Greetings, this is Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church with a moment of truth, where we challenge you to think through an important issue of life and faith. Today, what are the 10 most important events in church history which have affected your life, your church, and your salvation, whether you realize it or not? For example, are you aware that this is not only the season of Halloween, but also of the Reformation? On October 31st, 1517, Martin Luther, most people have heard of him, Martin Luther posted 95 theses for debate with the Roman Catholic Church.

He posted them on the door of the Wittenberg Chapel, where he taught and lived in Wittenberg. And we can see that his world's reaction to those 95 theses precipitated what we now call the Reformation of the Church. Luther, in his study of the Bible, had come to the conclusion that salvation came by the grace of God, through faith in Jesus Christ, and not through one's own merit by being obedient to the law. Now, very few modern Christians understand the debt we owe to Luther and other reformers like Calvin and Knox for the rediscovery of this biblical truth.

Sometimes we live and think about our world without even thinking about what shaped us, what has come before. History is to the church what your own personal genealogy, if you will, is to who you are today. You may not be aware of your family tree all the way back, but that does not stop your inherited genes from determining your height, your hair, your eye color, your intelligence, other kinds of traits like this. Well, as with family history, so it is with church history.

The church inherits traits in the present from what it was in the past, no matter how eager believers naively tried to deny that they do, and that they can just come with a pure, untouched approach to the Bible and how a church ought to be done. Oh, just because you do not know your church history does not mean you are not a product of that church history and of other Christians who preceded you and shaped, for example, doctrine that you were taught or worship that you now experience, and opinions, too, that you hold about the world about you. My point is, know your church history that you might know yourself.

As we have demonstrated to you over the last few weeks, no one comes to the Bible free from presuppositions, that is, assumptions about the world about them. No one comes to the Bible free of hubris. Oh, we need to be humble when we come to the Bible, do we not? And no one comes to the Bible without a tendency to repeat the errors of the past if we do not understand the history of the past. Knowing church history helps you understand the extent to which presuppositions and hubris and cyclical error make you vulnerable.

Church history also helps you understand the rich heritage that you have in believers from the past. Many of these believers, if we're honest and not arrogant, we're just as smart and spiritual as we are, if not more so, maybe many of them. I know that's a fact with me. So, to help in your understanding of church history, we at New Geneva are conducting a study of church history on Wednesday night at 7 p.m. We invite you to it. We are holding this class in our fellowship hall at 101 4th Street on the corner of 4th and Boulevard, and we're using Bruce Shelley's fine book, Church History in Plain Language, as our text.

We invite you to join us. This is open to all for this important study. Call us at 523-0196 for further information. Well, what are the 10 most important events in church history that affect me now, that affect you now? Well, let's us begin to go through them, shall we?

Number one, if we're working chronologically. Number one, the Emperor Nero's persecution of the church is the template for all other persecutions and the interpretation of the book of Revelation, too. Not many people realize this, but indeed, the book of Revelation was written in response to the persecution of Nero. In A.D. 64, most of the city of Rome burned to the ground with countless numbers of citizens burned to death and injured. Now, history attributes its cause to Nero, the Emperor Nero at the time, who himself had a personal aspiration to build a new Rome on her ashes.

It was ancient urban renewal, if you will. Now, Nero did not expect the revulsion and the rage of the people in the fire's wake, so he turned and blamed that fire on Rome's favorite scapegoat, the Christians. They started it, he said, and they must be punished. Thus began the first empire-wide persecution of the Christian church. As one historian puts it, crucifixions were carried out by the score.

Humans were wrapped in animal skins and torn apart by wild dogs. Women were tied to the horns of bulls to reenact a Roman myth. Christians were dipped in flammable materials such as wax or oil. They were tied to stakes and then used as torches. People were invited to see the spectacle.

It was entertainment for them, unquote. So, while Nero or I'm sorry, with Nero, the church then began to see what it was up against exactly, a demonic hatred seemed to consume the world. And John wrote Revelation in response to it, with the beasts being symbols of the empire and the emperor and the false prophet was indeed emperor of worship at the time. Even the number of the beast, 666, perfectly fit the number of Nero's name. So, this event, the fire that burned Rome started by Nero, this event shaped even what you know today about these things.

Well, number two, what is the second event that has helped shape who you are as a Christian in church history? Number two, with the conversion of the emperor Constantine, the sword of the state went from Christian's throats in persecution to a Christian's hand in power. For centuries, Christians had been the object of Rome's wrath. Just a decade earlier, the emperor Diocletian had visited upon her the worst persecution in the church's history. Now, they were the object of the emperor's favor, Christians were.

Constantine's edict of Milan in AD 313 made Christianity a legal religion, even a favored one, the one that this former pagan had adopted just a year earlier at the Battle of the Milvan Bridge. Here at this battle, in a vision before it, which gave him supremacy in the empire of this battle, he saw a cross in the sky and he heard a voice say, in this sign, conquer. So, while it is a matter of debate how sincere Constantine's conversion was, because today there's a great deal of reading back our experience into his day rather than taking him at his word and understanding his own world and culture.

That is, you know, just because Constantine didn't know about the four spiritual laws, he didn't pray the sinners pray, he didn't sign the commitment page at the back of his Bible, well, then he can't be a Christian. No, dear listener, it is important to remember two things that still affect us today about Constantine becoming a Christian. First, men in government now began to apply the Bible as they governed. Yes, this will determine so much of church history and civil government in the future, too. That is, men in government now began to apply the Bible as they governed.

As imperfectly as he may have done it, Constantine ruled as a Christian prince. He consulted the Bible and his bishops to form Christian notions of justice and law. He did this for the first time in kingdoms outside of Israel, and it would take almost another 1,400 years, but this nascent trend would culminate, of course, in the American Constitution, the culmination of such effort and thinking. Well, secondly, also a note about Constantine, the struggle between church and state began here and continues today. Who should be supreme over the other?

Should the church approve and appoint the prince, or should the prince choose the pope? This struggle back and forth would continue for centuries, with one gaining the upper hand over the other, until finally our founding fathers in America, with great insight, saw that the federal government should have no say in the conduct of the church, and no one church should be the official church of the state. But as we see yet today, this is greatly misunderstood by our rulers, and the struggle between church and state continues.

Well, the third event in church history that has profoundly affected you, dear believer, this day, even in your own life, as we celebrate Reformation week, Reformation Sunday. The third event in church history that affects you is the Council of Nicaea in 325, because it settled the question of Christ's deity and set a pattern for doctrine as well. Percolating throughout Constantine's empire was a controversy over the deity of Christ. One party, led by a man named Arius, in fact, this heresy is still called Arianism today.

One party, led by a man named Arius, asserted that Jesus was a glorious being, a creature who had become man, but was not equal with God the Father, but rather had been made by God the Father at some point in time. The other party in the controversy, led by a man named Athanasius, held that the Bible asserted Christ's full equality and deity with the Father. That is, he was equal in substance, but who was also another person of that same substance. Now, Athanasius went on to borrow a term from another Christian thinker, Tertullian, to describe the relationship between God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

And that term was Trinitas, or as it comes to us in English, the Trinity. In order to bring unity to the empire and peace to the church, Emperor Constantine called a council of the bishops of the Roman Empire to decide this question. Now, these men, many of whom bore the scars of persecution from only years before, some of them had missing eyes and limbs, others had burn or cut scars, these men set a pattern for the future of the church when other doctrines of the church were threatened by heresy.

And this pattern would be that leaders of the church would gather from all over the known world and pray and think and debate what the Bible said and indicated about the question under consideration. And out of this promise, or I'm sorry, out of this process came what we now know as the seven great ecumenical councils from which we derive so much of what is orthodox doctrine in our churches even today. Doctrine that you believe and often take for granted, but was hammered out in these great seven ecumenical councils.

Well, the third event that shaped who you are as a believer and shaped your church today is, number four, the Catholic church, the one universal church split in A.D. 1045. There was a huge church schism, as it is called, in A.D. 1045. Well, what do you think? When one brother says potato and the other says potato, when one says tomato and the other says tomato, why you split the family, right? This is how some people see the East-West schism.

Other Christians are utterly unaware and ignorant that there was such a division in what was once the one universal church of Christ. Well, by the dawn of the second millennium, we're looking at A.D. 1045, after all. Just think of it. The Christian church had already been around for a thousand years by this time. Some pretty significant differences had cropped up within this one church.

For example, Constantine had moved the capital of the empire to Constantinople, named after himself far to the east in Asia Minor. And this church had developed its own identity from Rome, along with the church that moved there. Rome used Latin, Constantinople used Greek. Rome taught purgatory, Constantinople did not. Rome practiced celibacy, Constantinople encouraged its clergy to marry.

So, each church also used different calendars to determine the dates of Easter and Christmas. Tensions finally reached the breaking point over a doctrinal point. That is, does the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father only, as it was taught in the East? Or does the Holy Spirit proceed from both the Father and the Son, as it was taught in the West? Well, the leaders of both churches, that is, Patriarch Michael Cellularius in the East and Pope Leo IX in the West, they ended up excommunicating one another and all their followers, and the schism has never been healed since, though efforts have been made to do so.

Well, the fifth event in church history that profoundly affects you, dear listener, and to which you must pay some attention, is number five, Pope Boniface VIII declares the church supreme over the state in 1302. In a very real sense, the age-old struggle between church and state, because that's what we're looking at here, this struggle between church and state reaches a crisis and climax in 1302, when Pope Boniface attempted an end run around the kings of England and France by simply asserting that outside of the church and the pope himself, there can be no salvation nor remission of sins.

In other words, not just a greater Roman Catholic church and council, but he himself alone, the pope, had authority from God to excommunicate any individual or land if he chose to do so. This was bravado of the first order and is considered the most egregious power grab in the history of the church. Now, the reason that Pope Boniface did this was because two kings were giving him trouble, Edward I of England and Philip IV of France. They were at war with each other and they both needed money and so they hit the churches. They taxed the church and her lands and her bishops too.

To Boniface, this was abhorrent. It was the last straw for him. In his mind, rather, these kings should be paying taxes to him and the church. So Boniface issued his famous decree, Unum Sanctum, in which he made church dogma that the Roman Catholic church is the supreme power in the world and that salvation is found in no other church and under no other power but that of the pope. Well, the sixth event in church history that profoundly affects you, dear listener, even to today, number six is Johann Gutenberg, prints the first book with his movable type press in 1456.

Gutenberg, yes, prints the first book with his movable type press, 1456. Now, historians are unanimous that this is the single most important event in the history of the West. That's a pretty sweeping statement, isn't it? But as one historian puts it quite simply, he changed everything. At the time that Gutenberg arrived on the scene, it could easily take two years to produce a copy of the Bible by hand, for example, and it would cost the equivalent of three years of a worker's wages.

Also, remember that most people couldn't read in this day. Books were largely restricted to a small number of clergy and scholars and nobility who could afford to teach themselves and their children. Out of this world came a very creative and inventive man in whom the skills of metallurgy as a goldsmith, inks as a chemist, and the genius of an inventor in connecting the usefulness of a screw press like that of a wine press, which was his model. All of these skills converged. Unlike anyone before him, Gutenberg found an efficient way to cast movable metal type that could be easily set in pages.

He created oil-based inks that would adhere to the typeface long enough to be pressed on the paper, and then he created the press where the whole page could be pressed evenly onto paper. Well, Gutenberg was also an ardent Christian whose first book to print was, what do you think, the Bible. And of course, Gutenberg Bibles are now the most valuable books in the world. Gutenberg said about his invention, he says, God suffers in the multitude of souls whom his word cannot reach. Religious truth is imprisoned in a small number of manuscript books which can find instead of spread the public treasure.

Let us break the seal which seals up holy things and give wings to truth in order that she may win every soul that comes into the world by her word, no longer written at great expense by hands easily palsied, but multiplied like the wind by an untiring machine. Unquote. Pretty eloquent, isn't it? The words of Gutenberg. The Bible that you hold in your lap on Sunday morning and that you can read is available to you as a direct inheritance of this one man, Johann Gutenberg.

Well, the seventh event in church history that has a profound effect upon your life is indeed Martin Luther. Martin Luther posts some ideas for debate and inadvertently launches a new historical eon, the Reformation, 1517. These ideas for debate were in the form of theses, 95 of them, and they were submitted in the traditional manner of the day for debate by nailing them to the door of the local chapel in Wittenberg, Germany, where Luther lived and taught at the university.

Now, Luther, in his study of the Bible, had rediscovered, as I mentioned, an old truth long forgotten by the Roman Catholic Church, and that is, as Paul says, we know that a man is justified by faith in Jesus Christ and not by works of the law. Unquote. Therefore, Luther wanted to debate the Roman Catholic Church, their practice of selling indulgences to buy grace for himself or his loved ones, maybe, the seeming idolatrous treatment of the Lord's Supper as well in transubstantiation, and then a host of other practices that seem to indicate that, unlike Paul's insistence on faith, the Church insisted on works of the law to justify a person.

But rather than rational debate, Luther stirred a firestorm of hatred and invective, excuse me, and cries of heretic. Luther was excommunicated by the Pope and hunted down, yet undeterred, Luther and others who would follow him began to reform the worship and doctrine of the Church in the light of the Bible and salvation by grace through faith that the Bible taught. So, in these invaluable truths that we celebrate at this time of year are found on Reformation Sunday. Celebrate Reformation Sunday. It applies to you today, dear listener.

Well, the eighth event in church history that still has a profound and reverberating impact upon your life, even today, dear listener, is number eight, the United States Constitution is written in a convention of the states and then submitted to those states for approval in 1787. Now, I say the world will look back upon this as one of the high points, one of the great achievements of mankind, and they will also see it as a religious event, a significant event of the larger church. Why?

Well, as I have labored to establish over many years, our Constitution was not a product of men who sat down with a blank slate and said, what can we come up with? No, our Constitution is a product of centuries of preparation as Christian thinkers and statesmen and Christian patriots took the best of what men had produced in creating governments from the past, based them upon biblical principles of justice and mercy, and then crafted the Constitution that we have today. The American Constitution is a Christian document, not because it's allarded with Christian lingo and proof texts from the Bible. No.

Our Constitution is a Christian document because centuries of hard-bought experience and hard-bought thought and suffering as well taught our founding fathers that limited government was the best government, that man's evil inclination was to tyranny if he is not severely curtailed and limited in exercising power over his fellow man. And centuries of experience and thought taught our founders that the individual, when he is personally self-disciplined by Christian principle and a love of God, that the individual, the Christian individual, could best govern himself and create prosperity for himself as well, and his family, and his community.

This was done when he had the maximum amount of liberty, which was granted by God, by the way. This liberty, all of his liberties were granted by God and not the state. And he could create the maximum amount of liberty and prosperity when he had this maximum amount of liberty in which to live and prosper. Our Constitution is the finest document of this liberty to date, dear listener. Number nine, then, the ninth event of church history that has a profound effect upon you and your Christian life, even today.

Number nine is William Carey. William Carey leaves for India in 1793 and, in effect, launches the great Anglo-American missionary movement. Missions have transformed the world. The Anglo-American missionary movement has transformed your world, dear listener. The modern worldwide missionary outreach has sent the gospel through missionaries to every continent, country, and almost every tribal corner of the earth.

Much of this movement vision and motive and model can be traced to how Carey did it. His pamphlet, for example, the obligations of Christians to use means for the conversion of the heathen, and then Carey's sermon, great sermon, expect great things from God, attempt great things for God. These are still preached and reprinted today as inspirations for missionaries. Well, Carey also modeled the various things a missionary must do when he gets to the field. He translated the Bible into 36 languages, for example.

He evangelized the lost, planted churches, opened schools for children, and established medical clinics to relieve the misery of poor Indians. He also pioneered the variety of means of support for missionaries. At one time or another in his career, Carey was supported by individuals, churches, missionary boards, established to aid in his support, and he was also supported eventually on his own as a university professor. Well, Christians in the West, primarily in England and America, used this early model of missions to reach practically the entire planet, almost the entire planet, but we're still working on it, dear listener.

Most churches and denominations in Africa and China and India and South and Central America, and for that matter, every island and continent of the world can trace their origin to an early missionary effort from England or America. So, as revivals surge in South America and the gospel spreads under the radar in Muslim lands like Iran, we can thank God for his having used the Christians and churches of England and America for the conversion of the heathen, as Carey so aptly put it.

Well, our 10th and final event that has shaped Christian life, your life, and the church of modern America, the final and 10th event is the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, sweeps communism into power in Russia and marks the beginning of the great persecution of the church. This is our 10th event, the great persecution of the church, and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 starts this. Christian relief agencies around the world today are presently far overwhelmed by the extent of the persecution of our brothers and sisters in almost every nation of the world.

For example, Kristen Wright, who is the director of advocacy for Open Doors USA, she says that Christian persecution has never been worse in the history of the world. And she says this is not an exaggeration. More Christians are being persecuted and martyred for Christ now, even as we speak, than ever before in the history of the world. And this is, of course, in part because of number nine. That is the incredible spread of the faith owing to the great Anglo-American missionary movement.

And we can trace the inception of the great persecution, which you and I are now living through, to a man and a government that hated Christ and Christianity with a passion. That is V.I. Lenin and atheistic Marxism. Lenin quickly closed churches and turned them into museums. And his successor, Stalin, estimated he killed over 50 million of his own people, many of whom suffered because of their faith.

And then in China, Chairman Mao was even worse. He killed over 70 million of his own people, 25 million of whom, it is estimated, were slain because of their Christian faith, according to Open Doors USA. All of this took place behind the Iron Curtain in Russia and the Bamboo Curtain in China, unbeknownst to the world, but thankfully not unbeknownst to God, dear listener. All of this only intensified with the rise of Islam. For example, the Islamic State in Syria.

ISIS recent released a video showing militants beheading a group of 21 men for being people of the cross. Oh, this kind of thing is happening all over the world, isn't it? Not only there, but in Iran and Iraq. The Christians in Iraq have shrunk from one and a half million to less than 300,000 in Syria. The stable Christian population under Assad has shrunk from nearly 2 million.

They've lost nearly 500,000 of their brothers and sisters to either martyrdom or flight as refugees. So, while atheistic Marxism began this great persecution in the early 20th century, it continues now, not only in China, but also in North Korea, places like North Korea. Dear listener, I urge you to make a study of church history to discover not only where you have been, but also where you are and where you're headed. For example, do you think that you may hear about and pray about the persecution of your brothers and sisters and sit passively on the sidelines? No.

Do you think that none of this will touch you? No. Dear listener, wake up, O sleeper, as Paul says, and arise from the dead and Christ will shine upon you. You have been profoundly affected by each of these 10 events that I have detailed for you today from church history, whether you realize it or not. To help you understand these things, we at New Geneva are conducting a study of church history Wednesday night at 7 p.m. in our church fellowship hall at 101 4th Street on the corner of 4th and Boulevard.

Call us at 523-0196 for further information. And remember as well that New Geneva Meets for Holy Worship on Sunday at 10 a.m. at 101 4th Street on the corner of 4th and Boulevard. Call us at 523-0196 for further information.