Meet the Puritans

Satan is the great enemy of our souls. When he realizes that he cannot stop God’s saving a person, he does all that he can to trouble and vex that soul. Recognizing this, the Puritans spent a great portion of their sermon ministering to wounded souls in their congregation. For example, consider...

I once spent a cracking day at the Evangelical Library in London, attending a "Reading John Owen" conference. Those lectures (including Nigel Graham's exceptional popular introduction to the life of Owen) left me hungry to do more reading and re-reading of John Owen. I was reminded, by my own...

As more and more people are beginning to read the Puritans, there seems to be a natural inclination towards what I call “the hard and heavy” writings of the Puritans. One reason is that more of that kind of material is available, having been reprinted several times over the last few centuries...

In his classic work, The Doctrine of Repentance , the great Puritan Thomas Watson lists six ingredients necessary for true repentance: Sight of sin Sorrow for sin Confession of sin. Shame for sin. Hatred for sin. Turning from sin. According to Watson, “if any one is left out it [i.e. repentance]...

“For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh:” Romans 8:3 Among the years of fruitfulness in the ministry of Thomas Manton, an unknown Dutch artist was completing a painting in...

Then He said to them all, "If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me." Following Jesus requires a commitment to lifelong self-denial. Anything less falls short of biblical religion. The Lord made this exceedingly clear immediately after...

Reformed Catholicity . Depending on where you are in the Reformed-Evangelical world, this label may prompt songs of joy or cries of disdain. Those who adopt the term for themselves wish to retrieve the best of the catholic tradition, or perhaps seek to confess doctrinal truths with the Great...

“And let us consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works: Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching.” For Christians living in the rampantly-individualistic twenty-first...

“For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh:” Romans 8:3 The law of God has great value in the Scriptures and for the Christian life. Thomas Manton would not doubt the value...

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been looking at Puritan preaching through the lens of the trivium. Scripture gave Puritan preachers a foundational grammar , and through logical/dialectical methods this grammar would be brought to bear upon the minds of men. But sermons are more than logical outlines...