Status Updates From A Quest for Godliness

Principles have power with us when we see them embodied in persons whom we admire.

Plainly, [Puritans] did not believe that God sent them, or sends anyone, to tell congregations that God requires everyone to receive Christ at the close of the sermon.

Formally from pulpits and informally in personal counselling, [Puritans] highlighted the present duty of the unconverted to seek Christ; but they did not see this as implying a present capacity to receive Christ savingly, and so one does not find them commanding all the unconverted to ‘decide for Christ’...on the spot, or making appeals in which they profess to be ‘giving them an opportunity’ to make this decision.

Most modern evangelists seem to have given up expecting more than a small percentage of their ‘converts’ to survive. So it is not obvious that results justify the methods that stem from Finney. I shall suggest later that these methods have a natural tendency to produce a crop of false converts, as evidently they have in fact done.

It may be said that results justify their use; but the truth is that most of Finney’s ‘converts’ backslid and fell away, as, so it seems, did the majority of those since Finney’s day whose ‘decision’ was secured by these means.

Now, if Finney’s doctrine of the natural state of sinful man is right, then his evangelistic methods must be judged right also . . . But if Finney’s view of man is wrong, then his methods must be called into question—which is an issue of importance at the present time: for it is Finney’s methods, modified and adapted, that characterize a great deal of evangelism today.

Basically Mr. Packer is a big John Owen fan, great book so far! (Took an accidental sabbatical for a few weeks, but onward!)

It is God’s sovereign prerogative to make his word effective, and the preacher’s behaviour in the pulpit should be governed by recognition of, and subjection to, divine sovereignty in this matter.

When the preacher has finished instructing, applying and exhorting, his pulpit work is done. It is not his business to devise devices in order to extort ‘decisions.’ He would be wiser to go away and pray for God’s blessing on what he has said.

The Puritans would have criticised the modern evangelistic appeal, with its wheedling for 'decisions', as an unfortunate attempt by man to intrude into the Holy Spirit's province. It is for God, not man, to fix the time of conversion.

The Puritans insisted that the ultimate effectiveness of preaching is out of man's hands. Man's task is simply to be faithful in teaching the word; it is God's work to convince of its truth and write it in the heart.

We complain today that ministers do not know how to preach; but is it not equally true that our congregations do not know how to hear? An instruction to remedy the first deficiency will be labour lost unless the second is remedied too.

The thought of communion with God takes us to the very heart of Puritan theology and religion. . . . Thus, to the Puritans, communion between God and man is the end to which both creation and redemption are the means; it is the goal to which both theology and preaching must ever point; it is the essence of true religion; it is, indeed, the definition of Christianity. (201-22)

Sanctification has a double aspect. Its positive side is vivification, the growing and maturing of the new man; its negative side is mortification, the weakening and killing of the old man.

We must pray for help, and fight the good fight of faith in God’s strength, and give thanks to him for the victories we win.

God's purpose for the Christian during his life on earth is sanctification. So said Calvin; so says Owen; and so says Holy Scripture (1 Thess. 4:3; 1 Peter 1:15f).

The gospel of Christ, as the Puritans understood it, specifies that faith must express itself in a life of continual contrition, confession, and conversion. Without these habits of the heart there is no genuine repentance, and where there is no genuine repentance there is no genuine faith either.

The question of the extent of the atonement does not arise in evangelistic preaching; the message to be delivered is simply this—that Christ Jesus, the sovereign Lord, who died for sinners, now invites sinners freely to himself. God commands all to repent and believe; Christ promises life and peace to all who do so.

Whence comes the skill to apply God’s truth appropriately in preaching? From the experience of having God apply his truth powerfully to oneself.

The healthy Christian...has a sense of God’s presence stamped deep on his soul, who trembles at God’s word, who lets it dwell in him richly by constant meditation upon it, and who tests and reforms his life daily in response to it. We can begin to assess our real state in God’s sight by asking ourselves how much exercise of conscience along these lines goes into our own daily thinking.

Because of their concern for preciseness in following out God’s revealed will in matters moral and ecclesiastical, the first Puritans were dubbed ‘precisians.’ . . . the local lord of the manor . . . asked [Richard Rogers] what it was that made him *so precise*. ‘O sir,’ replied Rogers, ‘I serve a *precise God*.' If there were such a thing as a Puritan crest, this would be its proper motto.

If we can learn to see the principles [God] was inculcating and applying in his recorded dealings with Israel and the early church, and to reapply them to our own situation, that will constitute the guidance we need.