is that you have these statues of John Calvin in Geneva, and sometimes when we think about him, that's almost how we envision him, this cold, hard thinker, right? And about a decade ago, we were living in Switzerland, and the time came for the Calvin 500, the Reformation 500. Some of you might remember this. There were events going on in Geneva. And this thing seems really loud, actually. Is this loud to you? This seems loud to me. Scott, maybe can you turn it down just a little? Yeah, that's good, that's good. So, I was working kind of on the other side of the country in the German part of Switzerland and I knew that there was this Calvin 500 stuff going on and a lot of Americans were coming over, a lot of Presbyterians were descending and flocking into the city of Geneva and they were having all these series of events and and there were a lot of sermons and so on in John Calvin's church. But I was working during the week, so I couldn't attend all of this in the weekend. I decided to drive over there, and so I drove in. And alas, a lot of this stuff was done. And so there were still festivities going on, though. So I'm walking around the city, and there is a plate that's being prepared. about the Reformation and specifically about the life of John Calvin, which is weird for a number of reasons. Number one is John Calvin probably would have taken a very dim view of that, about a play about the Reformation, especially about himself, and especially about himself as a hero. I think he would have not assented to any of those things happening in his lifetime. But nevertheless, this was part of the festivities for the Calvin 500. The weirdness did not end there. So at this festivity, at this preparations for this play, they were selling beer. And it was not just any beer, it was Calvin beer. Yes, there is a Calvin beer. And so there's a Calvin light beer and there's a Calvin dark beer. And so you can take your, there's a little picture of him, and the light one is light and the dark one is dark, and you can take your pick. So I thought, well, this is, This is interesting. And so I, what am I gonna do? So I get my Calvin beer and I get ready for this play. And I'm sitting down and I'm encountered by this woman who it turns out is a member of a religious sect. So I don't remember which one it was. But anyway, we got to talking about the Reformation and about John Calvin and about the points of the Reformation. So here I sit. at this play, speaking with this woman from this religion sect, drinking John Calvin beer, and thinking to myself, this is just one of those things that my experiences growing up in that small town in western Michigan did not really prepare me very well. Didn't see this coming. But it was interesting nonetheless. So the goal of the people that put on the play was to introduce Calvin the man. It wasn't really so much to talk about his teachings as much as just to try to break that stone image and say, this is who he was. And so that is kind of my goal for us here this morning. is I'm not gonna get into too much depth about the particular doctrines, with some exceptions, of John Calvin. I want us to get to know who this person was, right? And kind of what he went through. And we are gonna get into some of his teachings a little bit as we go on. So, where do we start? Calvin, unlike Luther, Calvin was French. And he was born in a place called Neon, which is about 60 miles north of Paris. So he is a guy from the north of Paris. He grew up, he had a number of siblings. His grandfather, I think, was a Cooper. not the kind of cooper that you're thinking of. He was, I think a cooper means barrel maker or something like this. And his father kind of rose up in the world and became kind of a member of the bourgeoisie. He had a couple of offices related to the church. I think he was secretary to the bishop. And he had another role that he played. And so he was kind of what you would say somebody who was making his way and rising among the, pulling himself up by the French bootstraps, I guess. within, not as a member of the clergy, but nevertheless, work related to the church. So Calvin has these multiple siblings, parents, kind of middle class, fairly well-to-do, comparatively speaking. Mom passes away when he's about five or six years old, so she's kind of out of the picture when he's very, very young. And his dad, by the time he was around 12 years old, sends him off to Paris to study. And I think here, this fact alone was just very formative in terms of the kind of man he became. Because at this point, his life is kind of focused around learning in the church. So he goes to Paris, and you can see all the text we have in the handouts there. I'm not gonna go through everything, but the point is he went to a couple of good schools. He learned the basics in Latin and rhetoric and things like this from some of the greatest masters of his day in the city of Paris. So he was a very well-educated young guy, and they applied a certain rigor to this schooling. So, What did a day in the life of young John, or Jean, which is probably what they called him, actually look like? They got up on time for four o'clock prayers. Four o'clock. Little kid, right? Lectures at six o'clock, followed by Mass. And you wonder why he wanted to abolish the Mass. I think I would have wanted to abolish the Mass if only to get some sleep. After this, there were classes and Bible reading, more classes in the afternoon followed by Vespers, more schoolwork followed, bedtime at eight o'clock. Such was the life and the experience of young John Calvin. Question? What is Vespers? That is a good question. Vespers, I think, is a Catholic service in which I believe psalms are sung. So I think it's an evening psalm sing or hymn sing kind of thing, if I'm not mistaken. I want to say there was something like five services throughout the Catholic worship order throughout the day where they had different services with different areas of focus. All right, so that was kind of the end of the day. And that's kind of what life was like for him. So this goes on for a while, and Calvin is being educated by these great masters. At some point, his father has a falling out with a bishop. and sends John over to study law rather than theology. So some people see a tie in there that his dad was frustrated with the church so he sends him to study law instead of theology. We don't really know if that was the case. What we do know is that he now studied law as he was growing up and so he prepared to be a lawyer. So this is not a bad combination of things to learn, right? Theology and the law. Good things, formative things for him to learn as he was growing up. So after studying the law, he received his Master of Arts in 1528. By this time, of course, he studied theology and the law. 1530, he teaches rhetoric, and remember, he's just a young guy. He was born in, what is it, 1509, July 10th. That makes him 19 years old. 1530, he teaches rhetoric at an Augustinian convent and preached at a local church. And of course, during this time, Calvin was not the reformer that we know today, right? He was a good Catholic boy. Later, he would describe himself as being very attached to Catholic ideas at that time. But let's think about a little bit what's going on in the rest of the world, okay? This is 1530. What happened in 1517? Anybody remember? Wittenberg Castle, monk with a mallet, yeah? 95 theses. Luther's ideas had been spreading around Europe and around the world for the prior decade, okay, so this is all the talk. We don't have lots of details about how it is that John Calvin went from being this young Catholic man who had received the education that he did and was teaching at a convent and doing these other things and preaching to being this reformer. He does not give us, unlike Luther, we seem to have all the gory details as it were. We don't have all those details with Calvin. He does lend us some insights, but much is left to speculation. What we do know is this. that around the time of 1533, by this point, he seems to have undergone a conversion experience and is now in the camp of the Reformation. I have to make a confession, another confession here, and that is I got a couple of dates down here which are incorrect. If you see the 1550s indicated, we're talking about the 1530s at this point, so just, if anybody's doing the math, these things that are taking place are in the 1530s. in any event. So Calvin's conversion and exile. Lot here we don't know either. What we do know is that the ideas of Luther were going around Europe and going around France. A lot of people were talking about them. There were a lot of reform minded folks who wanted reform in the church in France as well. And one day In 1533, a certain friend of Calvin's named Nicholas Copp. Now this Nicholas Copp was a rector at the University of Paris. He was a new rector, but he was an old friend. Calvin was a friend of his family. Nicholas Copp delivers a lecture. And in this lecture, he gives kind of a synopsis of the Lutheran law versus grace ideals. And so, remember this is Catholic France. This did not go over well with the powers that be. So what happens? Nicholas Kopp has to make himself scarce or he's gonna be arrested, basically. So that's what he does. The interesting thing is that we see at the same time Calvin leaving, and as the story goes, He escaped out of a bedroom window by tying bed sheets together and hanging them out the window and scaling down the wall. So you don't see this guy with a long beard in the front of his book doing things like that. You just don't see that happening. But he did. So he seemed like he was at least a little bit athletic. So Calvin escapes. And his room is searched. And in his room, what do they find but a handwritten copy of a speech of Nicholas Copp. And the handwriting was Calvin's. So the idea is that some have that the speech that Nicholas Copp gave was actually written by Calvin. We don't really know. There are different ways that that could have come to pass. He might have just listened to the speech and taken it down. He might have written it. We just don't know. What we do know is that the guy decides to leave town. And so, generally speaking, you don't flee town where you've lived most of your life unless you have to. So Calvin is quote unquote guilty of something, right? Anyway, he leaves. So a warrant goes out for the rest of Nicholas Kopp. Kopp flees to Basel and he is not the only one to do that. Calvin was a relative unknown at the time. But by all implication, he was also implicated, according to my notes here. He was implicated by implication. So he flees from Paris, as we've said, using the bedsheet as a rope. And he spends the next couple of years in the south of France under a pseudonym of Charles de Spiveau. And my French is not very good. So hopefully, that comes somehow close to how that name actually sounded. All right, around this time, there occurred in the city of Paris something called Affaire du Bocard, which means Affair of the Bocards. Affair of the Bocards, what does this mean? This is before social media, right? And people didn't have Facebook. So if they wanted to spread ideas, they had to create little signs. And then they would put these signs here and there, like little bulletin boards, right? And what did these little signs say? Well, they basically demonstrated against the mass. They demonstrated against some of the Catholic ideas, like the whole Catholic notion of justification by this grace by infusion. If you remember, we talked about that a few weeks ago. So, these ideas related to the Catholic mass and Catholic theology were being protested on these little placards, which were placed all over the place by these French reformers, as it were. Now, one of these would be reformers, took a placard, and he somehow managed to get it into the king's bedroom door. So the king's bedroom door was not like the wall in Wittenberg. It wasn't the bulletin board of the day. You didn't go and post things on the king's bedroom door. Such an act could have been seen as treason. It could have been seen as sort of an act of terrorism. In other words, We don't like what you're doing and we know where we live. We know where you live when we know how to get to you. You know, this is kind of the implication, right? So as you can imagine, the king wasn't real happy with this. And so the king, who had been at least somewhat lenient toward these Protestant folks earlier, takes on a new demeanor, no more Mr. Nice Guy, and by October 1534, King Francis first changes his policy of tolerance toward the Protestants, arrests hundreds, executes some, burns some at the stake. It was not a pretty ordeal. So he gives six months to those leaning to Protestantism to conform. Right, you've got an ultimatum, six months, shape up or ship out. So Calvin at this point, he has, we say he resigns his benefices. Remember these offices that we talked about his dad having, his work for the bishop and for the cathedral and such. These were offices that were bringing Calvin income. This is what he lived off of. And so, He resigns this, and this means a couple of things. One, it means that he's not gonna have a whole lot of money anymore, and the other thing is that he's kind of cutting off the tie with the church that was supporting him. So here we see something of a clean break, and Calvin goes forward without this. He goes and lives as an exile with a family friend, and he stays there for a while and lives in this friend's library, which is a great library, and he did a lot of reading and a lot of planning for the future, works as a tutor for the children, kind of gets along for a while and plans his path forward. The next step in his plan is to move to Basel. Basel, Switzerland is a place that was known for his tolerance and it was a place that he could go and where many people went. We talked about Nicholas Kopp going there a little bit earlier, right? So Calvin goes over to Basel, arrives in January, takes on the new name, Martianus Lucianus. Am I the only crazy one that thinks that sounds just a little bit like Martin Luther? I tried to search, Google this. Why did Calvin pick this name? I couldn't find anything. Call me crazy, but Marcianus Lucianus sounds just a little bit like Martin Luther. I got to think there's some kind of link there, maybe. So anyway, he goes there and he settles with these other French folks. And at this point, he's identifying squarely with the reformers. But he doesn't have this view of himself like Luther did. Bear in mind, he's a very educated guy. He was a humanist. He understood law. He understood the theology. He had a great mastery of the church fathers like Augustine. But he's a bookish, quiet dude, and he doesn't see himself at leading anything. What does he want for himself? All he wants is some peace and quiet. He wants to go and live his life, write his writings, and so what does he want to do? He wants to move to a place where he can do that and not be under threat of arrest and so on. Such was not to be, though, as we will soon see. But that was his idea. Okay. Now, we get to the next part in this, which is Calvin's Institutes. Calvin's Institutes is this book that he wrote, and he didn't just kind of write it once. This book started out being a few hundred pages, a few chapters, talking about basics of the Christian faith with a Protestant view, and it was, in time, expanded to this. Very thick, right? So I have read parts of it. I've not read the thing from cover to cover. You can get it on Audible as well, by the way, if you so desire. But it didn't start out this big, thick book. He wrote it when he was, I want to say, 26 years old, the first parts of it. Yeah, 26 years old. How about that, right? And think about what had been going on up until this time. So Luther is talking about justification and things like this, right? So these are the big topics of the day that everybody, you know, Lutherans and the Catholic Church were kind of at loggerheads about. But behind this, there were a whole host of other issues that were not really being addressed while these kind of key topics were being discussed. So Calvin has this in mind. So he wants to write a Christian reference book about the basics of Christian doctrine and set that forth in a very clear way that anybody who's interested can read, can understand, can learn, and especially those who are preparing for the ministry. But that's not the only reason that he does this. And the preface of this original version, he writes this preface which is delivered to the king of France, in fact, if you want. If you get this version, it's still in there, and it's really long, so we're not gonna read it. But he writes this preface, and he addresses it to the king of France. And here's the deal. Oops. Here's the reason, part of the reason for doing this. There were, in Calvin's time, Catholics, of course, And then you had the Lutherans, but those were not the only groups. If you remember back when we were talking about Luther, we had talked about kind of a radical reformation, and there were folks running out there, starting revolts, starting rebellions, espousing all sorts of very unorthodox ideas that had nothing to do with what the reformation was teaching. And so you had folks, this peasant revolt, which ended up in, I don't know, hundreds of thousands of people being killed. But these were being led by people with some of these radical ideas. And some of the folks that were behind this were the Anabaptists. So the Germans referred to them as the Schwammerei. These were kind of the fanatics. And so politically, the most expedient thing to do in dealing with people like Kelvin for Francis was not to confront them as Lutherans because there was a lot of political muscle behind Lutheranism, but rather he wanted to identify them as radical fanatics that were on kind of the lunatic French. So he painted them with that broad brush And Calvin's saying, no, look, this is not who we are. So he writes this book, this Institutes of the Christian Religion, and writes out clearly the basics of Christian doctrine in this very clear way, and he writes this preface to the king. That was the idea, right? It was an act of apologetics, and it was a way of teaching. Killing two birds with one stone. Okay. The Institutes, first edition appeared in Basel in 1536, and was 516 pages, six chapters, the law, the apostles' creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the sacraments kind of went through those things. Also taught a bit about the Protestant position on some of the sacraments of Rome. Preface was made up to King Francis, as is indicated here. A little bit of other stuff here. I'm not going to go through everything. Right, so the Frenchmen fleeing to Switzerland were being associated by the state with Anabaptists, and so this was an attempt against that, as we've said. The book sells out in nine months, so it's a big hit. It sells out in nine months, and that was just the first publication. Later editions, you had 1539, 1541 in French, 1543, 45, 50, 51, 59, 56, this thing kept on selling out. In fact, it was sold in the French language, Latin language, English language, and it was, I think, the best-selling book on theology in English print during this time. So, it had massive, massive influence, as it continues to have today, right? We have it in our library. Okay, moving right along. Calvin's institutes are widely regarded, or were widely regarded as the high point of Protestant systematic theology, and it continues to be that today. So it kind of put Calvin on the map. He wasn't super well known after this, but he went from being completely unknown to being somebody who was somewhat known, certainly among Christian scholars, he was well known. So this makes him recognizable, and that's relevant for what's about to happen. So I think we all know the story about Calvin and Geneva. But Calvin did not intend to go to Geneva. He wanted to go to Strasbourg. And he wanted to go to Strasbourg because it was a quiet place that was already reformed. He didn't have to fight that battle. He could live in peace and quiet and be a professor or something, write his books, and be happy. It so happened that to get to Strasbourg, he had to go through Geneva. Now this wouldn't have normally been the case, but there was war going on. If you remember from a few months ago, we talked about this was the time of the Holy Roman Empire, right? And so you had the guy who was anointed as the Holy Roman Emperor, who was Charles, remember the Diet of Worms, Charles, right? There was this big fight between Charles and Francis, the king of France, and so both wanted to be the emperor. Charles won, so Francis wasn't happy about that, and so the two of them were fighting it out, right? Well, that is relevant to this discussion simply because it meant, among other things, that you couldn't get to Strasbourg except through going through Geneva. Calvin has no plans to spend any time in Geneva. But he has to go there. So he goes to Geneva, thinking he's going to stay the night, you know, kind of travel through. And then he gets there, and by this time, he's famous enough that he's recognized by the city's reformers. So one of these reformers is Farel. And Farel is one of these guys that if you look at him, he just looks like he's He's a fairly excitable fellow. In fact, you see this picture at the bottom of your notes, where Pharrell is kind of sitting there with his hand outstretched, looking for all the world like the ghost of Christmas future, about ready to grab Calvin, who's kind of looking at him saying, you're freaking me out, dude. Back off, please. That's kind of what happens. So Pharrell recognizes Calvin and says, hey, here's this guy who wrote the Institute. That would be a great guy to have here in Geneva to help lead the Reformation. And so Calvin says, no, sorry, I'm just a country boy on his way to the city to try to make a living. Please leave me alone. And Pharrell compels and compels and compels and Calvin says, no, no, no, no, no. So finally, Pharrell says, May God condemn your repose and calm you seek for study, if before such a great need you withdraw and refuse your succor and help. So in other words, you better help me, because if you don't, God is going to get you. Well, what do you say to that? Calvin said yes. I don't know what I would have said. I think I would have taken it on my heels, but Calvin said yes. And he decides to stay in Geneva for a while to do some work. And he has in view for himself that he's not going to be playing such a leadership role. But again, events are larger than he himself. My papers keep falling off my stand here. So he stays in Geneva. So this is where he's going to spend the most of the rest of his life. So again, we think about Calvin, of course, what do we think about? We think about Geneva, right? That's kind of where he lived much of his life. So let's talk about Geneva a little bit. We think about Geneva kind of, Calvin comes into Geneva, he preaches, Genevans fall under his spell, this becomes the Protestant Rome, and now we have the Reformation 500 and the Calvin Wall, and everything is great. Not quite the way things went. But to understand this, we have to understand a little bit about the background. So when we think about Geneva today, if you've been there, Geneva is kind of the French-speaking part of Switzerland, and it's on the western half of the country. Historically, Geneva was part of the Duchy of Savoy, which is a Catholic region overseen by a powerful bishop. but it was a smaller city, about 10,000 people, without a lot of military resources, and this is the time of the conflict between Catholics and Protestants, right? So neighboring city of Bern is Protestant. Bern sends over its army into Geneva, this is before Calvin gets there, attacks the city, and takes control, turning Geneva into a quote-unquote Protestant city. Well, as you can probably guess, you don't walk in with a sword and make everybody become Protestants. It's not quite the way things work. But it had gone from the rule of Savoy, which was Catholic, to the rule of Bern, which was Protestant, and so you had these people which were not what you would say at that point really reformed. They were kind of half and half. So there were those who really wanted to align more with the House of Savoy. There were those who wanted to be Protestant. Neither side seemed particularly There was a small nucleus of people that were really concerned about reform, and everybody else seemed like they were kind of along for the ride. That's the impression I get when you read this, and maybe you've experienced this in your own life. That's kind of the way things sometimes seem, that there's a small nucleus of folks who are already really worried about reform, and then there's a lot of other people who are kind of there. At any rate, this is my impression of reading this. But you can imagine, the situation was very, very tense. They had undergone a military takeover, right? So you have the idea, a lot of conflicting ideas going on at this point. This is the situation that Calvin walked into. It was a little bit of a hornet's nest. And in this hornet's nest, you have a guy running around and whacking the hornet's nest in the form of Pharrell. You can kind of tell that just by looking at the picture, right? And so that's what he was like. So Calvin was a very astute person, very educated person. When he got together with Pharrell, the two of them seemed to kind of, Pharrell seems to have kind of made an impact on him, and Calvin starts to be a little bit more Pharrell-ish. and his behavior, and we're gonna see that in a few minutes here. But at any rate, this is kind of the background. The city was ruled by a small council, which was a political body. This small council oversaw other bodies, and they together governed the city. The matters that these people oversaw included matters of the church. It wasn't just the state, okay? So the ministers and the religious leaders that went in there were always under the thumb. of the city council. And that is going to cause a lot of strife on both sides. It's going to cause a lot of issues that are going to come to a head pretty soon as we'll see. Calvin is a young guy in his late 20s, right? So you can kind of picture this. Practically civil war going on, Farrell is running around trying to generate enthusiasm for the reform. Calvin's in his 20s, so in walks Calvin and he's gonna change the world, right? Well, Calvin and Farrell work together and they start to introduce their vision of change, which included measures toward We have here the introduction of a confession of faith, right? And articles concerning the organization of the church. So they wanted to change things, and they wanted to institute discipline into a place that was not used to discipline. So you can imagine how that went. Calvin in his 20s, ready to change the world. under the thumb of the city council, which was in turn under the thumb of the folks in Bern. And so it was a difficult political situation to be in for young Calvin. Some folks, like John Knox, embraced these changes. So those of you, some of you are probably familiar with John Knox, right? He was something of a founder of the Presbyterian Church. This is where the Presbyterian Church came from, Scotland, John Knox, right? So if you go to Geneva, You can see this church where Calvin taught and preached. It's called St. Pierre's. And right next to St. Pierre's is John Knox Church. So Calvin was preaching over there in French to his people. John Knox is preaching, I think, in English to folks from Scotland, other English-speaking folks. But it's still there today. You can go there and see both of these churches sitting right next to each other. So John Knox loved these changes, and we all know that he went on to work back in Scotland and to introduce these Reformation ideas to Scotland, which resulted in the Presbyterian Church, and here we are today in the Presbyterian Church, with very direct links to all of this. Others didn't like this. He had a lot of enemies. One of these folks was P.R. Carolli, who was another reformed Frenchman from Bern, and he did not get along with Calvin and his cohorts. And so one day when Calvin was off doing something else, this guy Carolli comes forward and makes charges against Calvin and Farrell and others, claiming that they were Aryans. Now, Arian is a big deal, right? We're not talking about some secondary issue. Arian goes right at the heart of Trinitarian Christianity. If you're Arian, then you don't believe Jesus is the Son of God. You believe Jesus is a creature. The Trinity goes out the window. You're really talking about something that is not Christian, in my view. So it was a significant charge. Calvin defends himself very ably, but at this point, the hornet's nest has been kicked, okay? And so there's a certain amount of tension in the air. So he defends himself, Pharrell and Calvin continue the work, and that work includes the organization of the church and this discipline. Well, not everybody liked discipline, and not everybody liked the way that they wanted to organize the church. In fact, we talked about this small council ruling over things, Calvin couldn't just come in and make the decision that he wants to introduce this new confession, or that he wants to make these changes. The church had received its liturgy from the Protestant church in Bern, so that's what they were supposed to follow. Well, we have to sympathize, I think, a bit with Calvin here, because he saw how the people were living, and they were living very loosely. He saw sin going on, and these people that were openly sinning would then come to the table, want to partake of the sacrament, and Calvin would look at that and say, no, right? Calvin and the others. And so this caused a lot of friction. You get different views of this depending on who you read. So as I read through this, my impression is a big part of the problem is the city council and they're not really adhering enough to biblical principles. But part of the problem seems to be young Calvin who wants to go fast and far and introduce these measures and to do things that he didn't really have authority to do. So it seems to me there were probably problems on both sides. Well, things came to a head on Easter Day, which was a high point of the year, right? They were supposed to have communion, and Calvin and the other ministers barred these folks from partaking of communion who had been sitting and who had refused to recognize these new institutes, or not the institutes, but rather the confession that Calvin and Pharrell and others had introduced. And so they were really at loggerheads. Moreover, Calvin and Pharrell apparently were denying anybody else access to the ministry. So there's a lot more we can go into here, but suffice it for our purposes just to say they were really at loggerheads with the small council, with the city council, and the city council hadn't had enough, and they said, you guys pack your bags, you got a few days to get out of here. Well, that didn't work. Calvin goes off to Strasburg, which is where he wanted to go along anyway, Pharrell goes off to the city of Neuchâtel, which he had previously been a minister in, so they called him back and things were okay for him. And Calvin now finds himself without the influence of Pharrell, which is probably a good thing. Instead, he's being influenced by Martin Busser, which is a great reformer in the city of Strasbourg. So Strasbourg had a lot going for it. Unlike Geneva, they were not at loggerheads. They had not just been taken over by another city militarily. There was not all this conflict going on. They were not under the iron grip of this small council. The great reformer, Busser, had a lot of sway in the city of Strasbourg, and it is also the city where my ancestors lived, so it had that going for it. So Strasbourg was a place that Calvin really enjoyed living. And he does a certain amount of growing up there. And so where he came in as a kind of a, what seemed to be kind of a young man who was ready to really change the world in Geneva in his late 20s, he moves to Strasbourg. He comes under the influence and the mentoring of Martin Busser, from whom he derived a lot of his ideas. Martin Busser was a very mature man, a very devout man, and he mentored Calvin. During this time, Calvin also marries. So up until this time, he had decided not to marry, but when he moved to Strasbourg, he said, this is where I'm gonna live, this is where I'm gonna put down my roots, I'm gonna marry. And so a number of proposals are made to Calvin about, hey, everybody wanted to be a matchmaker, right? So different women were proposed to him, and one was a very high-class lady, But Calvin looked at her and said, you know, she's a little bit above my station, so I'm not gonna agree to that. But he considered marrying different women. And in the end, he falls in love with this young widow. And this widow's name was Idelette, I think that's how you pronounced it, Deborah, on August 6th, 1540, which is an interesting choice, because number one, she was a previous Anabaptist. So remember, Calvin is, being blamed by the king of France and people like him for being something of a fanatic. And then he goes and marries a previous Anabaptist. So, it was an interesting choice for that reason. She was also very poor, so he didn't marry her because of her money, obviously. She had some young children of her own. But it seemed to really be a marriage of love. So he gets married. He's under the mentorship of Busser, which matures him. He gets married, which anybody who's ever gotten married will tell you that's a humbling experience. He befriends the other reformers, like Philip Melanchthon and Zwingli. So things are going really well for him, and he, put yourself in his position, he must have felt like, I have finally arrived. But such was not to endure for very long. He spends three peaceful, happy years and is mentored, married, and matured in the city of Strasbourg. So Calvin is happy. And Calvin is at peace. Geneva is not either one of those things. So Geneva continues to struggle with these two different groups. The one wants to return back to the Catholic fold, the other is Protestant, and while this is going on, this turmoil, the Bishop of Savoy reaches out and he writes a letter. And then in this letter, he basically says, hey folks, listen, you've tried it out, you went your way, let's face facts, things didn't work out so well for you. Why don't you come back to the fold? And the people in Geneva kind of look at each other, scratch their heads, and say, well, what do we say to this guy? So they did what they always did, and they went to the city of Bern, who was, of course, their military overlords, and said, what shall we do? Within the city of Bern, Calvin had a number of friends, and those guys said, you know what we need? We need somebody to write a response to this, somebody who's very astute, somebody who can write really well. Let me think, who can that be? Ah, how about John Calvin? So Kelvin is listening to this thinking, no. I'm happy here. I want to stay here. Do I really want to go to this city of Geneva again? He might have felt a little bit like the Rosians going to Ohio. I'm sorry, I couldn't resist. In any event, He takes, the gauntlet is thrown down and he takes up the challenge and he writes this letter. And we won't go into the letter, but in the letter he defends the city of Geneva, he defends the Reformation, and he lays out in a very winsome way the basis for the Reformation. Why is it that we did this, okay? And so this is published, it's sent over to this bishop. And upon reading it, you see this guy is not a fanatic. He loves the city, he loves the Reformation. You know what? We need this guy back here again. So through those actions and through the influence of Calvin's friends and Byrne, Calvin is invited back to the city of Geneva. And you can imagine again how he felt about this. I finally got out of that place and now you want me to come back again? He's got cold feet. He doesn't want to go. But he feels himself called, and because of this calling, compelled to go to serve and to help Geneva go from being kind of half-reformed to really embracing the Reformation. So finally, the city of Geneva says, you know what, we gotta roll out the red carpet for this guy. So they send over an armed entourage, now this is not to kidnap him or anything, but just to show him a lot of respect. They send over an armed entourage, they take him back, they make this great big house for him, so he's living in this big house, give him a nice salary, armed escort, pull out all the stops. They bring him back, and their idea is, you know, Luther's over in Germany, and he's kind of the center of things. He's inviting all of these people over to his house, they're, you know, they're having these evening discussions, and he's kind of leading the Reformation in this kind of homey way. They wanted to do the same thing with him. So Calvin comes back, sets up shop, He starts preaching the next Sunday exactly where he had led off when he stopped three years ago when he left the town, right? Folks, I'm back, no big pomp and circumstance or ceremony. I'm just gonna come back and I'm gonna keep preaching. So he sets a modest tone and as we said, he's been humbled by his experiences. He's grown, he's learned. And he's a more able man for all of his experience. He comes back, and we're not gonna have time to go a whole lot further here because I think we got 20 after already, but what does he do? He sets to preaching in a very serious way. Now, we're used to going to church twice on Sunday. My kids go to a Lutheran school. And their schoolmates all seem to be very impressed with the fact that our kids go to, they have church twice on Sunday. Church twice Sunday morning and Sunday afternoon. How about that? But Calvin preached on Sunday morning, he preached on Sunday afternoon, and he preached on every other day in between, pretty much. For an hour. Every day. Just about. Specifically, His schedule changed a bit, but he preached twice on Sunday, then he preached on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and he later changed his schedule to preach, excuse me, every day of alternate weeks, as well as twice on Sundays, averaging 251 hour sermons per year. Talk about a preachy guy. That's a lot of preaching, isn't it? You wonder how somebody can do or so long under such circumstances like this, but he did it. Weekdays he went through the Old Testament, Sundays he went through the New Testament, and at some point the church says, you know what, this is really great, we gotta write this stuff down. They hire a stenographer, he starts writing down these sermons. Over the next 12 years, over 2,000 sermons are recorded and printed. I have these remain with us today. I think some of them were lost actually, but I wanna say something like 1,500 remain. So we have a lot of sermons from this time, from John Calvin's pen. And again, the church exercised Christian discipline with a rigor not previously known. Continuing to cause some controversy, folks, we don't have time to get into that now. Wish we did, because it's really exciting stuff. We will get to it next time, Lord willing. But I hope this has been a good introduction for you into the life and the times of John Calvin, and introduced to you the man a little bit. And when we continue, we'll talk about the reforms that he brought to Geneva. We'll also talk about some of the struggles that he went through and some of the differences between Lutheranism and Calvinism. Excuse me, I should say not Calvinism, but the reform, the teachings of the reformers, I wanna say. How do you say reformers without referencing Lutherans too, right? We're gonna get into some of those differences. next time, but for now, let's close with prayer.