Bold As Lions – Willaim Tyndale

“William Tyndale was a passionate Christian, a watchman, a scholar, an ordained priest, and he was educated at Oxford. He saw firsthand the universal corruption within the Roman Catholic Church (of that day.) The Pope and his bishops believed they were incapable of error in all spiritual matters. For William, the infallible, inerrant Word of God, the Holy Bible, was this reformer’s final authority. 

“The spiritual climate of his nation was sterile and barren. The Roman Catholic Church went to extreme measures to prevent the ordinary common people from having any independent understanding of the Bible. In direct defiance of the Pope’s law, William laid a foundation of the New Testament from the original Greek. The translation was far different from the Roman Catholic Church’s Latin Vulgate version. His resistance to the Pope marked him as going rogue and unleashed the full wrath and rage of the Papacy. He was hunted down much like David fleeing from the demonized fury of King Saul. 

“William knew it was illegal to translate the Bible into English, the language of the common person. But after seeing people wander aimlessly without truth, after talking with priests who knew very little of the Bible themselves, William went about making copies of his version…and getting the Word out to as many people as possible. This was his passion and Divine assignment. His dream and mission, if successful, was that the boy plowing the fields, who owned a Bible, would know more than the priests of the time. William was no criminal. He was a faithful pioneer, a reformer, a messenger of hope and deliverance, who dreamed of his generation and generations yet to come to encounter Jesus in the life-giving Word of God.” (Brian Gibbs)

“Every Scripture is God-breathed and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for instruction in righteousness, that each person who belongs to God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.” (2 Timothy 3:16-17; WEB)

“‘Look! The days are coming,’ declares the Lord GOD, ‘when I will send a famine throughout the land— not a famine of food or a thirst for water— but rather a famine of hearing the words of the Lord.’” (Amos 8:11; ISV)

Give Him 15 minutes in prayer:

  • Ask the Lord to give you the passion for the Bible that William Tyndale had.
  • Talk to the Lord about your specific relationship with His Word. Do you read it, lean on it, rely on it, trust it, live by it? Or, has it become common to you? Do you take it for granted?
  • Commit to take the Bible more seriously in the future, learning to use it to learn of Him. 
  • Look for passages to war with over your circumstances, family, city, state, and nation.
  • Consider Jesus, the Living Word of God, the author and finisher of your faith, Savior of the world. 

A prayer you can pray:

God, it is incredible to hear how someone like William Tyndale would literally lay their life down for the sake of the written Gospel. In his case, he lived and died for the Word of God written in English, the language of the people in his community in his day. While many of us take Your Word for granted and hardly read it today, it was the most precious commodity of his life. Give us that level of passion for the Word of the Lord. Make us fear Amos 8:11 lest it become our permanent condition. If men like Tyndale laid their lives down so we common people could read the Bible, what are we thinking to treat it so lightly today? Is it because Bibles are everywhere, even on our electronic devices? Is it because we think we have read it so much, we don’t need its fresh revelation daily? Do we think we know You so well that there is nothing more we can learn of You from its wonderful pages? Lord, forgive us! Let us treasure it, share it, read it, study it, and incorporate its words in our everyday lives. Let Your Word come alive to us in a fresh and new way. Let it be declared and decreed from our lips and may our tongues worship You with it as long as we have breath. Living Word of God, Jesus, let Your Word be that sword that we use to shift our circumstances, our families, our cities, states, and nation. Let our hearts agree with its contents so much so that we are able to resist temptations and withstand the spirit of this age. God, thank You for the Bible, the inerrant Word. Thank You for revealing Yourself to us as we read it. We are a blessed generation in a blessed nation to have such free access of it. We worship You, Jesus. Amen.

Today’s decree:

We have been given the blueprint for life-saving, society-transforming, culture-shaping, and history-making in the Bible, God’s Holy Word!


1 Excerpted with permission from “Bold As Lions”, by Brian Gibbs.