Scottish reformer John Knox. There's some times throughout that I'll be quoting John Knox. I will refrain from doing a Scottish accent. I'll spare you all. And myself, the embarrassment. But yeah, that's exactly right. But Knox is somewhat well-known, I think. He's fairly well-known, especially within the Presbyterian and Reformed world. But I think there's also a lot about his life that we don't know or that we don't understand. I'm not going to pretend like we're going to be able to get a full grasp of who John Knox was. and what his motivations were and what it is even that he did. His life is incredibly eventful. We really don't have a record of much that happened in his life before the age of 30, but from the age of 30 to the time that he died in his late 50s, He did so much that we will not be able to cover all of it this morning. His life was very packed, full. His life was also very cinematic. It would make a very good Netflix series or something, exploring the life of John Knox. I don't think it would be well done, so I wouldn't want anyone to do it. But he did a lot and a lot of exciting things happened to him and happened as a result of his ministry throughout his life. But we're going to begin before we look at the life of John Knox by looking at God's word. And so if you have your copy of the Bible, please turn with me to Ezekiel chapter 33. We're gonna read just the first seven verses here, which are on your sheet and printed on the screen, but it's also helpful to have your Bible in front of you. Sorry, not the first seven, the first nine verses. Ezekiel 33, starting in verse 1. It says, This is, of course, Ezekiel proclaiming, prophesying in God's name. And the Lord is speaking to him. It says, Speak to your people and say to them, if I bring the sword upon a land and the people of the land, take a man from among them and make him their watchman. And if he sees the sword coming upon the land and blows the trumpet and warns the people, then if anyone who hears the sound of the trumpet does not take warning and the sword comes and takes him away, his blood shall be upon his own head. He heard the sound of the trumpet and did not take warning. His blood shall be upon himself. But if he had taken warning, he would have saved his life. But if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet so that the people are not warned and the sword comes and takes any one of them, that person is taken away in his iniquity. But his blood I will require at the watchman's hand. So you, Son of man, I have made a watchman for the house of Israel. Whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me. If I say to the wicked, O wicked one, you shall surely die, and you do not speak to warn the wicked to turn from his way, that wicked person shall die in his iniquity. But his blood I will require at your hand. But if you warn the wicked to turn from his way, and he does not turn from his way, that person shall die in his iniquity, but you will have delivered your soul. Why do we read this passage from Ezekiel chapter 33? Well, John Knox had a very strong personality. You may know some of the events in his life in which he confronted the Queen herself in her sin. John Knox saw himself as sort of a biblical figure, as sort of an Ezekiel, or even an Elijah, who was sent by God to declare a message to the people, to be this watchman on the wall, this watchman with the sword, or telling the people that God's judgment is going to come upon the land if they don't repent of their ways. John Knox's calling, it seems, at least what we can glean of his own sense of his calling was to be this watchman, to be the one to stand in the gap and tell the people of Scotland in particular, you are going down a bad path if you continue in Roman Catholicism. If you don't turn from your wicked ways and turn toward the Protestant religion, then the Lord will come and he will strike you down and your iniquity will be upon your own head. Knox is, you know, the way that... that he conducted himself in his ministry, and it's hard to get a sort of a psychological analysis of someone 500 years after the fact, but the way that he conducted himself, it certainly seems as though he took this calling very seriously, that he had a great sense of the fact that he was put in place by the Lord to declare a message to the people of Scotland, and that he was going to die if need be in order to proclaim that bold message. And we see biblical figures doing this all the time. We can think of Moses confronting Pharaoh, or Elijah when he confronts King Ahab, or John the Baptist not holding back from confronting Herod, or even Jesus when he's in front of the Jewish leaders or in front of Pilate. or the apostles who constantly are praying for boldness throughout the book of Acts so that they might stand up against the Jewish leaders and against the Roman rulers of the day. So John Knox is very much in this same vein of person called by the Lord to stand up and declare the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ and to declare the coming judgment from the Lord if the people don't repent. Now, we're not going to get into whether or not that was a genuine calling that the Lord placed on his life. It certainly is in the way that he conducted himself. But it's important to see this because Knox would have read this passage and said, this is me. This is what I am called to do. This is what I am going to do with my life. One of his famous prayers throughout his life was, Lord, give me Scotland or I die. He was so, just so caught with the idea of, enraptured with the idea of saving his people, of his home world, the homeland of Scotland. And it drove his entire ministry. It made him say and do harsh things. But this is important to understand that this is where Knox saw himself. Well, let's take a look at the man. This is an artist's rendering of John Knox. No one really knows exactly what he looked like. This is a close approximation. I think this and other drawings like it were made soon after he died. So it's probably pretty close to what he looked like. But there were no paintings made of him while he was alive. Knox was possibly born around 1514. We don't know the exact date of his birth, even the exact year of his birth. The only reason we think that he was born around 1514 is that there's an account of his baptism taking place in 1515. So the assumption is that he was baptized as an infant and that that took place near Edinburgh, Scotland in 1515. So he was likely an infant when that happened. He wrote a lot throughout his life, but he did not talk much about his early life. And I think the reason is that he studied to be a priest. He spent a lot of his early life in the Catholic church. And I think when he became Protestant, he wanted to hide that fact as much as possible. And so didn't talk about his Catholic upbringing. And so we don't have much of what happened to Knox. Don't know much about what happened in his life until around the age of 30. Um, so like I said, he, he studied, uh, to be a priest, he studied at the university of St. Andrews, which is important. He'll come back to St. Andrews later. That's where he'll take up his first, uh, pastorate. But it was while he was studying that he developed something, excuse me, something of a mistrust of the Catholic church, particularly the Catholic hierarchy with the papacy at the top. and everyone falling in line behind him. He was still a part of the Catholic Church, whoops, skipping ahead. He was still a part of the Catholic Church, but he grew very weary of it and was, started to develop this mistrust toward the school, or excuse me, toward the Catholic hierarchy. While he was at school, he developed a great love of language, of words, and how to use them as weapons. And he developed a great love for debate and a great capacity in it. He was very good at it. One biographer says this, like a boxer with his fists, Knox used words and phrases to score points and try to flatten his opponent. Knox was like that. He was quite belligerent at times. And so we said that he had this mistrust of the Catholic hierarchy, and yet that didn't stop him from entering the priesthood when he graduated from St. Andrews. It seems that his conversion to Protestantism was pretty gradual. It didn't happen right away. And so he became a Catholic priest, but then his life changed a few years after that when he renounced the priesthood and began supporting a Protestant preacher named George Wishart. And this happened around the time that he was 30 years old. And this is when Knox's life, we really get a clearer picture of what it is that Knox did in his life. So, George Wishart. Knox spent only five weeks traveling with George Wishart, who was a Protestant preacher who was Scottish and traveling all over Scotland proclaiming the good news of justification by faith alone. He was really imbibing a lot of the Reformed teaching and began to preach that to the Catholic Scotland. Protestantism was still illegal in Scotland, and so he was traveling all over the place, proclaiming the gospel, but also sort of being hunted by the Catholic Church. And so, Knox, I don't know whether he took it upon him, I like to think that he took it upon himself to begin carrying around a sword, this is Knox here at the front, carrying around a sword and being Wishart's bodyguard. There are claims that the sword came up to his chest. This is a massive sword that Knox is carrying on his back. And you get this idea of who he was going to be for the rest of his life. He is this man. He's not like Zwingli, who's going to die on the battlefield. He is one who would carry around a sword to defend a gospel minister. And that's what he's doing. So for five weeks, he is traveling around with Wishart all over Scotland, hearing the gospel preached wherever they went, because Wishart was a very good preacher. And Knox is seeking to defend him from those who would try to stop him, stop Wishart from preaching. Wishart was condemned by the Catholic Church. He was told not to preach, and he did it anyway, which is why Knox had to carry this sword. But the Catholic hierarchy was coming after him. They were trying to get at Wishart and trying to stop him from preaching the gospel. And so in January of 1546, Wishart was arrested. Just before he was arrested, he sent Knox and his other followers away, basically saying, only one of us needs to make this sacrifice in order for the Catholics to be appeased. So don't die with me. You go and I will die. Wishart was arrested in January of 1546. He was put on trial by the Catholic cardinal named David Beaton. And Wishart was condemned to death. He was then hanged and burned in March of that year, March 1st, 1546. Knox left Wishart's side, and he went home back to Edinburgh area, back to St. Andrews. He went home a changed man. He saw the boldness of Wishart. all the example that he said, but more than that, he heard the gospel of Jesus Christ proclaimed time and again by Wishart. And so he went back to St. Andrews to take up his first pastorate. The situation surrounding this time in Knox's life, and particularly the events that took place at St. Andrew's Castle, are very complicated. They have to do a lot with Scottish, English, French, Spanish politics, and the wars that were taking place between these four countries, and all throughout the area at the time. So there's a lot of warfare going on, and Knox almost seems to be caught up in the middle of some of that. But this top picture here is St. Andrew's Castle, the ruins of St. Andrew's Castle, as it stands today. Those are stones that would have been there when Knox was there. But the whole structure itself is no longer standing. So what happened is that Cardinal David Beaton, a man John Knox called that bloody wolf, he's the man who put Wishart to death, he lived in St. Andrew's Castle. And the Protestants in the area, there were a lot of them in Scotland and in the surrounding area, were very angry over Wishart's death, very angry over the way that the Catholics handled it. And so they sought vengeance, particularly against Cardinal David Beaton. This is Beaton here. This is George Wishart, Beaton and Wishart. They were very angry, so what they did is they stormed the castle, they found Beaton in his sleep, and they stabbed him to death. And then they took over the castle and essentially locked it down. the Scottish army was coming to besiege it. They were sort of, they were saying, we're just going to be Protestants, we're going to hunker down in this castle, and we're going to wait out any army that might come and try to, or the Catholics who might try to come and avenge Beaton's death. So how did Knox end up there? Well, Knox was employed at the time as a tutor to two families. He would teach the children of those families all kinds of different things. And those families were Protestant families. Their parents were very supportive of the Protestants who took over St. Andrew's Castle and were worried for their own safety and the safety of their children. So what they did is they sent their children with Knox to St. Andrew's because they figured It's safer there because they're behind those big castle walls than it is nearly anywhere else we could go. And so we're going to send our children with the tutor to continue their education behind the safety of the walls of St. Andrew's Castle. It seems like a crazy idea to me, crazy decision that those parents made, but that's what happened. And so Knox ended up in St. Andrew's Castle. It was there that he continued teaching the children, but he also started to preach, and he would preach through sort of informal sermons through the Gospel of John. He, though, was reluctant to become a gospel minister. I don't know exactly why. He just didn't feel as though that was what the Lord was calling him to do. And so the congregation encouraged him but he was sort of saying no until one day a pastor of the church there, one of the preachers who was in St. Andrew's Castle, there were probably about 150 people in the castle waiting out the Catholic anger, I guess, waiting for it to subside. But one of the preachers there, his name was John Ruff, he preached a sermon on Christian's calling and gifts, particularly the gifts of the pastorate. And at one point in his sermon, he specifically addresses John Knox. He calls him out from the pulpit. Alex, this is not a good idea. Don't do it. Yeah. He calls him out from the pulpit and he said this. Again, I'm not going to try a Scottish accent, but he said, I charge you that you refuse not this holy vocation, that you take upon you the public office in charge of preaching, even as you look to avoid God's heavy displeasure and desire that he shall multiply his graces with you. He's specifically calling, it's like Pharrell and Calvin. Pharrell sort of cursing Calvin's peace until he becomes a gospel minister. This man, John Ruff, is doing almost the same thing, and specifically calling Knox out and saying, you, brother, have to become a gospel minister, have to become a preacher. The congregation was then asked, do you agree that Knox should become a pastor? And they said yes. And Knox was so overwhelmed, he ran from the room in tears and went back to his room and really reflected on it. But then he realized that he could not refuse. And so he became a gospel minister. It's not a very Presbyterian way of doing things, but that came later. So I'm the Presbyterian part of it. So what he did while they were still in St. Andrews, and again, I'm not sure the exact details of how this all worked out, but he was able to debate Catholic priests in the area, and he continued honing his gifts in preaching. And so that's what he did while he was there. Again, a quote from a biographer, Knox realized that he had found his very own sword for the fight, his voice. He no longer carried that large sword to protect George Wishart. He instead used his voice as the sword for his fight. Well, then soon after Knox took the pastorate, things changed drastically for the people at St. Andrews. The queen regent at the time in Scotland, her name was Mary of Gui, she called on allies in France. And the French king sent over troops to St. Andrews to help squash the Protestant rebellion there. Again, Protestantism is not legal. What those people did, of course, was murder. And that was not allowed by the law either. So St. Andrew's Castle was attacked by the French troops and it was overwhelmed eventually by those troops. So the people there were taken into captivity. The noblemen and the children of the noblemen were taken to France to be prisoners, but the commoners were enslaved. They were sent to the galley ships to be oarsmen on the ship. This is an example of a French galley ship from the 16th century. And this is possibly what it would have looked like, an artist's rendering of what it would have looked like for the French soldier here. with his whip in his hand, commanding the men to row. So Knox was one of these oarsmen. He spent the next 19 months of his life on a French galley ship as a slave. All the while, he was able to keep his spirits up, He didn't despair. He knew that the Lord would see him through. But he also didn't talk about this event much later in life. And we also know that some of the damage that his body endured while he was there plagued him for the rest of his life and probably was what caused him to die somewhat early. Well, certainly. dying somewhat prematurely. Knox was able, again, to keep his spirits up. He maintained his faith. He was even able to preach to the other slaves, to be someone who would lift up the spirits of others as well. He was very encouraging to others. We don't know why, but by the spring of 1549, he was freed from that ship. He was no longer a slave. But because Bloody Mary was on the throne in England, he was unable to return to, or excuse me, no. He was, I forget exactly why, but he was unable to return to Scotland in 1549, so he went to England. It was while James, No, it was while Edward was on the throne. He was in England for a time and was conscripted into the English army and he was a chaplain for a time. But then Edward died and Bloody Mary took the throne. And so he left with a lot of the Protestants. He decided he was not going to stick around in England to see what Mary was going to do. She had likely already started rounding people up. And so he wanted to get out of there. And he decided to go to the mainland, to go to Geneva. So Knox, after this time of enslavement and exile in England, he goes to further exile from Scotland into Geneva. He's there for a very short time until he takes a call in Frankfurt, Germany, to an English-speaking church there. He was the pastor there for about a year. 1554 to 1555. But there were some contentious debates that were taking place within that congregation and the surrounding area in Frankfurt around the Book of Common Prayer. And Knox came out on the losing side of those debates and decided to go back to Geneva. He, there's this time, like I said, Knox goes all over the place, and if we were to spend time talking about everywhere that he went, or all that he did, we would not have enough time to do that, certainly this morning. I debated asking Alex if I could have next week too, but I said no, we'll just do one, we'll just do one week. Try to fit it all in. Knox, after he leaves Frankfurt, actually goes back to Scotland, sneaks into the country, checks in on some of his Protestant friends to see how they're doing, and marries a woman. and takes her with him back to Geneva. He gets a letter from some English speakers in Geneva saying, we need your help preaching at a church of Frankfurt exiles here in Geneva. And so he's in Frankfurt for a little while, goes back to Scotland for just a brief visit, and then goes back to Geneva. And it's there that he is really able to minister alongside Calvin and really see what a Protestant town could look like. And that gives Knox a lot of ideas for what a Protestant country might look like. Even though they did not speak the same language, Knox was hugely influenced by the ministry, the teaching, and the example of Calvin. He said this, and it's printed for you in your handout, but he says that Geneva was the most perfect school of Christ that ever was in earth since the days of the apostles. In other places, I confess Christ to be truly preached, but manners and religion so sincerely reformed I have not yet seen in any other place. He's saying other places preach Christ, but they actually live it here in Geneva. They actually show us what it can look like to have a place so enraptured with the love of Christ that it seeps into everything in this town. Really, it really sinks down into his bones. He really falls in love with this idea of reforming Scotland. Again, give me Scotland or I die is his constant prayer throughout his life. And so he wants the people of Scotland to be reformed and wants it to look like what he found in Geneva. This is a famous picture, of course, of the Geneva Wall. I'm sure many of you are familiar with this. This is actually in Geneva, Switzerland. Has anybody been there and seen this? No? OK. Well, this is Pharrell, Calvin, Beza, and here's Knox. So even though he only spent a short amount of time in Geneva, he's still an important figure, certainly because of what he learned there and took back to Scotland. So. He's in Geneva for a time, for about four years, and he felt a deep longing to return home. He really wanted to get back to Scotland. And things were changing politically so that he was able to get back to Scotland. Bloody Mary died, and Elizabeth came to power, and so he figured, well, a Protestant is in power, therefore I can return home. He had to go around England, though, because Elizabeth was mad about some of the things that Knox had been writing about, which we won't get into. But he had a long book that he wrote while he was in Geneva. about the evils of women ruling over others. So I think a lot of people read that book and that's the only thing they know about Knox and they think he's misogynistic and that's not the case, but he did have some very strong opinions about about women in leadership in a country, thinking that it was a sign of God's judgment upon the nation, and something that the people should rebel against. So Elizabeth had read this work, and Knox was well-known enough that she said, you can't come through England. So he had to go around England. He was sufficiently scared of her, I guess. So in 1559, he returns to Scotland. They're able to proclaim the gospel fairly unimpeded. The Catholic Church still is the predominant church in Scotland, but he's able to preach. And so he returns to Scotland and goes to the town of Perth. where he is preaching justification by faith alone and preaching against the evils of idolatry. And he's preaching in Perth one Sunday against the idolatry of the Catholic Church. And essentially what happened is that after the sermon was over, the people decided to riot. They really took what he said and took it to heart and said, well, we need to get rid of all of the Catholic things in our city. and they began to tear down any trace of Catholic icons. And really that sermon and that cleansing of the town there in Perth is seen as the beginning of the Reformation in Scotland. It's really when the Reformation took off and became bigger than just localized people preaching justification by faith. He then returned to St. Andrews where he had been holed up for a time and where he had taken his first pastorate. He returned to St. Andrews and he preached there on Christ's cleansing of the temple and the congregation again thought that they needed to cleanse the church that they were in and the area that they were in of all Catholic remnants. So they reformed the town of St. Andrews, which then sort of became the headquarters of the Reformation and headquarters of the Scottish Protestant Army, where Knox was seen as sort of a figurehead of that army. The Catholics sent an army to St. Andrews, and the Protestants had an army of their own, and it became sort of a stalemate where the Catholics decided to leave and just leave the Protestants alone there in St. Andrews. While he was here, in these early stages of the Reformation, Knox wrote with others the Scots Confession. It was really one of the first Protestant confessions written and it was a very influential confessional document declaring the Protestant religion, but particularly how it's going to look in Scotland and what it is we're going to do in Scotland. And so this Scott's Confession was written, and the Scottish Reformation was beginning. If you take, if you look at those events from Perth and from St. Andrews, these riots that are breaking out, you can understand that the Scottish Reformation, more so than in some other places, like Germany or England, was really a violent affair. The Scots were fiery and wanted quick reformation. And so they sought it with the sword at times. And it could often go too far. Any thoughts or questions before we jump in? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Henry was indiscriminate in who he killed, Protestants and Catholics alike. Mary was specifically targeting Protestants, and maybe that accounts for... Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. We would not want to live under any of these rulers, certainly. We would not want to live at this time. No indoor plumbing, so. So then Knox is, yes, yeah. It does. I think it was a major influence in Westminster. I don't know if any of the churches in Scotland still have that as their main confession, but I know it does still exist. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. We use it as confession of faith from time to time, even here. Okay. Yeah. Is there a specific portion? Sure, yeah. Yeah, we should. We should use it. The very first. So this is a picture of John Knox preaching, and this is Mary, Queen of Scots, right here, listening to his preaching. That's the next part of Knox's life. It's really his contentious relationship with Mary, Queen of Scots. Again, Knox here, Bible in hand, confronting Mary, Queen of Scots. They met on four different occasions. They lived in a similar area, same area, so she would have heard him preach more often than that, but they met face-to-face four times. And he was such a firebrand that he did have a hard time with anyone in leadership over him, but particularly with women. The part of the book title that he wrote against women in leadership was something to do with the monstrous regimen of women in leadership over him. So he sort of laid out on the table exactly how he felt about having women on the throne. But his arguments were not good. It's not a good work. In fact, he wrote it while he was in Geneva, and I said that Knox and Calvin didn't speak the same language. Knox didn't speak French or German, and Calvin didn't speak English. This work was written in English, and it was printed in Geneva and sent out. Calvin didn't know about it until after it was printed, and when he found out, he was very angry with Knox because they had had this debate multiple times, and Calvin came out on the other side, the right side of this debate, and Knox was on the wrong side. And he came to walk back many of the things that he said in that book throughout his life, especially as he's talking with Mary. His relationship with Mary, Queen of Scots, was contentious. She was a child when he was beginning the Reformation, and then she grew up to, her mother was the Queen Regent, but she abdicated and Mary took over when she was probably in her late teens or early 20s. And by this time, Knox is a 50-some-year-old man. So it's... Yeah, he's not being very kind to her, but. She was a Catholic, and while this Reformation is going on, she was given by the Scottish Parliament a special dispensation to receive the Mass, to receive a Catholic Mass. And Knox felt like that was an affront to him, and to his fellow Reformers, and to the work that he had put into the Reformation, and an affront against the Gospel of Jesus Christ, most of all. And so he would often preach against the Catholic Mass, often preach against Mary herself, Because of this, Mary is said to have said, it's believed that she said, I fear the prayers of John Knox more than all the assembled armies of Europe. She knew the power of his prayers and was afraid, but she continued to be Catholic. She did not prevent the Reformation from continuing, though. She wasn't like Bloody Mary, who put a stop to all the Reformation. She allowed it to go on. allowed Knox to continue to preach, but he still preached against her rule and her actions, particularly when she became engaged to the Spanish heir. The king of Spain, his son, was eligible to be married and so Mary was engaged to him. Knox found out about this and delivered a whole sermon against it. The Spanish are, of course, Catholics. Mary was Catholic. His fear is we'll get two Catholic rulers on the throne here in Scotland, and they'll just turn the whole country Catholic. What happened in England will happen here, and all the work that they've done in Scotland will be completely overridden. So after this, Mary calls Knox to meet with her. This is their fourth and final meeting. And here's a conversation that essentially happened to them. I think it's according to Knox's rendering of it. She says, what have you to do with my marriage? And Knox says, my duty is to forewarn of such things as may hurt Scotland if I foresee them. For both my vocation and conscience crave plainness of me. He's saying my calling as a preacher, my conscience as a man says I cannot but speak against your marriage because it's going to do great harm to Scotland. Um, she, he, he then went on to sort of reiterate the points that he made in the sermon from the day before, uh, or the, the, the sermon that caused her to, to bring him before her. And, uh, she started, she broke down in tears and according to some accounts, she tried to attack him. She, she got up from her seat and tried to physically attack him, which you can kind of understand why, you know, how she would be upset, why she would be upset about that. And so this was the final time that they met with one another, was when he had problems with her marriage. She didn't end up marrying this Spanish heir. She married someone else and then had to abdicate the throne because of some political things that we don't need to get into. But her son, James VI, then became king of Scotland. He was a child, though, and too young to rule, so regents ruled in his place, and the regents that were put in place were Protestant. Knox was a spiritual leader to many of them. He was their pastor, so he had great influence over King James VI in a positive way. He preached at his coronation, I believe. And so Knox continued to lead the Reformation from St. Andrews and Edinburgh. Around the 1570s or so, he suffered a minor stroke, left him sickly. He had to be carried into the pulpit. But his body was weak, but his voice was still strong. His mind was still sharp. He was able to continue to preach and write until he died in 1572. He died November 24th, 1572, so that's next Sunday. That will be however many years since then. So that is the life of John Knox. What is his legacy? This picture that I put here, many of you may know this, but Knox was buried outside of St. Giles Cathedral. He supposedly wanted to be buried within 20 feet of this cathedral. This was where he spent a lot of his time, where he preached a lot. At some point, that space 20 feet away from the cathedral was turned into a parking lot. And so this is a grave marker on the parking lot in front of spot 23 that says, the above stone marks the approximate site of the burial in St. Giles graveyard of John Knox, the great Scottish divine who died 24 November 1572. Knox was a humble man. I don't think this would have bothered him very much. But this is a people park on top of where he is buried. Knox, what's his legacy? There's much that we can learn from him. Of course, we didn't even get into the Presbyterian side of things, but Knox was the father of Presbyterianism in so many ways. It was set up under his guidance and continued on, especially after the Westminster divines met and recognized Presbyterianism as the best form of church government and codified it. They saw in Knox a lot of what they wanted to do and what they thought church government should be. Knox was, of course, as we've seen, a strong defender of the faith. He was a faithful yet fiery preacher. who was seeking to reform his country. He was born into a tumultuous time in world history and he rose to the occasion of the calling that the Lord clearly placed on his life. Whether or not he was called to be a watchman is, you know, we don't know. But he certainly saw himself as that watchman of Ezekiel 33 who was called to stand before the people and say, this is what the Lord has said. If you do not believe, you will die. And so I think we can learn from the boldness of John Knox. We can take the good and leave the bad. There's a lot of bad along with all the good. But he was a faithful preacher, proclaiming the two main thrusts of his preaching were justification by faith and stay away from the idolatry of the Roman Catholic Church. Most of his sermons really landed there. He was also one, and this is something we can certainly learn from John Knox, who had no fear of man. It's said that one of the regents for King James VI said at his burial or soon after, here lies one who neither flattered nor feared any flesh. I think some of this goes too far in Knox's life. He was too bold to speak to authority at times when it got him in trouble. But how often are we hampered by our own fear of what others will think of us? How often do we neglect to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ to our friends and neighbors because we're afraid of what they're going to think about us? Knox did not have that fear. I think we need some of that freedom from the fear of man that so plagues so, so many of us. Knox was bold in the face of adversity. He was bold to proclaim the truth when all around would, when all the people around him would want to tell lies or want to reject the gospel. Knox was also a man of action. He had many helpers, but he was really the central figure of the Reformation in Scotland. And for so long, Scotland remained a Protestant stronghold. In the midst of so much Catholicism and other religions, Scotland was staunchly Protestant. I'll again quote the biographer. Her name's Jane Dawson. She wrote a fantastic biography recently on John Knox. Well worth reading. It's very fair and balanced. It's really great. Jane Dawson. But she wrote this about Knox being a man of action. She said, if a nail needed driving home, the Scot reached for a sledgehammer. If salt were needed to cleanse and scour, then he picked up a shovel. He was a blunt instrument, but he was an instrument used of the Lord to get a lot of things done and to reform the Church of Scotland. And it often got him into trouble, but it helped that church in Scotland prosper and it helped the gospel of Jesus Christ to go forth. And that's what Knox was all about. Give me Scotland or I die. He so desperately wanted his people to be saved by grace through faith in Christ alone. And may we have that same desire in our hearts for our friends and our family members, for our home country, for other countries as well. May we not rest until all people know Jesus Christ and Him crucified. We've got maybe a minute for thoughts or questions, comments. In Scotland, you mean? Yes. Yeah. Yeah, the churches in Scotland are. some of the most liberal at times. Yes. Yeah. But they are by far the minority, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Any other thoughts? Well, let me pray for us. Our gracious God, we do thank you for this time we've had to spend reflecting on the life and legacy of John Knox. We pray that we would, like Knox, be bold to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ. May we be men and women of action, seeking to spread the gospel far and wide. And may we not fear what others might think of us and might say about us, but instead fear only you, our great God. We pray, O Lord, that you would give Pastor Alex the boldness to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ in the next few moments. We pray that as we gather together to worship you, our triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we pray that you would bless us by your spirit. Would you condescend to us by your spirit so that he might point us to Christ, our Savior, and that we might all give glory to God, our Father. It's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen.