If it's true that a picture is worth a thousand words, the truth of that reality is one reason among many to study the life of a man whose life was set on fire by the Word of God. I want to focus this morning on the life of William Tyndale. He is a man who loved the Word of God ultimately more than life itself because it came down to that in his life as it did for many of the Reformers. And to introduce this study, I want to parachute, as it were, into the high point of his life. The year is 1526. 1526 is when William Tyndale finished his translation of the entire English Bible, Hebrew, Greek. He had translated virtually every word of the Bible into English. It was not the very first English translation, but it was the first that went back to the original Hebrew and Greek, and it elevated the English language higher than it had ever been elevated before. Tyndale's work as a wordsmith became very obvious early on. Here's what I mean. He was proficient in eight languages. Eight languages he knew, so translation was at the center of his wheelhouse of skills. 1526. If you're keeping track of the dates and the years, that's only nine years after the Protestant Reformation began in Germany, and things were changing quickly throughout Europe. Ever since Luther posted his 95 indictments against the abuses of the Roman Catholic Church, the purifying fires of reform have spread throughout Europe, including England, and that's where Tyndale was living. Tyndale was a brilliant young man. He studied at Oxford University beginning at age 12. And before you gasp at that too much, keep in mind that was normal back then. That was a typical age to start college. But after spending 10 years soaking in all he could at Oxford, learning the languages, immersing himself in the text, he then went to Cambridge University to continue his studies. But all the while, he didn't know the Lord. He had no saving relationship with the Lord Jesus, although he had been raised a devout Roman Catholic from his birth. While Tyndale was studying at Oxford, the writings of Martin Luther were spreading throughout the universities of Europe and Tyndale read them. He was converted in around 1519, sometime in 1519, two years after Luther posted his 95 theses in Wittenberg, Germany. So he initially followed his religious desires and it led him into the Roman Catholic priesthood. He thought, this is what you do when you want to be faithful in the only church we know. So he became a priest and he remained there until his heart was slowly changed by scripture. And so I want to ask you, what do you do when the only church you know is corrupt? That's the question Tyndale and many other faithful Christians had to answer. For Tyndale, it was you be faithful as you can where you are. You try to be faithful to the Word of God, you do what you know pleases God, and you serve Him where you are. And so, that's where Tyndale began. He began being faithful to the Word of God right where he was within the Roman Catholic priesthood. But he was reading the Bible. He was studying the Bible at a deep level. And the more he knew the Bible, the more Reformed he became. He was also reading books and tractates by people like Martin Luther on grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. He saw justification as a free gift of God. And it was based on these writings and his study of scripture that he became converted. So his heart turned from the system of works righteousness in which he had been taught to trust to an exclusive dependence upon Jesus alone. This British priest and scholar had a heart that was set on fire with a love for God's holy word, the Bible. Tyndale came to realize that he was living in a nation of religious people who were lost. He was surrounded by religious neighbors, religious shopkeepers, religious politicians who were all lost. They didn't know the gospel. They had no copy of the scriptures to read for themselves, and that bothered Tyndale. When you know God's truth, you can't unknow it. Once you see the truth, you can't unsee it. and seeing it, his life was radically changed. He had personally experienced God's power through the Scriptures. The Scriptures were bearing fruit in his life, and he could not remain silent. So the Bible was doing massive work in his heart, and so the drive to get the Word of God into the English language so that English-speaking people could have the Bible was just growing in his heart. so much during this time that he couldn't resist it. Now even before he translated the entire Bible into English, he had to earn some money to pay for his education at Cambridge. And so to earn some money on the side, he was serving as a private tutor. I suppose in the languages, since that's where he was so proficient, he was serving as a private tutor at the home of a prominent Roman Catholic family in Britain. It was the early 1520s. And one night, this Catholic family invited over another Roman Catholic priest. And over the dinner conversation, Reformation became the subject. Tyndale began to talk about his views on Luther, and Luther was headline news back then, and so he was very unpopular with this family that was hosting the meal, as well as this Roman Catholic priest who was speaking openly against the Reformation. Well, Tyndale kept defending the views of the Reformation, and thereby the views of Scripture. The priest was taking more and more heated issue with Tyndale's Reformed views, and then the priest made this blasphemous comment. He said, we would be better off without God's law than the Pope's. And to this, Tyndale replied to the priest, I defy the Pope and all of his laws. And if God spare my life ere many years, I will cause a boy that driveth the plow to know more of the scripture than thou dost. And it came to pass. Those words became known. And his views began to spread after that dinner party. The rumors of reform were now vilified in England. And King Henry VIII wanted nothing at all to do with it. Although, I have to say, he was hot and cold. He vacillated back and forth based on his mood at the time. And so the reformers were very cautious of this. Sometimes Henry seemed open to the Bible being published in England. But other times he seemed very much against it. Right now at this point it was illegal to own an English copy of the Bible and to produce a Bible in English would lead to imprisonment if not execution by the monarch. And so backing up to 1524 if you go back to 1524 Tyndale is 30 years old. It was during this time, in preparation for his translation, he had to flee to Germany because of all the hostility going on in England around the Word of God. It was contraband. So he goes to Germany from England, and here's where he goes. He knows about Luther, so he goes to Wittenberg, he goes to Hamburg, and then he goes to Worms, but he never meets Luther. There is no record in history that there was ever a meeting between Tyndale and Luther, but Tyndale is going to all these Luther towns. He's in all the major Luther cities and he's during the same time period as Luther lived, but there is no indication they ever met. Tyndales would be the first English translation to draw directly on the original Hebrew and Greek. If you think of the earlier Wycliffe Bible, about which we've spoken in the past, Wycliffe didn't translate from Hebrew and Greek. He went back to the Vulgate. The Vulgate was the main Latin translation that had been used by the Catholic Church. And so he translated from Latin into English. So there's a gap between the original languages because you're translating a translation, basically. But Tyndale goes back to the original sources, which became one of the Reformation slogans, ad fontes, which means back to the sources, go to the sources. So that's where they went. Now the most significant thing about this translation is that it began to spread because of the invention of something that was relatively new at that time. It was the printing press. The printing press had been invented nearly a hundred years before this in Germany by Gutenberg. And so Gutenberg's printing press was now employed to make mass copies of this new English Bible. And so copies of Tyndale's Bible were mass produced and they were widely spread throughout Europe. Now, since Tyndale had lived in England among cloth merchants before he fled to Germany, he got to know many of those merchants who were like blue-collar workers who understood his passion for God's Word, and they wanted to help him. Because this is the man who told them about Jesus. This is the man who shared the truth of God with them, and they wanted to repay a debt. to their friend, William Tyndale. So after Tyndale's New Testament, and by the way, this just shows you how God works, how God works behind the scenes of providence. After Tyndale's New Testament had been translated into a final English version, he began to smuggle copies of his new English translation. And he did it in bales of cloth, bales of cloth that were loaded onto the ships that were headed back to England. And those bales of cloth would be delivered first to the cloth merchants who waited at the docks, who knew Tyndale was doing this. And they got those copies of the Bible. And where do they spread? They don't go to the top of the echelon of society first. They start at the bottom. It starts with people like the shopkeepers and the plowboys. People that William Tyndale most wanted to reach with the Word of God were the first to have a copy of the English Bible, and his translation swept across England, including to the Plowboys, as Tyndale predicted. Now it was a bold thing for William Tyndale, an ordained Roman Catholic priest, to produce an English Bible, or any kind of Bible for that matter. He was daily becoming more and more reformed by becoming more biblical, as he understood God's word by reading it and by translating it. Prior to William Tyndale, there had been other attempts at a comprehensive English translation of the Bible. As I mentioned, there was John Wycliffe's Bible, and there were a few rare copies of Wycliffe's Bible scattered here and there around England. But again, a person would be jailed or executed for reading it. And who was doing this? Well, it wasn't just King Henry VIII, although he certainly opposed it in his time. It was the Catholic Church who largely suppressed it. At this time, the Bible was hard to get. It was illegal to read in Europe under Roman Catholic control, at least privately illegal. When William Tyndale first produced the English Bible, King Henry was initially supportive. Surprisingly, he even endorsed the new Bible when it was proposed. But here's where historians refer to the John the Baptist moment of Tyndale. Here's what happens in life. You notice this in the providence of God. You have to deal with things as they are, as they come, even when it's inconvenient. And so William Tyndale had his John the Baptist moment after he criticized King Henry's unbiblical marriage to Anne Boleyn. And that's when the king radically turned against William Tyndale. He wanted Tyndale executed. King Henry wasn't even thinking of the Bible. The Bible wasn't even on the radar. It's the man Tyndale that he wanted executed because he spoke out against his marriage to Anne Boleyn. And so the English Bible became a casualty at that moment because it became more contraband. The king turned against the Bible because of its association with a faithful man and his views from the Bible. And now the Church of Rome also pursued the arrest and the execution of anyone who owned or read a copy of the Bible. And yet Tyndale didn't stop. He persevered in his work. Early modern English versions of the Bible reached their first and most enduring zenith under Tyndale. And incidentally, the work of Tyndale is not old bygone work. It still influences every English version that is produced to this day. They can't get too far from Tyndale because he's so masterfully translated the Bible. Tyndale's earlier work held sway when the 1611 King James Bible came into view, and that's where it reached its fullest expression. Now, if you go back to the 1611 King James Version of the Bible, roughly four-fifths of the entire King James Bible is Tyndale. It's his prose. It's his poetry. Now, before the Reformation, Europe was dwelling in spiritual darkness. The Institutional Church of Rome held the keys and the Bible was literally locked up from the public. Not only was it kept in a chain under a chain in various Roman Catholic churches, but it was also linguistically chained in Latin because most people could not speak Latin. Only the Catholic priests and the monks had access to the Bible. And since it was in Latin, most of the common people never read the Bible. They never heard the Bible. Now, the Bible was not being taught in the Catholic churches. It was occasionally read, if at all, in public. It was read only in Latin. And again, most people couldn't understand it. So there is an aching disconnect between the Bible and the people. But after the Reformation began, all of that started to change, and the light of Scripture began to dawn on Europe again. Now, in our day, we're 502 years after the Reformation. We now have unhindered access to the Bible in English. I read that there are over 450 English versions of the Bible right now, and most of them are in electronic form. The Word of God is powerful. It is the most powerful force in the universe. The Word of God sets our lives upon the rock, it reveals God's precepts, and it unfolds His living promises to us. Without it, we go astray. The King of England was going astray and all of England was going astray. Europe was going astray. They were living in darkness. But God used William Tyndale to unlock his word. We all need the Bible. An outdoor bulletin board in front of a church in Quincy, Massachusetts had this quote by Charles Spurgeon. It said, a Bible that is falling apart usually belongs to a person who isn't. That's a great statement. A Bible that's falling apart usually belongs to a person who isn't, meaning they have used that Bible until it's threadbare. When your Bible is falling apart from daily use, from studying it, from underlining it, and just going through every verse, every word, year after year, your life is usually in very solid and consistent form. The applied truths of Scripture keep us from falling apart and from drifting away from the moorings of truth. Scripture is our rock, but only as it reveals Christ. We are not to worship the Bible as an idol in and of itself, but it points us to Christ. And He is the one we worship. He is the one we adore. So we stand on the promises of Christ and we rest in His love. The more influence the Bible has on the hearts of a population, the more blessed that nation will be. One of the reformers said, unless God's Word illumined the way, the whole life of men is wrapped in darkness and mist so that they cannot but miserably stray. Prior to the Reformation, people were starving for the Word of God, but as I said, it was locked up. And religious or not, people were going astray. Devout or not, they were going astray. The Catholic Church had meanwhile grown more and more powerful and more corrupt, and they had to conceal the Bible to do that. Because if the Bible is known and open, it would expose the corruption of the religious leaders, so they had to suppress the Bible to keep the corruption going. And so they were distorting the truth about salvation and accepting money, making people think that they could buy their entrance into heaven through indulgences. But after the Protestant Reformation, the Word of God was unleashed and unlocked so that even those who were illiterate were hearing the Word of God from those who were literate and could read it to them. They could read it in the villages. They could read it in their homes. They could read it privately because it was now available to the people. The truth about justification, as I mentioned earlier, that was the primary doctrine that was uncovered and reformed in the Reformation. The reformers couldn't deal with every issue that was corrupt during that time. You had to pick and choose where to fight. And so they fought on the main battleground of justification. That was the doctrinal issue that was at stake. How was a person made right with God? And so they were pointed to Jesus Christ. It is the free gift of God by grace through faith in Christ alone. Now for Germans, you know that Martin Luther was the primary translator of scripture. He is the primary reformer that we talk about. And even to this day, he is the primary German translator. In fact, Jennifer and I saw this when we visited German bookstores. We always wanted to look at the Bibles just to see what they were offering there. And while there are some modern translations, all of the old translations are Luther translations. If you go to a German bookstore right now, they still sell Luther translations. They are equivalent to the King James Version in English. They're old, they're archaic, not the same German language that they speak today, but they are still there, still bearing witness even 502 years after the Reformation began. Now all of these old translations, it has to be said, were brand new when they were released. They were all modern, fresh translations that were alive and powerful. They were and are beautiful translations in the language of the people. At that time, it was the common language. But even before Tyndale, John Wycliffe produced a Middle English Bible with the help of his Lollards. But for most English speakers, the work of William Tyndale has defined what they know about the English Bible. In doing some research, I read the words of John Piper that he said about William Tyndale. John Piper has noted that more people have unknowingly quoted William Tyndale by quoting the Bible than have quoted William Shakespeare among English speakers. That's an incredible statement. They don't know they're quoting Tyndale, but they are, because his influence over the shape of the English language and the words we use is immense. It's incredible. The man was 42 when he was executed, just 42 years old in 1536. His life overlaps that of Martin Luther. He was born after Luther, but he died before Luther. And they both worked in Germany during the same time period, but on slightly different paths. In England, as I said, Henry VIII was on the throne. Henry did not like it that Tyndale was promoting Luther's teachings that had sparked social and institutional changes throughout Germany. King Henry had his own problems with the Catholic Church, to be sure. I mean, he had his own fights to pick, which he would settle in his own way by establishing Anglicanism after his own heart. And here's an ironic point from history. Ironically, it was a book written by William Tyndale that King Henry used to break free from the Church of Rome and start his own church called the Anglican Church. Now that was 1534. two years before Tyndale was executed. So Tyndale was the best friend of the king at that moment because he had published a book that King Henry could use. So the king liked that book, but only insofar as it served his selfish purposes. But what the king ultimately never liked about Tyndale is he kept going back to the truth of God. and it kept exposing the king's evil personal policies. This man Tyndale keeps promoting the principles in England that made the peasants revolt in Germany just a few years earlier and no king wants political unrest. All of that on top of Tyndale's rebuke of Henry's marriage to Anne Boleyn. Yet for William Tyndale it all comes down to one book. It's the written word of God. He staked his life on the Bible. That one book drove Tyndale's life and it became his chief cause. Now, he didn't set out to do that. I mean, that wasn't where he began. He got his education. God trained him. God set his heart on fire with a love for scripture. He saw the obvious need in front of him and he went to serve. He just took one baby step at a time. That's the way God leads us. He leads us, not in some giant epiphany of the future, but one step at a time. One faithful step. Proverbs 16 9 puts it this way, the heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps. This is the way it happens. That's what God did in Tyndale's life. Tyndale became convinced of the power of God's word to change lives as it had changed his and to bring reform. So in applying the principles that set Tyndale's life on fire with a love for Christ and scripture, I want to share with you now five enduring truths, five truths for our lives. These are truths that shape Tyndale's life and will change your life for the glory of God if you apply them. It all comes down to you and the Bible. First, Scripture informs us of spiritual realities we cannot learn from any other source. Therefore, we need to read the Bible daily. William Tyndale modeled daily Bible reading, even before his conversion. From his conversion, his regeneration, all the way to his execution, he was always being molded by the Word of God. And it was daily, and it needs to be daily. How often do you eat? We eat multiple times a day. Our physical bodies tell us to eat. Your soul needs to be fed. Your soul needs to be fed at least daily. We would do well to have multiple feedings in the day. Scripture feeds our souls. We learn truths about the nature and the character of God that no other source, including all of natural creation, can reveal. None of them can reveal Jesus like the written word of God. And so as we read the Bible daily, we are gradually being shaped and influenced by its truth. And this leads to the second enduring reality about Scripture. Second, Scripture transforms us moment by moment through the power of the indwelling Holy Spirit. Therefore, we need to apply the Bible. We need to apply it. We don't go through life by years or months or even days and hours. It's been said that we really go through life by moments. It's the moments we remember. We remember the high points of joy and deliverance. and also the low points of fear and tears and loss. It's the moments that shape us. Our lives are the aggregate of the various moments that God has brought us through. Every moment is either softening us toward God and his word, or they're hardening us. When we know truth, but don't apply it, we become hypocrites. We become externalists like the Pharisees. We are transformed by the content of Scripture as we apply specific revealed truth or truths to the moments we are living right now. And yes, it's hard. That's what shapes us. That's what we see in the life of Tyndale and other Reformers. They made hard choices based on the truth of God's Word when it was very inconvenient. Even when they had to lay down their lives to do so. And the only time you can apply God's truth is right now. Do you realize that? The only time you can apply any truth is right now. Now you can plan to apply it later on, yes. But that plan doesn't change anything about you. It's just a plan. It's a plan that has, as of yet, been unfulfilled. But it's only when later on becomes right now that application and life change really occur. Life change happens when we apply God's Word in the moment. In the moment. I want God's Word to shape you this hour so that your future hours and moments in this life will be indelibly marked by the truth of God's Word. Get into the Bible. Tyndale applied God's word as he was drawing on biblical truths that he had learned in the past. And with it, he faced his present enemies in the storms of life. And with the courage born of the Holy Spirit, he spoke truth to power. He always spoke truth to power. This is where he put biblical truth into action. This is where the rubber met the road. And in like manner, you and I are changed by the Bible as we apply what we know to be true to the broken and messy details of each moment. When we reach out to a friend who is obviously moving away from God and his word, when we appeal to them with the truths of scripture, this is reformation at a personal level. This is what reformation does. But not only does scripture inform us and transform us, but it also reveals something dark within us that our flesh would love to keep hidden. So third, scripture reveals hidden sin and brings true conviction that leads to repentance. Therefore, we need to submit to the Bible. That's the third thing we see modeled in Tyndale's life. Submitting to the Bible, when it convicts us of any sin, whether it's a sin of commission or a sin of omission, whether it's an active sin or a passive sin, we agree with the verdict of scripture. That is, we confess in agreement with God that his word is true about our sin and we repent. Now when we speak of repentance, what are we saying? What do we mean by repentance? To repent, biblically, is to have a mind changed by biblical truth in such a way that we turn from our sin. So your mind is changed in such a way that you actually turn from your sin toward Jesus. Without such moral and behavioral turning, our mind or heart has not really been changed by the truth of God's word. And so we must submit to it with change. Now Tyndale modeled this for us in turning from sin and repenting as he made his way through scripture, but he did so in the most demonstrated way when he left the Catholic priesthood. When he turned his back on his livelihood and he left his career and all the years of education that he had piled into serving as a priest and he said, I can't do this anymore. My heart is bound by Scripture. And he turned away from his livelihood and his income, and it changed his whole career path because he wanted to be faithful to Jesus Christ, so he left the false religion. Now, not only does Scripture inform us and transform us and reveal our hidden sins so that we can repent, but fourth, Scripture gives us God's perspective on our purpose in life and why we exist. Therefore, we need to prioritize the Bible. We need to prioritize the Bible. That is, the Bible must be first. It must be the first source we consult and not merely a part of our general library of living. It's not just a background element that we check off of our to-do list in the morning so that we can move on to more important matters. The routines of our life that relate to our fellowship with God and his word and his people, those need to be prioritized above routines related to this world and its temporal system. Providence, that is the loudest witness we have in the world. It's the priorities that govern our lives. While there are necessary exceptions that we know, our daily and weekly priorities are what shape our lives. You know, some people go through their lives with habitual exceptions, it seems. but we set a higher value upon those things that we prioritize above other things. You can't fully give yourself to two things at the same time, not in the same capacity, not in the same way. So when two values come in conflict with each other at the same time, in the same relationship, which one gets prioritized above the other? Which one has the higher value? Or to ask it another way, are your values consistent with your priorities? The purpose of Tyndale's life came into focus as he made his values consistent with his priorities. They were even, they were parallel. His life came into focus as he learned and applied God's word every day, first and foremost, above all other influences, more than the Catholic priesthood, more than King Henry, more than his friends. He was always putting God's word first. Each of us will find the clearest revelation of our purpose in life as we know and understand God's written word, the Bible. Tyndale came to realize his purpose in life by reading the Bible. And then by looking at what was going on in the nation around him, he saw the obvious need and he moved to serve. That's what you can do. You can do the exact same thing whether it's in this body of believers called Providence or whether it's in the community around us or in the world at large. Look around at the needs and see how God would have you to serve. But you study, you study God's word to know this and then you look around and you see how God has gifted you to meet a need and fulfill a purpose. God's great truth, in light of man's great need, becomes the dominant call of a believer's life. It changes us. We prioritize the Bible because it is in the Bible that God reveals to us His purpose for our individual lives. But not only does Scripture inform us and transform us, and not only does it reveal our sins so that we can repent and show us our purpose in life, But fifth, Scripture also points us to Jesus Christ, and it reveals how to live according to His saving gospel. Therefore, we need to continue in the Bible. Continue in the Bible. I have heard stories in the past of men who have studied the Bible so well, they thought they could close their Bible and go on their memory for the rest of their lives. It never ends well. Those stories never end well. I can tell you many tragic stories of men who thought they had mastered the Bible so much, they could teach it. They could teach weekly Bible studies with thousands of people, but they thought they knew the Bible so well, they could leave it on their bookshelf and never open it again. Those stories never end well. You need to stay in the Bible. No person can read the Bible once and then move on as if all of its contents have been mastered for life. They haven't. You see, here's the problem. We are finite creatures. The Bible is the product of an infinite being. You and I can never exhaust the resources and the knowledge and the revelation of an eternal and infinite God. And so we must continue in the Bible every day. Every day. There's not a day that I read the Bible that it doesn't teach me something new and fresh that I think I've never seen before. Although I've read the words maybe hundreds of times. There are some parts of the Bible that I have read probably over a hundred times. Familiar parts. We've all been in those sections of the Bible. The Bible continues to show me new things every time I read it. And so we must continue. Tyndale invested his life into the translation and into the spread of the Bible. And as a result, as you can imagine, he was despised, despised not by the public, but by the Catholic officials, as well as Anglicans, as well as the politicians. It was entirely because he loved the Lord of the Bible. This was the priority that shaped his entire life. So here's how it ended for Tyndale. When he was finally captured, the authorities strangled him as he cried out for mercy. But he never recanted. He never apologized for any of his work. And after they strangled him, they burned his dead body. And then they did other things that are too awful for me to even mention. But you might ask, why such punishment? Why such hatred? His crime is that he put the written word of God into the English language. He made the gospel known. He made it available. And it assaulted the kingdom of hell. And it still assaults the kingdom of hell. Missionary Jim Elliot was right. He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep in order to gain what he cannot lose. That's what Tyndale did. He invested wisely. We are called to invest wisely. The temporal kingdom of Satan has never recovered from the damage done by William Tyndale. That's because the written word of God continues to expose satanic lies even this morning. And it causes the hearts of those who read it and believe what it says to rejoice in Christ both now and forever. And if you are in a hopeless situation, and I know what that feels like, when you are in that darkness that will not lift, you cling to the truth of scripture, you cling to the promises of Christ, and you hold on until the light dawns again. You hold on. Through his labor in translating and spreading God's written word in English, William Tyndale, being dead, still speaks, even today. Let's pray together. Father, on this Reformation Sunday, we do celebrate the glories of your written word through the life of William Tyndale, especially as English-speaking Christians. As your living word causes reform across the nations, I pray that the Bible would cause reform to grow and continue and to burn like a flame in our hearts this morning. Thank you for the lives of other redeemed sinners saved like us by grace alone in Christ alone. May we live each moment according to the glorious liberty of the gospel of your Son, our Savior Jesus Christ. And may we discover our purpose in this life as we read and apply your written word, the Bible, every day of this life. And we pray all of these things in Jesus's glorious name. Amen.