WWUTT 2695 Q&A The Protestant Reformation, Having a Quiet Time, Pastors Using Teleprompters

What is the Protestant Reformation and why is it still important today? Where did the expression quiet time come from? And should pastors use a teleprompter? The answers to these questions and others when we understand the text.

This is when we understand the text, a daily Bible teaching podcast that we may be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord. Tell your friends about our ministry at www .utt .com.

The Protestant Reformation and the Five Solas

Here once again is Pastor Gabe. Thank you, Becky, who is not along with me for this episode of the Q &A, but I will get to some of your questions in a moment. We come into the weekend of October the 31st, and you know what that means.

Yes, Halloween. If you have a calendar, it comes pre-printed on your calendar that October the 31st is Halloween, but it is also the anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. And this is a passage that I study every year.

Every October 31st, I study Romans 3, verses 23 to 26. Let me begin by reading from the scriptures. For there is no distinction, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood to be received by faith.

This was to show God's righteousness because in his divine forbearance, he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.

This October 31st, 2026 marks the 509th anniversary since the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, which is largely considered to have started on October the 31st of 1517, when Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg, Saxony in what is modern day Germany.

In addition to Martin Luther, other reformers include John Calvin, John Knox, Ulrich Zwingli, William Tyndale, Thomas Cranmer and others, but also preceded by men like John Wycliffe and John Hus, which is how you pronounce his last name, right?

Hus, Hus? Always hear it done different ways. The Reformation challenged the corruption and excesses of the medieval Roman Catholicism and restored the central truths of the Bible, especially what are considered to be the five solas of the Protestant Reformation.

We are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, to the glory of God alone, and under the authority of scripture alone, over human tradition and the man-made doctrines of the papists.

Those five solas of the Protestant Reformation, we can find right here in this passage in Romans 3, verses 23 to 26. These aren't doctrines that were just made up, and it was said, hey, this is going to be, these are going to be our theme statements of the Protestant Reformation.

Let's come up with a creed. We're going to make it these five solas. No, this is right out of scripture that they summarized the gospel to these five doctrinal truths, and everyone who would consider themselves Protestant should believe in and agree with these.

So what do we have here in Romans 3, 23 to 26 that point us to those five solas? First of all, we have all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, by God's grace alone, whom God put forward.

He put Christ forward as a propitiation by his blood to be received by faith. It is only by faith alone that we receive this wonderful propitiation. The atonement for our sins applied to us when we believe in Jesus and only by faith, not because we work to attain it, but because we believe.

This was to show God's righteousness because in his divine forbearance, he had passed over former sins. In Christ alone, we believe and we are saved, and this is to God's glory. It was to show his righteousness at the present time that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.

And where do we find this glorious statement made to us? What sets this as authoritative over whatever the Roman Catholic Church would have to say, or even Eastern Orthodox or any other false religion like Mormonism or Jehovah's Witnesses or otherwise?

What has the authority over all of this? The Bible, scripture, scripture alone. This is God's word, God's word written down for us that we may know him, Christ crucified for our sins. And by faith, we are saved.

This was concealed at the time of medieval Roman Catholicism. It was shrouded in darkness because of their excessive man-made doctrines that made it more difficult for people to see the truth of the gospel.

And so that's why one of the theme statements that came out of the Protestant Reformation was post-Tenebrous Lukes, out of darkness, light. Because where the gospel had become hidden beneath all of these demonic traditions and dogmas, it was brought out by God's grace through his providence to illuminate to people once again, the good and glorious gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ that only by faith in him are you saved and not by your works.

This is the gift of God so that no one may boast. It was a big deal that the printing press came about in that period of time, which also made it possible to print the Bible in languages that people could understand.

You didn't have to know Latin and go into the Roman Catholic Church and listen to a Latin mass. And now I don't even understand what it is that's being said. I just have to trust my priest. Now you could read the Bible in your own language and see the truth for yourself.

And many people were able to see that what Roman Catholicism is pushing upon us is not what the Bible says. And so praise God for the Protestant Reformation. But you know, I am astonished at how controversial the Protestant Reformation can be, even among Protestants sometimes.

I believe it was in 2017, which was the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. I believe it was that year. There were also five Sundays in the month of October. So I committed all five of those Sundays to preaching on a different sola of the five solas.

Well, just a few weeks after that. So sometime in November, I sat down with the pastor who hired me, like the very first guy who hired me and gave me a job as a pastor and had me ordained. He had become our missions director for our region.

And we went out to lunch together because I wanted to get some ideas from him as to how we could grow the church. Really, the reason why I was having this conversation with him is because I was hearing from other people.

I was getting this like second and third hand, but I was hearing from other people that he was telling folks in our town to go to other churches and not ours. And so I was using this as an opportunity to sit down with him and say, listen, we've got empty seats in our church.

We're part of this same mission group that you're in charge of, that you've been put over and you have that role because you're supposed to be serving the churches that are in our region. So help me out and how we can grow our church.

And I'm trying to convict his heart over the fact that I've heard he's been telling other people to go somewhere other than our own church. And it was in that conversation, it was while we were talking that he said, you know, your church, you've decided to be reformed.

And I said, okay, well, what are you basing that off of? Like, of course, I lean reformed in my soteriology but I still wanna know where he's coming from when he is accusing our church of being reformed.

Cause our church did not have a reformed statement of faith. We still had the usual, you know, we were a Southern Baptist church. So it was the Baptist Faith and Message 2000. So where was he coming from in saying that we're a reformed church?

I wanted to get his definition of that. And he said, well, I know that you just did a series through the five solos of the Protestant Reformation. And I said, yeah, that doesn't make us reformed. That makes us Protestant.

And he kind of guffawed at that and was like, oh, well, you know, it's nice that some people hold onto those things, but I don't really wanna think about our churches as being like that anymore. And I had to say, what are you talking about?

These are basic Protestant doctrines. We still have no association with Rome. And I knew that his wife's family was still very Roman Catholic. So he had a lot of sympathies for the Roman Catholic church that he should not have had, unless those sympathies were, man, I hope they become reformed, or they leave Roman Catholicism and would come to know the sound doctrine of the gospel of Christ that we have taught to us in scripture.

But he just had this attitude about the Protestant Reformation is just this controversial thing. And we should not be pinpointing these doctrines like the five solos any longer. It's a controversial thing even among Protestant churches today.

Many Protestant churches probably won't be preaching anything on the Protestant Reformation either last Sunday or this Sunday or ever. They're just continuing on with business as usual and coming up with the next gimmick to entertain the butts that are in the seats.

But we love these doctrines because they're biblical doctrines, not because they were made up 500 years ago, but because they come from the pages of scripture. What happened in the Protestant Reformation was to recover that, which had been hidden by man-made doctrines.

We went back to what the apostles taught, what was stated for us in the New Testament, pointing to Christ who had been given for our sins so that people would know it is by faith in him that we are saved, and not by all the things that the Roman Catholic Church tells you that you have to do in order to be saved.

We don't just protest against Roman Catholicism, though. We protest against any religion or tradition that would elevate itself against the doctrine of God. So like I had said before, even Eastern Orthodoxy, even the Jehovah's Witnesses, even the Mormons, even some of these charismatic churches that will present man-made doctrines, or even some of the legalistic independent fundamentalist churches.

There are many churches that owe their existence to what happened in the Protestant Reformation, but even they will deny it. They'll say it's something Calvinist, and we've moved beyond that. We're much better than that, higher than that now.

But they leave behind the traditions that were truly biblical to recover the gospel and bring us to a biblical understanding of the Christian life. I hope that you praise God for that event that happened in history 509 years ago, because as you hold a Bible in your hand, you owe that to what God had accomplished through the Protestant Reformation, being able to listen to a podcast like this one, where I've got the Bible open in front of me here.

That's all thanks to what had happened 500 years ago. And I am so grateful to God for what he has done for me through Jesus Christ, my Lord. Let's get to some of the questions today. This is the Friday edition of When We Understand the Text, when we take questions from the listeners.

And you can submit those questions to whenweunderstandthetext at gmail .com, or go to www .utt .com, click on the voicemail tab, and you can record a voicemail from your phone or from your computer. It'll give you about a minute and a half of record time to ask your question.

Now, Becky sends you her greetings. She was not able to be with me on this program. In fact, if we're gonna make her more regular on the Q &A, I'm probably going to have to pick another day to record than Thursday.

We just can't ever seem to get Thursday to work. Even on the weeks that Thursday does work, we still can't get it to work. It's such a struggle to get things moved around that Becky can sit down and record with us.

Thursday is kind of like the end of the week because our girls who are in a Christian school, they attend classes Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. So it's kind of like Friday begins our weekend, and we get to the end of the week, and it's just like, oh, I'm done, I'm vegging out.

The kids are watching a movie because they don't have to wake up the next morning early or something to that effect. And that's part of the reason why Thursday becomes so hard. So we need to try to do it earlier in the week, I think, if we're gonna get Becky more regular on this program.

But we thank you so much for your kind words. Emails always include her name as well as mine. We thank you for your gifts. We've received such generous financial gifts. And if you wanna know how to give to us or to our church, you can also go to the website, www .utt .com, and click on that Give tab, and you'll find all of the information there.

Anyway, let's get to some questions. This first one is from Trevor. He says, hi there, I just thought I would let you know that there seemed to be three minutes of audio at the end of the Grok episode that you may not have intended to be there, you and Becky just casually chatting after the ending of the bumper music.

My wife and I occasionally listen to your podcast in the car, and we always find it a source of encouragement. Well, I appreciate that, Trevor. That audio at the end of the program is deliberate. It is meant to be there.

You may notice it is preceded by two beeps. It'll go beep, beep, and then it will start like that. I inserted those beeps because whenever I would have like outtakes at the end of the episode, we would get emails from folks saying, oh, I think you left your mics on.

You guys were still chatting there at the end. You forgot to stop the recording. No, it's there intentionally. It's there deliberately. So I put the beeps in, hoping to indicate that this is an outtake.

This is something that's been added. It's a typical sound that might be added to footage, like leftover footage from a movie, or if you've ever seen like the blooper reel at the end of a film, sometimes between the blooper clips, there'll be those beeps in there.

That's why I did that. But I guess it doesn't always clue everybody into that's intentional. I did mean to have that there. But thank you for letting us know. There have been sometimes something ended up in an episode I did not mean to be there, like saying something goofy.

I don't know why I said it that way. Or maybe I got a reference wrong or some fact wrong or something like that. I'll take corrections. I'd love to hear from you on that. But that one was intentional.

Daily Meditation, Prayer, and the History of “Quiet Time”

This next question comes from Josh. He sends us a voicemail. Here we go. Hey, Pastor Gabe, this is Josh.

I recently heard a brother of Christ of mine say to somebody that not having a daily personal Bible reading time is like a spiritual check engine light. Basically saying that there's something spiritually wrong or you might have some kind of problem if you don't have that daily time.

And while I do think that daily Bible reading can be a great benefit to somebody spiritually, I worry that he is overstating it and maybe erring in the legalism. But I wanted to see what you thought. Thank you.

Thank you for your question, Josh. The history of quiet time. There's actually an interesting story to this. I'll share it with you in just a moment. I do believe your friend's being a little legalistic.

There isn't anything in scripture that tells us we have to read our Bible every day, but we are told to meditate on God's word every day. We meditate on it. We spend time with God in prayer. We should be doing that every day.

So Joshua 1 .8, you remember God speaking to Joshua and saying, this book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night. And the way that the Psalms begin, it says the same thing.

Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers, but his delight is in the law of the Lord. And on his law, he meditates day and night.

So yes, as Christians, we should be meditating on God's word day and night. We should spend time with God in prayer every day. That should be every day. The apostle Paul saying to the Thessalonians, pray without ceasing.

So we pray. And even if we have seen an answer to those prayers, we still pray again. It doesn't mean that we pray constantly and you just have to be in this constant mode of prayer, but we would continuously pray and never give up praying.

We come to God with our requests. Peter's saying in 1 Peter 5, cast all your cares on him because he cares for you. Thematically, we see throughout the Bible that we should be praying to God daily. So that is very important.

But should we have Bible study every single day? Well, I think you should meditate on God's word every day. But does that mean you have to have time set aside where you're sitting down and opening up your Bible and spending X amount of time just reading the scriptures?

I mean, it might. That might be what you would need to do. But Christians have not always had a Bible in their language that they can sit down and open up and read, as I just talked about regarding the Protestant Reformation.

The printing press came about during the Reformation so that Bibles could be printed and distributed. They could be translated into people's languages. But before all of that happened, there really was not a way for people to meditate on God's word like this.

You meditated on the word by going to some sort of devotional time at the church, at the cathedral, or something like that. And even then, what you're listening to might not even be in your language. It might be in Latin.

People had to have things written down so that they could meditate on that and think about that. They would have creeds that they would memorize or certain passages of scripture, chapters that they might memorize.

I believe that memorization was probably a lot better back then than it is now. We don't seem to be putting as much emphasis on memorization because the Bible is practically ubiquitous. You can access it anywhere.

If you're not carrying one around with you, you know, a bound Bible with a leather cover and pages, then you've got one on your smartphone or you can access it on your computer. We're a highly literate culture.

And in this highly literate culture, we've got the Bible all over the place. This used to not be the way that it was. Praise God that we have such access to scripture and certainly take advantage of that.

Don't take that for granted, but take advantage of it, that you would be in God's word and reading it every day. I think that is a very important thing. But it wasn't always the case for a Christian to be able to do this.

So what would they do with God's word and in meditating on God's word? Well, they would think of those passages that they had memorized, maybe songs or creeds or otherwise that they had memorized regarding God's truth and meditate on those things and desire to have their minds and hearts conform to them so they would be shaped more in the image of Christ.

And that would be how Psalm 1, 2 would apply. His delight is in the law of the Lord. On his law, he meditates day and night. When you are given two options, go this way or go that way, you would meditate on God's word to know which is the right course to take.

When you are being tempted, you meditate on God's word so that you would not go after the temptation that it would turn into desire, which turns into sin, but instead you would meditate on God and on his word.

And it's reading his word and storing up his word in our hearts that gives us the word that we may come back to continually when we should be meditating on it. It's a good thing to have a quiet time in the word that that's a term that we use very commonly.

It's like part of the Christian vernacular to say quiet time. But that expression quiet time has an interesting history. It was in 1932 that an English journalist named Arthur James Russell published a book entitled For Sinners Only about the Oxford Group and its founder, Dr. Frank N .D. Buckman.

Now, what is the Oxford Group? Like, of course, Oxford University, yes, but this particular group, the Oxford Group, was an evangelical movement that combined social life with Christian ethics containing no hierarchy, no temples, no endowments.

Its workers received no salaries and there was no plan but God's plan. That was like part of their creed or their mantra as the Oxford Group. And perhaps their most recognized contribution to the world today is the addiction recovery program Alcoholics Anonymous.

Yeah, that was derived from the Oxford Group. Since they wanted to combine social life with Christian ethics, Alcoholics Anonymous was one of the programs that was developed as a result of this ideology.

Well, the Oxford Group followed four spiritual practices. Number one, sharing with other Christians about sins and temptations. So confessing to one another our sins. That's good. It's a good thing to do.

Number two, making restitution with all who have been wronged. Also a very good goal. Who have you wronged? Go make it right with that person. If there's anything you need to pay back to them, then do it.

Number three, listening for God's direction. Kind of an interesting thing there. We can listen for God's direction when we come to the word. We see what God wants us to do according to what is said in the Bible.

But the Oxford Group was going a little bit further with that. They believe that you could just kind of sit there and wait for God to speak to you into your mind and that he would give you direction. But how would you know the difference between your own voice in your head and God's voice should he actually speak to you?

How would you know that it's actually God talking to you and not your own mind? And then number four, so four spiritual practices. Here's the fourth one. Surrendering to that direction and following it.

But there's still kind of a subjective thing going on there when it comes to understanding what that direction is. Buckman believed that if you gave God enough quiet and uninterrupted time, that he would tell you what to do.

This is a quote from him, quote, "'Listening means unhurried time when God really can have a chance to imprint his thoughts in your mind," unquote. Now, this is looking like contemplative prayer or emptying your mind so that God will fill it with his thoughts.

And that is not a Christian discipline. Emptying your mind is not a Christian discipline. We're actually supposed to fill our minds. Fill our minds with what? God's truth, meditating on his word. Buckman used to begin every morning with Bible study and prayer.

So he started off well, Bible study and prayer. However, he decided that this was unproductive. There was an evangelist friend of his, F .B. Meyer, who happened to be a friend to D .L. Moody. He convinced Buckman that he needed to be silent and let the Holy Spirit guide you in all that you were doing.

So for an hour every morning, Buckman would sit in what he called his quiet time, capital Q, capital T. And he wrote about this in a book. And when we talk about quiet time today, this is exactly what it's derived from.

It's derived from Buckman's book. And you probably think of quiet time as just such a general term. Did anybody really invent that? Or it's just the term that we use to describe our time with God? No, this was Buckman writing in a book directing other Christians how to do this.

And he called it quiet time. But quiet time was not just Bible study and prayer. Quiet time was listening for God to speak. And what he experienced in those moments, he claimed to be so life-changing that he wanted to share his new method of meditation, which he considered to be thoroughly biblical with the whole world.

Buckman's teachings gained international notoriety. And two English women read Russell's book and they were captured by the practice of what the Oxford group called guidance. That was what the Oxford group called it.

So they called it guidance. Buckman was calling it quiet time. And Russell shared of a time that he went to visit Buckman and he shared with Buckman some of the visions that he'd received. At the end of their meeting, they sat in prayerful silence, pen and paper in hand, and Russell wrote down all the thoughts that came to his mind.

And Buckman pronounced them to be God-given thoughts. Now, the two women, the two women that were so inspired by Russell's account of receiving thoughts from God, they decided to try this method for themselves.

And what they wrote from their meditations was compiled into a book that was entitled God Calling by two listeners. It was edited by Russell and published in 1935 in England. You can still find copies of it today and it's published as simply God Calling, but the original title was God Calling by two listeners.

Now, Russell said in his introduction to the book that the two women remained anonymous and they seek no praise. One of the listeners, one of these women, explained in the introduction to the book how the book was written.

We sat down, pencils and paper in hand, and waited. This was in December of 1932. And she described herself as skeptical, but her friend as deeply religious. And so the one woman who wrote the introduction of the book was actually saying of the other woman that was with her that she was the one that received all of the visions from God.

So most of the writing came from her hand. Now, these two women always remained anonymous. Frankly, when I studied on this myself, I don't believe that those two women even exist. Now, I'm just speaking speculatively here.

I don't even think those women are real. I think it was actually Russell who wrote this. And he just attributed it to these two women probably to save himself from any accusation of like, you didn't really hear from God.

You were just sitting there like with a blank mind and you wrote whatever came to your mind, but you did not hear from God. So that he could avoid the scrutiny and having to answer questions like that, but he instead foisted it upon two women that he just made up.

That's my theory about the whole thing because nobody ever knew who these women were, but the book was a smashing success. Again, it was entitled God Calling. What other book do you know of that has a title that sounds like that?

Jesus Calling, right? Jesus Calling by Sarah Young. And it used to be, if you find a copy of Jesus Calling today, like if you go to Walmart or your local grocery store, which probably carries the book, it's one of the most published, most sold Christian books outside of the Bible in modern history.

So if you go pick up a copy of Jesus Calling today and you read the introduction, you read the introduction from Sarah Young, she doesn't tell you in the introduction how she wrote the book. But it used to be in the early editions of Jesus Calling that she did say exactly how she wrote the book.

She recalled her process exactly like these women did and exactly like Russell did. She would sit there emptying her mind, pencil and paper in hand, and she would write down whatever thoughts came to her mind and whatever thoughts came to her mind ended up being the book, Jesus Calling.

That's exactly the way she wrote it. But there was so much criticism because of that method. It's called automatic writing. It is a pagan practice. She may have a Christian mind that is trained upon the scriptures, so what she ends up writing might really be biblically influenced, but she's still not writing God's words.

It's not God speaking to her mind and her writing those things down. If that's really what's happening, then what she's writing is scripture. There would be no discernible difference between her words and the Bible.

They would both be equally as authoritative because what came to her mind was from God. It was the word of God. Just as God would speak to a prophet or an apostle and they would write down what God said to them, so Sarah Young or these two women or Russell or whoever, they're all claiming the same thing.

God spoke to me, I wrote these words down, they're God's words. Therefore, they're equally as authoritative as scripture. And as we've been talking about the Protestant Reformation at the very beginning of this episode, like that's reverting back to Roman Catholic practices.

This is what the Roman Catholics were claiming. This is what the papists, the priests, the Pope were all claiming. God is speaking to me and he's telling you this, and my word is every bit as authoritative as his because it came from God.

It came from God to me to you. And these folks writing these books and this kind of style and this kind of style and this kind of fashion, it's reverting back to that same Roman Catholic personal revelation claim.

This is where quiet time came from. All of this was derived from the same guy that wrote about you need to have a quiet time. You need to have a time of meditation. And again, the guy that came up with this even considered reading his Bible and prayer to be unproductive.

Sarah Young, when you go back to those early editions of Jesus Calling and you read that introduction, she said the same thing there. Bible study and prayer were not sufficient enough for her. She needed another way to talk to God or to have God talk to her.

And so she came up with this meditative practice that she read about in Russell's book that she got from God calling by two listeners. She even acknowledged in the early introductions to the book, she said she read that book and it gave her this idea and she came up with Jesus Calling.

It was a rip off of all of this, but it's all derived from the same guy who came up with quiet time and even said for himself that Bible study and prayer were not enough. That's where the term quiet time came from.

Like I said, there's an interesting history behind that expression, behind that term. All of that aside, we should spend time with God, reading the word and praying, but don't ever think that's not enough.

Like that's not sufficient enough. I have to have some other way to communicate with God or have him communicate with me. No, he speaks to us through the Bible. We speak to him through prayer. These are the means that God has designated for our communication.

He speaks to us through the Bible. When we read the Bible, we are reading the words of God. When we meditate on the Bible, we are meditating on God's words. We are conforming our thoughts to his thoughts.

When we pray, we are speaking to God, but even our prayers must be informed by the scriptures. Yes, you can pray to God about whatever is going on in your life. You can think of others and you can lift up requests to God on their behalf, but even the way that we pray for ourselves or for others should be informed by scripture.

We see the way the saints prayed in the Bible. We have a whole book of prayers in the Psalms. We read those things and those words that come from the scriptures should also shape the way that we communicate with God.

This is two-way communication, God speaking to us and us speaking to the Lord, but there is a way that God has set that he has designated that communication is supposed to happen. And it's not by emptying your mind and letting whatever thoughts come in be considered as God's thoughts.

It's God speaking to me. No, he speaks to you through the Bible. And I don't know how off track I am with your question, Josh, but all this to say, it can be a little legalistic to impose on somebody, you have to read your Bible every day.

And if you don't read your Bible every day, well, then that's a good indication that maybe your life with God is not really healthy right now. I do read my Bible every day. There are days though, when we don't get to do family devotion time every day.

Now, my kids, they all have assignments and they also are supposed to be reading their Bible every day, but we may only get to family devotions four or five times a week. We don't do them on Wednesday or Sunday because of church things that we've got going on that day.

And then sometimes there might be some weekend event, Friday or Saturday that takes us out. Saturday night, we don't really do them either because that's right before Sunday. So yeah, it's about four or five times a week that we'll do family devotions.

So would somebody then be looking at our family and saying, well, that's not a very healthy family because they're only hitting it four times a week. See, that's where it can get a little legalistic. That's where you're starting to impose something on somebody else because you don't do it five times a week.