Lord.”

As important as that title is for Christ in the New Testament, I want to look at how it relates to our understanding of the church. Another meaning of the word kyrios refers to a man in ancient Greek culture who was wealthy enough to own slaves. The slave owner was called a kyrios and those who were slaves of a kyrios were purchased by the kyrios.

I stress that for this reason: kyriakē is the etymological foundation of the word church. In its original meaning, the church referred to people who were owned by a kyrios, who were owned and possessed by a lord. In the New Testament, we find this imagery frequently used with respect to the relationship between believers—individually and corporately—and Christ. Paul, for example, calls himself a doulos, or slave. He uses this metaphor of one who has been purchased. He applies it not only to himself but also to all of the people of God when he says, “You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body”(1 Cor. 6:19–20). We are God’s possession because He has redeemed us.

The New Testament speaks frequently about Christians as being people who are in Christ Jesus. When evangelism takes place, the call to people is not simply to believe in Jesus but to believe into Him. The Greek word there is eis, which means “into.” Eis and its meaning can be illustrated thus: if I’m outside the city, I have to first move into the city through the city gates before I can be inside the city. That’s the idea that we have in the New Testament when we are called to believe into Christ. And when we do have authentic faith, we are in Christ Jesus, and He is in us. This is the mystical union of the believer and Christ.

Now if I have a mystical union with Christ and you have a mystical union with Christ, that means we have a particular communion, a co-fellowship in Christ. This has all kinds of practical ramifications in the New Testament. For example, Paul tells us that the spirit by which we are to relate to one another in the church is the spirit of charity that covers a multitude of sins. Furthermore, we are called to respect one another’s Christian liberty in the Lord. We are to refrain from harsh judgments of each other. We are always to remember that we are relating to people who have been purchased by Christ.

In order to exhibit that kind of attitude toward the people of God and towards the church as an institution, we have to look past the individuals who are plaguing us and who are thorns in our side and look to the One whose church it is. If I am a member of a group of servants and I have conflict with the servants, that conflict must never cause me to speak against the owner of the servants. We are all servants under one Lord.

The hardest and most radical command of Jesus is the command to love our enemies. I can’t think of anything more unnatural. If someone is our enemy, the last thing we want to do is promote his welfare and to do good to him. And yet, our Lord said that this is our duty. We must do good to those who spitefully use us and who persecute us. We need to hear this over and over again because to pray for the well-being of those who are at enmity against us is foreign to our basic human nature. And yet, we have the supreme example of Jesus, who laid down His life for the very people who despised Him even unto death. I don’t think that we can love our enemies by nature. The only way we can possibly hope to do it is by grace and by looking beyond the enemy to Christ. We are to love our enemies for Christ’s sake.

Though fellow Christians cannot ultimately be our enemies, we can still apply Jesus’ teaching to church life. If we are to love our enemies, how much more are we to love everyone in the body of Christ?

The question of whether we have free will has been debated by Christians for two millennia. But what does the Bible say? Can we find any help in God’s Word to answer how we can freely choose our actions and be responsible for them? Many Christians, sometimes known as free-will theists (including Arminians), have answered this question one way, embracing what is called libertarian free will. Other Christians associated with Reformed theology (Calvinists) have answered the question another way, embracing what is called compatibilism.

Proponents of libertarian free will believe that for any choice to be truly free, it must not be constrained by any outside causal forces. God and other sources can influence our choices, but they cannot decisively determine the outcome of our choices. Furthermore, libertarian free will affirms that we have the power of contrary choice. Suppose you drive your car to a T-intersection and choose to turn right. However, if the clock could be rolled back and the conditions were the same, you could have equally chosen to turn left.

Proponents of libertarian free will believe this model of human freedom allows for moral responsibility and the opportunity for meaningful relationships. For example, some argue that if God determines our love for Him, then our freedom would be constrained and our choices coerced, taking away our moral responsibility. We must possess the ability to freely love God or reject loving God. Free-will theists believe this model of human freedom is assumed by the Bible, citing the “whosoever” passages such as John 3:16. At first glance, these passages seem to support libertarian free will, but this view faces insurmountable problems.

For example, this brand of free will undermines the sovereignty of God over all things (see Isa. 45:5–7; 46:9–11; Dan. 2:20–21; 4:34–35; Eph. 1:11). It also does not square with the doctrine of human depravity, as the Bible makes clear that unbelievers are in bondage to their sin (Rom. 3:10–18, 23) and have no power within themselves to escape this bondage (Rom. 8:7–8). Furthermore, libertarian free will cannot account for divine foreknowledge. How could we have the power of contrary choice when God already knows with certainty what we will choose?

The compatibilist view of human freedom and responsibility better corresponds with Scripture. It teaches that every human choice has a dual explanation. First, God has ordained in eternity past and providentially ensures in the present all the choices human beings make without coercing us to act against our will. For example, the book of Exodus says that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart (Ex. 7:3; 9:12). Yet simultaneously, it says Pharaoh freely and sinfully hardened his own heart (Ex. 8:15, 32; 9:34). Second, God’s sovereignty is compatible with what we voluntarily, unconstrainedly choose as dictated by the condition of our hearts, whether good or evil. Corrupted hearts can only make corrupted choices (Matt. 7:17–20; 12:33–35). To make God-pleasing choices, the heart must be transformed, regenerated by the Holy Spirit (John 3:5–8).

Solomon understood this mysterious intertwining of human and divine wills, saying,

The heart of man plans his way, 
but the Lord establishes his steps. (Prov. 16:9)

He also said,

Many are the plans in the mind of a man, 
but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand. (Prov. 19:21; see also Prov. 16:33; 21:1)

These proverbs indicate that God is the remote but primary cause of human actions, whereas humans are the immediate but secondary cause of their own actions. Thus, we are not helpless puppets dangling from some grand puppeteer’s strings. Our choices are real and meaningful.

The Bible is full of specific examples of compatibilism. Consider how Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery, an act for which they bore moral responsibility. Yet simultaneously, God brought about their actions (Gen. 45:4–9; 50:15–18). Joseph declared to his brothers, “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good” (Gen. 50:20). In Acts 27, an angel reveals to Paul that he and his sailing companions shall all be divinely rescued from a fierce storm. He tells the sailors, “Take heart, men, for I have faith in God that it will be exactly as I have been told” (Acts 27:25). God will sovereignly ensure their safety. Yet, when some of the sailors tried to escape from the faltering ship, Paul urged the centurion in charge, “Unless these men stay in the ship, you cannot be saved” (Acts 27:31). Thus, God’s providence is not fatalism in which human choices do not matter. Rather, God exercises His sovereign plans through the freely exercised wills of His creatures.

The most significant example of compatibilism is the death of Christ. Scripture is clear that God sovereignly ordained the grand plan of redemption that required Him to send forth His Son to be our crucified and risen Redeemer. Peter declares to the inhabitants of Jerusalem that Jesus was “delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God” (Acts 2:23). And yet, Peter does not exonerate the Jews of their moral responsibility here: “You crucified and killed” Jesus “by the hands of lawless men” (see also Acts 4:27–28).

There is tension and mystery in the relationship between the divine and the human in the choices we make. Scripture usually emphasizes the divine or the human side of the equation. Sometimes both perspectives are placed side by side. In either case, the two always go together. God is completely sovereign, and we are responsible for our voluntarily (freely) made choices.

More people are entering the doors of churches in the United Kingdom.

This year’s State of Theology survey reveals an encouraging trend in church attendance: 28% of UK evangelicals say they began attending Sunday church services for the first time as adults within the past two years.

This flood of new visitors should be met with joy and gratitude. But ultimately, attendance is not the same as conversion. And the findings from the State of Theology survey reveal that these new attendees are confused about core doctrines of the Christian faith.

• 71% of ‘new evangelicals’ believe God accepts the worship of all religions
• 57% of ‘new evangelicals’ believe that the Bible, while helpful, is not literally true

The need for faithful teaching and discipleship is clear. As congregations welcome newcomers, they have a responsibility to proclaim the whole counsel of God, call sinners to repentance and faith, and help believers grow in the knowledge of God’s Word.

Download the Free Study Guide

What can we learn from these survey results? Gather a group and download the free digital study guide for The State of Theology UK. Each section includes discussion questions and biblical insight to guide your conversation.

More Resources on the Church

R.C. Sproul founded Ligonier to help Christians know who God is and who they are. Here are several of our resources addressing the Bible’s teaching on Christ’s body, the church.

• The Bride of Christ teaching series with R.C. Sproul
• The Church in a Changing World teaching series with W. Robert Godfrey
• “The Marks of a Church” article by W. Robert Godfrey
• “Remembering Sundays” article by Paul Levy
• Welcome to a Reformed Church book by Daniel Hyde

1. John Calvin was ousted from his church, ministry, and home.

Less than two years after beginning his ministry in Geneva, a twenty-nine-year-old John Calvin (1509–64) found himself ousted from his church, ministry, and home, with two days’ notice to quit the city. No doubt as he and William Farel traveled away from Geneva that April, they wondered what would come next. Their thoughts were on a looming ecclesiastical battle in response to this bitter experience; they were planning how they could persuade Zurich and Bern to work to reinstate them in Geneva. Yet, unknown to Calvin, the Lord in His providence would thwart their attempts. Instead, He was arranging a season of pastoral training that would prove foundational for Calvin’s future pastoral labors.

2. John Calvin experienced ministry failures.

While those who have some familiarity with Calvin’s life story know of his early efforts in Geneva to implement a faithful observance of the Lord’s Supper through church discipline, fewer know the story of how the Lord changed Calvin through this failure. Once in exile, Calvin initially settled in Basel, but then was invited to come to Strasbourg by Martin Bucer (1491–1551). Bucer, who was almost twenty years older than Calvin, not only opened up ministerial opportunity in the city, but also warmly befriended Calvin, welcoming him into his home, and in time assisting with the purchase of a neighboring home for Calvin. This was despite the fact that the year before, Calvin had written him a confrontational and arrogant letter—which Bucer had met with a patient, loving response. In Bucer, Calvin met the mentor and pastor he needed.

3. John Calvin served as pastor to refugees.

The year that Calvin arrived in Geneva (1538) was also the year that Bucer was completing the manuscript of his “little book,” Concerning the True Care of Souls.¹ No doubt in their mealtime conversations, the two spoke extensively about pastoral ministry and the life of the church. Bucer had long experienced obstacles in ministry in Strasbourg, and his writing was part of his patient effort to bring Christ-centered growth to the church and her ministry. In God’s kind providence, Calvin’s opportunity for ministry in the city went beyond teaching; he served as the pastor of the French refugee congregation. While there were many encouragements in the work, Calvin also experienced sorrows. His close friend and cousin, Pierre Robert Olivétan, who had been instrumental in his conversion, died. An old friend from France, Louis du Tillet, who had sheltered him from persecution and provided resources for the first draft of The Institutes of the Christian Religion, returned to Roman Catholicism. A new joy came through his marriage in 1540 to Idelette de Bure, “the best companion in my life.”

4. John Calvin willingly returned to the church that ousted him.

The same year of Calvin’s marriage, in the midst of the new work in Strasbourg, a time he called “the happiest years of my life,” a most unexpected call came. Geneva wanted him to come back and serve as pastor again. He hesitated, stating “there is no place under heaven I am more afraid of . . . I would rather submit to a hundred other deaths, than to that cross on which I would have to perish a thousand times every day.” Yet, it was not only Geneva that had changed—Calvin had as well in these few short years. With Bucer’s encouragement, and his own trepidation, Calvin yielded to the call. In some respects, the city had changed and was more welcoming to a Reformation direction in the church and community. In other ways, it was the same. It would take fourteen long years of ministry before the issue of the faithful administration of the Lord’s Supper would be resolved. While he continued to grieve the weaknesses of the church, Calvin, in part due to the Lord’s instrumental use of Bucer’s ministry in his life, had a much longer vision and a more patient love for the church.

5. Through joys and trials, John Calvin looked for God’s providences.

Nine years later, well into his renewed ministry in Geneva and just months after burying his dear wife, Calvin taught on Paul’s words to the Thessalonians: “Paul does not ascribe merely the beginning of our salvation to the grace of God . . . the whole progress of our salvation is nothing but the grace of God.” Through joys and trials, he had learned more profoundly that behind both pleasant days and what seem frowning providences is the smiling face of the Savior who continues to shape us for service and glory.²

Have you ever started a project with a specific goal in mind, only to realize along the way that the final product would look very different from what you’d originally planned? If so, then you can understand something of how the Westminster Confession of Faith came to be.

How It Came to Be

The creation of the Westminster Confession represents the crescendo of a century of political and religious upheaval on the British Isles. Beginning in 1534 with the Act of Supremacy, whereby Henry VIII declared himself to be the head of the Church of England, English Christianity underwent considerable change. Thanks to the reforms of Henry’s Protestant son, Edward VI (reigning 1547–1553), and Protestant daughter, Elizabeth I (reigning 1558–1603), the Church of England adopted the Book of Common Prayer for its worship and the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion as its confession of faith, which was Reformed in character. Though these represented a positive shift away from the theology of Rome, there were still those within the Church of England who desired further reform, namely the Puritans. Their primary objections were to the fixed liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer, clerical vestments, and rule by bishops (episcopacy).

Charles I (reigning 1625–1649), together with the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, ratcheted up tensions even further. Charles, a firm believer in the divine right of kings, ruled without the consent of Parliament for eleven years (also known as Personal Rule). Laud disregarded Puritan concerns and espoused Arminian theology, prioritized the Lord’s Supper over preaching, and insisted on the divine right of bishops. After trying to impose the Book of Common Prayer upon the Scottish Church in 1637, the Scottish Covenanters rebelled against the Crown in the First Bishops’ War (1639). Charles had no choice but to call Parliament with the hope that it would raise taxes to fund the war effort. Charles’ hopes were frustrated when Parliament sought instead to limit his powers as king. The ensuing conflict between Charles and Parliament eventually led to the English Civil War (1642–1651). On the one side were the Royalists who supported Charles I and the religious status quo, and on the other the English Parliament and Scottish Covenanters who desired reformation of the Church of England along Presbyterian and Reformed lines.

To that end, Parliament moved to abolish rule by bishops in 1642 and appointed 151 men to assemble in Westminster Abbey on July 1, 1643, to reform the church’s government and liturgy according to the Word of God and to defend the reformational theology of the church. The divines’ original assignment was to clarify and defend the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion. But after signing the Solemn League and Covenant (1643) wherein England vowed to pursue religious uniformity together with Scotland (which was Presbyterian), plans changed. The Thirty-Nine Articles were set aside and the assembly began its work on a new confession of faith.

What It Continues to Be

In surveying the historical context of the Westminster Confession, we are given fresh reasons to praise the sovereignty and wisdom of our God. What arose out of a period of political and religious division, God has used as one of the most unifying theological confessions in the world. Today there are men and women, boys and girls, on every continent who point to the work of the Westminster divines as the confession of their faith.

The confession is further unifying in its unwavering commitment to the doctrine of sola Scriptura. As the assembly neared completion of the confession in 1646, Parliament requested that the divines provide Scripture references to support their claims. The next year, the assembly presented no less than 2,500 proof-texts, demonstrating their commitment not to doctrines and commandments of men but to the authoritative Word of God.

Charles Spurgeon once said of John Bunyan: “Prick him anywhere; and you will find that his blood is Bibline, the very essence of the Bible flows from him. He cannot speak without quoting a text, for his soul is full of the Word of God.”¹ If you read the Westminster Confession of Faith, I expect you will feel the same way. You’ll find it to be overwhelmingly bibline; its soul is full of the Word of God. And that is a confession worth believing, indeed.

The Protestant Reformation is a story of transformation—a transformation from hate to love, from slavery to freedom, and from blind faith to a glorious discovery of the truth in Jesus Christ. In this short video, Dr. R.C. Sproul summarizes the main catalyst for the Protestant Reformation and the mission of Ligonier Ministries more than five-hundred years later. This video is also available in Chinese, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. You’ll find below several other resources that explain what the Reformation was all about.

Books

The Beauty of Divine Grace by Gabriel N.E. Fluhrer

This book introduces readers to the five solas of the Protestant Reformation—Scripture alone, grace alone, faith alone, Christ alone, and the glory of God alone—explaining their biblical foundations and their significance for Christian faith and life. Dr. Gabriel N.E. Fluhrer devotes a chapter to each of the five solas, tracing their roots in Scripture and their development through church history addressing common misunderstandings surrounding each doctrine, such as the nature of faith as an instrument rather than a cause of salvation, and the inseparable connection between the sufficiency of Scripture and the finished work of Christ.

The Heart of the Reformation: A 90-Day Devotional on the Five Solas by Ligonier Ministries

Sometimes one word is all that stands between the truth and a lie. During the Reformation, that word was sola: “alone.” That word made all the difference during the Reformation, and the same is true today. This devotional covers the five solas of the Reformation, helping readers to better understand the core biblical truths that display the reliability of God’s Word and the depths of His mercy.

Reformation Women: Sixteenth-Century Figures Who Shaped Christianity’s Rebirth by Rebecca VanDoodewaard

Just as Deborah, Esther, and the New Testament Marys helped shape Biblical history, so the women of the Reformed church have helped to make its history great. In this book Rebecca VanDoodewaard introduces readers to twelve sixteenth-century women who provide Christians today with examples of strong service to Christ and His church. These influential, godly women were devoted to Reformation truth, provided support for their husbands, practiced hospitality, and stewarded their intellectual abilities. This book can help readers better understand church history and how God used women to further the Reformation through their work and influence.

The Unquenchable Flame: Discovering the Heart of the Reformation by Michael Reeves

Burning pyres, nuns on the run, stirring courage, and comic relief: the Protestant Reformation is a gripping tale, packed with drama. But what motivated the Reformers? And what were they really like? In this book, Dr. Michael Reeves, brings to life the movement’s most colorful characters (Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, John Calvin, the Puritans, and others), examines their ideas, and shows the profound and personal relevance of Reformation thinking for today.

Podcasts

Luther in Real Time with Barry Cooper

Covering events that occurred more than five hundred years ago, this podcast invites listeners to walk in Martin Luther’s footsteps at the dawn of the Reformation. Hear in Luther’s own words the powerful story of his journey from heresy charges to his famous stand for the authority of God’s Word at the Diet of Worms.

Renewing Your Mind

Renewing Your Mind delivers daily Bible teaching to listeners worldwide. R.C. Sproul launched this outreach in 1994 to help people gain a deeper understanding of who God is as their minds are renewed according to His Word. Tune in during the month of October for Reformation-themed broadcasts.

Film

Luther: The Life and Legacy of the German Reformer by Stephen McCaskell

Discover the story behind the man who sparked the Protestant Reformation. Told through a seamless combination of live-action storytelling and artistic animation, this film presents Martin Luther’s daring life in extensive detail with commentary from R.C. Sproul and other teachers.

Teaching Series

Luther and the Reformation by R.C. Sproul

Centuries after his death, Martin Luther is celebrated as an intellectual giant, a brave opponent of corruption, a shaper of culture, and indeed one of the most significant figures in Western history. Many people, however, are unaware of the events of Luther's life that led him to make a courageous stand for the gospel in the sixteenth century. In this series, Dr. R.C. Sproul provides a thorough introduction to the life and thought of Martin Luther. With an eye to the lessons we can learn today, Dr. Sproul traces the major events of Luther's life and explores the gospel recovered by Luther and the other Protestant Reformers.

This teaching series (also available as a book) discusses several crisis moments in the life of Martin Luther that led to his recovery of the gospel as revealed in Scripture. Justification by faith alone was a liberating truth for Luther and the other Protestant Reformers, and it is still good news for God’s people to cherish today.

Justified by Faith Alone by R.C. Sproul

How do we answer the question, “What must I do to be saved?” The doctrine of justification by faith alone is at the center of Reformation theology and remains critical for all believers today. This doctrine is continually under assault, yet without it, there is no gospel. In this lecture series, Dr. R.C. Sproul explores the doctrine of justification historically and theologically. He carefully defines each term in the phrase “justification by faith alone” while pointing to the imputation of a perfect righteousness found only in Jesus Christ.

The Necessity of Reforming the Church by W. Robert Godfrey

What if the priorities of the church and the priorities of God’s Word were worlds apart? This realization launched the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, as men such as Martin Luther and John Calvin worked to bring the church back under the authority of Scripture. Slowed by opposition, Calvin wrote to defend the necessity of reforming the church. In this teaching series, Dr. W. Robert Godfrey gathers insights from Calvin’s treatise to ask penetrating questions for Christians and congregations today as the work of reforming the church continues.

Reformation Truths with Michael Reeves

Some people dismiss the Reformation as a peculiar chapter of history with little relevance to contemporary life, but nothing could be further from the truth. In this eight-part teaching series, Dr. Michael Reeves explains that the Reformation still matters because the gospel still matters. This series surveys the beliefs of Roman Catholics and Protestants, revealing that these two traditions hold very different views on salvation—one relies on our performance, while the other rests on Jesus’ righteousness alone.

For Kids

The Woman Who Helped A Reformer by Rebecca VanDoodewaard

What does Katharina Luther do with an old monastery, lots of children, a busy husband, many guests, and little money? Work very hard! In this board book, take a peek at Katharina Luther’s days looking after it all out of thankfulness to God. These simple stories, written with toddlers in mind, have beautiful, engaging illustrations that will have your children asking you to read them over and over!

Martin Luther: Christian Biographies for Young Readers by Simonetta Carr

In this volume for children, Simonetta Carr tells the compelling story of Martin Luther, the monk who wrote ninety-five questions, hoping to start a discussion about sin and repentance. The book traces Luther’s quest for peace with God, his lifelong heroic stand for God’s truth, his family life, and his numerous accomplishments. The Reformer’s greatest accomplishment, Carr writes, was “his uncompromising emphasis on the free promise of the gospel.”

Reformation Heroes by Joel Beeke and Diana Kleyn

The Reformation did not happen instantaneously. Rather, it was something that God in His providence arranged over a number of years. This book looks at how the Lord used various individuals to plant the seeds of church reform long before Martin Luther published his Ninety-Five Theses. Readers will learn about figures including John Knox, Peter Martyr Vermigli, Zacharias Ursinus, and Willem Teellinck, who contributed to the Reformation. Also included are chapters covering the Anabaptist and Counter Reformation movements.

Faithfulness Under Fire: The Story of Guido de Bres by William Boekestein

The life of Guido de Bres teaches us that we can find enduring hope in the gospel of Jesus Christ, even during persecution. Author William Boekestein sensitively tells the story of de Bres for children, guiding them through his turbulent life and times—from his birth in 1522 in a small Belgian town, to his call to the ministry and study under Reformers such as John Calvin and Theodore Beza, to his authorship of the Belgic Confession, to his life of suffering and his martyr’s death in 1567. Skillfully crafted illustrations and an easy-to-understand narrative combine to capture the entire family’s interest in—and admiration for—this amazing Reformation hero.

Collections

Browse more curated content on our website and mobile app by selecting the following Reformation-themed collections.

• What Are the Five Solas? by Various Authors
• The English Reformation by Various Authors
• New to Reformed Theology by Various Authors

“Are you going to hell when you die?”

How often have you heard this question come up in conversation? Probably not often. Yet this is a question of eternal significance. It concerns the condition of our souls before the holy God.

Today, we live in a world that desperately avoids such questions. Many people live as though reality is limited to what we can see, hear, and feel. Others laugh away life’s greatest questions. We see this every October as our society trivializes the demonic as a source of amusement. Satan is happy for people to fear haunted houses and scary movies, so long as they remain blind to the eternal destruction of their souls.

Even Christians are tempted to live as though this world were all there is. Yet in the words of Dr. R.C. Sproul, “Right now counts forever.” He taught us that we can only truly understand our lives in light of unseen realities.

Ligonier Ministries confronts spiritual apathy by proclaiming the eternal truth of God and applying it to all of life. With our prayerful and generous supporters, we’re providing clear Bible teaching around the world.

Your gift of any amount this month can accelerate this outreach in an increasingly secular age. As thanks, we’ll send you Unseen Realities by Dr. Sproul. This book brings biblical clarity on the spiritual realm that impacts our daily lives.

We are a people at war. Yet this struggle is not against flesh and blood (Eph. 6:12). Satan has blinded the minds of billions, leading the world in rebellion against God. This battle rages because our Lord Jesus Christ has invaded the domain of darkness to redeem His people. Through His death and resurrection, Christ has delivered us from the devil’s tyranny and brought us into God’s eternal kingdom.

In this battle for souls, Ligonier Ministries does not shy away from confronting people with the truth about God and about themselves. Our teaching resources directly address the holiness of God, the threat of Satan, and the urgency of the gospel. Since God’s Word makes Christians sober-minded and watchful, we can “resist the devil, and he will flee” (James 4:7).

Your support reaches more people with truth to fortify their souls:

• All of Dr. Sproul’s 170+ teaching series are now free to stream. Thank you for helping to remove financial barriers to these 1,400+ messages to strengthen the global church.

• Ligonier’s app serves Christians around the world, around the clock. With your support, significant app upgrades now help more Christians set their minds on eternal truth.

• Hundreds of thousands of pastors worldwide are receiving the Reformation Study Bible to better shepherd their flocks and equip their congregations for spiritual warfare.

Through all of Ligonier’s outreaches, we seek to arm our Lord’s church with the sword of the Spirit, the Word of God (Eph 6:17). And since Satan never rests from sowing seeds of indifference, neither can we slow down from rousing sleepers to watchfulness.

Help us spread the Word to every nation and generation, knowing that victory in Christ is certain. When you donate this month, we’ll send you Dr. Sproul’s book Unseen Realities. R.C. draws our attention to the spiritual battle around us. His chapters on angels and demons, heaven and hell, remind us of the eternal significance of our lives and our absolute dependence on the Lord Jesus.

Since Christ has overcome the evil one, we can march forward with confidence. Thank you for joining Ligonier in proclaiming the holiness of God with full assurance that the gates of hell will never prevail against our King and His church.

How serious is our sin?

The State of Theology survey has returned to the United Kingdom, revealing what people really believe about God, the Bible, and salvation.

The results reveal significant confusion, even among professing Christians.

63% of evangelicals in the United Kingdom agree with the statement, “Everyone sins a little, but most people are good by nature.”

This response shows that the confusion has grown worse since Ligonier’s last UK survey in 2018, when 48% of UK evangelicals agreed with this false statement.

Now, nearly two-thirds of evangelicals seem to misunderstand the effects of the fall. Though God created humanity upright and in His image (Gen. 1:26–27), Adam’s sin corrupted the entire human race. We’re not good people who occasionally do wrong. By nature, we are fallen sinners in desperate need of God’s grace.

Scripture is clear about the seriousness of our sinful condition. We have all sinned and fallen short of God’s perfect standard of righteousness (Rom. 3:23). That is why we need Jesus Christ, the only One who has perfectly obeyed God’s law and whose righteousness alone can make sinners right with our holy Creator.

Download the Free Study Guide

These survey results are serious, and they warrant serious discussion. Gather a group and download the free digital study guide for The State of Theology UK. Each section includes discussion questions and biblical insight to guide your conversation.

More Resources on Total Depravity

R.C. Sproul founded Ligonier to help Christians know who God is and who they are. Here are several of our resources addressing the Bible’s teaching on the doctrine of total depravity.

• The Bondage of the Will, book by Martin Luther
• “Radical Corruption” article by R.C. Sproul
• “The Sinfulness of Man” message from Reformation Truths with Michael Reeves
• “TULIP and Reformed Theology: Total Depravity” article by R.C. Sproul
• “The Bondage of the Will” article by Nicholas Needham

What do people in the United Kingdom really believe about God, the Bible, and salvation?

For the second time since 2018, Ligonier Ministries UK has sought to find out through The State of Theology survey. This nationwide survey takes the UK’s theological temperature, exposing what people actually believe—both outside and inside the church.

The results are in, and they reveal great opportunity and great need.

There is some reason for encouragement. Many churches appear to be welcoming newcomers, and 28% of UK evangelicals say they began attending Sunday church services for the first time as adults within the past two years.

Yet the findings also reveal significant theological confusion among professing evangelicals and widespread uncertainty among the wider public:

• 63% of UK evangelicals believe that most people are good by nature.
• 39% of adults in the UK are unsure about who God is.
• 57% of ‘new evangelicals’ think the Bible contains ancient myths but is not literally true.

An Opportunity for Discipleship

As new people enter churches, there is a significant opportunity to ground them in God’s Word through faithful teaching and discipleship. At the same time, widespread uncertainty about religious matters within Britain points to the need for faithful gospel witness throughout the country.

Ligonier Ministries UK exists to support the church in this opportunity by equipping Christians with trusted Bible teaching anchored in the historic Christian faith. To that end, we hope The State of Theology can equip you with insights for discipleship in your community.

Respond to the Results: Free Study Guide

Gather a group from your church or community to discuss the significance of these results from the UK State of Theology survey. A free digital study guide can be found at the bottom of the webpage. Each section includes discussion questions and biblical insights to guide your conversations.

Engage with the UK State of Theology Survey:

• View key findings.
• Explore complete survey results.
• Take The State of Theology survey to compare your responses.
• Create a private group survey for friends or members of your church.

Even amid our failures, God remains faithful.

The book of Judges records one of the darkest times in biblical history—and its pattern is familiar. Like ancient Israel, our world today rejects God’s authority and does what is right in its own eyes. Yet, when His people cry out for mercy, the Lord proves faithful.

In his new book, Light in the Darkness, Dr. Michael Barrett reveals the enduring relevance of Judges, reminding us of God’s faithfulness, our weakness, and the hope of Christ, who never fails His people.

A Look Inside the Book

“To miss seeing Christ in the prophetic book of Judges is to miss the principal message: Christ is the light in the darkness.” —Michael Barrett

Read a sample and order your copy today. 

What Others Are Saying

“This book is what I call a ‘gripper’—that is, neither a superficial survey nor a dense technical tome but a study that gives the reader a real grip on the book of Judges. And Dr. Barrett believes in ‘overspill’—he constantly points out implications for the believer’s life and always has his eyes fixed on Jesus. Ideal for church study groups.” —Dr. Dale Ralph Davis, Professor of Old Testament (Retired), Reformed Theological Seminary

Finding Strength in God’s Character

This hardcover book underscores how the Lord’s mercy and faithfulness shine brightly even amid human failings and sins. Each chapter concludes with study questions for personal reflection or group discussion, making this an ideal resource for small groups or Sunday school.

Purchase copies today for yourself or for your study group.

We all want to grow in our faith. But how do we move beyond the surface and put down deep roots? The Grow app from Ligonier Ministries gives you clear Bible teaching and guides your daily study for a deeper walk with Christ.

Grow is available on Apple and Android devices.

Whether you’re a new Christian or have been one for years, find trusted teaching to read, watch, or listen to each day and grow in your faith.

When You Download the App, You Can:

• Explore R.C. Sproul’s 170+ free teaching series and other daily teaching videos.
• Listen to Renewing Your Mind, Ligonier’s podcast library, and sermons from Dr. Sproul
• Read or listen to the Bible directly within the app
• Search thousands of free articles, devotionals, conference messages, and more
• Sign in to access your purchased teaching series and ebooks in your Learning Library
• Download your favorite messages for offline playback
• Cast messages to a connected device

Special Features for Ministry Partners:

• Get answers to your theological questions with the new Ask Ligonier intelligent assistant
• Access the study notes and commentary from the Reformation Study Bible
• Stream the Message of the Month and all of Ligonier’s teaching series

There’s always something new to study in the app, and we regularly add biblical and theological resources to help you grow in your knowledge of God. Make sure you enable notifications so you can keep up with the latest teaching and ministry updates from Ligonier.

The free Ligonier app is available in the App Store for iPhone or iPad as well as on Google Play for your phone or tablet. Just search for “Ligonier” or “Grow” in your app store to get started.

I want you to meet Pastor Moses.

In the small West African country of Togo, he serves at the only gospel-preaching church in his village. Many members of his congregation have come out of generations of animism and voodoo. To this day, ancestral worship and other idolatry shape daily life in the surrounding community.

In the face of so much spiritual darkness, Pastor Moses seeks to shine the light of Christ. Yet as he labors to proclaim God’s Word and disciple his congregation, he faces a challenge shared by millions of pastors worldwide:

• Many Christians in the church have never even owned a Bible.
• Trusted theological resources are scarce and financially out of reach.
• Meanwhile, the influence of false teaching is rampant.

By God’s grace, Ligonier recently supplied Pastor Moses and his church with the Reformation Study Bible and other trusted discipleship tools. His congregation is now better prepared to stand as a beacon of light in a sea of darkness. Yet in many places around the world, falsehood threatens to drown out the true gospel.

The global church needs our help. I’ve seen it firsthand. We thank God for the supporters who share Ligonier’s commitment to strengthen His people. Will you join us to bring trusted Bible teaching to even more Christians? Your donation today can help equip pastors for a lifetime of faithful ministry and spread the light of God’s Word among the nations.

A pastor like Moses carries a calling of eternal weight. Day after day, he sacrificially shepherds God’s people: admonishing the idle, encouraging the fainthearted, and helping the weak. He must give an account for every soul under his care and for every word he teaches them (Heb. 13:17; James 3:1). All his labors will prove fruitless if they do not rest on the authoritative Word of God.

Yet today, of the roughly five million pastors worldwide, 95 percent lack formal theological training. Most pastors have limited access to trusted resources to help them study and teach the Bible. They’re unprepared to form disciples who can grow strong in the faith amid an unbelieving world. All the while, false teaching abounds; the darkness is rising.

These challenges are not new to our time. Five centuries ago, the church was shrouded in another cloak of spiritual darkness. When preachers and teachers courageously took up God’s Word and proclaimed it faithfully, the Protestant Reformation dawned. God dispelled the darkness in many places, delivering hearts from sin, hopelessness, and superstition.

Post tenebras lux. “After darkness, light.” This Reformation rallying cry sounds through the Bible-teaching outreach of Ligonier Ministries as we seek to spread the light of God’s truth throughout the global church. Dr. R.C. Sproul led the charge when he launched Ligonier’s study Bible distribution to pastors in need. He understood that a renewal of the historic Christian faith starts with leaders thoroughly equipped for the work of the Word (2 Tim. 3:14–17).

When a pastor receives the Reformation Study Bible, he gains a trusted, lifelong companion to enhance his teaching ministry through:

• Exhaustive verse-by-verse commentary from 75 distinguished scholars,
• Dr. Sproul’s clear and precise notes covering the whole scope of theology,
• And two millennia of historic Christian creeds and confessions of faith.

And when pastors are better equipped for their calling, the whole church benefits from the light of God’s Word.

We seek to equip 500,000 pastors with the Reformation Study Bible by 2035. God has blessed this outreach; our pace is quickening, and we’re already 40 percent of the way to this goal. Last month alone, Ligonier’s supporters enabled the equipping of tens of thousands of church leaders throughout Africa. I was privileged to see their profound gratitude and renewed encouragement firsthand.

Yet I also glimpsed the depth of the problem. Prosperity preachers are flooding Africa with containers filled with false teaching. The cults are there too. Darkness remains across the continent. To counteract this, we must accelerate the distribution of study Bibles to spread the light of God’s truth. 

Reaching our goal to equip half a million pastors still requires significant funds. Your support today can accelerate this outreach while fueling multi-year translations of the _Reformation Study Bible _into Arabic, Russian, Chinese, and other major languages.

All of Ligonier’s outreaches exist to serve the global church, from our newly upgraded app, to the expansion of RefNet, to YouTube and satellite TV broadcasts, to Tabletalk Bible studies and translated books, to conferences and training events around the world. Your prayerful and financial support can further each of these outreaches and strengthen pastors to shine the light of God’s truth.

Dr. Sproul said of Ligonier’s study Bible outreach, “We’re talking about an investment that has long-lasting impact in the lives of people.” Your gift today will help place study Bibles in the hands of pastors like Moses and accelerate worldwide Bible-teaching outreach.

Thank you for joining Ligonier to strengthen the church, equip the saints, and proclaim God's holiness among the nations.

We all long for the church to be marked by joyful unity. But what should we do when division, rivalry, and discouragement threaten genuine gospel fellowship?

In Sinclair Ferguson’s new video teaching series on Philippians, discover how Christ’s example of humility can renew our churches with steadfast faith, joyful fellowship, and unity in the gospel.

Get complete streaming access when you order the series today.

In My Joy and Crown, Dr. Ferguson explores the theology and pastoral wisdom in Paul’s affectionate letter to the Philippians. Start studying today to discover how the gospel provides a firm foundation for Christian living and fellowship with other believers.

12 Messages, Including:

• A Joy and Crown Congregation
• Lessons on Prayer
• The Wonder of God’s Providence
• The Secret of Humility
• How to Think as a Christian
• And More

Watch the first message for free to start your study.

Several Teaching Series Formats Available

• Digital download
• Ligonier Connect course
• Digital study guide

Preorder the DVD Edition and Study Guide

You can also be among the first to receive the DVD edition and paperback study guide for My Joy and Crown when they become available. Preorder Dr. Ferguson’s DVD teaching series and study guide for yourself or a loved one today.

Watch Now as a Ministry Partner

Did you know that Ligonier’s Ministry Partners get streaming access to our entire teaching series library? Unlock My Joy and Crown, along with Ligonier’s entire catalog from dozens of teachers, when you partner with Ligonier today. 

Your prayers and monthly donation will help fuel gospel outreach so more Christians worldwide can benefit from this biblical teaching.

To help reach as many people as possible with the truth of our holy God, we’re making R.C. Sproul’s entire teaching series library permanently free to stream online and in the Ligonier app.

Now Freely Available:

• 170+ audio and video series from R.C. Sproul’s decades of ministry
• 1,400+ messages on the Bible, theology, church history, and more
• 500+ hours of teaching to help you grow in your Christian faith

Start Watching Series like These:

• Dust to Glory: Study the whole Bible
• Foundations: Apply theology to your life
• Defending Your Faith: Answer common objections

Access This Teaching Anywhere

Learn from R.C. Sproul’s teaching series at any time in the Ligonier app. We’ve recently enhanced our app to make trusted teaching even more accessible, and more new features are coming soon. Make sure you update the app for the best streaming experience.

Thank You to Our Ministry Partners

This could not happen apart from your faithful support. As demand for this trusted teaching is rising in the Philippines, India, Nigeria, and around the world, Ligonier’s Ministry Partners are helping to equip the global church. Thank you.

Spread the Word

Tell your friends and members of your church about these free teaching series in the Ligonier app so they can study God’s Word with Dr. Sproul too.

For a limited time, you can enter to win two free registrations ($500 in value) to the 2027 Ligonier National Conference.

How to enter the giveaway:

• Follow @Ligonier on Instagram.
• Complete the giveaway form.
• Who would you like to bring to national conference? Tag a friend in the comments of the Instagram post—each tag counts as an additional entry.

Already registered? You can still enter the giveaway. If you win, we’ll reimburse you, or you can apply the value toward an additional registration.

Entries close August 31 at 11:59 ET. Enter today, and we will contact you via email with the results.

We hope to see you in Orlando as we gather with like-minded Christians to rejoice in the glorious attributes of God.

This giveaway is available to U.S. residents only. No travel costs included. To learn more about this giveaway, view the full terms and conditions.

My other favorite Reformer, partly because I love his name, is Johannes Oecolampadius. His name literally means “house lamp,” but he was a brilliant language scholar. He wrote a Hebrew grammar. He wrote a commentary on Isaiah that became the model for Luther, for Calvin, and for all the Old Testament work of a whole century of scholars. Every time we pick up our English Bible, we know that a boatload of scholars made that possible. Some of them gave their blood for us to have an English Bible. Oecolampadius was one of those guys. He died young, but he filled his life as much as he could. And what a great name!

This text doesn’t literally mean we should never do anything other than pray. It’s clear the Scriptures call us to all sorts of other things. But prayer should be a regular, recurring part of our whole experience, such that there are not only, perhaps, set times of prayer for us but that we turn to the Lord throughout the day. We don’t have to pray at great length all the time, and I think that’s part of the reminder here. This text calls us to cultivate a sense of the presence of God with us, along with us turning our hearts, minds, and cares to Him regularly throughout the day.

It’s an encouragement to think of ourselves as a prayer-filled people. That’s the call, and it’s a valuable call for us to hear.

To know who you are already in Christ is invaluable. You belong to Him. Any persecution you experience, any demeaning you experience, yes, it will be sore, but you can look up to Him and say: “Lord, I belong to You, I’m Yours, and I know this is about You. You will help me cope with it.”

The other thing I would say is really get to know your Bible. Psalm 119 was written for people your age. That’s why it says, “How can a young man keep his way pure?” (Ps. 119:9). Psalm 119 teaches us that if we hide God’s Word in our hearts, it will not only protect us from sinning, but it will make us wiser even than our teachers. That doesn’t mean you’ll know more than a rocket scientist, but it does mean that you have the clues to the meaning of life and that you learn in Scripture first principles that will enable you to negotiate your way through life. That is such a tremendously stabilizing force.

I would also advise that you really seek to understand Christian doctrine. Understanding Christian doctrine gives you a framework of reference, and most of your peers have no idea of their framework of reference. They don’t have any roots. They don’t have any first principles of which they are conscious. They are awash. They’re blown around, as Paul says, by any teaching that comes along. There is “cool” teaching that you’ll come across—for example, it’s cool to be an atheist today just like it was cool to smoke fifty years ago. But just like it was cool to smoke fifty years ago, being an atheist is going to kill you.

There is a tremendous strength in the Christian gospel, and one of the things our conference time does for youngsters is give them a sense that the gospel has its own intellectual power, and we don’t need to be ashamed of it.

There are people in the visible church—that is, they attend church and may even be members of the church—but they are not members of the invisible church. They may even make a profession of faith, but we don’t know the heart. We can’t see into the heart. In some denominations, in order to be a member, you have to have a credible profession of faith. They are looking for evidences, but even then they don’t know if someone is genuinely saved.

To sum it up, false converts are not converts who then become not converts. They were never converts. This is not something that’s new for us; it’s there in the epistles of John and in the New Testament church.

I started reading the Bible when I was nine. I had read John 5:39–40 before, but I was fourteen when it hit me. That verse applied to me in this way: I thought being a Christian meant reading the Bible, saying prayers, helping old ladies cross the street, and doing good things, but that verse hit me like a hammer. I thought: “This is exactly where I am. I’ve been searching the Scriptures and reading them diligently. In five years, I’ve probably missed only five days of reading the Bible.” It really came to me with great power and awakened me. It didn’t convert me; it awakened me. A number of months afterward, I was brought to a living faith through John 8:12: “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”

Those are reasons why I love John’s gospel from my mid-teens, but there are many other reasons. One of them is simply because of the sheer wonder of the portrayal of Christ in it. There are also sections of it that I particularly love. Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve loved John 13–17 particularly, but there is no part of it I don’t love. Every time I read it or preach on it, I think, “This is absolutely endless.” The early fathers used to say that John’s gospel was like a sea that an elephant could swim in and in which a lamb could bathe—it’s just so rich for all believers. So, I think my favorite book of the Bible is John’s gospel.

I remember when I was converted as a high school student and first found myself worshiping amongst the Dutch Reformed, we always prayed the Lord’s Prayer, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.” We can debate the translation, and it can go either way, but I think our Lord is reminding us that He withstood temptation for us and overcame the evil one. We pray that He will continue to preserve us so we don’t face temptation as He faced it and that we would be delivered from the evil one to live for Christ. I think that’s at least part of what’s going on in the Lord’s Prayer.

REEDER: I love the translation, “Do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.” I actually think it’s a better translation because that’s exactly where this is aiming: we are reminded of Christ having endured temptation for us, and therefore, we are delivered through His faithfulness in all of life under the assault of the evil one.

On the other hand, the notion of testing itself is not evil. On the contrary, God uses testing. Further, God can sovereignly take that which the world, the flesh, and the devil would use to ensnare us, and the Lord can use it instead to disciple us and develop us. But we are to flee temptation. I’ll make two comments.

First, Christians make a big mistake in this area by saying that we resist temptation and flee Satan. I think the Bible would have us do the opposite. The Bible does not want us to flee Satan; the Bible wants us to resist Satan, and he will flee from us. But that which is designed to ensnare us into sin, we are to flee that temptation and pursue the environment of holiness and the means of grace that build us up.

Second, having said that, when God brings tests, they are not designed to ensnare us. Rather, they are designed to edify us. A test from the divine hand does three things. It’s kind of like my algebra teacher in the eighth grade. I was convinced she gave me tests to flunk me. I have always told people: “You never have to worry about prayer in school. As long as you’ve got algebra tests, you’ll have prayer in school, I can promise you.” But a test in the hand of the Almighty is there to show us what we know, to show us what we don’t know, and to show us what we need to know. That is from the hand of the Lord. But we flee that which is designed by the world, the flesh, and the devil to bring us down.

PARSONS: I think it is confusing for everyone when we hear that translation. Part of the issue with the way it’s translated into English and the way we understand that portion of the Lord’s Prayer is that it’s a bit of a Hebraism. It’s a way of speaking. It’s a manner of getting a point across to say: “When we are tempted, Lord, lead us away from it. Get us out of it. Help us to flee it.” I know that sounds like the opposite of what it is saying, but that is the way the Hebrews thought and spoke. We see Hebraisms throughout the Gospels, and I think that’s what it’s getting at.

The second thing I would say is that many Christians have been taught to have prejudices against the Reformed faith, but often they don’t know what it is. However, if they are really the Lord’s people, there is one person they are not supposed to have a prejudice against, and that is the Lord Jesus. So, immerse yourself in the teaching of Jesus.

Our late friend, James Montgomery Boice, once preached a sermon on the radio, which I think was called “Was Jesus a Calvinist?” He got more bad press for that sermon than for anything else, but that is actually quite a good question because we can get prejudices about “isms,” but if we are the Lord’s people, we love the Lord Jesus. We know even at the instinctive and emotional level that if He taught it, we should listen, and if He believed it, we need to learn to believe it.

So, a great tool for us in keeping friendships and helping our friends is our own study of the way in which Jesus Himself taught about the grace of God, the depravity of man, the nature of the atonement, and the sovereignty of God. It’s all in the Gospels. I think that will enable you to maintain friendships, or if you lose them, they will be lost because alas, people won’t listen to Christ Himself. That is very sore, but I think it does mean that you have not been the offensive one. That’s one thing that I’ve found helpful.

The Spirit primarily does two things in us, and if you understand these two things, you’ll understand how the Spirit helps us pray. First, the Spirit illumines us. He opens our eyes to see who God is truly, and we then find our minds turned. We have a complete misunderstanding of what God is like, and then the Spirit opens our eyes, and it’s a mighty aha moment that carries on as we carry on being educated by the Spirit. So, the Spirit renews our minds as we think: “Oh, that is what God is like. I did not think God was like that.”

Second, by renewing our minds, the Spirit transforms our hearts. He takes away a heart of stone to give us a heart of flesh. That is an initial work that He does, but it’s also an ongoing work. The Spirit gives us a new mind and a new heart, but He also ongoingly educates us and affects us. In regard to prayer, that means that as the Spirit works in me, my mind is enabled to know what to pray for.

As a young Christian, I naturally tended to have a prayer life like a shopping list of blessings for me, my family, and my friends, and it was pretty self-centered. And then I’d remember that I ought to do some less self-centered prayers. But as the Spirit works in me and transforms my mind, and I see reality differently, as I start seeing the centrality of God and not me, then my prayers start following that change. My prayers start becoming more God-centered and less me-centered. That’s the Spirit’s re-education work.

Further, through the Spirit’s re-education work, He is also transforming my affections and desires. It’s not merely as the Spirit works in me that I know, “Yes, I really ought to be more God-centered and less self-centered.” Rather, the Spirit is doing a deeper work. He’s actually making me want to be and enjoy being God-centered so this just becomes natural to me. I’m not trying to work at it. It just comes out of who the Spirit is making me to be. Therefore, I begin to desire to pray God-centered, God-loving, and God-adoring prayers.

The Spirit educates and affects me such that I begin to desire to pray, to desire long communion with God in a way that I did not think about before. Initially, prayer was just one of those things that I ought to do every now and again. But the Spirit’s work runs so deep that I begin to enjoy communion with God.

So, it’s those two things that the Spirit does. He educates me, transforming my mind, and He transforms my affections so that I enjoy prayer and begin to pray more intelligently and more Christian prayers.

The basic principle is to make sure that you have space in your day, then space in your week, and then space in your month set aside for reading. I remember the late John Stott saying that he tried to read one hour a day, a morning a week, a day a month, and a week a year. If you keep that up, or some such program, even though it seems slow, you will eventually get through a lot of books over a longer period of time.

This is not a matter of setting a pattern or a standard for everyone. Some of us read very quickly, and some of us read more slowly. Some books should be read quickly. Others should be read slowly. I think the thing that helps is breaking the back of our sloth and indifference and saying, “Even if I have to start small, I will do it.” And if you keep going, it’s amazing how much you can get through.

I would also recommend paying attention to the style. If you read something and think, “That is really good,” then don’t just go on to the next thing. Look back and ask yourself: “Why is this really good? How is this person doing this?” Then, see if you can build some of these principles into your own use of language. I think we often forget that we use language in ministry, and the better we can use it, the better it will be. In a sense, the better our language is, the better we will be able to glorify God with words—not just cheap, easy words and slang but words that exalt God and lift the spirits of those who listen to us.

In the ministry of Christ and the seventy, when they came back from their mission, Jesus said, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven” (Luke 10:18). An aspect of Satan’s control over the world was affected by the ministry of Christ, His death and resurrection, and the day of Pentecost, which suggests that now the gospel is to be preached in all the world.

That being said, Satan is still referred to as the “prince of the power of the air” (Eph. 2:2). He still has power. He does not have as much power as he did under the old covenant, but he is still to be reckoned with: “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Eph. 6:12). In his Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis said something along the lines that you can make too much of the devil, but you can also make too little of him. He hasn’t yet been cast into the bottomless pit that the book of Revelation speaks of in Revelation 20. So, he is very much to be reckoned with, even in the new covenant.

GODFREY: I certainly agree, but we have to be very clear: Jesus is King of kings and Lord of lords now. I think Lewis is exactly right: we can’t make too much or too little of Satan. On the “too much” side, sometimes we talk about Satan almost as if he were a minor god. He is a finite creature, which means he can’t be everywhere at once. He can’t be the Holy Spirit, so he has minions who serve him.

Sometimes we talk as if there is the Holy God and then there is the evil god, Satan. Satan is not God. He’s a finite creature. He’s limited by his finitude as well as by God’s sovereignty. He is a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour, but he is chump change compared to the sovereign God. He has been defeated, and he will be destroyed. Our calling is not to let him destroy us before he is destroyed.

FERGUSON: We all try to answer questions by saying the same thing in different ways, and there are two things I’ve found helpful in this context.

The first is what Bob has alluded to in Matthew 28:18–20. Jesus is saying in Matthew 28:18–20 that as the second man and the last Adam, He has won back the dominion on earth that Adam lost. Adam lost his dominion. He fell to the tempter. Christ has overcome the tempter so that He now says, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” We might instinctively think, “He’s the Son of God—of course all authority in heaven and on earth is His.” But Jesus is speaking in a particular context, saying that the dominion Satan won in the garden of Eden has been overthrown, and that authority is now His.

The second is to pick up what Derek said: the limiting context of the expression regarding the binding of Satan is that he would no longer deceive the nations. It isn’t just a general statement, “Satan is bound,” but that Satan is bound in this particular respect: until the resurrection of Christ, the sending of the Holy Spirit, and the coming of the last days, Satan was deceiving all the nations except the one nation God was undeceiving in His mercy. On the day of Pentecost, the crowd that gathered was analogous to the crowd that gathered to build the Tower of Babel in an attempt to pull God down. God judged the nations at Babel and committed them to the deception of Satan. But from the day of Pentecost onwards, the nations are being undeceived by the preaching of the gospel. That is symbolized by the gatherings of the people at Pentecost and has now been experienced for two thousand years.

This is just another way of saying that we always need to look at the context in which phrases are used. We don’t just see a phrase and then make up ourselves what it means. In specific ways, the Scriptures help us to see these statements within a particular grid and context. So, when the Scriptures say that Satan is the god of this age, we realize that those who are not Christians are living in this age. However, the end of the ages has dawned on believers, and the preaching of the gospel continues to invade this age to bring people into the new age, which will continue until the Lord comes. And then, whatever your eschatology, comes the end.

I was seventeen in 1965, a first-year student at university, and I encountered the first reprints of John Owen’s works. They were big—six hundred pages per volume, and there were twenty-four volumes. I was able to buy them for fifteen shillings a volume, which is about eighty cents or something like that. When you are Scottish and young and you can get six hundred pages for under a dollar, you buy it. Of course, I’m being humorous. But when I started to read him, I realized this was a different order of teaching altogether. Owen’s works were so theologically rich and spiritually profound that they made some of the other things I was reading seem very superficial. So, that was how I started reading John Owen, and I have kept reading him ever since.

If somebody asked me, “Which theologian taught you to think?” I would say John Calvin because I bought his Institutes when I was a teenager as well.

BINGHAM: Was it expensive or cheap?

FERGUSON: I got them cheap. However, they were more per volume than John Owen. I probably got my first set of Calvin’s Institutes for about $4.50. But Owen helped me to apply theology and to see the way biblical theology flows out into the experience of the church and the Christian life.

Some of Owen’s books in particular helped me, and the one I have treasured most is his book Communion with God, which focuses on communion with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There are also helpful volumes in his complete works. He talks about Christ in volume one, sin in volume six, and justification in volumes four and five. There are twenty-four volumes. I go back to reading him and sometimes think, “Why do I bother reading anybody else?” It is so rich. He is not an easy read, but it’s worth persevering.

The world takes confidence in all sorts of things. It takes confidence in its own accomplishments. It takes confidence in the various ways it avoids having to think about reality. It’s sometimes prideful. Sometimes it’s just indifferent. Christian confidence, on the other hand, is attuned to the Word of God, the promises of God, and the assurance of what God has said.

Recently, I was talking to some friends about a dear saint in our church who is on her deathbed. They reported that she is full of confidence that Jesus has eternal life for her and that death is not the end. It is critical that we have confidence like hers as we face the struggles, difficulties, and from our limited perspective, uncertainties of life. We can have confidence that God’s promises that will prove true.

Machen was a brilliant scholar. He had a bachelor’s from Johns Hopkins, was Princeton-trained, and then became a Princeton professor. Machen lived during the time of modernism in American culture, as the twentieth century was a time of optimism and growth. Of course, it had World War I, but that influenced Europe far more than it did America because it took place on European soil. France lost 2 million people in World War I, while America lost 170,000 soldiers, which is terrible, but the differences are known. But it was still a time of modernism, and Machen lived during the “Roaring Twenties,” as we call it. It was a culture that was ready to move away from God. That’s modernism: “We don’t need God anymore. We built skyscrapers, and He is holding us back.”

Much of the church didn’t want culture to keep moving past them, so they said: “Hold on, you don’t have to leave just yet. We’ll make our doctrines a little more palatable. If you don’t like sinful man, let’s say that humanity is basically good. If you don’t like the idea that Christ had to die and you must have a substitute, let’s turn Christ’s death into just an example that you are empowered to follow every day. Isn’t that beautiful?” That’s liberalism. It compromised the doctrines that actually define Christianity in order to stay at the “cool table” of culture.

Along came Machen, and he wrote a book, Christianity and Liberalism. He essentially said: “This is not Christianity. This is a Christianity without a cross, which is not Christianity. Christianity without the message of sin is not Christianity. Christianity without an authoritative Bible standing over us that we are accountable to is not Christianity. If you don’t have those things, you don’t have Christianity. You are American. You are free to believe whatever you want to believe. We love liberty, but you can’t believe something that’s the total opposite of Christianity and call it Christianity.” Machen took a bold stand.

I mention all of this because I think it’s true of the story of American Christianity, which is a tale of two cities. We love our culture in America. Sometimes, we want to be a part of it so much so that we’ll compromise our convictions. It has happened. We all saw it. It’s happening right now. Whole denominations are selling their birthright to keep up with culture. That’s one city. Or, we can be a church of conviction that says, “No, we are going to follow God’s Word.” Machen is a good example of being a Christian of conviction.

So, that is one incident I find interesting and informative.

Later on, I used a different pattern and then I started using the kind of “Through the Bible in a Year” type pattern and there are various forms of that. I have used one that was written by Robert Murray M’Cheyne, Scottish minister in the nineteenth century that is very well known. You read four chapters a day from Old Testament, New Testament. You get through the Old Testament once and the New Testament twice in the year. And so, getting through the whole Bible each year I think is a helpful practice.

I’ve also, in addition to that, focused from time to time on certain books and given them more concentrated study. The material I actually recommend, I think I find myself recommending most, is actually Tabletalk, Nathan, for two reasons. One is because it does give you that help of a disciplined program of Bible reading. It gives you help in the notes that help you to expound and understand and apply the text, and there are also some great articles that go along with it. And it’s a terrific bargain. So, product placement is Tabletalk.

I know people who have used the same pattern all their lives. I have tended to vary the patterns I’ve used just because knowing the way I’m wired, that’s what I’ve found most helpful. And then, I have surrounded that with various things. You know sometimes I’ll have used some kind of prayer book just to help me, you know, to get the engine started. Sometimes I would sing.

Last year I did something I had never done before. I’m a speed reader and I felt I was speed reading instead of meditating, and so I started chanting the Psalms to myself, now not quite in the old Anglican way, but what I found in the English Standard Version was I could slow myself down by chanting out loud. And one of the things, I think, both my wife and myself have found is that speaking the Bible out loud is a very good help to Bible study because it was actually written to be heard and not just to be read.

So, those are some of the things that I have found helpful.

For those who want to pretend that God doesn’t exist and want to act as if He doesn’t and claim that He doesn’t, I still say to begin with Him. At the end of the day, people are not converted by the way in which we evangelize but rather by God who works in their hearts. So, objectively, begin with God. Begin with His standard, His character, who He is, and what He demands.

At the same time, I would also say that it depends on the conversation. I am engaged in conversations with non-Christians all the time, whether at restaurants, where I am in the community, at the gym, and so on, and it’s fascinating to me: people are incurably religious. They are religious at the very core of their being. Even people who don’t go to church, who are not a part of any organized religion, are religious. We see it every Sunday: clubs, communities, people coming together, being spiritual, being people of faith, whatever they are. So, start wherever they are. In one sense, you can meet people where they are. If they’re thinking about their children, if they’re thinking about their situation, if they’re worried about things, if they have guilt, if they feel the pressures and the anxieties of life, start there.

I would also say this: engage in conversations with them as human beings in a genuine and authentic way because you actually care about them. Yes, you want to communicate and proclaim the gospel to them—but communicate with them because you care about them.

That’s one of the things we see Jesus doing in His ministry. We see the Apostles doing that in their ministries. They have a love for people and a care for human beings. It’s true that their love for God and their desire to glorify God exceeds all of that, but they actually do care about people. They engage with people because they care about them. They care about their souls.

We evangelize not so that we can tell our Christian friends that we have evangelized; we evangelize for the glory of God and for the sake of the souls of those to whom we speak.