TROUBLED
BY GOSPEL TRUTH

Topics: Bible; Truth

References: Matthew 7:21–27; 1 Corinthians 6:9–11; Galatians 5:22–24; James 4:4; 1 John 2:15–17

Thomas Linacre was king’s physician to Henry VII and Henry VIII of England, founder of the Royal College of Physicians, and friend of the great Renaissance thinkers Erasmus and Sir Thomas More.

Late in his life, Linacre studied to be a priest and was given a copy of the Gospels to read for the first time. Linacre lived through the darkest of the church’s dark hours under the papacy of Alexander VI, the Borgia pope whose bribery, corruption, incest, and murder plumbed new depths in the annals of Christian shame.

Reading the Gospels for himself, Linacre was amazed and troubled. “Either these are not the Gospels,” he said, “or we are not Christians.”

—Os Guinness, The Call (Multnomah, 1998)