City Life Starter

I. The Word: Luke 6:22-23:

“Blessed are you when men hate you, and ostracize you, and insult you, and scorn your name as evil, for the sake of the Son of Man. Be glad in that day and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven. For in the same way their fathers used to treat the prophets.”

II. Study Questions

1. Why are college students integral to the kingdom of God?
2. What role did college students play in the Reformation?
3. What will you do to help reach college students for the Kingdom?

This week we are highlighting the college campus. Interestingly, this week exactly 500 years ago an event occurred that changed the course of history, and college students played an important part in it.

This story actually starts in the 14th century at Oxford University in England. There, a professor named, John Wycliffe, translated the Bible into English and called for reform within the Roman Catholic Church. His writings and criticism of the Roman Catholic Church were considered radical and earned him a posthumous excommunication from the church, but they were firmly rooted in the Bible. Wycliffe wrote before the printing
press, but some enthusiastic students of Wycliffe from Prague took it upon themselves to copy his writings by hand and took them to Prague.

Wycliffe died in 1384 but thanks to these college students, Wycliffe’s teachings lived on and took root in Prague. There, a pastor and seminary professor named Jan Hus read Wycliffe’s works and he too became convinced of the supremacy of the Bible over the Catholic Church. Hus taught that the true Church was made up of believers in Jesus, not merely members of the Roman Catholic Church. Hus also spoke out against corruption in the Roman Catholic Church and the selling of indulgences.

For his teaching, Hus was burned at the stake in Constance, Germany on July 6, 1415.

As a college student at the University of Erfurt in Germany in the early 1500s, Martin Luther happened upon a book of Hus’s letters in the university library. Luther would find in Hus’s writings confirmation for his reading of the Bible and his criticism of the corruption in the Roman Catholic Church.

On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther, then a professor at the University of Wittenberg, nailed his Ninety-Five Theses on the door of the All Saints Church in Wittenberg. Luther intended his Ninety-Five Theses only to be only a starting point for discussion among the academics at the University of Wittenberg, but a couple college students were so inspired
they took the Ninety-Five Theses to the local publisher (the printing press had been created about 60 years prior) and began printing copies for distribution. Thus began the Protestant Reformation, and it began because of college students at Oxford and college students at Wittenberg.

College students are integral in God’s Kingdom because they are idealistic and enthusiastic. They have the courage to believe the Gospel can truly change the world because they have seen what Jesus has done in their lives and see no reason why He cannot do the same with others.

They are not ashamed to believe God’s promise that the kingdoms of this world will become the kingdom of our God. They have no stake in being “reasonable” because they know instinctively that reasonable people do not change the world.

Luther was not a reasonable man. If Luther had been reasonable, he could have pushed for reform respectfully from within the Catholic church. In response, he probably would have received the same response as others had before him, and we would all be the worse for their reasonableness. Instead, like Wycliffe and Hus before him, Luther was inspired by the Holy Spirit to stand on the firm ground of the Word of God, and as a result, with the help of some enthusiastic and idealistic college
students, he changed the world.