500th Anniversary of the Reformation...Why the Celebration?

   This year marks 500 years since the official beginning of the Reformation.
   But what does that even mean? What were our past generations re-form-ing from, anyway?
 The church at Rome, in the 1330's, and centuries after, was a place of some of the world's greatest opulence while the common people starved and continued putting their pennies into the coffers of the clergy; and in the Middle Ages, some of the greatest atrocities against humanity, known as the Inquisition, was carried out by the church in Rome.
   The church in Rome claimed to represent Jesus Christ, but their abuses against all people, including Christians who wanted to honor Jesus Christ and His written Word, the Bible, clearly showed that many in the church at Rome knew nothing of Almighty God.
   The church at Rome had made laws that demanded the Bible be in the Latin language only, giving the excuse that if the common people could read Scripture they would make it ordinary and misused, instead of revered. In reality, If the common people knew God's Holy Words for themselves, they would know how abusive the church had been and the church would lose their income and place of honor.
   The church at Rome, in time, made it a hanging, or burning, offense, to possess even a singe page of the Bible; as one example, a man who was teaching his children the Lord's prayer in English was burned alive.
   Needless to say, the deterrent to disobeying the church at Rome was extreme; there were, however, some who had the courage and will to do the right thing by standing up to the mega monster clergy inside of this church.  We have their names and their stories because they were highly educated, with the Bible as their main source of learning. Their education was far more extensive and deeper than most any we know of today, which included, and was perhaps the majority of their studies, history and the ancient historians of their time, with the Bible in Latin, as supreme.
   The first of these men was John Wycliffe, theologian, seminary professor, and Bible translator. Wycliffe wrote extensively against the clergy of the church at Rome, and against the powerful influence the church had over the kings and queens of Europe and Britain.
   Wycliffe was a strong advocate of translating the Latin Bible into the language of the people. While Wycliffe died of natural causes at age 64, Bohemian Jan Hus, who distributed Wycliffe's writings, was burned alive.
   Wycliffe, the first of the known advocates of having the Bible in the language of the people, and oversaw a translation into the English language, was called the Morning Star of the Protestant Reformation, eventually leading to our great privilege of owning our own copies of the Bible today, and the future cleaning up a great deal of abuse of the Church at Rome.
   This is the beginning of the story of why we celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Reformation!