Sola Scriptura: John Wycliffe and the Search for Truth

The reading tonight is taken from 2 Timothy chapter 3 and starting at first 14 to verse 17.

2 Timothy 3 · chapter mention

But continue thou in the things which thou hast learned and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned then, and that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.

All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works, and may the Lord add his blessings of his most precious work.

Amen.

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, and I pray this night you are in Christ.

The question that Wycliffe was tormented with in his soul, I believe, is this Where can I find truth?

Where can I find truth?

There are moments in history when the world seems to lose its bearings, when truth becomes slippery, when authority becomes corrupt, and when the ordinary people feel lost in a fog of competing voices.

In such moments God raises up men and women who simply say let us go back to the word.

Let us go back to the word.

It's what I say every Sunday in this church.

Let us go back to the Word.

In the fourteenth century, when kings fought for power and popes fought for thrones, when the church's voice was tangled in politics and wealth, a scholar, I've written a quiet scholar, but I'm not too sure about that.

But a scholar by the name of John Wycliffe asked the most dangerous question of his age.

Where can I find truth?

Not in Rome, not in councils, not in the decrees of men, but only in Scripture.

God's word written.

Wycliffe believes something so simple, something so obvious, and yet totally revolutionary for his time.

That the Bible belongs not to the powerful and not to the rich, but to the people, the ordinary people.

People like you and me.

That the ploughboy in the field has as much right to hear God speak as the priest in the cathedral.

That the word of God is not chained to a pulpit or locked in a language that people cannot read.

And yet none of this was new.

So he translated it.

He preached it.

He lived it and he died for it.

And after he died, they dug him up and they burned him and put his ashes in a flowing river.

All because he asked the question, where can I find truth?

And that question is still our question today.

In this age of confusion, competing voices, competing traditions, competing versions of the Bible, competing moralizers, morals.

The sands are shifting beneath our feet.

But on Christ a solid rock we stand, because everything else is sinking sand.

And the answer, the question we have to ask for our day and our time is the same as Wycliffe asked in the 14th century, where can I find truth?

Where do I anchor my soul when the world is loud and my heart is weary?

The psalmist answers, My word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path, not a flicker, not a suggestion, a lamp, a light, a sure and steady guide.

And this evening we begin our journey through the five solars with the first and fundamental cry of the Reformation.

Sola scriptura by scripture alone.

And we begin with the same longing that said, Whitecliffe's heart, Lord speak, for your servants are listening.

Something that we should always have on our lips.

Lord speak for your servants are listening.

The fourteenth century then was a troubled age.

The Roman Catholic Church and the English crown were locked in a struggle of power.

The Catholic Church, a Roman Catholic Church, you know how I hate using the word Catholic for the Church of Rome.

The Roman Catholic Church owned two-thirds of the country.

Yet rather than preaching and following the teachings of Christ, or even the older Celtic tradition of bringing the word of God to the people, the hierarchy were more concerned with temporal authority than spiritual care.

This was the world that Wycliffe inhabited.

And just to digress a little bit, just to explain, what we know of the early Celtic Church, they, the monks, would wander into a village.

They would stand in the center of the village, pick up a piece of Bible or a piece of scripture, read it, preach it, and then teach it.

And then they'd move on to another village.

They took scripture to the people and they spoke the language of the people.

They didn't speak Latin.

They didn't speak some strange foreign tongue.

It was the language of the ordinary people.

And that was something that was handed down from the patrocitic fathers.

And you can ask me questions about that some other time.

Wycliffe wrote extensively.

He argued that the church had far too much power in England.

And this drew the attention of a gentleman called John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster he was, I think, and others who shared similar concerns.

But it also brought him under the scrutiny of church authorities.

His stance against the papacy grew increasingly firm, moving from respectful criticism to outright opposition.

His commitment to apostolic poverty became sharper, as did his conviction that clergy should not wield temporal power.

And this attitude is reflected in his book The Officio Regis, foreshadowed in his earlier thirty three conclusions, and in it he argued that excommunication should require trial before parliament and synod, and that the king should not intervene rather than allow imprisonment to be used as a punishment for excommunication.

I can't remember whether I come across this, but some of you will have heard me talk about a rule called Deheretico Deheretico Carburundo.

1401.

This is slightly before that.

But what was happening here is if if you were declared heretic by the church, you couldn't be buried, you couldn't be married, the children couldn't be baptized, you weren't allowed on holy land, Holy Communion was and it really was cutting you off from the Lord who works, something the church should not do, and certainly not something the state should be getting involved with.

Wycliffe, in all his works, was concerned with reforming the church.

This is a hundred and so years more than before Henry VIII, and believed the temporal arm had a necessary role in that reform.

From 1380 onwards, Wycliffe devoted himself to writing and rejected transubstantiation and strongly criticized those who defended it.

If you listen and are paying attention, you can hear the seeds of the Reformation starting to settle.

Transubstantiation being argued against, the power of the church being argued against, the Bible being in the language of the people being proposed.

These are all things that are picked up down the line.

All things that we as Protestants say we self stand for.

Wycliffe's conviction that the Bible is for the plowboy.

Now we have to be careful with that because the plowboy quote actually belongs to Tyndale.

I beg your pardon.

Yet the principle is clearly present in Whycliffe's work.

He sought, and this is the important thing to take away, he sought to place the scriptures into the hands of the ordinary people by producing an English Bible.

Now, when we tend to think about 14th century England, the 1300s, we don't tend to think of people being able to read and write, but that's not true.

Literacy in Wycliffe's day as a percentage was about 5%.

Literacy, sorry, percentages can be misleading.

5% sounds a tiny amount, doesn't it?

It doesn't sound much, but it's what if 5% off?

The number doesn't help, unless you know what it's a whole number of.

And the Black Death had caused England's population to fall from around uh to fall to around two and a half million people.

So 5% of that is roughly 100,000 sold.

Who could read?

That's not bad going.

That was quite good for those days.

There was a problem.

It wasn't English, they could read.

The educated classes could only read Latin.

The people in the streets very rarely could read English.

They might get the odd one or two.

A small fraction of a small fraction could read English well enough to benefit from Whitecliffe's Bible.

And yet, it was a precisely that small group, that little remnant.

And remember, God will always leave a remnant.

That little remnant who God used.

Wycliffe's English scriptures opened the word to those few, and through them the word spread to many.

Another little aside.

We often say that Wycliffe wrote the first English Bible.

That's actually not true.

History tells us there was a Bible in English, as there was a Bible in French and a Bible in German.

There's a difference.

Those Bibles had been sent to Rome to the papacy to be anointed and approved.

So Rome could scribble on them and say this means this, this means this.

What Wycliffe did is he created the first English Bible that wasn't approved by Rome before distribution.

And that's where the problem starts for him.

For us, it was a great step forward.

We actually had a Bible that was translated by a knowledgeable man of the languages involved, and I think he uses a Greek translation by Erasmus, but I could be wrong there, which was the best at its time, and he didn't send it off for verification.

So he didn't get the Pope's seal of approval.

Good prod.

We are all familiar with the Lollards, or at least I hope you're aware of the name.

One of the more fascinating aspects of their ministry was something they called book clubs.

You all know what a book club is.

It's where you all go and read a book, isn't it?

And then you talk about it.

Well, the Lollards had a version of this, though not in the modern sense.

A lollard preaches he would arrive in a little village with a portion of scripture in English.

Or it might be the Lord's Prayer, it might be a single book, it might just be a wee fragment.

And we know of one lollard who was executed just for processing the Lord's Prayer in English.

She was burnt, she's in the Coventry Martyrs Memorial.

They would gather around them, anyone who was interested, they would stand in the center of that group and read aloud the passage until it was memorized.

The first memory verses, I like to think.

But they would stand around and they would read the passage until everybody in the room could recite the passage back.

And what is memorized?

It's very rarely forgotten.

Because those people would then go out into the village and into their families and into their friends and maybe to the next village and tell that story.

A hidden line of witness when we pass down the word of God from mouth to mouth, and this is what Protestants have done since the dawn of time.

We've sat in our houses with our kids, with our grandkids, with our aunts and our uncles and our friends, and we've spoken God's word to them.

Passed it on.

And the point that I've only recently discovered is that the lullards also taught people to read.

This was another benefit that we claimed from the Reformation.

Not only did Wycliffe give England the word of God in its own language, but his followers gave England the ability to read that word.

This stuck more fear into the church authorities of the time and the civil authorities who recognize the danger that when people study the Bible for themselves, and then they look at how the church behaves, they can see a massive difference.

And they can start to question the authorities, and they could question the priest and they could question the bishops because they knew what the Bible said.

When people study the Bible for themselves, we gain direct knowledge of God's will for mankind.

Nobody in authority wants that power in the hands of ordinary people.

I said before that it was reckoned that less than 5% of the population could read in English.

During the period that the Lalods were most active, up to when Whitecliffe died and just afterwards, apparently that figure rose to 20%.

That's a 15% jump in the literacy skills of the people.

I don't know whether that's uh an overestimate or not, but I can actually see it happening.

The more you teach people to read, once you've started them, stopping them's a problem.

You know, I look around today at the churches, all of them.

And we could argue, I believe, that the church today is in such a terrible state and such a mess because people, especially those in authority, no longer read God's word.

They don't look at this and go, does my life match it?

They don't let God challenge the way you behave, or the way you talk, or the way you treat other people.

They've lost the fear of the Lord.

Now people say the fear of the Lord means you're supposed to be scared.

Isn't that what fear is?

No.

In this particular instance, in Bible language, the fear of the Lord is that you love God so much that you're scared of letting him down.

You don't want to disappoint him.

You're not scared of him per se.

You just don't want to let him down because he means that much for you.

Scripture is the lamp that exposes false authority.

Wycliffe saw a church acting contrary to Scripture.

I wonder what it'd make of the church today, if it was bad in those days.

And he raised profound concerns.

His question was simple.

Had the Roman Catholic Church descended into preaching another gospel?

I would say it's still preaching another gospel.

Had it become just another worldly power?

And I think history says the answer to that is yes.

In 2 Timothy 3.15 we read, and from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.

The problem was this.

Unless one submitted to its teachings, yet what the church taught was not always in line with Scripture.

To prevent challenge, the church restricted what people could hear or read, by keeping Scripture in a language only the educated understood, by making a disagreement with the church a punishable offence.

And would you believe by stopping the gospels being read to the people because they couldn't understand them?

Wycliffe sought to break that chain and restore the word of God to the people.

How then do we apply our reading from 2 Timothy 3, 14 to 17 and take the words of Psalm 119, 105, and support it with sola scriptura and the life of John Wycliffe, the morning star of the Reformation?

And I'm going to give you four points to take home with you.

First point, the word of God must be available to all people.

The word of God must be available to all people.

Individuals, as they read the Bible, depending if they go to church or not, may take different things from Scripture.

That's how Scripture works.

That's how God works.

He doesn't expect you to understand everything at once.

He uncovers what he thinks you need to know.

And I have said this frequently here.

I can read a passage of Scripture to you and say one thing.

I can read the same passage a couple of weeks later.

And I may say something entirely different.

Doesn't mean I'm contradicting my first statement, it just means I understand it slightly differently, hopefully improved.

No person, no group, or power has any right to deny access to the word of God.

When a society, i.e., a country, a nation, but I'm going to say any society, restricts the Bible or the version of the Bible, if it reveals more about that society than it does about God's word.

If they see scripture as a threat, then something is deeply wrong.

The only thing Scripture is a threat to is Satan, the devil, and all his work.

As the old baptismal formula has it, we stand against sin, the world, and the devil, and it is the word of God that gives us the power to do that.

Thirdly, we must follow in the steps of the Lalad, to study the Word of God for ourselves, to help others come to know it, and to make it freely available.

What matters is that we teach the Bible honestly and truthfully, not twisting it to mean something other than what is plain and stated.

As I said recently to someone, Bishop Ryol of Liverpool once wrote that the simplest understanding of Scripture is usually the correct one.

The simplest understanding of Scripture is usually the correct one.

Once you begin to complicate it, once you begin to twist it, to make it mean things that are not simply not supported by it, you risk creating a meaning that was never intended.

Scripture alone is fine, but you must feed scripture alone.

The Bible is the sole authority on which the church stands.

This applies to anybody who calls themselves a church.

But it also applies to people like you who are the church.

The sole authority on all matters of scripture, all matters of faith, is this book.

To quote Chillingworth, the Bible and the Bible only is the religion of Protestant.

No church gives authority to the Bible.

Don't let anybody tell you different.

No church gives authority to the Bible.

The Bible gives authority to the church.

By this and this alone do I stand in this pulpit and preach to you.

By this and this alone do I proclaim that Christ died for your sins and rose again for your justification to open the gates of the kingdom of heaven.

By this and this alone do I say that the blood of Jesus Christ washes you free from sin.

By this and this alone do I call you to repentance.

Not by me, not by works, as Paul would write to the church in Ephesus, by grace we are saved.

Not of works, lest any man should close.

Grace is the start of this book.

Grace runs through the book, and grace closes this book.

The Bible sorry.

So in closing them, my dear brothers and sisters in Christ, Wycliffe's cry still echoes across the centuries.

Where can I find truth?

And the answer in 2026-27 is the same as it was in the thirteen hundreds.

In the Word of God, our lamp, our light, and our sure and steady guide.

May we be people of the book, may we be hearers and doers of the word, and may God grant us the courage to stand as Wycliffe stood upon Scripture alone.

Amen.