The Morningstar of the Reformation - John Wycliffe

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Hello, welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.
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This is a daily conversation about scripture, culture and media from a Reformed perspective.
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Get your Bible and coffee ready and prepare to engage today's topic.
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Here's your host, Pastor Keith Foskey.
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Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.
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My name is Keith Foskey and I am a Calvinist.
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Today is October 26th, 2020 and we are beginning this week what we call Reformation Week.
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This is the week where we celebrate up to the 31st, October the 31st, which was the day that Martin Luther nailed the 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany and that was the moment in time that sparked and created what became known as the Protestant Reformation.
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If you are familiar with history as far as Christian history and particularly Reformed history, you will understand why this date is so important and why we celebrate it.
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But this week what I want to do is take the opportunity on the podcast every day to introduce you to some of the figures of the Reformation which you may not know.
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Most people are very familiar with Luther and what Luther did in regard to the Reformation and I am going to be talking about Luther this coming Saturday, October 31st, 2020.
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I'm going to be talking about Luther at our Reformation celebration.
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If you are in the Jacksonville area and you would like to be a part of our Reformation celebration, we want to invite you to come and participate with us.
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We have a German feast which is then followed by a retelling of the life of Luther and then we're going to have an open air sermon from Brother Mike Collier and he preaches from a replica of George Whitefield's mobile pulpit, which we built last year and we have been using for various things and it's a really interesting time of learning.
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It's a time of fellowship and it's a time of fun.
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So I want to encourage you, if you are in the Jacksonville area, come out this Saturday and join us.
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We're going to begin at 12 o'clock, we'll probably be done about 3 o'clock and we would love to have you just message us and let us know that you're coming because it is an event where we serve food and that way we know that we not only have a place for you but we also have food for you.
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We'd love for you to come and be a part.
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But as I said, since I'm going to be talking about Luther on Saturday, I thought I would spend this week talking about some of the other people that are very important in the history of the Reformation, most particularly those men and women who may have played a part that most people don't know about.
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Now the person I'm going to talk about today is pretty famous, so many of you maybe have heard his name, but some of you may not know who he is outside of just his name.
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The name of the man we're going to talk about today is John Wycliffe.
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Now some of you may have heard his name pronounced Wycliffe, and if that's how you're used to hearing it, that's fine, but I call him John Wycliffe, that's the way that I've heard it and I think that that's the appropriate way to say it, so that's the way I'll be saying it, but please don't let that throw you off.
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So we're going to be talking today about John Wycliffe.
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John Wycliffe was known as the Morning Star, or the first light of the Reformation.
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He lived about 150 years before Martin Luther, and he was a man who was opposed to the excesses and the false teachings of Rome well before Martin Luther or John Calvin or any of the other Reformers were ever born.
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Wycliffe was a brilliant student of the Bible.
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He entered Oxford at the age of 16, and he spent 12 years studying for his doctorate.
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In the year 1371, he was acknowledged as their leading theologian, yet his knowledge of scripture made it apparent to him that the church had fallen into severe error, and he began to teach against those errors.
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In particular, he began to teach against the false teaching known as transubstantiation.
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Now for a moment, for those of you who've never heard that word or maybe you don't understand what that is, I want to just take a moment and explain what transubstantiation is.
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Transubstantiation is the doctrine that says that the bread and the cup of the communion table literally become the body and the blood of Jesus Christ.
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But it's actually more than that.
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Transubstantiation doesn't just say that the bread and the cup become the body and blood of Jesus, but it also says that the bread and the cup are a representation of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
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What that means is that it's not as if Jesus is just present in the table, but he's actually present again as a sacrifice.
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As one Catholic writer put it, it's as if the priest has reached up into heaven, taken Christ off the throne, and sacrificed him again on the table for the sins of the people.
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Now, if you are a Christian and you've never heard of anything like that, this is not an obscure teaching that I'm talking about.
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This is traditional Catholic dogma.
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This is what is taught in Roman Catholicism.
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This is why the Mass is central to Roman Catholicism, because they believe that they need to have their sins forgiven again.
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They need to have this fresh forgiveness, and that's why they go to Mass, so that they can receive this representation of the sacrifice of Christ.
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This is totally against Scripture.
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The Bible says that Jesus Christ died for sins once for all time.
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He did not die and then have to perpetually have his sacrifice offered up again for sin, because his sacrifice was sufficient for all sins for all time.
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He does not need to have his sacrifice re-presented.
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It does not have to be sacrificed afresh.
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He does not have to be presented anew.
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And so, this is one of the major failings of the Roman Catholic Church.
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Now, some people will say, well, the Christians have always believed in real presence, that Jesus is really present in the bread and the cup.
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And there is some truth to the idea that for a very long time in Christian history, you can find evidence that Christians have believed that the bread and the cup had the real presence of Christ.
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The problem is, that's not what transubstantiation is saying.
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Transubstantiation is not just about real presence.
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Transubstantiation is about the re-presentation of the sacrifice of Christ.
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And that is a major theological problem.
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And it was a new doctrine during the life of John Wycliffe.
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During the life of John Wycliffe, it had only been around for about 150 years.
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It was introduced, the doctrine of transubstantiation was introduced in 1215.
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So even though the concept of the real presence of Christ in the table predated that, the false teaching of transubstantiation was a relatively new doctrine.
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In fact, that's one of the arguments that Wycliffe made.
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He made the argument that this doctrine of transubstantiation was a new doctrine.
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It was not founded in scripture.
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It was not founded in church history.
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It had been invented by the Roman Catholic Church.
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Well, as you can imagine, his teaching about this would create quite a stir with the Roman Catholic authorities and a lot of hatred came his way.
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It would eventually lead to him being forced out of his teaching position at Oxford.
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And so he moved to Lutterworth, where he became the pastor of a church there.
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And he took the task, took to the task of translating the Bible into English so that the people could read it for themselves.
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And I believe that he saw this as an opportunity for the errors of the church to be exposed.
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The problem is the Bible being translated into English was actually something that was not legal.
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This was a difficult time in history, and this was a difficult time for the people because they only had the Bible in Latin.
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Wycliffe wanted them to have the Bible into English, but the church did not want that.
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And so Wycliffe fell into disfavor with the church.
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Not only had he been expelled from teaching at Oxford, he was ultimately under the disfavor of the church because of what he was doing in translating the Bible into English.
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But he did not get condemned during his lifetime because he ended up passing away.
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He died in his church during worship on New Year's Eve 1384.
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But here is where his life takes a very interesting turn.
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It's actually after his death that something very interesting happens.
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Years later, after he had died, a council called the Council of Constance convened and they had several things to deal with, but one of them, one of the articles that they dealt with at the Council of Constance, one of the issues was the legacy of John Wycliffe.
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And so they gathered together to discuss the legacy of this man, John Wycliffe, and the decision that they made was that he would be condemned.
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But what do you do with a man who is already a, he's already dead? How do you condemn somebody who is already dead? Well, they decided to dig up his bones.
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And they did.
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They condemned him as a heretic.
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They exhumed his bones and they burned his bones to ashes.
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And then they poured his bones into a nearby river called the River Swift.
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And this is where his life takes a very interesting, just makes an interesting note in the annals of history.
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Here's a man whose life was so impactful on the world and what he did was so impactful that even after his death, the church found it necessary, the Roman Catholic Church found it necessary, not only to condemn him, but to dig up his bones and burn them to ash and pour those ashes into a river, hoping to eliminate his memory forever.
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But they didn't eliminate his memory.
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What I'm doing today and talking about his life is proof of that.
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They didn't eliminate his memory.
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In fact, a later chronicler recounted the event and wrote this, and I want to read this verse from the chronicler, quote, they burned his bones to ashes and cast them into the Swift, a neighboring brook running hard by.
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Thus the brook conveyed his ashes to the Avon, the Avon into the Severn, the Severn into the narrow seas, and they into the main ocean.
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And so the ashes of Wycliffe are symbolic of his doctrine, which is now spread throughout the world, end quote.
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And that is the truth.
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John Wycliffe is the morning star of the Reformation.
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Certainly there were men and women who came before him who did mighty works.
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And there were those who stood against the Roman Catholic Church.
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And we could talk about the the Waldensians and we could talk about other groups that had separated themselves from the Roman Catholic Church.
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But one of the mightiest and earliest voices of the Protestant Reformation who came 150 years before Martin Luther was a man by the name of John Wycliffe.
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And I wanted to tell you his story today.
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And tomorrow we're going to look at another man, a man by the name of Jan Hus.
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And we're going to see the unique connection that these two men had because both of them were condemned at the Council of Constance.
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So I hope you will be with me again tomorrow for another edition of Coffee with a Calvinist.
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Thank you again for listening today to Coffee with a Calvinist.
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My name is Keith Foskey and I have been your Calvinist.
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May God bless you.
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As you go about your day, remember this.
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Jesus Christ came to save sinners.
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All who come to him in repentance and faith will find him to be a perfect Savior.
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He is the way, the truth and the life.
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And no one comes to the Father except through him.
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May God be with you.