Monday 15 November 2010

Grafted into Christ

William Tyndale gave his life to translationg the Bible from the original languages into English for the very first time, and it cost him his life. He was made an exile from his own country for doing so and eventually captured, strangled and burned at the stake for doing so.

One of the things that drove Tyndale to risk everything for the translation of the Bible into the ordinary language of the people was the recognition that if the Bible is locked away from people then the gospel is locked away from people. He knew that our only hope is found in the gospel of God's grace.

Tyndale had the rock-solid conviction that we are utterly helpless apart from the sovereign grace of God revealed in the gospel. We are in bondage to sin, blind, dead, damned, and helpless. We are utterly helpless and unable to do anything for ourselves apart from the grace of God, shown towards us in Christ, and revealed in the gospel, which we can only access to through Scripture.

Listen to how Tyndale describes conversion and how it shows both our utter helplessness and God's all powerful sovereign grace in Christ:
By grace . . . we are plucked out of Adam the ground of all evil and graffed [grafted] in Christ, the root of all goodness. In Christ God loved us, his elect and chosen, before the world began and reserved us unto the knowledge of his Son and of his holy gospel: and when the gospel is preached to us openeth our hearts and giveth us grace to believe, and putteth the spirit of Christ in us: and we know him as our Father most merciful, and consent to the law and love it inwardly in our heart and desire to fulfill it and sorrow because we do not.