Steve Stanley’s Reviews > A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life > Status Update

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.