Status Updates From A Quest for Godliness: The ...

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.

The Bible is, after all, a very old book, the product of a now long-vanished culture. Most of it was written for people in an utterly different situation from our own. How can it throw clear and direct light on the problems of life today? It can do so, the Puritans would reply, because the God who wrote it remains the same, and his thoughts about man’s life do not change.

God will only prosper our study if we continually exercise ourselves to live by what we learn. . . . He who would interpret Scripture aright, therefore, must be a man of a reverent, humble, prayerful, teachable and obedient spirit; otherwise, however tightly his mind may be ‘stuffed with notions’, he will never reach any understanding of spiritual realities.

To [the Puritan] mind . . . 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 pour 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.

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.

When Owen refers to the ‘divine originall’ of the Scriptures, he means, not only that God *spoke* their contents long ago, when he caused them to be written, but also that he *speaks* the same content now: the Scriptures remain his contemporary utterance to every generation.

[Owen] is quick to deploy against [the Quakers] the old dilemma that if their ‘private revelations’ agree with Scripture, they are needless, and if they disagree, they are false.

The giving of spiritual understanding is not, of course, an end in itself; as Owen recognises, it is always to be seen and valued as a means to something further—knowing and enjoying God.

All Christians need Scripture truth as medicine for their souls at every stage, and the making and accepting of applications is the administering and swallowing of it.

If our theology does not quicken the conscience and soften the heart, it actually hardens both; if it does not encourage the commitment of faith, it reinforces the detachment of unbelief; if it fails to promote humility, it inevitably feeds pride.