Five hundred years ago, an Englishman named William Tyndale decided that ordinary English people ought to be able to read the Bible in English.

That doesn’t sound like a terribly controversial idea, does it? After all, we have Bibles everywhere. Most of us have several in our homes. There are Bibles on our bookshelves, Bibles on our nightstands, Bibles on our phones. You can walk into Walmart and buy one. You can download one for free.

And nobody is going to arrest you for it.

But five hundred years ago, in England, putting the Bible into the hands of ordinary people could get you killed.

William Tyndale knew that. He knew that people had been arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and even burned alive for their involvement with English translations of the Scriptures. He decided to translate the Bible anyway.

He left his homeland in 1524. He spent the next twelve years living as an exile, moving from place to place in Europe, translating the Bible from Greek and Hebrew into English. He never returned home.

In 1535, he was betrayed and arrested. He spent about eighteen months in prison. And in 1536, he was executed.

According to the traditional account, his final prayer was for God to open the eyes of the king of England. Within a few years, English Bibles were being authorized and placed in churches throughout England. The work that had cost Tyndale his life was becoming available to the very people for whom he had sacrificed it.

This year, AD 2026, marks the five-hundredth anniversary of the publication of Tyndale’s English New Testament.

I want to ask some questions. What kind of book is worth dying for? What was so important about the Bible that this man was willing to surrender his home, his friends, his freedom, and finally his life, so that ordinary people could read it?

Perhaps there’s another question we ought to ask.

If a man was willing to die so that people like us could have the Bible in our own language, why do so many of us have so little interest in reading it? Those are the questions behind our sermon this morning.

But we’re not going to begin with William Tyndale. We’re going to begin with the apostle Paul, because the reason Tyndale was willing to die for the Scriptures is found in what Paul tells Timothy about the Scriptures.

In his second letter to Timothy, Paul is writing what appears to be his final letter. He is writing to a younger pastor whom he loves like a son. Paul is in prison. He knows his death is approaching. Before this letter is done, he will tell Timothy that the time of his departure has come.

In chapter 3, Paul has been warning Timothy about the terrible things that will characterize the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, ungrateful, and unholy. Many will have an outward appearance of godliness while denying its power. There will be false teachers who lead people away from the truth. What is Timothy supposed to do in a world like that?

Paul doesn’t tell him to come up with a new plan to meet the challenges. Listen to what he does say:

S&R 2 Timothy 3:14–17

¹⁴ But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it ¹⁵ and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. ¹⁶ All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, ¹⁷ that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

As we work through these verses, there are three great truths about the Scriptures that we need to understand.

1. God has given us his Word through the Holy Spirit.
2. God has preserved his Word and brought it to us.
3. God has given us his Word to bring us to Jesus and equip us to serve him.

And as we consider these truths, we’re going to see how God used a man named William Tyndale to put his Word into the hands of ordinary English-speaking people like you and me.

the first great truth

God has given us his Word through the Holy Spirit.

Look at verse 16.

Paul says that all Scripture is breathed out by God.

The Greek word translated “breathed out by God” is theopneustos. It’s a compound word. The first part refers to God, and the second part has to do with breathing. Based on centuries of translation tradition, Tyndale used the word “inspired” to say in English what Paul was saying in Greek.

But we need to understand something about this word.

Sometimes we say that a beautiful sunset is inspiring. Or a musician gives an inspired performance. Or when somebody writes an especially moving poem, we might say he received a unique inspiration. When we talk that way, we’re saying that what we saw or heard prompted unique feelings of wonder or joy within us.

That’s not what Paul means.

He’s not just saying that the Bible is an especially inspiring book, with a unique capacity to excite our imagination or emotion. It certainly is that, but that’s definitely not all that he means. Not even close.

He’s saying that the Scriptures have their origin in God himself. God is their ultimate author. Just as you breathe out the words that you use to say what you’re trying to say to people, God breathed out the Bible.

And that means that when we read the Scriptures, we’re not merely reading the religious opinions of ancient men. We’re reading what God has revealed. It is the word of God.

Of course, God used human beings to write the Bible.

Moses wrote. David wrote. Isaiah wrote. Paul wrote.

And when you read their writings, you can tell that they were different men.

They had different personalities, different backgrounds, different vocabularies, and different writing styles.

The Gospel of Luke doesn’t sound exactly like the Gospel of John.

Paul doesn’t write exactly like Peter.

And that’s because the Holy Spirit didn’t simply erase their personalities and turn them into machines.

He worked through them.

Peter explains this in 2 Peter 1:21. Men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.

That’s a wonderful description.

The men were really speaking. They were really writing. They were using their own minds, their own words, and their own abilities.

But the Holy Spirit was directing the process so that what they wrote was what God intended to reveal.

And this is why we believe that the Scriptures are trustworthy.

Not because Moses was incapable of making mistakes.

Not because Paul was a perfect man.

But because the Holy Spirit was superintending their writing.

The Bible is God’s Word, given through human authors.

There’s something important here that we shouldn’t overlook.

When Paul tells Timothy that he has known the sacred writings from childhood, he’s primarily talking about the Old Testament.

Timothy’s mother and grandmother had taught him the Scriptures long before the New Testament had been completed.

But the New Testament also came to be recognized as Scripture.

Peter refers to Paul’s letters alongside the other Scriptures in 2 Peter 3:15–16.

And Paul himself understood that the message entrusted to the apostles was not merely human teaching, as we’ve pointed out repeatedly in our study of the Thessalonian letters.

The risen Christ had commissioned his apostles to speak with his authority.

So when we speak about the inspiration of Scripture, we’re speaking about the Old Testament and the New Testament together.

Sixty-six books, written over many centuries by many different men, yet forming one great revelation from God.

And what is the great subject of that revelation?

Jesus Christ.

The Old Testament prepares us for him. The New Testament announces his coming, explains his saving work, and teaches us to follow him.

The Holy Spirit didn’t give us the Bible merely to satisfy our curiosity about ancient history.

He gave us the Bible so that we might know God through his Son.

Be careful, now. God was under no obligation to reveal himself to us in this way.

He didn’t have to give us a written revelation.

He could have left us to look at the world he created and try to figure out what we could about him.

And the world does reveal something about its Creator.

But you can’t look at the stars and discover that Jesus Christ died for sinners.

You can’t study the mountains and learn that salvation is by grace through faith.

You can’t examine the ocean and discover the promise of resurrection and everlasting life.

Those are truths God had to reveal.

And he has revealed them in Scripture.

The Bible is not something humanity discovered. It is something God graciously gave.

That’s our first truth.

And if the Holy Spirit originally gave the Scriptures 2000 years ago, then what a remarkable thing it is that those Scriptures have survived to reach us.

Which brings us to our second point.

the second great truth

God has preserved his Word and brought it to us.

Look back at verses 14 and 15.

Paul reminds Timothy that he has learned the Scriptures from people he knows and trusts.

And he tells him that he has been acquainted with the sacred writings since childhood.

Think about that.

Timothy wasn’t standing at Mount Sinai when God gave the Law.

He wasn’t there when David wrote his psalms.

He was not around when Isaiah preached to Judah.

Yet he had those writings.

They had been handed down from generation to generation.

They had been copied, preserved, taught, and passed along.

And Timothy had received them.

There’s a whole history of God’s providence behind that simple statement.

We need to distinguish something here.

The Holy Spirit inspired the Scriptures.

That was a unique work of God in producing the biblical writings.

But God has also preserved those writings through the centuries.

And he has ordinarily done that through the work of human beings.

Scribes copied manuscripts.

Teachers instructed children.

Churches read the Scriptures publicly.

Believers carried copies from one place to another.

And eventually, translators made those Scriptures available in languages that the original authors had never spoken.

None of that means that every copyist was inspired the way the original authors were inspired.

Copyists make small mistakes. Manuscripts sometimes differ in minor details. Translators sometimes disagree about the best way to express a particular word or sentence.

We don’t need to deny any of that.

The doctrine of inspiration doesn’t require us to pretend that every manuscript or every translation is perfect.

The salient point is that, through all those centuries, God has preserved his Word.

We have an abundance of manuscript evidence, and through careful comparison of those manuscripts, scholars have reconstructed the original text.

God has not left his church without the Scriptures.

And the Bible you hold in your hands today is part of that long history.

Which brings us back to William Tyndale.

For many centuries, the dominant Bible of Western Christianity was the Latin Vulgate.

Latin had once been widely understood throughout much of the Roman world.

But languages change.

By the time William Tyndale was born, ordinary English people didn’t speak Latin.

The Bible was read in Latin in the churches, but most people couldn’t understand it.

And most people didn’t own a Bible.

That doesn’t mean nobody had ever translated the Bible into English.

About a century and a half before Tyndale, John Wycliffe and his associates had produced an English Bible from the Latin Vulgate.

But those Bibles had to be copied by hand.

Imagine what that meant.

There were no photocopiers. No printers in Wycliffe’s day. No way to produce thousands of inexpensive copies.

A Bible was a large and costly undertaking.

And ecclesiastical authorities placed severe restrictions on unauthorized English translations.

By Tyndale’s day, possessing or distributing prohibited religious writings could bring serious punishment.

But something had changed.

In fact, several things had changed. And they had been developing for generations, in places far removed from England.

For centuries, scholars in Western Europe had relied chiefly on Latin translations of the Bible. Knowledge of ancient Greek was comparatively scarce. But in the Greek-speaking East, scholars had continued to read and teach that language.

As the Ottoman Turks pressed against the Byzantine Empire, Greek scholars and their learning increasingly made their way westward. Manuel Chrysoloras, for example, began teaching Greek in Florence in 1397. Western scholars were learning to read books that many of their predecessors had known only through translations—including the Bible itself.

And when Constantinople did fall in 1453, the movement of Greek learning into Western Europe gained still more force.

Think about that. A great Christian city falls to a Muslim empire. A terrible event, by any ordinary measure. Yet God, who rules over nations and kings, was also preparing men in the West to read the New Testament in the language in which it had been written.

At about the same time, another change was taking place. Johannes Gutenberg and other printers were developing the use of movable metal type in Europe. Books that once had to be copied one at a time by hand could now be printed in hundreds of copies.

The recovery of Greek learning made it possible for scholars to work directly with the Greek New Testament. The printing press made it possible for their work to reach far more readers.

Then, in 1516, Erasmus published his printed edition of the Greek New Testament, with a new Latin translation alongside it. That was actually one year before Martin Luther nailed his famous thesis to the church door in Wittenburg.

Those events did not happen because anyone was planning William Tyndale’s English Bible. The scholars teaching Greek in Italy weren’t working for Tyndale. Gutenberg wasn’t building a press for him. Erasmus wasn’t preparing his edition for one English translator alone.

But God was at work through them all.

For a scholar like William Tyndale, the opportunity was extraordinary. Instead of translating an English Bible from a Latin translation, he could translate the New Testament from Greek. And instead of producing a handful of expensive handwritten copies, printers could produce books that could be carried into England and passed from one reader to another.

And he became convinced that ordinary English people ought to have that opportunity to hear the Word of God in their own language.

There’s a famous story about Tyndale.

According to John Foxe, Tyndale was involved in a dispute with a learned clergyman who placed greater confidence in the authority of the pope than in the Scriptures.

Tyndale responded with a declaration that has become one of the most famous statements in the history of the English Bible.

He intended, God willing, to make even a boy driving a plow better acquainted with Scripture than that clergyman.

Think about the significance of that.

Tyndale wasn’t translating the Bible for kings and bishops.

He was translating it for the ordinary man.

For the farmer.

For the laborer.

For the fellow who worked with his hands all day and came home tired.

In other words, he was translating the Bible for people like us in Dundalk.

He believed that the Word of God belonged in the hands of ordinary Christians.

And he was right.

The same Holy Spirit who inspired the Scriptures is able to use those Scriptures to teach ordinary believers.

You don’t need a seminary degree to understand the gospel.

You don’t need to know Greek to learn that Christ died for sinners.

You don’t need to read Hebrew to understand that the Lord is your shepherd.

That’s why translation matters.

Tyndale first tried to obtain support for his translation project in England.

He failed.

So in 1524, he left the country and traveled to continental Europe.

He would never return.

By 1525, he had completed his translation of the New Testament and had begun printing it in Cologne.

But the authorities discovered what was happening.

Tyndale escaped and continued the work elsewhere.

In 1526, the complete printed New Testament appeared in Worms, Germany.

And copies began entering England.

They were small enough to conceal and transport.

Merchants and sympathizers helped distribute them.

And the authorities tried to stop them.

Copies were confiscated and publicly burned.

But the books kept coming.

And people kept reading.

Tyndale went on to translate portions of the Old Testament from Hebrew.

He also revised his New Testament, producing an important new edition in 1534.

His translation was not simply an academic achievement.

It was an act of Christian conviction.

He believed that people needed to hear the gospel in words they could understand.

Why was there so much opposition?

We ought to understand that the opposition to Tyndale was not simply a matter of church leaders being afraid that ordinary people might read a book.

There were serious theological disagreements.

Tyndale’s translation choices challenged important elements of the medieval Roman Catholic system.

For example, he translated a Greek word often rendered “priest” as “elder.”

He used “congregation” where readers were accustomed to “church.”

And he translated the language of repentance in ways that challenged the established system of penance.

Those weren’t trivial matters.

Words shape the way people understand doctrine.

And Tyndale was convinced that Scripture should be translated according to what the original text actually said, rather than being made to support doctrines imposed upon it.

That conviction put him into direct conflict with powerful religious authorities.

Thomas More, one of the most famous men in England, became one of his fiercest opponents.

The two men engaged in a bitter literary controversy.

And the struggle was about far more than vocabulary.

It concerned the authority of Scripture, the nature of the church, repentance, and the way sinners are made right with God.

Tyndale believed that sinners are justified—declared righteous before God—not by earning God’s favor through penance or good works, but through faith in Jesus Christ. That was not merely a dispute about the right English words. It was a dispute about the gospel itself.

And even faith is not something a spiritually dead sinner can manufacture by his own power. The Spirit calls sinners through the gospel in a way that brings them willingly to Christ. We call that effectual calling. The same Spirit who gave the written Word opens blind eyes to see the Savior revealed in it.

And he wanted ordinary people to discover that truth in the Scriptures.

In 1535, Tyndale was betrayed by Henry Phillips and arrested.

He was imprisoned at Vilvoorde Castle, near Brussels.

And one of the most moving documents from his imprisonment is a letter in which he asks for warmer clothing because he is suffering from the cold.

He asks for a lamp because sitting alone in the darkness is miserable.

And then he makes another request.

He wants his Hebrew Bible, a Hebrew grammar, and a Hebrew dictionary.

Think about that.

Here is a man who has lost his homeland.

He’s lost his freedom.

He’s cold, lonely, and facing the possibility of execution.

And he wants to keep studying his Hebrew Bible.

Why?

Because the work of making God’s Word available to ordinary people still matters to him.

Even in prison.

In 1536, Tyndale was condemned and executed.

He was strangled and then burned.

William Tyndale’s famous final prayer, reportedly spoken just before his execution on October 6, 1536, was:

“Lord, open the King of England’s eyes!”

The prayer was recorded by John Foxe in his Book of Martyrs.

There is considerable irony in what followed. In 1539, just three years after Tyndale’s execution, Henry VIII authorized the Great Bible to be placed in English churches. Much of that Bible’s New Testament was based on Tyndale’s translation.

Tyndale died praying that the king would recognize the importance of making God’s Word available to the English people. Within three years, English Bibles were being placed in churches throughout the kingdom—with that same king’s authorization.

Tyndale did not live to see that development.

But his work survived him.

And his words continued to shape the English Bible for centuries.

Much of the language of the King James Version can be traced directly to Tyndale.

And through that tradition of English Bible translation, his influence continues even in the Bible translations we use today.

Consider a few familiar expressions.

“Let there be light.”

“Am I my brother’s keeper?”

“Fight the good fight.”

“The powers that be.”

These are a few of the many expressions that Tyndale helped establish in the English language.

Five hundred years later, they remain familiar.

But the greatest legacy of Tyndale isn’t his influence on the English language.

It’s that he helped put the Word of God into the hands of English-speaking Christians.

And here’s what we need to remember.

God didn’t need William Tyndale. But God was pleased to use William Tyndale.

The Lord who inspired the Scriptures also rules over history.

He raises up men and women to accomplish his purposes.

He gives them abilities, opportunities, courage, and conviction.

And sometimes he calls them to suffer.

Tyndale was not an apostle. His translation was not inspired in the way Paul’s letters were inspired.

He was a servant of God, working with the gifts God had given him.

And through that servant, God brought his Word to countless people.

That’s providence.

That’s grace.

And that brings us to our third great truth.

the third great truth

God has given us his Word to bring us to Christ and equip us to serve him.

Return to verse 15.

Paul tells Timothy that the sacred writings are able to make him wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.

That’s the heart of the passage.

And it’s the reason everything we’ve said about William Tyndale matters.

God didn’t preserve the Scriptures merely so that we could possess a really old book.

He preserved them because of what they reveal.

They tell us how sinners can be saved.

Wise for salvation

Notice that Paul doesn’t say Scripture saves people apart from Christ.

It makes us wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.

That’s important.

You can know a great deal about the Bible without being saved.

You can memorize its books.

You can study its history.

You can learn Greek and Hebrew.

You can even teach Bible classes.

And still be lost.

The Pharisees were experts in the Scriptures.

Yet Jesus told them that they searched the Scriptures while refusing to come to him for life.

The purpose of Scripture is not merely to fill our heads with information.

It’s to lead us to the Savior, Jesus Christ.

The Bible reveals that we are sinners.

It reveals that God is holy.

It reveals that we cannot make ourselves righteous by our own efforts.

And it reveals that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, came into the world to save sinners.

He lived the life we have failed to live.

He died as a substitute for sinners.

He rose from the dead.

And everyone who trusts in him receives forgiveness and everlasting life.

That’s the gospel.

And that’s what Tyndale wanted ordinary people to understand.

He didn’t merely want them to become more educated.

He wanted them to know Christ.

The Scriptures are profitable

But Paul doesn’t stop with salvation.

In verse 16, he tells us that Scripture is profitable for teaching, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness.

Let’s consider those four things.

Teaching.

The Scriptures tell us what is true.

They teach us who God is, what he has done, what he requires, and what he promises.

Without Scripture, we’re left to our own guesses about God.

And human beings are remarkably good at inventing gods who agree with us.

The Bible corrects that.

It reveals the true God.

Reproof.

The Scriptures show us where we’re wrong.

And that’s not always pleasant.

Nobody enjoys being told that he’s wrong.

But if you’re heading down the wrong road, somebody who loves you will tell you.

And God loves his people enough to confront their sins.

Sometimes the Bible tells us things we don’t want to hear.

It exposes our pride.

Our greed.

Our lust.

Our selfishness.

Our bitterness.

But that’s a gift of grace.

Correction.

The Scriptures don’t merely tell us that we’re wrong.

They show us how to get right.

They call us to repentance.

They direct us back to the truth.

They teach us how to restore relationships, turn away from sin, and walk in obedience.

Training in righteousness.

This is the ongoing work of Scripture in the Christian life.

Just as a child must be trained to do what is right, God’s children need to be trained in righteousness.

And God uses his Word to do that.

The Bible isn’t merely something we consult when we have a problem.

It’s the means by which God shapes the way we think, the way we speak, and the way we live.

And verse 17 gives us the purpose.

The man of God is to be complete, equipped for every good work.

In its immediate context, that applies especially to Timothy as a minister of the gospel.

Paul is preparing him to teach and shepherd the church.

But the principle extends to the whole Christian life.

God’s Word equips his people to serve him.

It equips parents to raise their children.

It equips husbands and wives to love one another.

It equips workers to be honest and diligent.

It equips Christians to face suffering.

It equips us to recognize false teaching.

It equips us to share the gospel.

It equips us to live faithfully in a world that often rejects the truth.

And that’s why we need it.

Not merely on Sunday mornings.

But every day.

set the hook

And this brings us back to the question we asked at the beginning.

Why would a man give his life so that people could read the Bible?

Because he believed that the Bible was God’s Word.

Because he believed that it revealed the gospel.

Because he believed that ordinary people needed to hear that gospel.

And because he believed that no human authority had the right to keep God’s Word from the people of God.

William Tyndale was willing to die so that English-speaking people could read the Scriptures.

And here we are, five hundred years later.

Picture William Tyndale sitting in a cold prison cell, asking for a lamp, a Hebrew Bible, and a dictionary so he can keep studying God’s Word.

And picture one of us sitting in a comfortable living room, with three Bibles on the shelf and another twenty on our phone—but 217 movie channels saying we just can’t find the time to read it.

We have more access to the Bible than any generation of Christians before us.

We have printed Bibles.

Study Bibles.

Audio Bibles.

Bible software.

Bible apps.

And we can read the Scriptures in the language we speak every day.

What are we doing with that privilege?

Do we read it?

Do we study it?

Do we meditate on it day and night?

Blessed is the man
who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,
nor stands in the way of sinners,
nor sits in the seat of scoffers;
but his delight is in the law of the Lord,
and on his law he meditates day and night.

He is like a tree
planted by streams of water
that yields its fruit in its season,
and its leaf does not wither.
In all that he does, he prospers.
The wicked are not so,
but are like chaff that the wind drives away.

Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,
nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous;
for the Lord knows the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked will perish.

what God wants them to do

There are two things worth asking of ourselves today.

First, receive the Scriptures as the gracious gift of God that they are.

Don’t treat the Bible as an ordinary book.

The Holy Spirit has given it to us.

God has preserved it.

And through centuries of faithful labor, sacrifice, and sometimes bloodshed, he has brought it into our own language.

Treasure it.

Read it.

Learn it.

And second, come to the Christ whom the Scriptures reveal.

Because the greatest tragedy would not be to own a Bible and never read it.

The greatest tragedy would be to read the Bible and never come to know the Savior it proclaims.

William Tyndale did not die to give us an interesting piece of literature.

He gave his life because he wanted people to know the gospel.

And that gospel tells us that Jesus Christ died for sinners and rose again.

The Scriptures make us wise for salvation through faith in him.

So trust him.

Follow him.

And let his Word shape your life.

The Bible in our hands is a gift of God’s grace.

May it never become a gift we take for granted.

Eternal Father, in this very moment, we turn again from our sin and ourselves to you and your glory,

Trusting only in your Son’s sacrifice for our sins to make us right with you.

We want to shelter ourselves in the shadow of his cross,

Bathe ourselves in the blood that he shed there for us,

Rest ourselves on his redemption

Robe ourselves in his righteousness,

Renew ourselves in his resurrection,

Lose ourselves in his Lordship,

And find ourselves in his friendship.

We want him to become for us, for today and forever, wisdom from God, and righteousness, and holiness, and salvation.

For he is the One who suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to you, our Father.