Teachin' Preachin' & The Legacy of John Wycliffe

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It's really encouraging to, and I try to post this on my social media, I took a little picture in there while you were going at it, you were doing a great job. Hundreds of men are packing this church hearing you teach about preaching. Now, you're not juggling, you're not throwing javelins in the air and doing crazy circus stunts. You're preaching, you're dressed up in a suit with the Word of God preaching about preaching.

Help me understand what's going on here, will you? Yeah, well, Stu, thank you for having me on. There needs to be a recovery of preaching the Bible in churches, and there is a famine in the land for the hearing of the Word of the Lord. And our conference is all about talking about the basics of what we call expository preaching, which is in reality biblical preaching.

And there is a dearth of that. And so we host conferences around the country where we take three days, and let me give you a quick intensive, whether you've ever been to seminary or not or Bible college or not, if you've just started preaching or if you've been preaching for a long period of time, we need to review the basics. What actually is preaching? And what actually is expository preaching? And how do you even take a passage of Scripture and know what it says? And then what does it mean by what it says?

And then what does it require of the listener? And so we're talking about really how to prepare a sermon that is drawn from a passage of Scripture, opens it up, gives the God-intended meaning of the passage, and then connects it to the lives of people in a way that encourages them, challenges them, even convicts them, comforts them, all the above, and also is used to bring people to saving faith in Jesus Christ. So I'm amazed really at the crowd that has come. I was just in Oklahoma City and did the same thing with an even larger crowd.

And I'm going to Phoenix, Arizona, do this again, and I'm sure it'll be a great turnout. So there is a desire on the part of many pastors and young men thinking about the ministry to be better taught in the basics of preaching the Bible. So that's what we're about, Stu.

That's the voice of Dr. Stephen Lawson. We've got a couple of young men here, Auburn University students. They came to the Tar Heel State, God's country to hear you today, didn't they?

Yeah. No, I met these guys at a Ligonier conference, and they're just enthusiasm for the Word of God. And as they think about their future, perhaps even in ministry, it's an opportunity to interact with them and to help hopefully shape their life and point them in the right direction. And, you know, when you reach one person like this, they're going to reach thousands of people over the course of their life in ministry. And so it's time well invested. And so that's what Paul was doing with Timothy, he was passing the torch down to the next generation.

And that's what we do as well. And God always has that next generation. He's faithful to raise up a body of preachers.

But, Stu, it's so desperately needed today. Church has become watered down in many places, not every place, but many places. And we've really, we've lost the power of the Word of God, the power of God himself, because God put the power in the Word. And that's why the Word must be preached and it must be taught. And Martin Luther likened it to letting a lion out of the cage. Let the lion out, let the Word of God out, and it will have its powerful effect upon the lives of people.

That's what we need in this day. Dr. Lawson, real basic, you talked to a lot of pastors, some are at different levels, some are way advanced, and the disciples are growing wiser than their teachers in some ways, and you're seeing the fruit of that in your ministry. A lot of pastors and people want to know, what does that even look like? Basically, like, how, where do I start, and what does a church look like that does preach the Word? Not about the Bible, not a bunch of gimmicks. I mean, I feel bad for these pastors, they get, you know, you've got suicide rates are up, you've got people hurt, you've got this whole virus thing, you've got pandemics, you've got wars, you've got politics, you've got vitriol, you've got maskaholics, and you've got the battles of that stuff.

People get mad when you do, mad when you don't. What does it look like? What is a church that preaches the Word? Biblically, gospel-driven, Christocentric, what does that, describe it for us. Yeah, well, there's a pulpit in the middle of the worship center, and there's an open Bible on that pulpit, and there's a man of God who's been called by God and gifted by God to preach the Word, and he starts with a passage of Scripture, he stays with that passage of Scripture, and he explains and applies that passage of Scripture with passion and with energy that only God can give to a preacher. And there's a congregation of people who have come to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. They actually know the Lord, and because of that, they have a hunger for the Word of God.

They're not sitting there tapping their watch. They want more truth, more of the Word of God, and they have an open Bible in their lap, and many of them are taking notes so that they can internalize this message. And in a church like that, they're also singing the Word of God.

They're careful about what they sing. And when the pastor prays, Scripture is just flowing out of his mouth, and they take the Lord's Supper, and there's baptism. They're doing what is found in Scripture. It's not a three-ring circus. It's not an entertainment center.

It's not a concert. It's a congregation being fed the Word of God, and it attracts other men who love the Word of God, laymen who are gifted to teach the Word of God. They want to be with a strong man, and so they surround him, and they become Sunday school teachers and disciplers and small group Bible study leaders and men's discipleship leaders.

And then there are women who become women disciplers and women teachers of other women, and it's more than just the preacher. He is surrounded by circles of other men and women who are gifted in the Word of God, and this is, like, so important for them. They get in their car, and they're willing to drive great distances to be in a church like this, and they have fellowship based upon the Word of God. They hold these truths in common, and when they're together, they talk about Christ. They talk about the truths of Scripture that they're learning, and then they go out into the community, and it just happens.

Evangelism just happens. It spills out because as they meet people, they want to share what they've been learning, and they pass that on to other people, and they are witnesses for Christ. And in the midst of a church like that, there are young men who are being raised up because they're sitting under the preaching of the Word of God, and they begin to think, that's me.

That's what I need to be doing. And so they are sent out by the church, and they go to seminary or Bible college, and they're taught and trained. And so there's this multiplying effect, and where does it start? It starts with one man in the pulpit, with one book, and one method to preach that book. And it multiplies exponentially until you are reaching hundreds and thousands of people, and people are being sent out, even as missionaries around the world. It starts with one man, one book, one method, standing in a pulpit to preach the Word of God. He's the author of Famine the Land, which is a book that's been reprinted in a bunch of languages you were telling me. Show Me Your Glory, which got Christian Book of the Year. Congratulations on that. And a new book on the life of John Wycliffe, which we'll talk about.

We're going to come back and do a quick segment. Dr. Stephen Lawson is his name. And the ministry OnePassion, is that.org, Doc? Yeah, OnePassion.org, and you spell out one. Please go to our website. We have a brand new website, and it has all kinds of tools and resources to help your Christian life, and even help your preaching and teaching of the Word of God.

And it's all free, and it's for you. Okay. When we come back, we'll meet a man who was such a threat to the church of the day, the Roman Catholic Church, that they exhumed his body 300 years after his death and re-burned his bones at the stake, John Wycliffe. We'll talk about him, the legacy of Wycliffe, and you've written eight or nine of these biographies. We'll touch on that and how you can get these resources.

With Dr. Stephen Lawson, I'm Stu Epperson. This is Truth Talk. Be sure you download this podcast. Share it with your pastor. Pastors are looking for something. They're searching, and it's right there. The Word of God's right there.

OnePassion.org. More with Dr. Stephen Lawson after this quick break on Truth Talk. Don't touch that dial. Hang on. What is the greatest weapon in the church today that the enemy's running from, that is called by Luther the lion, that can defend himself if you just open the cage?

Well, that weapon. You've dedicated your life, Dr. Stephen Lawson, to teaching and preaching from that book. Am I correct?

Yeah, that is correct. I'm a man of one book. I want to be like what Spurgeon said of John Bunyan, or the man's a walking Bible.

Prick him anywhere, and he bleeds biblion. We need to be walking Bibles. We need to know our Bibles so well that the Word of God, we live in the Word, and the Word lives in us. And that really is where God put the power. The last sermon Martin Luther ever preached, he stood in the church where he grew up as a young person, and he said to the congregation in Eisleben, Germany, you're looking for the power in all the wrong places. They were going on pilgrimages.

They were looking at relics. They thought in these superstitious things that somehow the power of God would be admitted to them. And Luther said, no, God put the power in the Word. You need to be in the Word. You need to study the Word, read the Word, live the Word. That's where God put the power.

And it's still there. It's still in the Word of God. And we're in the 21st century, and there's been such a departure from the Word to gimmicks and techniques and trendy things that churches like to jump on the bandwagon. And the truth of the matter is God put the power in the Word, and the Word must be preached. The Word must be taught. All of the ways that the Word of God would come to the lives of people, that's where God wants the church to be made strong.

And it's the only way. There's no substitute for the Word of God. We have the Gospel in the Word. We have the treasure of who Jesus is and all of Revelation right here.

Let me just say this. No one will ever be saved apart from the Word of God. No one will ever be sanctified apart from the Word of God. So everything that you need in your life to come to know Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and for you to grow in the grace and knowledge of Christ, it is dependent upon you being in the Word of God. Dr. Stephen Lawson, tell us about your journey to where you are today, because we're going to talk about your books here in just a sec, but tell us about what kindled this hunger for you. How did you come to know Christ and how did you end up before Christ and how you met him real quick? I grew up in a Christian home, went to church, but I didn't come to know Christ until I was 17 years old. And I heard a message at a high school camp on being born again, and I realized that that's what needed to happen to me, and God birthed me into his kingdom.

I was 17 years old, and amazingly, in the strange providence of God, the very next year when I was 18, I began to preach, and God opened doors for me that probably shouldn't have been opened, but they were opened, and I began to preach. And I had never sat under Bible teaching and preaching. I didn't know how to preach, but I was reading my Bible voraciously. And as I stood up to speak, all I knew to do was just read the Bible, explain the Bible, and apply the Bible. And people were saved, people were converted, and I saw the hand of God, and I wanted to do that for the rest of my life, though I really didn't even know what steps to take.

And so I went to law school, I worked for some politicians, I worked at First National Bank. But I sat under, for the first time in my life, a strong Bible preacher, and Stu, you know who that is, it's Adrian Rogers, and he was a powerhouse for God. And I was the first young man called into the ministry to preach under Adrian Rogers at Bellevue Baptist Church.

And so I had that fire in my bones from being under his preaching. I went to seminary, I needed to be trained desperately, and I was. And I then launched off into, I was a college pastor for one year. I pastored an independent Bible church for 14 years, and then pastored two Baptist churches for 20 years. And during that time, I preached about five times a week, five different messages.

And it really indoctrinated me yet further in the Bible and the Word of God, theology, sound doctrine. And five years ago, I came to the point I realized I've got to multiply myself even more. And so I retired from my pastorate and started a ministry called One Passion. And I host conferences for pastors on how to get to the next level of effectiveness in preaching the Word of God. And I began to work with the Master's Seminary and John MacArthur as the professor of preaching, and I oversee the doctoral program. And then I work with Ligonier Ministries. I'm a teaching fellow, and R.C.

Sproul put his arm around me, which was a great association. And so that's what I've been doing for these years. And I have been in airplanes flying everywhere and flying overseas to preach the Word of God to people and to train as many people as I can to preach the Bible, the Word of God. And so that's where my life has been invested.

And I'm now 70 years old. I've been preaching for 52 years. And whatever time the Lord has left for me here upon the earth, and we know that He has foreordained good works for us to walk in, I want to capture the moment, and I want to maximize my time and my efforts for the cause of Christ. So that's kind of a quick run through my life. I would say, just to add to that, everything before God called me to preach was all about sports and athletics, and I played college football. But when God called me to preach, that all just disappeared, and I had a new love, and I had a new interest, which was the Bible and the truth, and to do everything I could to get the truth of the Word out. So that's kind of a walk through my life. Well, you've also taken up your pen, and every time I see a new Stephen Lawson book, I get it.

And I get a bunch of them, and I've ordered cases, and I give them out to pastors. You've written on Calvin and Luther. You've written on all these guys. But why would you write about a guy who's been dead for centuries? Why a book on John Wycliffe?

Please tell us. Well, he is a part of what I would call a cloud of witnesses who continue to speak to us by the example of their lives. John Wycliffe was a towering giant for God who lived in England before the Reformation, about 150 years before the Reformation, and he was a professor at Oxford. He was the leading intellectual of his day in all of England, many say in all of Europe. And he, in studying the Bible, came to realize that the common person needs a Bible that they can understand and read.

At that point, there's only a Latin Bible. And so he, along with some other professors at Oxford, for the first time translate the Bible into the English language. And other strongmen began to stand around John Wycliffe, and they formed what was known as the Lollards, which was a Dutch word that just kind of means mumblers, and it was a derogatory term.

It's what people called them. But these were preachers on foot who went into the streets and the highways of England and went into town squares and went into places where people would gather, and they would just preach the Word of God because it was not being preached. And they kept, really, the truth alive until the time of the Reformation. And John Huss was converted as a college student sitting in the library being paid to hand copy Wycliffe's class notes and came to a saving knowledge of Christ. And he became the Bohemian pulpit giant in what is today the Czech Republic, who had a great effect on Luther. So the road to the Reformation really begins with Wycliffe, and then it passes through Huss, and it comes to Martin Luther. And so John Wycliffe, if Martin Luther and John Calvin are the fathers of the Reformation, John Wycliffe is the grandfather of the Reformation. It really started with him, and he recovered the true gospel, that salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.

And he confirmed that to the teeth. And he believed in the authority of the Word of God, and he then called into account the supposed authority of the pope in Rome, which put him in dangerous position and on dangerous ground. And he was even rebuked and summoned to come to Rome to stand before the pope. And John Wycliffe was so bold and courageous, he just refused to go and just continued to preach and to translate the Bible into the English language. And he was a valiant man, and he died before finishing the task, but the men around him finished translating the Scripture, and those lawlords continued to preach.

But he was such an influence that even after he died at the Council of Constance, they ordered that his bones would be exhumed and burned and scattered into the swift river, just in a total repudiation of John Wycliffe. And what was his crime, Stu? What was his crime? His crime was translating the Bible into the English language so that the common person could read the Bible and understand it. His crime was to preach that salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone. That's why they dug up his body and burned it, and actually, even before that, they had already dug up his body and moved it out of the church sanctuary in essence to unsanctified ground, but that wasn't enough.

So then years later, they just exhumed it and burned it. So that's what they thought of John Wycliffe. And in my estimation, he's really the first English preacher of the English language of any note. That all who would follow in the English language, even all the way down to Spurgeon and Lloyd-Jones, they really stand downstream from Wycliffe, who really was the father of the English pulpit. And so if you preach in the English language, John Wycliffe's your man. He is the man that you look to who first began to preach with some national influence and impact.

And so we are so indebted to this man. William Tyndale would come years later, 150 years later, and translate out of the original Greek and Hebrew. That wasn't even available yet because Erasmus had not yet compiled it in 1516. And so he had to work out of the Latin, and it was a bit of an awkward translation, yet it was better than what they had.

And then Tyndale would come along and really produce the best translation. But Wycliffe was like the icebreaker ship going first to bust up the frozen tundra so the other ships could come in behind him. Wycliffe put his nose to the plow, and he shouldered the plow, and he really led the brigade of what would become the Reformation.

Well, thank you, Dr. Lawson, for writing this book. Now, tell us the full title of the Wycliffe book and how our listeners can get it and learn more. The title, and I love this title, by the way, The Bible Convictions of John Wycliffe. And every chapter is Bible teacher, Bible preacher, Bible translator, Bible defender, Bible theologian, Bible legacy. It's just all about the Bible, and that was John Wycliffe. And they can receive a copy either by contacting Ligonier Ministries, ligonier.org, or by Amazon, or going into their Christian bookstore and requesting it.

It has literally just come out, and it's been a while since there's been a book on Wycliffe like this. Your prayer in terms of a potential second Reformation in our culture. Oh, yes. What's it going to take, Dr. Lawson? These Reformers you've written about, prolifically you preach about, you quote them. Tell us your passion for that, and to see that again, even in America across the world, it may have to come from outside of America here.

Yeah. Well, it always starts with the first of those solas, sola scriptura. It's a returning back to the Bible. The Reformation was the greatest back to the Bible movement this world has ever seen. And for us to have a second Reformation, it will require the greatest back to the Bible movement that we have seen in 500 years. Taking the Bible seriously in the word of God for what it is, and then for young men to preach the word. Interestingly enough, the Reformation started as a college movement. It was young men in college who caught hold of this truth and had their whole life ahead of them, and they had their youthful zeal and their convictions, and really had nothing to lose.

And they put it all on the line. And Calvin was converted while he went to the University of Paris, Orleans, in Bordeaux. Luther was a professor in college, University of Wittenberg for years.

John Knox graduated from the University of St. Andrews. I mean, just on and on and on. I won't bore us with all of that. It's not boring, but it was really a college movement with young men in their 20s. And the White Horse Inn at Cambridge, it was a small group Bible study. And there ended up being something like nine martyrs in that one small group Bible study. And William Tyndale was a part of that. The greatest preacher of the English Reformation was a part of that. And the architect of the English Reformation, Thomas Cranmer, was a part of that. It was staggering.

But it was all on a college campus. It happened with young men in their 20s, maybe late teens, catching fire with the truth of the word of God. Yeah, there at the White Horse Inn, they began reading Martin Luther, who had just written.

The books had come across the English Channel. And it just spread like a wildfire. So that's what we need again. I'm taking notes while you're talking.

Very rarely do I actually take notes from one of my guests. But to have Dr. Lawson on what to treat, OnePassion.org. Now, you've given that website. Everyone go there. And by the way, you may get a better seminary education than most seminaries, or should I say cemeteries, you know, in the country.

And there are still some good ones. But Dr. Lawson, close us out with Your One Passion. That website, there's a reason you've called it that, or your ministry, OnePassion.org.

Close us out with Your One Passion. Yeah, it's really based on Romans 11, 36, which is my favorite verse in the Bible. And I think it's the most all-comprehensive statement in the entire Bible and the most all-encompassing sentence that's ever been written in any literature.

It says, And from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To God be the glory forever and ever. Amen.

That God is the source, God is the means, and God is the end of all things. And so the only response to that can be, to God be the glory forever. Amen. And so One Passion is really all about a passion for God above all things. That recognizing the holiness, the sovereignty, the righteousness of God, that He's the architect of all, He is the administrator of all, and He is the aim of all. And so to God be the glory forever and ever.

Amen. So that's what we have a white-hot passion for, is the glory of God. Listen to his sermons, watch the videos, watch the expositors, expository preaching lessons, and we're going to let you go because you're about to go stand up in front of a bunch of expositors in a few minutes to teach them on how to handle the rightly divided word of truth. I'm amped for that. So please come to one of our conferences, the Institute for Expository Preaching.

We hold them in various places around the country. I think in many ways it's an impact upon preachers and pastors. It's a game changer. So please come. Well, thanks for hanging out with us here on Truth Talk.

Dr. Stephen Lawson, thank you Ligonier Ministries for helping put all this together and the publishing part and all the different ministries in your ministry and the folks that support you. And men, preach the word. Amen. In season and out of season. Amen.