This morning, Pastor Walton is away on duty, and so you guys are stuck with me, hopefully, today's class. This is a class where even if you haven't been here for previous classes, you're not going to be lost. It's history. We can step into any point in time, and there's fascinating stuff. Now, it doesn't mean we can step into any point in time and there's easy stuff. In fact, finding relevant things in the sixth century of church history was not the easiest task that I've been given as a pastor. And so we're gonna look at some things that happened in and around the sixth century that I think, after kind of spending all week looking at, I think will be great encouragement to us and will be very relevant to us. Before we get started, let's pray and seek the Lord's blessing. Our God in heaven, we thank you that you are building the church. Father, the gates of hell cannot prevail. Evil cannot quench your fire. And yet, as we look at the history of the church, oftentimes the greatest obstacle to the church has not been those outside, but those inside. the lukewarmness and the complacency of our hearts are really the thing that most astound us that you have built the church over the last 2000 years. And you have shown your great power in, through and despite sinful man. Father, we pray that as we look at the history of the church that you would increase our confidence in what you're doing and that the beauty and power of Jesus Christ would be all consuming to us. So Father, help us to understand and connect the dots between events of almost 1,500 years ago and the relevance of our lives today. In Jesus' name, amen. A few weeks ago, I came across a quote, and I shared it with a number of people in this church by John Piper. Just a show of hands, how many of y'all are familiar with John Piper? Good person for us to be familiar with in a lot of ways. Piper does not mince words, and so here's what he said. There is a great gulf between the Christianity that wrestles with whether to worship at the cost of imprisonment and death, and the Christianity that wrestles with whether the kids should play soccer on Sunday morning. There's a great gulf between the Christianity that wrestles with whether worship at the cost of imprisonment and death and the Christianity that wrestles with whether the kids should play soccer on Sunday morning. You get what he's saying, right? This is a picture of how the church has changed. Looking at the first five centuries of the church that we've seen so far, what we've seen is to be a Christian was effectively to sign your own death warrant. There was no such thing as nominal Christianity for the most part. If you said, I am a Christian, you understood that you were following Jesus, not just in his footsteps, but you were following him on the path to the cross. Suffering was expected for the first five centuries of the church. And it ought to be because Jesus has told us we should expect it. How did we get from there to where we are today? where the greatest conflicts, the greatest sacrifices we're willing to make don't have to do with whether or not we're willing to go to jail for Christ, it's whether or not we're willing to let our kids miss soccer practice for church. Whether or not we're willing to make small sacrifices day after day. What does it reveal about the state of the church that Piper can say what he said there? What do y'all think? Explain that. Good. What else would you say about that quote and really not so much that quote but that reality of life today that we long for an easy Christianity that costs us nothing? the entire book of Deuteronomy is behind that idea that he's quoting and that we see in our society every day, which is, Moses says right before they go to take the promised land and all the victories are gonna come to them, if you remain faithful, then I will continue to bless you and be your God, but if you get comfortable and you rejoice in your own affluence, I'm paraphrasing here, and you, Great observation. Other thoughts? with the saints and churches on Sunday is kind of just seen as a suggestion. Marsha, what? I'm interested to analyze that thought of the gulf. I just don't know what is the gulf that exists, because there's people who are saved on both ends, right? There's people who are genuinely regenerate on both ends. But the real threat isn't violence, it's not, you know, He always said, your greatest barrier to your desiring Christ is your desire for comfort. And the things in our lives and our parts of the world, I guess you can make a dichotomy between east, west, people in China, the church in China, us in church in America, it's not necessarily geographic, but there is some geographic element to it, that there are parts of the world, because of our affluence and peace that we've enjoyed over the years, have sunk to a level to where our crisis is And our willingness to risk much is directly correlated with how valuable Christ is to us. I mean, so this is just symptomatic of far bigger problems. And the great problem for us is that, for the church in America, for the church in the West, probably in our own hearts, that we love our comfort, ease, we love acceptance into society more than we love Jesus. And that's why so few of us really know what it is to really sacrifice and suffer for the sake of the gospel. You know, if we were to summarize or break church history down into two categories, we could say this, persecution has killed its thousands, but prosperity has killed its tens of thousands. And that's what we see. As the church gets more prosperous, It is less vibrant. As it is more accepted in the world, and that's where we're transitioning in the sixth century, is the church becomes the most powerful institution on the face of the earth. It leads to great complacency and indifference. And in a lot of ways, we are riding that same wave of complacency and indifference. But that is not biblical Christianity. Turning your Bibles to Luke 9 for a moment. I want you to see what Jesus thinks of easy, shallow, complacent Christianity. And you're going to see it beyond the shadow of a doubt. Luke 9, 23 to 26, and he said to all, if anyone would come after me, Let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself? For whoever is ashamed of me and my words, of him will the Son of Man be ashamed when he comes in glory and the glory of the Father and of the holy angels. Now there is a kind of a play off of this passage that has accepted its way into normal communication today. And that is when people say, well, that's just my cross to bear, right? So what might somebody be talking about today when they say, that's just my cross to bear? Well, I mean, it might be a physical affliction, it might be a difficult spouse or other family relationship, but that's sort of the height of our suffering. When Jesus is saying to take up your cross daily, he is saying to follow me is to take onto yourself this instrument of shame. this instrument of destruction, this instrument of suffering daily, voluntarily. He's saying, if you have signed up to follow me, then you have signed up for a life of willful, shameful suffering in the eyes of the world, and it will cost you everything. Isn't that amazing? Salvation's totally free, and it costs you everything. It will cost you everything. but it is in losing your life that you find it. We need to heed the call of Jesus here. Our Lord's life was dominated by suffering and he has called you to a life with a cross. This is easy to forget in our soft sort of flabby life in the Western church. The world beckons us to believe that we can simultaneously live life to the glory of God and also live lives of utter self-indulgence. But what if it costs? Jesus never says what if it costs, he says it will cost. All who desire to live a godly life will be persecuted. That's interesting, Jesus says all there. Because what we want is a caveat where we don't have to suffer for the sake of the gospel. Because suffering sounds awful, doesn't it? We love our comfort. But if you take up your cross daily, if you speak the gospel publicly, if you live life intentionally to the glory of God in a world that is repulsed by Him, it will cost you. Now, the offense ought not be you, right? Sometimes people think they're suffering for Jesus' sake, but it's actually because they're jerks. there ought to be a sweetness. Going back to what JD talked about last week with Augustine, the thing that drew him to the preacher that he sat under, I think it was Anselm, the thing that drew him, Augustine to Anselm was Anselm's kindness. Anselm's overflowing with the fruit of the spirit. So he was not the offense, but the gospel is an offense. Why is the gospel necessarily offensive? What about the gospel is necessarily offensive to the world? You need a savior. You need help. You're not okay, right? You are bound for hell. You have lived your life as a rebel against the sovereign God of the universe. You have sought to uproot his kingdom. It demands change. Absolutely, absolutely. It hits us right in the complacency. I wonder, I'm not gonna ask for a show of hands, but how many of us know people who have truly suffered for the sake of the gospel? I know some. It doesn't quite look like suffering did in the first, second, third century, but I know some who, because of their stand for the Lord Jesus, have truly suffered. But I know far more. who profess to be Christians and yet it has cost them nothing because they want it to cost them nothing. We are, if we are proclaiming the gospel of Christ, as Paul says in 2 Corinthians 2.16, we will be the stench of death to those who are perishing. And there is nothing we can do to change that. Such an aversion to costly discipleship has infiltrated every nook and cranny of the Christian church. Just think about how the church does evangelism today. In many cases, hopefully not in our case, but in many cases, normal evangelism talks about God loves you and has a purpose for your life. Is that evangelism? What's the full evangelistic message? Yeah. Yeah. Sin and hell and death are essential to our message. No wonder people don't think very highly of Christ because they don't understand what he's come to do for them. They don't understand what it cost him. They think, we're pretty good, I just need a little behavior modification and all will be well, but he should be pretty happy to have me on his team. I think that is the normative Christian experience in America today. You know what's not normal? Is to mention in our gospel appeals, Jesus Christ bids you come and die. What was the message to the Apostle Paul? What was the evangelistic message to the Apostle Paul? Go and show him what? how much he must suffer for the sake of my name. We tend to leave that part out. We do a little bait and switch in our evangelism. We talk about the free offer, but we do not tell people it will cost you everything. And that has so affected the church today. Because we don't understand, many do not understand that the call to follow Jesus Christ is a call to sacrificial discipleship. Spurgeon, I think, said it this way. Charles Spurgeon said, why should we expect to float to heaven on flowery beds of ease when our Savior went there on a cross? Why do we expect a life of ease when our Savior endured a cross for our sakes? Dietrich Bonhoeffer is helpful here and he understood, he had a lot of wonky things with his theology. A lot of wonky stuff, but he did understand the cost of discipleship. The cross is laid on every Christian. The first Christ's suffering, which every man must experience, is the call to abandon the attachments of this world. It is that dying of the old man which is the result of his encounter with Christ. As we embark upon discipleship, we surrender ourselves to Christ in union with His death. We give our lives to death. Thus it begins. The cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise God-fearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die. It may be a death like that of the first disciples who had to leave home and work to follow him, or it may be a death like Luther's who had to leave the monastery and go out into the world, but it is the same death every time, death in Jesus Christ, the death of the old man at his call. That's the normative Christian life, that we are daily dying to self, that we may live to the glory of God. And if we are not constantly dying to self, we will not live to the glory of God. We will seek comfort and ease. We will seek to find a third way of Christianity that gives us all the benefits, but none of the costs. Many years ago, missionary James Calvert and other missionaries were boarding a ship for Fiji. Now, Fiji sounds really nice today. Back in those days, it was a haven for cannibals. The captain of the ship laughed at him when they told him they were going to Fiji, and he said to them, you'll surely die over there. And Calvert says, Captain, we died before we started. That ought to be the mindset of every Christian. that we have died to self that we may live all of life to the glory of God. I say all of that as background as we come into the sixth century because we're reaching this point in church history where we probably don't know a whole lot that happened. We probably don't know a lot of the characters of church history. And part of the reason for that is the church is growing very comfortable in the world. The church is trying to pave a way of discipleship that has no cost to it. The church is exerting influence, not the weaponry of words, sacraments, and prayer, but political influence. This is leading us into what's known as the Dark Ages. They were spiritually dark. There's a lot of things about the Dark Ages. And in all honesty, the next few centuries of church history are going to be hard for me because there's a lot that we don't know. There's a lot of things that happened that we don't know when they happened. But we are transitioning by getting to the 6th century into an age of prosperity and comfort. in the church. A lot of that goes back to Constantine. As Constantine tried to make Christianity a legal, or did make Christianity the accepted religion of the Roman Empire, you came to a place where you could be a Christian and it would cost you nothing. In fact, it would cost you more not to be a Christian, culturally at least. And so suddenly you have the advent of something called cultural Christianity or nominal Christianity. What do we mean by that? What's that? Yeah, nominal would be in name only. What is cultural Christianity? The American South in a lot of ways. Cultural Christianity is I live in a Christian culture and so I'm gonna accept, I'm gonna adopt the norms and the customs of this culture because this is what everyone does. But you know, my heart has not been enthralled with Jesus Christ. So as soon as these things stop being the cultural norm, I'm gonna stop following them. We are in the midst of that transition today. So how many people can you think of in your own life that 15 years ago were committed to biblical morality because it was normative in America? Just think of definition of marriage. And yet they have utterly changed over the last 10 or 15 years because the culture has shifted. And Jesus Christ is not worth being at odds with the culture in their eyes. That's what cultural Christianity looked like, and that's what's being created by the sixth century, is a Christianity that is governed by the times. It's a Christianity that people are sort of checking the winds of culture. In whichever way the culture is moving, that's the way Christendom is going to move as well. We're going to look at four things, four events in the 6th century. First is the fall of Rome. actually happened a little bit before, but we're gonna start seeing the effects of it in culture in the sixth century. We're gonna look at monasticism and Benedict. We're gonna look at Gregory and Roman Catholicism and the papacy, and then we're gonna talk about two missionaries. So we're gonna end on a good note, I think, but we're gonna hit some hard things along the way. So let's talk first about the fall of Rome. So official date was 476 AD. Rome falls, it's strange. So how did Rome fall? Well, initially, when Rome would defeat a people, they would oftentimes completely wipe them out. But over time, what they started to do was sort of, as their military was getting weaker, as they grew more comfortable and prosperous, Rome started to say, well, you can stay here, but don't cause any problems for us. Well, a lot of people assimilated into Roman culture, but many will not. And so you started seeing, by the fifth century, people like the Visigoths and others that have been entrenched into Roman culture saying, well, why aren't we in charge? We can be great here. And so you have pockets within Rome that are starting to rise up. And Rome doesn't have the, they've grown lazy, they've grown comfortable through the years, and they don't have the infrastructure to defend themselves. One of the questions becomes, how will the church survive without the Holy Roman Empire? And the answer is, just fine. The church will be fine. The church is not dependent on any governmental system. We do not trust in princes or chariots. Our help is in the name of the Lord. And so the church can thrive. We see this today. Can the church thrive in capitalism? Sure. Can it thrive in communism? Sure. It is over and above any governmental approach. And so the church does not need the Holy Roman Empire, and Rome falls. And you've got all these institutions or these people groups within Rome, and they're vying for power. And I'm not going to get into that too much. But what's fascinating is the church isn't really hindered at all. It thrives. It's the only institution that grows through the fall of Rome. And what's happening is actually God has seems to have strategically placed people in positions of leadership where they're able to have influence. Now some of that influence I think is going to become, is pretty misunderstood as to the role of the church. But one of the things when you study church history, and this is just an encouragement to those of you who are married to unbelievers. You see women, godly Christian women, having tremendous influence upon their pagan husbands. We saw it last week, moms having influence on their sons, so you have Augustines, you have others growing up under the influence of a godly mom. Here's just a fascinating story. There's an important king of the Franks named Clovis, and he's married, and it was an arranged marriage, and he's married to this beautiful, cultured, aristocratic Christian woman. And from all counts, she was a virtuous woman, very commendable. And she's been witnessing to her husband. So her husband's trying to make sense out of this. And we've got Clovis's prayer. And I just want you to hear kind of how he's trying to reconcile his paganism and Christianity. I like the candor of it. The prayer itself is very flawed. He says, O Jesus Christ, you whom my wife maintains to be the Son of the living God, you who graciously give help to those in trouble and victory to those who trust you, in faith I beg for the glory of your help. If you will give me victory over my enemies and if I may have proof of the miraculous power with which those devoted to your name say they've experienced, then I'll put my faith in you and be baptized in your name. I've called on my own gods, but I see all too clearly they have no intention of helping me. I therefore cannot believe they have any power, for they do not come to the rescue of those who trust in them. And I now call on you. I want to believe in you, but first I need to be saved from my foes." He wins the battle. He's baptized. Whether he was truly converted, we don't know, but we see the influence there of a godly Christian wife over her pagan husband. Rome's fall really isn't hindering the church. What happens, I know it's not fun to think about, what happens if America ceases to be? From an eternal standpoint, how is the church affected? The church will never perish, her dear Lord to defend, to God sustain and cherish will be with her to the end. We see it in the fall of Rome, and it's easy to feel like, well, if America wasn't here, if America's not who we are, then how will the church survive? And the answer is just fine. Just fine. The danger was not the fall of Rome. The danger was the prosperity that the church actually comes into at this point. There's just comfort and complacency. And the church really has two responses to it. And one of them is monasticism. Do you all know what monasticism is? It's the mentality of life where if you really want to serve God, you've got to go into the monastery. If you really want to do something for the Lord, you have to go into a sacred position. So we're going to start really seeing the sacred-secular dichotomy. So that explains why by the 15th and 16th century, if you want to be useful to God, the only way you can be useful to God is to be in full-time vocational service. So, me, I'm real useful to God. You guys, not so much. You who are just raising children and being faithful church workers, not so much, at least in the Roman Catholic worldview. Now, we know that is patently false, that you can do any lawful job to the glory of God, right? There are certain jobs Christians can't do. Can we understand that? But you can do any lawful job to the glory of God. You can do that as much as I can do that. So you can be as faithful as a school teacher and glorifying to God as a school teacher as I can be as a pastor. But the mentality is starting to arise in the early church that if we want to really be faithful, we've got to get away from the world and go into monasteries. And so what you start to see, really third, fourth, fifth century, but it's kind of being canonized by the sixth century, is people saying, I wanna be useful to God and therefore I'm gonna go move out into the desert and live by myself for the rest of my life. Oftentimes, we saw it with Augustine, we saw it with Chrysostom a couple weeks ago, oftentimes the mentality is, I am so wracked and plagued by lust that I need to just go live by myself and not see another woman. That's what the monastic movement is creating, is people who are living out the Christian life in solitude. And we're gonna give an assessment of that in a couple minutes, but we need to meet this guy named Benedict of Nursia. How many of you have heard of him before? Okay, a couple. How many of you have ever heard of a Benedictine monk? So you've heard of Benedict of Nursia. This is those who followed Benedict's approach The Benedictines, he started a community called Monte Cassino in 529, and life is focused on prayer, work, and we'll talk about what work was, worship, and learning. And so Benedictine monks would form a monastery, and the goal of it was to be completely economically self-sustaining. So you really don't have to have interaction with the outside world. It's just however many monks are there in that monastery. One person, one monk would be elected as the abbot, and all the rest of the monks were to serve him with unquestioned obedience. Let's see, a typical day here. Four and a half hours a day for prayer, about seven hours of work, that included seven worship services a day. Seven hours of Bible study and training, and about eight hours for sleep. What's missing there? Do what? Playing soccer. Food, all right, good. I'm sure it's built in somewhere. Right. Yes. Has God called us to live the Christian life out in solitude, cut off from the rest of the world? What's it look like? What's God's call look like for us? If not solitude in a monastery? Yeah. Yeah. You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Oh yeah, Jesus, we can hide it. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations. I mean, this is really repudiating the call of Jesus Christ to be a disciple-maker. Let's give our assessment of it. What do we think of this? Well, certainly, it sounds good. It sounds like a good life of devotion. Oftentimes, it was accompanied by asceticism. What's asceticism? The tangible things, the face, smell, light, all that kind of stuff, those physical things in and of themselves. So I need to punish and deprive myself. Is that God's desire that we would simply deprive ourself of good things? Is that holiness? I think God's desire is that we would enjoy his good gifts and praise him for it, you know? Here's the thing, you can strip me of all my earthly goods, I'll still find something to idolize. You can take everything away from me and I'll still idolize myself. So cutting myself off from the world actually accomplishes nothing. God has not called us to do that. God has called us to enjoy his good gifts and give thanks to him for them. I would argue that while there were good intentions behind this approach to life, it is the exact opposite approach that Christians ought to be taking. You know, if we ever reach a point where you're at the church four and five nights a week for different things, I think we've failed. I think, when would you be in your neighborhood? When would you be having people over to the home? You know, there ought to be a major aspect of the Christian life that is engaging with the world. And so it's tempting, it's tempting to retreat from the world. That's what monasticism aimed to do, and that's still going today. So what's the name of the, There's a monastery in Moncks Corner, Mepkin Abbey. Did you tell me about it? Somebody here told me about it. There's a monastery there, and they're benedictine, so it's very much this approach to life. I've never been, so I don't know. But I read a little bit about it this week. It's the idea that to serve God, we have to be completely cut off from the world, and I think that is patently false. All right, let's move on. Another way the church aimed to deal with the world was through Roman Catholicism and the garnering of political power through the papacy. So prior to the fall of Rome, the church is under the Roman Empire. But with the Roman Empire falling, the church becomes the most powerful institution on the face of the earth. Prior to this, you had a Bishop of Rome who was a leader of the church, but you really didn't have anybody taking the name of Pope. Now what is, well, let's say it this way. Does the Bible prescribe a Pope? What do you think? He is the head of the church. One of the nicknames or other names for the Pope is the Pontifex Maximus. What does that mean? Literally, the great bridge builder, right? We understand it idiomatically as the high priest. That's strange. Didn't Paul tell Timothy something about a mediator? There is one mediator between God and man. Who is it? the Lord Jesus Christ. But what you have is a vacuum of power after the fall of Rome, and this office of Pope rises up and becomes really probably the most powerful man on the face of the earth. The first Pope, in terms of the way we think of it, is a man named Gregory, or Gregory the Great. So if you were to drive to Bluffton, you'll pass Gregory the Great Catholic Church. It's a quasi-religious, quasi-political position. Much of Gregory's life, and he's a fascinating character, in a lot of ways solid Christian attributes, in other ways very problematic stuff, but much of Gregory's life is spent as a politician. So he's brokering peace treaties with foreign invaders. And here's what he does, all right? If you want to be at peace, if we're gonna work a peace treaty here, you need to be baptized. You and your whole tribe need to be baptized. Is that a good thing? Well, it depends on what baptism means, right? J.D. did a great job last week with Augustine. Great character. One of the things we didn't get into is probably one of the biggest shortcomings of Augustine's theology and the theology that's starting to arise in the Catholic Church in the fourth and fifth and sixth centuries. So we love Augustine's view of salvation by grace alone through faith alone. We love a lot of other things, but one of the things Augustine and many others in this age got wrong was their sacramentology, what they understood about the sacrament. So let's talk a minute about salvation. This will help understand why you've got mass baptisms being done by force, because we're thinking, how in the world does that make sense, that we would want to compel people to be baptized? Here's a summary of Roman Catholic sacramentalism. And by the way, a year and a half ago, I was deeply entrenched in a debate over Catholic doctrine. It went on for months. So I studied Catholic doctrine a lot, because I never want to be guilty of setting up straw men. What's a straw man? What is that? Yeah, easy to knock down, right? It's hollow. So I went to the greatest source, I think, of what Roman Catholicism teaches, which is the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church. It's an incredible document with about 2,000 questions and answers. So let's go to the catechism and just talk about what Roman Catholicism teaches, because I don't want to misrepresent things. Let's let them speak for themselves. The first thing is baptism. In Roman Catholic sacramentology, baptism actually wipes out original sin. To be baptized is to have original sin washed away. What is original sin? Yeah, it's our natural innate sin problem. And so the idea is baptism wipes it out. So, Catholic Catechism, the baptized have put on Christ. Through the Holy Spirit, baptism is a bath that purifies, justifies, and sanctifies. Ex operae operato is the mentality, it was the Latin term about the sacraments. In their working, they work. So to be baptized in the Roman Catholic Church is actually to wash away original sin. Some people then would refrain from being baptized until their deathbed, right? That's a great idea, isn't it? As long as you know when you're gonna die. Well, so what happens if You've got original sin wiped away, but the problem is, you're still a sinner. Well, Roman Catholicism distinguishes between venial sins and mortal sins. Venial sins are sins that you can sort of do, and your grace increases, but it's not killed. Mortal sins, you have a whole other problem. Mortal sins will actually steal your salvation in a sense. So let's look at, well, so the question is, how do we deal with ongoing sin? Well, we deal with ongoing sin through the mass, through what we would call communion, but it is not what we are practicing in communion in the Lord's Supper. Listen to this, is the blessed Eucharist, the Lord's Supper, a sacrament only? The blessed Eucharist is not a sacrament only, it is also a sacrifice. That is from the lips of Rome itself. In the mass, Jesus is being what? Resacrificed. If you ever go to a Roman Catholic church, and I would urge you not to altogether, but if you go and mass is being served and you are invited to participate, please don't. Because you are actually saying Jesus' work upon the cross was inadequate. that when Jesus cried out, it is finished, he was actually lying. There's still more work to be done. So let's see here. For what ends is the sacrifice of the mass offered? It's offered for four ends. To give supreme honor and glory to God. We can get on with that. To thank him for all his benefits. We can get on for that. Third, to satisfy God for our sins and to obtain the grace of repentance. To satisfy God for our sins. as if there is remaining wrath that Jesus did not satisfy in his once for all death upon the cross. So here's the mentality that's arising in Roman Catholicism, is that Jesus, and they would never say this of course, but it's what's communicated in their theology, Jesus' work upon the cross was not sufficient. This is why when you see a Roman Catholic crucifix, what's on that crucifix? Jesus is still hanging there. because the work is not finished. And this is what is becoming normative in Roman Catholic doctrine by the sixth century, and that's why you see Gregory baptizing people in mass in groups like this. Oh, by the way, what if you didn't do enough in this life to offset your sins? What if you didn't refill with enough grace through the sacraments? to offset the sins you've committed. Yeah, so Gregory comes up with an idea, purgatory. If you were to read, and I don't have it with me, if you were to read the Catholic catechism as to the proof text for purgatory, whoever wrote them has tortured the scriptures to get those texts to say purgatory. The idea of purgatory is that we have not fully been purged of our sins. and therefore we must suffer for some time in an intermediate state that is neither fully held nor is it heaven. There is a degree of suffering to purge our sins out of us. Now what does that say about the work of Jesus Christ? It's inadequate. Jesus paid it all, no, Jesus paid a lot of it, but I'm gonna have to pay with a few thousand years in purgatory as well. It's an absolute slap in the face to the glory of God in Jesus Christ. It makes him out to be a liar. But that was Gregory's solution. And so what you have by the 6th century with Gregory, with Roman Catholic sacramentology, is all the seeds that are there for the corruptions. They're going to come to full bloom by the 1500s when Luther hears Johann Tetzel traveling from town to town saying, when a coin in the coffer rings, your mom from purgatory springs. Indulgences weren't, they didn't come yet in the time of Gregory. Gregory's just saying, you know, if you haven't purged all your sins through the sacraments, you're gonna have to spend some time in purgatory. Indulgences come about later to say, well, how do we get, how do we kind of speed that up? Here's where it gets really offensive. Tom was a super guy. He was a real, he was a true saint. He was so good, he did more than enough good works for himself. Tom has leftover good works. Now David's got a real problem. So we can buy some of Tom's leftover good works from the Treasury of Merit and apply them to David's account. We call those indulgences. You can still buy those online today. to confer grace that makes us savable, I think, but doesn't actually accomplish our salvation. That's what I would think. Sure. Yeah, so can you be a Catholic and truly be saved? I would say yes. Can you be a Catholic who knows the plain teachings of the Catholic church and still be saved? Now that to me would be a much greater struggle. The vast majority of people that are in Roman Catholic churches week after week probably have some hybrid of Roman Catholic theology and Billy Graham's crusade preaching. And they could not define what they believe as a Roman Catholic church. These are the things that are showing up in seed form by the 6th century. And they will come to fruition by the 1500s, leading to the Reformation. Let's talk about world missions for just a couple of minutes. This is the one kind of encouraging thing out of the 6th century, is you have people for the first time starting to think about the gospel beyond their own local setting. Right? For 500 years, they've really just been trying to figure out, how do we survive? How do we get by? And now you have, for some of the first time since the apostles, you have people thinking about going with the gospel. And so, Patrick, well, let me talk about missions for a second. What does the word missions mean? It comes from Latin. What does it mean? Sent. Yeah. So I think the basic text behind world missions, in terms of the terminology of it, would be John 20, 21. As the Father has sent me, Jesus Christ is the ultimate missionary coming from heaven to earth, so I am sending you. And then you put that into the Great Commission and Acts 1, 8 and other places. Now, Patrick actually lived in the 5th century, so he's a little bit anachronistic here. Who was he? Well, what country do we associate with Patrick? Do you know what Irish people think about our St. Patrick's Day celebrations where we dye rivers red, I mean green, and people get really drunk? They think that is super strange, just to be clear there. So Patrick was Irish. Now, Patrick wasn't Irish, he was actually British. He was born into a Christian family, but did not grow up as a faithful Christian. As a teenager, Irish raiders came in and took him in slavery to Ireland. He was there for six years and the Lord did a great work in his heart. And so upon escaping Ireland, he came back to Britain. He claimed to have a dream in which God called him to return to Ireland to convert the pagans there. There's a lot of legends about Patrick. What are some of the legends about him that are kind of magical and larger than life? He expelled all the snakes from Ireland. No. Actually, it's noted historically from the third century that there was a strange lack of snakes in Ireland. So he's not responsible for that. He did not defeat the Loch Ness Monster in Scotland, as some have said. He actually probably did not write that wonderful hymn known as St. Patrick's Breastplate. Sorry to crush any hopes and dreams there. He probably did not use the shamrock as an illustration for the Trinity. And we would all say, amen. Good. That's a bad illustration. There's no record that he did that. He actually, I think, had healthy Trinitarian theology. It doesn't seem like he did any of those things. What he did was probably far greater. He carried the gospel to many, and thousands were converted through his ministry. He evangelized in cities and the countryside. He was a man, according to his one biographer, who was soaked in the Bible. He was soaked in the Bible, and what it did was it gave him a missionary mandate that he needed to go forth with the gospel. Really, one historian says, as far as our history can tell us, he's the first person after the apostolic age who is really missions-minded. There's probably some that we don't know about that just discreetly went to the nations, but we don't have a common practice of that until Patrick. This is his legacy. I'm going to summarize his biographer. A pious and zealous desire to see the Great Commission fulfilled. even among the very same Irish who had once made him their slave. So he read Matthew 21, Acts 1, Great Commission. And for him, the ends of the earth was to go to Ireland. Columba of Iona. Potentially, he was one of the converts of the ministry of Patrick. He was a missionary to the Scots. He's very interesting. We don't know almost anything about his theology, but we know that he had a great passion for the spread of the gospel, and it drove him to the nations. It drove him particularly to Scotland. And through men like Columba and Patrick, even though Rome is crumbling and it should seem like the church is going to fall apart, God is actually using it for the spread of the gospel. Let me read a quote by J.C. Ryle here. Ryle's another one that if you've never read him, he is such an encourager. And at times, he'll make you very uncomfortable with complacency. He says, nothing can altogether overthrow and destroy the church. Its members may be persecuted, oppressed, imprisoned, beaten, beheaded, and burned. but the true church is never altogether extinguished. It rises again from its afflictions. It lives on through fire and water. When crushed in one land, it springs up in another. The Pharaohs, the Herods, the Nero's have labored in vain to put down this church. They slay their thousands and then pass away to go their own place. The true church outlives them all and sees them buried each in his turn. The church is an anvil that has broken many a hammer in this world and will break many a hammer still. The church is a bush which is often burning and yet is not consumed. Praise God. Friends, let us not be content with complacent Christianity that lives for comforts and will give nothing up for the sake of the gospel. Those who have given up for the sake of the gospel, those whose gospel zeal has driven them to the ends of the earth or to the end of their street to witness, those are the people through whom God has built His church. Let's pray together. Lord, guard us from complacency. We know there is something in all of our hearts that love comfort. We love to be loved. We long to be accepted. We bristle at the thought of being strange in the eyes of the world. And we ask, O God, that you would teach us to turn away from that and turn to the Lord Jesus Christ, to trust Christ, to follow Him. not simply in his ethics and his morality, not simply in the hope we have of the gospel, but I pray that as our king, we would follow him even to the cross. Teach us to so cherish Jesus Christ that we would be content to follow him no matter what it may cost us. We ask this in Jesus' name, amen.