Preaching

N o Puritan was more concerned about preaching than William Perkins (1558–1602). Detesting the substitution of eloquence for the “lost art” of preaching, Perkins led a reformation of preaching. He did this in his instruction to theological students at Cambridge; in his manual on preaching, The Arte...

I certainly do not wish to leave the impression from my previous post that the Puritans were bad examples as preachers. There are many ways in which we can and should imitate their preaching. Here are a few of the lessons we can learn from them. 1. Preach Well-Rounded Sermons There are four...

To guide God’s saints in readying themselves for the reception of His preached Word each Lord’s Day, this earthen vessel shares his own weekly preparation to proclaim it to them as a model to modify and use. Prepare through Prayer With an intense sense of the responsibility of the task and a desire...

T he Puritans set high standards for preaching. They believed they should preach the Bible from their own experience of it and apply what they preached to the particular needs of their hearers. But as much as we admire the Puritans, we should not slavishly imitate them, but critically examine their...

Y oung John Bunyan (1628–1688) hardly seemed fit for preaching. He was a coarse person with little education and a mouth full of foul language. He had lost his mother and sister to death and was exposed to the evils of military service before his seventeenth birthday. As a young man, he worked with...

Happy New Year! Let's kick it off Puritan style with a free book giveaway. Our friends at Latimer Trust in the U.K. have given us two (2) 3-book bundles to give away: Chad B. Van Dixhoorn, A Puritan Theology of Preaching , Peter Adam, 'To Bring Men to Heaven by Preaching': John Donne's Evangelistic...