There were four axioms which underlay their philosophy
of preaching.
And this, again, was something that was true
from the very first.
And you can find these axioms written into
Perkins' On the Art of Prophesying.
Though he doesn't make points of them in
the way that I'm going to do now,
to try and focus the approach for you.
Axiom number one, belief in the primacy of
the intellect.
It was a Puritan maxim that grace enters
by the understanding.
They were not rationalists in any vicious sense,
but they did believe that God was rational,
and that he'd made man in his own
image to be rational, and that he treats
man as rational, and that, in ministry, the
preacher must treat his congregation as rational.
The intellect is primary.
In other words, God doesn't move men to
action by physical violence.
He addresses their mind by his word, and
he calls for the response of deliberate consent
and intelligent obedience.
It follows that every man's first duty in
relation to the word of God is to
understand it, and the preacher's first duty is
to explain it.
The only way to the heart that he's
authorized to take runs via the head.
From which it followed that the minister must,
in all his preaching, be teaching, instructing.
And if he isn't preaching sermons, which are
systematic instruction in the contents of scripture, if
he's not a didactic expositor in every sermon
he preaches, well, he's off the rails.
And when, in the mid-17th century, when
fanaticism broke out under the commonwealth, and a
lot of untrained preachers began standing up and
erupting verbal rhapsodies in the name of the
Lord, this was the point which the Puritan
preachers made against them.
You are not teaching the scriptures.
These enthusiastical raptures, as they called them, are
simply not a fulfilling of the preacher's calling.
Primacy of the intellect, then.
You must, from which it follows, you must
teach.
Second axiom?
Belief in the supreme importance of preaching.
To the Puritans, the sermon was the liturgical
climax of public worship.
Nothing, they said, honors God more than does
the faithful declaration and the obedient hearing of
his truth.
Preaching, under any circumstances, is an act of
worship, and must be performed as such.
And furthermore, second thought here, preaching is the
prime means of grace to God's people.
I quote from a late-17th century Puritan
named David Clarkson, who, in a sermon entitled
Public Worship to be Preferred Before Private —it's
a provocative title, isn't it?
Public Worship to be Preferred Before Private, wrote
this, The most wonderful things that are now
done on earth are wrought in the public
ordinances.
Hear the dead, hear the voice of the
Son of God, and those that hear do
live.
Here he cures diseased souls by a word.
Here he dispossesses Satan.
These are wonders, and would be so counted,
were they not the common work of the
public ministry.
It's true, indeed, the Lord has not consigned
himself to work these wonderful things only in
public, yet the public ministry is the only
ordinary means whereby he works them.
This does not mean that the Puritans downgraded
what we call personal work.
It does mean that they upgraded preaching, the
public ministry of the word, far beyond what
most of us, I think, would do with
prompting and a good deal of instruction.
We are conditioned not to regard preaching as
too significant.
The Puritans regarded it as supremely significant.
It's from David Clarkson, Public Worship to be
Preferred, three volumes of it.
You see, to the Puritans, preaching is a
very solemn and a very momentous enterprise, the
most solemn and momentous enterprise in which any
servant of God ever takes part in this
life.
And that's true whether he's a preacher or
whether he's a hearer.
Both the minister and the congregation, you see,
should, on the Puritan view, should recognize that
Sunday sermons are the most important and significant
events of the week.
And the Puritan insistence was that whatever else
is neglected, sermons must not be.
The minister mustn't allow anything to divert him
from preaching them and preaching the best he
can, and equally the congregation mustn't allow anything
to divert them from going to church to
hear them.
God works in sermons in a way that
he doesn't work elsewhere.
You may be interested to know that the
preachers, that the Puritan preachers regularly had full
manuscripts or pretty full manuscripts before them in
the pulpit.
Perkins, to be sure, advises that if you
can, you should memorize your sermon and simply
deliver it entirely from memory.
I suppose that what happened, though it's not
possible to check this up, is that a
lot of people tried it and found that
God simply hadn't made them capable of it.
Just as I have, and I dare say
you have, tried to preach without any notes
at all and found that God hasn't made
us capable of it.
And so what they used to do was
to take a pretty full manuscript into the
pulpit.
I spoke of the mid-17th century enthusiasts.
Among them were the Quakers, Richard Baxter got
into controversy with the Quakers and they accused
him, among other things, of not having the
spirit and not preaching in the spirit because
they said, you read your sermons out of
a paper, you use notes, you have a
script.
And Baxter replied, as wisely should the Quakers
argue that because we use spectacles or hourglasses
and pulpits that we have not the spirit.
It is not want of your abilities that
makes ministers use notes, but it's regard to
the work and the good of the hearers.
I use notes as much as any man
when I take pains and as little as
any man when I am lazy or busy
and haven't leisure to prepare.
And then, interesting, it's easier to preach three
sermons without notes than one with them.
He is a simple preacher that isn't able
to preach all day without preparation if he
preached at your rest.
In other words, you see the thought, if
you contend to get up and blather in
the name of the Lord, well, there's no
limit to what you can do.
But the Puritans insisted, sermons should be thought
out.
The preacher is an extremely solemn business and
requires premeditation, preparation, and care.
And you shouldn't speak lightly in the name
of the Lord.
Well, all this is part is the expression
of their conviction that preaching is supremely important.
So that they would say what I imagine
your homiletics instructors say to you, although I
certainly hope they say to you, that a
minister who knows his priorities will plan his
week around the allotted time for sermon preparation.
And he will take care not to skimp
his.
When I used to teach in Bristol, brethren,
I don't know whether the idea gets around
here, but it got around there, that after
you've been preaching a few years, sermons will
begin to come easily so that it won't
take you anything like as long to prepare
them.
Well, that's a very dangerous doctrine.
The Puritans would have warned us against it.
I'm going to warn you against it.
Preachers in the Puritan tradition have not found
that it works out that way, nor have
they encouraged other people to.
Another aspect, another expression of the Puritan conviction
that preaching is supremely important is the congregations,
said the Puritans, must be taught how to
listen to sermon.
And from time to time in their writings,
you find instruction given on this point.
Memorize the heading.
Have your Bible with you.
Look up the texts that the man is
expounding.
By looking at them, you help to fix
them in your mind.
If you find that you can't recall all
the headings, well, don't be ashamed to come
into church with a piece of paper and
a pencil and make some notes.
And when you get home, in the family,
repeat the sermon.
Go over.
Indeed, one of Father's jobs on Sunday after
church is to make the members of the
family repeat the sermon and ensure that they
all of them remember what was said and
have understood what they've heard.
The great thing, you see, that the Puritans
make of the congregation taking note of the
sermons they hear and then when they've got
it clear in their mind, praying over what
they've heard, meditating on what they've heard, making
the sermons that they heard on Sunday staple
diet in their devotional life for the next
week and putting in their own private Bible
reading as, well, to use a modern phrase,
in the nature of supplementary snacks.
But the main food congregations must realize is
given in the sermon.
That's what God has given preachers and sermons
for, says the Puritans, times without number, to
feed you.
And you've got to come with open ears
and you've got to attend and memorize and
repeat and meditate and pray.
This is part of the Puritan way of
life, taking sermons seriously.
Well, there's the second axiom, belief in the
supreme importance of preaching.
Third, a point that we've already touched in
other connections, belief in the life-giving power
of biblical truth.
We had this point, remember, when we spoke
of William Tyndale.
The Bible is the word of God.
Light for the eyes, food for the soul,
God's rule, God's directive, God's word of life.
Preachers must, we've already said, instruct their congregations
in the Bible because the intellect is primary
and God deals with men through their minds.
Now, another complementary way of putting that thought,
preachers must feed their congregations by teaching them
the contents of the Bible because the contents
of the Bible are life-giving words of
God.
And by teaching the scriptures, you quicken and
sustain and deepen spiritual life.
So, they would say, don't preach anything but
the Bible because that won't be food, but
be confident of the value of what you're
doing when you do preach the Bible because
that is food and even if people don't
realize at the time they're being said, they'll
profit from the hearing of the word.
The Puritans, all the way along, defined pastoral
work in terms of preaching.
For they said, pastoral work is shepherd's work
and the shepherd's business or at least the
first fundamental element in the shepherd's business is
to see that the flock gets food, to
see that they get to pastures where there's
food to be had, to see that they
don't starve for want of nourishment.
This, I think, is a good word for
our times because we're inclined to think of
pastoral work in terms of visiting and personal
dealing only.
The Puritans thought of pastoral work primarily and
fundamentally in terms of preaching.
A man pastors his people by preaching to
them and teaching them the word of God.
If we had said to a Puritan, a
man may be a good pastor and yet
a bad preacher, they would have said that's
a contradiction in terms.
I'm going to quote you from John Owen
on this because honestly, I do regard this
as a very important point for us all.
It's missed by so many in these days.
Quote Owen, The first and principal duty of
a pastor is to feed the flock by
diligent preaching of the word.
It's a promise relating to the New Testament
that God would give unto his church pastors,
that is shepherds, according to his own heart,
which should feed them with knowledge and understanding.
He's quoting Jeremiah 3.15. And this, says
Owen, is by preaching or teaching the word
as no otherwise.
This feeding is of the essence of the
office of a pastor.
The care of preaching the gospel was committed
to Peter and in him to all true
pastors of the church under a name of
feeding.
Feed my sheep, feed my lambs.
John 21.15. And according to the example
of the apostles, they are to free themselves,
that is pastors, are to free themselves from
all encumbrances that they may give themselves wholly
unto the word and prayer.
Acts 6.
They are to labor in the word and
doctrine, 1 Timothy 5.17, and thereby to
feed the flock over which the Holy Ghost
has made them overseers.
Acts 20.
This work and duty, therefore, as was said,
is essential unto the office of a pastor.
It's worth thinking about.
The Puritans would have said, you see, that
what we would call a pastoral call wasn't
strictly a pastoral call unless when you got
into the home you'd been able in some
form to minister and teach the word of
God.
This is how the Puritans understood the meaning
of pastoral work.
And it sprang directly from their belief that
it's only biblical truth that gives life.
And where biblical truth isn't being given, well,
life isn't being conveyed and the shepherd's work
is not being done.
Final axiom.
Belief in the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit.
The Puritan preachers were strong, lively, impassioned, pointed
in the pulpit, but they never allowed themselves
to impersonate the Holy Ghost.
And they never allowed themselves to ask for
a response to them, themselves, God's messengers, as
distinct from calling for a response to God's
word.
You see, they believed that the ultimate effectiveness
of preaching is out of man's hands altogether.
Man's task is simply to be faithful in
teaching and applying the word.
But it's God's work to convince men of
its truth and right it at the heart
and elicit the response.
So you see, they didn't think in terms
of appeals, they thought in terms of application.
Important distinction there.
I appeal, but when an application of Scripture
is made, well, it's Scripture appealing, if appeal
is the right word to use.
It is Scripture, certainly, that's called Scripture truth
that's calling for response.
It's a very striking difference between the Puritan
outlook and our own.
They believed that when the preacher had finished
his sermon, applied the word as sharply and
pointedly as he could, called for response to
it in the name of God, well, then
he'd done his job, and the thing for
him to do was to close the service
and leave the church and go and pray
for God's blessing on the word in private.
And they would rather have goggled, I think,
if they had known of some of our
contemporary techniques for, as we say, drawing in
the net.
They just were operating on a different wavelength
altogether.
Belief in the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit.
The Puritans were confident, you see, that if
it was Scripture being faithfully expounded and faithfully
applied, the Spirit would be active and good
would be done.
There would be fruit.
And they were content to leave it to
God's time for the fruit to appear.
There's the Puritan, then, is the Puritan philosophy
of preaching.
Helps to give you a sense of the
kind of preaching situation which these men created
for themselves in this period from 1570 on
for the next 100 years.
From this, we move to a further heading.
The Puritan type of sermon.
Here again, some more general characteristics of their
preaching.
We can go through this more rapidly because
we've already made some of these points in
other ways.
Puritan preaching was expository in its method.
That we've already said in different ways.
Texts must be put in their context.
Texts must not be rested.
Bring out of the word what is there.
Don't read into the text something that isn't
there.
The comment that a text without a context
is a pretext is 20th century, not 17th
century, but the Puritans would have nodded their
head.
The comment that preaching is not juxtaposition, putting
a truth alongside a text, nor imposition, reading
a truth into a text, but exposition, getting
out of the text the truth that's already
in it, that also is a 20th century
comment, but that too would have won the
agreement of the Puritans.
The method of handling texts, as I think
I indicated to you yesterday, Wednesday, talking about
Perkins, was to extract from the text one
or more statements of doctrinal truth and to
confirm those statements by other scriptures and argument
from other scriptures and then application, or as
the Puritans used to call it, use, the
Latin word, the idea of the Latin word
usos, putting something to what we call practical
use.
They would draw out so many uses or
practical applications of the truth that they taught,
applying them either in their character as law
or in their character as gospel, to the
needs of different people.
And this is one of the reasons why
Puritan expositions ran to such tremendous length.
You must have been surprised sometimes at how
long a Puritan exposition of a comparatively short
passage of scripture could be.
For instance, I know that some of you
in homiletics this last term, semester, have been
using Manson on Jude, 500 and more pages
on 24 verses of scripture.
But you see, it follows from the method.
Out of a single text, you can draw
a whole series of truths.
And if you state each of those truths
on its own and confirm it from other
scripture and then apply it, well, you can
see how a little scripture can provide you
with a lot of preaching.
And the Puritans regarded this as perfectly proper,
perfectly acceptable.
They taught their congregations to regard it as
perfectly acceptable too.
Let's take time to be thorough, said the
Puritans in effect.
And they preached their way through books of
scripture slowly and majestically, shaking out of each
text all the doctrinal truths that they found
taught or exhibited in it, and going through
them and applying them one at a time.
Let me give you one or two illustrations
of this.
Here you have, for instance, John Owen, working
on Romans 8 verse 13.
If ye through the spirit do mortify the
deeds of the body, ye shall live.
And he raises from that three doctrines as
follows.
Doctrine 1.
The choicest believers who are assuredly free from
the condemning power of sin ought yet to
make it their business all their days to
mortify the indwelling power of sin.
Doctrine 2.
The Holy Ghost only is sufficient for this
work, and it cannot be done without him.
Doctrine 3.
The vigor and power and comfort of our
spiritual life depends upon our mortifying the deeds
of the flesh.
Well, developing those three doctrines and making application
of them, John Owen rapidly has quite a
sizable and solid little treatise on the mortification
of sin in believers.
Or take another work, the most famous of
all the Puritan evangelistic tracts, Richard Baxter's Call
to the Unconverted, from which some of you
will be interested to know, Joseph Allen lifted
a lot of the ideas that you now
find in his Call to the Unconverted.
His alarm, I should say, to the unconverted.
Baxter's work, which went into literally hundreds of
thousands and was translated into several European languages,
and even, you'll be interested to know, into
the Red Indian language by John Eliot, who
at that time was doing missionary work amongst
the Indians in New England.
Baxter's Call to the Unconverted is an extended
exposition of seven doctrines derived from Ezekiel 33,
11.
I have no pleasure in the death of
the wicked.
Turn ye, why will ye die, O house
of Israel?
And here are the seven doctrines.
One, it is the unchangeable law of God
that wicked men must turn or die.
Two, it is the promise of God that
the wicked shall live if they will but
turn.
Three, God takes pleasure in men's conversion and
salvation but not in their death or damnation.
Four, this is a most certain truth which
God hath confirmed solemnly by his oath.
Five, the Lord doth redouble his commands and
persuasions to the wicked to turn.
Six, the Lord condescendeth to reason the case
with them and asketh the wicked, why will
they die?
Seven, if after all this the wicked will
not return, it is not long of God,
that is, not because of God, that they
perish but of themselves.
They die because they will die.
Well, there you've got seven good divisions of
an argument, haven't you?
And I'm sure that you or I could
write a fair evangelistic tract along the line
of following through that sequence of seven thoughts.
Seven doctrines that Baxter derives from his text.
Well, this is how the Puritans do it.
This is what they understood the task of
exposition to mean.
Draw out your doctrines, you state them, and
then you apply them.
Second feature of Puritan sermons, they were doctrinal
in their content.
As we said a moment ago, the Puritans
stood in the pulpit to teach the word
of God, and they demanded that their congregation
should sit in the pews, working away, listening
to learn the word of God.
So that if you had said to a
Puritan, should I preach doctrine?
The Puritan would have said, what on earth
else do you suppose there is to preach?
Doctrine is what God has put into the
scriptures.
Doctrine is what you as a preacher must
bring out of them.
Doctrine is what your congregations must learn from
the scripture.
Baxter, Richard Baxter, had a working class congregation
at Kidderminster in the 1640s and 50s, and
they apparently behaved very much as a modern
congregation would in these circumstances, and tried to
excuse themselves from bothering about doctrine on the
grounds that, quote, we are not learned, and
therefore God will not require much knowledge at
our hands.
All right for you chaps in the pulpit,
you get on with your theology, but don't
bother us with it.
That's not what we come to church for.
And so Baxter takes a deep breath and
reasons with them like this.
Have you not souls to save or lose
as well as the learned have?
God has made plain his will to you
in his word, and he's given you teachers
and many other helps.
You have no excuse if you're ignorant.
You must know how to be Christians even
though you are no scholars.
You may hit the way to heaven in
English, though you have no skill in Hebrew
and Greek, but in the darkness of ignorance,
you can never hit it.
Well, that was the line of thought, you
see.
Preaching must be doctrinal.
Congregations must understand why it's doctrinal.
They must come to church to learn the
way of the Lord.
Certainly doctrinal preaching bores the hypocrites.
The Puritans knew that.
But then it's only doctrinal preaching, they believed,
that saved the sheep.
And preachers are there to feed the sheep,
not entertain the goats.
Third point, only a moment on this.
Puritan preaching was orderly in its arrangement.
Do you preach sermons with headings that stick
out?
Well, the Puritans did, and they thought it
was very good for the memory of the
congregations that the headings should stick out so
that people could get them and memorize them.
A sermon that was needlessly hard to remember,
the Puritans would have said, is a bad
sermon.
And they're often found extolling the value of
what they call method.
Orderly arrangement of ideas.
Orderly arrangement of truth.
Your sermon must have method.
Otherwise you won't be teaching effectively.
Fourth quality, Puritan preaching, though profound in its
content, was popular in its style.
Or to use the Puritan word, plain in
its style.
There's an implied contrast here.
The early 17th century, to which we're now
coming on, was the great age of what
came to be called witty preaching.
That doesn't mean jokes in the pulpit, it
means something more.
Wit in those days was a word for
liveliness of mind.
The capacity to play with words.
The capacity to make smart remarks.
They didn't have to be funny to be
witty.
And in the early 17th century, learned pulpiteers
vied with each other in stuffing their sermons
with what Thomas Goodwin called the eminentist farrago
of all sorts of flowers of wit.
Pulpit pyrotechnics, letting off fine phrases and smart
remarks and artful alliterations and all the rest
in the pulpit.
So that preaching degenerated into a kind of
sophisticated entertainment for the cultured.
And an occasion, of course, for the preacher
to show off.
Well, the Puritans condemned this as making light
of holy things.
Let's hear Baxter again.
He condemned witty preaching as, quote, proud foolery,
which savoureth of levity and tendeth to evaporate
weighty truths.
And he complained that its practitioners, quote, deal
liker to players, that is actors, than preachers
in the pulpit.
In any case, the Puritans said, preaching that
exalts the preacher is unedifying and sinful on
that very account.
The preacher should, so far as possible, obliterate
himself and call all attention to God and
the truth of God and of Christ.
Baxter went on in the passage from which
I've quoted to lay down the principle that
determines the Puritans' own homiletical style.
And here's the principle.
The plainest words are the profitablest oratory in
the weightiest matter.
Bishop Ryle said of himself that in the
early years of his ministry, in order to
learn to preach plainly, he crucified his style.
Striking phrase.
The Puritans did just the same.
They eschewed any sort of rhetorical display.
They talked to their congregations in plain, straightforward,
homely English.
Their speaking wasn't slipshod or vulgar.
I don't mean that.
Their ideal was rather of dignified simplicity.
You remember the bit I quoted to you
yesterday from John Geary?
The old English Puritan could distinguish between studded
plainness and ignorant rudeness.
Baxter, in the passage I was quoting from,
it's the preface to his treatise of conversion
actually, goes on to say, look, if you
were going to tell a man that his
house was on fire, you wouldn't make up
a fine speech full of elaborate alliterations and
so on.
You'd simply open your mouth and talk to
him in plain, homely, honest, straightforward language.
John, the house is burning.
Take action at once.
And this is how the Puritans understood preaching.
In other words, this is an aspect, an
expression of their conviction that preaching is an
urgent business.
That the warning of people to flee from
the wrath to come and to seek Christ
till they find him is an urgent warning.
And Baxter, in that same passage, says that
he aspired to be nothing other than a
plain and pressing downright preacher.
Talking to people in a way that would
help them to believe that he was just
as serious as he wanted them to believe
he was.
That he was behaving like a serious man
on an urgent mission.
And that he wasn't showing off or entertaining
or doing any such thing, but simply bringing
them a life and death message spoken in
plain language because that's the only sort of
language that's appropriate when it's something really serious
at stake.
Well, that's the fourth feature of Puritan preaching.
Fifth feature, it's practical and experimental interest.
The Puritans preached in order to bring men
and women to know God and serve God.
Do you remember Baxter's phrase, of practical, sorry,
affection of practical English authors, the young minister
is to get of many affection of practical
English authors as he can.
Well, this is what I mean when I
speak of a practical and experimental or experiential
interest.
This is experimental in the old sense.
Not in the sense of try it and
see, but in the sense that your whole
being, including the emotions, is engaged in response
to God's truth.
And it's experiential in that sense.
And the things about which they were always
preaching were sin on the cross, and the
work of the Holy Spirit, faith and hypocrisy,
repentance, assurance and the lack of it, prayer,
meditation, temptation, sin and mortification of sin, growth
in grace, death, heaven.
You can take Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress as a
kind of pictorial index to the central content
of Puritan preaching.
They preached about all the things that the
Pilgrim's Progress deals with, all the themes that
come up for treatment, in other words, at
any stage in the Christian life.
They taught the scriptural doctrine on these issues,
and then they applied it in order to
lead men on in their pilgrimage the right
way and bring them back from traveling the
wrong way.
It was a Puritan, David Dixon, who, once
when a young minister was being ordained, charged
him to study two things.
One, the Bible, the other, his own heart.
Because you must know, Sir Dixon, how human
nature works in order to know how the
word of God applies to it.
And this is something which, like charity, ought
to begin at home.
Learn to know what's in your own heart
and how the word of God applies there.
And that will help you to apply it
to the hearts and lives of others.
The Puritans made it a matter of conscience
to prove for themselves the saving power of
the truth that they were preaching to others.
They knew that, as John Owen puts it,
quote, a man preacheth that sermon only well
to others, which preacheth itself in his own
soul.
If the word do not dwell with power
in us, it will not pass with power
from us.
And it was said of Robert Bolton, one
of this brotherhood, that he never taught any
godly point, but he first wrought it on
his own heart.
Practical and experiential preaching, then, beginning at home.
And when the, and when one had tasted
something of the power of the message, then
one was ready to proclaim it.
Proclaim it to others.
Further quality.
Puritan preaching was realistic in application.
The Puritans just didn't declaim at random about
sin and things like that.
They made it their business, they thought it
was part of a preacher's job to consider,
so far as he could, the congregation to
whom he was preaching, to try and form
a judgment as to what they needed and
the different types of person in the congregation
would need and apply the word with some
sense of where it was supposed to go
and what good it was supposed to do
in the hearts of those people.
The application must be realistic.
The expositor must take care to make the
Bible address men where they are.
Yesterday's application may not speak to their condition
today.
Quote Thomas Manton, it is but a cheap
zeal that beclaimeth against antiquated errors.
And things now out of use and practice.
We are to consider what the present age
needeth.
This is why the Westminster Directory for Public
Worship speaks of application as, quote, a work
of great difficulty to the preacher himself requiring
much prudence, zeal and meditation and to the
natural and corrupt man it will be very
unpleasant.
Which consideration, of course, then as now will
sorely tempt God's messenger to pull his punches
because no normal man likes giving offence.
And in the Lord's name the preacher often
has to give offence by challenging the sin
that he knows is there in men's hearts
and minds.
Yet, goes on the directory, the preacher is
to endeavour to perform it, this work of
application, in such a manner that his auditors
may feel the word of God to be
quick and powerful a discerner of the thoughts
and intents of the heart and that if
any unbeliever or ignorant person be present he
may have the secrets of his heart made
manifest and give glory to God.
So, a man must work and seek the
grace of God to achieve a realistic application
to people's real spiritual needs.
Do you remember the different classes of people
whom Perkins listed for us?
We went through them yesterday.
The proud, unhumbled, ignorant.
The teachable ignorant.
The proud, knowledgeable people.
The humble, knowledgeable people.
Those who'd lapsed or fallen from grace, well,
from orthodoxy or from right living.
And the church of a mixed assembly in
which there'd be all these different classes of
people.
You could bet your boots listening to every
sermon and you ought to try and mix
in something for all of them.
Puritans thought the application through.
The one way of putting this is to
say that they thought their sermons through both
forwards and backwards.
Forwards, from the text, which gives the doctrine,
which gives you your theme, your topic, which
you develop and lay out before people.
That's thinking it through forwards.
Thinking it through backwards is starting at the
other end and starting your thinking with the
people, saying, well now, what's their condition?
What's their need?
What is there here in this message of
mine to help them?
How must I draw out the application to
make sure that the truth comes home in
a way that will touch them and do
them some good?
If you don't think your sermon through backwards,
brethren, it will always be weak at the
point of application.
You'll never carry the application far enough.
I've been listening to preachers and preaching long
enough to tell you they're quite categorical.
If you don't think it through from the
standard, starting with the people of the receiving
end, you will never carry the application far
enough.
Well, the Puritans insisted that you should think
your messages through backwards as well as forwards
and carry the application right home.
And final quality of Puritan preaching, it was,
or at least the preachers aspired to be
powerful in manner.
The Puritan coveted unction in the pulpit.
He aspired to be, as I quoted the
phrase from Baxter earlier, a plain and pressing
downright preacher speaking from a full heart.
I quote their phrase now.
Baxter's phrase, in good sadness, and another phrase
of Baxter's, with life and light and weight.
He thought to preach, as it was once
said of Puritan minister, as if death were
at his back.
Or as Baxter put it in a poem
of his called The Preacher, he preached as
one that ne'er should preach again and
of the dying man to dying men.
Now this quality of unction, of course, it's
the spiritual quality of something which you never
have, which you never see unless prayer has
been made.
The difference between the Puritans and very many
of us today is that we do regard
it as adequate preaching if a man preaches
clearly and scripturally without unction.
We're content, in other words, with orthodox sermons
and we feel that's good enough, whereas the
Puritans weren't.
And if there wasn't unction, the power of
God on a man's ministry, they were reluctant
to say that he was preaching at all.
They would describe him as an honest, weak
minister or something like that.
That's the phrase I found in Puritan writing.
They coveted unction.
They prayed for God's blessing on their sermons.
They prayed for God's power in their preaching.
You read Baxter's Reformed Pastor on this.
I won't go any further into it, but
just to give you one quote out of
the Reformed Pastor in which I may say
there's a great deal on this subject.
A minister should take some special pains with
his heart before he's to go to the
congregation.
If he be then cold, how is he
like to warn the hearts of his hearers?
And it's not enough just to bring light
into their minds.
He must warm their hearts.
That's part of his job.
Go therefore then especially to God for life.
And read some rousing awakening book or meditate
on the weight of the subject you're going
to speak of and the necessity, that is
the need of your people's souls, that you
may go in the zeal of the Lord
to his house.
Well, that's the Puritan type of sermon so
far as we can describe it in this
generalized way.
Finally, subhead five, the content of Puritan sermons.
This in effect, we've already dealt with in
talking about the philosophy and the style of
them.
All that we need to say to round
the exposition off therefore is this.
That the Puritans who lived in the age
before everyone had become history conscious in the
way that happened in the 19th century.
The Puritans approached the Bible as primarily a
book of doctrine.
I suppose that you here like students in
other seminaries are taught right from the start
to regard the Bible as an inspired interpretative
history of redemption.
And historical biblical theology, the historical unfolding of
truth through God's dealings with his people down
the centuries.
This is made central in your thinking and
I suppose it's central in the teaching you
get in your Bible courses.
Well, I only say that in order to
make the point that it wasn't so with
the Puritans.
They lived before the age when everyone felt
that the historical approach was the primary one.
They knew indeed that the Bible was an
interpretative record of a historical redemption.
But the line of approach to the Bible
that they followed was not the historical line
it was rather this.
That to them the Bible was a book
of doctrine.
It contains three things.
Law.
Gospel.
That is to say precepts and promises.
Together with illustrations.
Narratives which illustrated the principles of law and
gospel working out in people's lives.
Narratives that is of people who either had
or hadn't obeyed God's law.
Had or hadn't believed the promise.
And what happened to them.
How God dealt with them.
This is the substance of the scripture of
the Puritans.
As a matter of fact this formulation goes
right back to Tyndale and I think it's
true to say that it goes back to
at least the thought of the Bible as
being doctrine plus illustrations that's a formula that
goes back to the medieval preachers.
Certainly Tyndale gives you the formulation law and
gospel precepts and promises plus a great deal
of narrative matter illustrating these various principles in
action.
So that the Puritans approached the Bible as
first and foremost a book of a book
of doctrine with the illustrative narrative backing it
up.
And when they preached it they taught first
and foremost doctrine and they illustrated the doctrine
from the Bible stories Bible history.
I told you yesterday I think how Perkins
distinguished between milk and strong meat in Pulpit
Instruction.
I did give you that yesterday didn't I?
Yes I thought so.
But you will have noted that both the
milk and the strong meat are what they
called heads of doctrine.
And even the milk starts with a trinity.
You begin with the Triune God in himself
and you go on by proclaiming his law
and his works of redemption.
So the Puritan line was quite simply to
focus on what the Westminster Directory called a
profitable points of doctrine.
So I'm sorry what Perkins' art of prophesying
called profitable points of doctrine.
Extract these from the text prove them apply
them.
This meant that in Puritan preaching you find
what I think by absolute standards must be
judged a lack of preaching directly from biblical
stories particularly gospel stories.
By absolute standards it's a lack but the
balancing point to make is that Bible stories
including gospel stories were constantly brought in to
illustrate doctrinal points in sermons from more directly
doctrinal texts.
As for the particular doctrines well I've already
given them to you.
You can see from what we've said already
that broadly speaking you can sum it up
by saying the Puritans preached their way through
the economy of redemption and they preached their
way through the economy of redemption the law
and the gospel for conversion edification and the
promotion of practical religion.
They didn't preach a great deal on problems
of Christian ethics.
The only person who really did a job
in that department from the pulpit was William
Perkins who spent a year and more towards
the close of his ministry preaching through the
whole sum of the cases of conscience.
But in general Puritans took for granted a
general knowledge of ethical standards just as they
took for granted a general knowledge of Bible
stories and they didn't devote their sermons to
telling the stories and crystallizing the standards rather
they assumed that these things were known and
devoted their sermons to enforcing them where appropriate.
If you ask what was the gospel the
Puritans preached well the short answer is it's
the milk followed by the strong meat of
Perkins's distinction.
It starts with the trinity it starts with
God it's God centered first to last it
moves from the trinity to the explanation of
sin it moves from the explanation of sin
to the proclamation of Christ on to repentance,
faith then the Christian conflict with indwelling sin
and the path of pilgrimage and warfare as
the Christian travels home to God.
One particular area in which the Puritans preached
a great deal is the area of preparation
for conversion.
The Puritans believed that there were ordinarily various
preliminary things that God had to do in
men's hearts before they were capable of true
repentance and true faith that is he had
to humble them for sin he had to
humble them for sin and the Puritans as
I say devoted a lot of time to
preaching through texts a lot of texts and
the psalms and others which deal with a
man how a man is humbled by God
for his sin made to hate it made
to desire a new heart made to long
for forgiveness restoration and the rest and so
prepared for the working in his heart of
regeneration and the dawning in his consciousness of
faith and assurance and the realization that God
is now enabling him to turn from sin
to give himself to Christ and in the
fullest sense to become a Christian this teaching
on preparation for conversion has sometimes been accused
of being legalistic as if the Puritans had
said what in actual fact some English hyper
-Calvinists did say in the 18th and 19th
centuries that the fact of being humbled for
sin was itself the warrant of faith in
other words that not until you knew you'd
been humbled enough could you regard yourself as
being included in the invitation to come to
Christ an invitation to those that are that
labor and are heavy laden not till then
could you believe that the promise was for
you and that you were entitled to claim
it well of course when you put it
like that it's obvious at least I hope
it's obvious to you I certainly think it
ought to be that this is a mistake
the warrant of faith is quite simply the
universal promise and command of God in fact
I only mention this in order to dismiss
it though writers like Alan Joseph Alan Richard
Baxter John Rogers the New England divine Thomas
Shepherd Thomas Hooker have all been accused were
accused by no less a man than Spurgeon
of making the fact that one's been humbled
for sin the warrant and the qualification um
for believing that the promise is extended to
you a study of their work shows that
it was not so you can show this
quite shortly in a sentence simply by pointing
to the fact that they all quote texts
like 1 John 3 23 this is the
commandment this is God's commandment that we believe
on the Lord Jesus Christ as he gave
us commandment the warrant of faith is the
command of God that men should believe and
the only significance of this preparatory humbling is
that it's God's way of bringing a man
to the point where he's able to believe
it's simply the divine act that makes him
seek seek in a way that leads him
to find well if you like next time
we can talk more about that I simply
mention it in order to dismiss it if
you want to go into it by all
means we can but we can't do it
this afternoon for our time has gone thank
you for listening