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

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.