I thought that I would do something different tonight, this being the first Sunday of the 3^rd millennium (as everyone is counting the beginning of the millennium – which is all that counts in such matters! After all, Christ wasn’t born at the beginning of A.D. 1 either. It’s the way people take the numbers that make them important, not that they perfectly reflect any historical reality! To be precise, the millennium began three years ago, 2000 years after the actual birth of Jesus Christ). I gave you a challenge for the New Year last Lord’s Day evening. Tonight I want to lift our sights higher, impart, the Lord helping us, a sense of perspective, of our place as Christians at this moment in the broad sweep of the history of the kingdom of God in the world. There are warnings, consolations, challenges, and inspirations in seeing ourselves in that larger context.

We are familiar with the account of the progress of the gospel outward from Jerusalem after Pentecost as that story is told in the New Testament. But, of course, the NT tells but a small part of the story. We don’t know for sure what the other apostles did besides Peter, John, and Paul. James, John’s brother, was the first of the Twelve to die, Judas excepted, and we have the account of his martyrdom in Acts 12. The Lord’s half-brother, James, James the Just as he is known to Christian history, became the most prominent leader of the Jerusalem church. But of the remainder of the Twelve we have only scattered reports. Apparently Thomas went east and, tradition has it, as far east as India, where still today there is a Christian church in the south that bears his name. Paul went as far west as Spain, we gather from his own remarks. Both Peter and John traveled and we have good reason to believe that John finished his ministry in Ephesus. Of the rest we have only stories, traditions really, of doubtful reliability: Matthias, for example, the apostle chosen to replace Judas, preached in Ethiopia according to one tradition; tradition has Matthew preaching in both Ethiopia and Persia. In any case it seems likely that most of the Twelve became itinerant evangelists and church planters, as did Paul, the only apostle whose life-work is extensively reported in the Bible.

In any event, by the middle of the first century, the few hundred Christians in Palestine at the time of the descent of the Holy Spirit had become many thousands all over the world, enough in Rome itself to be regarded as a bothersome minority and, so, easily made scapegoats for bad news, such as the devastating fire that destroyed much of the city of Rome in AD 64.

Through the following generations the gospel was spread widely and deeply both in the Roman world and to the east of Palestine. Christ had said before his Ascension, "you shall be my witnesses," and so it was. Itinerant preachers, lay evangelists, and, especially, ordinary Christians sharing their faith, continued to the turn the world upside down. Justin Martyr, in the middle of the second century, was converted through a "chance" conversation with an old Christian on a beach. Many women came to Christ, Celsus sneers, through Christian women "gossiping Christ at the laundry." And, then as now, the largest number of Christians were born and raised by devoted Christian parents in Christian homes. By far most of the Christians even from this early period whose names we know were the product of Christian homes: Polycarp, Origen, Chrysostom, Jerome, and on and on the list goes.

Adding power and attraction to all of this witness-bearing was the extraordinary character of the Christian life in that pagan world: both the ordinary conduct of Christians ("My how those Christians love one another.") and their fortitude in the face of sometimes savage persecution. Julian the Apostate thought that the triumph of the Christian Church in the Roman world was due to the Christians’ fortitude in the face of death (a heroism that could not be ignored, especially when it was often simple people, young men and women, old men who manifested this courage), their liberality to the poor (it was humiliating he said that the Christians care not only for their own poor, but for everyone else’s poor also), and their treatment of the dead (they embodied a hope that no one else had!).

So great and so rapid was the progress of the gospel in the first three centuries that by the time Christianity began to be officially tolerated in AD 311 (it wasn’t formally recognized as the state religion until Theodosius did so in AD 381), it is estimated that one in every ten inhabitants of the empire was a Christian. And that is just the Roman world of the Mediterranean basin. It is estimated that there were, by 325 more Christians east of the Holy Land than west.

It was a glorious period in Christian history and in the advancement of the gospel. But, all of the ordinary problems surfaced as well. Outright heresy had surfaced and resulted in a variety of so-called Christian sects, the ancient equivalent, in many cases, to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Mormons, and Christian Science. A great many orthodox Christians struggled along with a theology that was not heretical but was hardly fully biblical, – in many cases a decidedly juvenile theology – a situation that was bound to lead to larger and more dangerous errors over time. You have only to compare the theology of the church fathers to that developed from the Reformation to see how much was lost from Paul and the New Testament to the next few generations of Christian thinkers. (Not so surprising really. It is the work of generations to discover all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge that are hidden in Christ; and it had to be a process that proceeded in stages -- Christology and Theology first.)

There were as well divisions of various kinds that separated Christians from one another. And, just as there had been glorious courage displayed out of fidelity to Christ in the persecutions, so there had been plenty of Christians who had played the coward. What to do with them after the persecution ended was a controversial, divisive question in early Christianity.

Something else had begun during this period. A deep devotion to Christ working on a pervasive asceticism and gnosticism (a philosophy that favored the spiritual at the expense of the physical and material) in the culture produced the beginnings of Christian monasticism. Its great early figure was Antony, an Egyptian monk of the 3^rd century, and the reading of Athanasius’ Life of Antony, written in the 4^th century, proved decisively influential in the lives of many of the most important servants of the church and the gospel in the few centuries that followed. It was a book with an influence very much like Jonathan Edwards’ 18^th century edition of The Life and Diary of David Brainerd, which sent so many great men into the ministry and to the mission field in the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

Christian monasticism had its problems, of course, and there were theological errors at its heart that were to produce terrible corruption later on, but it also had some wonderful strengths – had not the Lord himself spoken of those who would become eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of God? – and those strengths were likewise to be of immense importance later. It would be monasticism, more than the life of the Christian parish that would preserve the best and purest parts of the Christian faith when spiritual darkness settled over Christian Europe. We have only to remind ourselves that Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, the two Bernards (Clairvaux and Cluny), Francis of Assisi, John Huss, Savanarola, and Martin Luther were all men of the monastic life.

After Constantine brought peace and a new status to the church, she faced a new set of problems brought about by her prosperity and her newfound favor in the eyes of the world. Nominalism, for the first time, became a standing problem in Christianity. Because it was accepted or, in some cases, demanded, large numbers of people became baptized Christians who had no living commitment to the gospel or to following Jesus Christ as a present Lord and Savior. They made public profession of faith but lived by sight.

What is more, for the first time, the church began accumulating power and wealth and, though certainly there were those whose hearts were not corrupted by the enticements of the world, there were many others who were. And many of these were among the leaders of the church. Arguments over power and authority in the church and efforts to accumulate more power and wealth became commonplace. The papacy as we know it today came into being in these circumstances. And so did the contest between east and west that was to lead to the rupture of Christendom in AD 1054, a dispute, at bottom over power in the church and who was to wield it, as so many subsequent breaches of Christian unity have been.

In the west the church expanded, the various peoples who inhabited Europe were Christianized, even if often in an only superficial way. And as the power of the papacy expanded the church replaced the old Roman empire as the organizing institution of Europe, coming to have an all-encompassing presence in the life of the people not unlike what the Federal Government has in America today. It collected taxes, it established the annual holidays, it made laws concerning all manner of things, it raised armies and went to war to settle disputes over territory, revenue, and political authority in various states. At the height of its power the Pope actually exercised authority over the imperial government, such as it was in medieval Europe.

During these same middle ages, Christianity made it all the way eastward to China, and for several centuries was a thriving minority, but it did not survive an imperial purge. By AD 987 a monk sent to investigate reported that he was unable to find evidence of Christianity in China [Neil, History of Missions, 97].

The rise of Islam from the 7^th century onwards then effectively split the world in two, with a Christian West, a Muslim center, and a Buddhist and Taoist East. From that time until the great missionary enterprise of the 19^th century, Christianity was largely confined to Europe, including eastern Europe and western Russia.

The deepening corruption of the medieval church – so closely resembling the pagan corruption of Israel during the centuries of the divided kingdom – led eventually to a situation that demanded reformation. After some abortive attempts in the previous two centuries, it stole upon the Christian world, unexpectedly and surprisingly, through the writing of a German monk, Martin Luther and spread like wildfire outward from Wittenberg to all parts of Europe. The countries most loyal to the papacy, Spain and Italy, were able largely to extinguish the Reformation, but the rest of Europe was suddenly in a terrific tumult. As had been the case before, Christian and church developments were entangled with and took strength from political and economic developments in the culture at large. It was a time of breaking free from the old political associations and ideas. There were new aspirations for freedom in the air. The renaissance, with its flowering of art and thought, had broken up the concrete around the feet of old Europe. We sometimes forget that Luther breathed the same air as Christopher Columbus and Michaelangelo. The German Reformation prospered, when other attempts at reform had come to nothing, humanly speaking, because the political climate favored it and the German princes were looking to take political power and liberty from the Pope and the old Holy Roman Empire. Christ, remember, is Head over all things for the church!

But, it is also true that there were giants in the land in those days. When God has a great work to perform, he furnishes the church with great men. And was there ever a group of men so great, so well-suited to lead a spiritual revolution, as Luther, Calvin, and Knox? Still today, their footprints can be more easily detected in the landscape of Christianity than those of any other men. They changed the world! If there is a man who surely qualifies as "The Man of the Millennium" it is Martin Luther. And these men exercised their mighty influence in Christian ways: preaching, teaching, prayer (the most important event in the history of Scotland, said Spurgeon, was when John Knox went up to his room to pray!), and an example of goodness [and] fidelity that adorned the gospel they preached. They led no armies, they took no political power. It was a spiritual force that they exercised.

In the two generations that followed 1517, Europe was reborn spiritually, commercially, politically, and culturally. The power of Rome was broken – though it would make serious efforts to reassert itself for several centuries to come, Rome’s control over Europe had come to an end. The counter-reformation, the rise of the Jesuits, the theological solidification of Rome’s anti-reformation theology at the Council of Trent, strengthened Rome’s grasp on the Catholic sections of Europe, caused a great deal of blood to be spilt and pain to be suffered all over Europe, but, eventually failed to undo the Reformation. Germany, England, Holland, and Scandinavia, became Protestant countries and, invigorated by their new faith, exported their Protestantism to the northern part of the new world, while Rome was exporting its Catholicism to the southern part.

The Reformation was a spiritual revival as well as a purification of doctrine. But, because of the political nature of the contest between Rome and Protestantism it was the case that many became the same sort of Protestants as they had been Catholics before. When, for example, the entire realm of England became Protestant by the decision of its King, it was inevitable that most of the people would be nominal Protestants as they had been nominal Catholics before.

It was this situation that was the backdrop of the second reformation in Europe during the 17^th century. This was the age of the Puritans in England and Scotland – of Owen, Baxter, Bunyan, and Rutherford, of Jacob Spener and the pietists in Germany, and of the men of the Nadere Reformatie in Holland. It was called the "second reformation", by which was meant not a further doctrinal reform, but a spiritual renewal that would bring the Christian soul into the living experience of the doctrinal realities rediscovered at the Reformation. It was also an effort to continue the purification of Christian worship.

Paralleling these developments in the church, was the so-called Enlightenment and the growth of a godless rationalism. This was eventually to produce the secular state and the secular-humanist university in both Europe and North America. The Great Awakening in the middle of the 18^th century – the revival that swept over especially the English speaking world through the preaching of Whitefield, Edwards, Wesley and many others was a check, but only a check on the growing secularism and unbelief of European and American culture.

From the middle 18^th century onwards the spiritual life of Europe has turned steadily anti-Christian, though not without periods of Christian renewal, such as that in Holland in the time of Kuyper. In Great Britain the advancement of naturalistic and humanistic thinking proceeded more slowly, in large part because of a more vigorous evangelical Christianity – sustained by the renewal of Scottish Reformed Christianity in the early 19^th century (the age of Chalmers, William Burns, and Robert Murray M'Cheyne) and by the preaching of Charles Spurgeon in England. Still the march of liberalism and skepticism about historic Christianity was only slowed, by no means was it reversed. Just as Hezekiah and Josiah could slow the spiritual decay and delay the eventual collapse of Judah but not avert it, so it was in Scotland in the 19^th century.

And the situation was similar in North America, where a vigorous and intellectually sophisticated evangelicalism continued to flourish until its defeat in the great battle for the soul of the mainline Protestant church in the first third of the 20^th century. Darwin, Marx, and Freud did their work and Christianity in the West has not yet recovered. Yet the Lord has not left himself without a witness even where Christianity is in decline or has lost its influence through worldliness. In the 20^th century the American church experienced the revival of the 1970s, the "Jesus Movement," a time of many thousands of conversions, and still the evangelical church is a force to be reckoned with in American life. Earnest Christian believers are to be found wielding authority in all the institutions of our land, the exercise of Christian faith is visible everywhere in our culture, even in football end zones! Why, even our President claims to be such a Christian believer. And, though much smaller and less influential, the evangelical church of Europe still soldiers on, populated, as God’s house always is, with a number of people whose lives are a beautiful adornment of the gospel of peace.

But, at the same time that the light was fading in the West, the 19^th century missionary enterprise, given birth and sustained by evangelical churches in Europe and North America, was changing the face of the Christian world. From the last years of the 18^th century and through the entire 19^th century, missionaries flooded those parts of the world that had been utterly unreached before; in many cases, not only unreached by the gospel but unexplored and unmapped by Europeans and Americans. The great Yale church historian, Kenneth Scott Latourette called the 19^th century "The Great Century." And, certainly, at no other time in church history besides perhaps the first three centuries following Pentecost did Christianity extend its borders so dramatically. The populations of Africa, India, China, Japan, Southeast Asia, the South Sea Islands, and South America all began turning in large numbers to Protestant evangelical Christianity and lesser numbers to Roman Catholicism. In Africa today, for example, a continent that had no Christian population to speak of 150 years ago, Christians now outnumber the adherents of any other faith, including Islam.

This too was an age of giant men and intrepid women. William Carey, Henry Martyn, David Livingstone, John Paton, Hudson Taylor, were but the more celebrated of a great host of Christians who went at risk of their lives to take the gospel to the lost and, in doing so, utterly changed the world. We know, in just this past year we have witnessed the astonishing sight of a large majority of third-world Anglican bishops decisively defeating an effort by western liberal Anglicans to declare homosexuality an acceptable lifestyle!

And here we are at the end of 2000 years of Christian advance in the world. The story began with some 120 followers of Jesus of Nazareth in an Upper Room in Jerusalem. There were at least some several hundreds of other believers scattered about Palestine. Peter’s sermon on the Day of Pentecost may well have more than doubled the size of the Christian community in the world at that moment. Today, it is a different situation altogether. Of the world’s population of some six billion people, there are now two billion who are counted as Christians, – fully one third of the world’s population – of whom almost a billion are Roman Catholic, two hundred million are Orthodox, and almost five hundred million are Protestant. The Christians outnumber Muslims almost 2 to 1, and they outnumber every other religious and non-religious grouping still more decisively.

How many of those are faithful followers of the Lord Jesus, Christians in heart and life as well as in name, the Lord alone knows. A great multitude of those counted as Christians surely are not Christians in truth. But these numbers are still nothing to sniff at, and give us pause as to how swiftly the spiritual situation in the world could be transformed if the Lord sent his Holy Spirit to revive his church!

And, of course, this is but one way to think about Christian history. It is also the story of individual believers walking with Christ, of the ups and downs of Christian experience, of faithfulness to the Lord at great cost and, alas, of unfaithfulness, cowardice, and worldliness. Just as we would expect from Holy Scripture, the kingdom of God is populated by frail and weak people who consume vast quantities of divine grace every day they live, who must be forgiven for a great many things all the time, yet who, by faith, still serve the Lord in important ways and advance his interests in the world.

It is the story of families raising their children to love and serve the Lord and of others coming into the church from the world. It is, as well, the story of apostasy and desertion. It is a story of individuals, of families, of individual congregations and denominations, as well as the story of the church altogether in a certain place and time.

All of this the Scripture already taught us. Indeed, the simplest thing to say is that the story of the gospel and the church in the world has been simply a continuation of that story we already read in Holy Scripture of the Israel of God and her triumphs and tragedies.

In Scripture and in the history of the church up to this moment we learn that genuine spiritual life will ordinarily be possessed by only a remnant of the community of those who profess to believe in Jesus Christ. We learn that most of the time the church is not forcefully advancing and turning the world upside down, but is rather either growing slowly, like a seed that produces a tree over time, or, in many cases, not growing at all, but lying sleeping, to be awakened by the Holy Spirit when he pleases.

We learn, whether we are reading early church history or American history that worldly stature, prosperity, and power has almost never been good for the church, has always turned her head, and drawn her attention away from the things of God and eternity to the temporary things of this world. When Christians begin worrying about protecting their privileges or acquiring more, the interests of the gospel are forgotten. This was the story of medieval Christianity, it was the story of English Anglican Christianity, and it has been the story of modern American Christianity.

But we have learned as well that even thought the church can slumber through a long dark night, the darkness never lasts. The Lord never said truer words than "I will build my church and the gates of hell will never prevail against it." The Romans thought many times to destroy the church, so did the Muslims. And since the Enlightenment, the unbelieving element in the church and outside of it was sure that before long the old superstitions of Christianity would disappear. But she is still here after communism has crumbled and she will be here when all those modern alternatives to Christian faith that now so mesmerize the University and Hollywood have long been forgotten.

"Sire," said Theodore Beza to King Henry of France, "it belongs in truth to the church of God, in the name of which I speak, to receive blows and to give them, but it will please your Majesty to take notice that it is an anvil that has worn out many hammers." Or, as Chesterton put it in a more homely way: "Five times the church has gone to the dogs and each time it was the dog that died."

How many years remain to the end of this story and the return of our Lord and Savior? No one can say. What will the next decades bring: advance or decay? No one can say. "The Lord does what pleases him in heaven and on earth."

But whatever our lot, it will be like that which other Christians have experienced before us. There have already been times when the Lord might well have wondered if he could find faith on the earth, though, apparently there is a time still to come when Christian faith will be at a still lower ebb in the world. So some Scriptures seem to teach. But, then, there is also another day that has not yet dawned, a day when the knowledge of the Lord shall cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.

Meanwhile, it is ours to complete our pilgrimage, to serve the Lord in every way we can, to advance the interest of the gospel both near and far, while we wait for the glorious appearing of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.