Thank you to everyone who is braving the clock to be here, to go back into history, look at the history of public worship of God from the time of the Reformation. This is, if you will, part two of a presentation that was begun yesterday, the worship of God, the history of the worship of God up to the Reformation. We laid out some important criteria of the church that were desperately needed that the Reformation answered directly. And we laud the Reformers, but most of all, we laud our Lord who conducted the Reformation. It's his work because it's his church.

One of the hallmarks of our nation's founding were the guarantees of freedom of worship that were added to the various constitutions. And I say various constitutions because state constitutions preceded our national Constitution. This is a book that was published 1783. It's known as the Magna Carta of America and it's not the federal Constitution because it predates that but it has the various state constitutions. The guarantees of freedom of worship are in these various state constitutions.

For example the 1780 Constitution of Commonwealth of Massachusetts states it is the right as well as the duty of all men in society, publicly and at stated seasons, to worship the supreme creator and preserver of the universe. And no subject shall be hurt, molested, or restrained in his person, liberty, or estate for worshiping God according to his conscience and it goes on from there. We have to understand these are not church documents but these are documents that respect the church and the role of the church. That was the job of civil government was to provide a civil environment of protection for the church and that was the one of the key blessings with the founding of our nation and those guarantees were written into the founding documents. So we find the freedom of worship was not something granted at all by the civil state but it was recognized that it was a grant from God.

And of course we understood therefore that our nation was founded on vastly different principles than what we saw in the prior talk that was the problem with ancient Rome, which did not recognize, much less respect, the right of people who worship the living God. I like the clarifying statement of John Adams, one of the key founding fathers, when he remarked upon King William III's grant of religious liberty to the colonists of New England. Adams replies, it is not a grant from, is it not a grant from the King of Kings which no puppet or royalist upon earth can give or take away? So here we appeal to the higher grant of our religious liberty and that's exactly what he's pointing to. So we refer to the founding documents of our nation to understand the respect that this nation and the people in this nation and the governors particularly of this nation have for the sole position of the worship of God.

If we step back before a generation before John Adams, we find documents such as this. This is a Christian history. It's actually the first magazine published in Boston. It was a weekly magazine, and as a historian I love it because it goes to what Christian history is. This was concurrent with the Great Awakening.

This was published by Thomas Prince, who was the pastor of the Old South Meeting House, and he was a great advocate of the Great Awakening, which was a controversial subject at the time, and he's trying to publish these things to get the Americans aware of the roots. So this is 1740s talking in this case, in this issue, about the founding of the colonies. He begins with the founding of New Plymouth on the basis of the people's right to worship God. They left England in 1620 in order to establish free worship here. That was central to the American mindset both in the 1600s as well as here in the 1700s.

We are to always be reminded of our foundations. But he goes on to say, again Thomas Prince, who by the way was a descendant of the Mayflower Company, as well as a great collector of documents himself, which is why he was a historian. He for instance owned John Bradford's, or William Bradford's original copy of Plymouth Plantation, which at the time that this was given was in the Old South Meeting House and was later stolen by the British and then recovered in the 1800s. So he's a great collector of original documents and he published these founding era sermons and I mean founding era as the first sermon preached in the various colonies. But he says in this magazine, but a greater colony, Biz, Massachusetts, that is greater in his opinion than New Plymouth, is now coming on to strengthen the other, and to fill up the land and sea from sea to sea, from the river to the ends of the earth.

And here behold the wonders of this is also accomplished." And what he's referring to here is the great Winthrop fleet of 1630. "'Great numbers of eminent persons and others of the same pious and pure dispositions in the main with the former yet continued in the churches of England in the communion with them as long as the higher powers, meaning the king of England, indulged him. In other words, many did not come over with Plymouth but desired to stay and worship God according to the dictates of God's Word in England. But a spirit of severe imposition is now let loose upon these. Again, this is talking about what happened in the 1630s and 20s.

The book of sports on the holy Sabbath of God must be read by ministers in their public assemblies and their assent to unscriptural ways of worship must be subscribed to as the necessary term of their preaching even though they were solemnly ordained in the church to the office required by Christ himself to discharge. Now this is a wordy way even in the 1700s of describing something that would have been even more wordy in the 1600s and that is the fact that God had ordained these pastors but they were being required by the state to add things to their regular worship that were dictated by the king and they refused to do that. They did not like what he said. In this case he mentions the book of sports which is a king's proclamation that was demanded to be read during Sunday service throughout England saying what sports you should go out in entertainments you should go out and enjoy after service. The Puritans detested that kind of thing, and they grossly objected to what the king was demanding of them.

Thomas Prince here in the 1700s says, that right to worship God in their own assemblies is what drove those who settled Massachusetts as well. So this is part of our understanding of the basic foundation of who we are as a nation. That is, the right, the freedom, and the duty we have to worship Almighty God according to his dictates and not dictated by anyone else. And they were very jealous about their liberties within their own churches because it was the local congregation as they sought that was to conduct the services because they were answerable to God Almighty the King of Kings for what they did. So we're going to pick up the story of worship because to understand the foundation of our nation and the foundation of the colonies that preceded our nation, you have to understand what drove them to those principles.

They did not grab them out of the air when they wrote the original constitutions. They did not come up with good ideas. They inherited a whole legacy of worshiping God that they wanted to preserve and that's what the founding of this nation was largely about. But because they didn't invent the ideas, it's important for all Americans in particular, but certainly Christians that are desirous to know some of the richness of the history of our worshiping God, to understand or at least have working knowledge of that history prior to the founding of our nation. And therefore we can understand what we owe to God in what we do, which is all glory to Him, but also what we owe to Him in thanksgiving for His providence and allowing us to freely worship.

Because as we know, as we saw In yesterday's lecture, the right to worship was granted by God, but was paid for dearly by many, many saints that went before us. So it's a great privilege we have, both culturally, providentially, and by the dictates of God to worship him with all our hearts, with all our souls, and with all our minds. The history of the Reformation goes back to the time of Luther in Germany, Calvin and others, Wingly in Switzerland, Knox in Scotland, and I love the fact that the English Reformation was conducted by a whole host of people because again that points to the fact that it's God's Reformation rather than a particular man's. And in fact, if you were to ask Calvin or Luther, they detested the terms Lutheran, Lutheranism. Calvin detested Calvinism because they said it takes your eyes off of the true harbinger of our Reformation.

Don't associate my name with it, associate Christ. We are just instruments. And that's characteristic of the English Reformation. There are many men that stand out but none that's a stalwart central figure and I think that's indicative of the kind of preaching we had as well. So our session last time ended with the eve of the Reformation and I must say Europe was not ripe for a Reformation, Europe was rotten for a Reformation.

The time for the restoration of the worship of God was right at hand to in fact behold the beauty of the Lord and inquiring in his spiritual temple. Worship is not confined as we saw to any one place. Our Lord made sure of that in the way that the early church was established. It was established in local congregations. That has been the story of it ever since.

So we're going to fast forward now to the time of Luther, but to set him up for those who may not have been here yesterday, there was a great cry of protest, which we later know as Protestantism, but it was really protestism, if you want to describe it in a way that our minds understand it. There's great protest against the corruption of the church prior to the coming of Luther and Luther's writings. In fact, when Luther wrote, when he objected in his 95 Theses to the indulgence of the church. There was a resonant audience ready to hear that. They resonated that.

Luther didn't wake them up as much as resonated with what God was planting in people because the Holy Spirit was already doing the work in people and then he sent his spokesmen and that resonated with them and they embraced it. Luther would have been nothing in the 95 Thesis, would have been nothing more than an academic exercise if people hadn't grabbed onto it with their hearts and said, yes, someone is speaking out. Somebody is driving this thing, and if you know anything about Luther's personality he drove the issue. He was the man of the hour because God said this is the kind of voice I want at this season and he was able to be a stalwart spokesman. So we have his 95 Thesis which was ultimately just a proposal for a council to discuss indulgences.

But he drove the issue and Luther would not back down because he read the Word of God for himself as his contemporaries had and he wouldn't back down from what God demanded in his word. And that's what drives reformation. So he was the man of the hour. One of the key documents that Luther published was in 1520. And appropriately, it was called the Babylonian captivity of the church.

It's how the church has been sent into exile to purge itself of idols. Luther addressed public worship in that document and it's an essential document. One, historically because it got him kicked out of the church but also it addressed the subject that's always at controversy. What is the worship of God? Luther regarded the first captivity of the church, the withholding of the cup of the Lord and the Lord's Supper from the laity.

We remember there was a strict difference between the laity and the clergy and The laity were considered too vulgar to engage in the full Lord's Supper or transubstantiation at the time. Luther says that's preposterous because a worshiping assembly is the assembly itself, not a sideshow up here that people come and attend and watch other people worship God. Worshipping God involves a congregation and that is exactly what's pictured in the Lord's Supper. He says, return the cup of Christ to the people. The second captivity is a doctrine of transubstantiation itself or the supposed priestly changing of the wine and bread into the literal or corporal they called it body and blood of Jesus Christ.

That was considered by the Reformers idolatry. It's not what happened, That's not how we worship God is by seeing physical things with our eyes and mistaking those for Jesus Christ who is ever on His throne in heaven. The third captivity was the assertion of the priest mass itself was an altar sacrifice and that he said was idolatrous as well. The whole idea of a priest performing, re-performing the death of Christ before the people was idolatry. It's putting before people on a weekly basis or even more frequently than that something that Christ accomplished once and that sacrifice was the propitiation for our sins.

We don't go to have our sins forgiven through what we see performed in front of us through a priest. So Luther is cutting through everything in his Babylonian captivity and as you can imagine it got him in much trouble with the Father Church under which he served. He was threatened with excommunication that very year 1520 and Luther of course as he never could he would not back down. He was presented with a bull of threat of excommunication and he answered it in this document, this is adverse excrebrulum, antichristum bullum. It's against the Antichrist bull.

Let me note Luther, nor Calvin, nor the Puritans after that, who all referred to the Pope as Antichrist, they did not invent the term. You know who invented the term antichrist for popes? Other popes, because at the time of the Great Schism that we talked about last time, the popes would accuse each other of being antichrists. So the Protestant had that ready word to pick up and say, you are all acting as antichrists. So it's a borrowed term and not an invented term by the Protestant Reformers.

So Luther picks that up and subsequently, because he's answering and not standing down, the Pope does the greatest favor to the church that anyone could possibly do. They excommunicate Luther. Now Luther is not bound to reform a corrupt church from within. He is free as well as the host of people that are reading the materials and reading the Bible for themselves. Free now to go out and establish his houses of worship not based on reforming something that by then they considered dead, but on the basis of God's Word.

I think the Pope did himself the worst mistake you could imagine and did the Church of Jesus Christ the best favor he could have done. Luther in conjunction with the burning of the bull, burnt a copy of this. This is a document we talked about yesterday. It's the Canon Law. He burnt a copy of this with the bull as well.

He said, since they have burned my books, I burn theirs. The Canon Law is included because it makes the Pope a god on earth. So here it's all about bringing worship back to the true God and the true way methods that God ordains with the heart that God demands of us when we worship Him. Those are the three fronts of true reformation. So Luther was a great champion during the Reformation and he set out a lot of reforms but as God never uses one man to accomplish all his works, Luther took a giant leap into Reformation, but the Reformation, and we have to understand the word Reformation is something that's ongoing.

The church is ever reforming. So there was another generation and there was another area of center of reform that took the Reformation further. For instance, Luther wrestled with the idea of transubstantiation and came up with the idea that there is the presence of Christ in the elements but it's not his corporate presence that the elements themselves are altered into a super state of physicality and that's what we take. Well and he also believed therefore that you still take Christ in through your physical mouth and the elements do embody Christ and that was something that he was dead verse views on with other Protestants. So there became a struggle now.

If it's not what transubstantiation dictates, what is it? So now you have the Reformers themselves trying to back and forth work out what this thing is. They all agreed that the priest mass was idolatry but what is the Lord's table, the ordinance that the Lord demands. Luther is also important because he declared that there are only two sacraments rather than seven and that was something that was adopted by all subsequent reformers. Luther however believed that images or worshiping God with images around you was neutral.

He said it doesn't matter that they're there and it doesn't matter if they're not there because they're really nothing. So the Reformers that came a little bit later than Luther said, no, we need to drive this thing even further. And so they came up with the idea of Christ being in the – spiritually in the elements because we know God through our mind and our heart and we worship God through the word and his word is spiritual so when you participate in the ordinance of the Lord fundamentally it is a spiritual ordinance. There is a receiving of Christ but it's spirit to spirit, God to person. So therefore, according to Calvin and others, Martin Bucer and other great champions the Reformation, you don't physically worship God by taking him in through your mouth at all.

You take him in through your heart and through your mind. That's how you receive the elements of the Lord's table. He's there certainly but he's there as he really exists. When it came to images Calvin said in 1535 that They are not merely distractions. Certainly they aren't as Luther assumes them to be, that is statues in your church or items on your walls.

They're not just distractions. They take your mind away. They're anti-worship because they again fix your mind on something physical when your mind is to be on Christ spiritually. They put something before you that destroys worship rather than is neutral towards it or enhances it in any way. These are some of the contributions that came particularly out of Calvin's Geneva.

So Calvin takes another step forward in reforming the church. So a number of things take place in the second generation or the subsequent to the first generation of Reformation, particularly out of Geneva. And it infiltrated then France to the heart. In fact, at one point Calvin was forced to leave Geneva to flee to Strasbourg to worship there. And it was in Strasbourg that he ran into some Lutheran hymns.

And he rather thought that was appropriate to sing to the Lord. And Calvin says that we worship God in word, meaning with our mind, but we also worship Christ and God through melody. That's the things God sees. So it's not like we don't have things that we worship God with, but they're things that God recognizes, which is mind and heart or word and melody. So he proposes and actually publishes a French Psalter in the 1530s.

And then when he returns to Geneva, he publishes the Geneva Psalter as well. This is a copy of the Geneva Psalter that's translated in the later 1500s into English and it's very interesting reading because it's a Psalter but it has more than just Psalms in it or translations of Psalms. It has very interesting hymns. The been a creator or praise to the Creator as a humble suit of a sinner that people sing. It has the song of Ambrose, a hymn written by Ambrose as well.

It has the Lord's prayer, the Magnificat of Mary put into music as well, and as well as the Ten Commandments put to song as well. And then it begins the metered Psalms of David. So we find these things. In fact, it has the old 100th in it, which is a psalm to God as both creator and redeemer. So you sing to God according to his word, and one commentator said that if Calvin had lived long enough he probably would have put the entire Bible into music for people to sing.

And I think that's appropriate because we do understand God with our mind as we read scripture and we repeat it back as the overflow of our hearts back to him in worship. And that's very key to worship. Calvin says in 1537, which accompanies the French Psalter, it is the thing most expedient for the edification of the church to sing some psalms in the form of public prayers by which one prays to God and sings his praises, so that the hearts of all may resound and be stimulated to make similar prayers and to render similar praises and thanks to God with a common love. What he's saying by that is when the congregation sings to God, it's the love of the congregation unified that pours out in worship to God as the congregation. That's a beautiful sentiment because it's pouring back to God thanksgiving.

He says in the foreword of his 1542 Geneva Psalter, And in truth we know by experience that singing has great strength and vigor to move and inflame the heart of men to evoke and praise God with a more vehement and ardent zeal." In other words, singing to God increases or magnifies the zeal you have for him, so it's an outpouring that should never stop. In other words, Worship of God elicits greater worship of God because that's our purpose and God is drawing us to that end. So we see the Reformers reformed primarily worship and of course that again as the circle always comes around is what gets you in trouble because the world is not neutral towards the worship of God. Either the corruptions in the church will oppose it or ignorance will oppose it as well as those outside of the church will oppose it. But we see in the 1500s two kinds of church.

We have the Roman Catholicism which is holding to the old forms of worship and traditions and we find the whole array mostly Lutherans and Reformed, Lutherans being those of Luther's stripe, Reformed being more of the Calvinistic, I use that as an adjective, stripe as well. But that is being opposed now, not from within their churches or what they would call the only true church, but being opposed from outside or the Roman Catholic Church. We find that is indicative of a lot of the push for reforms. And we'll shift now just briefly, and we're just touching upon the Reformation here. It's a vast subject, but we're just kind of getting the flavor as it pertains to worship.

And each nation as we can see that is reformed, again always being reformed for what God is already working in the people that live there and keep that in mind it's not one man that does it but we shift now to Scotland and John Knox who happened to be a refugee in Geneva and he's learning the reformed faith. He returns to Scotland and he resonates with a lot of men, particularly the nobility there, who for a century hadn't had much taste for Rome. And he largely is the mouthpiece there. But there's a different front that's always been attached to it. And I'd like to focus on just one aspect.

Again, there's many aspects and there's common aspects with all the reformers but there's some that distinguish the various nations. Scotland was the first that was a national reformation. Well you say, wasn't Germany? No, Germany was not a nation as we think of it at the time. They were the Germanys.

There are many principalities and throughout Germany you'd have Reformation and you'd have one to hold the Catholicism or something else. There were reformed principalities in Germany as well. Scotland was a nation and it came with force and because it came with force and was driven by the magistrates in Scotland at the urging of Knox and others, it became an issue of rights. So the idea of a right to worship really took root in Scotland more than anywhere else. Or Your right, God-given right to worship is something that you need to fight for in this land.

And the fight was battled or fought out on that front. The idea of the right to worship God as a nation. This book was published in the 1700s. Knox published a wonderful Reformation of the Church, but I will tell you it is hard to read because it's written in the 1500s and anything in the 1500s you have to go through a lot of exercise just to get the nut of what he's saying in any given paragraph. This one was written a little bit later, it's The History of the Reformation by Gilbert Stewart and he's covering the basics, not of the Reformation of Scotland all the way through the 1600s, but the basic start of what reform was.

And it basically documents, in fact it's got a wonderful appendix, the documents all the basic fundamental treaties that were passed by the Scottish nobility. We have the right, first of all he goes through some of the martyrdoms that went on prior to the Reformation which were atrocious, but he also has the founding documents. So We have covenant after covenant. There's not one Scottish covenant, there's a series of them. The first one he mentions at 1559 was in Perth on the last day of May in the year of God, 1559.

Being convened in the town of Perth in the name of Jesus Christ setting forth his glory understanding nothing more necessary for the same than to keep a constant amity unity and fellowship together doing all things required of God in his scripture that may be to his glory and at the whole powers to destroy and put away all things that doth dishonor his name so that God may be truly and purely worshipped." So all the covenants of early Scottish Reformation were about establishing true worship in this land as a national statement. That's indicative of Scotland. Under Knox, a Confession of Faith was written in 1560. It was revised in 1580. This is a copy of that.

And this was the same confession that became the Solemn Covenant in 1638. So it was passed on from generation to generation so it has long legs this is an early printing of that but the Scots came with force they saw much like Luther but now with a whole nation coming against apostasy and worship And listen to some of the terminology. We won't speak this way today, and I don't think we need to speak this way unless we're confronting an opponent. But can you imagine a confession of faith that says this, we durst and refused the usurped authority of the Roman Antichrist upon the scriptures of God, upon the Kirk, upon the consciences of men, all his tyrannous laws made upon the indifferent things, meaning useless things, against Christian liberty, Have bastard sacraments, all his rights, ceremonies, and false doctrine added to the administration of the true sacraments without the word of God, his blasphemous opinion of the transubstance of creation, or the real presence of the body of Christ in the Lord's table. Receiving the same by the wicked bodies of men, his devilish masses, his blasphemous priesthood, his profane sacrifices for the sins of the dead, his wicked canonization of men, the calling of angels and saints departed, worship of imagery, relics and crosses, dictating kirks, churches, with holy days, his purgatories, prayers for the dead, processions, blasphemy, it goes on and on and on of all the things they decry about corrupt worship naming them and calling it anti-christian And then it ends with a seminate, we will worship God according to His word and we bind ourselves to that obligation.

So it's very forceful because force has to meet force. So we have what they call then the true church or true religion as the way the reformers said versus false religion. Now let's traverse down from Scotland to England which is more our direct ancestor, that is many of us in America today. So it's important for us to have a working knowledge of the Reformation in England, which precedes much of what happened in Scotland, which was concurrent with what was actually happening in Luther's time in Germany, and certainly of the same sentiment as what was going on with Calvin in Geneva. So what England, the blessing of England was to incorporate so much of what was fought in other lands.

But they had their own fight as well, because it's always a struggle. There was a man, John Collette, who at the convocation in London in 1510, a convocation was where the clergy, at that time the Catholic clergy would assemble in London, it was basically a junket where there was wine, women, song and these guys would talk about being clergy and how holy they were while they debased the whole idea. Well, John Collette stands up and said, we need a reformation. He calls it that before Luther, seven years before Luther's 95 Thesis. He says, we need to return because you, he's preaching this to the clergy.

It's his job to stand before them and preach to the clergy. He said, you are corrupting it. You are taking people's eyes off of God and you are reaping the benefits of that for yourselves. He said, shame on you. Return to God and His Word because it's His Church.

This is before Luther, John Collette, and subsequent to that we have the translation of the English Bible from the original Greek in the New Testament with William Tyndale. This is a leaf from his second edition. Tyndale's second edition of the New Testament Greek and forward to that edition calls the Word of God the covenant for his saints and I love that because his first edition called it pure grace which it certainly is but he Now Tyndale reforms himself a little bit more and starts talking about the Word of God as our covenantal document with God, which spells out our obligations. This is a reprinting of that edition a little bit later after he had been burned on the stake. And I love this because it includes Matthew 18 and where we read the word church in Matthew 18, Tyndale corrected that and said no it means congregation.

So Tyndale's idea of Reformation and Reform was we worship God in Reformation. Subsequent to that, for instance, the King James calls it church and why did they do that? They say in the foreword to the translation of the King James it's because we want people to think of the church as the Church of England rather than individual congregations. So we find that distinction then in the very beginning of God's Word in English. And of course they were going to have their own battle with royalty.

We know that the King of England was Henry VIII at the time that the Reformation hit. He was called the defender of the faith by none other than the Pope of Rome because he resisted Lutheranism until the Protestantism would suit his particular ends. So England got a partial reformation with the king. He was the same king that had William Tyndale hunted down and strangled before his body was burnt to the stake outside of England. But as we know, Tyndale's famous last prayer was, Lord, open the king of England's eyes.

And the Lord opened the eyes of many in England. This is the title page of the great Bible that was published under the auspices of the guy who had William Tyndale killed for translating the Bible. And here we have centered up front on the title page, Henry VIII, and he's receiving the Oracles of God and then handing them down to his bishops and here's all the vulgar people. And they're not saying praise God, they're saying God saved the king because the Reformation in the King of England's eyes was all about his authority. He was still Catholic in his ideas of worship.

He believed in transubstantiation. In fact, when he martyred Protestants, this is out of a copy of Fox's Book of Martyrs, it shows Windsor Castle where the King liked to stay when he was on his hunts and it shows some burning of some Protestants at the stake. They were burnt for heresy because they didn't comport to the king's idea of worship. Here's some Catholics being not burnt at the stake for heresy but being whipped and beat and humiliated for insurrection against the king. It's kind of like America today.

You're guilty of one law. No matter what you do, there's a law that makes you guilty. Well, that was the case of people in England. Henry died and his son, Edward VI, took the throne. He as well as many people in his administration were in direct contact with John Calvin.

There was a series of letters that went on between Geneva and England. The Reformation took hold in large part, again never perfectly, but in large part in England during the rain, short rain of Henry VIII's son. He dies in 1547, I'm sorry, he dies in 1553, he took the throne in 1547. And his younger sister Mary comes to the throne and thus we have the counter-reformation in England beginning in 1553. This is Mary.

These are some original acts that were passed during her reign, which goes to establishing the new laws of heresy in England. So If you deny transubstantiation, you can be guilty of heresy. This is a quite rare document. It's probably the only one that exists outside of the public records of England, but it's in order to have somebody either martyred or severely tortured under the name of the Catholic Queen and her husband by the way the prince of Spain she was married to the man who later became the great Spanish Inquisitor Philip II, a tyrant. He for a short time during the reign of Bloody Mary, English words for her, was king of England.

And this is an order to have somebody persecuted for denying Catholic worship. So now we have, again, push comes to shove. So England is a battle. What drives the battle in England, so we look at distinctives to England, not that they don't exist elsewhere, but what stands out at the forefront in England that we find predominant in the success of the Reformation. And that's primarily the role of the sermon.

So England had a great part in returning the sermon as the centerpiece, although it was recognized elsewhere. Calvin, of course, and Luther and the Scots were all about sermons. But what drove the Reformation was the sermon, the preaching of God's Word, the putting of God's Word in meaningful practical ways in people's minds. These are the famous sermons by Hugh Latimer. He was the first great preacher of the Reformation in England.

It's a series of sermons. I wish I had time to go through them, but he talks about a number of things. He has a convocation, the first sermon here is another convocation where he says, we need the Restoration, this is in Henry VIII's time, before Henry VIII is fully Protestant, well he never was fully Protestant before he gave the face of Protestantism to his reign. He says, we need preaching in England. And then he goes on to say we need to throw out all idols in England.

And he goes on and he preaches the Reformation. He preaches the tenets of people and he has the ears of kings, of parliamentarians, of the esquires, of everybody that has ears in England. His sermons were published and read by all. Bloody Mary, of course, didn't like Latimer any more than she liked anyone else that promoted God's word. This is again another plate out of Fox's book of martyrs and it shows the burning of Hugh Latimer at the stake, one of the first martyrs under her reign because he was a powerful preacher.

But preaching is what overcame superstition and idolatry. What also helped was the publication of the Geneva Bible. This is a 16th century copy of the Geneva Bible with the footnotes, again right out of Geneva, which is why the name Geneva is associated with, but now published in England during the reign of Mary's younger sister Elizabeth. The Elizabethan age changed the Reformation considerably because they had the Book of Common Prayer that was established, which at the time served a great function, which later would be opposed by those who wanted further reformation. So again, you look at reformation in England as a series of steps, always reforming, but in the end, in many ways going beyond Geneva, not in the progressive sense, but getting back to what God's Word says.

Reform is always going back to the first principles. We saw this in the chart of the early martyrs yesterday. They were obsessed with what was called the Primitive Church, the Primary Church. In fact, this is a book that was printed in the 1600s. And it's called An Inquiring to the Constitution, Discipline, and Unity of Worship of the Primitive Church.

He's not looking at it academically or in a detached way. Look at how these backward early Christians worship. No, this is what we need to return to, the primary, that's the root word, a primitive, the primary things we need to get back. So Reformation then is going back to closer and closer to what God demands in worship. And that's a process that's never complete.

And it wasn't complete certainly in Mary's age, certainly not in her father Henry VIII's age, and not in Elizabeth's age. For instance, Elizabeth continued to publish the calendars of the Holy Days. This is part of a Lisbethan calendar that spells day by day what saint you venerate, what saint you sing songs to or whatever. Not that they venerated in the Roman Catholic sense, but they honored the saints. So it's a less aggressive calendar than you find coming out of Rome, but still it's a calendar of holy days.

And people are saying, where is that in God's Word? We don't have that. You find in Elizabethan age the first printing of family catechisms. This is one from 1576. The key here is get the Word of God and the worship of God in homes if it can't be found in the church because God is to be worshipped and we need to inculcate people with the principles of worship so they can worship God in their homes.

And of course if you want a real revolution, that's where you start. The seedbed of all societies is the home. One of the great early Puritan reformers is William Perkins. He taught at Cambridge in the late 1500s. He was a brilliant man who could put the great oracles of God in very practical terms.

I love this particular treatise that was translated. He actually taught in Latin at Cambridge but it was translated here for the people of England to read and it's Christian economics and what it means by that is not how to manage your finances but how to run your home the economy of the home which is what the original word Greek word means and it's called a short survey of the right manner of erecting and ordering a family according to Scripture It's very practical and he has a section here on worship. It's the man or what they call the master of the family or the good man of the house, he says. It's his job to lead the worship of the home. It's his responsibility because God is going to answer.

He's going to answer to God for that. But he spells out a lot of practical necessities of that. It's your job to have everyone trained in the worship of God. It's your job to have everyone trained in the worship of God so that you can go to a church and worship God fit to worship. Don't show up expecting to worship.

Don't show up getting in the mood to worship God because of what you see in front of you. If you don't come to participate, you haven't really come to worship God. And he spells that out. And then he talks about the role of the father after the sermon. It's the father's job then to teach the young ones who may not have understood the language that was being said from the pulpit, it's the father's job to break that down into the level of understanding of all his children.

So everyone has at least some knowledge of what they've heard. They respect congregational worship, therefore greater than they can ever otherwise, and they also come prepared to worship God, and then God is truly worshiped, which is the key feature by the gathered congregation. This was revolutionary because it adds a fuller realm, and this happens primarily in England, and due to the fact that Reformation in the church itself was only partial the Christians were driven to this and it turned out as all things do providentially for the good of God's glory The other thing they added in England was the idea of not scheduled days of extra prayer and worship of God but what they called occasional days or days listed on occasion. The two most prominent would be a day of fasting and prayer. That could be called by the government, where the Puritans and the Reformed said, but the king doesn't dictate our prayers.

That's the exception. That's the difference. This is where they have a rub with the Book of Common Prayer. The Book of Common Prayer has a lot of good prayers. It has the ordinations of a lot of good ceremonies that they called.

All these things look good on the surface. The problem is they're dictated from outside the church itself. Therefore, the accountability to God isn't with the church itself or much less the worship of God, it's dictated outside so it's removed. So they said no, congregational worship includes self-government or at least a good sound working level of self-government But the government could call for days of fasting and prayer. The government could call for days of Thanksgiving because the government should be able to rely upon the church to come to its aid as well.

If the government is about preserving your right to worship God then it should be able to draw upon your virtue when needed. So they didn't have scheduled holidays or holy days, they had necessary, occasional, with a purpose in you gathering and the people would then go to their congregation and worship God. And this is what the Puritans insisted upon. And all of these things, by the way, were part of the heritage of the colonists. In other words, the American colonists benefited from all those prior struggles, all those fights that were fought.

And when they fled the corruptions that they fled in their day they brought with them much Reformation and to the benefit of us. We are the recipients of that today. We owe a lot of people thanks. Things came to shove in England in the 1640s against an Anglican king who thought it was his job under God to literally run the congregations of England. This is Charles I.

Parliament resisted because by 1640s it was full of Puritans and those who were reformed and they were pushing back. So within the separation of powers which really came to the fore for the first time in government you have an administration that's saying doing one thing, you have the representative of the people saying no we need to push for other things. One of the things the Parliament did was pass this ordinance in 1642, and it's asking the people in churches and families, it says, to appeal to God for a remedy of a tyrannical king. See the scenario here. When you have the people here desiring to worship God and you have a tyrant blocking that, you got the trump card, which is prayer to the King of Kings who orders of all affairs according to his dictate.

So Parliament was savvy enough to say let's appeal to the one who really owns the church and of course that was conducted in the English Civil War and the king was brought down and it was that Civil War that gave us some of the wonderful documents that we enjoy regarding worship. This is the Confession of faith that was published in the 1640s by the Westminster Confession, a product of that struggle. What they did, and the reason this exists, is because they threw out the Book of Common Prayer. The Book of Common Prayer, again, was mandated prayers on certain days that were dictated by bishops. Well, they threw the whole idea of bishops out as well.

And they said, let's leave it to the congregation. We're not against prayer in any way, but the congregations form their prayers to God. And you have pushed back in this document, this is 1646, a discourse concerning prayer extemporariness or by pretense of the spirit in justification of authorized and set forms of liturgy. And what he's saying here is those congregations and those ministers are too stupid to form prayers that would actually reach the throne of heaven and be answered by God in any way. You'll bring disgrace upon the churches of England if you don't follow the set liturgy given to you in the Book of Common Prayer.

So it was push and shove, but the idea of the Westminster standards was to get them into congregations but also get educations in what? The masters of families so they can continue to conduct worship in their homes. That's why these documents were published for both families as well as churches for the same reason that William Perkins preached long before. Well the English Civil War was a battle from royalists and Anglicans with independence as well, but it was also a battle between independents and Presbyterians. And there were some that came to the fore for the case of the independence against the Presbyterians.

And it wasn't that they were against Presbyterianism, but they were against the idea of a presbytery run of all of England. And they argued, many that fought with Oliver Cromwell in the English Civil War said, we didn't fight as Independents or as Reformed Baptists so that you could set up Presbyterian ordination and force all of us now to baptize our children not as Anglicans but as Presbyterians. We don't necessarily believe in that. Cromwell preaches, he speaks this speech before Parliament in 1654 and he says, many of these men would have not laid one gun against the royalists if they would have been put under another form of religion. This is the first statement by a chief magistrate or the chief executive power in England arguing for religious liberty within congregations and it's wonderful if you're an American because he says that is the very reason that so many people in England that we dearly love gave up their estates here on this side of Atlantic and traversed at great risk to that side of Atlantic for one thing and that's to worship God according to scripture.

This is Oliver Cromwell saying this while he's Lord protector of England. So we find the Reformation pushed even further and it's pushed even further in the next generation. If you're familiar with the theologian, great theologian, Puritan John Owens, he was very much a congregationalist, not in America but in England And they came out with the Declaration of the Faith and Order owned and practiced by the congregational churches in England. And this is a great statement of faith as well. And they draw from the other statements of faith but they push the Reformation even forward.

John Owen says in this, or not John Owen and I should not ascribe John Owen because this is a series of pastors who gathered together in a synod and drafted this document. They talk about each congregation's fidelity to Christ and how each congregation is going to be answerable to Christ just like we find by the way in Revelation 2 and 3 where Jesus has a direct relationship with the various churches, not one through another. But what the Savoy Declaration, which is what this is called in English history, purports is not only are ordained ministers called to take the pulpit, but men that are trained in the oracles of God or the things of God that understand worship from the congregation under the eldership of the assembly are to take the pulpit themselves and preach. So now we find Reformation going one step further back to its origin under the apostles in this document. So England is continuing.

And the only reason it continues to reform is there's continued opposition. See how opposition drives you, Opposition and persecution of the church drives the bride of Christ closer to him. And that's the role of persecution. So when you see persecution and adversity in your day, say praise God, he's driving us even further and closer to him to keep him close. It's when he takes his hand off and leaves us to ourselves that we find corruption bubbling from within.

Corruption from without happened in 1660 with the restoration of the monarchy and the reestablishment of the church and with it the act of uniformity. This is the act of uniformity that was passed ultimately in 1662. Act of uniformity said everyone in England has to be a member of the Church of England. Your children, whether you're Baptist or not, are baptized into the Church of England because that's how we keep track of Englishmen. All marriages that had been taking place during the relaxation of Anglicanism during the Commonwealth era and the English Civil War, all those marriages have to be reconfirmed in the Anglican Church.

Why? So that the king can control his church. And there were many who disagreed, notably John Owen of course. Richard Baxter was the great man during the time of the Restoration that came to prominence for teaching his practical theology. This is a copy from the 1670s of his Christian directory, a thick tome.

And what Baxter does is takes the oracles of scripture, talk about reform taking another step. These guys, as the Puritans did, got very detailed in what the Bible says about nuances of worship. We can't even imagine the great information just to see topics of worship that we wouldn't consider today. But he divides worship into family worship or family economics again, and the role of the Father and His role in the home, also what church worship is. And He's doing this in the face of tyranny because just like the Elizabethan age a hundred years before when people were driven to worship in the home when the church became corrupt, they're getting resources now.

But instead of just the catechism, they're getting tomes like this, which are complex reading, but wonderfully rich if you really desire to know the details of the mind of people desiring to worship God. Now all of that is background for what happened in America, which is a great blessing because the persecution in England drove so many here. And so what England lost was some of its best because they were the ones close to God that were driven out. So again a great providence of God and blessing our nation was the fact that persecution took place in England and we find that from the beginning I alluded to through a magazine that was in the 1700s the persecution that led to both the what we call the Pilgrims as well as Plymouth. This was published at the end of the the government of Massachusetts, the new Plymouth colony, and it's talking about the reasons for the planting of their colonies and it's written by Nathaniel Morton, one of the first generations of Plymouth settlers who now is passing away and he wants the world to remember the basic purposes of their colony.

He mentions the Mayflower, what we call the Mayflower compact now, but he also says it all began with the desire to worship God and they formed a covenant back in England and the fact that they were coming in together as a congregation and eventually landed them in America. Then we find other documents such as this and I've got a fast forward now. This was published by the first reform pastor, or the first pastor of any stripe, in the new little town of Boston in Massachusetts. It's called the Ways of the Churches of Christ of New England. It's called now in nomenclature the New England Way, but this is written by John Cotton, the first teacher.

He called himself teacher of the church and he lays out what worship is. This is how we worship God in America and it imports all those aspects of getting back to Reformed worship in England and applying him here, but more in a congregational sense. This document followed after John Cotton. It's the confession of faith of the elders and messengers, the synods that met in Boston, Massachusetts 1680, and it lays out the fundamental orders, the basics of what worship is. So now we have this thing ingrained in the New England conscience.

It was also ingrained in the New England heart by men such as Thomas Shepard. Thomas Shepard was the pastor of a new town called Cambridge, Massachusetts at the time this new College was being formed which was the first in America known as Harvard. These are a series of sermons preached at that place at the time Harvard is being formed and it's fittingly called a parable of the ten virgins opened and applied in a series of seasonable sermons and it's all about the virginity of the churches, keeping ourselves pure to Christ, keeping our worship pure. Oh New England, don't go back to foreign ways to God. It's this cry, it's the heart being poured out to what the statements of faith were written for our minds.

That was one of Jonathan Edwards favorite books that influenced him greatly before he was involved in the Great Awakening. I love his comment that he says about the pastor's role. He says, I think it myself by the way of my duty, meaning as a pastor of a church, to raise the affections of my hearers as high as I possibly can, provided that those affections are nothing but truth, And with affections that are not disagreeable with the nature of the subject, and that subject was the worship of God. So he says the pastor's job when he stands at the pulpit isn't to put on a performance, but to elicit the praises of God of the congregation. That's the job of any pulpit preaching.

That's the job of any worship service. It's to get the people to worship God. And that became the character. I have many other documents. I'm going to jump to a few that are of significant note.

This is, I think, one of the most incredible documents not only printed in colonial America, but in the history of the church. It's The Body of Divinity by Samuel Willard on a series of lectures that he preached before Harvard College at the turn of the century from the 1700s or 1600s into the 1700s and it was later published and forwarded by Thomas Prince, the same gentleman who is the pastor of the Old South Meeting House that published the magazine. But this is getting into people's hands what was called the body of divinity or The Doctrines of the True Faith. But it's a commentary not on the Bible, but on the shorter catechism. And the shortest book published in New England was The New England Primer, which half of it was the short catechism.

This is the largest book ever printed in colonial America on expositions on that. So we have the little catechism that's so succinct and tiny that you can put it in a front pocket and you have this book with expositions on it. So you can see how rich their understanding was. The key Here, if you want to understand, and I recommend this to anyone, if you want to understand the regulatory principle of worship, read the commentators, the various Puritan commentators as well as New England commentators. Willard is excellent on the first, second, third, and fourth commandments because they go into what true worship is.

If you want a treatise, the best treatise available on what true worship is, read the first four commandments, particularly the first, the second, and then the subsequent other two. He's got ten sermons on each of those commandments in here, what they mean to you, why they're important. Again, he didn't sit in a room with him and God alone and come up with all this. He imports all that knowledge, all that heart for God into this book that the people could enjoy then in America. And I will say that's a metaphor for where we are today.

We are the beneficiaries of all that reforming. And oh, by the way, the Reformation isn't finished. But we do ourselves the greatest disservice to cut ourselves off from the teaching and the drove of literature that's been provided to us by our forefathers. We read on that to know why and how we got here, to see how we're obliged to God in our worship and how we need to continue to worship. It does us no good to remember someone else's worship because our obligation is just as immediate as theirs.

Our fight and our struggle is just as pertinent as theirs. Our obligation is directly to God just as there were. So if you take from this conference your obligation to worship God according to his dictates but draw on that great host of witnesses that went before us and benefit from their virtue and what they paid so dearly for, perhaps we can truly worship God in ways that He demands, both in the correct object of worship, the correct modes of worship, and certainly the great and best heart of worship. Thank you. For more messages articles and videos on the subject of conforming the church and the family to the Word of God and for more information about the National Center for family integrated churches where you can search our online network to find family integrated churches in your area log on to our website ncfic.org.