John Flavel on the Value of Communion

“This ordinance hath a direct and peculiar tendency to the improvement and strengthening of faith. It is a pledge superadded to the promise for faith’s sake: Heavenly and sublime mysteries do therein stoop down to your senses, that you may have the clearer apprehensions of them; and the clearer the apprehensions are, the stronger the assent of faith must needs be: By this seal also the promise comes to be more ratified to us; and the firmer the promise appears to the soul, the more bold and adventurous faith is in casting itself upon it.” [Flavel, Works, VI:45]

- Quoted in J. Stephen Yuille. The Inner Sanctum of Puritan Piety: John Flavel’s Doctrine of Mystical Union with Christ(Reformation Heritage Books, 2007), p. 102

Meet the Puritans

Meet the Puritans, Joel Beeke & Randall Pederson
(Reformation Heritage Books, 2006), hb., 896 pp.

This is an incredible, monumental work! This is the most significant, most helpful guide to the Puritans I know of. The book provides a brief bio and list of reprinted works of over 120 Puritans as well as a brief history of English Puritanism and an essay on how we can benefit from the Puritans. It also contains similar bios and reprint lists of Scottish and Dutch writers who paralleled the Puritans. Less people are aware of these writers. I discovered some of the Scottish writers during our time in Scotland and only more recently have encountered some of the Dutch like Herman Witsius. All of these are covered here in one volume. This is now the one stop place for Puritan overview and we are indebted to the authors for such a helpful volume.

Available at Amazon or at the publisher’s site.

Puritans, Your Best Life Yet to Come

There is much wisdom to be gleaned here, both in how we live and in how we shepherd the souls of people. When you think of the pastoral role in terms of “preparing the saints to leave this world in peace when their time comes”, you automatically leave behind much of what goes under the name of pastoral ministry today. We need this perspective simply to understand the Bible and to persevere, but also to shape us into shepherds guiding souls to the Celestial City rather than hawkers of just one more bauble to add to life.

“Third, these Puritans were great hopers. One notable strength of the Puritans, setting them far apart from Western Christians today, was the firmness of their grip on the biblical teaching about the hope of heaven. Basic to their pastoral care was their understanding of the Christian’s present life as a journey home, and they made much of encouraging God’s people to look ahead and feast their hearts on what is to come. The classic works here are Richard Baxter’s massive Saints’ Everlasting Rest, written to show how the hope of glory, analysed by biblical study and internalised by meditation, should give believers energy and direction for present living, and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, both parts of which reach their climax with triumphant passages through Jordan to the celestial city. The vividness of the vision of heaven in both Baxter and Bunyan is remarkable by any standards; sanctified imagination gives concreteness and colour to theological perception, resulting in extraordinary power to convey the flow of glory to the Christian heart. The Puritan point, which was first, of course, a New Testament point, was that Christians should know what their hope is and draw from it power to resist whatever discouragements and distractions present circumstances may produce. The unreadiness of pain and death that Western Christians too often reveal today contrasts unhappily with the realism and joyful hope that the Puritan masters inculcated in order to prepare the saints to leave this world in peace when their time came.” (334)

- Packer, J.I. A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1990

Mourning Over Lost Souls

People often think that a firm belief in the sovereignty of God in all things including the salvation of souls will undercut evangelistic zeal. History is full of examples to the contrary, and the Puritans are key examples. I previously mentioned Richard Alleine’s book Instructions About Heartwork . In this book Alleine has an entire chapter entitled, “Why Should We Mourn Over Lost Souls?” Here is an excerpt. Could you expect anything more passionate?

“Oh, pity these lost souls! Do you have any compassion? Parents, have you any compassion for your sinning children? Friends, have you any compassion for your sinning friends? Draw forth your compassion in sighs and lamentations; pour forth your hearts through your eyes; weep over them; look upon the ignorant and sottish ones; look upon the profane ones, the lying children, the swearers and cursers and drinkers, the unruly children among you, and let your eye affect your heart” (67).

Oh, as pastors we especially must have this heart toward the lost. In the busyness of life it is so easy to allow the reality of their eternal fate to slip from our view, to fail to live each day in full view of eternity. Let us pause long enough for these realities to move our souls once more that we might be reminded of the earnestness of evangelism. Then we will be able to speak with people as Alleine did. Here are just a few excerpts from his address directly to the unconverted:

Sinners, will you yet go away thinking that it is well with you? … Do the pleasures of sin make your chains pleasant to you? … Have you no pity on that poor soul of yours, but you will give it up to be racked, torn, and burned forever rather than for its sake deny your will, your lust, or your appetite?” (68-69)

Loving and Living the Scriptures

One of our Wednesday night classes at church is studying J. I. Packer’s A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life. I am enjoying going back through the book because it is so good. Here is a quote from Packer about how the Puritans viewed the Bible. I have elsewhere, in a different context, written about the propriety of talking about loving the Bible in spite of what some may say. May this approach to the Bible mark us and our people.

“For Puritanism was, above all else, a Bible movement. To the Puritan the Bible was in truth the most precious possession that this world affords. His deepest conviction was that reverence for God means reverence for Scripture, and serving God means obeying Scripture. To his mind, therefore, no greater insult could be offered to the Creator than to neglect his written word; and, conversely, there could be no truer act of homage to him than to prize it and pore over it, and then to live out and give out its teaching. Intense veneration for Scripture, as the living word of the living God, and a devoted concern to know and do all that it prescribes, was Puritanism’s hallmark.” (98)

Richard Alleine on the Oversight of Souls

Alleine (1611-1691), like his other Puritan counterparts, understood the importance of oversight. Addressing his hearers on the importance of guarding their hearts (Prov 4:23-27), he mentioned others whom God has ordained to watch over us. He quoted Hebrews 13:17 and then wrote:

“We deal so plainly and so closely with you, we are so instant in exhorting, reproving, warning, and watching over you, because we must give an account of how we discharge our duty towards you”
(Instructions About Heartwork , 7)

May our ministries also be shaped by this crucial truth.