exactly what John Calvin lived for, that God might have the glory in all of his life. On this Reformation Sunday, we're celebrating today, which is the last Sunday before October 31st, the day that Martin Luther, in 1517, posted the Ninety-Five Theses to the chapel door at Wittenberg. We're going to be celebrating the life of John Calvin, who was born some 25 years after Martin Luther was born. He's the second generation reformer, I guess you could say. He follows on down in the area of France and Switzerland, ministered to a lot of French people, and he was French himself, but actually in Switzerland. And the theme of this message today is going to be, to God, all praise and glory. Let's say it with me, please. To God, all praise and glory. Francis Schultz, who wrote this last hymn, had it right on. John Calvin was known as the theologian for very good reason. He was one of the world's greatest thinkers in theological things. And although he lived 500 years ago, we live today with the incredible blessing of his uplifting of the glory of God in the theology that he wrote. And lest you think this is just a dry individual who has who has no sense of humor. He probably didn't have very much of a sense of humor. But unless you think it's entirely worthless to pursue this, I want you to look at the course of human history and what has happened as a result of Calvin's life. He has affected education. He has affected the entire reformed movement in the world today, which in the last century has really, really accelerated, by the way. His works have actually increased in sales over this last hundred years. Calvin has been both the hero and the bum, if you will, for a couple of reasons. For those who believe in the doctrines of grace, that is the five points of Calvinism that we hold here at Colleen Bible Church, the old tulip doctrine. We won't be going into a lot of that today. He is a hero because he articulated the doctrine of scripture that pertains so carefully and clearly to the centrality of God. in salvation. The centrality of God in all the universe. Christianity is the one religion of the world that focuses truly upon God and makes him the center of everything. As he sent Jesus Christ to die for the sins of his people, accomplishing his plans. But to the rest of the world, to much of the other parts of the world, he's the bum. He's the one that people name their dogs after. And it's always been that way. This is not new. The antagonism to Calvinism, if you will, or Reformed theology is not new. In fact, he experienced it in his own generation. And we're going to see that today. Calvin himself would not like what I'm going to do today for a couple of reasons. He wouldn't want us examining his life because in his humility, he would be greatly offended by the fact we're doing this. He was a person who desired to be buried in an unmarked grave. He didn't want any glory. He truly did not. He was blessed and pleased that so many people read his institutes, but he did not want to take the glory or the credit. He did it for the glory of God. But another reason that he would object to us doing this little special on his life today is that It takes us away from exegeting the text that he was so faithful at doing every week from the pulpit. In fact, not only every week, but usually nine or ten times every two weeks, he would preach from the pulpit. He would always preach from the New Testament on Sunday morning. And then in the evening or in the afternoon, he would go to the Old Testament, perhaps. And then during the week, he would lecture every other week for each and every day when he was on on schedule there in Geneva. We'll talk about Geneva here in a little while. But if you'll just oblige me this morning, we're going to take a few minutes and do this anyway, because I think it's important that we get a glimpse of someone who took this Word of God so seriously, who took the glory of God so seriously, and who magnified the Lord so eloquently in his words, both spoken and written, that we must stop and take notice. Hebrews 13, 7 says, Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith. I think that's true not only for people in our own generation. It's true for those who have gone before us, those on whose shoulders we stand. And what I want us to think about this morning as we consider Calvin's life is not Calvin as an end in himself, although he is a mighty man of God. But I want us to think about the glory of the God that he served. I want us to stop and think about the centrality of God in our lives, or should I say the lack of centrality of God in our lives, the lack of worship of Christ in our lives. This is what Calvin would want us to do today. And the theme verse I'm going to use is down at the bottom of your bulletin is 1 Corinthians 10.31. So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. Let us go to the Lord in prayer as we begin. Father, we thank you so much this morning for the gifts of apostles and prophets and for the gift of gifted men that you have sent after the apostles and prophets. to proclaim to us what the apostles have written, to proclaim to us what the prophets, New Testament and old, have spoken and written. And Lord, we just ask this morning that you will cause us to see how mighty a God you are as we see what you did in this weak man's life. And Lord, the enormous gifts that you gave him intellectually not matched by bodily strength have powerfully spoken to us your word. And we are grateful for that. Lord, we pray today that you will cause us, as a result of this reflection this morning, to understand more clearly how great you are. For it's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Robert Dick Wilson, an Old Testament scholar from Princeton in the last century, He is said to have come back from time to time to hear his former students preach. He would slip into the back row and just watch his former students as they preached. He was curious about one thing. That one thing was whether those young preachers were big gutters or little gutters. When asked what that was, a big gutter, he says, is someone who has a vision of God that is expansive. that understands the greatness of Almighty God and preaches that God from the pulpit. A little God or somebody gets up there and preaches a man-centered sermon. And this is the pablum that many of our churches, I'm afraid, get from week to week. It's always a struggle to be a big God. Because we want to insert ourselves into everything. We want to make us the focal point of a sermon. We want to make us the focal point of the text. What does it mean to me? Rather than what does it say about God? And when Calvin would go in and exegete a text, he would humble himself before that text to find out that truth, to find out what it said about God. He can teach us just a little bit about glorifying God. I'm going to take a look at some six different areas I've got here on the list today. We'll go through. As many of them as we can. I know this is not going to work, but we'll just do the best we can and cut it as short as we can. His conversion. He glorified God in his conversion. He glorified God in writing theology and in preaching and pastoring. And these go through phases of his life, as you see the time frames listed. He glorified God in being exiled from exile. He had his second stage exile. OK. He glorified God in preaching, pastoring, and writing for the long term, and finally he glorified God in his death. If you really get bored today, and you probably will, just flip over to the back side and that will put you to sleep for sure. It's a little list, it's a chart of Calvin's life so that you might be able to see some of the highlights and be able to stay with us. Calvin was born into the late medieval world in France in 1509, a very close in France to the border of the Holy Roman Empire, which is what Switzerland, the area we know as Switzerland today, was in. Although he was a Frenchman, he ends up across the border in Switzerland, and that's where he spends a good deal of his life, as we're going to say. There were two competing kings. There was Francis I, who had taken the throne in 1515 in France, who was not friendly to the Reformation. And then across the border there was King Charles V, the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, that empire that was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. But he was nonetheless in charge and Calvin finds some safety over under his rule during this particular, his lifetime. As it turns out, John Calvin's birth country will actually drive him out. after his conversion, because France at that time during the Reformation was not friendly to the gospel at all. And you'll end up in Geneva. The printing press has already been invented. This is one of the sovereign acts of God because the printing press was already there back in the 1440s. Johann Gutenberg, you remember the story, a German, had invented that. And so the printing press was used by Martin Luther before Calvin. And Martin Luther was 25 years old the day Calvin was born. So Calvin comes a little bit behind, but he's able to take advantage of those same tools. Columbus had just discovered America 17 years earlier, 1492, and 17 years earlier. And the first of the reformers was now currently teaching at the University of Wittenberg. That's Martin Luther. And just a few years later, Martin Luther is going to be posting. Just eight more years, Martin Luther is going to be posting the 95 theses to that chapel door at Wittenbeck. Calvin, as we said, is a second generation reformer. He's standing on the shoulders of Martin Luther before him. They did not collaborate. It's very interesting. He read Luther's writings and vice versa. He had great respect for Luther, but it's very interesting. They take different paths. Gerard Calvin, the father of of John, recognized the significant gifts that his son had at an early age and tried to get him the best education possible. He was a man of some means. He wasn't totally wealthy, but if there were a middle class of the day, he would have been in that. He was able to get John Calvin a stipend, a benefice is what they called it, from the Roman church because Gerard had worked at some legal work for the Roman church there. in Noyon, France, where John was born. At the age of 11, he was able to get this stipend starting to come. It was very clear that he had in mind for his son to go into ministry in the Roman Catholic Church, and he wanted to get him the best education possible. In keeping with what folks did in the 16th century, somewhere between the ages of 12 and 14, we're not exactly sure when, he sent his son off to university to continue that education. the first of a three-fold way of education. Grammar, then logic, and then rhetoric is the way they educated in those days. Calvin, interestingly, always seems to have been submissive to his father. In fact, throughout his life, he's submissive to authority overall, which is exactly the opposite of the complaint you hear of Calvin being Mr. General in Geneva. Calvin submitted to God, certainly, But he also submitted to the authority that God gave him, starting with his father. And so he obeyed his dad and went off to study theology and related subjects. And then in 1526, around age 19, we don't know exactly why, but the father suddenly changed his plans for his son. Instead of wanting to be in the ministry, he now changes his son's plans to go into law and to excel in law. This too is the divine hand of God. as he takes Calvin into some new areas of study in what you might call Renaissance studies. It could be that Calvin's father had problems with the church financially. He was under investigation for a while. He was finally excommunicated in 1528, but in any case, Calvin went to Orleans and Bourgeois. Pardon my French pronunciations. I don't know how to pronounce these names. In any case, his father did die. in 1531 when Calvin was 21 years of age. I've got his ages on the back side so you can kind of track how old he was. It's incredible what he did at the ages in life that are listed there. Freeing him to take the direction in life that he wished to go. Now say it with me, to God be the glory. God is guiding Calvin's life in a way that would glorify him. And so Calvin turns to the side of education that will get him into languages. He got into studying at least the ancient and Greek authors in what we would call today humanist studies during the Renaissance period, which was a tremendous thing. We look at humanism as a bad thing today, secular humanism is, but with respect to the Bible in those days, humanism was actually a good thing because it caused the reformers to get back to the original text. and say, what does the Bible say about matters? Instead of taking the Latin translation of Jerome called the Vulgate and using it, and no one could understand Latin as far as the common people were concerned, and say a bunch of mumbo-jumbo and services, what the Reformers did was got us back to the original text. Now, what Calvin did was he used Greek and he used Hebrew later on, but interestingly, he also used Latin. to actually do his writing. And his thinking was that he would, later on we'll see this, that he uses Latin as the international language, the ability to communicate to everybody. He had Greek, as the expression goes, he had Hebrew later, and he had Latin. He did not have German and he never had English. Kind of interesting. And so Latin he depended upon to be the international language, if you will. At the University of Paris, he had one of the finest instructors around, a man by the name of Mathurin Cordier. His instruction in Latin enabled Calvin to excel. He got a great education. He was able to use his Latin to the maximum. In 1532, at age 23, he published his very first book. He's still not a Christian. This is still unbelieving John Calvin, getting this education that will prepare him for the future. He writes a commentary on the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca's work De Clementia, a work on ethics. And as he writes this work, it turns out to be a very impressive one. The most important thing about it is it honed his critical skills for being able to analyze a text and make comments upon it. Now God's going to use that skill in the future as Calvin writes theology, as he writes not only the institutes of the Christian religion, but as he writes commentaries on the Bible. He's going to be able to understand what the text is saying and be able to explicate it, to be able to open it up and exegete it for us so that we might understand. You've got to know, I got a set of Calvin's commentaries in the New Testament given to me about three years ago. And since I've gotten them, I've used them for every Sunday service, virtually. There may have been one or two I missed, but I use them every week. He's an incredible resource. He writes very simply. Even I can understand the basic words he's saying. And I just love it. If you ever get a chance to get his commentaries online, many of them are free online. You can download them or read them on the screen. Then please do. You'll be blessed by this 500 year old exegete. So Calvin glorifies God. And what we're going to enter into now is this phase of conversion. He glorifies God in conversion. This book that he wrote came in the midst of a process of conversion that happened sometime between 1529 and 1532 or 1533, from ages 20 to 24, we think. Calvin did not write a spiritual autobiography like Luther did, so we can't understand exactly when things happened. So please bear with us on the looseness of the dates. What he did do, though, is give us some clues about his conversion in a couple of places. One place was in his introduction to the commentary in the book of Psalms. Let me read you just a few lines. When I was as yet a very little boy, my father had destined for me the study of theology. This was about age 14. But afterwards, when he considered that the legal profession commonly raised those who follow it to wealth, that's what he understood, this prospect induced him suddenly to change his purpose. Thus it came to pass that I was withdrawn from the study of philosophy and put was put to the study of law about age 19. To this pursuit, I endeavored faithfully to apply myself in obedience to the will of my father. But God, by the sweet guidance of his proficiency at length, gave a different direction to my course." What we're going to see in Calvin's life is that God begins shining a light into Calvin's mind. He's one of these guys who probably could not say, I became a Christian, on August the 16th at three o'clock in the afternoon. He probably could not tell you that. What he could probably tell you is that God began opening my mind so that I could understand who he is over the course of a year or two years or three years. Now he calls it a sudden conversion. Since I was too obstinately devoted, he says, to the superstitions of potpourri, he's referring to Roman Catholicism here, to be easily extricated from so profound an abyss of mire, That's where he was before. God, by a sudden conversion, subdued and brought my mind to a teachable frame, which was more hardened in such matters than might have been expected from one in my early period of life. Having thus received some taste and knowledge of true godliness, I was immediately inflamed with so intensive desire to make progress therein that although I did not leave off other studies, yet I pursued. Then he goes on to say, after a year had elapsed, all those who came around him began to ask him questions. What we see, there's a gradual process, even though he uses the word sudden. We don't know what Calvin meant by sudden conversion. Perhaps he was using the Latin word subita, which he's writing in Latin here, to mean unpremeditated. That is, it was a surprise. That could be what the sudden means in sudden conversion, that he was surprised by what happened. Maybe that's happened to you. You've gone on in life and God at some stage of your life has begun to reveal himself to you by means of his Holy Spirit, which is what Calvin testified to, and illumined him, caused him to understand, just as has occurred in your life. In his reply to Sotoledo written in 1539, a Roman Catholic cardinal, we'll talk about him a little bit later, who was trying to woo back the citizens of Geneva to Catholicism. He may give his personal testimony. He says that he experienced a consciousness of sin at this time. Calvin was someone who was very sensitive to having offended God. And the sensitivity comes as a result of the spirit working in his heart. That's what's going on. And maybe you've had that experience too, or maybe you never have. where God has worked in your heart a sense of inadequacy before him. If I die tonight, will I go to heaven? I don't know how I possibly can because I am a sinner. Or maybe you're a believer who examines your heart on a regular basis and you realize how much sin has built up on this callous that needs to be stripped away so that our conscience might become sensitive once again to sinfulness before God. Then he says in this reply to Satellito, when, however, I had performed all these things, though I had some intervals of quiet, I was still far off from true peace of conscience. For whenever I descended into myself or raised my mind to the extreme, terror seized me, terror which no expiations nor satisfactions could cure. And the more closely I examined myself, the sharper the stings with which my conscience was pricked. This was not fun. as he went through this examination by God, so that the only solace which remained me was to delude myself by obliviousness." Well, God didn't leave him there. And God revealed himself to Calvin through his word and caused Calvin to understand that justification that is being made right with God comes as a result of what Christ has done. Justification is by faith. So true it is, he says to Satellito, that Christian faith must not be founded on human testimony, not propped up by doubtful opinion, not reclined on human authority, which is what he saw in the Roman Catholic Church. It's all propped up by the external authority. If you do these things, the church will absolve your sins, but rather engraven on our hearts by the finger of the living God so as not to be obliterated by any coloring of error. What Calvin is saying is this conviction comes from the Lord and the resolution comes from the Lord as it reveals to us the truth of how a man becomes right with God. What the other system does is it actually removes Christ as the satisfaction for sins and inserts human elements. And what Calvin needed and what we need today is this direct forgiveness of God for our sins. We need a mediator who stands between us and God, and that's the man Christ Jesus, to plead for us. A man who died on a cross for sins not his own. So, long story short, we don't know exactly when Calvin became a believer. What we do know is that he did become a believer. There's perhaps a clue as to when it happened in a simple entry in the Noyon archives where he where he signed off of the stipend that he was receiving. He logged out, so to speak. They passed it on to a new beneficiary. This happened in May 4, 1434, at a time when Calvin probably had already made his move to leave the church. 1434, that would be when Calvin was 25 years of age. And so the break was made with the Roman Catholic Church. What we see him now is a convinced reformer. Calvin made his decisions quickly. He was a very bright man. When he made his decisions, he acted quickly and decisively. He moves out. He is going now to not just be a Christian, he is going to be a reformer. He is going to be someone who actually leaves the Roman Catholic Church and leads in the Reformation movement at this early age. this process is now completed and he is now a believer. Now what brings all this to light and what makes it clear is what I'm going to call the Nicholas Copp incident. It's the time when he is forced to leave France. The day is November 1st, 1533, All Saints Day. It's the day after the 16th anniversary of Luther posting the Ninety-Five Theses. Nicholas Kopp was the rector of the University of Paris and he was a good friend of Calvin's. Calvin was with him there in Paris. Kopp was giving a lecture, not really a sermon, but a lecture at the time that he was there. In that lecture he said things that would lead people to believe that he was in agreement with the Evangelicals, with the Reformers. He said things that would put him in the Reformation camp. In France at the time, this was not a good thing. Some believe that Calvin may have even written the sermon, because after the sermon, when Nicholas Copp was threatened, Calvin was too, and they were both on their way out of town as quick as they could go to avoid being captured. Some say that Calvin left dressed as a workman. Now, the event did blow over, perhaps because of the intercession of the king's sister. who was a friend of Calvin, but this day in 1533 was the start of a wandering period for Calvin. Before this time, he was kind of a reformer in the closet, so to speak, and now he's let out, and he's able to move forward in the Reformation. And what he has to do is escape the country in order to do that. So he starts wandering. He goes from home to home. He finally arrives in Basel, Switzerland. There he tried to settle into an academic life. Part of his time of wandering was spent with a man named Louis de Dutillet, a man I don't know anything about, but evidently had a very strong library. That's why he's important in history here, because as Calvin stays with him, he begins to learn about the church fathers, Ambrose, Cyprian, Chrysostom, Tertullian, and most importantly, the great Augustine, with whom he developed a great theological bond. As you go through Calvin's life, you see what an influence Augustine had upon Calvin. Augustine lived in the fourth century. Finally, when he arrived in Basel, he applied himself. What would you do if you just escaped barely with your life and you're kind of on the run moving around? Calvin studied Hebrew. That's what we ought to do, study Hebrew. And so he does. So he can learn Hebrew. He wants to have Hebrew. Now, while he's there in Basel, and while he's studying his Hebrew, he starts writing a great work. This work is called the Institutes of the Christian Religion. But something drives him during this process in this writing, and I want to just mention this very briefly. Back in France, on October 18, 1534, and I've got this on your list, the pamphleteer Antoine Marcourt produced placards condemning the Roman Catholic Mass and had them distributed all over Paris. Now, it was not cool to be critical of the Roman Catholic Church in France in that day. It was not cool. You were in the minority if you did something like that, and you were subject to very serious consequences. One of these placards evidently made it to the ante room next to the bedroom of King Francis I. Now, this got King Francis' attention, and he realized that he needed to deal with this upstart movement within his kingdom that threatened the Roman Catholic Church, of which he was a member. It evoked a strong response. Within a month, more than 30 evangelicals in France were burned at the stake. This is serious business in those days. To be a Christian today, we might get an adverse comment or something, but to be burned at the stake is something else. And this Calvin learns about as he is in exile up in Basel. Then he learns that a friend of his, Etienne de la Forge, A personal friend of his, a Waldensian from Piedmont, had been burned on February 15th of 1535. Now, he had arrived in Basel at the beginning of January of 1535, and so he's getting news of the persecution that's going on across the border in France. And then he gets news that that persecution has actually affected one of his friends. And he is motivated. He's already motivated to write the Institutes of the Christian Religion. Now he's doubly motivated to do it, and to do it quickly. These events propelled him to get the work done, and the reason is, and he says this in his preface to the Institutes. The Institutes, by the way, look like this today. They were a lot smaller back then, but this is about 1,400, 1,500 pages here. In those days, it was probably about one-tenth of that size. But what he was going to do was vindicate what the what the reformers were doing. Because a lot of the Roman Catholics who were involved in the opposition were just just kind of reacting. They didn't have all the information they needed to understand what it is that they were fighting against. And what Calvin was doing was saying, here is what these reformers are standing for. And what he did is he laid out the first chapter on the law and the gospel with knowledge of sin and salvation. The second chapter on faith, specifically justification by faith alone. which is something the Catholic Church did not teach. The third chapter on prayer and the importance of communication between the believer and God. The fourth and fifth chapters were on the true and false sacraments. Calvin only believed in two of the Roman Catholic seven sacraments. He only believed in the Lord's Supper and baptism. The last chapter was on Christian freedom, examining how the Christian is free in matters of religion from all human invention and is bound only by the teaching of the Bible. And what he had to do was articulate this and get this work out so that people would know why these people are dying. What's going on? This is important. Ideas are important, as someone has wisely said. And the idea of the gospel is very, very important. And you need to understand what the truth is. And so he laid down the basic teachings of the Reformation so that the general public would understand what this movement was all about. In other words, what the fundamental truths of Christianity are. get back to the gospel, what the Roman Catholic Church has hidden so well. And so he articulated these things. And then to make it a little more personal, he wrote the introduction to this version of the Institutes to none other than King Francis I himself. And I read it. It's just an amazing document. Anybody with the courage of Calvin has got to get some kind of a gold star. It's unbelievable. how bold he was in telling the king what was going on. And this, O king, is what's going on in your kingdom. And you're going to be held responsible. Worthy indeed, he says, is this matter of your hearing to the king, worthy of your cognizance, worthy of your royal throne. Indeed, this consideration makes a true king to recognize himself a minister of God in governing his kingdom. But that king who is ruling over his realm does not serve God's glory, exercises not kingly rule, but brigandage or banditry. But our doctrine, that is the Reformation doctrine, must tower unvanquished above all the glory and above all the might of the world. For it is not of us, but of the living God and his Christ, whom the Father has appointed to rule from sea to sea and from rivers even to the ends of the earth. He needed to go to a school in kingly protocol, did he? To know how to speak to a king. But he communicated very clearly to the king. Long story short, Calvin finished that first version of the Institutes in the summer of 1435, handed it over to the printer, it was published in 1436. Say it with me, to God be the glory. God raises up a man and transforms him, a scholar, to do this mighty work with his pen. Next, we have the preaching and pastoral glory of God while in exile. I call this Geneva I from 1536 to 1538. Calvin finally decided that he needed a permanent place to live outside of France. He wasn't going to be able to go home anytime soon, and he chose the town of Strasbourg. Today, this is a French city, but in Calvin's day, it was culturally more German than French. Remember, Calvin does not speak German. He's very good in Latin and Greek and now in Hebrew, and of course in French, his native language, but not in German. He's going to go into some kind of a different role there. He has to go the triangular route to get there. I didn't bring a map with me, but he's up looking at it from your direction, Paris. He could go from Paris to Strasbourg. It would be basically from west to east, but he can't go there because the armies are fighting. Francis I is fighting against? the Holy Roman Empire. And so this war is going on. Say it with me, to God be the glory. What he does then has to go south to go around the conflict and then come back up. And so what was going to be a relatively short journey of about 300 miles turns out to about 577 miles. Of course, they didn't have the motorized vehicles that we have today. And so he stops in Geneva down here at the bottom of this triangle, okay? Paris down to Geneva and he's going to go back up to Strasbourg. And when he gets there, there is a man there by the name of William Farrell who has been preaching the Reformation doctrines for probably about less than a year there in Geneva trying to get a church started. He's held some debates in this city and has been very successful in doing so. Geneva was governed at the time by a council. They called it the Little Council. There was the council of 200 below them, and then there was the citizens below them. They had a complex system of checks and balances. It was a new system. They'd just broken away from the House of Savoy. All this was new. The church was new. The Protestant Reformation was new. All this is new. Farrell is seeing people come out of the Roman Catholic Church and come into the Protestant Church. This is amazing. Now, he gets up and debates in front of the city with the Roman Catholic priests. One of the general comments that the authors make here is, one author in particular, is that typically the reformers knew their Bibles a lot better than the Catholic priests did. And so when it came to a debate, it was pretty one-sided. And that is what would happen in Geneva. And the city council decided that the that the reformers won. And that they're going to start a reformed church there in Geneva. Say it with me, to God be the glory. This is amazing. This is before Calvin gets there. And so when Calvin gets there, it's just been going on a few months now, since these debates occurred, Farrell says, you know, what are you doing? Basically, I'm going to Strasbourg. You know, I'm going to go, I'm going to live a life of scholarship. I'm going to work on my books. I'm going to do writing. Good scholars do. They get tenured and they go off in a corner somewhere and write their books. That's what I want to do. And Pharaoh comes unglued. Now he was, no offense here, but he was red-headed. He was left-handed. And they say he was a fiery preacher. And he stood up in front of Calvin and pronounced a curse on Calvin for leaving them and going somewhere else. Here's the way Calvin says it. Pharaoh detained me in Geneva, not so much by counsel and exhortation as by a dreadful curse, which I felt to be as if God had from heaven laid his mighty hand upon me to arrest me. He proceeded to utter the imprecation, that's a curse, that God would curse my retirement and the tranquility of my studies, which I sought if I should withdraw and refuse to help when the necessity was so urgent. Did it communicate? Say it with me. To God be the glory. It was effective and Calvin stayed. He stayed with the Reformation there in Geneva, all for the glory of God. It was a difficult work. Can you imagine starting a church from scratch, not having anything? We've got a church constitution. We've got we've got hundreds of years of history behind us that we can look back upon and learn lessons from in terms of how churches get going. They had nothing. This was the ground floor of the Protestant Reformation. And so they had to write everything from scratch. And so they began to work, he and six, about six other ministers there in the Genevan church. They had to do all the normal duties of ministers, counseling and so forth. And they drafted up a Genevan confession to give to the church council. Because one of the things that has to be worked out here, as you can imagine, is this age old problem is what's the role of the state and what's the role of the church. in this city that has been taken by the Reformation. There are other cities where this had happened, in Bern, for example, in Strasbourg, but it just happened in Geneva. So, they have to deal with that situation. So, Calvin and Ferrell attempt to lead this by putting things down. Calvin is not that old a believer himself at this particular time. And he comes to Geneva at age 27, if you can imagine. He's one of the key leaders in the church. And they're writing all this up. One of the tensions that comes up is, how do we deal with excommunication? How do we deal with the issue of church discipline? Calvin had this strange idea that people are sinful. I don't know where he got that. But that there might be a need in the church for discipline. That people might do immoral things. In fact, in Geneva at the time, The rule of the law of the city was that a man could have only one mistress. Okay, that's the depth of the depravity that was there and they have to deal with this. And so they're dealing with how do we set up discipline. Church council, the city council, I should say, did not want to give up the right of authority in excommunication, nor did the ministers of the church. So that tension was going to build. Secondly, there was a tension about church practices. What can women wear to a wedding? That kind of thing. What kind of bread should we use at communion? Should it be unleavened or not? The city council wanted to follow the example of Bern and just do everything that that more liberal group was practicing. The ministers at Geneva did not. It all came to a head within two years, Easter 1538, when the city council directed, without their council, without their He directed that the ministers use unleavened bread in communion like the church at Bern, and the ministers refused, including Calvin and Pharaoh. In fact, they refused to serve communion to anybody that Easter day. They only served communion once a quarter, so this was a big deal. It was Easter Sunday to boot. What did the city council do? They immediately banished both Calvin and Pharaoh. They threw them out. Now, this better stay on the ground floor of church here, OK? This is getting things started. And so things go a little crazy here. Humanly speaking, this is a very unfortunate affair, could have been totally avoided. But tell me now, to God be the glory. God has a plan for Calvin, and that plan is to be expelled for a while, to grow up a little bit, OK, as he goes to a new city, goes up to Strasbourg. He might consider himself to be a failure at this point. If you're 27 and you get thrown out of a church and you're trying to do everything right, that would be a little bit discouraging. And they threw him out. And so he linked up in Strasbourg with a reformer named Martin Busser, a well-known reformer, a very gracious man, leading the ministry in that German-speaking city, as we mentioned earlier. And there was a French refugee population. Remember what's happening in France. This persecution of France is driving people out of France. And some of these refugees are ending up in Strasbourg. And this French-speaking population now forms a nucleus that Calvin can minister to in French. And so, Busser asked Calvin to take up that ministry. But Calvin, understandably, was unsure about what he should do. Busser pressed. He didn't get quite to the implications that Ferrell did, but he put very heavy pressure. And eventually, Calvin decided to stay. And it's a good thing he did. While he was there, he accomplished not only ministry there in the church, or churches, but he did four other very important things. He compiled the second edition of the Institutes. He wrote a commentary on the Book of Romans. He wrote the now famous Reply to Sottolito, which I referred to earlier. And most importantly, he met and married the woman of his life, Adelette de Bure, August 6, 1540. She was a widow who had been married to an Anabaptist. Calvin had no time for Anabaptists, but that is people who believed in re-baptism. We would be in that stream eventually. But what he did was draw the debuers into the congregation and they changed their beliefs to agree with his. Unfortunately, this man died and the widow with her two children then are there and he ends up marrying Idelet and they eventually have one child of their own. A child who dies shortly after childbirth, an infant. Calvin never has children that survive to maturity. God graciously gave him this wife and it turns out she's fairly weak and sickly too and over a period of time she moves back with him down to Geneva. They will only be married about eight and a half years when she will die. After several miscarriages and the death of this baby, then she passes away. Calvin never remarries. But it was a blessed time of his life and a real blessing for him to have been there. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the folks down in Geneva began to realize that they had made a mistake. Maybe they shouldn't have been so hasty in sending Brother Calvin away. And so they write him a letter and he's not at all willing to come. I would submit to death a hundred times rather than to the cross, which I had to daily suffer a thousand deaths. the top ten things on his list that he wanted to do. The more that time passes, he writes a month later, the more clearly do I see what a whirlpool of danger the Lord has delivered me from. In other words, I don't want to come back. But over time, he begins to understand that the will of God sometimes takes us through difficult circumstances and that we are to bear our cross through those difficult circumstances. In fact, that's the very text that came to his mind, and so on. Tuesday, September 13, 1541, he entered the city for the second time, and he was to stay there for the rest of his life. He'll die there in 1464, so some 23 years more of ministry. He was 32 years old when he returned, more mature, a little bit more patient, a little bit, hopefully, and he proposed a compromise whereby the ministers had the authority for excommunication, but they would consult with the city council. And so he did many amazing things, revised the church order, trained the children every Sunday at noon. He preached faithfully and constantly. By the way, his first sermon back there was in the Book of Acts. It was the very next verse from where he left off three years earlier when he left in 1538. And this is a guy who believes in the consecutive expository preaching. I love this guy. And so he continued to preach and preached faithfully for the rest of his life. Pharaoh was not invited back, kind of interesting, only Calvin. And so preaching was at the center of his work. When I expound the Holy Scripture, I always make this my rule, Calvin said, that those who hear me may profit from the teaching I put forward and be edified unto salvation. If I have not that affectation, if I do not procure the edification of those who hear me, I am a sacrilege. profaning God's Word. Calvin took his preaching seriously. He was a brilliant mind. He didn't preach from notes. People who saw him preach, he would just preach from the original text. An amazing mind, just an incredible mind. And so God uses him. His final project was the fifth edition of the Institutes of the Christian Religion. This is the one I just showed you. This is one we have with us today, published in 1559, still used by not just scholars, but by everyday preachers and teachers of the word. And if you want to get a copy, you can understand it. It's written in a way that anybody can understand. Calvin's life is going very well, but with every man of God, there is a defect. And Calvin had one, in my opinion. That's the matter of Servetus. And I've got to hit this. This is painful, but I've got to address it because it's the first question you're going to get if you talk to somebody who does not believe in the doctrines of grace and they want to attack John Calvin, they will attack him on the matter of Michael Servetus. Servetus was a Roman Catholic Spanish physician who had been a theological enemy of Calvin's for years. His problem in doctrine was he did not believe in the Orthodox understanding of the Trinity. He argued that Jesus was not divine and was not the eternal son of God. He denied the deity of Christ. Now, he was a Roman Catholic and this violated Roman Catholic doctrine. And so the Catholics were out to execute him because he was a heretic. He had run away. He had actually been imprisoned by the Roman Catholics and he had escaped from jail, gotten away, and for some reason, who knows why, decided to come to Geneva. knowing that Calvin, who was a Protestant, would feel exactly the same way because this is one area we share truth. And so, what do you do if you're a minister who is responsible to a church council in a reformed city like Geneva, who has a person come into your midst, who is under death threat. He's actually been sentenced in abstentia by the Roman Catholics in France. come into your congregation, knowing that you have exactly the same problem. These were tough days, by the way. Heretics got burned in those days. When I say burned, I mean burned at the stake. This was serious business. The city council, who was a little bit at odds with Calvin on other matters at this particular time, thought they would use this Servetus issue to gain some leverage with Calvin, thinking they could embarrass him a little bit. And so what they did is they delayed the process and sent a message out to other reformed cities to get their opinions about what they would do. The recommendation for excommunication was virtually unanimous from the Protestant cities. The city council then served as judges. They decided to put him to trial. And they made Calvin the prosecutor. Calvin was not unwilling in this because He had already warned Servetus, or warned others, that if Servetus came, he would not live alive, because they took this doctrine so seriously. He was condemned by the city council. He was ordered to be burned at the stake. Calvin recommended beheading, but the city council denied it. He was tried on October 20th, condemned on October 21st, and actually executed on October 26th. During this time, Calvin continued to visit Servetus. urging him to repent, but he would not. And as he died, his dying words were, and I quote, Jesus, son of the eternal God. Notice he doesn't say, Jesus, you are God. He says, Jesus, son of the eternal God, have mercy on me. In the flames, he was denying that Jesus himself was the eternal God. Now, this execution, although not performed by Calvin, but certainly with his support, he was the prosecutor. has been a major target for those who wish to attack Calvin for whatever reason. It was used as an indication of Calvin's cruelty in one of the first biographies ever written about Calvin in 1577, 13 years after the fact. It's a major subject in the 2002 book, which I read some years ago by a man you all know. It was called What Love Is This? It's an attack against Calvinism. He devotes several pages to the to the condemnation and execution of Servetus. People look at this and they say, how can this be love? How can you love somebody when you're burning them at the stake? Now, we have to be careful in judging people who are not in our times. Had Calvin not dealt seriously with serious sin in this fledgling organization or this fledgling organism, this church in Geneva, which was a fledgling movement in all of Europe, which was a fledgling movement in the world at the time, that could have been very bad for the Reformation. It also could have lowered their esteem in the eyes of the Roman Catholics who would have done the same thing. In fact, they had already condemned him to death, just were not able to do it because he escaped. So we've got to be careful about inserting ourselves into another person's time. But I will say this, my take is he should not have done it. regardless of the nature of the times. And as Calvin prepared to die one month before he died, he prayed, I didn't bring a copy of his prayer, this beautiful prayer of forgiveness, asking forgiveness from God for some sins. And I have to think that this is one of them, that he stepped too far here. Now, it's wonderful that the Bible doesn't withhold the sins of its heroes. It's also wonderful that the Reformation does not do that either. And it's all on display for everyone to see. We have to acknowledge, we have to face up to the fact that this happened. But God, nonetheless, in his grace, has used Calvin and his writings in a powerful way. It could have been that he's right and that I'm all wrong. Please understand, I'm not in those times. But if he was wrong, then God in his grace has performed a remarkable feat in enabling that work to continue to prosper. This is only the work of the Lord. Say it with me, to God be the glory. What are the results of Calvin's life? A man who lived constantly with gout in his feet, with arthritis, with hemorrhoids, with every disease, who did not have a computer, who wrote like candlelight for all those years, produced 48 volumes, numerous tracks, commentaries on all the New Testament except for the book of Revelation and the books of 2nd and 3rd John. He even wrote commentaries on some of the Old Testament as well. God has taken those works and has used them in a mighty way. As one person said, he was a tightly strung bow. He died at age 54, long before he should have died. He worked himself to death, literally. for the cause of the gospel, for the glory of Christ. The results of his work from his base in Geneva, he maintained a supply not only of French Bibles and Reformed literature, but of pastors. He supplied those pastors. Between 1555 and his death in 1564, over 100 pastors were sent. Churches sprang up in towns all over France, Orleans, Rouen, Bordeaux, Toulouse, and a dozen other towns. In 1558, Calvin said it was reckoned that there were 300,000 Protestants in this officially Roman Catholic country. The Reformation had a powerful impact on the region at the time, but it also had an impact on the rest of the world. John Calvin is the reason that many of us know about Reformed theology. When I was in high school, I wrote a report one time, a world history class. I uncovered it the other night. It was on John Calvin. I actually wrote on John Calvin when I was a senior in high school. Didn't know anything about him, didn't know anything about the Reformed faith, but what I read. But that name came down through the history books and alerted in my mind and I wrote about it. And there's a little bit of a light that went on, maybe encouraged later on when Brother Joe exposed me to the Reformed doctrines here at Colleen Bible Church some years later. Calvin has blessed the world with the glory of God. He's exalted God's glory. He's put God back in the center of religion, which is where he should be. And I would ask you this morning, if you don't know the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, I call on you today to come before him, to fall down before this glorious God and repent of your sin. Believe in the Lord Jesus that John Calvin believed in. And his life was transformed and may yours be as well. Father, we thank you so much today for what you have done with this one man's life. Lord, we pray that you will work in our lives today. Lord, that you will reveal yourself in a similar way and cause us to understand the truth of the gospel and the falsehood of these religions that crop up around us. We ask, Lord, that you will do a work of regeneration in our hearts, cause us to know new life, as you did with John Calvin. And Father, cause those of us as Christians who, unlike Calvin, eat more than one meal a day with no snacks in between, who frequently, Lord, focus upon temporal matters when we should be focused on the eternal matters, to so focus today. Lord, to you be the glory. In Jesus' name we pray.