REFORMATION DAY · OCTOBER 31, 2026 · JEREMIAH GENERATION, DAY 19 OF 90
Jeremiah 1:11 “Jeremiah, what do you see?” “I see the rod of an almond tree.”
Luke 24:44–45 Then He said to them, “These are the words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things must be fulfilled which were written in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms concerning Me.” And He opened their understanding, that they might comprehend the Scriptures.
Today, in Duluth, Minnesota, five hundred and nine years to the day after an Augustinian monk nailed ninety-five theses to a church door in Wittenberg, Germany, I saw a reformation army being mantled, equipped, and commissioned. From that vision, I began to call forth “the finishers” who will finish the reformation. The Lord spoke to me many years ago about finishing a reformation no one has ever finished, and it has been my main mission and mandate ever since. Most people mark October 31, 1517, as the birthday of the Reformation, and in one sense it was. But the door Martin Luther knocked on that day had already been pried open more than a century earlier, and if we celebrate only the hammer, we miss the whole story the Lord has been writing.
THE MORNING STAR OF THE REFORMATION
In the early 1370s, more than a hundred years before Luther was born, an English priest and Oxford scholar named John Wycliffe began doing something the church of his day deemed dangerous: translating the Scriptures into the language of the common man. Wycliffe challenged the authority of the papacy, rejected the teaching that the bread and wine physically become the body and blood of Christ, and, for the first time in centuries, gave ordinary people direct access to the words of the Book rather than only the church’s interpretation. History remembers him as the Morning Star of the Reformation, the first visible light before the sun rose.
He died in 1384, and the council that had condemned him as a heretic, so threatened by what he had started, had his bones dug up and burned decades after his death. A generation later, a Bohemian priest named Jan Hus picked up Wycliffe’s writings and carried the same fire into central Europe, preaching that Christ alone, not the pope, was the head of the church. Hus was burned at the stake in 1415 for this, reportedly saying from the flames that in a hundred years God would raise up a man the church could not silence. Almost exactly a hundred and two years later, Martin Luther nailed his theses to a door of his own. I don’t believe that is a coincidence. I believe it is a pattern. The Lord does not raise up one man to finish a work; He raises up a lineage, each one opening a door wider than the one before, until the door finally swings all the way.
THE HAMMER AND THE DOOR
What Luther actually did on October 31, 1517, was far less dramatic than the legend. He posted ninety-five academic propositions for debate, mostly about the church’s practice of selling indulgences to help fund the building of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. But beneath those ninety-five points was the same fire Wycliffe and Hus had carried: that a sinner is justified by faith alone, not by purchased paper; that Scripture alone, not the tradition built on top of it, is the final authority; that every believer, not just the ordained, has priestly access to God. Four years later, Luther stood before the empire at the Diet of Worms and refused to recant, saying, “Here I stand, I can do no other.” He was excommunicated and hidden away by friends for his own safety. He used the time in hiding to translate the New Testament into German so that, like Wycliffe before him, the people could finally read it for themselves. Luther didn’t start the fire so much as he was the one standing closest to it when it finally caught the whole house.
That knock on the door, bearing the Ninety-Five Theses straight from the Lord, released the voice of His word, and I believe it unsheathed angelic swords that began cutting away the religious veils over people’s eyes and over whole nations, eventually across all of Europe and throughout the earth.
FINISH THE REFORMATION, SON
About fifteen years ago, while I was studying these very reformers, the Lord spoke four words over my life that have never left me: “Finish the reformation, son.” He went on to explain why so many of Scripture's great and precious promises have still not fully manifested on earth. He said He is calling forth finishers, a company that will complete the reformation of His Body to His original intent and design. That word has been my mandate for the past fifteen years, and I believe with everything in me that it was never meant to be mine alone.
The reformation I am talking about was never about doctrines and creeds. It is about reforming the Body of Christ back to His image, likeness, and mandate. The Body of Christ, the Last Adam, was created to recover and restore everything the first Adam lost, including the dominion mandate and the places of dominion where the Kingdom, the King’s own Dominion, becomes the sole and exclusive priority for everyone redeemed by the blood and who honors that blood by living a life worthy of it.
Psalm 103:20–22 Bless the LORD, you His angels, who excel in strength, who do His word, heeding the voice of His word. Bless the LORD, all you His hosts, you ministers of His, who do His pleasure. Bless the LORD, all His works, in all places of His dominion. Bless the LORD, O my soul!
Here is what I mean by finish. Luther recovered justification by faith. Two centuries later, the Wesleys recovered personal holiness and the new birth. A century after that, at Azusa Street, the person and power of the Holy Spirit were recovered. Every move of God since Wycliffe has been a genuine recovery of something real that had been buried, and each stopped short of the whole blueprint because each generation grabbed its piece, built a movement around it, and then calcified, just as the thing they reformed had calcified before them. We have been moving from unveiling to unveiling, from glory to glory, and the Lord is not finished unveiling. The reformation that started at a door in Wittenberg was never meant to end there. It was meant to keep going until the whole house looked like the blueprint again. WORTHY OF EVERY DROP HE SHED
By worthy, I mean understanding the gravity of God becoming a man, bearing the wrath of injustice on our behalf, and, in return, being awestruck by the unfathomable love of the Lord, who took on human form, poured out His blood, and absorbed the blow of God’s own wrath in our place. When we truly see this, we will live a different life, a life worthy of every drop He shed. And then the apostolic mandate will be restored, because we will begin to live apostolically, wholeheartedly, for the sent purpose of God. We will no longer play it safe, living for a retirement version of American Christianity, but will become whole burnt offerings, the living sacrifices of the Lord, who manifest the full measure of His Name because we are walking fully in that Name and can therefore truly manifest it.
THE HAMMER PROPHETS
A Jeremiah Generation of reformers is emerging, men and women who, like Jeremiah, cannot remain silent because the word is a fire shut up in their bones. They will be Hammer Prophets, commissioned with the hammer of the Lord's word, straight from the counsel of God.
Jeremiah 23:18, 22 For who has stood in the counsel of the LORD, and has perceived and heard His word? Who has marked His word and heard it?… But if they had stood in My counsel, and had caused My people to hear My words, then they would have turned them from their evil way and from the evil of their doings.
That is the counsel on which these Hammer Prophets stand, and from it comes a word that cannot be mistaken for anything less than the Lord’s own voice.
Jeremiah 23:29 Is not My word like a fire? says the LORD, and like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces?
That hammer is already breaking apart the hardest rocks of resistance, unsheathing the fiery sword of the word of the Lord, and igniting a fire from the altar of heaven that no religious spirit resisting reformation can put out. It will be a wildfire, and it will be unstoppable.
EYES OPENED LIKE THE TWO ON THE ROAD
After His resurrection, Jesus walked for miles with two of His disciples on the road to Emmaus, and they didn’t recognize Him. Only when He opened the Scriptures to them, showing Himself in the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms, did their understanding finally open. That is exactly what happened to Wycliffe poring over a Latin manuscript in an Oxford library, to Luther wrestling with the book of Romans in a monastery cell, and I believe it is what the Lord is doing again right now. Not new revelation stacked on top of the Bible, but old revelation that was always there in plain sight, waiting for a generation with eyes finally open enough to see it. It isn’t that the text changes. The veil over our eyes finally lifts.
A NEW BREED OF DOOR-KNOCKERS
I believe the Lord is raising up a new breed of door-knockers, a generation that will not be content to defend five hundred years of someone else’s reformation but will actually finish it. Not Lutherans finishing Luther’s reformation, not Wesleyans finishing Wesley’s, not Pentecostals finishing Azusa’s, but sons and daughters willing to carry it all forward into the one thing none of those movements fully achieved: the Body of Christ restored to the Father’s original intent and image, not a doctrine recovered here and a gift recovered there, but the whole house finally standing as the blueprint always said it should.
So today, in Duluth, I watched the mantle fall, as Jeremiah saw the rod of an almond tree and the Lord told him He was watching over His word to perform it. I saw the reformers of this awakening being commissioned by the nail-pierced hand of the ultimate Reformer. That same mantle is being held out today, and receiving it has never been only about securing heaven for ourselves. Jesus did not die merely to get us to heaven. He died to restore mankind to the dominion mandate and to reform all things.
Every finisher in that line paid a price. Wycliffe’s bones were burned; Hus was burned alive; Luther spent the rest of his life as a hunted man. I don’t say this to be dramatic; I say it because finishing has always cost more than starting, which is exactly why so few generations ever finish what the one before them started.
AS THE FATHER HAS SENT ME
On that same resurrection day when He opened the Scriptures to two men on the Emmaus road, Jesus had already stood in the midst of the rest of His disciples behind locked doors and done something that reframes everything a finisher is being called to.
John 20:19–22 Then, the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in the midst, and said to them, “Peace be with you.” When He had said this, He showed them His hands and His side. Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord. So Jesus said to them again, “Peace to you! As the Father has sent Me, I also send you.” And when He had said this, He breathed on them, and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”
He not only showed them His hands and His side but also breathed on them. Just as God breathed into ADAM in Genesis 2:7, so the Lord breathes into the Body of the last Adam and sends them exactly as the Father had sent Him, with the same promise He had already given them before the cross. Whoever believes in Him will do the works He does and even greater works than these, because He was going to the Father (John 14:12). That is the breath blowing through every human shofar, His finisher’s trumpet. It is not about volume; it is about authority rooted in authenticity. It is the same breath Jesus breathed into His first 12 Apostles (SENT ONES), now sent into a generation unwilling to stay silent.
That is why this company will not stay silent. They will raise their voices like a trumpet, and the Lord will blow through them an awakening breath and an awakening sound. They will be the Jeremiah 1:11 generation, the rod of awakening for a reformation that is finally being completed.
DECLARATION
I am part of the generation the Lord is calling to finish the reformation, not to admire it from five hundred years away. I receive the same Spirit that opened Wycliffe’s eyes to the text, drove Luther to the door, and opened the Scriptures to two men on a road who didn’t recognize the Lord walking beside them. I will not calcify around a single recovered truth and call it the whole house. I will keep walking toward the blueprint until the Body of Christ reflects His original intent and image again.
PRAYER
Father, thank You for every reformer who paid a price so we would have a door to walk through at all. Forgive us for the centuries we have spent defending doors instead of walking through them. Open our eyes as You opened the eyes of the two on the Emmaus road, so we see what has always been in Your Word, waiting for us. Raise up Your finishers in this generation, door-knockers who will not stop at the first unveiling. Make us the generation that finally brings the whole house home to the blueprint. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.