 Okay. Good morning everyone. Welcome to a new week of classes. Before we begin, can one of us please lead us in prayer? Let's just pray before we begin. Yes, can one of us please lead us in prayer? Can I pray first? Go ahead, Abdi. We thank you, Father God. We thank you for this new day. We thank you, Lord Father, for your presence that goes with us day after day. We thank you, Lord Father, that you're leading us, Father, day after day. Your goodness prevails in our life, Father. In your goodness, we stand, Father. On your promises, we stand, Father. And as we are learning so much about your love, your grace, your mercies, throughout generations, Father, how you love your church and how today, Father, we are learning your deeper secrets, Father. We just want to thank you for the anointing that rests upon our teachers. We thank you for the heart of hunger and thirst in our students, Father. We thank you for everything that you have provided for us, Father, that we may lead a victorious life on this earth. And we thank you for the power of the Holy Spirit that you have given us as help for, Father, the Holy Spirit. We thank you, Father, for everything, every blessing of life, for good health and for all the provisions of life, Father. We just want to thank you, Father, for continuing to be with us, Father. Bless everyone today with the wisdom that we need from our teachers to all the students, Father, the wisdom to learn, to receive, and to be applying it in our lives and walk in the ways that you are teaching us, Father. Once again, we thank you for this platform. We thank you for APC Bible College. We bless each and every member of this college, this day, Father, to walk victoriously. And in your strength and wisdom, we may continue to do the good works that you have created us for. We give you glory, honor, and praise once again and ask this prayer in the precious name of Jesus, our Savior and Lord. Amen. Amen. Amen. Thank you, Avni, for praying. Okay, so let's begin our class. Let's do a quick review of what we did last week. Now, last week, we looked at the third and the fourth century church, right? So, we saw that the third century church began to see a lot of persecution, right? New emperors came, emperor services, emperor deities, these emperors who came wanted to, their main goal was to wipe out Christianity, right? And so, there was a lot of persecution towards the church, and we see that that was not the end. God raised up people, great leaders who were called as apologists and theologians who wrote against the practices of the early, you know, the Roman church, we could say. God raised up many other leaders where the gospel began to spread to different parts of Europe into, we also looked at North Africa, which saw about a million believers added into the church. So, yes, there was persecution, the church was being, you know, people were being martyred for their faith, yet we see that just because of that, we did not see the church, okay, just coming to ease, but that whole sense of, you know, let's spread the gospel even more. God raised up leaders there. Then we looked at the fourth century church, again, persecution was increasing, emperor Diocletian, he, you know, intended to wipe out Christianity, and again, there was constant persecution, but God raised up leaders in their midst. Emperor Constantine came, when Emperor Constantine came, there was some kind of a freedom, right? He was one emperor who, you know, supported Christianity, who said, okay, let them do what they have to do. He also went the next step by providing land and finances and opportunities for the Christians. So, this era of Constantine is known as the golden era for Christians, because imagine a Roman emperor who's saying, okay, Christians, y'all can do what you want, we will help you also. Yet, even through this, there was this, because of this freedom for Christianity, there was this sense of relaxing. People, you know, just got laid back, and Christianity began to become a common thing, right? It's okay to be a Christian. And so that whole sense of fervency and studying of the word of God and preaching the word of God, all of that casually died down, right? And so, out of that, during that season, the church became institutionalized, right? And those periods are called the dark ages. Why is it called the dark ages? The only reason is because after the church becomes institutionalized, the church was not impacting the world, right? But it was the other way around. The cultures of the Roman cultures came into the church, and that's where Roman Catholicism began, right? And we saw that there was only liturgies, there was rituals replaced by scripture, belief in purgatory, only the pope is the leader, and only he can do everything. And so, the church went through dark ages. Now, even during this time, let's pick up from here. I'm on page 34 on your notes, if you're tracking along. Now, just because the dark ages, Roman Catholicism has come in, okay, so there's basically, here's the picture. You've got one Bible, right? Even though there are plenty of translations, there were about 22 translations of the different languages of the Bible, but here's what they did. They had one Bible, right? And that Bible we kept in the church, and only the leaders or the pope had the, you know, option of going and reading it. So, laypeople did not have a Bible, right? So, it came up to that point where, you know, it was like, if you want to know about the word, you have to go to church, and you have to listen to what the pope and the bishops and the other leaders preach, and that's it. That's all you can get. So, that is why the season is called the dark ages, but after that, the Lord raised up people, and it was to talk and to come against this dark times of the church, against the teachings of the pope and the teaching of the Roman Catholics there. So, this next season is called the Reformation, right? Now, what is the word reform is to make things come back to normal, right? Something that is formed to reform it, right? So, God used many leaders, and they were called reformers. Basically, what they want to do, is they said, okay, we've come to a time where the church is controlled by the pope, and it's institutionalized. There's no teaching of the word. There's no more of the Holy Spirit. Things have become, you know, things have become so dry in the church. So, God raised up leaders who stood against the Catholic Church, and these leaders were called reformers. So, this week onwards, what we'll do is we will look at a few people in history, reformers. Now, we're not going to go deep into a study of their lives, but we will only look at what they did and how they impacted the church, right? And because of them, what was the changes that happened within the church, right? So, let's look at, so we're going to look at some of these church reformers, early church reformers, right? John Wycliffe, right? This is, he was known as the Reformation Morning Star. Now, John Wycliffe was educated in the Oxford University. He received a doctorate in theology, and during this time, he declared, right? Now, what I want each of us to understand is to keep this in our background. The background is the church is institutionalized. So, you've got popes, you've got a leader, you've got bishops and cardinals and all of these hierarchy, but the church is dry. There's only one Bible. People were not free to have their own Bibles, and even if they were caught, you know, they could end up being killed or martyred for what they have done. So, with that in the background, these people stand up against the church, right? So, Wycliffe received his doctorate in theology, and what he did was, he began to study the scriptures. You know, he began to look at these other translations of the Bible, and he said, this is, this is what the church is. This is what, how the church should be. And right now, we see that, you know, the church is doing everything opposite to what is written in the Word of God. So, he declared that it is the right of every Christian to know the Bible. And he emphasized that every Christian needs Christ as a salvation, and there is no need of pilgrimages, no need of all these, depending on the Pope and all of this. And so, Wycliffe translated the Bible into English. And if we see the early, early translations, you will see his name mentioned there, John Wycliffe. So, even if we, if you look at the King James Version, which we will study later on, we see that portions of the translations was taken from John Wycliffe's translation of the Bible, right? So, he was able to do that yet. Since he translated the Bible in English, he said, you know, every Christian should have a Bible and be able to read it. The Romans, well, no, they captured him. The church organized for him to be captured, captured him, and he was killed and martyred for his, for his faith. Then we look at, after this, John Hus, another young man, he was, he was born of peasant parents, born in Czechoslovakia, and he trained himself for priesthood, right? He wanted to become a priest in the church, and he became a professor in theology, and he joined Charles University in Prague. So, he was, he was a professor, and he was also preaching and teaching the word of God. But during his time, right, he wanted to become a priest, but during his time of studying the word and all of this, he saw that, you know, the church is going through a lot of corruption. He's also said that he looked at the happenings within the church, right? Because there was immorality, there was sin that was open, because as we mentioned, the dark ages brought corruption into the church, right? So, John Hus saw all of this. He said, I don't want to be part of this kind of a community where, you know, they're talking about God, but their lives are something else. So, he began to write about justification by faith. Now, this is easy for us to talk about now, but during that time, you talk about justification of faith by faith. Now, Pope and his whole order of people will, you know, will be affected, because he's saying justification is not by any works, not by coming to the church, lighting up candles, and just sitting there, no, justification is by faith. So, he wrote many books saying that, you know, this is what the church is, this is what every believer should do, and eventually, the Roman Catholic Church, they tracked him, they caught him, and the Pope, of course, they communicated him from the church, and then later on, he was caught, he was strangled, and he was burnt to the stake. You know, and so, we see that John Wycliffe and John Hus were contemporaries, but both of them gave their life for the sake of the gospel. Right? And what happened? Now, the outcome of this was not that, okay, they died and the thing, you know, the work stopped. No, the Bible, this scriptures that was translated began to spread in different parts of the world, yet it was not an authorized version. It was not like the Romans said, okay, you can take this, everyone can, no, it was all done through, you know, they would say that early Christians, these writers and theologians were sponsored by rich people, like rich merchants and businessmen who would pay them and say, okay, you write the scriptures and we will, you know, they would probably smuggle these Bibles across into different parts of the world. So that's what was happening. So if you get caught with, you know, any other form of scriptures, the Bible or anything, there was this whole thing of, you know, they could be put to death. So it was still that serious. Right? And so later on, 1452, God raised up another young man named Savona Rola and he came to the city of Florence and he was more of a bold preacher of God. Right? So he was not afraid of what the Romans would say. He was not afraid of the Pope. He was not afraid of the Roman Catholic Church. He was bold, right? And he began to preach the revelations of God though, the wrath of God. He began to preach about the grace of God. It said that when he preached, people would, you know, weep and moan during his preaching because he would weep to see the tender mercies of God, God's love, but they were also weeping because it exposed this in full nature. And his sermons affected the city, the government, people in high places were affected. And, you know, just so that the city of Florence becomes a better place, you know, businesses were open, jobs were given, banks were open where, you know, they were given finances with less interest rates. So all of this were good things. Yet the Roman government, the Roman church said, we need to get rid of this guy because he's getting popular and he's doing all these things without our permission. So, you know, they capture him and then they excommunicate him. They form the church and later on he still begins to preach but he was caught. He was then hanged and burned to the stake, right? So we see here that being a Christian during these times trying to reform the church, these are men of God who gave their life for the sake of the gospel, right? And after this time, the Guttenberg Latin Bible was printed. Now, Johannes Guttenberg, I'm sure many of us may have heard of him, he invented the printing press and he was the first person to, you know, all these days, all these while they were only written copies, right? So when you look at the Old Testament, they had scribes who would sit and, you know, just make copies of the scriptures. So Johannes Guttenberg invented the printing press and he got these Bibles printed and many stocks of Bibles were made in Latin and it was given to people in different places of the world but the Romans were not happy with this whole thing, right? Because as we know, now we need to understand that you've got the Roman government and you've got the church, right? So they both are working together now. So for example, if there's something that the Roman church didn't like or if the Roman church wanted to excommunicate somebody, they would use the help of the Roman government and with the Roman church also, the Roman Catholic church growing, history says that they would pay the government, the Roman government or the soldiers, okay, go catch this person and let's get rid of them. And so this Roman influence spread across the world. So it was not like, okay, if I am away from Rome, if I'm in, you know, France or if I'm in Europe or if I'm in Egypt, nothing's gonna happen to me. No, the word would come and the Roman, you know, the Roman Catholic church would have their way of getting hold of these people who are against the church and excommunicate them. So we see here that people were giving their lives for the sake of the Gospel, right? Yet all is not lost. It's so wonderful to see this, that their lives, the blood of the martyrs, the blood that was shed, those who lost their lives, it was not like, you know, that was the end, but reformation began. After this time, God raised up many more leaders. Let's look at some of them. Erasmus was another fiery preacher and he was a person who was, you know, we know about Martin Luther and how he was able to, you know, impact the church through his teachings. But Martin Luther, sorry, Erasmus, he reconstructed the original New Testament. So the old Greek version, he began to make parallel Latin translations and he added notes. He added commentaries. Like what we see now, if you go to Google, we have plenty of commentaries by different writers and so Erasmus was a great scholar and highly intellectual person and he was so well learned that he would read something and he would just, you know, translate the whole thing into Latin and he would add commentaries to it. So his writings and some of his additional writings and commentaries, he wrote about how the Roman Catholic Church is the arrows of the church and he wrote about the practices of the priests where, you know, they lived dual lives. They, you know, they openly lived with mistresses or they openly lived a sexually immoral life and he denied all the claims of the pope because during that time he said, only if the pope says this, you got to do it. So the pope is in all authority. All these people said, pope is nowhere in authority, it is God. And so eventually we know that what is going to happen to him, he tried to, people tried to catch him, get him, he was excommunicated and, you know, he wrote about the, you know, relic worship and indulges of the world that the church is going through. Right now when we say relic worship, relic worship is either mortal remains or material that, you know, people used who died later on, people used and that was worshiped or they would pray to it. Now where did this come from? History says that most of all this understanding came from in the book of Acts when Paul's handkerchiefs healed people. Right now there was a wrong understanding of that and so it went on for many years and so the people during this time they had relic worship. So if, for example, they were in the church, if there were people, great leaders or popes may have come and got new popes may have been elected. So what they would do is they would have their, you know, maybe their mortal remains or some of their belongings and in the church people began to worship that. So Erasmus wrote against that and said this is not right, this is not what God expects of us and so again he was captured and Erasmus was killed by the sword for what he had done. So then later on Martin Luther, now we all know about Martin Luther. Martin Luther was one of the most effective writers and we still talk about how he reformed the early church. He was one of the most infamous or most famous writing is the one he wrote, the 95 thesis. He wrote this whole thing of the thesis about the scriptures, about the grace of God, about justification by faith and God's mercy, God's love and how we are to, you know, there is one mediator between man and God. So 95 thesis, he wrote this and he went and, you know, just kept it at the church at Wittenberg in Germany and after reading this, many people got their hands on this book, 95 thesis, people began to repent, right? So Catholics, the Catholics who were going to institutionalize church, they began to repent of their mistakes and many of them came out of the church, right? Now this writing of the 95 thesis led to the reformation, right? We see that all this why people are, God is using reformers but we didn't see any kind of reforming happening in the church but after this writing, the 95 thesis, it led to reformation, reformation began, meaning what? Thousands of people all across the world, Catholics who were probably in the church, many of them would have been in the church because of the fear of being martyred or many of them would have been in the church just so that they enjoy freedom and enjoy, you know, they could make money or, you know, have the facilities and benefits of the Roman government. So there would have been different reasons of people being in the Catholic church but after this 95 thesis went out, people began to repent. There was a vast move of the Holy Spirit. Now why was there no move before this? We don't know. Was it because of only the 95 thesis? No. Of course, there were many other writers, John Wycliffe, John Hus, they all wrote wonderful books but what happened was God chose this writing of the 95 thesis and this writing touched the people's lives and their lives were changed. So now we can picture this in the church. You got the Roman government, you got the Roman church, you've got like thousands and thousands of believers, not believers but part of the Roman Catholic church and now after this writing of the 95 thesis, maybe they all get a copy, it was, you know, spread to different places and then many are repenting and they're coming out of the institutionalized church. Now we should also keep in mind that there were the regular believing churches, right? So with pastors and, you know, a regular church about a believer's church, they were there, right? It's not like they were, you know, there was no church at all. There were churches. Only thing was because of the intense persecution, they were not more open, right? So we see in the first and second century church, it was open. People just began to join the church but in the third and the fourth century, leading to the dark ages, the churches had to, maybe some of them shut down because of the persecution, maybe many were killed and martyred but the church as a whole, they continued, right? I'm talking about the non-institutionalized church, they continued. There would have been churches, believer churches with pastors doing a genuine work of God, right? How do we know that? Because later on we see that, you know, many of these people who left the Roman Catholic Church went and were part of the, you know, the Protestant and the Anabaptist movements also. So we look at that as well. Okay. Going on, Zurich, another young man, Ulrich Zwingli, in Zurich there was reformation. What happened was, Zwingli was a young man, he received good education and he was ordained as a priest, right? Now Zwingli, what he did was, he was very attracted to the word of God and one person in particular was Apostle Paul. So what he did was, he began to study in detail about the life of Apostle Paul. He became, he served at the parish, at a parish in Glaris and then he began to preach on the gospel. Now, getting a good sermon during that time was a great thing, right? Why? Because remember, we looked at, during the dark ages, liturgy and rituals were replaced instead of preaching and teaching of the word of God, right? So basically it would have been people coming into church, the pope or the priest would say something, they would say amen to that and walk back home. There was no teaching of the word of God. But here Ulrich Zwingli, he joined to be a priest, he studied to be a priest and he wanted to look into God's word, Apostle Paul's life and he began to study it and as he began to study it, he saw that what is happening in the church right now is completely against Paul's writings. Paul wrote about the grace of God, about righteousness through justification and all of these wonderful aspects, but nothing is being taught in the church. So he decided that we need to make a change in the church, right? So he preached from the Bible. Now the moment people preached and moment people got, you know, popularity within the church, the Roman church would look out, okay, this is something that is happening, we need to make a stop to it. They tried all they can, all they can to, you know, suppress the work of God. So he went about teaching and many people were touched by his teachings, right? And so he wrote many other materials stating about the, just like Martin Luther wrote his 95 thesis, he wrote about how, you know, the grace of God, the mercies of God, justification is through faith and we need to look at the scriptures to live a holy life and all of that. What happened? Tensions began to rise. Now he's a leader in the Catholic Church, right? And now the Pope and the priests and all of them are saying this Ulrich Wigley is becoming famous for the wrong reasons, meaning he's preaching the word, he's doing all these things. It is said that Ulrich Wigley would call people after his sermon, he would give them an altar call, he would call them in front and he would pray for healing and the gifts of the Holy Spirit and, you know, and so it was something new to them. This never happened in the Catholic Church, a Roman Catholic Church, but he was, it is said that he would call people, he would pray for them and people were healed, people began to receive the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Now this became a challenge, right? Imagine the Pope and the priests and all of them saying, what is happening? So they, Ulrich, what happened was they tried to excommunicate him from the Church, they disputed his teachings about the gifts of the Holy Spirit and saying that they no longer exist for us and all of that and then a big kind of a war happened between the, within the Church itself, the Catholics, those, a lot of people believed in Wigley and his teaching and the again the institutionalized leaders, the popes and all of them, there was a war between them both and many were killed and Wigley also was killed during these these battles but, but here's what happened. After Martin Luther's 95 Theses and Ulrich Wigley's work in the Church, again many lives were touched, many Roman Catholics came out of the institutionalized Church and they saw that, you know, they saw the move of God, they saw God working, they saw miracles and healings and, you know, people, you know, receiving the gifts of the Holy Spirit, they saw all of this. So now within the Roman Catholic Church itself, one group of people were like, there are gifts of the Holy Spirit, there are healing, one group was, we don't need all of that, let's just focus on what the Pope says, let's come on Sunday, finish church, go back home. Again, if you think about it, a church that is divided among itself is not a strong church. It was not doing much of an impact because they believed in certain things, yet they didn't want to come out of the church. They said, okay, whatever you say is all right, whatever the Pope says, whatever your leaders say is all right, but it's just what we believe. So they were not in a position to just walk out of the institutionalized church, but some of them did and again many were martyred. So if we read books on church history, if you read during times when, you know, they would take these Christians and burn them to the stake, they were fed to lions, all these things happened. Probably during this, of course, during the second, third century also, but those practices went on even after the Roman Catholic Church was formed. So many were killed, many were killed, but what happened? God raised up radicals, reformation radicals in the sense that God did not say, okay, I'm done with you all, leave it, let the church go through what it has to go through now. God is faithful. He raises up great reformation radicals. Now one of them after Eldred Swingley, now let's look at what he did. We saw that he died, but Anabaptism began in Zürich in Switzerland. Now what is, they are called the Anabaptists. Now I'm not sure if you have any of, have Anabaptists here in your nations, wherever you are, but I'm sure you've heard of Baptists. Now they are very similar. The Anabaptists were first and then later on the pro-Baptists came into being. Now the Anabaptists, how did they come into being? Anabaptists simply means one who re-baptizes. Now what is it that they did? Now remember that Eldred Swingley, he looked at the life of Apostle Paul. He studied it very clearly, so probably he went through Romans and he saw Romans. Okay, the death, when we are baptized, we identify with the death, burial and resurrection of Christ. So what he said was, baptism is not for small babies. It's not for, you know, people who don't understand the work that Jesus did on the cross. Yes, there is a place where, you know, babies or little children are, you know, just blessed and all of that, but he wrote against the idea of baptizing infants. He wrote about, against it, he said, this is not what it is. Baptism is a work of God where we need to understand that we partake in the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Now for this stand, he was persecuted severely by the Catholics, severely. And, you know, the Roman Catholic Church was so against this that they tried all their best to wipe out this whole, you know, Anabaptists from this whole community. They wanted them to be excommunicated, but it did not happen. The Anabaptists began to grow stronger. They believed in the illuminating presence of the Holy Spirit when we read the Bible. Now picture this. First of all, the Romans don't want you to read the Bible. The Roman Church Catholic Church doesn't want you to read the Bible. But here now, on top of reading the Bible, they're saying the Holy Spirit will illuminate to each of us the work, you know, the illuminating work of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit will bring revelation to us. Now this caused big tensions between the Roman Church and the Anabaptists, but they emphasized that it's okay. We need to be strong enough, even to the point of death, to continue what God has called us to do. Many, many people lost their lives and they also began to teach that it's the responsibility of every believer to minister and to preach the word of God. So we see that the Anabaptists did a powerful work. They were able to touch lives. They were able to, you know, bring in a reformation into the church and they are known as the Reformation Radicals because they were, they were like open. They said, if you have to catch us, if you have to kill us, do so. But here's what the truth is and they held fast to that truth. And so out of these Anabaptists came many wonderful, wonderful leaders. Let's look at a few leaders. I'm sure all of us have heard of William Tyndale. William Tyndale, he is the greatest writer of the English Bible, translator of the English Bible. He translated the English Bible from original Greek and from the original Hebrew into English. He was a brilliant scholar, William Tyndale, a scholar in Oxford. He studied in Cambridge. William Tyndale spoke seven different languages and was proficient in Hebrew and Greek. Now, while I was studying this, and I just thought to myself, you know, when God chooses people, it's not that they were only people who had a heart for God. We see that they were all wonderful theologians, apologists. Martin Luther with his 95 thesis said that his thesis was so well written, the language used was so well written that even the, you know, the high, the priests could not understand it, you know, in Gutenberg in Germany. So they called learned people from colleges and universities to come and read and explain what he's saying. So his, the language proficiency was so great. William Tyndale's writing was also like that William Tyndale's aim in life was one thing. He wanted even a person in the field working the fields to have a Bible. Even the, you know, even as they, at the end of this, you know, life as they questioned him and all his, all the things that he was doing, he says, he challenged the Pope and he says, if I am alive, I will make sure that even the, those who drive the plow, that means the farmers in the field will have their own scriptures in their hand. Now these are big words to say to an entire church, institutionalized church, but what he did was he translated the Bible from the original Hebrew, the original Greek into English. And what did he do that these English versions, he spread it all across England. Right. So now you've got the Roman Catholic Church who are saying you should only come to here, come to the church and listen to the Pope. And on the other side, you've got these wonderful leaders who are and writers and theologians who are writing scriptures and making translations of the Bible and spreading it all across the world. Now, if you think of it, even now the greatest, the most sold book in the world is the Bible, even now. So God's work cannot be suppressed. How much ever we try cannot be suppressed. William Tyndale, when William Tyndale, he made copies of the book, wealthy merchants. Again, as we said, wealthy people who accepted the Lord as their personal savior and they're doing their business and all of it, they supported William Tyndale. They said, okay, you write, how many of our copies you write, we will get them printed. So they made 6000 copies of the Bible, New Testament, they were sent all across London, all across the world, the Bibles were sent. And William Tyndale, he translated even the Old Testament, not the entirety of it at one time, but he made it in portions of it. And William Tyndale's versions of the Bible were very unpopular within the church. Imagine, the entire church is trying to find out who this guy William Tyndale is, how is he able to translate the Bible and do all of these things. So as usual, the Romans go in search of him, they catch him and they bring him and he's imprisoned for a year or so. And even when he was imprisoned, reminds us of Apostle Paul, when he was imprisoned, he began to write potions and translate scriptures and then they caught him and they burnt the material. Finally, he was strangled and burnt to the stick. And I think they made a movie about him, William Tyndale's movie, I forget the name of the movie, but in the last words, while they were burning him was Lord, open the king of England's eyes. And that prayer was answered later on as King James, he agreed to have the Bible being printed and made available for every Christian. But you see here, what a wonderful work William Tyndale did, the very fact that you and I have an English Bible and 100 other versions and translations of it. And when we study all of this, we see that there was lives at stake, people lost their lives for the sake of just translating the Gospel. They were willing to die, they were willing to let go of the pleasures of this world. Now, most of them that we saw were not people who are uneducated, they were not people who were on the streets and then God took them. No, these were all studied in Cambridge, studied in theology with their master's degree and all of this. But it's so wonderful to see that even through all their learning and all their educational qualifications, they could have had a wonderful life. They could have got a good job, they could have gone any part of the world, done anything else with that high level of education that they received yet, they chose to translate the Gospel. They could have done anything else, they could have written other books or just secular books, nothing would have happened to them. They could have just gone on with their life. But they chose to do something for the kingdom of God, for the church. It was a burden that God put in their hearts. So William Tyndale was murdered, was strangled and burnt at the stake. You know, the movie depicts it very well. He's, you know, smiling and going to the stake and he's saying, God's outlaw. Yes, thank you Christopher, thank you. Yes, William Tyndale, God's outlaw. There's a scene where he's standing, he's sitting with all the leaders in the Roman Catholic Church and they're telling him, you need to stop what you're doing, you need to stop translating the Bible. And that's when he says this, if God spares my life, I will make sure that even the person who plows the field will have a Bible in their hand. And that became the, you know, the fire that caused the Roman Catholic Church to catch him. Okay, we'll stop here and we will pick up from next class. We will look at, after this, what happens is the Protestants come into being, right? Now, what is Protestants? They protested against the work of the church, right? There's, we Protestants are still around, and basically it's a group which later came on to become like a proper part or a sect of Christianity. But during that time, there were people who simply protested against the Roman Catholic Church, right? Now, they didn't protest about, you know, they didn't just simply protest, okay, saying that we don't have material, sorry, we don't have material needs or we don't have a house. They didn't protest about all that. All they protested against was the church is depriving them of their religious freedom. And we want our religious freedom. We want to be able to read the Bible. We want to be able to pray at home. We want to be able to want to be able to choose which church to go to and which church where we want to, you know, learn and study the word of God. It is, it is some, it's a choice that we want. And so they began to protest against the Roman Catholic Church. Now, just because they began to protest doesn't mean that the Roman Catholic Church said, okay, please go ahead and do, no, no. Again, they wanted dominance. They wanted the power. They wanted to, you know, capture the entire world under their governance. And the Romans were okay with it because they were probably getting huge sums of money from the church. And they're not doing anything wrong, right? It was not like, you know, because there was, remember, we talked about how the Roman influence was there in the church. So even if a Roman, a gentle Roman would go and sit in the church, it wouldn't be any different to them because it was, you know, a lot of idols and all these form of religion and, you know, it didn't, there was no impact that the church did. So the Romans were okay with it. Okay, do what you have to do. But make sure that we get our amount or make sure that we get our benefits and all of this. So they work together. But the Protestants began to stand against it. And so yeah, that we will pick up from next week. Sorry, I know that I'm talking a lot. And, you know, that's because there's a lot of material, but I'm trying to make it concise. But is it okay? Is everyone able to track? Do you have any questions, any thoughts? Feel free to share if you have any thoughts, any questions. Everything okay? All right. Now, I know that we may not be able to understand all of it at one time. Yet, I do hope that it is stirring up our hearts to see that, you know, now that we can just pick up a Bible and read it, nobody's going to stop us. We can go and have, we can have plenty of translations of the Bible, but it only shows us that, you know, we need to honor the Bible. Not only because it's the Word of God, because lives were, you know, lost during the whole process of it being made available to each of us. So we need to honor this. We need to honor the people in church history who gave their life for the sake of the gospel that we can, you know, have different versions made available now for us. So it's wonderful to study all of this. Let's continue to, you know, even as we study all of this, our main aim is that the Lord inspires us and, you know, to desire more of him, that we will continue to look to God and say, God, you know, these people gave their lives for the gospel. How much more should I not be able to sacrifice the things of this world to live a holy life, to live a life that is pleasing to God. And so that is our main aim, right? It's not only about head knowledge. Okay, I know what happened in the first and second and third century church and the dark ages. I know everything. It's not about head knowledge, but it's about the Holy Spirit ministering to us that the Lord can use us also the way he used all these wonderful men of God. So, okay, so we will pick up from tomorrow. We'll continue tomorrow. And can one of us just close in prayer, request any one of us to close in prayer, please? Sarul, is it possible you can close in prayer for us? Pastor, can I pray? Go ahead. Go ahead. Father, we thank you, praise your honor, you God, Master, for this wonderful time, what you've given to us. We thank you Holy Spirit that you're understanding Lord Master, which is flowing in us, so Father God, that Father God, as you are teaching us Lord Master, the sacrifice and the commitment of the generals of Father God who stood for you, the faith that encourages us of Father God to stand for you. And we pray that Father God, as Lord Master, as our pastor said, when we look to the word, let we able to honor those people, Lord Master, who sacrificed their life, who sacrificed everything for you, God Master, give us that grace and commitment so that we can also Lord Master sacrifice our desires, our will, our fleshly needs of Father God, and we could able to completely surrender as a living sacrifice for your kingdom, so that we can glorify our King of Kings and the Lord of Lord. Prepare each one of our hearts of Father God, strengthen your servant, or Lord Master, as he is Lord Master, releasing your word, or Lord Master under the anointing of the Holy Spirit. Thank you, Father God, for you are giving, strengthening him every time when he is releasing his word, releasing your word of God. Once again, I thank you, let your love flow in our heart, and let your peace rest upon our heart and mind. Thank you for this wonderful time. In Jesus name I pray. Amen. Amen. Amen. Thank you, Shri Kumar. Thank you all. Have a wonderful day. I'll see you tomorrow. God bless.