Welcome to the Bible Study. I'm Stephen Lawson, president of One Passion Ministries.

And each week I will teach verse by verse through the passage of scripture

so that you can better understand the word of God

and put it into practice in your life.

Join me now as we look together into this section of the Bible.

So I'm just going to begin in a word of prayer. So Father, as we now begin this study this morning,

we're so grateful for men who have gone before us that you have raised up, men you've given to be gifts

to your church, that we're not confined to our own hour in history, but that we can stand on

the shoulders of giants and see how they peered into

scripture and how they addressed issues. We need the collective wisdom of your saints down through the ages.

So Father, expedite even my thoughts so that I can get to the heart of the issues.

So Father, I pray this in Jesus' name, amen.

All right, man, this is going to be quite a study we're going to have.

We have taken just a short time out from our verse by verse study of Romans,

which we will be picking up the first of the year.

And I started several weeks ago just a tiny little mini series on the reformers and so this is part four and just

to remind you the reformers were those men in the 16th century who helped reform the church that had become deformed and to reconform

it back to the New Testament standard that God had given, both in doctrine and in practice.

And so it became really the pivotal moment for Western civilization,

and that is not overstating what happened. It not only radically affected the

church and it would be out of the reformation would come the Puritan movement and out of the Puritan movement would become the denominations of Presbyterian and Baptist and eventually Methodist and independent and is really the scripture but out of that the reformers of the 16th century and these

are extraordinary men and so I just want you to know about these men and time does not permit me to walk you through

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