Morning Sermon - 25th October 2026 - William Tyndale and the Gift of an English Bible

Now in our Bibles we're turning to Romans chapter 10 please.

Romans chapter 10 and we're going to break into the chapter at verse eight.

Romans chapter 10 breaking into the chapter at verse eight and reading to the end of verse 17.

Romans chapter 10 and verse eight.

What does it say?

The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart.

That is the word of faith that we proclaim because if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead you will be saved.

For with the heart one believes and is justified and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.

For the scripture says everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame.

For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek for the same Lord is Lord of all bestowing his riches on all who call on him.

For everyone who calls in the name of the Lord will be saved.

How then will they call in on him in whom they have not believed And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard?

And how are they to hear without someone preaching?

And how are they to preach unless they're sent?

As it is written, how beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!

But they have not all obeyed the gospel for Isaiah says, Lord who has believed what he has heard from us?

So faith comes from hearing and hearing through the word of Christ.

Amen.

Now I want you to imagine a world that you're living in where you can't have the Bible on an app on the telephone, where you're not allowed a copy of the Bible in your home.

You're not allowed to have a personal copy of the Bible.

No Bible in the pew when you come to church.

No Bible that really is in the language that you speak.

And way back five hundred years ago in England there was only one Bible.

It was the Latin text.

It was known as the Vulgate.

And almost nobody understood it because the ordinary people didn't speak Latin.

It was controlled by the religious authorities who insisted that ordinary people had no business with the Scripture because they couldn't really understand the Scripture because of their ignorance.

And as I say that was the situation five hundred years ago in England.

Then one brilliant courageous young man risked everything so that the boy who drove the plough and the girl who worked in the kitchen could hear God's Word in words that they already knew.

And in 1526 William Tyndale's English New Testament was printed and this year 2026 marks the five hundredth anniversary since that particular world changing moment.

And this morning we're going to look carefully at his life, at his work, at his teachings, his lasting influence and we'll ask what has this really still got to say to us in our day and generation?

What has it still to say to us with regards to the gospel and to every one of us who can open a Bible in English?

So first of all let's consider his life.

William Tyndale lived a short life.

It was courageous but it was costly but he was obedient.

He was born in 1494 in Gloucestershire, somewhere in Gloucestershire in England.

He came from a family of means and he received a fine education.

He studied at Magdalene Hall in Oxford where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1512 and then a Master of Arts degree in 1515.

And then he later spent time at Cambridge where the new learning associated with Erasmus, the Greek scholar and the early stirrings of reform were in the air being led by a man called William Perkins.

And he became proficient in Greek and Hebrew and Latin at a time when such mastery was rare among the English clergy and he himself became a Roman Catholic priest.

And the church historian John Fox who was a contemporary of this period wrote this about William Tyndale.

He said that he grew up and creased in the knowledge of tongues and other liberal arts but more especially in the knowledge of the Scriptures to which his mind was singularly addicted.

And what he saw among the clergy really disturbed him.

Deeply many priests barely knew their Bibles.

Ordinary people were kept in spiritual darkness.

And while serving as a tutor and a chaplain in the household of Sir John Walsh at Little Sudbury, Tyndale found himself in conversation with a very learned man who insisted that we were better to be without God's law.

We were better to be without God's Word than the Pope's.

And Tyndale's reply recorded by Fox of course has become famous, I've already alluded to it.

I defy the Pope and all his laws and if God spare my life ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of the Scriptures than thou dost.

And whether the precise wording comes directly from Tyndale or it's been shaped by Fox's retelling, the conviction is very clear from Tyndale's own writings.

He believed it was impossible to establish the people in any truth unless the Scriptures were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue so that they might see the process, the order and the meaning of the text.

And that passion that Tyndale had made him a dangerous man in the eyes of the authorities.

The constitution of Oxford away back in 1408 and later royal ecclesiastical policy combined together forbade unauthorized English Bibles.

And when Tyndale sought permission to translate in England he was refused and he left for the continent in 1524 and lived a life as a fugitive in Germany and the Low Countries and Belgium and Holland, always moving, often poor, frequently lonely, always working.

He never returned home.

In 1535 he was betrayed by a man called Henry Phillips.

He was arrested near Antwerp because Henry VIII wanted him taken out completely and he was imprisoned in the cold castle of Vilfort near Brussels for more than a year.

During that particular time it's said that he continued his translation work and that bore testimony upon those who were his actual captors and then in October 1536 he was condemned as a heretic and they defraught him as a Roman priest.

They strangled him and they burned his body.

And according to John Fox's last words were in prayer Lord open the King of England's eyes and he was about 42 years old, a short life of scholarship, a life of exile, a life of not really having anywhere to lay his head and it was costly.

It was costly because his own life was taken as a result of it.

And as one modern assessment puts it, Tyndale might well rank among the most important Englishmen who ever lived precisely because of what he accomplished in those few years.

Bruce Gordon of Yale University has described his work as generative, creative, a great act of culture and language.

Dermot McCulloch of Oxford has placed him alongside Thomas Cramer and William Shakespeare as one of the decisive figures who shaped the English language that would eventually circle the globe.

His life, William Tyndale lived a short life of courage and costly obedience.

And his life is no different from our life today.

We are being called in these days to be courageous in a society that is moving away from the Word of God.

Moving away from the standards of God's law.

We're told that we're to have courage.

We're told to make our stand for Christ.

And it's going to be costly as time goes by and we must live this life of obedience.

We must seek to serve the Lord.

His example, William Tyndale's example is the example that we need to follow in these days.

We need to be courageous and that courage may indeed cost us but yet we must be obedient.

But then secondly let's think about his work, William Tyndale's work.

Tyndale's great work of course was translation and he approached it with very unusual vigor.

He didn't begin from the Latin Vulgate which everybody was required to read from or the priests were required to read from.

No one else could read from it.

There was an English Bible of course that was translated by Wycliffe, and Wycliffe's translated it from Latin Vulgate, but it wasn't very accurate.

Tyndale, he decided, well, he needed to go back to the original for the New Testament and he used Erasmus' editions of the translation of the New Testament, the New Testament Greek and to the Hebrew of course, he went back for that for the Old Testament books.

And the first complete printed English New Testament appeared in 1536 in the language of the ordinary people.

There had been an attempt to have it published in 1525 in Cologne, but it was interrupted and very interestingly it was printed in 1526 in the city of Worms where Martin Luther was living.

See the world was connected at this time.

Luther had made his stand in 1517, And as a result of that people like William Tyndale were following on.

Copies were smuggled into England and hidden in bales of cloth and Saxe of Green, Bishop of London at that time Cuthbert Tunstall condemned it and ordered public burnings of the printed copies.

Cardinal Wolsley, who after Henry VIII was the most powerful man in England, condemned Tyndale as a heretic.

Possession or distribution of this Bible could mean death or imprisonment.

So the authorities bought and burned many copies themselves yet the demand continued.

Estimates suggest that there were tens of thousands circulated before Tyndale's death and he kept revising and thorough revision of the New Testament and this New Testament appeared again in 1534.

He also translated the Pentateuch which is the first five books of the Bible or Old Testament.

They were published in 1530 and then he was able to translate the book of Jonah in 1531.

And substantial parts also of the historical books going from the books of Judges right through to first and second Chronicles.

He wrote also explanatory prologues and treatises such as the obedience of the Christian man and one of his great critics at this time was Thomas More who he stood against and amid this situation of the printing presses and secret networks of merchants and reformers and the constant threat of betrayal and scholarship in those days was a very high costly thing and he never finished the whole Bible yet what he did produce was so accurate that those who came after him, translators who came after him stood on his shoulders.

Now scholars have measured Tyndale's or the dependence of other translations on Tyndale's translation.

David Daniel, leading modern biographer and editor of Tyndale's work stated that William Tyndale gave us the English Bible and that roughly 90% of the authorised versions New Testament is Tyndale's.

Computer analysis by John Nielsen and Royal Skusen found that 83% of the King James New Testament and 76% of the Old Testament books was translated from the wording of Tyndale.

Brian Moynihan who's a more contemporary up to date biographer of William Tyndale said that 84% of the New Testament and about 75% of the relevant Old Testament came from Tyndale.

Daniel B.

Wallace of Dallas Theological Seminary in The United States quotes that in Matthew chapter five the overlap is 90%.

F.

F.

Bruce observed the abiding influence of one man in particular may be traced throughout great portions of their work and that man was William Tyndale.

The translators of the revised standard version later acknowledged that the King James owed more especially in the New Testament to Tyndale.

When the British library acquired a copy of the fifteen twenty six New Testament way back in 1994 for the cost of £1,000,000 they said it was the most important printed book in the English language.

And Tyndale himself insisted on fidelity when it came to translation writing to his friend John Frith who was himself facing martyrdom he declared I call God to record against the day we shall appear before the Lord Jesus to give a reckoning of our doing that I never altered one syllable of God's word against my conscience nor would this day if all that is in the earth whether it be honor pleasure or riches might be given to me.

And in his writings The Obedience of a Christian Man, he observed that the manner of speaking in the original text often requires little more than a word for word rendering into English to preserve grace and sweetness and sense and pure understanding.

He preferred to place explanatory notes in his margin rather than alter the text.

And this was not a free paraphrase for the uneducated.

It was a carefully crafted literal yet readable translation intended to let ordinary readers see the process and the meaning of the original for themselves.

His work, this is William Tyndale's work.

It's set before us and it's very clear he was a man of great ability, a great translator who gave his time to the Word.

And quite simply, we're not Tyndale's, are we?

No, we're not like William Tyndale.

We don't have the abilities that Tyndale has, but we do know because of Tyndale have a copy of the Bible in English.

And the question is, how much do I?

How much do you treasure having the word of God in English?

And how much time do we spend really reading it and thinking over it and obeying it?

And that's the challenge for you and for me in our day and generation.

And then thirdly let's consider his teaching.

His teaching, well his teaching was in line with all that was coming out of Germany and coming from Luther and Zwingli and others of the reformers and Tyndale's teaching was simply the Bible's teaching recovered from the originals and made clear in English and that's all the Reformation was.

It was a rediscovery of biblical truth.

It was nothing new.

First Tyndale said look Scripture is the final authority.

Not popes, not councils or written traditions.

He wrote that it's impossible to establish the lay people in any truth except the Scripture is plainly laid before their eyes and their mother tongue.

And he insisted one simple literal sense whose like the enemies of truth couldn't abide.

He wasn't adding anything to the Scriptures.

He was giving literal translation.

Allegories and traditions that contradicted the plain text he rejected completely.

So he said the Scripture had final authority.

But then secondly, he said we are made right with God by faith in Christ alone not by buying indulgences or performing our penance or relying on our own goodness.

He translated the great Reformation text from Habakkuk and from Romans, The just shall live by faith and he preached it.

He preached justification as God's free gift received by trust in the finished work of Christ not by human merit.

And then thirdly, every believer he said is a priest before God and may come straight to him through Jesus Christ.

And there's no needy saying for some mediating clerical class.

Tyndale's word choices made this point very very sharply.

He rendered the Greek ecclesia as congregation rather than church, presbuterus as elder or senior rather than priest.

The whole idea of repentance, his translation of the word repentance was not based on penitence in any way.

It was coming and turning away from sin and agape as love.

He translated it as love rather than charity.

And David Daniel notes that these choices undercut any sacramental or hierarchical structure that had grown up over the centuries.

The Greek New Testament itself once put in English would undercut everything.

The word would speak for itself.

And then fourth the Gospel he said as the good news of God's grace Christ died for sinners and rose again so that we may be forgiven and given new life.

And Tyndale as I've said wanted plowboys and servant girls to hear this for themselves.

His translations and writings smashed the idea that ordinary people needed a special class of priest to stand between them and God.

And that message fuelled the English Reformation and it still cuts through all the religious and ritual fog of today.

As one scholar has put it, Tyndale was not merely a translator.

In important respects he was the catalyst of Reformation in England.

His teaching was clear.

It's the gospel that we know today.

It was the rediscovery of that true gospel That the Word of God reveals God.

That God speaks through His Word.

That the Word of God has final authority on all things.

That we can only be saved through the hearing and the preaching of the Word of God.

The reading of the Word of God is essential.

We're saved by grace alone.

God puts the gift of grace within us.

God puts within us the gift of repentance.

God gives us the ability to believe in Him and in the finished work of Jesus Christ and that each and every one of us can access God at any time and at any place and you don't need a priest to help you.

And then fourthly and finally we move to consider his influence.

His influence William Tyndale's labors and teaching had profound effect on the English language and it had profound effect on the spread of the gospel.

So two things drawn out here.

It affected the English language.

It affected the spread of the gospel.

Tyndale's fingerprints, as we know, are all over the English language and the worldwide spread of the gospel.

Renaissance historian, John Strike provides a vivid picture of the popularity of Tyndale's bible and indirectly shows the means by which Tyndale managed to transform the language of a whole nation.

This is what he wrote.

He lived at the time of Tyndale.

He said, It's wonderful to see with what joy the book of God was received all over England among the common people and what greediness God's Word was read and what resort to places where the reading of it was.

Everybody that could bought the book and even little boys flocked among the rest to hear portions of the Scripture read.

Yet a remarkable gift for clear, vivid, memorable English.

Many words and phrases we still use came through his Bible or were powerfully popularized by it.

Examples include, Let there be light.

Am I my brother's keeper?

The powers that be, the salt of the earth.

Fight the good fight, the spirit is willing, the flesh is weak.

Allah unto themselves, signs of the times, the land of the living, pouring out one's heart, scapegoat, atonement, Passover many of these words were created by Tyndale.

And everyday words he helped shape or introduce some in lasting form the word beautiful, busybody, castaway, fisherman, land ladies sea seashore taskmaster and scholars estimate he added well over a thousand words to the English language comparable in scale to Shakespeare's contribution.

And when you open the King James version or many modern translations that stand in the Tyndale King James mainstream such as the English Standard Version, roughly 80 to 90% of the wording is still essentially Tyndale's.

C.

S.

Lewis could say concerning Bible translation, our Bible is substantially Tyndale.

David Norton has observed it is difficult even to imagine how our language would have developed without Tyndale's tradition embodied in the King James.

David Daniel coined a memorable phrase no Tyndale, no Shakespeare pointing to the way Tyndale's prose helped to create the linguistic resources on which later writers drew.

And you know literacy rose as a result of what Tyndale did.

People were able to read before they weren't able to read.

Literature, politics, ideas of human dignity and equality later drew strength from what people reading the Bible.

Reading the Bible in English.

Dermot McCulloch has noted that providence turned Tyndale into a major cultural force against the planet together with Cronmer's prayer book and Shakespeare's plays.

His work helped make English language capable of carrying the deepest truths with power and with beauty.

Melvin Bragg of the Southbank show fame until recently the longtime presenter of the BBC Radio programme In Our Time, who isn't a Christian writes glowingly of Tyndale's contribution to the development of the English language.

In his short book, A Very Brief History, Bragg says of Tyndale that he loaded our language with more phrases than any other writer before or since.

And then he added, and almost as an accidental byproduct he loaded our speech with more everyday phrases than any other writer before or since.

We still use them or varieties of them every day five hundred years on.

So that was his influence upon literature, his influence upon the reading of the Bible, how it changed the whole outlook of society.

And then in the Gospel the effect was even greater because Tyndale the message of Jesus could run freely in the English speaking lands and through them and across the world and ordinary people met Christ in the scriptures.

Revival, missionary movements, churches and countless personal conversions trace back to Bibles that stand on his work.

His dying prayer was answered within a few years.

English Bibles were legal and being placed into churches.

Amazing isn't it?

Henry VIII had him imprisoned.

Henry VIII generally we believe had him murdered, martyred.

And in the end Henry VIII accepted the very Bible that he himself was so influential in translating.

The plowboy really could know the Scriptures, principle he championed that the Word of God belongs in the language of the ordinary people of course continues today in global Bible translation.

And at the very preface, if you look at it in the English Standard Version that acknowledges the fountainhead, that stream was William Tyndale's New Testament of 1526.

It's influential in Bible translation.

And William Tyndale's labors and teaching had profound effect on the English language and on the spread of the gospel.

And today, today that same gospel goes forth and that same gospel is growing in other parts of this world as a result of translators following the standards, following the manuscripts that Tyndale used.

And we give thanks for that.

So William Tyndale to bring us all together, the man who gave us the Bible in English, his life, his labor, his legacy is phenomenal.

And William Tyndale lived a short life of courage and costly obedience.

He died a martyr.

Tyndale's great work was a translation work and it was translation work and he approached it with the usual vigor.

He was a linguistic genius.

Tyndale's teaching scripture alone, grace alone and access for all was simply the Bible's teaching recovered in the originals and made clear in English.

And William Tyndale's legacy is rooted in the profound effect that his teaching had upon the English language and on the widespread worldwide movement of spreading the gospel.

Five hundred years on Tyndale's achievement is not merely history.

It's not the language of trivia.

He gave us life so that you can hold the gospel in your hands and hear it in words you understand.

And the Bible message is still the same.

All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.

The wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

And Jesus died on the cross for sinners.

He rose again.

He calls every one of us to turn from our sin and to trust Him alone to be saved.

And you know friends you don't need to be a scholar.

You don't need to be a hero.

You don't need to be a martyr.

You don't need to be a tendeel.

What tendeel longed for every plowboy to possess is still freely offered today the word of God, the good news of Jesus Christ, and the free mercy of God for helpless sinners.

And here what the scripture says, everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.

And that's the invitation.

Not to be strong, not to be learned, not to those who have already cleaned up their lives, but to every sinner who will call upon Christ.

And the thing is you're not able to save yourself.

That's what Tyndale was trying to say.

Your works cannot open heaven.

Your sincerity cannot atone for sin.

Your knowledge of history and even of Tyndale's noble life cannot justify you before a Holy God.

But Christ can and Christ has.

He died for sinners.

He rose again.

He is freely offered in the Gospel to all who will receive Him.

His blood is sufficient, His righteousness is perfect, His promise is sure and therefore I say call upon Him ask Him to give you the faith to believe the good news ask Him to place within you the ability to turn from your sin plead with him to give you the capacity to trust Christ alone to save you cast yourself upon him as your only hope your only savior your only righteousness and don't leave this place merely admiring a martyr.

Don't be a history enthusiast only.

Be one who actually receives the salvation which Tyndale suffered and come and experience that free gift of eternal life in Jesus Christ.

And if God has opened your eyes today then come call upon Jesus.

He's not going to cast you out And may your prayer be Lord open my eyes, have mercy upon me, save me by your grace and draw me to Christ today.

Amen.

May God bless his word to your hearts.