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The Reformation’s True Power: Scripture Unleashed · Reformed Thinking

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  Welcome back to REFORMED Thinking.
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  I'm glad you were here with us. We're taking a hard look today
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  at a mechanism that really drives history.
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  It's something that sits in the engine room of civilization, but
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  you know it often gets ignored in favor of wars, treaties or
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  economic shifts. It really is.
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  It's the invisible hand behind all the visible changes we see.
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  We're discussing the sufficiency of Scripture, but this isn't
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  going to be just a systematic theology lesson.
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  We want to look at how the proclamation of the Bible, I
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  mean literally, the act of getting the words out of the
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  text is into the air, is the primary agent of change in the
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  world. I would say it's the only agent
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  of lasting change, and before we get too far into it, we should
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  probably define who we are in this conversation.
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  We are approaching this from a pretty distinct angle.
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  That's a good point. We're Protestant Christians.
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  We hold to the Westminster Confession of Faith.
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  Which, for anyone who might be new to that term, is the 17th
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  century standard that really defines historical
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  Presbyterianism and Reformed theology.
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  It's our baseline. It means when we say the word,
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  we're not talking about some vague spiritual feeling or a
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  philosophy. No, not at all.
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  We're talking about the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments,
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  inspired and inerrant. Precisely.
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  And the argument we're putting forward today, and the source
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  material is very strong on this, is that you simply cannot
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  separate missions from reformation.
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  They're two sides of the same coin.
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  Exactly. Missions is the proclamation.
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  Reformation is the result of the response to that proclamation.
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  So the thesis here is that God draws sinners to Himself
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  specifically through the instrument of His Word.
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  Not through mood lighting, not through clever marketing, not
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  through the charisma of a particular speaker.
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  It is the text itself that does the heavy lifting.
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  The Spirit of God uses the Word of God.
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  We have a lot of ground to cover.
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  To demonstrate this, we're going to look at the Old Testament
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  monarchy, specifically the reign of Josiah.
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  And then, of course, we'll move through the Protestant
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  Reformation. Obviously, and then we're going
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  to look at the modern missions era with William Carey and
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  Adoniram Judson. It's a massive timeline, but the
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  pattern is startlingly consistent.
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  It is. Whether it's 600 BC or 1800 AD,
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  the catalyst is identical every single time.
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  So let's start with the theology of it, the theology of this kind
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  of change. If you look at the biblical
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  record, spiritual awakening never ever happens in a vacuum.
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  It's always sparked by the reintroduction of the Word of
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  God into a society that has forgotten it.
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  The classic example has to be Nineveh.
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  You have this massive, violent Pagan city and then you have
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  Jonah. Now Jonah is not what you would
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  call a seeker sensitive preacher, is he?
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  Not even close. He hated his audience.
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  He wanted them destroyed. He absolutely did.
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  He wasn't trying to win friends or influence people, he was
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  there under duress. And his sermon in the original
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  Hebrew it's just 5 words. 5 words, yet 40 days, and Nineveh
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  shall be overthrown. That's it.
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  That is the whole message. No music, no emotional build up,
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  No 3 points in a poem. Just a raw warning.
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  And yet, what's the result? The total repentance of a
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  metropolis. I mean from the king sitting on
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  his throne, taking off his robes and sitting in ashes.
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  Down to cattle in the fields they fasted and put on
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  sackcloth. If you analyze that from a
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  sociological perspective, it makes no sense at all.
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  It's impossible. A foreign profit with A1
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  sentence message turns an entire city upside down.
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  It's only possible if the agent of change resides in the message
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  itself, empowered by the Spirit. The source material draws a
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  straight line from that to Pentecost.
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  In Acts chapter 2, you have Peter.
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  He's a fisherman, not a trained rhetorician.
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  Right. And he stands up and what does
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  he do? He delivers a sermon that is
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  essentially a string of Old Testament citations.
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  He's just explaining the Scripture.
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  He quotes Joel, He quotes the songs.
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  He's just connecting the dots for them from their own holy
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  books. And the response?
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  3000 people are cut to the heart.
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  That phrase is so crucial. It's surgery.
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  It's not a general persuasion. No.
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  Ephesians 6.17 calls the word the sword of the Spirit.
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  Psalm 119 says it's a lamp, a light.
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  The Holy Spirit has a preferred instrument.
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  He doesn't generally work through vague intuitions or
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  feelings. He works through the sharp edge
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  of Scripture to Pierce the darkness.
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  This brings us right to the Reformation in the 16th century.
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  There's this common misconception, I think, that the
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  Reformation happened because Martin Luther was a genius, that
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  he was this larger than life personality who outwitted the
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  Pope. That's the great man theory of
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  history. It's popular because we like
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  heroes. We like to focus on individuals.
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  But Luther himself would have been appalled by it.
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  He explicitly rejected that whole narrative.
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  He. Has that famous quote, I think
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  it was from a sermon in Viddenburgh where he deflects
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  all the credit. He basically says I did nothing.
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  It is one of my favorite Luther moments.
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  He says I simply taught, preached, and wrote God's Word,
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  otherwise I did nothing. And then he says, And while I
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  slept or drank Wittenberg beer with my friends Philip and
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  Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that no
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  Prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses upon it.
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  He's saying the text did all the work while he was at the pub.
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  It sounds funny, but he is making a profound theological
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  point. He called scripture his rock and
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  anchor. He understood the mechanics of
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  what actually happening. The Roman Catholic Church had
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  maintained its control for centuries, largely by
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  restricting access to the source code.
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  The. Bible was in Latin.
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  A language which was, for all intents and purposes, dead to
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  the common German plowboy or the English milk maid.
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  They couldn't understand a word of it.
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  Exactly. So the church had the Bible
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  locked in a cage. The people were starving
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  spiritually because they couldn't access the Bread of
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  Life. The Reformation wasn't about
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  inventing some new theology, it was about unlocking that cage.
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  So when Luther translates the Bible into the German
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  vernacular. All of a sudden, ordinary people
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  could read for themselves. The just shall live by faith,
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  and once that happens, the entire structure of selling
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  indulgences and earning time out of purgatory just collapses it.
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  Collapses because it can't survive the light.
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  The source material references Hebrews 4.12.
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  Here the word is living and active, sharper than any 2 edged
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  sword it cuts. It cuts through centuries of man
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  made tradition. But, and this is so important,
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  Luther didn't start this fire all by himself.
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  One of the most interesting parts of our research for this
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  deep dive is the section on the Forerunners.
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  There's a kind of genealogy of the Bible that predates Luther,
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  and it is paved with blood. Let's talk about the Waldensians
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  going back to the 12th century, now deep in the Alps.
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  Peter Waldo. These guys were incredible.
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  They really were. Waldo was a wealthy merchant who
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  gave everything away to follow Christ.
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  But his followers, the Waldensians, they realized
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  something very practical. The Roman authorities could
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  confiscate their physical scrolls.
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  They could burn the parchment. Right.
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  So they developed a strategy of internalizing the text.
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  They memorized it and we aren't talking about a memory verse for
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  Sunday school. No, we're talking about entire
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  gospels, the epistles, Revelation.
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  They would memorize massive sections of scriptures so that
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  if their handwritten books were taken and burned, they still
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  carried the library and their minds and hearts.
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  They became walking Bibles. That's a perfect way to put it.
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  You could burn the book, but you couldn't burn the word out of
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  them unless you killed them. Which, of course, the
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  authorities often did. Then you move forward to the
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  14th century in England. John Wycliffe.
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  The Morning Star of the Reformation, Wycliffe was a
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  brilliant Oxford scholar, but he had a heart for the common man.
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  He oversaw the first complete translation of the Bible from
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  the Latin Vulgate into Middle English.
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  But translation isn't enough, is it?
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  You need distribution. And that's where the lawlers
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  come in. The poor priests, they were
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  these itinerant preachers. They would walk from village to
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  village, often just gathering people in fields or market
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  squares, and they would simply read the English scripture
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  aloud. Which was illegal.
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  Highly illegal, it was incredibly dangerous work, but
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  it planted the seeds that would explode 2 centuries later across
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  the country. Then you have Jan Huss in Prague
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  in the 1400s. He was influenced by Wykless
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  writings that had made their way to Bohemia.
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  Huss did the same thing. He preached in the Bohemian
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  language, the language of the people, not in Latin, and his
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  central conflict was about authority.
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  He argued that the Pope was not the head of the church, Christ
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  was, and the only way you know Christ is through the
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  Scriptures. The Council of Constance didn't
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  take kindly to that idea. No, they did not.
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  They promised him safe conduct, then arrested him and burned him
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  at the stake in 1415. There's a legend.
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  It may be apocryphal, but it's historically resonant that as he
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  was dying, he said you may cook this goose.
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  The name has means goose and check.
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  But 100 years from now, a swan will rise that you will not be
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  able to silence. And almost exactly 100 years
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  later, Luther the Swan posts his 95 Theses.
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  But the pivotal figure for the English speaking world has to be
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  William Tyndale in the 16th century, because Tyndale did
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  something that Wycliffe couldn't do.
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  He went back to the original languages.
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  That's it. Wycliffe had translated from
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  Latin, which was already a translation of a translation.
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  Tyndale went back to the Greek and Hebrew.
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  This is a massive shift. He's bypassing the church's
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  official filter entirely. And his translation choices were
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  explosive. This is where linguistics
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  becomes political and theological.
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  The Church relied on certain Latin derived words to maintain
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  its power structure. Give us an example, OK?
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  The Greek word ecclesia, the church, translated it as church,
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  meaning the institution, the hierarchy, the building, the
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  clergy. Tyndale translated it as
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  Congregation. That changes everything.
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  Congregation applies the people, not the bishops.
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  Right. Or he translated the Greek
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  presbyteros not as priest but as elder.
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  Suddenly, the biblical text doesn't support a special
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  priestly class that mediates between God and man.
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  It supports a group of elders shepherding a local flock.
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  This would have terrified the establishment.
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  It did. It wasn't just heresy, it was
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  treason against the entire ecclesiastical state.
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  So they haunted him down like an animal.
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  He fled to the continent, right? Living in yes.
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  Smuggling Bibles back into England in bales of cotton and
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  sacks of flour. But eventually he was betrayed
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  by a so-called friend. He was arrested, strangled and
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  then burned at the stake. But his final prayer is just
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  haunting. Lord, open the eyes of the King
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  of England. He was praying for Henry the
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  Eighth of all people, and the answer to that prayer is one of
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  the supreme ironies of church history.
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  Two years later. Just two years, Henry the Eighth
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  breaks with Rome for his own selfish political and marital
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  reasons. He wants a divorce.
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  He wants a divorce and in the process he commissions the Great
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  Bible and orders it to be chained to the pulpit of every
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  parish church in England so people can read it for
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  themselves. In the text of that great Bible.
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  It was essentially Tyndale's translation.
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  The King of England authorized the very words that he had
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  killed William Tyndale for writing.
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  God used the political selfishness of a corrupt monarch
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  to answer the prayer of a faithful martyr.
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  It really just emphasizes that principle of sola scriptura.
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  It wasn't just a slogan for these men, it was the entire
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  mechanism of recovery. That's it.
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  Ignorance of scripture is what necessitated the Reformation.
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  The recovery of scripture is what fueled it.
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  You can't have a reformation without a standard to reform to.
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  Think about it like a building. If you've been building crooked
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  walls for 500 years because you lost the blueprints, the.
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  Moment you find the blueprints, you have a crisis.
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  You have a massive crisis. You have to tear down the walls
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  and start over. That is what happened in Europe.
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  I want to pivot back now. We've looked at the 16th
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  century, but the source material takes us back to a much older
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  case study that's just as dramatic.
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  The Kingdom of Judah. The reign of Josiah.
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  This story mirrors the Reformation perfectly, but to
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  understand the light of Josiah's reign, you have to understand
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  the absolute darkness of his grandfather Manasseh.
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  Manasseh is the ultimate Old Testament villain. 2 Chronicles
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  33 gives us the dossier on him. It wasn't just that he was a bad
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  king, he was an anti king. He systematically dismantled the
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  worship of Yahweh. The list of his crimes is
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  staggering. He rebuilt the high places that
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  his own father, Hezekiah, had torn down.
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  He brought in Baal worship. But he didn't just keep it
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  outside Jerusalem. And then he brought it right
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  into the temple. That's the ultimate desecration.
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  He built altars to the host of heaven, star gods, Zodiac
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  worship inside the very courts of the Lord's house.
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  But it gets even darker. He instituted state sponsored
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  child sacrifice. In the valley of Ben Hinnom,
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  Yes, the text says he burned his own sons in the fire as an
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  offering to Molech. This is the leader of God's
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  covenant people. It's hard to even comprehend
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  that level of evil. And on top of that, he practiced
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  sorcery, divination, necromancy. Tradition tells us he murdered
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  the prophets who opposed him. The extra biblical history says
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  he had Isaiah the prophet sawed in two.
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  And the Scripture makes this chilling statement.
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  He misled Judah so that they did more evil than the Pagan nations
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  God had destroyed before them. They were worse than the
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  Canaanites. That's the context.
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  Then Manasseh dies, his son Eamon takes over, is just as bad
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  and gets assassinated by his own servants.
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  The Kingdom is in total chaos. The temple is a wreck, filled
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  with idols and dust and neglect. And into this mess enter Josiah,
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  8 years old. A child on the throne, but the
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  grace of God is at work. The text tells us that at age
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  16, he begins to seek the God of his father, David.
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  At age 20, he starts a purge. He begins smashing the idols,
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  tearing down the altars. But the real catalyst happens in
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  the 18th year of his reign. They're renovating the temple.
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  Just clearing out all the rubble from his grandfather's reign.
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  And how Kaya, the high priest finds something.
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  He finds the book of the Law of the Lord given by Moses.
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  The irony is just crushing. The Bible was lost inside the
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  church. It had been buried under decades
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  of religious debris and neglect. They were running the temple,
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  going through the motions of rituals, but they had lost the
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  word itself. Hilkiah gives the scroll to
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  Chaffin the Scribe, and Chaffin reads it to King Josiah.
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  And Josiah's reaction is visceral.
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  He tears his clothes. That is the sign of absolute
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  mourning and horror. Why?
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  Because as he hears the law read for the first time in his life,
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  perhaps he realizes the magnitude of their guilt.
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  He sees all the commands they have broken, the curses they
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  have incurred. He realizes that even their good
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  attempts at reform have been flawed because they weren't,
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  according to the text. He sees the wrath they've stored
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  up. Exactly, but it leads to a very
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  specific festival. Two Chronicles 35 says they
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  celebrated A Passover unlike any since the days of Samuel the
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  Prophet. This is key.
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  Why Passover? Why not the Feast of Booths?
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  Or something else? Because Passover is the festival
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  of atonement. It's the story of the blood on
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  the doorpost that causes the Angel of Judgement to Passover.
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  When the law was rediscovered, it exposed their sin in all its
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  horror. The only possible answer to
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  expose sin is atonement. So the rediscovery of the Law
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  leads directly to the rediscovery of the Gospel.
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  Perfectly said. You see the same pattern with
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  Luther. The law crushed him.
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  He knew he couldn't be righteous enough.
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  Then the Scripture showed him grace.
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  Josiah's reformation wasn't just about moral improvement.
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  It was a return to the blood of the Lamb as the only hope.
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  It's a perfect theological loop. Now let's look at the New
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  Testament era, specifically the book of Acts.
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  We usually think of Acts as the Acts of the Apostles, or maybe
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  the Acts of the Holy Spirit, but the source material points out
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  that the author Luke often treats the Word of God as an
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  active character in the story. He personifies it.
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  It's fascinating when you see it.
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  Acts 6.7 is a great example. And the Word of God continued to
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  increase, and the number of the disciples multiplied greatly in
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  Jerusalem. It depicts the Word as this
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  living, organic growing force. Or Acts 12.24.
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  This comes right after a king, Herod Agrippa, is struck dead by
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  an Angel because he accepted worship as a God.
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  He's eaten by worms. It's a gruesome, awful scene.
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  A terrible end for a prideful man.
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  And immediately in the very next verse, Luke contrasts it.
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  But the word of God increased and multiplied.
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  Herod is dead and rotting. The word is alive and growing.
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  The tyrants die, but the text prevails.
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  Then in Acts 19 .20 you're in Ephesus, a city dominated by the
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  occult and the massive Temple of Artemis.
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  And it says so. The word of the Lord continued
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  to increase and prevail mightily.
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  It conquers. It's an active, powerful agent.
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  And this brings us back to the logical chain of the
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  Reformation. Solace.
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  The motto of the Reformation was Post tenebrous lux, after
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  darkness, light. Let's walk through that logic
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  chain. It all starts with Sola
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  Scriptura. Scripture alone.
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  If that is your final authority, what does it tell you about
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  humanity? It tells you we were dead in our
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  trespasses and sins. We're like the Israelites in
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  Egypt, enslaved. We cannot free ourselves.
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  So that immediately destroys any idea of salvation by our own
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  works or by doing penance. Completely, which leads directly
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  to Soul of Gracia. If I'm spiritually dead, I need
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  life to be given to me as a gift.
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  It must be by grace alone. And how do I receive that grace?
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  Not by earning it, but by solified through faith alone.
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  And who is that faith in? Not in the Church, not in the
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  Saints, not in my own efforts, but solace, Christus in Christ
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  alone. And the ultimate result of all
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  of. This solidaeo Gloria glory to
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  God alone. If I contribute even 1% to my
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  salvation, then I get to keep 1% of the glory.
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  But if God does 100% of the work from beginning to end.
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  He gets 100% of the glory. It's a perfect system, and the
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  entire structure rests on that first foundation, Scripture.
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  If you remove the authority of the Bible, the whole gospel of
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  grace falls apart. So we have established the
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  theology and the history. Now I want to move to the
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  application of this in what we call the modern era, because
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  this same dynamic scripture driving change is what launched
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  the modern missions movement. We have to talk about William
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  Carey. He's known as the father of
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  modern missions, but the England he lived in during the late
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  1700s was not excited about evangelism.
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  Not at all. It was frozen solid by hyper
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  Calvinism. We should probably explain that
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  term. Hyper Calvinism is a distortion
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  of Reformed theology. It takes the true doctrine of
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  God's sovereignty and pushes it to an unbiblical extreme.
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  The logic was something like God has already elected who will be
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  saved. He will save them without our.
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  Right. Therefore, we don't need to do
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  anything. In fact, trying to evangelize
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  the heathen might be an insult to God's sovereignty.
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  As if he needs us. There's that famous story where
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  Kerry, as a young man proposes a mission to the heathen at a
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  minister's meeting. Yes, an older respected minister
• 18:41
  named John Ryland reportedly stood up and rebuked him, saying
• 18:45
  Sit down young man, when God pleases to convert the heathen,
• 18:48
  he will do it without your aid or mine.
• 18:51
  That was the spirit of the age, just crushing inertia.
• 18:54
  But Kerry couldn't sit down. He was a bubbler by trade, a
• 18:57
  Shoemaker. A simple tradesman, but a genius
• 19:00
  intellect, he taught himself Greek, Hebrew, Dutch and French
• 19:04
  while hammering on shoes, and he had a visual aid that changed
• 19:07
  his life and really the world. He made a map, a map of the
• 19:11
  world out of leather scraps and paper.
• 19:13
  His other Bible. That's what they called it.
• 19:15
  He kept it on the wall of his workshop.
• 19:17
  He mapped out the known world. He wrote down the population
• 19:20
  statistics. He could find the dominant
• 19:23
  religions of each country, and he would look at that map while
• 19:26
  he worked, see the vast darkness where the gospel had never gone,
• 19:29
  and he would weep. He collided the Word of God, the
• 19:32
  Great Commission, to go and make disciples with the cold hard
• 19:37
  facts of the world. And that collision produced a
• 19:39
  little book called The Inquiry. It was an 87 page booklet he
• 19:43
  wrote in 1792. The full title is a paragraph
• 19:46
  long, but the argument was simple.
• 19:48
  The Great Commission is still binding on us today, and we must
• 19:51
  use means to fulfill it. Means was the controversial.
• 19:54
  Word that was the fighting word means meant forming societies,
• 19:58
  raising money, sending people, building ships, starting
• 20:01
  printing presses. It meant we have to organize and
• 20:03
  attempt something. This led to his famous deathless
• 20:06
  sermon. Expect great things from God,
• 20:09
  attempt great things for God. And from that sermon, the
• 20:12
  Baptist Missionary Society was formed.
• 20:15
  They started with about 13 lbs in the collection plate.
• 20:17
  A laughable sum. But it was the seed of a global
• 20:21
  movement. So Carrie goes to India and this
• 20:23
  is where the romance of missions meets the brutal reality.
• 20:27
  It was not a victory loud. It was a Crucible.
• 20:30
  He faced abject poverty. His wife, Dorothy, suffered from
• 20:34
  severe mental illness and eventually went completely
• 20:36
  insane from the strain. He faced active resistance from
• 20:39
  the British East India Company, who didn't want missionaries
• 20:42
  stirring up trouble and messing up trade.
• 20:44
  And he went seven years without a single Indian convert.
• 20:47
  Seven years. Can you imagine the pressure to
• 20:49
  quit? Imagine the hyper Calvinists
• 20:52
  back home hearing that news and saying, see we told you God
• 20:56
  isn't in this. But Kerry didn't quit.
• 20:58
  Why? Because his confidence wasn't in
• 21:01
  his strategy or his cultural savvy.
• 21:03
  It was in the word. He poured his life into
• 21:06
  translation. He believed that if he could
• 21:08
  just get the Bible into Bengali, Sanskrit and the other dialects,
• 21:11
  the text itself would do the work.
• 21:13
  He suffered a massive set back in 1812, didn't he?
• 21:16
  The fire a. Devastating fire at the Serum.
• 21:19
  Poor print shop. It destroyed his massive
• 21:22
  multilingual dictionary, his grammar books, whole
• 21:24
  translations of the Bible that had taken him years to produce.
• 21:27
  It was all gone. A lifetime of scholarship turned
• 21:30
  to ash in a single night. Most men would have packed up
• 21:33
  and gone home. Carrie wrote to a friend.
• 21:35
  The ground must be labored over again, and he started over from
• 21:39
  scratch. He ended up translating the
• 21:41
  Bible in whole or in part into dozens of languages.
• 21:45
  He planted the seed of the word that is still bearing fruit in
• 21:48
  India Today. He famously called himself a
• 21:51
  plotter. I can plot.
• 21:53
  That is my only genius. It's a beautiful, profound
• 21:56
  humility. He didn't want to be a hero.
• 21:58
  When he died, he requested that his tombstone include the lines
• 22:01
  from an Isaac Watson, a guilty, weak and helpless worm.
• 22:04
  On my kind arms I fall. He lived and died by grace
• 22:08
  alone, through faith alone. Let's move to our final figure
• 22:11
  in this historical line, Adonerum Jetson, the apostle to
• 22:16
  Burma, which is modern day Myanmar.
• 22:19
  His story connects directly to the authority of scripture in a
• 22:22
  very personal, costly way. Judson was an American.
• 22:25
  He graduated from Brown University.
• 22:27
  He was brilliant, ambitious, had a bright future.
• 22:30
  He set sail for India in 1812 with his new wife and who they
• 22:35
  called Nancy. They were sent out by the
• 22:37
  Congregationalist. Which means they held to infant
• 22:39
  baptism. Correct.
• 22:41
  But they knew they would be meeting William Carey's
• 22:44
  associates in India, who were of course, Baptists.
• 22:47
  So on the long voyage over, we're talking months at sea on a
• 22:50
  sailing ship. Jensen decided to study the
• 22:52
  Greek New Testament on the topic of baptism so he could refute
• 22:56
  the Baptist when he arrived. He was preparing to win the
• 22:58
  argument. He was, but a funny thing
• 23:00
  happened on the way to the debate.
• 23:02
  As he studied the word baptizo and looked at the narratives in
• 23:04
  the book of Acts, he became convinced that the Baptist were
• 23:07
  right. He realized that, according to
• 23:09
  the text, baptism was for believers only by immersion.
• 23:12
  This is a disaster for him professionally.
• 23:14
  A total catastrophe. If he became a Baptist, he would
• 23:17
  be resigning from his mission board mid trip.
• 23:20
  His funding would be cut off instantly.
• 23:22
  He would be stranded in Asia with no home, no job and no
• 23:25
  support. Every pragmatic instinct in his
• 23:27
  body must have been screaming. Just keep quiet.
• 23:30
  Keep your new view private. Yeah, you couldn't.
• 23:33
  He wrote in his journal, Truth Compelled Us.
• 23:36
  He and Nancy were baptized by one of Carrie's men in Calcutta.
• 23:39
  They chose fidelity to the text over their own financial
• 23:42
  security and reputation, and that act of submission to the
• 23:45
  word really defined the rest of their ministry.
• 23:48
  And the ministry in Burma was incredibly hard.
• 23:50
  Harder than Carrie's, arguably Burma was a hostile, closed
• 23:54
  Kingdom. The Emperor was an absolute
• 23:56
  tyrant and like Carrie Judson, labored for years with no fruit,
• 24:00
  no converts. There is a story in the sources
• 24:03
  about his interaction with a Burmese intellectual, a man
• 24:06
  named Ushwin Gong. I think this dialogue just
• 24:09
  captures the essence of this entire deep dive.
• 24:11
  It really does. Ushwin and Gong was a respected
• 24:14
  Buddhist teacher. He was attracted to Judson's
• 24:17
  intellect. He read the tracks Jensen had
• 24:19
  translated. He eventually told Judson, I
• 24:22
  believe in this Jesus. But he had one major objection.
• 24:26
  He could not accept the cross. It was too shameful for him.
• 24:30
  To the Buddhist world view, the idea of a divine being
• 24:33
  suffering, dying like a common criminal, was repulsive.
• 24:37
  It showed weakness, bad karma, he said to Judson.
• 24:41
  I believe he suffered death, but I cannot admit the shameful
• 24:44
  death of the cross. He wanted a Jesus without the
• 24:47
  blood, without the atonement. And this is where Judson proves
• 24:50
  he's a true reformer. He doesn't say, well, that's a
• 24:53
  good start. Let's focus on the teachings of
• 24:55
  Jesus for now, and we can worry about the cross later.
• 24:57
  Not a chance. Judson looked at him and said
• 24:59
  flatly. You are not a disciple, He told
• 25:01
  him. Break down your pride and yield
• 25:03
  to the word of God. Judson understood that you
• 25:05
  cannot edit the message to make it palatable for the culture.
• 25:08
  The power is in the message, specifically the message of the
• 25:11
  cross. If you remove the offense, you
• 25:13
  remove the power. And eventually, Yushuena Gong
• 25:16
  did yield. He was baptized, but the cost
• 25:19
  for Judson just continued to rise.
• 25:21
  The war between Britain and Burma broke out and because
• 25:24
  Judson was a foreigner, he was accused of being a spy.
• 25:27
  He was thrown into the Let Ma Yun the death prison.
• 25:30
  It was a literal hell on earth. No ventilation, crowded with
• 25:33
  filthy criminals. Vermin everywhere.
• 25:36
  Judson was hung upside down by his ankles at night to prevent
• 25:39
  sleep. He was there for nearly two
• 25:41
  years. And Nancy?
• 25:42
  She was a true hero. She was pregnant then, nosing a
• 25:45
  newborn, living in a little shack outside the prison walls.
• 25:49
  She would bribe the guards just to let her bring him scraps of
• 25:51
  food. She smuggled his manuscript
• 25:53
  translation of the New Testament, which she had hidden
• 25:55
  inside a hard pillow so the guards wouldn't find and destroy
• 25:58
  it. She eventually died of the
• 26:00
  strain of it all. She died of malaria and
• 26:02
  exhaustion. His daughter died shortly after.
• 26:04
  Judson was completely broken. He went through a deep dark
• 26:07
  depression. He actually dug a grave for
• 26:09
  himself in the jungle and sat in it for days just contemplating
• 26:13
  death. But he didn't abandoned the
• 26:14
  work. He finished the Bernie's Bible
• 26:16
  in 1834. And here's the amazing
• 26:19
  statistic. It's incredible.
• 26:20
  To this day, the standard Bible used in Myanmar is the Judson
• 26:23
  translation. It is so accurate, so literary,
• 26:27
  that even secular Burmese scholars respect it as a
• 26:30
  masterpiece of their language. He built a foundation on the
• 26:34
  word that has outlasted empires and persecution.
• 26:37
  So we've travelled from the high places of King Manasseh to the
• 26:40
  printing presses of Saranpur. We have seen the scroll found in
• 26:44
  the temple and the Greek New Testament studied on a boat in
• 26:47
  the middle of the ocean. And the common thread is just
• 26:50
  undeniable. Reformation, whether it's
• 26:52
  personal, national, or global, is always caused by the recovery
• 26:56
  of truth. It is catalyzed by the fearless
• 26:59
  proclamation of that truth, and it results in worship and
• 27:02
  obedience. The agent of change is not in
• 27:05
  the strategy. It's not in the means, as
• 27:06
  important as they are, It is in the message itself.
• 27:09
  The word is the change. As Luther said while he was
• 27:11
  drinking beer, the Word did everything.
• 27:14
  So as we wrap this up, I want to leave our listeners with a
• 27:16
  provocation. We live in an age of technique.
• 27:19
  We have better technology, better marketing strategies, and
• 27:22
  more demographic data than any generation in church history.
• 27:25
  And yet we often seem to see less genuine change.
• 27:28
  Exactly. If the Word of God was
• 27:30
  sufficient to tear down the altars of bail, if it was
• 27:34
  sufficient to break the grip of the papacy, and if it was
• 27:37
  sufficient to crack open the closed Kingdom of Burma, why do
• 27:41
  we so often act like it needs our help today?
• 27:44
  Why do we try to Polish a lion? Spurgeon used to say that you
• 27:48
  don't defend a lion, you just let it out of the cage and it
• 27:50
  will defend. Itself.
• 27:51
  That is the challenge, isn't it? Maybe evangelism isn't about
• 27:54
  having the perfect sales pitch or the most attractive program.
• 27:57
  Maybe it's just about having the courage to open the book and
• 28:00
  speak the words. It's about trusting that the
• 28:02
  Holy Spirit is still willing and able to wield his sword.
• 28:06
  Thank you for going on this deep dive with us.
• 28:08
  It's a heavy topic, but I think a very hopeful 1.
• 28:11
  It's the only real hope we have. We will see you next time on
• 28:14
  reformed thinking.