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

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.

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.

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.