G3 British Reformation Tour

As I began, let me say also that it has been an incredible privilege, uh to be here. I remember when Josh and I first started having conversations about this, and it went from do you think to let's do it to this is gonna happen? Yeah, and and now we're here, and it has been a unique privilege for me to be a part of this. So Josh, thank you for your your vision, uh and leadership with this and partnership with this. It has really been a blessing. Pray for us. We uh. We have been in Lusaka for the last four years there at the African Christian University. I'll I'll share a little more about that as we go my assignment today. And this is. This has bothered me the whole time, and it's bothered me more the closer we've gotten to it. I'm supposed to talk about Spurgeon and Lloyd Jones and the future of the reference. It's just not going to happen. Okay, there's just no way that that happens tonight. But I want to I want to focus on on Spurgeon, but really more than focusing on Spurgeon, because I don't want to take us too far Afield from the idea of British Reformation. What I want to do is I want to use Spurgeon kind of as this folcrum point, and I want to look back and look at Spurgeon as a product of the things that we've looked at and learned and talked about. And then I want to look forward and I want to see Spurgeon as a model for the reformation in our. Day as well. And then in doing that, I want to answer the question that people ask me all the time, why'd you move to Africa? And there's a complicated answer and a simple one. The simple one is that the Lord called us there. The slightly more complex answer is I had the opportunity to go to Lusaka in two thousand and six for the first time. A friend of ours, Paul Washer, told me sometime in the early two thousands, Hey, there is a guy in Zambia that you need to know. And at the same time he was telling Conrad and Bedway in Lusaka there is a guy in America you need to know. And so I was invited to come over and preach at the annual conference that they do there in Lusaka. It's the annual Reformed Family Conference, and I get there and I discover that there is this, you know, at the time, two decades old indigenous confessional second London Baptist Confession sixteen eighty nine, Reform Baptist movement, this vibrant movement there in Zambia. And having been aware of some of the things going on emissions, I knew that this was incredibly unique for something like this to be in existence, especially something that was as something that was indigenous, an incredibly healthy and vibrant. These guys are planting churches, they're multiplying, they're growing, having incredible impact. It's a unique country, a unique culture. It's a constitutionally Christian republic. There's a British colony that gained their independence just in nineteen sixty four. So English is. The official language in Zambia, so there was no need to learned language or anything there, just some very unique things. Went there and spent a couple of weeks. Me, my oldest son, and I came back after that and Bridget asked me. How was it. And I looked at her and I said, I think I want to be buried there, And you know, she wasn't too happy because I'll back up a little bit. So people have asked me about Oxford. I told you about our time in Oxford. What I didn't tell you was a year earlier, I had a preaching trip to England and I came back home and she asked me, how was it, and I said, I think I want to go to Oxford. And the next year we were there. So now I'll come back from Zambia and I say, I think I'm going to be buried there. Mama wasn't happy because that's a little bit different. And now there's you know, nine kids, seven still at home. That was way different than the trick that we took to Oxford. And I kept going back almost every year for the next eight years, and the African Christian University began to materialize. Several things began to happen to bring the work about, and more specifically, there was a gentleman in Mozambique by the name of Turnbull. He and his family had served in Brazil and now in Mozambique. Mozambique was a colony of Portugal, so the Portuguese was language there. He spoke Portuguese working in Brazil, Portuguese working in Mozambique as a homeschool dad. They educated their children on the classical education model. He had been the chairman of the chemistry department at the University of Arkansas law PhD. Chemistry from Caltech, holds three patents. Sharp guy who knows his stuff and was very interested in starting a classical Christian or semi classical Christian university. But the infrastructure wasn't there in Mozambique because he also didn't want this to be a colonial effort, and a lot of our mission work in Africa has been very colonial in nature. It has been, you know, foreigners coming doing something for Africans that looks very much like us doing something for Africans, creating dependency, never becoming indigenous, and he didn't want to do that. So there wasn't the infrastructure. But he came to the conference in Lusaka and there was infrastructure. The churches in Lusaka, multiplying churches and leaders wanted to start a seminary. Ken Is interest is starting a university. They start meeting and talking two thousand and eight or so, putting their heads together, and the thought was to do both. And so two thousand and nine they start talking about this in earnest. Now all the while, I'm going almost every year, not on my radar. Twenty twelve, a representative comes and speaks to our church about things getting closer for the university. Twenty fourteen, we go on a visit and we take everybody, me, Bridget, seven youngest kids are then soon to be son in law. We take everybody and we go. We're away for a month. We go to Kenya, and then we go down to Zambia. We're there for a couple of weeks and there's more talk about the university. And while we're there, Bridget comes up to me one night and she says, it's time for us to do this. And I said, do what she said. You need to be here. That was August twenty and fourteen. August twenty fifteen. We were moved. And all I can say is that. I fit. All of the things that the Lord had done to make me who I am were things that fit with this particular work. Now, let me bring this into our context. Why why was I so interested and so passionate about the African Christian University One Number one because it was growing out of this reform movement. The reformation hasn't stopped. Amen, The Reformation hasn't stopped, and it's been happening in Zambia any enough. One of the gentlemen who was the main gentleman to bring Baptist work to Zambia was a missionary who was sent out from. Matt Tat. Spurgeonist Church, which is one of the reasons there's such a strong indigenous reform Baptist movement there. And so here's this movement, and then here's this school that's going to start, this classical Christian liberal arts, biblical worldview university based on the same model and foundation as Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard, on the same philosophical model, in the African context, where this real transformation is happening with a very young country with an open door for Christian work and Christian ministry because again, it's a constitutionally Christian republic where there are not some of these same obstacles, and where we're having the opportunity to do things looking back at all the mistakes that have been made and looking forward at all the incredible potential. Listen, Europe is gone. Europe has fallen. Europe has fallen, and we used to think that Africa was going to be evangelized by Europe. And during the colonial era there was that thought, right, we're going to take the Gospel to Africa, And in many ways that happened during the colonial era, but not completely, not appropriately, not thoroughly. And there's a lot of syncretism, a lot of unhealthy quasi Christian movements that have attached themselves to the African traditional worldview and African traditional religions. And it's bad. It's just bad. Some of it is heretical, others based on easy believism, the soft peddling of a gospel. That's not really a gospel. And now Europe is gone and Islam looms large in the north of Africa. So how is God going to do that work of evangelizing Africa from the north because Europe's gone. I believe it's going to happen from the south. And I believe this indigenous movement that's been happening in Zambia for the last three plus decades. Is a bulwark in. The south that is being used and that is going to be used for this great work. And sometimes it's overwhelming to think about the potential of that. So when I say we're a semi classical Biblical worldview university. What does that mean all of our students. Currently, we're offering degrees in agriculture, business education, fine arts, and theology on the undergraduate level. On the graduate level, offering beginning to offer a couple of degrees theology. Degrees we're getting ready to add at the undergraduate level, probably political science, chemistry, and biology. Our goal is to be a leading research institution in Sub Saharan Africa, the leading academic institution in Sub Saharan Africa, the Oxford and Cambridge and Harvard of Sub Saharan Africa. And it's doable, and not just because of the high commitment to academics, but a commitment to Biblical worldview throughout. All of our programs. Not like Christian universities in the United States, where you're a Christian university and you have Christians in your theology department and you have good theology in your theology department, but the person who's teaching psychology is doing the exact same thing that the state university is doing. They just sign, you know, a statement of faith that is big enough, broad enough to drive a mack truck through. You know, all of our lecturers are confessional sixteen eighty nine, folks, and one of my jobs is in the area of faculty development, teaching all of our faculty how to understand their discipline and teach it from a biblical worldview. So the person who teaches political science who's never taken a class from a biblical worldview, a PhD. We have, our new president, by the way, is a Harvard PhD. Never taken a course from a biblical worldview, a Harvard lawyer, and a PhD never taken a course from a biblical worldview. So do you then just say, great, teach this class from a biblical worldview. Nope, It's my job to teach you, number one, how to understand your discipline from a biblical worldview and then walk you through the process of creating from the ground up a course that reflects the Biblical worldview from beginning to end. Not just teach the same thing they do at Harvard and pray before and after class, but everything from beginning to end from a thoroughly biblical worldview and confessional. Incorporate the sixteen eighty nine in your lectures in chemistry and math. It's an amazing thing. All of our students learn Latin their first year, for their entire first year. Why because we're a classical Christian, liberal arts, biblical world view university and we want to create linguists. Why should we rely upon people from the West to come to Africa to translate the Bible into African languages. Now, at ACU, we're going to raise a generation of linguists the likes of which we've been talking about since we've been here, who will then translate the Bible into the languages that their hearts speak. So this is the kind of stuff that's going on. This is why at you know, I guess it was forty five. I guess it was forty five at the fact. This is why forty five made the decision to move to Sub Saharan Africa with my wife and our seven youngest children because of the importance of this work. I say, there's nothing like it really in Sub Saharan Africa. There's very few things like it in the world. There's only a couple of places that are doing anything like this. So be praying for us. Now that's sort of the end of where we're going. Let's back up and talk about Spurgeon in this context. We know Spurgeon. We know Spurgeon as the Prince of Preachers, and we'll talk about Spurgeon as the Prince of preachers. But what I want to do is I want to put this in context. Spurgeon is born in eighteen thirty four. He comes to pastor what we now know as the Metropolitan Tabernacle at in eighteen fifty three. He's called there when he's nineteen years old. Never spent a day in seminary, by the way, He's called there when he's nineteen years old. Why is this significant? Remember that we've talked about the fact that the Reformation was not just about theology. It's just about a theological transformation. But this is a worldview issue. There's this medieval worldview, and the Gospel comes crashing in on this medieval worldview. And it's not enough to just take the truths of the Gospel and put them on top of this medieval worldview. The medieval worldview. It has to go. It has to be confronted. And so this happens, and the referendimation comes and we see this transformation. Now we fast forward a few centuries and we're in Spurgeon's time, and there is a different worldview that has to be confronted with the Gospel. Why we just. Take off a few things for you. Remember he comes to this pastorate in eighteen fifty three. David Hume lived from seventeen eleven to seventeen seventy six. We saw that monument to him in Scotland. So Spurgeon is born into this world, this world of empiricism. Stue Revolution takes place from seventeen sixty to about eighteen thirty or forty. Again, Spurgeon comes along right after the Industrial Revolution eighteen fifty three, he comes to pastor the church. Eighteen fifty nine, Darwin publishes Origin a Species. The World. It is a change in in the eighteen hundreds. Well, let me back up eighteen forty four to nineteen hundred. That's the area. That's the time period of Frederic Nietzsche again right smack dab in the middle of Spurgeon's pastorate. In the eighteen. Hundreds, Karl Marx, Emil Durkheim, Max Weber. They transform the social sciences. They give us what we now know as sociology. We know about Sigmund Freud's work in psychology. All of these things now analyzing man's problems apart from the scriptures, trying to find solution to man's problems apart from the scriptures. There's major scientific breakthroughs during this time, and there was incredible optimism, and understandably so. The first electric relay, the first telegraph, Morse code, the first light bulb, the telephone, the periodic table. We got that in eighteen sixty nine. Discovery of the moons around Mars eighteen seventy seven, pastures, vaccine against Rabi's aspirin in eighteen eighty nine. The first section of the London Underground was open in eighteen sixty three. Are you getting the picture? All of this is happening during Spurgeon's era. All of a sudden, man is the measure of all things. You see, the world used to look like this to the medieval mind. It was this world where we live that is controlled by the world of the ancestors, and then the world of spirits, and then the realm of God. And there is this fear because of these powers that are above us, that control everything. Now in the eighteen hundreds, we're not afraid of anything because we control everything. We understand now the very origins of the universe. We don't need Nietzsche says God is dead. Why does he say that? Why is this his declaration during this era? Because science is advancing so far, so fast that people, by the end of the nineteenth century believe there's no more discoveries to make. God is no longer necessary. We used to need God to explain things to us because we weren't as sophisticated as we are now. But now we don't need God because man is God. There is nothing above my head. Everything that I need to know is right here. There is no God. So in Spurgeon's day there was the need for almost another Reformation. Church. He followed a few other pastors. One of them was this guy named John gil Another was Benjamin Keasch John Rippam, some of the greatest names in Baptist theology. Here's another thing that you need to understand about Spurgeon. The reformers that we've heard about thus far come out of Catholicism and either go to Lutheranism or to Anglicanism, and in some instances, when we're up in Scotland, to Presbyterianism, to early Presbyterianism. But you still have a state church, and in the case of Anglicanism, you still have a state church that looks a whole lot like the Roman Church. And so there's another group of reformers, the radical reformers. These are our. Ancestors as Baptists, and the steps that. We take. Are almost unthinkable, and there were Baptists who were martyred for taking the steps that we took against things like baptism, rejecting infant baptism, which meant two things. On the one hand, when you reject infant baptism, you say that the baptism that you gave me when I was an infinite, when I was an infant, is illegitimate. That's why they were often referred to as rebaptizers, right, because essentially they're saying it's illegitimate. Baptism is for believers and it's not by sprinkling. The word means to emerg. Now, what we've been hearing about over and over again was people being burned at the stake. A favorite for Baptists was drowning. You believe in baptism by immersion will baptize you to death, and so Spurgeon is in that line, the line of the radical reformers. His confession would have been the Second London Baptist Confession of sixteen eighty nine. Again William and Mary sixteen eighty eight confession which came about in sixteen seventy seven, ratified in sixteen eighty nine. Don't lose the symbolism there, and so here is Spurgeon, the prince of preachers. The church under Spurgeon went from about twenty two hundred and fifty pe two over five thousand, and they had to move to what we know as the Metropolitan Tabernacle. His sermons were reprinted in many languages and in newspapers all over the world. By the following Monday. Phil Johnson writes more than twenty five thousand copies of Spurgeon's printed sermons were sold weekly. The sermons were compiled in sixty three thick volumes that are still being published today. They are They comprise some twenty five million words. The man was a machine and he died just before they started recording voices. You can hear Lloyd Jones, and sometimes on Saturday evenings we'll listen to Lloyd Jones. It takes a while to learn to listen to the Welshman, but once you get used to it, right fantastic. We don't know what Spurgeon sounded like. And I think there's an important point here. Spurgeon was a reformer in the midst of a literate culture. We live in a post literate culture. People know how to read, they know the rudiments of reading, but they don't know how to read right. People know c. At is cat but people pick up a Spurgeon book or something by one of the Puritans and their head hurts by the second page. Amen people read through. Modern Christians read through one of Spurgeon's sermons, and halfway through they're asking, well, wait a minute, what is he saying? Because we don't know how to read, we don't know how to bear down follow complicated arguments. But when you read one of Spurgeon's sermons, please know that during his era, thousands of these were reprinted because people read things like that, and the theology was better because they read things like that. We need another reformation. We've lost something because people don't read anymore. We've lost something because people don't write anymore, not like this. We've lost something because people don't follow through with these kinds of arguments. There's a book that why Johnny can't preach. Have you seen this book? And one of the arguments is that we no longer teach the close reading of texts. We're not reading, analyzing, and memorizing poetry anymore. We don't read things that are complex. The news is written on a sixth grade level because people can't handle or bear with things beyond that. We need another reformation. And isn't it interesting? The Reformation comes and the war is get the Bible into the language of the people, so that the people can read the Bible. And we get the Bible into the language of the people. And now people have the Bible, but they don't read the Bible that they have in their language. Preachers aren't preaching. Churches are filled with pastor ets preaching sermonets for Christian nets. We're not preaching. It's it's self help. It's therapeutic. We're not bearing down on theology and forcing people to think. We don't follow confessions anymore. We have statements of faith that are this big on a website. Why most Christians today wouldn't read through. Second London or Westminster. They're ahead and would hurt by paragraph two or three, and then they come away saying why are we putting God in a box? We need another reformation. But there is another reason. Spurgeon was involved in a well known controversy called the downgrade controversy. Most people are not aware of this controversy. They know the name, but listen to the way that he summarized it in his first Downgrade article. Believers in Christ's atonement are now in declared union with those who make light of it. Believers in Holy Scripture are in confederacy with those who deny plenary inspiration. Those who hold evangelical doctrine are in open alliance with those who call the fall a fable, who deny the personality of the Holy Ghost, who call justification by faith immoral, and hold that there is another probation after death. It is our solemn conviction that there should there be no pretense of fellowship. Fellowship with known and vital error is participation in sin. He could have written that last week. He could have written it last week. And these compromises were coming because individuals wanted to accommodate the spirit of the age. New theories about how we got the Bible, new theories about how the world and how man came into being, and so we create new theologies so that this rapidly changing scientific world will stop looking down on us. They say God is dead and your Bible is irrelevant, because. We now know. That man evolved, We now know that the world is far older than you think. And we come and we say, wait, wait, wait, we have new theories. We can reread Genesis for you so that you'll like us, so that you'll accept us. Only they don't. But there's a worse problem when we compromise again. Spurgeon writes assuredly, the new theology can do no good towards God or man. It has no adaptation for it. If it were preached for a thousand years by all the most earnest men of the school, it would never renew a soul nor overcome pride in a single human heart. We need another reformation, because again, he could have written that last week. We're seeing the same kinds of compromises. We're seeing the same kinds of compromises with individuals who who no longer believe that the Bible is sufficient, and who look around to the social sciences some of those things that came about during Spurgeon's era. They look around and say, tell us, oh, wise ones, what we need to believe about man and what we need to believe about God. Tell us, oh great ones, what we need to say so that you can like us. Please tell us. What we can do in order to not be on the wrong side of history. Towards Spurgeon and I say, preach the word, and you'll never find yourself on the wrong side of history. You may find yourself on the wrong side of the powers that be, you may find yourself on the wrong side of a sword or the wrong side of flames, but you will not be on the wrong side of history. Because God writes history, and he doesn't have an eraser, because he doesn't make mistakes. It has been absolutely incredible to see the things that we've seen, to walk the streets that we've walked, to commemorate the things that we've commemorated. But I hope that as we prepare to leave, that you recognize that this history is still being written. This Reformation is not over. This war with God's Truth has not ended our adversary. The devil did not run away with his tail tucked between his legs in the sixteenth century. He's not done. But to quote Martin Luther, even The devil is God's devil. Amen. He's not done, but he's also not in control. There is one who is, and he sits enthroned in the heavens, and he does whatever pleases him. He is sovereign over the ends as well as the means. And the means. They've always been the same, those ordinary means of grace, and we continue to misinterpret them or run away from them. They're the same, those same word based means. Gospel ministry and baptism and the Lord's Table and the prayer of God's people, they haven't changed. You know what's changed. We have. Before the Reformation, the chief piece of furniture in the church was the table, because the theology was based around the mystery of the Eucharist and the people way out there who could not understand it. The Reformation comes and the architecture within the church changes, and now the principal piece of furniture is a pulpit, and they're high and tall and big and masculine and awe inspiring. Because the Word of God is now in our day. You walk into a church and the greatest thing you see is not a table. You won't see one because we don't do the Lord's supper anymore. It's not a pulpit. You may get electorn and you may get some fiberglass something that's brought up there to hold something on. No, no, no, no no. Now it's a stage. Because we've gone from the sacrament to the sermon to the show. We've run away from the word. And this reformation that we need is just like the other reformation that we needed. It's a reformation of Sola scripture. It's a reformation that says his word is true, his word is sure, and his word is sufficient. Amen.