E-BOOK: God’s Generals – The Roaring Reformers by Roberts Liardon.
INTRODUCTION
When I was almost twelve years old, the Lord appeared to me
in a vision and told me to study the lives of great preachers so I could learn
the reasons for their successes and failures. n that quest, I learned the
importance of history.
History is a blueprint of our past. With all of its mistakes and triumphs, it tells a story that is always repeated somewhere else in time, some place in every generation, but many times under a different disguise or a different method.
I’ve appropriately entitled my second book in the God’s Generals series,
The Roaring Reformers. I believe it is vital that we understand the past
history of the Reformation and the character of those who brought it to pass.
Every generation needs a reformation, because when we forget our history
or our reason for living, then our reliance upon the Holy Spirit can grow
dormant, and the heavens close and become brazen.
This second book is more detailed than the first because the volume of study was more expansive. It includes methods of thinking and doctrines that
might seem foreign to us. That’s mainly because we are living in and enjoying what these great men had to pioneer.
We live in the benefits of what these men gave their lives for. Today, we can hear in one service what took them years and years to understand!
I also wrote this book because I want you to understand the process of the
Reformation and the spirit behind it. Reformation brings a complete
upheaval a dark situation and, through great physical and spiritual
strength, creates an atmosphere of freedom and relationship between God
and His people. As you read, you will see how each of these men built upon
the work of his predecessor to accomplish reformation in his generation.
Although the actual period of the Reformation is historically recognized in the sixteenth century, the workings of it began generations before-and that’s why I’ve included John Wycliffe and Jon Hus as primary figures.
Each of the six men I’ve chosen was different in personality and method-but their
goals were the same. They each had an assignment from heaven. They cach
gave their lives in hopes of seeing it come to pass, and some died as
martyrs. And cach of them (except Fox) had the hypocrisy and blasphemy of
the medieval Catholic Church to conquer.
Chapters 1-5 have the same religious setting. Let me briefly summarize
the situation. Before the fourteenth century. if one was deemed a Christian,
then that person belonged to the Catholic Church.
You were either Catholic or a pagan. As early as the fourteenth century, the Catholic Church had become delirious with power, and the abuses began to show up in extreme hypocrisy and blasphemy. It had set itself up as the absolute voice and that’s all for now.