Lord, we do thank You for the fresh reminder of Your great love this morning. Lord, how Your love does draw us in a continual way unto Yourself.
And Lord, as we continue in Your presence now, we really pray that, as we consider this matter of church history, Lord, afresh in You we could see the love of God—how You are not only jealous for individuals, but because of Your love for the church, You gave Yourself for her.
Lord, we thank You for the reassurance that You are building Your church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. We pray this day, Lord, that in a fresh way, through the anointing and enabling of Your Holy Spirit, we can continue to learn some lessons from our brothers and sisters who have gone before.
Lord, we thank You for them. We thank You for their lives laid down. We thank You for their love for You. May they be an encouragement to all of our hearts in the days that we are living in, Lord.
Lord, we do want to be a people that would be hastening Your return. We want You to be the passion of our heart, the focal point of all that we do and see. May we learn, as those before us have learned, of Your great love and of the all-sufficiency of Your precious Self.
In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Can we turn this morning to Revelation 3? Revelation 3, the letter to the church at Sardis.
Revelation 3, starting in verse 1:
To the angel of the church in Sardis write:
He who has the seven Spirits of God, and the seven stars, says this:
I know your deeds, that you have a name that you are alive, but you are dead.
Wake up, and strengthen the things that remain, which are about to die; for I have not found your deeds completed in the sight of My God.
Remember therefore what you have received and heard; and keep it, and repent.
Therefore if you will not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what hour I will come upon you.
But you have a few people in Sardis who have not soiled their garments; and they will walk with Me in white, for they are worthy.
He who overcomes shall thus be clothed in white garments; and I will not erase his name from the book of life, and I will confess his name before My Father, and before His angels.
He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.
Let’s read verse 2 again:
Wake up, or awaken, and strengthen the things that remain, which were about to die; for I have not found your deeds completed in the sight of My God.
And verse 4:
But you have a few people in Sardis who have not soiled their garments, and they will walk with Me in white, for they are worthy.
One other passage: Hebrews 11. As we read these verses, it is really to remind us that we are but strangers and sojourners upon this earth. This is not our home; we are just passing through, and we are not to be attached here.
Hebrews 11, beginning in verse 13:
All these died in faith, without receiving the promises, but having seen them and having welcomed them from a distance, and having confessed that they were strangers and exiles on the earth.
For those who say such things make it clear that they are seeking a country of their own.
And indeed, if they had been thinking of that country from which they went out, they would have had opportunity to return.
But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one.
Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; for He has prepared a city for them.
As we continue today studying and fellowshipping together on this matter of church history, we started last time on this letter to the church in Sardis. We said that this covers the time from the Reformation through our present time, and it speaks in a pictorial way of the overall Protestant system.
We talked on the Reformation last time, and there were two great truths that were recovered there. First, there was justification by faith—a tremendous entering into a truth that had been hidden for many centuries: how by faith we are justified. It is not by works, not by our good deeds, but solely by faith that we are justified before the living God.
The second thing that came out of the Reformation was an open Bible. The Word had been shut. There were those who were able to have individual Bibles throughout the times, but because of the Reformation, the Word of God became open to the people again.
We saw an entering into many of the truths that the Lord had touched people with. But what happened is that they came in, and they only went so far. It is like the phrase in Revelation: “Your deeds are not complete.” They started, they saw something, but it was not brought through to completion.
We will see this throughout the church in Sardis. It is kind of a step-by-step matter. Some precious saint of the Lord sees something and enters into it, but there is still more out there for us to see.
As we fellowship about the church in Sardis, I got overwhelmed by the testimony of the Lord through the last century. In fellowship with some of the brothers, the way we would like to approach the church in Sardis, and throughout the rest of the time now, is on a century-by-century basis.
Now, you cannot cut these off precisely—1501 to 1599. There is going to be some overlap. But, in general, today we will be fellowshipping around the sixteenth century. The group we want to fellowship about is the Anabaptists.
In the future, Lord willing, in the seventeenth century we will see a move of the Puritans, the Quakers, Pietists, and Moravians. Technically, some of the Puritans started in the sixteenth century, and the Moravians carry over into the eighteenth century, but the essence of that movement is in the seventeenth century.
Then, in the eighteenth century, we will see the works for which the Lord raised up John Wesley and George Whitefield. Also, within our own country, we see a Great Awakening that took place through Jonathan Edwards and some of the others whom the Lord used very mightily.
So maybe using a century-by-century basis from now on will help us progress through this in an orderly way and finish it out. After the church in Sardis comes the letter to the church in Philadelphia. Philadelphia is basically the nineteenth century, characterized by the Brethren movement. Laodicea is the twentieth century, which we are living in now.
Lord willing, there will be about five more times. I am hoping so. We will eventually finish. I do thank the Lord; I have really been blessed, and I thank the Lord for it.
As we look at the Anabaptists and the movement here, we saw last time how, out of the Roman Catholic Church, the Reformers through Martin Luther kind of broke free from that.
We also fellowshipped how, a few years later, there was a division between the Lutheran work in Germany and those in Switzerland under Zwingli over the issue of the Lord’s Table. Zwingli and Luther could not come to a oneness on that, so it was the first division.
Now we will see that, beginning in Switzerland, those who had actually been meeting with Zwingli—and Zwingli was encouraging Bible studies and fellowship—started what came to be called the Anabaptist movement.
Next time, we will look more at the Puritan and Anglican movements, the Pietist movement, and then, in the eighteenth century, much of the Methodist movement. But now, let us look at the Anabaptists.
The overhead made me lose my thought for a second. I could not write, but there is one quote I wanted to read. I even made a copy for you on page 3 because I was really touched by it.
As we saw the Lord doing a mighty work, we see how the Lord is always calling us into a fuller measure of Himself. The Lord is not the One wanting all this division, but He wants us to keep pursuing Him and come into fullness.
There was one brother, John Robinson, from England. He had to escape from England and went to the Netherlands. There were some brethren on the Speedwell who were going to sail from the Netherlands to the United States.
Their ship got in trouble, and they had to return. They ended up getting on another ship and sailing over. Does anybody know the name of that other ship? The Mayflower. There you go.
These were the brethren who came over on the Mayflower, and they received this charge from our brother John Robinson. In a way, it was a charge to our forefathers in this land, and in a prophetic sense, for them, for their descendants, and for us: to continue to seek the Lord in a greater and fuller measure.
I want to read this. Read along:
I charge you before God and His blessed angels, that you follow me no further than you have seen me follow the Lord Jesus Christ.
If God reveal anything to you by any instrument of His, be as ready to receive it as you were to receive any truth by my ministry.
For I am verily persuaded, the Lord hath more truth yet to break forth out of His holy Word.
For my part, I cannot sufficiently bewail the condition of those reformed churches which are come to a period in religion and will go at present no further than the instruments of their reformation.
The Lutherans cannot be drawn to go beyond what Luther saw; whatever part of His will our God hath revealed to Calvin, they will rather die than embrace it.
And the Calvinists, you see, stick fast where they were left by that great man, who yet saw not all things.
This is a misery much to be lamented.
This quote puts in the names Lutheran and Calvin. I do not think he is really picking on them. There are probably a thousand other names that could be substituted here. But, in principle, the Lord through this brother is encouraging us always to continue to pursue on.
One thing that always blesses me is when we hear different brothers minister the Word and see different brethren’s lives. Do we see a fuller revelation of the Lord in their lives and in their ministry? Or do we see what we saw twenty years ago?
It is like our testimony. When we ask people to share their testimony, what is our testimony? Is it from twenty years ago? Do we have the same testimony, or is it a testimony of meeting the Lord yesterday?
Brothers and sisters, we need to pray for one another that we do not become content, that we do not become satisfied with what we receive, even though we receive abundantly. There are so many more of the unsearchable riches of Christ that we need to press on into.
No matter how great the revelation, there is more. Receiving the revelation of justification by faith is probably one of the greatest revelations anybody can see, but there is so much more. We do not know the unfathomable, unsearchable riches of our precious Lord.
We as a people become so content to settle in. We are settlers. We love to settle. May the Lord encourage us to go on, to seek Him in a fuller measure, because we are looking for another country, a better city, a New Jerusalem—not upon this earth. That is where He is calling us.
I mentioned today that we wanted to fellowship about this group called the Anabaptists. In one sense, this term Anabaptist was never used by them. It was a derogatory term.
The people within the Protestant and Catholic systems at that time lumped together everybody outside either system and said, “You are an Anabaptist.” Anabaptist simply means “to rebaptize.”
It is interesting that, even as you look at current church history books, I left the title on the charts. Several publishing companies granted permission to use their overheads and material, and I left their titles. This chart is called “The Radical Reformation.”
From people’s perspective, the Anabaptist movement was radical. We will see a map in a minute, and they are called the left wing of the Reformation—as though something were off about them.
May the Lord show us. To me, this was the center and focus of what the Lord was doing, but here they were getting called radicals in the Reformation because they met like this. Has anybody ever called you a little radical, or said you were off? That is one of the things we live with. They were willing to be misunderstood.
Because of the name associated with them, most people immediately think that the issue was baptism. But actually, in Zurich, Zwingli called different ones together to begin studying with him around 1520 and 1521.
Certain brothers, Conrad Grebel and Felix Manz, were his students, and he encouraged them to study the Bible. These were young men. At that time, Grebel was about twenty-five, and Manz was in his late thirties, which is still young.
They were together, being encouraged to search the Word and having Bible studies. But as they searched the Scriptures, they began to see that some of the things Zwingli and the brethren were practicing were not matching up with the Scriptures.
So they began questioning him. His answer was, “No more Bible studies.” They outlawed these things.
There were two things in particular. The first issue was not baptism. The first issue was the church-state relationship within the city of Zurich, Switzerland.
Zwingli had merged, in essence, the government of the church with the government of the city. The city council decided all doctrinal issues and set itself up as the final authority on things.
This group of believers said, “No, this is not right. The church is separate from the state.” That was where they first broke with Zwingli.
Secondly, they said it was not a national church in which, once you were born, you were born into the church. The church is really a voluntary association. Once you believe, once you are a believer, you come together, and that is the church.
The third thing was the whole issue of infant baptism.
As these different ones began to meet in Zurich, the Lord touched their hearts in such a way that they continued to meet in spite of it being illegal.
One evening, on January 21, 1525, in Manz’s home, Blaurock, Grebel, and some of the others were there. George Blaurock turned to Grebel and asked him to baptize him.
Blaurock knelt down. Grebel went over with a pitcher of water, spooned the water out, and poured it over his head. Then Blaurock got up and baptized everybody else.
That was a tremendous statement. It sounds ordinary to us. We had a baptism the other day, and it was glorious and so free that we can have baptisms. But for them, it was a sentence of death—literally.
You talk about going into a grave. These people were being sentenced to death because it was outlawed within the country for anybody to be rebaptized.
I want to make clear at the beginning that the issue of the Anabaptists was not baptism by immersion. The issue was believers’ baptism.
The tradition, and what the church called for, was infant baptism. The Anabaptists were standing for believers’ baptism. At first, many of them were just what we would call sprinklers, but they continued to seek the Lord.
Within a period of time, they saw the truth of baptism by immersion also. But they were not first standing for baptism by immersion. It was the issue between infant baptism and believers’ baptism: only believers should be baptized.
From that, the Lord continued to reveal to their hearts. This movement started spreading throughout the city, and more and more people were being baptized.
The city council, in order to stop this, passed a resolution that all children had to be baptized. It was against the law not to baptize them. This put the parents in a turmoil and a bind. What do we do? They could not compromise their conscience.
If the parents did not yield, they were arrested. Also, to persecute those who were being baptized, once you were baptized it was against the law. If they found out that you had been, they would either put you in jail or, for those more ardent about it, they would drown you.
Felix Manz was the first martyr at the hands of the Protestants. He was taken out in a boat on Lake Zurich, had weights attached to him, was pushed over the side, and drowned.
The main method for martyring the Anabaptists at first was drowning them. They said, “Okay, if you want to be baptized, we will baptize you.” And they drowned them. A great persecution broke out against them. Many began fleeing Zurich, and the movement went underground.
As I said, Manz was martyred. Later on, Grebel died of the plague before they could get him.
But George Blaurock fled down to the area of Tyrol and began ministering there. He labored there for a couple of years.
We could describe Blaurock as the Peter of the Anabaptists. He was never noted for great knowledge, but his zeal and his mouth were noted everywhere. He was always going every which way.
He would actually go into towns and go to the local Reformation church. When the minister stood up to speak, Blaurock would stand up and say—sometimes not very discreetly—that he had a word from the Lord, and the minister should get down and yield to him.
He was a little disruptive at times, but it was all from zeal. He ended up being arrested quite frequently for disrupting services. Finally, because he was a determined outlaw, he was caught and burned at the stake for his service and love to the Lord.
Keep that area in mind, because later a brother named Jacob Hutter and the Hutterites took up where Blaurock had left off. That was the origin of the Hutterites.
Another brother in the Anabaptist movement who had a real impact was Balthasar Hubmaier. Judith is helping me with all these names here.
His ministry was more in the northern part of Switzerland and into southern Germany. The Lord touched his heart, and he went down and tried to have fellowship with Zwingli. Zwingli ended up calling him a heretic.
So he had to leave the Reformed church, and he started preaching the gospel throughout that area. He traveled extensively and was called the theologian of the Anabaptists.
He had a phrase he used whenever people said, “You are preaching in vain. Nothing will happen.” He said, “Truth is immortal.”
“Truth is immortal.” He said, “If I preach the truth, it will abide forever, and it will do a mighty work.” And he labored.
One time we see the humanity of these men. Hubmaier was arrested, and under torture he recanted some of his beliefs. They let him go.
But as soon as he was out, he was so stricken by what he had done that he repented. His ministry was revived, and he went on that much more zealously.
Finally, a few years later, in 1528, his ministry had gone all the way into Moravia. He was safe as long as he was in Moravia, which was always a kind of safe haven because the prince protected the brethren.
One time Hubmaier went down and visited Vienna. He was arrested there and burned at the stake. A few days later, they tried to get his wife to recant also, but she would not. So she was drowned in the River Danube there in Vienna.
We see so many of these brethren, how the Lord raised them up. There is a book called The Anabaptist Story. One time we had it out here; I do not know if we still do.
The title of the chapter that describes many of these brothers is that they were like meteors in the sky. It is like they came on the scene, and many of their ministries and lives were only a few years.
They started something in 1525; by 1527 or 1528 they were dead. They were martyred. It was like a meteor, just a flash. But the work they did lasted until this day and time.
It was not the quantity. It was not the time. It was the truth. That phrase, “Truth is immortal,” was let loose. They were going all over, really ministering.
After these first brothers, the Lord raised up another brother named Michael Sattler. He was from southern Germany and continued to go throughout Switzerland and southern Germany, preaching greatly.
The Lord used Michael Sattler in a particular way. He wrote and put together something like a confession of faith. It was not a doctrinal statement in a rigid sense, but he put together some of their beliefs. I think there is a copy for you on page 6.
It was not an oath people had to take. He was simply setting forth some things they believed when people asked, “What do you believe?” He was not excluding anything from the Word of God. These were simply beliefs that characterized this group called the Anabaptists.
They never called themselves Anabaptists, but we use the term today for descriptive purposes.
Michael Sattler and a group of them were meeting out in the woods one evening. The government found out about the meeting and arrested him.
He ended up being martyred in southern Germany, right on the border between Germany and Switzerland. He was publicly tortured and burned. His martyrdom is so gross, and what they did to him so terrible, that I would not dare read it publicly.
If you have a strong stomach, you can find out his story, but it is sad what torture our brother went through for the Lord. In the very end, even as he was being burned, as soon as the ropes around his hands were burned free, he raised his hand toward the sky as a testimony and sign of the faithfulness of the Lord.
A few days later, his wife too was drowned because she would not recant. They would often drown the women.
After that 1528 period, there was tremendous persecution and slaughter going on, both by Catholics and Protestants. They were together in persecuting those who were trying simply to stand for a return to the simplicity and fullness of the Scriptures.
They were believing in the priesthood of all believers, trying to gather simply around the Word of God, not in any fancy, formal way. They simply wanted to come to worship Him, remember Him at His Table, baptize believers, and go on faithfully.
Because of this, they were being spread through many places.
One group that is always included within the Anabaptists is called the Schwenckfelders. There was a brother named Caspar Schwenckfeld von Ossig, and he had a ministry in Silesia.
He was saved mightily through the ministry of Martin Luther. He heard Luther preach, light came into his soul, and he was greatly used for the spreading of the gospel throughout that whole area.
His testimony was that Christ is the summary of the whole Bible, and Christ is the summary of our life. Christ is the principal object of the whole of Holy Scripture. All that Holy Scripture shows us is the fullness of the Lord Jesus Christ.
The group did not take a name. “Schwenckfelder” was put on them by others later on. When people asked them, “Who are you?” they would say, “We are self-confessors of the glory of Christ.”
That is what they called themselves: the self-confessors of the glory of Christ. They believed in the priesthood of all believers and in believers’ baptism only.
Because of their growth in that area, they ended up being persecuted. They fled down to Moravia for a while, and later, in the eighteenth century, they fled to a place we will hear about next time: Herrnhut, where Count von Zinzendorf established a place of asylum for many believers.
This group fled to Herrnhut, but they were so hated by both the Catholic and Lutheran churches that they even had to leave Herrnhut. From there, they went to Pennsylvania. Still today, there are some Schwenckfelder assemblies in Pennsylvania.
As we talk about these groups—the Hutterites, Amish, and Mennonites—we must not think about them only from today’s perspective. We are trying to look back to their origins and to where the Lord really touched them.
Schwenckfeld is noted as one of the mystics. He was a very mystical person, and the Lord had touched his heart in such a way that he had a passion for the Lord’s Table.
He saw the reality of the Lord’s Table, the mystical reality and side of it. He saw people taking the Lord’s Table carelessly, abusing it, and showing no respect or reverence for it.
So what he said was that they needed to discontinue the Lord’s Table initially. Since people were not respecting it or taking it rightly, he felt they should discontinue it for a time until they were worthy and could come in a worthy manner.
The trap there was that his passion for the Lord’s Table focused attention on the Table and on our worthiness to take it. If we only take the Lord’s Table when we are finally worthy, we will never take it outside of Christ.
Some people accuse him of belittling the Lord’s Table. Actually, it was his love for the Lord’s Table that led him to stop it. But the result was that their focus got off.
I know that at times, as we take the Lord’s Table every Sunday when we come together, there is a tendency within any of us for this to become routine. It can become common to us, and we do not respect and revere it for the reality that it is.
It has been suggested at times—and this is Mac talking; I am not representing anybody—that perhaps we should stop the Table for a while, and then we might appreciate it more.
But the problem is not the Table. The problem is our heart.
The Table is real; it is from the Lord. If it is becoming common or routine, we need to ask the Lord to search our hearts, that we could see its fullness and reality in a fresh way.
As we come seeing the reality of the Table and its preciousness, it will not become routine. It will not become a ritual. It will become fresh and living to us every time we come.
Just as we were reminded last week of the preciousness of breaking bread together at the Lord’s Table in the early church, may the Lord continue to work within our hearts.
So often, we try to fix things our way. We have a lot of good intentions, but it does not work out. It is sad that this brother, Schwenckfeld, had such a passion for the Lord and His Table that it almost led him the wrong way because there was not a balance or right perspective there.
May the Lord help us that we would have that passion for His Table, and that we would pray in a greater measure for each one of us to come fresh.
I think that is one of the responsibilities we have as we come on Sunday morning. Often, we pray for ourselves to come ready, but we need to pray for one another that we all come ready in the Lord.
We not only carry one another during the meeting, supporting one another in praise and worship, but we carry one another before we gather too. We pray for families with young children, that the home will not be in chaos when they get here.
We pray for one another that husbands and wives will not have fights. The greatest fighting period in most marriages is Sunday morning, between home and when you get here. The enemy loves to get us out of rest with one another in so many ways.
We pray for one another so that, when we take of this Table, there will be a freshness and a preciousness to it every time. In that, we would see the glory of the Lord.
There is another group. I mentioned earlier how Blaurock had gone down to the area of Tyrol. Another group in this area is the Hutterites, and they are still around today.
What they are known for most is communal living. They still have their communes, though it is quite different from the way it started. They are still around in different parts of North America and Europe.
Because of persecution, many in this area fled to Moravia, to the town of Nikolsburg. They began meeting together there.
They were living in a communal setting based on Acts 2 and Acts 4, where they held all things in common.
I want to be clear because I think there are principles we can learn from the Hutterites. They did not live in a communal setting because they saw something in Scripture and tried to pattern themselves outwardly after it.
In the environment in which they were living, there was great persecution. One’s home could be taken away. One’s livelihood could be taken away.
As they sought the Lord, they were naturally brought together in a living way into a community-type life, so that when one was hurting, another was helping. They put all things together and shared communally.
When persecution came on one, another was there to help. It was a way of supporting and caring for one another.
In 1536, because of his zeal for the Lord and his faithfulness, Jacob Hutter was martyred also. The Hutterites continued to flee from place to place. Quite often, they lived and met in various cliffs and caves throughout the mountains of that region.
Again, they were persecuted by both Catholics and Protestants.
As I was studying this, I came across a quote about the Hutterites that I think is very priceless. As I read this, they use the phrase “community life,” meaning their way of living together.
I want us to think about this quote in terms of the essence of church life, as we live together. Think about its application within our daily lives together.
The first brethren within the Hutterites were refugees who had endured persecution for their faith and were willing to lay down their lives for it and for one another.
They were men and women of deep religious conviction and a love for the Lord Jesus Christ.
They identified themselves with the brethren, not from self-seeking motives, not to try to get from such a life as much as possible, but, on the contrary, to see what it was possible for them to put into a life for the service of God and for one another.
They were fully determined to make Jesus Christ the Master of their lives. For His cause, they were resolved to live or to die.
They saw clearly that willing service to God and man, involving self-denial and sacrifice, is the necessary fruit of the true Christian life.
And they believed community life to be the best outward expression of love toward God and the brethren, a necessary characteristic of true Christianity.
They accepted Hutterianism not from self-seeking motives, but from an earnest desire to be true followers of the Christ whom they loved. Christian love was, to the Hutterites, a blessed reality.
The one part in the middle is this: as they came together, their motive was not to see how much they could get out of the community, but how much they could put into the community.
It goes on to describe how, at times when persecution slackened, different ones would come in and see this life and say, “Hey, this really looks like a neat life. Let’s go over here and live with these brethren.”
Then persecution would come, and they would flee. It would be a core that remained. But others would see it and say, “Hey, this looks neat. Let’s go over here and live here.”
Later on, they wrote:
Many of the new believers failed to reckon with the fact that community life requires self-denial and sacrifice.
It involved a restriction on personal liberty.
They found, by costly experience, that in practice such a life differed widely from their preconceived ideas of how they thought it should be.
Since the need of a sacrificial spirit had been disregarded, the conditions for success were lacking.
They saw what they thought were all the benefits, but they failed to count the cost. There was a cost associated with it.
As they went along, they got away from that. All of a sudden, they were not going into the community to put into it, but to see what they could get out of it. It turned into a different system.
Today, many of the Hutterite assemblies are called Bruderhofs, which means “common household.” Today they practice communal living and do many good works, but it has come a long way from where they were then.
One lesson we can see is that the first ones we call Hutterites—they never called themselves that—touched something of community life, of church life together.
They saw necessary ingredients: laying down their lives for one another, self-sacrifice, self-denial, and not being there merely for their own interests. In that, they touched some of the fullness of the Lord.
There is a lesson we can learn there. May the Lord help us as we go on. It is not that we never get anything out of being together, but that is not our objective.
As we share the Lord together and give ourselves to the Lord, out of the overflow of His love and life, we are richly blessed. The brethren laying down their lives in the community were drawn by the love of God. It was something man could not do.
Often, as you read certain history books, the Hutterites are called the first communists. That shows a lack of understanding between communal living—having all things in common based on the Lord Jesus Christ—and an outward system imposed on fear.
The foundation for communism was fear. The Hutterites’ foundation for being together was love. There is a great contrast.
As we come back to this movement called Anabaptist, it is just like the enemy: if he cannot persecute from without, then what does he try to do? He tries to destroy and discredit from within.
One tragedy that occurred during this period was in a town called Münster. It is called the Münster tragedy.
A couple of brethren received a revelation that the Lord wanted to set up His New Jerusalem in Münster. They went there to set it up.
Actually, these brothers had first gone to Strasbourg. They said the Lord had given them a revelation to go to Strasbourg and set up the New Jerusalem. Nobody believed them, so they got another revelation.
It is amazing how these people can get revelations. First, the Lord supposedly told them Strasbourg, and that did not work. So they said, “Oh, the Lord has given us a new revelation. We will go to Münster and set up the New Jerusalem there.”
They went in and took over the town. They wanted a Christian city, so they told everybody in town either to become a Christian, be baptized, leave, or die. How is that for a gospel message?
Those who were not believers obviously left. So they had their community there, this supposed New Jerusalem.
It was not really founded rightly. It was a radical community. They legalized polygamy, and many other things in the Scriptures were distorted.
Instead of a community of goods, it became that the leaders got all the goods. They got rich, and one brother actually crowned himself king of the city. He was the new king.
It became so gross that finally the Catholic church and the army came in, destroyed the whole city, and they were all killed.
Even though this was a group of fanatics not really associated with any of the people we have been talking about, it became a benchmark and target. Everybody was compared to Münster, and it gave the Anabaptists a bad name.
It gave the Catholic and Protestant systems something to point at and say, “Look, that is the way the Anabaptists are.” It was really used by the enemy to discredit the work of God greatly.
It severely damaged the witness and testimony during that period, and it hung on for many years. If a group was raised up, the only thing you had to say was, “They are Münsterites,” and people would draw back and stay away. It put fear in people.
But thank the Lord, the Münster tragedy was in 1534. In 1536, there was a Roman priest in the Netherlands named Menno Simons, and the Lord saved him.
It was a wonderful testimony. Let me read Menno Simons’s testimony. It shows how, in the sovereignty of God, those who are seeking Him will find Him.
I obtained my knowledge of Christ, the focal point and center of life, and the baptism and the supper, by God’s great grace, through the enlightening of the Holy Spirit, by means of much reading of Scripture and meditation on it, and not through instrumentality and misleading sects, as I am being blamed for doing.
He sought the Lord in the Word. The Holy Spirit opened it up to him and showed him the Lord Jesus Christ in a fresh way.
He left the Catholic church and began coming in contact with many people who had been damaged, who had been victims, to use our modern term, of the Münster tragedy. The Lord burdened his heart for them.
The Lord burdened him in such a way that he was in great distress. He went out simply trying to encourage the brethren, draw these ones back to the Lord, and reassure them that the Lord was still there for those who loved Him.
Things had become so distorted that people were not even sure about their salvation. He began drawing scattered and hurt believers back together, building them up, encouraging them on in the Lord, and leading them to live in the simplicity of His life.
Eventually, in 1543, he had to flee the Netherlands. He lived out the rest of his life in Germany, where he did much of his great writing.
The Lord greatly used him to restore many of these simple principles that had almost been lost because of the Münster tragedy. Everything that had occurred in Anabaptism was almost ready to be thrown out because of that tragedy.
But the Lord, in His sovereignty, raised up Menno Simons.
Again, today we look at Mennonites and Amish. Forget about them for the moment. Go back to their beginnings. Menno was a simple brother just trying to be faithful to follow the Lord wherever he was led.
Because of him, they came to be called Mennonites. They never called themselves Mennonites at the beginning. But many groups throughout the Netherlands, and those traveling back through Switzerland, were being restored, renewed, and strengthened again. The Lord’s testimony was being raised.
In 1693, there was a brother named Jacob Amman—I better not say “Ammon”; I will say “Amen.”
He was in Switzerland, and there came a division between the Mennonites and the Amish. It basically began over how to treat believers who had been excommunicated.
Among the Mennonites, if you did certain things, you were put under the ban or excommunicated. Menno Simons felt there were ways brethren could be restored and brought back into fellowship.
But some, in their strictness, said, “No. Once you are out, you are out. We do not associate with you at all.” So the Amish, in their strictness, would not accept back those who had fallen away. That led to the division.
It was sad, but that is why the Amish have always been a stricter set than the Mennonites.
One sad thing is that Jacob Amman put in certain rules and regulations. In the past, some things had simply been living matters. Because the Lord had touched their hearts in certain areas, they were doing things.
But all of a sudden, things that had been living now became a set of rules and regulations. He was the first one to regulate that there would be no change in fashion. From about 1693 to today, they still wear the same type of clothes.
It is interesting that, in the past, those whom the Lord had touched through the Anabaptists and Mennonites had come to see that they were not of this world.
There were two verses that were used. One was from 1 John: “Love not the world and the things of the world.” The other was Romans 12:2: “Do not be conformed, or molded, to the fashion of this world.”
Through verses like that, they were convicted simply to dress and live a simple life. It was not that they were dressing to be spiritual, holy, humble, or outwardly separated.
Rather, the Lord had made it real within their hearts that they were separated from the world and were not to allow the world to influence them.
As we are separated from the world, there are practical implications upon our lives. Their practical implication was that they would not dress according to the standard of this world, but simply dress before the Lord.
It was not an outward way of doing this, but a personal conviction as the Holy Spirit taught them. They were not to be conformed to the fashion of this world.
This whole area of dress is treading out here on thin ice. One brother said that, in regard to fashion, we do not need to be the first in fashion, nor are we to be the last one out of fashion.
I raise this issue simply to say: Why do we dress the way we do today? Do we dress according to the standard of the world, or do we dress because we realize that we are a separated people?
The Lord has called us into His economy. As we realize that we are a separated people, there are practical implications upon our lives, in our dress and conduct.
May we be awakened to that, that the Holy Spirit might touch, lead, and guide us—not in any formalistic, system-type way, but in a living way.
Let us allow the Spirit to ask us, “Why do I dress this way?” In that, we would come into a greater appreciation of being separated from the world and its influences.
The world’s influence can put tremendous pressure upon us. When we talk about being separated from the world, there are many areas of practical daily life that this impacts.
These brethren back in the Mennonite movement had been touched in that area. May we allow the Lord to touch our hearts there also.
As we look back upon these Mennonite groups, they never really called themselves by these names. They were simply trying to stand for the simplicity of Christ.
They were recovering the precious truth of believers’ baptism. It cost many of them their lives. Yet today, we are the beneficiaries of it.
If you are trying to connect these groups geographically, the Anabaptists came down in one direction, the Hutterites went another way, the Schwenckfelders were never really what we could call the Swiss brethren, and then the Mennonites continued on while the Amish broke off.
But the Lord used Menno Simons to do a real and sincere work of recovery, recovering many primitive spiritual principles that might have been lost if it had not been for him.
There are two other items I just want to touch on today. The first is the Huguenots.
The Huguenots were in France. The Lord began to move in France through a particular brother who was actually a professor at the University of Paris, at the Sorbonne. His name was Jacques Lefèvre.
His testimony was:
True religion has one foundation, one object, one Head: Jesus Christ.
And the cross of Christ alone opens the gates of heaven and closes the gates of hell.
He began preaching that simple message, and many were saved. William Farel, who ended up influencing John Calvin, was saved through this. In certain cities in France, great revivals were taking place.
As they began coming together and practicing the priesthood of all believers, some of their leaders were persecuted and martyred. Other ones would come forward and take their place.
Around the late 1550s, more and more of these groups began coming together. But they associated themselves with one of the political parties in France.
There were basically two political parties in France at that time: the ruling party and another party heavily influenced by the Guise family. The Huguenots allied themselves with one of these political parties.
At first, this was good because it provided protection and freedom of religion. But then civil war broke out, and they were being persecuted again.
Then the king, through a couple of manipulative acts, determined that he wanted to destroy all the Huguenots. One of the Huguenot leaders was going to marry into one of the royal families of France.
Everybody thought this wedding would bring peace between the Huguenots and the French government, which was Catholic. The wedding was on August 18.
Then, on what is called St. Bartholomew’s Day, August 24, at a certain signal between two and three o’clock in the morning, the guards and military were turned loose to slaughter all the Huguenots.
Their leaders were killed first in France. Many had been gathered for the wedding, and thousands were slaughtered in Paris that night.
It is hard to estimate how many were killed overall. You will read between fifteen thousand and one hundred thousand Huguenots were martyred over the next few months.
Many Protestants fled France and went into Germany—kind of the best and brightest. But I point out the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre because many have described it as the greatest and darkest crime in the Christian era.
There are two things I would like us to see about the Huguenots as a lesson.
They fell into the trap of allying themselves and putting their hope in a political party.
It does not take a rocket scientist to make the connection today, does it? With November coming up, what is our hope in? What is our hope in?
They started using political means and political activism as a way of trying to achieve some of their rights, and it failed them because we are not of this world.
It reminded me, too, that in the Scriptures we are not granted freedom of religion as our ultimate calling. Brothers and sisters, we need to remember that standing for freedom of religion and standing for the testimony of Jesus are two different things.
It is wonderful if we can be free and there is freedom of religion. But we are not called to stand for freedom of religion. We are called to stand for the testimony of Jesus.
May the Lord touch our hearts. There has been so much fighting throughout the centuries among different religious groups for freedom of religion. Our Lord Jesus lived during one of the most oppressive times there could be.
We are not called to fight for religious freedom. Surely, if we have it, let us take it, and let us do legally what we can not to lose it. But we are called to stand for the testimony of Jesus. May the Lord really quicken us there.
The last thing I wanted to touch on briefly was that during this time a brother named Jacob Arminius was born. He had actually studied under some of the teachings of Calvin.
This is where the old Calvinism and Arminianism controversy came to a head. You can trace it back even to the early church in the fifth century, between Augustine and Pelagius. There is nothing new; it just took a form that we label today.
Calvinism is more related to the sovereignty of God, and Arminianism is related to the free will and responsibility of man. How do you balance those two things out?
If anybody has questions on Calvinism or Arminianism, all you have to do is ask any of the youth who went to the Lebanon Conference. They had a time of fellowship there, and they asked that question. They will be able to help you with the answer.
We are not going to solve that today. But ask them about the thief in the night and predestination, and they will tell you about it.
What it boils down to is that we need to remember that within Scripture there is a balance. There are perspectives from which we look at things, and depending on how we look at something, we need to remember that there is another side also.
If you take this pen and set it right there, all you see is a little dot. If somebody asked you to describe this pen, you would say, “It is a little dot right there.” That is all you see—a circle.
But if I turn it this way and somebody asked you to describe it, you would describe it another way. What is the true picture of a pen? Is it one or the other? It is both.
We need the fullness of truth to see and enter into the full knowledge of God. There are many balancing truths.
We have faith and works. We have God’s sovereignty and the free will and responsibility of the individual. We also have corporate responsibility.
We can get focused on the individual and forget the corporate. We can get focused on the corporate and forget the individual. Our Lord was full of grace and truth. We are called into faith and works.
There are many balancing truths that we see. We need to remember that they go together to show us the fullness of the Lord.
So, brethren, as we close out this morning, as we look back upon these Anabaptists who came out of the Reformation movement and tried to stand in simplicity, we need to be reminded that we are just sojourners and aliens.
The Lord is calling us to stand in the simplicity of His life. May we continue always to seek a greater revelation of Himself.
He has so much of Himself that He wants to show us. Would we be those who hunger and seek after that, in a way that He could move us and teach us?
As we see how we are separated from this world, may we see how that practically impacts our daily lives, our conduct, and all that we are living in in this day and time. Let us pray.
Lord, we do thank You for the mighty work that You are doing. We thank You for our faithful brethren over these years.
Lord, we thank You that You are a God who really brings forth and recovers these truths within our lives. We thank You that in these days we can have open, public testimonies freely, Lord, to testify for the Lord Jesus Christ.
Lord, we pray that, as we have considered these various lessons today, You would really help us to consider them before You: how, in a living way, we can see and know You as our daily life.
Lord, as You captured these different ones’ hearts, they were drawn unto You. We pray that our hearts would be fully captured to follow the Lamb wherever He goes.
In Jesus’ name. Amen.