Welcome back to our Voices of the Reformation series. If you remember last time we got started on the English Reformation, William Tyndale had labored to translate the Bible into English, was driven from his homeland, eventually tracked down by special agents, and executed for his faith. And if you remember his last words, just before he was put to death, he said, Lord, open the King of England's eyes. And what we'll hear about today is really when that happened. Sort of. It's a complicated history. We won't be able to get into all of it. But we're going to read about the King of England, particularly a couple of kings of England, but particularly the reformer named Thomas Cranmer, who did turn the English church from a Roman Catholic church into a Protestant church. And really, this is the origin of the Anglican church. So if you know people who call themselves Anglican, Thomas Cranmer is really the beginning of that movement, along with Henry VIII. And that's where Episcopal churches come from. So Episcopal churches in the U.S. are just Anglican churches, but they're no longer officially under the authority of the Church of England, but they're essentially the same kind of church. So this is the origin of Anglicans and Episcopals. This is where Henry VIII, we're going to see Henry VIII, the King of England. You could say that Henry VIII made the Church of England not Roman Catholic, and it was Thomas Cranmer who made the Church of England Protestant. So Henry VIII decided he didn't want to be under the authority of the Pope anymore, but it's really Cranmer who makes the church actually Protestant and not just not under the authority of the Pope. So as we look at Cranmer's life today, he is a complicated guy. I told you at the beginning of this series, we're going to get warts and all here. Cranmer has some serious problems. He made some serious compromises, failures at key points, at sin and key points of his life. We're going to grapple with what it looks like when a Christian doesn't pass the test, and then what do you do? And how do you grapple with that as a follower of Jesus Christ? But really, an important leading figure in these early years of the English Reformation, a very difficult time in English history. Cranmer served under three different monarchs, two kings and a queen of England. And that's really how we're going to divide up our time today. So we're going to look at his time under Henry VIII, then under Edward VI, And then under Mary I, or also known as Bloody Mary, and we'll do some application. So we'll look at his life under his service under three different monarchs, two kings and a queen in England. Just before we get to Henry VIII, though, just a little bit about Cranmer's background. He was born in 1489 in Nottinghamshire. 1489, so this is before the 95 Theses, right? Right here in the 95 Theses. 1517, right? Okay, so he's born a little ways before that, had some early education by a priest, and several records say that this was a pretty severe education. He had a really hard taskmaster of a teacher. This priest was very hard on him. And Cranmer was later a very sort of timid and peacemaking kind of person, and it may be partly a result of the kind of education he had. I mean, he had a really tough, tough education as a child. 1503, he was sent to study at Jesus College in Cambridge, at the University of Cambridge. And during his time there, he studied some of the humanists of the day, these people who are trying to get back to the original sources, people like Erasmus, and became concerned with getting back to the original sources himself. So this is 1503. It's still before the Reformation's really gotten kicked off. But he's starting to dig into original sources, try to find out what's the original sources on the, what are the original sources on these things. Between 1510 and 1515, he was made a fellow of Jesus College. That means he's a lecturer, he's teaching there. But shortly after that, he fell in love. And the professors at this time were not permitted to, they were supposed to be celibate, like the priests at this time. And so he falls in love with this girl named Joan and gives up his fellowship, gets married. Shortly afterwards, she passed away. They're only married for a year. She passes away, and he is offered his fellowship again. He gets back into being a professor. But maybe it just gives you a little more of a sense of his humanity, some tough things happening early on in his life. During his time then teaching at Cambridge, University of Cambridge, he started to hear about this man Luther in Germany. Daubigny's history quotes, Cranmer is saying, I must know on which side the truth lies. There is only one infallible source, the scriptures, in them I will seek for God's truth. So here he's hearing about Luther and he says, I've got to figure out if Luther's right or if his opponents are right. But already Cranmer's authority at that point is what does the scripture say? And so you see some of his humanist training where he's trying to get back to the original sources. Let's go back to the Bible. What does the Bible say? It's really primed to accept the truths of the Reformation, the truths that Luther was teaching. He became known for always going back to scripture. He always required the priests that he was training at the university to know scripture well. He would tell them, Christ sendeth his hearers to the scriptures and not to the church. And when they complained about how hard it was to understand scripture, he said, explain the obscure passages by those which are clear. These are some key ways that the Reformation approached scripture. If you don't understand scripture, yeah, it's hard to understand. Go look at a passage that's more clear. You interpret scripture by scripture. You don't just go ask the pope or go ask a priest to tell you what it means. You dig in and understand it yourself. from the word. And so during this time, he seems to have become convinced of some Protestant views on things like transubstantiation, the marriage of the priests, and things like that. He had some friends that he would get together with at a place called the White Horse Inn. If you've heard of the White Horse Inn, there's a podcast by that name these days. That's because that's a place that these English reformers would get together and talk about these things and grapple with scripture. He would get together especially with Hugh Latimer, and Nicholas Ridley. We'll hear about them again later. It wasn't just Cranmer by himself that was going to reform the church here eventually. He had these friends that were coming to reform convictions together. But at this time, Henry VIII was King of England. We can go to the picture of Henry there. What do we know about Henry VIII? Anybody remember anything about Henry VIII? A whole bunch of wives. How many? Six wives. And Cranmer got tangled up all up in the middle of all that. He was dragged into all these proceedings, and we'll see how some of that went down here. Henry had married his first wife, who was, anybody know? Catherine of Aragon, right? Later Catherine, but the first was Catherine of Aragon. And Catherine was actually his dead brother's widow. Henry VIII's brother had died shortly after marrying Catherine, and technically, according to church law at the time, you couldn't marry your deceased spouse's deceased sibling's spouse. That was technically not allowed under church law, but the Pope gave an official okay to this because they claimed that the marriage had never been consummated. He got special permission for this, but this whole question of whether this is allowed becomes a very important thing. He'd been married her for quite a while. He had had several infant children that didn't survive. And then he had a daughter named Mary, who's going to come back up in a little bit, who was born in 1516. But then he couldn't get himself a male heir. Couldn't get himself a prince, a son to take the throne after him. And he started to believe that, Henry started to believe that he was cursed for marrying his brother's wife. And he took this from scripture. Leviticus 20 verse 21 says, if a man takes his brother's wife, it is impurity. He has uncovered his brother's nakedness. They shall be childless. So he sees that. He says, hey, the scripture says, if you marry your brother's wife, you're going to be childless. Now, if you look in the context there, that's talking about all forms of incest. I believe that's talking about while your brother's still alive. We could talk about that some more. But during that time, Henry had his eye on a woman named Anne Boleyn. couldn't get the Pope to annul the marriage with Catherine of Aragon. Catherine was the aunt of Charles V, who was the Holy Roman Emperor, so there were lots of reasons people didn't want to cross her, they didn't want to cross the Holy Roman Emperor by siding with Henry on this one. So during this time, Henry had actually been a a friend of the Pope, he had opposed Luther's writings early on. Henry himself published a writing against Luther and got commended by the Pope. The Pope gave him the title Defender of the Faith for opposing Luther. And so Henry and the Pope were on good terms until Henry wanted a divorce and couldn't get the Pope to sign off on it. And so they start to be at loggerheads, Henry and the Pope start to be enemies. This just became, this whole discussion of the divorce became the topic of conversation in England. Everybody's talking about, what do we do? What should the king do? Is this right? Is this wrong? And some advisors of Henry's were talking to Cranmer, who was, you know, he was a learned man at this point. Talking to Cranmer, and Cranmer said, well, hey, this shouldn't be up to the Pope. He should ask the universities what scripture says. And that's a wild thing to say in these days, to say, no, the Pope doesn't get the final say. You should ask the scholars and the universities to tell you what scripture says. And this word trickles back to Henry. And as you can imagine, Henry loves this idea. And he says, let's send the word out to the universities. And he gets mixed responses. Some professors say, yes, this is scriptural, and others say, no, this is not scriptural. But because Cranmer's name got associated with this opinion, this idea, hey, you should go ask the universities, Henry becomes a fan of Cranmer and pulls him in and says, you're going to be my guy. And he makes him the Archbishop of Canterbury, which was the highest position in the land, the highest bishopric in the land of England. And from there on out, the rest of his life, until he was imprisoned later on, he would serve as the Archbishop of Canterbury, the most important role in the Church of England. Cranmer was instrumental in then continuing to make a case for why Henry should get to divorce his wife and marry Anne Boleyn. In January 1533, Henry secretly married Anne Boleyn. And in May, Cranmer and the church court signed off on his marriage to Catherine being null and void. And Cranmer was known as kind of the champion of this cause. And then in September 1533, his daughter Elizabeth from Anne Boleyn was born to Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth will come up later, but not in this lecture. He went ahead and did his own thing, and the Pope excommunicated him for it. Pope said, you're out of the church. You've directly disobeyed what I said. And so in 1534, Henry said, well, then I'm going to be the head of the church. And he made the act of supremacy in 1534 that said, the king's majesty justly and rightly is and ought to be and shall be reputed the only supreme head in earth of the Church of England. The king says, I'm the head of the church, and I can call, I can do what I want. This is the official break of the English church from Rome, from Catholicism. You can see that Henry's reformation didn't have much of anything to do with reformed ideas. It didn't have anything to do with Protestantism. He did make the break with Rome. Conveniently, Henry looked around the land and he said, hey look, there are all these monasteries and all of this church property that made up a huge amount of the property in the land. And Henry said, well, I'm the head of the church now, so that all belongs to me now. And he closed a bunch of the monasteries. He told the monks they had the choice to give up on their vows and not be monks anymore. And a couple of sources I saw said about half of them did. It's hard for us to wrap our heads around just what an upheaval this caused in England. The monasteries and the church property was such a key part of how England functioned that this just totally turned everything on its head. Now all that property no longer belongs to the Catholic Church, it belongs to the Crown, and all these monasteries are being closed. It's just total upheaval with all these things. There's all kinds of redistribution of this wealth. And so there's big upheaval at this time. But Cranmer then takes this opportunity to start making some reforms. Because like I said, he's already a little bit Protestant in his thinking. So we go back to, I think, the next picture of Cranmer. We'll get used to Cranmer's face here. I prefer it to Henry V, Henry VIII's. During this time, Cranmer starts to push for some slow reforms. And this is Cranmer's way. He was still operating in basically a Catholic way, despite having some different convictions from these things himself. But he's going to work slowly to try to change things. And one of the things he worked on was pushing for the English Bible. Henry VIII didn't like Tyndale's Bible because it had all these notes that were too Protestant. Cranmer pointed out some other English translations that were being worked on at the time and said, hey, this is good. We should have these English Bibles printed for English people in their own language. There's a lot of nationalism going on throughout this whole process. And he gets He gets a couple of different versions of the English Bible published in 1537. If you remember, 1536 is Tyndale being executed for publishing the English Bible. 1537, they're legally being published in England. And by 1538, Henry's vice regent commanded that every parish church in England have an English Bible for all to read. There's your answer to Tyndale's hopes and dreams and prayers. Not so much that the king wasn't really a believer at this point, as far as we can tell, but the land of England now has Bibles in every single parish for the people to read in their own language. And this is part of Cranmer's efforts to get the Bible to people. This would have a huge effect, as you can imagine, and there are accounts of lots of lay people starting to argue with their priests, starting to argue back and say, hey, that's not what the Bible teaches, which is what happens when people have the Word of God, they can read it for themselves. So this starts to change England from the inside out. During this time, Cranmer also got lots of Protestants into being bishops. He got them into important positions in the church, and that includes Nicholas Ridley and Hugh Latimer. They're going to come up again here later. But he started getting his friends to be bishops, and it started to become a much more Protestant-looking church over time. But the church really wasn't becoming Protestant officially. 1539, Henry VIII had the six articles officially adopted, and those six articles essentially affirmed a lot of the things the Protestants were trying to get changed in the church. It affirmed transubstantiation, that the bread and the wine become the body and blood of Christ. It affirmed that priests can't get married, other really strongly Roman Catholic ideas. A bunch of the Protestant bishops resigned. So Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley resigned at this point. Cranmer's buddies say, I can't do this. This is not my church. This is not what I believe. I can't stand for these things. And Cranmer publicly opposed them, but did not resign. Henry trusted Cranmer in a big way, kept him in position, didn't push him out, and Cranmer For better or worse, didn't feel like he needed to step down, and he stayed in the Church of England, even though it was standing staunchly in these six articles against the Protestant Reformation. And so over the course of the years ahead, then, we can't go into the terrible history of all of Henry's six marriages. Cranmer found himself over and over again cleaning up Henry's mess. having to sign off on things and give the church sanction for things that were awful, that Henry was doing to his wives. There's the rhyme, is it divorce, a beheaded died. Divorced, beheaded, I can't remember all the six, but all these things that he did to these wives of his to get on to the next wife. On top of illegitimate children, recognized illegitimate children, just terrible things going on. And Cranmer stayed right there with Henry the whole way. He was a man who compromised a number of times, and I'm not sure how you could I don't think you can do these things that he did in good conscience rightly before the Lord, but the Lord worked through him nonetheless. He wouldn't cross Henry completely. You can see some of his writings to Henry. He's trying to persuade him, but he wouldn't take that stand and cross Henry completely. By the end, in January 1547, Henry is in poor health. He can't speak and he's lying in his deathbed. Cranmer is the one there holding his hand. urging him to put his trust in Christ, and Henry, you know, squeezes his hand. So we don't know, we don't know what's going on in Henry's heart at that point in his life, but his life before that was certainly not becoming of a leader of the church, to say the least. So Henry had, along the way with all these wives, had come up with an heir, and that was Edward VI. We can go to the next picture here. Edward VI reigned from 1547 to 1553. He was the son of Jane Seymour, one of Henry's wives. He began to reign at nine years old, so he wasn't really, he had regents, he had people that were ruling for him, but he was known as this Protestant king. He had been raised with Protestant tutors all the way along, and this was the Protestant king they'd been hoping for. So during this time, we can go to the next picture. This is Cranmer's getting a little older at this point. He started wearing a long beard in mourning for Henry. He said it was in mourning for Henry. Conveniently, it started to make him look more like the Protestant reformers and less like the Catholic priests. And that was a divide at the time. If you're clean shaven, you're a priest. If you've got a beard, you're a reformed person. Some guys seem to want to carry that into today. We won't go there right now. He starts really beginning to reform the church now. He's got a Protestant king who's not going to get in his way. He starts to reform the church. He invites reformers to come to England as kind of a safe haven. This is when Martin Bootser comes. We talked about that before. Peter Martyr Vermeule, some of these reformers who needed to flee the continent would come to England. And they taught and really bolstered the Reformed movement in England. During this time, Cranmer had the 39 Articles adopted. And the 39 Articles are really, in many ways, a pretty good statement of the Protestant Reformed faith. It affirms the authority of scripture. In An Antidote to Scripture, it affirms Protestant view of salvation, predestination, a Protestant view of the sacraments. But in there, the 39 Articles is a really strong statement of the state control of the church. And so the 39 Articles are a pretty good picture of how the historic Anglican Church is. It's reformed, actually, in its doctrines, but the government controls the church. That was Cranmer's position, and he got it codified in the 39 Articles. He also published the Book of Common Prayer at this point. We go to the next slide. Has anybody heard of the Book of Common Prayer before? It's a book that gives you all the words that should be used in all the different occasions in the life of the church. It gives you wording for marriages, it gives you wordings for graveside, for other moments in ministry. It gives you all the language for that. It gives you a liturgy for the service, and it gives lots of back and forth between the congregation and the pastor. Cranmer publishes the Book of Common Prayer The first Book of Common Prayer in 1549, it had a lot of the same old Catholic rituals and Catholic language, but underneath it, it was Protestant. People said, this isn't Protestant enough, so he comes out with a second edition in 1552 that was more Protestant. It got rid of more of the Catholic things. Later on, when Elizabeth, years and years later, reinstitutes Protestantism, she goes back to the version that has all the Catholic stuff in it, Catholic language and rituals. And that is the basis of the ongoing Book of Common Prayer, including the one that was made in the 1600s, where the stone got the stool got thrown in Scotland, all the covenants are uprising, all that stuff. That was over the Book of Common Prayer, and it was the more Catholic version. But anyway, Cranmer is the one who wrote this Book of Common Prayer, wrote a more Protestant edition. But really, if you don't view it as the church requiring that you must do things this way, The Book of Common Prayer can be a wonderful resource for pointing you to scripture for all kinds of different occasions in life. There's some really beautiful language in there. The modern Western marriage ceremony is largely based on the Book of Common Prayer. A lot of that language that you think of in a traditional wedding is from the Book of Common Prayer. It really became so much a part of the life of England ever since. And Cranmer is the source of that Book of Common Prayer. Caused lots of problems for the Kevinanters later. We'll get to that later on. Unfortunately, Edward VI, he started reigning at nine years old, and he only, and he reigned from 15, excuse me, sorry, 1547, 1553. You see, he didn't last for very long. He was a sickly child, died at the age of 15 in July 1553. And all the Protestants are concerned at this point because obviously he hasn't had an heir yet. He's only 15 years old. And the next person in line for the throne would be, anybody know? But Mary, this would be the daughter of Henry's first marriage, Mary, who was staunchly Roman Catholic. So the Protestants hatched a plan and they said, we don't want a Catholic monarch, so we're gonna put in Edward's, Edward had this, he signed off on this himself. He's gonna have his cousin, Lady Jane Grey, be the queen. And she was the one who was queen for nine days. She didn't really wanna be queen herself. She was surprised when she heard that she was supposed to be queen. Mary had, the people knew that Mary was the rightful heir, and Mary shows up with an army and takes down Lady Jane Grey, and Mary becomes Queen. And so we come to Mary I, or Mary Tudor, also known as Bloody Mary. This is Henry's oldest daughter from a daughter of Catherine of Aragon, Henry's first wife, and Mary did everything she could to go back to being Catholic in England. She executed at least 280 Protestants publicly, including more than 50 women, and most of them by burning at the stake publicly. And so much so, and so severely, that most of her advisors and people around her were telling you, this is too much. This is going to backfire on you. And she kept right on and kept executing these Protestants publicly. And as you can imagine, she didn't forget who had signed off on her mother's marriage being dissolved, and that was Thomas Cranmer. So she goes and arrests Cranmer and Latimer and Ridley, his two friends, some of the leaders of the Protestant Reformation there in England. She didn't forget that it was Cranmer who had essentially said that she was an illegitimate child publicly, even though she wasn't. She was from a true marriage. So she arrested these men, and then Ridley and Latimer were condemned to death. And they were burned at the stake with Cranmer taken to see their execution. This was October of 1555. And we have a picture of that from that time. This is Latimer and Ridley being burned together. And this is when Latimer said these famous words to Ridley. He says, play the man, Master Ridley. We shall this day light such a candle by God's grace in England as I trust shall never be put out. And they remained faithful to the end, paid the price with their lives, and were burned at the stake for their Protestant faith, for their faith in the gospel. And Ridley suffered horribly. Latimer died pretty quickly. Ridley suffered for a long time. His family members added to the fire to try to help him die more quickly. It was such an awful, awful experience. Cranmer had to watch this. And it had a big effect on him. Because after this, then Mary, Mary knew that if she could get Cranmer to recant, that would be a terrible blow for the English Reformation. And so she tried everything she could. She gave him really awful conditions, put him in terrible dungeons with terrible conditions. Then she'd pull him out of it and put him into really nice conditions and send all kinds of people to befriend him and to convince him, really, you've been wrong all the way along, and you need to, for the sake of peace, you need to just say you were wrong. and signed this, and they kept offering him recantations to sign, things that said, I didn't really mean this, or I don't believe this anymore. It was wrong to publish this. Cranmer crumbled, and he signed the recantations. And he had them published, even. Mary had them published, that he was wrong, transubstantiation is the truth. He was wrong about all these different Protestant things. And here he's a frail man, being tortured, or maybe not tortured directly, but being subjected to all kinds of awful things, and he didn't stand. And so with those recantations, ordinarily he would have been pardoned for his heresy. But Mary said, you know what? He's been such a big deal, such a big problem, we're going to burn him anyway. So even after he recanted, he was sentenced to be burned to death for what he had done. So on December 4, 1555, we can go to the next slide there. He was hauled into public to be burned at the stake. And at his execution, a priest got up and preached a sermon on how good it was that Cranmer had repented, or recanted, really. And all about how great it was that he had seen his error, and he's a model to us of repentance. And even though he's going to be burned at the stake, they gave him hopes of heaven, and through the mass, you'll be saved, and all these things. Then Cranmer was given an opportunity to speak. I'm going to have a hard time getting through this. Cranberry got up and he said, he asked them to pray for him to the crowd. He's talking to the crowd. He says, pray for them that God would forgive his sins. And he says, yet one thing grieveth my conscience more than all the rest, whereof, God willing, I intend to speak more hereafter. He says, I've got one thing I've got to confess, a really scandalous sin that I'm going to confess at the end of my speech. And then he tells him, he gives him some exhortations. He says, don't set your minds on this world. He says, obey your king or queen willingly, which is amazing for him to say that, being executed by his own queen. He says, love one another as brothers and sisters, not enemies. And then he warns the rich in this world. He quotes several of his warnings in scripture to the rich. And then he says, I believe every article of the Catholic faith, meaning the true church, true faith at the church. And then he says, and now I come to the great thing, which so much trouble with my conscience. More than anything that ever I did or said in my whole life, and that is the setting abroad of a writing contrary to the truth, referring to his recantation that he published, which now here I renounce and refuse, as things written with my hand contrary to the truth which I thought in my heart, to the truth which I thought in my heart, and written for fear of death, and to save my life if it might be. And that is, all such bills or papers which I have written or signed with my hand since my degradation, wherein I have written many things untrue, and for as much as my hand hath offended, writing contrary to my heart, therefore my hand shall first be punished. For when I come to the fire, it shall first be burned. And as for the Pope, I refuse him as Christ's enemy and antichrist with all his false doctrine. And as for the sacrament, I believe as I taught in my book against the Bishop of Winchester, which my book teaches so true a doctrine of the sacrament that it shall stand in the last day before the judgment of God where the papistical doctrines, doctrines of the Pope, contrary thereto shall be ashamed to show their face. He takes back his recantation. And you can imagine the authority of the priests there are furious, raging at him. But what can they do? He's hardly gonna be burned to death. What can they do to him? And it just makes you think of Matthew 10, 28, where Jesus says, do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. So Cranmer's led to the fire, and when the fire is lit, he reached out his hand that had signed the recantation and had it burned first. And they said he held it there the whole time, until his hand was burned off before he died. And the whole time he was saying, my unworthy, or this unworthy right hand, because he had signed that recantation. Within three years, Bloody Mary was dead, and England would never be Roman Catholic again. And the Church of England, as it has been since, maybe the last 50 to 100 years notwithstanding, has been the faith of Thomas Cramer. Warts and all. There are some problems with how they operated that caused problems for our forebears and the covenanters and things like that. But it was, for many years, the Church of England was a reformed and Protestant church that upheld the authority of the Bible and the true gospel of Jesus Christ, despite its problems. And that is largely founded by Thomas Cranmer and the stand that he took for Christ even in the end. Or in the very end. So as we think about some applications today, there are some real challenges with being in high positions in a God-dishonoring age. If you're up at the top, if you're close to really powerful people, and they can do a lot to hurt you, it's really hard to do that well and to stand by your convictions. And just an encouragement to any of you, you get into a position where you're high up in your organization and your job, it can be really tough to be up at the top, near the top, and to stand for your convictions. And I think Cranmer failed on those points in some ways. And as you think about that, when is slow reform okay? How do we do slow reform? We can't change everything immediately, but how do you work out reform slowly without sacrificing your convictions? It seems to me that Cranmer sacrificed too many of his convictions along the way, and compromised many times under Henry VIII. So often in these cases, things happen by inches. Right, one sin begets a dozen others. So Cranmer has to, he covers for Henry's first divorce. He finds himself doing the same thing over and over again in different ways for different marriages and things. And it just begets worse and worse. The more lies you tell, the more you have to cover things. And the more you, if you've done something once, then you've got that thing in the back of your mind that says, well, I did it once before. How can I tell him I'm not gonna do it the next time? And so you see that it's better to cut it off at the beginning, right? It's better to stand for your principles the very first time. And that's true for all of us in our lives. You find yourself in terribly compromising positions and making compromises you maybe thought you never would. But I also want to just think, I want to encourage you to think about what our hope is, what our hope is. Where do we put our hope? Is it that we're going to hold on and be good enough towards the end, to the end, that Jesus will accept us? Because Cranmer didn't fail that, it didn't pass that test. that he truly publicly renounced the gospel of Jesus Christ. But then, when he realized his sin, he put his trust in Christ. And we gotta grapple with that. Can we, does our gospel work with that? Does our gospel work with the Apostle Peter, who denied Christ three times? I mean, Cranmer's a very similar figure, who denied Christ, but our hope is not in ourselves. And I actually think Cranmer's story is maybe more encouraging, more hopeful for us as failures, people who do sin, to know that our hope at the last moment, we can be the thief on the cross. We could be Cranmer about to enter the fire and say, my hope is in Jesus Christ, and I failed him, but I've asked him to forgive me, and he is a good God who saves people who repent. That's our hope. Our hope is not, I sure hope I hold on long enough and I'm a good enough person. Yet, that doesn't mean we have any, that doesn't give us any excuse for renouncing Christ. I mean, Jesus does say, Jesus says, if you deny me before men, I will deny you before my Father. So this can never be an excuse for us to deny Christ when the moment comes. We can't, it should never enter our mind, well, I'll repent later. That doesn't work. That's not how it works. But, The moment comes when you've done something you thought you would never do, and you've failed in a way that you want no one to ever know about, and you've ruined your life, Christ is your Savior, if you will come to Him, and you will repent of your sin, like Cranmer did at the end of his life. And we have got to have that gospel straight in our heads, because you're gonna have those moments when you do something you thought you'd never do, and we need a Savior who is bigger than our sin. Any questions or comments? Yeah? Yeah, so at his martyrdom, this was a public execution, and people would have taken notes on what happened, and it was quickly passed around. So it's true that things might get garbled going from one person to another, Fox's Book of Martyrs, that this woodcut is from, was written very shortly after this to record deaths like Cranmer. So it was within living memory of people who had actually been at the event. So you could have people who would say, well, he said this, and the other person was there and said, no, I think he said this, and you could correct it that way. And you could get a pretty good recording of what they said in those moments. But these were very public events, and they were purposely public. so that people would learn from the example. Anyway, it backfired on Mary. Yes, so the government wasn't recording it, but the followers of the Reformation were recording these things. So Fox, John Fox, I believe was on the continent at the time, but he had all these English refugees coming to him from England, telling him the stories of martyrs, and Cranmer's is one of those. So he had eyewitnesses telling him this is what Cranmer said when he died. So again, not an official government kind of thing, but they were recordings by eyewitnesses. Yes, Simeon. Yes, so Elizabeth that I mentioned will be Elizabeth I, who comes right after Mary. She reinstitutes Protestantism, but it's kind of a compromised Protestantism. It's got some of the Catholic vestiges in it. Cranmer faced off with John Knox. There's some of that we're gonna get into. The church still was requiring pastors to wear vestments, all the robes and stuff, and there was some debate over that, things like that. Kneeling was a big deal. Anyway, there were some issues, but yes. All right, let's go ahead and sing here again. Chosen Psalms that talk about our forgiveness before the Lord. Psalm 130a, we'll sing Psalm 130a here. Stanza two, Lord, who could stand if you, my Lord, marked each iniquity? But you are one who pardons sin, that you may reverence me. And that was the hope of Cranmer at the time of his death, is the hope for all of us as sinners.