Meet the Puritans

The Great Awakening of the mid-eighteenth century provoked the ire of many Protestants. This was due to reports of hysteria surrounding the Awakening's particular brand of revivalism. Many did not know what to make of the excitement and fervor exuded by those caught-up in the movement. In New...

The Puritans were driven by Christ-centered expository preaching. God’s Word gave them the grammar ; it was as essential to Puritan preaching as phonics for the four-year-old learning to read. And yet knowing what God said in a particular text is not alone sufficient for transformative, God-...

“For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.” – 1 John 5:7 The above verse is found in nearly all Reformation-era Bibles, such as Wycliffe 1395, Tyndale 1525, Coverdale 1535, Great Bible 1539, Matthew’s 1549, Geneva 1560,...

Earthly-mindedness is to the mind what gravity is to the body—it is an invisible, powerful, and constant force that weighs so heavily upon the individual that without a greater force acting against it, he is powerless to break free from its controlling influence. Even the stoutest Christians know...

Preaching was the heartbeat of the Puritan movement. It would be no exaggeration to say that without Puritan preaching there would have been no Puritans. To quote Irvonwy Morgan, "Puritanism in the last resort must be assessed in terms of the pulpit." [1] And though much has changed since the 17th...

Christian virtue is lovely to behold. Jonathan Edwards, in his treatise A Dissertation Concerning the Nature of Virtue , described it as, “Something beautiful , or rather some kind of beauty , or excellency.” [1] Edwards did not mean that a delicate flower or an excellent meal possess virtue;...

Previously, we saw the importance of understanding a covenant as an agreement in Scripture, and that the Covenant of Works existed with Adam before the Fall with the promise of life for obedience ( which we qualified typologically as temporal , not eternal—earthy, not heavenly). All these details...

…Hath made me free from the law of sin and death. Romans 8:2b Sin and death are often connected in the Word of God. In Genesis 2:17, the Lord commanded Adam to obey or suffer the pains of death. God said, “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day...

As we saw in our last post , we can appropriately use the term “covenant” to describe God’s relationship with Adam in Eden. Specifically, that relationship was a “covenant of life” (WSC 12), which is to say that “life was promised to Adam, and in him to his posterity, upon condition of perfect and...

William Perkins was a prolific writer and a monumental thinker within the Puritan movement. Yet Perkins believed that the heart of his ministry was preaching “one Christ, by Christ, to the praise of Christ.” We saw the principle behind this in our last post : Our preaching must be full of Christ...