Mr. Chairman and Christian Friends, I would like to say immediately that I regard this
occasion as one of the greatest privileges that has ever fallen to my lot.
I do indeed prize this invitation that I received from the Friends of the Free Church of Scotland
very highly indeed.
This is, as we've already been reminded, an historic occasion.
We are doing something that I am certain is well pleasing in the sight of God and which
I trust under God's benediction and blessing will prove to be of value and of benefit to
our souls.
And let us hope perhaps to the whole cause of God in this nation and in all nations at
this present time.
I always say when I have the pleasure of coming to Scotland that I'm interested to come not
only because of my concern about the Gospel but because of the deep feeling of admiration
which I have always had within me for you as a nation and as a people.
And there is certainly nothing in your long history which is more glorious and more remarkable
than that great movement of God which took place 400 years ago and which we are met tonight
to commemorate.
And therefore for every reason I was very ready to come here to Edinburgh once more.
Now our chairman has very rightly put to you one of the questions that I also felt
should be put.
It's not a question that arises spontaneously in my mind any more than it did in hers.
But it does arise apparently in the minds of some people and that is why consider the
reformation in Scotland at all at a time like this with the world as it is and with
this multiplicity of problems that are pressing in upon us on all sides.
Why turn back and consider what happened 400 years ago?
Now as I understand it there are two main objections to the doing of what we are meant
to do this evening.
The first was a general objection to looking back, a feeling that the past has nothing
to teach us.
That after all we are the people of the 20th century, we are the people who split the atom,
we are the people who are encompassing all knowledge, we are the people who have advanced
to such giddy heights that our forefathers could not even have imagined them.
Why should we of all people look back and especially look back for 400 years?
The whole climate of opinion today as you know and indeed during the last 100 years
which has been governed by the evolutionary theory and hypothesis which holds that men
advances from age to age and that the present is always better than the past is inimical
to this whole idea of looking back and of learning from previous history.
That's one objection.
The other is, as our chairman hinted, that we must not do this because the reformation
was a tragedy.
Now this is a view which is gaining currency very rapidly at the present time.
We are told that what we should be considering today is unity and that if we spend our time
in considering a kind of disruption in the church or a division such as took place 400
years ago, we are doing something that is sinful.
And there is a less an increasing body of opinion in Protestant circles which openly
and unashamedly is saying that the Protestant reformation was a tragedy and that it is our
business to forget it as soon as we can and to do everything possible to heal the breach
so that we shall be back again, one with the Church of Rome and there shall be one
great world church.
Well now those are the two commonest objections as I see the situation which are brought against
what we are engaged in doing this evening.
Why then are we doing it?
How do we justify a gathering such as this and the other gatherings that are to follow?
Well let me say quite frankly that there are wrong and false ways of doing what we
are doing here tonight.
There are people who are interested in the past merely in a kind of antiquarian sense.
That happens to be their great interest in life.
They're like delving into the past and reading about the past, not that they're interested
in it in any kind of active philosophic sense or religious sense or any other, but they're
just like burrowing about with ancient history.
You know there are people who do this in other realms, there are people who like collecting
old furniture and the glory of anything to them is that it's over.
They're not interested in a chair as such from the standpoint of something to sit upon.
What they're interested in is the age of the chair.
So that's antiquarianism and it is possible for us of course to be governed by a purely
antiquarian or merely historical motive.
There's no value in that.
I would be the first to agree that the times in which we are living are too urgent and
too desperate for us to indulge a mere antiquarian spirit.
There are other ways in which it is wrong to look at the past.
Now the last time I stood at this desk I said that I couldn't speak without having a text.
Well I'm still the same and it seemed to me that there were two texts which would not
be inappropriate for this meeting and for this consideration this evening.
There is a right way and a wrong way of viewing a great event like the Reformation and the
great men who took part in it.
The first, the right way, we are told of in the Epistle to the Hebrews chapter 13 verses
7 and 8.
Remember them which have the rule over you, who have spoken unto you the word of God,
whose faith follow, considering the end or the outcome of their lives, the end of their
conversation.
Jesus Christ the same yesterday, today and forever.
That's the right way to do it, that we look at these men in order that we may learn from
them and imitate and emulate their example.
But there is a wrong way of doing this and this is one I find in the Gospel according
to Saint Matthew in chapter 23 in verses 29, 30, 31 and 32.
These are terrible words and terrifying words.
Woe unto you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because ye build the tombs of the prophets
and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous and say, if we had been in the days of our
fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets.
Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves that ye are the children of them which killed
the prophets.
Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers, ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how
can ye escape the damnation of hell.
Now those are the words of the Lord Jesus Christ.
And he was addressing his own generation, his own contemporaries.
He said you are paying great tribute to the memory of the prophets.
You're looking after their sepulchres and you're garnishing them and you're saying what
great men they were, how noble, how wonderful, we must keep their memory alive.
And you say, what a terrible thing it was that our forefathers should have put these
men to death.
If we'd been alive then, we wouldn't have joined them in those wicked deeds.
We would have listened to them, we would have followed them.
You hypocrites, says our Lord, you would have done nothing of the sort.
How does he prove it?
Well, he proves it like this.
He tests their sincerity by discovering what is their attitude at the present moment to
the successors to the prophets.
What is their reaction to the people who are still preaching the same message as the prophets?
He says you say that you're admirers of the prophets and yet you're persecuting and trying
to encompass the death of a man like myself who is the modern representative of the same
message and the same school of prophecy.
Ah, says our Lord, it's one thing to look back and to praise famous men, but there can
be sheer hypocrisy.
And the test of our sincerity this evening is this.
What do we feel about men and how are we treating men who are preaching today the same message
as was preached by John Knox and his fellow reformers?
That's the test.
So you see, this meeting is a very important one for us.
You can't do a thing like this without examining yourself, without coming under examination.
Our presence is indicative of the fact that we are admirers of these great prophets of
God.
But I wonder whether we are in reality.
So it's a good thing, it seems to me, that we should come together where it merely that
we can examine ourselves in the light of this word of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
Why then are we doing this?
How do we justify our action?
Our chairman has already dealt with one of the answers, I needn't repeat it.
The fact is that you simply cannot understand the history of Scotland unless you know something
about the Protestant Reformation.
It is the key to the understanding of the history of your great country in the last
four hundred years.
Scotland has been what she has been directly and unmistakably as the result of the Protestant
Reformation.
So if we had no other reason, that is enough.
You're a nation of people famous for what?
Well for education, for knowledge, for culture.
Everybody knows that.
The peasants of Scotland were cultured and able and intelligent and intellectual people.
What accounts for this?
Well it's not merely a matter of blood you know, because before the Protestant Reformation
they were woefully ignorant and backward and illiterate.
What is it then that has made your nation?
Or perhaps by the whole world, as supreme in this interest in education and the pursuit
of knowledge?
The answer is the Protestant Reformation.
So apart from any religious considerations we have this mighty and all important consideration.
Add to it what the chairman said about the political aspect.
And all that was done for the cause of democracy by the teaching that was then given to the
people.
And then I want to add a third reason.
And after all, if I am to be quite honest, I must confess that this is my main reason.
Why are we considering the Reformation of four hundred years ago?
Well my main reason is this, because of the state of affairs today.
I am primarily a preacher, not a lecturer, not an historian, very fond of history, but
not an antiquary as I said.
No, no, I'm interested in this because I'm a preacher.
And as a preacher I am concerned about the present state of affairs.
Why so someone?
Well, for this reason, that they are increasingly approximating to the state of affairs that
obtained before the Protestant Reformation.
You are aware, are you not, of the state of the morals of this country and of Great Britain
in general before the Reformation?
Vice, immorality, sin was rampant.
My friends, it is rapidly becoming the same again.
There is a willful moral and social declension.
We are being surrounded by the very problems that were most obvious and rampant before
the Reformation ever took place.
The moral state of the country.
These urgent social problems, juvenile delinquency, drunkenness, theft and robbery, vice and crime,
they're coming back as they were before the Protestant Reformation.
But it's not only a matter of moral and of social problems.
What are the state of the church?
What of the clerk?
What about the numbers who are members of the church?
How many attend the church?
We are going back to the pre-Reformation position.
What about the authority of the church?
What about the state of doctrine in the church before the Reformation confusion?
Is there anything more characteristic of the church today than doctrinal confusion, doctrinal
indifferentism, a lack of concern or of interest in it?
And then perhaps most alarming of all, the increase in power and influence and numbers
of the church of Rome and the Romanized stold in the Protestant church.
There is an obvious tendency, I say, back to the pre-Reformation position where ceremonies
and ritual are increasing and the word of God is being preached less and less, sermons
becoming shorter and shorter, an indifference to true doctrine and a loss of authority and
a consequent declension, as I say, even in the matter of numbers.
I wonder, Christian people, whether I am exaggerating when I suggest that at the present time we
are really engaged in a great struggle for the very life of the Christian church, for
the essence of the Christian faith.
As I see the situation, it is nothing less alarming than that.
We are fighting for a heritage for the very things that were gained by the tremendous
movement of 400 years ago, very well.
There to me is the most urgent reason.
We can't afford the luxury, I say, of being merely antiquarian.
We should be concerned about this because of the state of affairs in which we find ourselves.
But says somebody again, why go back for the answer to that?
Why don't you do what's being done everywhere else and in every other realm of life?
I read an article in a supposed evangelical weekly paper not so long ago, and it said,
why does the church stand still?
And the man went on to say something like this.
He said, I see in business and everywhere else that people are making experiments.
They're employing the backroom buyers and the experimenters, and they're trying to discover
new methods, new machinery, new everything.
Why doesn't the church do this, he said?
The church always seems to be looking back, and they regard that as something which is
wrong.
Now, the answer as I see it to that can be put like this.
I'm not at all sure, but that the greatest of all the lessons which the Protestant Reformation
teaches us is just this, that the secret of success in the realm of the church and of
the things of the spirit is to go back.
Now I needn't elaborate this, the chairman has really dealt with it.
What happened 400 years ago, well, what happened in essence was this, that these men went back
to the first century.
They went back to the New Testament, they went back to the Bible.
Suddenly they were awakened to this message, and they just went back to it.
There is nothing more interesting as one reads the story of Luther and of Tobin, than
to notice the way in which they kept on discovering that they had been rediscovering what Augustine
had already discovered, and which had been forgotten.
Indeed I am suggesting that perhaps the greatest of all the lessons of the Protestant Reformation
is this, that the way of recovering is always to go back, always to go back to the place
of primitive pattern, to the origin, to the norm and the standard which are to be found
alone in the New Testament pages.
And that is exactly I say what happened 400 years ago.
These men went back to the beginning and they tried to establish a church conforming to
the New Testament pattern.
Very well, let us be guided by them then as we look at them this evening and as we try
to garner certain lessons from them.
What is it that happened 400 years ago?
Well whatever your views may be you've got to admit this.
It was one of the most remarkable historical phenomena that has ever taken place.
It is no exaggeration to say that the Protestant Reformation changed and turned the entire
course of history.
Now I mean by that note only the history of the church.
I mean secular history in addition.
Again fortunately I needn't keep you, our Chairman has referred to it.
There is no question at all that it's granted by historians that this Reformation laid the
foundation of the whole democratic view of government.
That is a sheer fact of history.
All the nations of the earth at the present time are looking to the United States of America.
How did the United States of America ever come into being?
Well the answer is it would never have come into being were it not for the Protestant
Reformation.
The Puritan fathers who crossed in the Mayflower were men who were products of the Reformation.
And it was not only because they wanted religious liberty but also this whole notion of democratic
liberty.
It drove them to face the hazards of crossing the Atlantic at that time and to establish
this new life and new state and new system of government in the new world.
You cannot explain the story of the United States of America except in terms of the Protestant
Reformation.
It gave lifeblood to the whole democratic notion in the realm of politics and the consequences
as judged from a social and from a moral standpoint simply baffled destruction.
This country of yours from being a dissolute and a drunken and an illiterate country became
famous throughout the world as a sober, righteous, unable, intelligent living people.
And it was the Protestant Reformation that led to it.
Now sir my difficulty on this occasion is to know what not to say.
The theme you see is endless but let me interject this in brackets.
Surely this is one of the greatest lessons that needs to be learned at the present time.
Everybody's aware of the moral problem and they're trying to deal with the moral problem
along various lines, acts of parliament, prison reform, psychiatric treatment in the prisons
and you know the various other expedients but they don't seem to be very successful
do they?
Why not?
Well for this reason.
You cannot have morality without godliness.
The tragedy of the last hundred years has been due to the fallacy of imagining that
you could shed Christian doctrine but hold on to Christian ethics.
That's been the controlling notion but it can't be done.
There is one verse in Paul's epistle to the Romans it's the 18th verse in the first chapter
that should have put us right on this once and forever.
He says the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness
of men.
That is the order.
Ungodliness first, second, unrighteousness.
If you haven't got a godly people you'll never have a righteous people.
You can't have righteousness without godliness and the protestant reformation is the most
striking proof of that that the world has ever known.
Once you have godliness coming in righteousness and morality follow.
But we are today trying to have morality and righteousness and a good ethical conception
without the godliness and the facts are proving before our eyes that it simply cannot be done.
So if you're merely a sociologist in this meeting, if you're just a politician, if you're
just interested in the moral problem well then in the name of God I say to you go and
read the history of the reformation.
And there you will find the only way to exalt your nation, godliness first and then righteousness
follows.
Well now there are certain things that we see on the surface.
The reformation was not a purely religious movement it was a general movement and it
was witnessed not only in Scotland but in England, in France, in Holland, in Switzerland,
Germany and in various other countries on the continent.
It was a great movement of the Spirit of God in which your country was given her share
and her portion.
Well what do we find as we look at it?
I can only give you some headings.
If you want the details I commend to you very warmly and heartily the book by our
chairman that has already been mentioned to you.
It gives a clear, succinct account of what actually happened and it is a thrilling and
a moving story.
Buy it and read it and digest it.
He gives you the general setting and he shows you the peculiar features in Scotland.
The one excellence of thus which we've got to grant you, who come from the south of the
border, the one excellence which you had in Scotland at that time was this.
That your reformation was a purer reformation.
There was no question of a king trying to get out of his matrimonial difficulties and
entanglements.
You were rid of that.
It was a purer reformation and the result was I believe that you had a purer church.
But speaking generally what happened here was the same as what happened in most other
countries.
What do we see then?
Well of course the first thing that attracts our attention is the men.
The men that God used.
Look at them.
Hamilton.
Patrick Hamilton.
George Wishart.
John Knox.
Andrew Melville.
John Welsh and many others.
Purer men worthy of the name.
Heroic men.
Big men.
Men of granite.
Big men.
Men of granite.
Mr. Chairman, need I apologise for being a hero worshipper?
I am a hero worshipper.
Think what you like about me.
I like to look at and to read of a big man.
In an age of pygmies such as this it's a good thing to read about great men.
We're all so much alike and of the same size but here there were giants in the land.
Able men.
Men of gigantic intellect.
Men on a big mould, a big scale in the realm of mind and logic and reason.
Then look at their zeal.
Look at their courage.
I frankly am an admirer of a man who can make a queen tremble.
These are the things that strike us at once about these men but then I suppose the most
notable thing of all was the effect of the burning conviction that dwelt within them.
These were the things that made them the men they were.
What were these convictions?
Let me note some of them.
We've already been referred to some.
Let me add some others.
What did these men believe?
What did they teach?
What were their characteristics?
Here is the first, obviously, their belief in the authority of this book.
The church was moribund and asleep under a scholastic philosophy that displayed great
cleverness, intellectual and critical of humans but was in the clouds and dealing with vague
generalities and concepts and the people were kept in utter ignorance.
And the men who did the teaching and the lecturing, what did they talk about?
Well, they were arguing about philosophic concepts, comparing this view with that and
indulging in refinements and minutiae.
But the great thing that stands out about these Reformers was that they were men who
went back to the Bible.
They said nothing matters but this.
This they said is the word of God.
This is the word of God in the Old Testament and in the New Testament.
This isn't theory, supposition.
This isn't speculation.
This is the living God speaking to men.
He's given his word to the prophets.
They've written it.
He gave it to the apostles.
They recorded it and here it is for us.
Here we've got something which is in a category on its own.
The living word of God speaking to men about himself, about men, about the only way they
can come together and live together.
The authority of the Bible, not scholastic philosophy.
You see, my friends, the importance of looking back at the Reformation.
Isn't this, I wonder, the greatest need at the present time to come back to this word
of God?
Is this authoritative or isn't it?
Am I really in a position to stand above this book and look down at it and say that's
not true.
This must come out.
Is my mind, is my 20th century knowledge the ultimate judge and decider as to the veracity
of this teaching?
It is since the time a hundred years ago when that notion began to creep in that the church
has been going down.
But the Reformers based their everything upon this book as the word of God to men which
they were not to judge but to preach.
And you and I have got to return to this.
There can be no health, there can be no authority in the church until she comes back to this
basic authority.
It is idle to talk about this as the word of God in a sense which still allows you and
me to decide that certain things in it are not true.
The book hangs together.
The Lord Jesus Christ believed the Old Testament.
He took his disciples after his resurrection.
He took them through the books of Moses and the Psalms and the Prophets.
He says I'm there, let me show you myself there, read them, why haven't you understood
them?
Why haven't you believed all that the prophets have written?
That was their trouble.
It has been the trouble of the church always in periods of declension and we must come
back to the Protestant Reformers position and recognize that we have no authority apart
from the authority of this word of God.
That was theirs.
What else?
Well here they found also the mighty doctrine of the sovereignty of God.
And they taught them not to approach their problems in a subjective manner as you and
I do.
Their concern was not how can I get a bit of help?
How can I get some physical healing or how can I get guidance or how can I get happiness
and peace?
How can I get a friend that will help me in my loneliness?
No, no.
There was this almighty, august being, God in his sovereignty.
And there they were before him.
The one question was how can a man be just with God?
The sovereignty of God.
They bowed before him.
They were godly men.
They were God-fearing men.
God was at the center of their thoughts, the controller of all their activities and of
their life.
The sovereignty of God.
They didn't talk much about free will as I read them.
But they knew that God was over all.
And he was to be worshipped and he was to be feared.
And then as we've been reminded there was the great central doctrine of the Lord Jesus
Christ and his perfect finished work.
They didn't feel sorry for him as they looked at him on the cross.
They saw him bearing their sins.
They saw God laying on him the iniquity of us all.
They saw him as a substitute.
They saw God putting our guilt upon him and punishing him for our guilt.
The substitutionary atonement.
They preached it.
It was everything to them.
The finished, complete, atoning work of Christ.
And they gloried him.
And that in turn of course led to the great pivotal central doctrine of which we were
reminded in the reading, justification by faith only.
Now my friends, I may be mistaken, but as I see the contemporary situation, the greatest
battle of all perhaps at the moment is the battle for justification by faith only.
Works have come back.
I was reading in a religious newspaper a fortnight ago something like this.
There was a heading to a paragraph, Saint, and then it gave the man's name.
Oh, I might as well give it to you.
It was in the paper.
Saint Gilbert.
What were they writing about?
Well, this is what they were writing about.
The writer of the paragraph was of the opinion that this man whose Christian name was Gilbert
was undoubtedly a saint.
And we must have called him the name and the dignity of a saint.
Then he went on to say this.
Of course he said, I know that in actual practice he called himself a rationalistic agnostic.
But though this man Gilbert calls himself a rationalistic agnostic, a Christian paper
so-called says that nevertheless he is a saint.
Well how?
Oh well, because of his life you see.
He was a good man.
He was a noble man.
He had high and exalted ideals.
He gave much of his life to the propagation of the League of Nations Union.
He was a man who spent himself in doing good and trying to uplift the human race.
He was trying to put an end to war.
He made protests against war.
Therefore the argument is, though he denies the being of God, though he doesn't regard
the Bible as the word of God, though he doesn't believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, nevertheless
he's a saint.
What makes a man a saint?
Oh his works, his life.
My friends, we are confronted again by a generation that no longer believes in justification by
faith only.
We are told that the greatest Christian of this present century is a certain man whose
belief in the deity of Christ, to put it at its mildest, is very doubtful, who certainly
does not believe in the Atonement, whose creed seems to be what he calls reverence for life.
Yet we are told here is the greatest saint and Christian of the 20th century.
Why?
Ah, here's the answer.
Look at his life, they said.
Look what he's done.
He gave up a great profession and he's gone out to Central Africa.
Look what he's suffered.
Look what he's given up.
He might be wealthy, he might be prosperous.
He's living like Christ, he's imitating Christ, he's done what Christ has done.
You see, it doesn't matter what you believe.
According to this teaching, it is your life that makes you a Christian.
If you live a good life, if you live a life of sacrifice, if you try to uplift the race,
if you try to imitate Christ, you're a Christian.
Though you deny the deity of Christ, though you deny his Atonement, though you deny the
miraculous and the supernatural, the resurrection and many other things, nevertheless, you're
a great Christian and a great saint.
My friends, John Knox and these other men risked their lives day after day just to deny
such teaching.
And to assert that a man is justified by faith alone, without works.
That a man is saved not by what he does, but by the grace of God.
That God justifies the ungodly.
That God reconciles sins unto himself.
It is all of God and none of men.
And works must not be allowed to intrude themselves at any point or in any shape or form.
The battle for justification by faith only is on again.
And if this meeting and these celebrations do nothing else, I do trust that they will
lead us to a rediscovery of the absolute centrality of the doctrine of justification by faith
only.
What else?
Do you believe in assurance of salvation as the Protestant reformers did?
I have known people who have paid great tribute to the memory of John Knox and others who
deny the possibility of assurance and regard it as almost an impertinence.
I know that the Westminster Confession of Faith is careful to say that a man can be
saved without assurance of salvation.
That saving faith and assured faith are not the same thing.
And I'm happy to agree with the Westminster Confession.
But let me say this, the Protestant reformers didn't draw that distinction.
And over and against the Roman Catholic Church, which teaches that a man can never be certain,
and over against a modern movement that likes to claim itself as reformed, which equally
denies the possibility of assurance, the Protestant reformers said a man was not truly saved unless
he had assurance.
Well without going all the way with them there at any rate we must notice this, that whenever
the church is powerful and mighty and authoritative, our preachers and ministers are always men
who speak out of the full assurance of faith and know in whom they have believed.
It was for that reason that the martyrs could smile in the face of kings and queens and
regents and local potentates and go gladly to the stake.
They knew that they would awaken from the stake here in heaven and in glory and see
him face to face.
Then to make my little list complete, universal priesthood of all believers, let me add another
simplicity of worship.
Away with your idols, away with your vestments, away with your forms and ceremonies, a simple
service.
And not least important, a pure church.
The three marks of the church they taught are these.
It is a place in which the pure gospel is preached, the sacraments are administered
and discipline is exercised.
A pure church, no room for all unsundry, no room for men who are doubtful, no room for
men who show by their lives that they love the world and its ways and its sin.
No, no, a pure church because the church is the body of Christ.
Those were their convictions, those were the doctrines which they held.
The other thing I want to note about them is this, their power in prayer.
You know we mustn't think of these men only in terms of doctrine, though we must start
with it.
This other thing was equally notable and remarkable about them.
They were men of prayer.
Didn't Mary Queen of Scots fear the prayers of John Knox more than she feared the English
soldiers?
Of course she did.
Why?
Well, he was a powerful man in prayer.
Have you read about the prayer life of John Welsh, the son-in-law of John Knox?
There was a man who spent nights in prayer.
His wife would wake up at night and find him on his knees, almost stone-pearled.
What was he doing?
Praying for the townspeople to whom he was ministering, asking for power, asking for
authority.
These men, every one of them, were men of great prayer.
They spent hours of their lives in prayer knowing that in and of themselves, though
their doctrines were right and orthodox, they could do nothing.
I like to hear that story of another of these men a little bit later, Robert Bruce.
There he was praying with some ministers one day.
He felt they were lifeless and that they were dull, and he was praying that the Holy Spirit
might come down upon them, but nothing seemed to be happened.
And then he began banging on the table, and what he was doing was he was trying to knock
down the Holy Ghost amongst them.
Isn't that the kind of men we need today?
Where's the power?
Where's the influence?
Where's the authority?
John Knox was only a man like us, a man of like passions with ourselves.
Whence the authority?
Whence the power?
There he got it.
A man of prayer who lived in the presence of God and who knew that he could do nothing
without him.
And that brings me to the last point, which is this, their preaching.
We've been reminded that they introduced preaching, and that they put preaching at the center
instead of ceremonies, instead of sacraments.
Yes, but my dear friends, let's remember this, there is preaching and preaching.
Merely to speak for twenty minutes is not of necessity, preaching, though you may have
taken a text and divided it up very cleverly, it's not of necessity, preaching.
Oh, there is preaching and preaching.
What's the test of preaching?
Oh, I'll tell you, power.
Our gospel came unto you, says the apostle to the Thessalonians in the first epistle
chapter one verse five, our gospel came unto you not in word only, but in power and in
the Holy Ghost.
And with much assurance, who had the assurance, the preacher, he knew something was happening,
he knew God was using him, he knew that he was the vehicle and the channel of divine
and eternal grace, much assurance.
And that was the sort of preaching you had from the Protestant Reformers.
What kind of preaching?
Prophetic preaching, not priestly preaching.
What we have today, you know, is what I would call priestly preaching, very nice, very quiet,
very beautiful, very ornate, sentences turned beautifully, prepared carefully.
That's not prophetic preaching.
No, no, what is needed is authority.
Do you think that John Knox could make Mary Queen of Scots tremble with some polished little essay?
These men didn't write their sermons with an eye to publication in books.
They were preaching to the congregation in front of them.
They were anxious and desirous to do something, to effect something, to change people.
It was authoritative.
What was it?
It was proclamation.
It was declaration.
Is it surprising that the church is as she is today?
We don't believe in preaching any longer, do we?
You used to have long sermons here in Scotland.
I'm told you don't like them now.
And woe be unto the preacher that goes on beyond 20 minutes.
I was reading coming up in the train yesterday about the first principle of Immanuel College in Cambridge.
He lived just at the end of the 16th century.
His name was Chatterton.
He was preaching on one occasion, and after he preached for two hours, he stopped and
he apologized to the people.
He said, please, forgive me, I've got beyond myself.
I mustn't go on like this.
And the congregation shouted out, for God's sake, go on.
You know, I'm beginning to think that I shan't have preached until something like that happens to me.
Prophetic, authoritative, proclamation, declaration.
A preaching that didn't respect persons, that wasn't anxious to play to the gallery or to
the intellectuals wherever they may sit.
And certainly not our modern idea of having a friendly discussion.
Have you noticed it?
Less and less preaching on the wireless programs, discussions.
Let the young people say what they think.
How interesting.
Let's win them by letting them speak, and we'll have a friendly chat and discussion.
We'll show them that, after all, we are nice, decent fellows, there's nothing nasty about us.
And we'll gain their confidence.
They mustn't think that we're unlike them.
So, of course, if you're on the television, you start by producing your pipe and lighting it.
You're sure you're like the people, one of them.
Was John Knox like one of the people?
Was John Knox a matey, friendly, nice, chattin' you can have a discussion with?
Thank God he wasn't.
Scotland would not be what it has been for four centuries if John Knox were that kind of man.
And can you imagine John Knox going to have tips and training as to how he should conduct
and comport himself before the television cameras?
To be nice and polite and friendly and gentlemanly.
Thank God prophets are made of sterner stuff.
An Amos, a Jeremiah, a John the Baptist in the wilderness,
a camel-haired shirt, a strange fellow, a lunatic, they said, he's mad.
And they went and listened to him because he was a curiosity.
And there, as they listened, they were convicted.
Such a man was John Knox, with the fire of God in his bones and in his belly.
And he preached as they all preached, with fire and power, alarming sermons,
conflicting sermons, humbling sermons, converting sermons.
And the face of Scotland was changed.
And your greatest epoch in your long history came to pass.
There, as I see it, were the great and outstanding characteristics of these men.
What was the secret of it all?
Well, it wasn't the men, as I've been trying to say, great as they were.
It was God.
God in his sovereignty, raising his men.
And God knows what he's doing.
Look at the gifts he gave John Knox as a natural man.
Look at the mind he gave to Calvin.
Look at the training he gave to Calvin as a lawyer to prepare him for his great work.
Look at Martin Luther, that volcano of a man.
God preparing his men in the different nations and in the different country.
And, of course, before he even produced them, he'd been preparing the way for them.
Let's never forget Wycliffe, John Wycliffe, John Huss.
Let's never forget the World Enzians and all the martyrs of those terrible Middle Ages.
God was preparing the way, and then he sent his men at the right moment.
And the mighty events followed.
Very well, shall I try to draw certain lessons for ourselves?
What is the conclusion of all this?
It is this.
Righteousness and righteousness alone exalted the nations.
And there is no righteousness without a preceding godliness.
The times are through.
The world is in a desperate flight.
There is a moral, an appalling moral breakdown before our eyes.
Marriage is breaking down, home life disappearing,
little children not knowing love and parents.
It's a tragedy.
The model is appalling, and we see it in other realms and in other respects.
Can nothing be done?
Is there no hope?
Well, to me, the main message of this Protestant Reformation of 400 years ago
is to point us to the one and the only hope.
Bad as things were in Scotland prior to this, God called their men John Knox
and sent him out as a burning flame and the others with him.
The position is not hopeless.
For Godly means, and with God, nothing shall be impossible.
The conditions could not have been worse than they were immediately before the Reformation.
In spite of them, the change came while God was there and God sent him.
So the only question we need ask is this.
The old question of Elisha, face to face with his problem.
Where is the God of Elijah?
And I want to ask that question this evening.
God of John Knox.
Our meeting will have been in vain if we don't ask that question.
If we stop with John Knox, it's not enough.
Here's the question.
Where is the God of John Knox that can give us the power and the authority and the might
and the courage and everything we need?
Where is he?
How can we find him?
And I suggest to you that the answer is to be found again in the Epistle to the Hebrews
but in chapter 4 this time in verses 14 and 16.
And they seem to me not inappropriate as I end this evening.
How can we find this God?
Here is the answer.
Hold fast the confession.
It doesn't actually mean there of course the Westminster Confession but in reality it does.
Hold fast the old Scots Confession.
You'll never find the God of John Knox without that.
Bring therefore that we have a great high priest that is passed through the heavens,
Jesus the Son of God.
Let us hold fast the confession.
What is the confession?
Oh it is this about Jesus the Son of God, our great high priest.
The Scots Confession, the Westminster Confession, the faith of these fathers.
We must have it because without it who dares go into the presence of God as it's put there
in Hebrews 4 16.
Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace.
What is the therefore?
Well it's this.
The knowledge that we have that we've got this great high priest that has passed through
the heavens, Jesus the Son of God and that he is touched with a feeling of our infirmities.
He is not one who cannot be touched with a feeling of our infirmities but was tempted
in all points like us.
We are yet without sin.
Where is the God of Elijah?
How can we find him?
How can we receive the power that we need?
Oh I say go back to the confession.
Go back to the faith.
Go back to the word.
Believe it's foods and in the light of it go with boldness, confidence, assurance to
the throne of grace to obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need.
We are living in an appalling time of need, sin and evil rampant, the whole world quaking
and shaking is the end upon us.
The times are alarming, time of need.
The one thing necessary is to find this God and there seated at his right hand is one
who's been in this world and does all about it, has seen its shame, its sin, its vileness,
its rottenness face to face.
Friend of publicans and sinners and men who knew the hatred and the animosity of the Pharisees
and scribes and seduces and doctors of the law and Pontius Pilate.
The whole world was against him and yet he triumphed through it all and he's there and
he's our representative on high, believing in him, holding fast to the confession.
Let us go in his name with boldness unto the throne of grace and as certainly as we do
so we shall obtain the mercy that we need for our sinfulness and unfaithfulness and
we grace to help us in our time of need, in our day and generation.
The God of John Knox is still there and still the same and thank God, Jesus Christ is the
same yesterday, today and forever.
Oh that we might know the God of John Knox, amen.