The National Center for Family Integrated Churches welcomes Dan Ford with the following message entitled, The History of the Public Worship from the time of the early church to the Reformation. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here and talk on the subject of the worship of our living God. It's the greatest subject that you can imagine because that's our purpose here on earth is to worship him, adore him, and serve him. Saint Augustine of Hippo is regarded as perhaps the greatest theologian of the first millennium of the faith, that is in the post-apostolic times certainly.

And he wrote a very important book, The City of God. And he wrote other books, his Confessions and others that were full of the compassion and passion he had for the worship of God, which was indicative of early worshipers. This is the first English edition, 1610, of Augustine's work, The City of God, and it greatly affected England. He describes what the city of God is, the city of God on earth, and of course he ends his book on Where Were Your Head Into the Glory, The City of God, The ultimate city of God in heaven. In Book 22, so it's of one volume of many books, Chapter 29 of Book 22, he describes and begins to describe this celestial city.

And he says, we must remember how great a man it was who said, now we see through a glass dimly but then face to face and he's of course quoting scripture in the apostle Paul who clearly had an image of worship here on earth as well as look forward to that celestial city. Augustine observed that day, that great day when we will worship God face to face, such is the current vision of the holy angels, he says. And we already begin to belong to those angels here on earth with whom we shall enjoy that holy and most delightful city of God. And I love that vision. We worship the God here that we are going to worship in completion fully face to face there.

Augustine goes on, how great shall be the expressions of joy which shall be tainted with no evil, which shall lack no good, which shall afford leisure to praise God, who shall then be our all in all. And I love that exposition, the theology behind that, but the reality of heart that is in this theologian's mind about the subject of worship. And that evokes us to be like the early church, to worship God the way those who are somewhat closer to the apostles worship God. Christians early on knew that worshiping God was the most blessed occupation you could have this side of eternity because God commands it from all our heart, our soul, and our strength here on earth. And that will be our occupation, as Augustine says, when we see him face to face.

In fact, Augustine says, we'll lay aside all other employments. All the organs that serve us in various functions here, he said, will be served to worship God. So we'd better get used to it and understand it here, at least have working knowledge of it on this side of eternity, because it's going to be our employment forever and ever. He represents therefore the aspirations of the early church, looking to God, and if we know anything about the early history of the church, it was great opposition to the worship of God during the first, particularly three centuries of the church, for sure when the church was persecuted on that very subject. Today we're going to look at this glorious subject in the first centuries, that is, take a little look at how the apostles planted it, somewhat what the Lord himself said about the worship of God, and then the post-apostolic age, and we're going to cover that territory through some of the corruptions of the worship of God that took place after the era of persecution all the way to the eve of the Reformation.

And by the eve of the Reformation, there was a great dearth or lack of true worship. There was a lot of superstition. There was a lot of falsehood. There was a lot of false doctrine, false practices. And there wasn't that intimacy in worship at all that we find Augustine speaking of some centuries before.

One seminarian who was of the Roman Catholic faith told me to look at what I call the corruptions of worship at the eve of the Reformation. He said, look at it this way. Originally with the apostles, worship was like an acorn. It was un-sprouted and unadorned. But now it's grown in the church of Rome into a mighty oak tree full of glory and to be seen by all.

And I replied, No, it rather looks as in the words of another medieval theologian, Thomas Aquinas, who looked at the treasuries of the Vatican and said to Pope Innocent IV, the day is past for the church to say, silver and gold have I none. Thomas Aquinas says, and the day is also past when she can say to the paralytic, take up your bed and walk. Because then the church glorifying itself and robbing God of the glory, it robbed people of understanding of the glory of God and therefore it lost its virtue. So the virtue of the church and the worship of God go hand in hand and we need to understand that about our worship. If we are going to have virtue before God, we need to know that we do worship Him and worship Him His way.

Again, something that was lost prior to the Reformation and something that was revitalized at the time of the Reformation. Therefore, the Reformation also is something we need to know very much because that brings us back to the first principles of many things. Sola Christos, Sola Deo Gloria, as well as how to worship God alone. That is the right God with the right heart and the right modes of worship. The church has left its heart of worship, that heart of worship that it had early on.

One of the earliest hymns that's recorded, perhaps the earliest known hymn, is Glorious and Excelsius. It dates back to the first three centuries of the church. This is a 1500s printing of that one of the first, if not the first, printing of glory in excelsis. And it's glory to God in the highest. And if you understand the theology, of course this is a paraphrase of the Gospel of Luke, but how controversial that would be at a time when you were required to only worship at approved temples, to worship only at approved places and state authorized places of worship in approved temples, in approved manners by Rome.

And also, by the way, they required you all approved religions in Rome, allowed for and required emperor worship as well. They all incorporated that, and that's what made the church distinctive. The church of Jesus Christ worshiped the jealous God, a God who would not show or share his glory with anyone. Therefore they insisted at great cost then their obligation, their duty to worship the right God and him only. Of course, they knew the Old Testament.

They knew what had gotten the Israelites in so much trouble when they worshiped other gods, and they weren't going to make that mistake. Here we have a table, a chart, if you will, fully illustrated, printed in 1570. And it's a table of the first persecutions of the primitive church during the heathen tyranny of Rome. It's a chart that comes out of Fox's Book of Martyrs. This is the first edition that included this particular chart dated 1570, and it shows a sweeping array of the various persecutions and martyrdoms of the early church during the first three centuries under the heathen tyranny of Rome.

And it mentions the primitive church. And this is an important part of our understanding of what Reformation and anything is. The idea of the primitive church, the idea of something being primitive to us means crude and backwards. What it meant until a couple hundred years ago was the prime thing. The basic.

Primitive means the best you can get. The idea there was the early church had the best of worship you can get because they got it from the apostles themselves. So when the Reformers, and you'll read this all the time in the writings of the Reformers and the Puritans in particular, they talked about the primitive church. They talked about going back to purity in these things to understand what God would have us do. The idea of progressive Worship is alien from the presupposition that the apostles in Christ gave us the best in the beginning.

So the best we can do to reform ourselves then is to go back to the primary things. And this is what the Reformation was about, was to get back to that. So this is a product of the very early English Reformation, but it goes back to lauding what the early martyrs stood for, and that's true worship. And that was the cause that caused so many to be put to death. The fact that they could not burn incense to the emperor.

They could not even tendentially associate him with the deity without disgracing the god who was a jealous god who they worshiped alone. It cost many, many thousands of early Christians their lives. But that kept the church largely pure in the early ages because it drove them, drove the bride of Christ to her groom to be close to him for his sustenance and his support. So worship was a bond but it also had ramifications in this life as well. I'd like to just cover briefly, if I could, some of the history of worship, because worship didn't originate with the coming of the church age as we know by reading the Old Testament.

And we know by reading the Old Testament it goes back a long way before Christianity. It goes back to the first worshippers. We know that Cain and Abel worshiped God and one was acceptable and the other wasn't. So we find opposition to true worship in the very first book of the Bible. It cost Abel his life as the apostles later laid out.

Worship though we can see is as old as mankind. God created man with knowledge of him by placing his image in us. It not only allowed us to cognitively understand God, to rationalize and be able to reason about God like no other creature on the face of the earth certainly can do, but it gave us an obligation to acknowledge him, adore him, and worship him as our creator. That's indicative, that's part of the basic character of man. And I've got a fast forward because we are going to go into the New Testament here pretty soon.

But the idea of worship is very central to the Bible from the beginning of the Old Testament all the way through to the book of Revelation, as we'll see. But religion was corrupted and part of the fallen nature of man, one of the central aspects of the fallen nature of man is we immediately, once we stray off of the dictates of God himself or knowledge of God himself, we fall into false worship. That's part of the human nature is to fall into false methods. We find that in human history all the way back. This is a very small amulet or seal.

It doesn't look like much. It looks like a lot of little scratches on a cylinder seal with a hole through it. It was worn about 2500 BC by a magistrate of some kind in ancient Babylon. If you roll it out, you see what was on his seal. And it's this magistrate standing before God, getting his power to rule in ancient Babylon.

So this is the same Babylon that Abraham came from, but it predates Abraham by about 500 years. But the idea of worship was central to power prior to Abraham's time. And it shows how quickly man went from knowing God to having false ideas of God and false ideas of worship. That's part of our nature. So we need to be on guard that we're not inventing things that sound good to our minds about worship that are doing nothing more but strain from God's ways and means of being worshiped.

Now Israel we know had a covenant relationship with God and that covenant with God was based on a redemption. So Israel's whole relationship being pulled out of Egypt from slavehood to being free people under God required them to worship God not only as Creator now but as Redeemers. Now you find a redemption covenant. And that came with great ordinances that were clearly spelled out. This by the way is a piece of a Torah scroll of the first five books of Moses handwritten in ancient Hebrew on an animal skin.

This happens to be the section. This would have been a scroll that was many, many feet long, many, many yards long. This is the section that has the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20, which begin about here and run to about here. So Exodus 20 spells out the moral law of God. But we know how detailed the Old Testament is on the ordinances of worship according to God.

And you have to understand that was a redeemer-redeemed relationship, and God demanded worship in a very particular way and of course we understand the long litany of the history of the ancient Israelites and then those of Judah was that they strayed from the worship of God and worship false gods. They went into captivity in Babylon that as Judah did before that the ten tribes of the north totally went out of existence by being conquered by Assyria. This is a face of a brick. It's an inscription brick off of a wall in Nimrod, which is the military capital of Assyria. And it says, Sennacherib, a man who appears, by the way, in the book of Isaiah, Sennacherib has built up the great walls of Nimrod.

He also had great walls of the political capital of Assyria as well, which was Nineveh. And the idea of walls was great power. The people who would have built, made these bricks by hand in Assyria as they were being disseminated into the culture of slaves and being wiped out into 10 tribes would have been the captured Israelites who went in to not only captivity but oblivion with that. And we find evidences of that in history as well. So it's a severe thing to worship falsely And that's the exact point that God is making in the Old Testament.

Judea, however, also went into captivity, but God had made a promise through Judea that he would send redemption. So instead of Judea to the south or the tribe of Judah to the south being wiped out, God preserved them, but he made them suffer dearly by sending them into Babylonian captivity. Now this is neo-Babylon. This is 2, 000 years later than the amulet that we looked at. At the time of neo-Babylon, we know it was accompanied by the prophets, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and others, telling them the purpose of them going into captivity for false worship.

What God was doing in Babylon was purging Judah of their worship of images and false gods. And never again did Israel, when they came out of Babylonian captivity, worship false gods. God put them in a place that they would there in captivity, amid all these false gods, find their affections to him. And that happened in many ways. If we read the book of Daniel and other books, Daniel is a great book of history.

This is a scroll, I'm sorry, a cylinder from the Neobabylonian period, and this went out to the various captive tribes that were under King Darius II. This would have been, at the time, later era of Daniel, perhaps as late as Mordecai and Esther. This went to the various places, the centers, that the Jewish people lived in, and it told them the taxes or the tribute they needed to make during their time of captivity. And what's interesting about that is we know that is how local worship, localized worship came about for the first time was in the areas that they were captive. They did not have to pay tribute by getting an IRS bill.

They went to their local assemblies. They gathered there and they paid tribute. But they also were allowed to worship. Why were they allowed to worship in the captivity period? Because they stood for God and refused to worship the idols.

And we know Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refused to worship an idol, and they were in the furnace, and the Son of God was there to protect them. When they came out, and this is what's important, they were allowed to worship their God without anyone questioning that. That became, as Ezekiel prophesied in Ezekiel 11, the little sanctuary, we find that promise, though God says you will be dispersed among the nations, I will be, and I love this, God puts it personally, I will be a little sanctuary to you. I will be there in your local assemblies. So from the time of the captivity on, even as they came back to Israel and settled in Judea, they also settled as far as Egypt, and they went into Syria and worshiped as well.

They worshiped God now apart from, that is on a regular practical basis, apart from the temple. And we know the history of that. It's spelled out in many works. This is a reformation book by Thomas Goodwin. Moses and Aaron, the civil and ecclesiastical rights used by the ancient Israelites.

This was a history book written in the 1600s describing how God purged Israel of these things and how they move forward into local worship and how, by the way, when Christ is in the fiery furnace with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, he's ultimately setting up the form of local worship that we enjoy today because he's winning them the right to do that in the worst of circumstances. So the whole idea of synagogue worship, which involved the reading of Scripture, the singing to God, the exposition of Scripture, and public prayer were all in place around Judea and around the Roman Empire by the coming of the early church. And we know that after the Babylonian captivity is when the Jewish people canonized not only the Torah scroll but the entire body over some centuries of Old Testament text. This is one of my favorite pieces in my collection. It's a section of a very rare Hebrew piece of Isaiah and it has Isaiah 53 marked with these little tick marks but it actually covers from left to right because the Hebrews write left to right from Isaiah 48 through Isaiah 55 and it's full of the promises looking forward to the coming of Christ.

It's full of promises of coming worship. And we know how providential it was that Jesus went to where to begin to preach. He went to the local synagogues first. He went to his local synagogue of Nazareth and he was handed a copy of the Isaiah scroll. And he reads it and said, this day this is fulfilled in your hearing.

And what he's doing is taking the local assembly, preaching the word of God and applying himself to it. And it's a perfect picture of God's attestation of the ministry. Luke 4 tells us, he was handed the book of the prophet Isaiah and when he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written and the spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has set me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty, etc., etc. He says this day this is fulfilled in your hearing.

So Jesus begins affirming the idea of local worship in his own ministry. So congregational worship was in place by the providence of God before the coming of the apostles. When Jesus spoke about congregations, when he spoke about church, this was already in their mindset. They didn't invent this from the ground up. It was what they had imported.

So the beauty of holiness of the Lord was granted through his spiritual temple. So the idea that the temple would go out of business, which it did in AD 70, and now we would worship as local congregations. It was a very equitable transition from old to new. We find that in the early church, the scriptures were written, the New Covenant scriptures were written by the apostles. This is a section of scripture that's on papyri.

This would have been the original way the apostles wrote it, and all the papyri fragments are just that. It's just a tiny fragment of a scroll, but it has scripture on it. And we see, therefore, we have the new covenant. Again, a covenant that's a redemptive covenant. A covenant that tells people how you are to worship God as your redeemer.

It's another redeemer-redeemed relationship, but now with the full revelation of Jesus Christ. And it was the Christians, by the way, that invented what we know of as the book. In the Old Testament they had scrolls. They had scrolls like this Esther scroll. This was a scroll by the way that would have been owned by your typical Jewish family and it has a complete book of Esther on it And this would have been read every year in a festival in your home.

So we had family worship as well established. Again, a practice was continued in the New Testament. But the New Testament times, the Christians being practical, still had scrolls for some centuries but they invented what was called the codex or the book. This is Ethiopian language. It's one of the gospels.

And it's on the same material as a scroll, on parchment, but it's put together in signatures or tied together. So you could have an entire book of the New Testament in an easy-carrying format. And then you could apply it with other books as well. So you could have books of the Bible tied together. And that's how the Word of God was distributed.

This is one of the tiniest little books I've run across, but it's a manuscript of one of the books of the New Testament. You can see how portable these were. And then they added boards to them and tied them together. They called the boards covers. So they invented the book and we, of course, worship God through the book.

And I think it's indicative that it was Christians who were very practical. They knew that you could write on both sides of the parchment and you can make things very small and replace the scroll. The word of God, which was the oracles of worship, went out into various languages. This is the beginning of the book of John. And the Coptic, Egyptian language.

And this was done much later. And we see it's translated then into Arabic after the time of the Muslim invasion. So you see the word of God is being aggressive as worship is aggressive. It's going out and informing people in languages that don't speak the original Greek. That's the character of God's word.

God's character in his word is aggressive. It goes out. This is early Cyrillic handwritten, the first language that gave written language to the Eastern Europeans as well. This is the basis of the Russian language and other Eastern religions. Again, their language was written by a missionary that went out and we needed the oracles of God.

And of course, there's Jerome's Latin. This is a leaf on vellum, very thin, thin, thinner than parchment of one of the Gospels so the Word of God is going out in people of all languages and tongues are worshiping God in their own tongue in their own language And this is important because we see worship going out. We see it aggressive. We see people in various tongues, what they would have said back then to the ends of the earth, worshiping God. That is, worshiping God to the ends of the known earth as well.

And of course, Jesus had an emphasis on worshiping from our heart, not just in forms. You do not worship God by attaching yourself to a form or a mode and saying, by going through this exercise without heart attachment, that I'm worshiping God. No, Jesus said, the Lord, the Father, is seeking those that will worship Him in spirit and truth. So Jesus adds the important component of worshiping God from our heart. And if you think you can worship God without beginning in your heart, you don't understand the early church, you don't understand the apostles, much less what Jesus means in the worship of God.

And Jesus, by the way, was very adamant about that. We hardly think that Jesus addressed existing churches unless we look at Revelation chapters 2 and 3, we see Jesus had some very specific things to say to the early churches. And they all weren't affirming. Much of what he said was corrective. When Jesus wrote the Church of Ephesus, that is through John and some of the commentators, some of the Reformed commentators, called these little letters, very brief letters in Revelation, the epistles of Jesus to the churches, and I love that.

But Jesus says to the church of Ephesus, you have lost your first love. This is the same author that said you will worship me, worship God, worship the Father in spirit and truth. He says, therefore remember from where you're fallen, repent and do your first works or else I will come to you quickly and remove your lampstand from its place. So here's Jesus himself affirming that we need to maintain a heart of worship. Smyrna, Jesus warns of those who want to go back to the old Hebrew Jewish rites.

He doesn't rebuke them nor does he rebuke any church by being a local congregation of worshipers. He says, you're false in either your doctrine, your modes, or your heart. In the case of Smyrna, he says that they worship in the synagogue of Satan. Now, he's not calling synagogues a synagogue of Satan, as in a local congregation of worshipers. What he's saying is going back to the Old Testament rights or bringing in those rights and trying to impose them on Christians who have their own ordinances makes that a synagogue of Satan.

So here we see that the right method is very central to God. So we have the right heart, we have the right method, affirmed by Jesus Christ. To the church of Pergamos, he accuses those who have fallen to the doctrine of Balaam, which means they had the wrong Jesus. They were distorting who Jesus was in their doctrinal understanding. So here we find that true worshipers must also worship the right Jesus.

So your theology has to be in line with what's in your heart, which is what needs to be in line with his word as well. And the worst of all was Sardis, who Jesus addressed as a dead church. But he says this to them. He says, he who overcomes shall be clothed in white garments. That's the picture of pure worship.

If you repent, if you and your church who's worshiping God in false ways either in false methods, false modes, or false hearts return to God, you will be clothed in pure worship And that gives us hope because this is Jesus addressing churches as well. So we find this was very central and this is why the early Christians were so jealous about their worship. Why they in fact overcame their greatest opponent which was the Empire of Rome. They outlived that great opponent so that they could worship God. But the worship of God is going to be attacked from the outside as well as from the inside.

When the churches get affluent they become self-focused rather than God focused. They lose sight of their groom. The bride of Christ goes astray, and we find almost immediately once Christianity is formally legalized, they go into error. The early church fought to maintain the truth through councils. They would hold councils when heresies would come up.

We want to make sure we have the right object of our worship. So when heresies would come up, that Jesus perhaps is only divine in his spirit, Or He is not divine at all. Various heresies break up or He's not God at all. All kinds of errors came into the church and they had councils to make sure they purified the object of their worship by people. So we have councils being held.

The Nicene Council in the 300s was the first where they came up with standards of who Christ is so that we can have the right form of worship. That is, get back to the first things. Make sure you are truly worshipping God alone. But other things came into the church as well. The other councils, by the way, there were several councils in the first centuries of the formalizing of the church under Rome which strove to maintain purity.

But as we know, purity doesn't last because of our human natures. Our human natures are corrupt. So they start bringing in other things. So the second council of Nicaea was the first to authorize worshiping God through images or veneration of images, which means you have something other than God. You have a visual image that stimulates your worship.

You have something that you look to through whom you worship God. And they authorized images in the churches, not stained glass by definition, but they certainly said paintings as well as mosaics were all approved. And the vessels used in the church should have these images of Christ. And the venerated virgin, they said, Mary, she's also to be venerated and she can become an object through whom you worship God. This is an icon not of ancient Babylon but from about a thousand years ago and it's something you would wear around your neck likely with a rosary but it opens up and you'd put a relic in it, something that caused you to feel close to God.

And this was to replace that spirit and truth worship of God with something that was external to you. The idea was you worship God through what you see. And they lost the fundamental principle that the basis of worship is not what you see. It's what God sees. God sees hearts.

He sees minds. It's our obligation to put those before them. When these people are replacing it with this, this is superstition. This is, if you will, borrowing all the way back to the Age of Vitals because it's trying to venerate their worship. But you can see it's the same old human nature.

So we find the canon law published. What the canon law is, and this is an early printing of that, it's a series of laws that were passed by the various canons. There's so many canons, and when they would have a council, they would pass certain canons that were truth. The problem with those is they changed over time, and they accumulated in this dictionary of canons. And so they tried to accumulate those and make sense of them or synthesize them, and therefore they came up with a body of doctrine that was pure tradition, that had strayed from the truth.

And so we find the canon law and then the decretals and then the part of the canon law that goes to confession condoning and encouraging things that are repugnant to true worship of God. That is, from the original the primitive church that the early Christians died for and stood for. And we find a whole change about. We find the rise of a New Testament priesthood wherewith Christ has sacrificed, re-sacrificed every service, and the centerpiece of the service was the Mass, where you watched because now the laity as spectators watching who? Priests worship God.

So no longer does the congregation engage in, they become spectators of something that's going on at an altar. That is not worshiping God as congregation or worshiping God in spirit and truth. This is a leaf from an antiphonal. We can enjoy choirs and whatnot, but this was something that was actually handwritten on parchment, but this was not for the congregation to sing from. This was from the choir again.

The idea of separating the performers from the viewers and therefore separating those who attended church from the worship of God. They came and watched. In fact, they began holding the communion cup away from the vulgar people. The vulgar means the common people, because they were not holy enough to receive the cup. So this idea of laity and clergy distinction, where the clergy is assumed to be holy before God, and the laity is just assumed to be vulgar and not worthy of worship, was part of the mindset.

So the people adopted superstition. And this is the state of things by the late Middle Ages. That is, in general. There are many attempts at reformation that came about. And I'd like to touch on a few of those as we wind our way towards the time of the Reformation.

This is a leaf from an original John Wycliffe Bible. He was the first to actually publish a Bible before there was printing or what we think of as publication where they hand wrote out scripture. This is a leaf from Romans 3 which talks about free grace, which talks about being saved, that all men are sinners, whether you're laity or clergy. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God and Christ saves you freely. He speaks about justification.

Words that did not exist in the English language until Wycliffe and then later Tyndale and others translated the Bible from, in the case of Wycliffe, from the Latin into the English. The English wasn't a language that was even fit to talk legal terms. It was a rough, hewn language. People didn't talk about justice in the English tongue in the 1300s because that word was reserved for Latin or high French. So when Wycliffe translates the Bible, and the Bible talks about beauty.

The word beauty didn't exist in the English language before the Bible was translated. Justice. These things become part of our understanding of our language. So the Bible raises culture as it raises worship. And of course, we know the reaction to Wycliffe is what?

Persecution. We've got to do away with this. So now we find the methods of ancient pagan Rome being adopted by Rome, the Christian Rome. And we find a lot of rites and rituals that go with that. This is a leaf from a book that was actually printed in 1493.

It's Hartman Shadel's History or Chronicle of the world. You can look it up, it's the Nuremberg Chronicle. It's the word it goes by today, but it's documenting the history of the world. And it's full of superstition, which you would expect from someone that's writing a history of the world. He's talking about the various popes and the various things they do and the veneration of saints, all those things that would have been part of his mindset.

But because he's a historian, he's laying out the facts of history. This leaf, if you can see, it has three illustrations. The timing that he's describing on this particular leaf, there's three popes. There's three vicars of Christ. We have a crisis in the church, and he's recording as history what is going on.

So now we have a few people like the Hussites, Waldensians, the Lollards, those of the followers of Wycliffe. We have them reading the Bible, and we also have, after the invention of printing, history is coming out saying there's conflict. So the seed of Protestantism, we call it Protestantism, but Protestantism predates Luther by over a century. We find people crying out for reform. They don't understand how to reform, but they see a clear contrast, contradiction if you will, between what the church is giving them and what they're reading in the Bible.

And that's all it takes. It takes that conflict. It takes that inconsistency. This is a Rosararium, which is a book that was published in the 1490s as well. And it's fully illustrated on all the councils that approved the rosary and praying on beads.

It shows Saint Dominic seeing a vision of the Virgin Mary and she's handing him a rosary and she says pray to God through me on these beads. All of this was part of the superstition of the 1400s and this was all published in printing So we find a contradiction. We find a contradiction in superstition between plain writings of God's Word. This is out of the same book, The Chronicle of the World, and it's speaking of this guy who is the great heretic of England, John Wycliffe. The problem with this history, it's very detailed about what happened to Wycliffe and what he was doing.

These books that were intended to give a history were now fueling this thing. This was published in Germany, in German, and then translated into Latin. He also talks about John Huss. There was a council of Constance that was called about 1410, so this is before printing, but it's recorded in the first book of history. It's recording that they're trying to reconcile the multiple popes.

What they do is vent on a man named John Huss, who they accuse of reading those doctrines of Wycliffe, which means reading the Bible for what it says, and they burn him at the stake. So there's great conflict. This leaf, I'm sorry, the back of that same leaf, has a story of something I've never read in any other history, that talks about the white robed people. I love that because the indication, if you return to God, He will give you white robes. There were people in the Alps.

They called them the Galilean Mountains here. But there was a great movement led by an unknown man who said, we need to get back to right worship of God. So the pope calls them to Rome. And it says, in this history, the pope had them executed before the people to show what they should not be doing. Well, what's that going to do to people in the late 1400s who are reading the histories?

Again, that gap between truth and what they're getting from the church is growing wider and wider, and there's many protests. By the providence of God, printing was invented in the 1450s. What was the first book printed? The book of books. The same book that had been passed around by the Christians, the Bible.

This is an early leaf from 1480, predates the Reformation in Latin of the Latin Vulgate. And it has handwritten notes by the original owner who's making his own notes in red in the margins. I love that because it shows engagement with the truth and what it says. He's making his own Bible notes. That whole idea of printing was outside of the feudal system.

The feudal system was the church hierarchy run in the state, the state running the order of all feudal Europe. With the invention of printing and other trades rising up, you find entrepreneurship. You find people wanting to earn money, people that can read Latin because of that. And what do they do? They want to read the Bible.

They want to read it for themselves. They want to have the Bible in their own hands because they're educated. So God uses this whole system to drive people to read the Bible. This is a document from a paper trader. And we have to understand in the 1450s, paper was new to northern Europe.

It was an import from the east. But these were the kind of merchants that were not only trading in paper, but providing the paper for the Bibles. And then they were the merchants who would take the Bibles and sell them for a profit. So the whole thing was driven by people that were self-driven. And then the Bible drove them to be more self-driven.

So by the time of Luther, people aren't walking around blind as zombies, not having any knowledge of anything. But when Luther makes his stand in 1517 and after, and then other formers rise up, it's resonating with what these people are reading in the scriptures. Now with God's word, they have the connect and they have preachers that can make that connection and that's what the Reformation is. It's important to understand that. This is a leaf from a German Bible that was printed on at the year that Martin Luther was born.

It was translated. The Bible was translated into the German language. So the Bible was read by German students as well. So knowledge drove this thing and set up this thing. This is one of the early Psalters.

This was a leaf from a Psalter. And people before the Reformation sought to be pious. They didn't understand. They were very devout, many of them. They wanted to worship God, but they had a disconnect in the superstitions and the forms of the church, but people were producing materials for them.

This is one of the first Psalters printed it in two colors, by the way, before 1500. You find many, many conflicts. This is the leaf I was looking for. This is the suppression of the Bohemians or the Hussites after John Huss is martyred. This is an amazing book if you read what was written in the 1400s because again, you put yourself back in the 1400s.

This is what people read. So you can see what's driving the thoughts about the world view. This talks about the Bohemians. 2, 000 of those rose up. These are people that wanted to worship God according to scriptures, and they found a school, and they were training preachers, And a war broke out where the pope called the cardinal out of London and had the magistrates under him form an army to suppress these people.

These people take up arms to defend their right to worship, and they fight back, and they have a little victory, and then all hell's unleashed on them, and it says 500 towns were destroyed in Bohemia, something I've never read in a history book. Well, you can see how appalling it is that people that desire to worship God, that are crying out to worship God, according to what they're reading in the scripture, are being martyred again. That was also part of the mindset of the Reformers, the Reformation. This idea of what's going on now looks an awful lot more like what was going on in ancient Rome than what we should be getting out of the Lord's church. But there's aspirations.

This is the first printing of the Lord's Prayer in English. It was actually published in Paris around 1503. But it has, for the first time, a printing of the Lord's Prayer. Wonderful, right? The problem is it's a book of all kinds of prayer including prayers to Mary and prayers to the dead and all this.

So there's still great confusion at the turn of the century about the idea of worship. But it's not a mild disagreement. It's a rupture. It's what I view as a volcano about to erupt. If it's not going to erupt in Germany, it's going to erupt somewhere else.

And by the way, it does. One of my favorite pre-Reformation books, because it's so telling, was Sebastian Brandt's Ship of Fools, published in the early 1490s and published here in Latin for the first time in 1497. And it's fully illustrated. Albert Durer, if you know who he is, one of the great reformed engravers and painters, he got his first job illustrating some of the illustrations in the Ship of fools. The ship of fools is a triple pun if you will and it's based on the idea of a nave.

A nave can be a fool like naive or a nave somebody that doesn't understand anything which is where they get the word fool. A nave is also a vessel We get the word navy from the word nave as well. And he links the two together and they have a ship of fools. But what is associating with this foolishness is the church itself because the triple pun of the ship of fools is The nave is also the center of a church. So he's drawing on this triple pun to say a ship of fools is what is going on in the church today in the late 1400s.

You can see how pointed that is. These are people that aren't Reformers yet, but they're crying out for reformation, and they're pointing out the errors. These people dare to speak because, and this is central, they dare to speak because only when you have a higher standard than what you're being fed, you have knowledge by which to gauge something else. So when God provides the standards of worship, that's the time that you can identify false worship. Without higher knowledge of what God says, you have no standard to judge error.

You are therefore a victim. So by the 1500s, we find This idea of a great schism between what people are getting from the church. The ship of fools, by the way, the two illustrations I show here, is two men, I love this, they're dressed up like court jesters, just like we would imagine. They're fools. In this case, They're shoving a reformer in a gunny sack to persecute him.

In the second illustration, again, these will be up here for a while if some of you want to come up and look after the talk. This is a cleric as well as a priest directing people, How do we get to salvation? Oh, the ship's over there. You just want to climb on that ship, and that'll take you where you want to go. And he's mocking the naivety of the time, the fact that the people are kept in foolish form of the truths of God.

So this entire presentation is to show us a glimpse of what true worship is, but also the sweep of the history of worship. Good and false from the beginning of man, but focusing more upon the establishment of worship in the new covenant, the redemptive redeemer relationship that you have with your father, and then the sweep, and it's only a sketch that we've had today, a sketch, a sweep of the history of worship from the time of the persecutions when people insisted upon worshiping Christ the way he insists upon being worshiped, the father insists upon being worshiped, And then the corruptions that happened when the church grew into opulence. And those are all telling to us. We can learn much from history because we know our human natures. We know that we would rather, many times, worship something other than God because it's either more convenient or less convicting, less obligatory to our keeping our hearts and minds before God.

So we seek other things to worship or things to worship through that don't bind us to the spirit and truth that the Lord puts upon us. But we see that's the history of worship. It's very helpful to have this as a background when you read to the Reformation. And it's not just Luther. It's Calvin.

It's many, many, many that went on besides them. We tend to, even when we read our history, to heroicize certain people. But if it wasn't for this driving force of people that read the Bible for themselves, that held the Word of God in their own hands, that took it home and read it to their own families, that read out of God's word what his oracles and what he says was the driving force of what would come, what would then prosper. And I think you look at those moments. You look at those moments in the early church when it strove to worship God in spirit and truth, the way God wanted it, what the heart gods wants, and the modes, and they have the right Jesus Christ as their object of worship, you drive back to those moments to reform yourself.

But you also look back at the Reformation, and the presentations I'm doing tomorrow will be complete with documents as well, and we'll go into the way that panned out. That is the history of worship at the time of the Reformation. And it looks like we have five minutes, so if I could, I'd be happy to take questions or comments. Yes, sir. What's a really good, summarized work of the history of the Hussians and the...

Waldensians. What I would do, I'm a researcher by nature, not by occupation, but by nature. I would go to, I don't know the answer to that, but I go to original documents and read. The researcher likes to find things that no one else knows that are very telling. I would go, I hate to recommend it, but I would go on the Internet and find those subjects and research out topic by topic.

And here's what I think is good to do. Buy an overview of the topics so you have the general take on it. And a lot of those things you can get from good reform sites on the internet. And then specialize in more details about what the Waldensians are, what the Law Lords are, what Wycliffe was. And there are wonderful tales that you can read that will encourage your faith.

And that's the way you look at history. You look at what makes history come alive and seeing what God is doing in the period of time. What makes history alive is knowing that each generation struggles with its own conflicts. So when you read of that, glory to God, because God knew this struggle would allow these people to do this, would allow this to happen. God sees the end from the beginning.

So Not to directly answer your question, but to spin off of it too quickly. I would understand the sweep of history, but understand getting anything you can in your hands about the providence of God and how he used generations to reform. Because that encourages us. We tend to be looking at our generation how, quote, bad the world's getting. We immediately take our eyes off of God and not seeing how glorious he is and how wonderful his vision is because Augustine wrote in a time, by the way, the book we started with at a time when the Roman Empire was collapsing.

And he largely wrote the city of God, don't lose heart, look to God. And now we look at that as one of the standards of our faith. So find your own interest within history, but always look to what God's doing and how magnificent he is. And you find stories, some of this hasn't been written, by the way, some of it is the ancient story which worship hasn't been written. The idea of the origin of the synagogue we know, but the idea, because I deal with antiquarian dealers and I deal with artifact dealers and these people know tidbits of history the Christians haven't heard of and you can start plugging these things together and you can see like The tablet that I found from Neo Babylon on the payment of tribute under the Persian Empire when the Jews were in captivity, and you plug that in with the origin of synagogues and it's this beautiful fit of how Christ is setting up, 4 to 500 B.C., what worship is going to be in local synagogues.

Well, who knew what that was all about? Jesus himself knew what that was about. So history will come alive if you're a Christian. If you're not a Christian, you'll be as dead as can be. But dig into it and then find those things that strike you.

There's a providence of God in that event. So I would say just research on the internet to get a wild sweep and then hone down your interest in a particular subject and then research that on your own through books. During your research, have you come across any material on this title, will finding that some recorded history of church worship service and how Christians came together on Sunday. Thank you for that question. Do I have a minute?

You do. That's something I completely over bypassed my notes on there so you're plugging into exactly. There are several wonderful documents. There are, to answer the other gentleman's question, there's a history of the Church Fathers. It's difficult to read because it's just translating what they wrote, and it gets really wordy and addresses issues that no longer pertinent to us.

So it's good to have a summary. The Dedicae was a document, have you heard of that? The Dedicae? It was a document that was discovered only complete in original form in the 1880s. This is a early translation.

So this is, if you want an original document in its first publication, you can buy these for under $100, which is pretty cool because it's one of the foundational documents of what is called post-apostolic times or pseudographia or other words. I call it good history. When you read these things that aren't scripture, that tell how they worship, you take it with a spirit of still comparing it with scripture, but you can find great interest in how they worship. This spells out, if you will, if I can stretch the meaning of what it really was, it was the first directory of worship. That is from chapter seven on.

And these early practices, thank you so much for your question, these early descriptions of how they worship always start with baptism. And that's something we tend not to view the ordinances themselves, the Lord's table and baptism, as worshipful events, as much as was ingrained in the hearts of the early church. But they talk about the idea of baptism being by believers only, hopefully in flowing water. If not cold water, then warm water is okay. It goes into some of these things, but then it also goes into what they did in their service.

The basis of their service is Thanksgiving. It's Thanksgiving in what was, And if you know what the word Eucharist means, Eucharist means Thanksgiving fundamentally. The idea of the Lord's Table is a Thanksgiving feast. It was in every service. They go into that quite a bit.

They have different practices depending on what you read. They have not to contradict themselves, but different in precise forms. One of the, what is it, Justin Martyr goes into that as well. He writes extensively. It's interesting because Justin Martyr is writing to a pagan emperor defending their practices.

So he's putting in a little bit of cold language that we wouldn't appreciate as worshipers of God, but he's explaining these are not things that we are deserving of death for. He's apologizing, if you will, for the forms of worship that they did. But he goes into what we would call the Lord's Table or the Thanksgiving. That was the word they ascribed to that was Thanksgiving. And they also went into preaching.

They all talked... These are the basic forms. You have the Lord's Table. You have singing. You have exposition of scripture, which is preaching, but one thing they emphasize more than we tend to today is long periods of reading scripture.

That seemed to be part of their worship as well. They would have a doxology at the end, And I love the doxology because it really points that, caps the whole thing off with the idea of worshiping. It always ended with glory to God. It was always a praise given from the congregation. And what you really find at the heart of the early practices of your, what would be a common worship service, is they are there to glorify God as a congregation of participants.

Not as spectators, not, let's see what the pastor has for us today, but this idea that did come and was revitalized in the Reformation of your job, when you're sitting in the seat, if you're not at the lectern or whatever, your job is to engage with God every bit as much as the man at the lectern. That's what you get the sense of in the early congregations. You get this community sense that I don't even think you find at the time of the Reformation. And that could have been because of the persecuted environment they were at. But these celebrations of worship were, we're coming out.

We're in our gathering of saints as a refuge from this cold, hard world that hates us. And let me just end on this one note that if we think the world is neutral towards the worship of God, we are fools. The world does not love the worship of God. It costs the early Christians their lives. At the time of the Reformation, it cost thousands their lives over that very issue of insisting upon worshiping God alone.

And we live in a day where we're being sucked into this idea of toleration as if everybody will tolerate our worship of God if we just tolerate everything about them. But I always point out it's those who speak of tolerance so much that come up with rules of zero tolerance. That's their lingo, not ours. They do not want us to worship God and we had better get it through our heads that we are in a fight to maintain worship from corruption within as well as opposition. Thanks for the question.

I think we're through. Thank you very much. For more messages, articles and videos on the subject of conforming the church and the family to the Word of God, and for more information about the National Center for Family Integrated Churches, where you can search our online network to find family integrated churches in your area, log on to our website ncfic.org.