Zwingli and the Lesser-Known 67 Theses

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Well, while we're standing, I want to invite you to open your Bibles and turn with me to the book of 2 Timothy, chapter 3, verses 16 and 17, a very familiar passage for many of us, especially those who have studied the doctrine of inerrancy and inspiration, those who have studied the history of the text of the Bible and understand what we mean when we talk about the Bible as the infallible and inerrant Word of God.
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This particular passage stands out among the rest as speaking to what the Scripture is and saying that all Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work.
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Father in heaven, as I bring the message this morning, as we continue our study of the history of the Reformation and why it still matters, I pray, Lord, that you would keep me from error.
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As I am a fallible man and capable of preaching error, and for the sake of my conscience, I don't want to do that.
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But more so, Lord, for the sake of your people and the integrity of your name, I pray that you would keep me from error.
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And I pray, Lord, also that you would tie me fast to the post of the Word of God and not let me stray.
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I pray, Lord, that you would open the hearts of your people to hear your Word and understand it.
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And I pray there, Lord, as we know in a group this size, there are always those who have yet to bow the knee to Jesus Christ, that they might see in Him today a Savior and reach out to Him and find in Him a Lord.
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And, Lord, that you might grant them the gift of regeneration and faith whereby they can do just that.
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And all of these things, Lord, we ask your blessing, your watch care, and your sovereign hand upon us.
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In Jesus' name, amen.
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Please be seated.
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Now, for those of you who have been with us for the past few months, you know that we are in a series on the history of the Protestant Reformation.
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We're in this study as part of a celebration, as it were, because on the October 31st of this year, 2017, will mark the 500th anniversary of the day that Martin Luther, the great Protestant Reformer, nailed the 95 Theses to the door of the castle church at Wittenberg and thereby sparking the flame which would become the raging inferno which was the Protestant Reformation.
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And the thing is, the Reformation doesn't just matter to the Reformed church.
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I mean, we're Reformed evangelicals and we know what that means.
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But the Reformation had impact throughout the whole world.
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It wasn't just something that affected a small group of churches or even the church only.
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But the Protestant Reformation had effects that were felt through all areas of life, not only religious, but social, political, economic, governmental.
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It made a difference.
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It was a watershed moment in history.
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And the eventual goal of this series, for those who don't know this, and maybe some of you don't, my goal in this series is I'm going to preach through one of the confessions that came out of the Protestant Reformation.
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We're going to use the confession as it were like a skeleton and use it simply to outline some doctrines and go to Scripture and show why the Reformers focused on these particular things.
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As we talked about last week, certain doctrines were understood and were not debated.
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Doctrines like the Trinity, that wasn't even an issue at the time of the Reformation.
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That was long understood and not a debate.
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But issues like how is an unholy man made right with a holy God, that was the single question that the Reformation depended upon.
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And I want us to understand those doctrines and I want us to understand as a church that theology matters.
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I mean, yeah, you could come here today and I could give you five ways to have a better marriage, three ways to have a better bank account, or ten ways to drive a better car and get a better parking spot.
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But you'll leave just as ignorant of God as when you came.
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I want you to know God and know Him better.
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I want you to know His Word and know His Word better.
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And the frivolities of life will work themselves out.
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In our last lesson, we studied the life and legacy of John Calvin.
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And it would be easy to stop there, because Calvin was such a massive influence in the history of the church and the confessions are so influenced by his writing that it would be easy to say, okay, now we're going to jump from Calvin to the confessions because it would just be a natural jump.
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Because he was a great theologian and his systematic teaching of scripture is really unmatched even to today.
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His writings, his commentary, and remember he did it with a quill pen under the light of a candle, not on a processing computer that could process thousands of bits per second.
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But his writings and institutes are still influential in the church today, 500 years after his life.
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But Calvin was not alone.
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And we've examined others.
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We've looked in this study already of history.
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We've looked at reformers like John Wycliffe.
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We've looked at Jan Hus.
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We've looked at the incomparable Martin Luther.
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And these men are so influential and so important that it's unfair.
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For anyone to call me or anyone else a Calvinist is unfair to all the rest of these guys.
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Because Luther and Zwingli, or he's the one we're getting to today, Luther and Hus and Wycliffe, all these other men have had such a profound influence as well.
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And God has used them powerfully as well.
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But today we're going to look at a man who I think is the unsung hero of the Reformation.
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One that his contributions, I think, are hugely valuable, hugely influential, and often overlooked.
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And it bothers me that it's so overlooked.
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Because many people will call themselves Calvinists.
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There's whole churches that call themselves Lutherans.
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But you ain't ever met nobody who said, yeah, I'm a Zwingli.
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Probably.
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But Ulrich Zwingli is a man who absolutely made his mark on the history of the church and the Protestant Reformation and cannot be discounted.
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If we want to say Luther was the heart of the Reformation, and Calvin was the mind of the Reformation, then Zwingli was the feet.
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Because Zwingli made not just small steps, he made giant leaps forward that other men were not willing to take.
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He took steps in the church that other men were afraid to even follow.
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But they were necessary steps.
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And steps that brought Reformation in Zurich, which is where he was.
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And he has been called the radical reformer.
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But I hope that as we learn today in our study of history, his contributions are no less worthy of attention than Calvin, no less worthy of attention than Luther.
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And I'll say this, where he may have been radical, there was a radical fight to be had.
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Beloved, when you've got people who are telling you that you have to bow down and kiss the ring of a pope, when you have people that tell you that you have to buy your way into heaven through the sale of indulgences, that's radical, and it takes a radical response.
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You've got to understand, that's the life.
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They had men out there shouting, when the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs, and they were milking the people of God.
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Radical times sometimes require a radical response.
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Urich Zwingli was born two months after Martin Luther.
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On January the 1st, 1484, 40 miles outside of Zurich, Switzerland.
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His father was a businessman.
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He had the means to provide his son with a quality education, and he did.
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Like Luther and Calvin, Zwingli was brilliant as a student.
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He went on to graduate with a master's degree, which was quite hard to come by in the late 1400s, early 1500s.
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It isn't quite as easy as today.
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You couldn't go to Phoenix University at night and get your master's.
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It was a little bit more intense in the early 1500s.
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And while enrolled at the University of Basel, he was influenced by a professor of theology named Thomas Wittenbach, who taught about the abuses that were being perpetrated by the Roman Catholic Church.
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And with that knowledge, Zwingli still continued in his desire to be a priest, because he wanted to serve God.
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And he felt like the way to serve God was to serve God as a priest.
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And so he became a priest, and he made it his mission to preach, and to teach, and to pastor well.
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And so he began to study the Scripture.
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It's interesting to think that in this point in history, you could be a priest and not know the Bible, because you were simply teaching what was being told to be taught.
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There were priests who didn't know Latin, and the only Bible they had access to was a Latin Bible.
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So Zwingli studied the Scriptures.
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He had a command of the original languages.
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So he was able to study the Scriptures in their original languages.
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And he went and studied also the writings of the early church fathers, and even some of the modern humanist scholars, like Desiderius Erasmus, who was a humanist scholar during the time of his life.
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And by the time Luther had nailed his 95 theses to the door at Wittenberg in 1517, Zwingli had already been opposing the false teachings of Rome.
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Zwingli was preaching Reformation before anybody knew Luther's name.
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That's hugely important.
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And the thing that he was preaching was the Gospel.
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In fact, we could call Zwingli, we could call him the real evangelical.
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What does that word even mean? I think it's been adulterated in our time, because if you hear on the news, well, the evangelicals are gathering in force in Washington or something, you know, you hear that, and you'll notice that there's really not a lot of uniformity among the quote-unquote evangelical church anymore.
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But that word evangelical does have a meaning that has value.
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The evangel is the Gospel.
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And to be identified as an evangelical is to be identified, as opposed to Roman Catholicism, as being one who is focused primarily upon the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
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That's what an evangelical is.
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Somebody asked, well, what kind of church do you attend? Reformed evangelical.
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We're more than that, but we're certainly not less.
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So he was preaching an evangelical message.
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And in 1519, he came to Zurich to preach.
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And instead of preaching...
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Remember, he's still a Roman Catholic, and they are assigning him lessons to preach, and instead of preaching the lessons that he's being handed, Zwingli began to preach verse by verse through the Bible.
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Remember, this is uninfluenced by Calvin.
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Calvin's doing this in Geneva, but here, this guy is before Calvin.
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And he's preaching verse by verse.
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He preached the whole New Testament.
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Verse by verse.
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Now, he did it in six years.
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I don't know how he did that, because it took me three years to preach through Hebrews.
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But still, I think he was taking big chunks.
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I'm just guessing.
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But he preached...
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You've got to imagine, these people never heard this.
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These people were used to hearing the lectionaries and the commentaries of the priests and the papacy.
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But here's a man who's reading the Word of God and explaining the Word of God, and he didn't rely on commentaries, but rather, he went straight to the Greek, and he memorized, some say, the whole New Testament in Greek.
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But there's no question, he memorized a great deal of it.
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So that he could quote the Bible in the original language from memory.
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He was...
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If you look at 2 Timothy 3, where it says that all scriptures breathed out by God, it's profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, that the man of God be equipped for every good work.
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Zwingli was equipped.
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He equipped himself not with commentaries and lectionaries, but he equipped himself with the Scripture.
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And he trusted the Word of God.
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And he trusted that it could be taught to the people of God and understood as the Word of God.
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He was a man of God, equipped for every good work.
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Well, in autumn of that same year, 1519, when he came to Zurich to preach, the plague hit Zurich.
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And there were 7,000 citizens, and 2,000 of them died.
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I don't think we even understand that.
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That's like...
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Think of First Baptist downtown.
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They have about 7,000 people that come on Sunday morning.
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That's about average, I think, attendance-wise.
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Imagine if 2,000 of them disappeared.
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Zwingli did not flee Zurich.
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He stayed, and he provided care and ministry for the sick and the dying.
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And in doing so, he got the plague.
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But by God's grace, he did not die.
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He simply was sick for several months.
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And that demonstration of love and care endured Zwingli to the people of Zurich.
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They knew this was a man of God who loved them.
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Because not only was he willing to love them in health, he was willing to love them in sickness, and even to death.
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And one of the great controversies of Zwingli's life happened in 1522, because some of his church members chose to eat meat during Lent.
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Now, if you're unfamiliar with the history of Roman Catholic practice, you don't eat meat during Lent, and that was a forbidden practice.
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And Zwingli knew some of his people were doing that, so he did nothing.
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He chalked it up to Christian liberty.
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He looked at Romans 14, which says, Some will eat meat, and some will not eat meat.
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And to each one must stand or fall before his master.
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And he said, That is the answer to the question.
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And he didn't chasten his people.
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And that began sort of a divergence from the church's teaching.
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But that was only a small movement.
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Two years later, in 1524, Zwingli convinced the leaders of Zurich that they needed to remove the idols from Zurich.
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That they needed to remove the statues.
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They needed to remove the crucifixes.
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They needed to remove the paintings and the murals, and all of these things that people were using as worship idols.
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He said, We need to get rid of them all.
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And in 13 days, with he and his council, in 13 days, Zurich went from a place which was a bastion of idolatry to absolutely nothing.
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They hired every carpenter, every painter, every craftsman.
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They went into every church.
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They whitewashed every wall.
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They took down every statue.
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They took it all down.
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To the point that one guy who was on a trip came home.
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He said, What happened? It looks terrible.
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He said.
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But Zwingli had a different view.
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He said, In Zurich we have churches which are positively luminous.
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The walls are beautifully white.
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And that may seem like a radical departure, but that wasn't the biggest departure.
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The biggest departure came in 1525.
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In 1525, the city of Zurich, Switzerland, chose to abolish the mass.
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Now you will remember, maybe, if you've been with this series and you understand, the mass in Roman Catholicism is the high point of worship.
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Because the mass in Roman Catholicism is when it is believed that the bread of communion becomes the body of the Lord Jesus Christ.
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And the cup of communion becomes the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ.
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In an act which is called transubstantiation, where the priest, through the consecration of a prayer, imbibes in those elements the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ and he is sacrificed again for the atonement of sin.
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This is why it's called an altar.
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Because they believe that a sacrifice is happening again.
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That Jesus Christ's sacrifice is being represented on the altar.
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But Zwingli taught that the table was not a table of sacrifice, but was a table of remembrance.
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And he got this from the words of Jesus Christ who said, Do this in remembrance of me.
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And he did one of the most astounding things ever.
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And I really wanted to do this this morning because I know we use this silver.
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These things are older than I am.
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And trust me, this little silver that we have for communion, this is not in any way trying to harken back to Roman Catholicism.
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We just had it forever.
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But I wanted to bring wooden bowls in this morning because that's how Zwingli did it.
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To make the point, he got rid of all the silver.
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And he brought in wooden bowls.
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And he served the table of the Lord in wooden bowls.
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And to many people, that was outrageous.
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That was too far gone.
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How do you serve the body and blood of Jesus in a wooden bowl? And Zwingli says, because it's not.
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The bread is bread and the wine is wine.
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They point to a greater reality.
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They don't become the greater reality.
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Zwingli was somewhat radical.
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And I want you to keep in mind, Zurich, not that far from Rome.
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I don't know how you are in your geography, but Zurich from Rome is about as far as from here to Nashville.
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As far as driving distance, it's a little over 500 miles.
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But while it was only 500 miles of distance, there was a world of distance theologically.
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So much more can be said about Zwingli and his life.
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But I want to get to his teachings.
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And this is more important, because that's what we're here for today is to learn about God.
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But this man is so important.
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But I want to talk about how he died.
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Because he died on the battlefield.
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Interestingly enough, Luther and Calvin both died of what we would say are natural causes.
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Calvin died of his asthma in his 50s, and Luther lived and died of natural causes.
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But Zwingli died with a battle axe in his hand.
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He died in defense of Zurich against the invading Roman Catholic cantons.
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And he died having himself preached, not against military service, but he had preached against mercenary service.
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You ever heard about the Swiss Army? You know, the Swiss Army knife? See, at this time in history, Swiss men were known to be rugged, battle-worthy men.
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So those men were hired by other nations to come in as mercenaries and defend other nations.
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And Zwingli preached against that.
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He says, no, he was a patriot.
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Don't fight for them.
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Fight for us if you're going to fight.
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But don't go for the sake of money, go defend another country.
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And actually, he wasn't real popular for preaching that, because a lot of money can be made as a mercenary.
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But he preached against mercenary service, but he wasn't against defending his land, defending his nation.
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And he did.
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And he stood and he fought for his nation, clad in armor and armed with a battle axe.
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Zwingli was wounded in battle on October 11, 1531.
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And when the enemy found him lying wounded, they killed him and treated his body with tremendous disrespect, quartering it, burning it to pieces, mixing his ashes with dung and scattering them about.
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He did not receive a hero's burial.
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Now, in all of this, you'll notice the title of the message is Zwingli and the Lesser Known 67 Theses.
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I haven't even mentioned those yet.
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But you know Martin Luther had 95 theses.
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95 theses are as big a part of Western culture and Western history as the Constitution of the United States as far as having a historical watershed moment.
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The 95 theses are huge.
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But Zwingli also had points of doctrine that he defended.
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And people sometimes wonder, well, what was the relationship between Martin Luther and Urich Zwingli? It was tense.
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Martin Luther and Urich Zwingli didn't get along really well because Martin Luther believed that the bread and the cup do become Jesus' body and blood, but that it's not a sacrifice.
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And it later become known as consubstantiation rather than transubstantiation.
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And Luther believed that and Zwingli didn't.
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And that was the part that divided them.
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Luther, in fact, said at one point, he said, I'd rather drink blood with the Pope than to drink wine with the Swiss.
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Luther had a way about him not mincing words.
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So they did have a tense relationship.
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But some people see Zwingli as sort of hanging on the coattails of Martin Luther.
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I want you to hear Zwingli's own words.
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He says, quote, Before anyone in this area had ever heard of Martin Luther, I began preaching the gospel of Christ in 1516.
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I started preaching the gospel before I'd ever heard Luther's name.
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Luther, whose name I did not know for at least another two years, had definitely not instructed me.
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I followed Holy Scripture alone.
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End quote.
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Now I say that quote to simply point this out.
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You've got a man in Zurich.
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You've got a man in Wittenberg.
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Hundreds of miles separate these two men, but they're both teaching the same gospel.
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This is a movement of God.
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Yes, they divided over what constitutes the bread and the wine.
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And that divide, I believe, was unnecessary.
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But they did not divide over how a sinful man was made right with the Holy God.
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And that was by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.
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That's the heart of the Reformation.
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So I want to read to you just a couple as we begin to draw to a close.
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I want to read to you a couple of his 67 Theses.
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Again, this wasn't written in response to Luther's 95 Theses.
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This wasn't written as a, I'm going to copy Luther.
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This was 67 points of doctrine.
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I'm not going to read all 67, so don't start, you know, I don't want to start seeing people fall asleep.
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But 67 points of doctrine that Zwingli presented to Zurich is here we stand.
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In fact, I'll read the introduction that he wrote.
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The articles and opinions below, I, Urich Zwingli, confess to have preached in the worthy city of Zurich as based upon the Scriptures which are called inspired by God, and I offer to protect and confer with the said articles, and where I have not now correctly understood said Scriptures, I shall allow myself to be taught better, but only from the Scriptures.
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He said, I'm willing to be corrected, but it will be from the Bible.
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Listen to this first one, right out of the gate, right out of the gate.
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All who say that the Gospel is invalid without the confirmation of the Church, and by that he's referring to the Roman Catholic Church.
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All who say that the Gospel is invalid without the confirmation of the Church, err and slander God.
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Number two, the sum and substance of the Gospel is that our Lord Jesus Christ, the true Son of God, has made known to us the will of His Heavenly Father, and has, with His innocence, released us from death and reconciled God.
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Three, hence Christ is the only way to salvation for all who ever were and all who ever shall be.
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Four, who seeks or points out another door, meaning another way of salvation, errs, and he is a murderer of souls and a thief.
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Five, therefore, all who consider other teachings equal to or higher than the Gospel, err and do not know what the Gospel is.
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I want that one etched on my tombstone.
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All who say that there's anything greater than the Gospel, all who say that there's anything other than the Gospel that can save, don't even know what the Gospel is.
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As I said, I could go on, there's 67 of them, feel free to Google it and read them all.
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But I'll tell you this, the heart of Yurik Zwingli was the heart of the Evangelical.
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The heart of Yurik Zwingli was a heart that loved the Gospel.
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My hope is that no one would see Yurik Zwingli as a wild-eyed radical, but rather as a man who loved Scripture, a man who loved his Savior, and a man who loved God's people.
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Some may say Zwingli was too radical and that he swung the sword of Scripture too loosely.
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But think about this as an example.
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A radical need requires a radical move.
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And if you were on a ship that was headed for the North Pole, and it were going south, the captain couldn't just slowly and quietly nudge a little bit by little bit, but he'd have to turn the ship.
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And that's where Zwingli was.
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He was in a church that said it was pointing to Christ, but was leading people to hell.
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And he knew the ship had to be turned.
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And he had a Jesus in his heart that was worth dying for.
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I wonder if we do.
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I really do.
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I thought about this a lot this week as I was preparing the message and writing my notes and studying.
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I began to think, Zwingli had a Jesus who was worth dying for.
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Do we have a Jesus who is worth dying for? Many people think they have a Jesus worth fighting for.
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But do you have a Jesus worth dying for? Has the Jesus you possess changed your life? Have you been moved to love Him? To love His people? To love His word? Not His building, and not the benefits of community, but the Christ that brings the community together.
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If Zwingli taught us anything, it's that the love of God is not found in the love of structure.
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It's found in the love of His people.
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The church is God's people.
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And God wants us to love Him, and love His people.
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Let's pray.
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Father, I thank You for Your word.
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I thank You for the truth.
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Lord, there's so much more that could be said.
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So much more that we can learn from these lives of these men of history.
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But Lord, may we never take our eyes off of the Christ that they loved.
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And when we see men like Luther and Calvin and Zwingli, who so loved Jesus that they were willing to fight for Christ, and they were willing even to die for Christ.
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Lord, may it be that we ask ourselves that question.
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Do we have a Christ? Do we possess a Christ? Who to us is our all in all.
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Who is to us life and breath and everything.
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Is our Christ the true Christ? Lord, may we all ask ourselves that question.
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And know it and confirm it in our hearts.
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In Jesus' name, Amen.
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Let's stand, beloved, and sing as we prepare our hearts for communion.