What Does John Knox show us about Faith?

“‘I do not pray for these alone [it is not for their sake only that I make this request], but also for [all] those who [will ever] believe and trust in Me through their message, that they all may be one; just as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be one in Us, so that the world may believe [without any doubt] that You sent Me. I have given to them the glory and honor which You have given Me, that they may be one, just as We are one; I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected and completed into one, so that the world may know [without any doubt] that You sent Me, and [that You] have loved them, just as You have loved Me.’” (John 17:20-23, AMP)

Many good men and women have gone to prison for the sake of the Gospel. They’ve been captured and persecuted for spreading it, honoring it, and defending it. Some wrote from those prisons like Paul or John Bunyan. Some strengthened the faith of those around them, the way we saw Lady Jane Grey do last week while she awaited her execution from isolated detention.

But imagine– instead of a jail cell with a cot, a chamber pot, and a desk with some paper– you were chained to a bench. And your hands constantly hovered before a massive oar on board a galley ship. Imagine instead of being a prisoner, you were a slave, forced to row military ships when the wind was not in favor of the sails. This is how John Knox lived for nineteen months in the late 1540s, after he was captured by the French when they took back Scotland’s St. Andrews Castle. The fortress that had become a safe haven for Protestants during the tumultuous period where Scotland hung in the balance between the Reformation that King Henry VIII had inadvertently given rise to, and the Roman Catholic church that constantly sought to regain a foothold there.

John Knox had been a bodyguard for the late George Wishart, a preacher who studied reformed convictions in England and Switzerland before going back to his homeland in Scotland to open-air preach these new ideologies that were making their way across Europe. Wishart was later captured and martyred, but not before Knox learned a foundation in the Gospel and the pitfalls that tarnished the Roman Catholic church from the purity of God’s Truth. 

It was actually John’s ability to so concisely communicate where catholicism acted outside of scripture and how they built man-made practices that served themselves that drew the attention of the Scottish people. They requested many times that John Knox consider becoming their pastor at St. Andrews Castle because of his innate ability to preach, and after much inner conflict, John finally accepted the role.

John Knox was adamant in his position that Christ was the only Head of the Church, and that the Catholic church was no longer part of the Bride of Christ because they had wandered away from Jesus’ teachings and added requirements that were not based in the Bible to the people.

Once the French seized St. Andrews Castle at the request of Mary Queen of Scots, Knox found himself on board a galley ship, rowing and being mistreated by the French soldiers that supervised the slaves. These French soldiers would have been Catholic and entertained themselves by tormenting the Protestant rowers. Many died from the poor conditions and the back-breaking work. Some admitted to crimes they didn’t commit so they could be killed rather than have to serve in such squalor. But Knox resolved to himself that he would leave this life as a slave and somehow get back to his pulpit in the chapel at St. Andrews. 

As a slave, one of Knox’s contemporaries, Henry Balnaves wrote to him with a copy of a book he wrote, asking Knox to edit it. In Knox’s off-hours, he worked on this manuscript, and found that he was comforted by the encouragement he found there. The book centered on this question: What should we do in times of trouble? 

The answer might have seemed obvious, but to someone like Knox, who was living as a slave under exhausting and hopeless circumstances, the reminder was good. The answer was that we should pray. We should draw near to God. We should run to Him and trust in His working, not ours. We should lean on His Word, not the images, saints, holy water, and good deeds that could never replace the salvation given to us by God’s grace, through faith in Him.

This message provided comfort to John that carried him through the nineteen, grueling months of his capture. In 1549, John Knox was released as part of a trade between England and France. At the time, King Edward VI was still a young boy, but a ruler in favor of protestantism and was building an England that worshiped in that way. Because of the pardon Edward provided John, he decided to settle in England, as Scotland was still technically under the catholic rule of Mary and those she allowed to rule in her stead while she served as queen consort to France. 

Knox would spend many years in England under Edward’s rule before fleeing to Geneva at the beginning of the English reign of Mary Tudor. In Geneva, Knox would glean much knowledge from John Calvin and Henry Bullinger, before taking up a pulpit of his own for other former-English subjects who were escaping Mary’s blood reign and persecution of Protestants in trying to re-establish the Catholic church in England.

Eventually, John Knox did travel back to Scotland in 1559, encouraged by John Calvin to take his knowledge and convictions back to his nation. On the journey back, John made himself an enemy to England’s newest queen, Elizabeth I, after publishing a book that stated women should not be ruling countries. Because Elizabeth saw that ideology as a dangerous set of beliefs to her right to the crown, she forbade John Knox from even passing through England to reach Scotland again.

But Knox did make it back to Scotland– twelve long years after he was captured and made a slave. When he got back, he immediately started preaching again. He garnered a reputation for being an strongly impassioned preacher, urging people to have faith in Christ and believe in Him. 

Eventually, Mary Stuart’s mother died, and a parliament was set up in her absence to rule over Scotland. Among them was John, and together, they wrote The Scots Confession of Faith. This effectually made Scotland a Protestant country with a distant, Catholic queen. This confession established and described a clear version of the Gospel, how to recognize a true church by the preaching of God’s Word and the aiding of others to fight sin. Scotland empowered their poor families to learn to read so they could interpret scripture themselves, which further allowed the church to reform.

Mary Tudor did eventually return to Scotland to rule, and John Knox very adamantly kept her from even holding Catholic mass in her private home, let alone allowing Scotland to be catholic again. And Mary would find, over the years, she would continue to make missteps in understanding the Scottish people and what they needed. She not only practiced a different faith than them, but she also was essentially raised by the French, and so did not resonate within the culture of the country she ruled. 

Mary, of course, would be captured and taken prisoner by her cousin, Queen Elizabeth, but John Knox would continue to vehemently preach the Gospel in Scotland. Even when he grew old and weak, people would say he was “lifted up into the pulpit” and would somehow preach lively, passionate sermons where people said he looked like “he wanted to beat the pulpit to pieces and fly out of it.”

In 1572, John preached his last sermon and spent the last fifteen days of his life battling pneumonia. It’s said that in those days, he had his wife read his favorite chapters of the Bible to him, including John 17, which is the passage that led him to believe in Christ as a young boy.

John Knox’s life was not without hardship. He was an outlaw at times for his faith. He was a slave because of his beliefs, and a stranger to his homeland for twelve years. He lost friends because of the Gospel and the work he did in the church. He challenged queens, clergy, and political systems in the name of the Lord and holding to the purity of His Word.

And in those hard times he faced, he prayed. He prayed for Scotland. He prayed for the church. He prayed that true faith and repentance would convict entire nations to follow Jesus. His urgency for God’s Truth and to preach His Word at all costs should inspire us to do the same in a culture that seeks misguidedly to dismantle God’s will for this world.

When we are met with hardships, we should pray. When we find grief and sorrow in our walk with the Lord, we should draw nearer to Him– the One who was sent into this world to save it. And we should take comfort that if we trust, believe, and follow Him, then we will be made One with Him, despite what we face. In Christ, we are perfected and completed, and our faith strengthens not only ourselves, but those who witness our faith at work in us. And there is nothing we can face– no force on earth that can undo what God sovereignly put in place– that can take that assurance away.