Puritan III: Piety and Theology | Behold Your God Podcast

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Welcome back to another episode of the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Matthew Robinson, director of Mediagratiae, and I'm here again with Dr.

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John Snyder, pastor of Christ Church New Albany and author and host of the Behold Your God study series from Mediagratiae.

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We're in our third episode of a short series introducing our listeners to a group of people called the

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Puritans. And in episode one, we really just set the historic and temporal context for who were these men, where did they live, when did they live.

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And in the second episode, we've talked about to what we might call defining marks of the movement.

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And we're now to our third defining mark. But before we get into that, I do want to encourage you that if you haven't listened to those podcasts to go back to Mediagratiae .org,

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look for those episodes on Puritans and listen to those podcasts. Get up to speed. I also want to mention that we're doing this short series because Mediagratiae has just released a film project that we've worked on for about the last two years in our spare time called

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Puritan, All of Life to the Glory of God, which was a project in partnership with Reformation Heritage Books and Puritan Reform Theological Seminary with Dr.

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Joel Beeke, sort of spearheading the project. He is the narrator on the film, and he's the man who sort of brought it all together.

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So we want to commend that work to you. You can find out more if you go to Mediagratiae .org

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or TheMeansOfGrace .org. But John, just to jump right back into where we were in our last podcast, we're on point three of these kind of core values of the men that made up this

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Puritan movement. And you called it a precise piety. So what do you mean by that?

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Well, piety being the old word for holiness. One of the key elements in Puritanism was its very intense focus on the interiority of the

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Christian life. And so, you know, there are dangers there. No human movement is without its flaws.

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And Puritanism takes a lot of criticism, I think, in this area. And so I personally believe we should say this is an area that's biblical, but you do have to guard against the abuses that the enemy will bring.

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The enemy always brings abuses and lays them in front of us, kind of like, you know, slippery slopes on the path of truth.

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So Paul preaches, you know, grace. And then Romans 6, he has to say, we're being accused of saying that grace leads to life of sin.

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Well, that's not at all what it does. So the Puritan, I think, if he were allowed to speak for himself today, would say, we took holiness seriously.

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And we focused on the interior, the holiness of heart flowing out into holiness of life.

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But we did not mean for you to become introspective and morbid and miserable people. So one thing we can say about their intense focus on a holy heart and life is that it did deal heavily with the motivational level of Christianity.

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It wasn't enough for a Puritan to show up to church. It wasn't enough for a Puritan to read his

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Bible. It wasn't enough for a Puritan to do the right things. But to do the right things with right love to Christ.

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That's what the king deserves. As the motive. Yeah, love to Christ. Gratitude for grace constantly flowing over the life.

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And mercies that are new every morning. Now, one way that that is different from other traditions in Christian history, which emphasized a lot of the holy heart, holy motives, holy life.

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Let's take another example. That would be, you know, Catholic mysticism. I always think of a

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Catholic mystic as a person that, you know, wanted to love God, but they're stuck in a church that really didn't emphasize scripture.

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And so, you know, you end up really in dangerous territory of trying to fuel love for God without a

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Bible and trying to guide love to God without a Bible. And so you can get into some pretty self -styled religion.

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And so, you know, is the Puritan a mystic? Well, in a way, maybe you could say he was. He focused on the heart.

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But he was a biblical mystic. The scriptures, as we mentioned earlier, were not just a guide for nations and churches.

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They were a guide for how to express and promote love to Christ. So it might be right to say that they did use the

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Bible and the truth that is contained therein to fuel their experiences and to guide their choices, not their feelings as a way to guide, you know, their experience.

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Well, I had this experience, and I feel that it must be this. In other words, they're always comparing things to the truth as it's revealed in the scripture.

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And they tested the validity of their feelings and their experiences by God's revealed truth in the scripture.

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One clear example of this actually comes about 50 years after Puritanism, and that's in Jonathan Edwards.

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You know, his book, Religious Affections, he's describing for people in the midst of the Great Awakening where there's so much happening.

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There's a lot of questions like, is this the real thing? Do I need that much experience?

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How much experience do I need in order to be called a Christian? How do I know my experience is the right experience?

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Is it a matter of degree, or is it just that I have some? And Edwards, so wisely in his book,

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Religious Affections, gives us a very practical application of what you just mentioned. The scripture fuels experiences, and the scripture tests our experiences.

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And that's the kind of thing that we really are in dangerous territory.

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If we choose a religion with no experience, you know, no, you just agree with the facts. Or if we choose experiences that are not rooted in scripture and tested by scripture.

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You know, the Puritans didn't just do that for themselves, but with their limited freedom in the Church of England, not being really appointed to the positions of real influence and power, very few

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Puritans, I mean we do have a couple of examples, but very few Puritans were made bishops.

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And so, generally the Puritan, he was allowed to pastor his little congregation, but in order to reach beyond that, it was his books.

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And so we have so many of the Puritan books that deal with this aspect of the Christian life. How are we to live out this love that we now have in our soul, which has been poured abroad, shed abroad in our heart by the

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Holy Spirit. So their books are very helpful. You know, we could say it this, maybe, we could say the

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Puritan would never have been happy with the person calling themselves a healthy Christian, whose head was full of great doctrine, but had no experience of those doctrines, no practical, daily, experiential acquaintance with the realities of those things.

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So it's like postcard Christianity. You see pictures of wonderful faraway places, but you never went there.

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But nor would the Puritan have felt that he could say a healthy Christian life was the opposite, and that is a person who has experience after experience, and you know, they're not happy unless they're having a new, fresh experience, but it's not flowing from a focus on the great realities of the

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Bible. Right, and in line with the truth that's revealed there. Yeah, constantly testing, is this a biblical experience?

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Is it flowing from the Scripture, and is it in harmony with what the Bible shows? Right. John, I do think that that simple explanation does make some things clear, and I'm glad that you gave it.

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You know, I don't want to give the impression to the listener that when we talk about experience, we're talking about, you know, do you have any experience in this job?

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Have you ever done it before? You know, how long have you been doing it? We don't mean experience as a Christian in terms of length of time.

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We're talking about experience of the truths that we believe, something that goes beyond just agreeing with something mentally, but something of the interiority and possession of these truths.

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And the way that it was written in one old hymn that I think we're both familiar with was this.

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Vain is all our best devotion, if on false foundations built. True religion's more than notion.

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Something must be known and felt. And so that was the note that these

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Puritan men were trying to sound. We can't just, it's vain. It doesn't matter if we just build our devotion on any old thing that comes along or our experiences.

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But if we hold to some of the best truths, but we don't know the reality of these things ourselves, then that's just as much of an error.

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Do you want to comment on that? Yeah, I think one way we could say it is there needs to be an immediacy.

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There needs to be almost, you know, if we could say it this way, a face -to -face interaction with these truths.

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I am living these things. This is life and death to me. The great doctrines that Paul gives in Ephesians 1, 2, and 3 are capped off by the prayer at the end of chapter 3 that you would know these things in a way that transcends knowledge and that you would be filled by these great doctrines grabbed hold of and dealt with, that you would be filled with the fullness that comes from God.

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So, you know, it is just so wonderful that we don't have to pick. We don't have to say, well, look, I'm really a guy that's more for concepts.

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And the other guy says, well, I really more, I like experiences. Well, no, the Lord, follow

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Him and He will lead us down a path where they are married. Yeah, I can't help but think, you know, when we talked about this issue in the

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Logic on Fire film and interviewed Ligon Duncan about it, he quoted the passage that you just quoted and, you know, in his beautiful southern accent put many, many syllables in the word know.

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He said, you know, Paul tells us that he wants us to know something that goes beyond knowledge.

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And there's only one way that you can know something that goes beyond knowledge and that's to experience it. And so, you know, the

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Puritans weren't saying anything that Paul wasn't trying to communicate to us there in the perfect Word of God.

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So that brings us to the last of the core values that united these men in this movement that we're going to talk about in our podcast.

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And that is, what about the issue of experiential Reformed theology? Well, we've really been kind of hitting all along the edge of this already.

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So we can just say a few things hopefully to clarify. Puritanism has been called, if we can use the

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Latin phrase, theologica pictoris, a theology of the heart. And again, it doesn't mean that the mind is not involved.

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And that truth isn't primary. It enters through the intellect, but then it comes into the heart.

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It does reach the heart. Yes, and having reached the heart, it's a short step from the heart to the choices.

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And, you know, and again, the Puritans deal a lot with how truth affects the interior of the

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Christian life. They're really the kind of the tour guides of the interiority of the Christian life. The Puritans possessed what one scholar described as a passionate desire to recover the inner life of the

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New Testament Christianity, which it seemed reasonable to the Puritans to believe would clothe and express itself in forms such as those in which it had first appeared.

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And so that's where we really, I think that's one of the sweet spots of Puritan Christianity.

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They've got these great biblical words. They've got this warm explanation and application.

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And then they don't stop there. What would it look like? And will you be satisfied if you don't see some evidence?

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I mean, it ought to show itself. Yeah, and probably there, speaking of would clothe itself and express itself in forms such as those in which it had first appeared, you have the simplicity of New Testament worship there.

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And you have the power of the explosive force of Christianity, genuine

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Christianity, conversion and all of these things. And so, you know, look, as you said, they had great words.

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The problem is the same problem that we run into in every generation. Everyone kind of had, there are only so many words in the

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Bible. And so we're all using the same words. We're all saying words like born again, you know, converted, saved.

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We all use the word faith. We all use the word repentance and even sanctification.

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But the Puritan and the non -Puritan would have both used those words, but they would have definitely had different expectations, practical definitions, even if they define them the same on paper.

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What do they expect to actually see in the life of the believer, the life of the church would have been very different.

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The Puritan felt like those words described things that God did in all of his children by the

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Spirit. And therefore, they did have the right to expect to see those things as being the normal part of the

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Christian life and the Christian's experiences. Therefore, the pastor in the church should expect to see some of these things in some measure if a person was really and truly called to be a follower of Christ.

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Yeah, that's a very practical, helpful paradigm for us and it's a very biblical one.

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If we think that Christianity exists in words and notions then when our children say hey, mom, dad,

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I got it and they spit out the right words and notions do we label that a Christian and say Johnny, you're fine.

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That's all there was to it. You got it. What about Christ getting us? When a pastor is talking to a person that says

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I want to join the church and I want to be baptized and I want there to be this visible testimony of the goodness of God to me and the church wants to put a stamp of approval on someone and say as we've talked about before, this is what a

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Christian looks like. Folks out here this is what we call a Christian because we feel that this is what the scripture calls a

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Christian. Well, are we only going to look for right words? If we believe that grace is effective then we will look for biblical kinds of results or biblical types of evidences of these biblical words.

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Now, we're not being perfectionists and the Puritans are very careful in their books to say, you know, a baby

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Christian is a baby Christian. You see a little tree start to grow, that gracious tree in the soil of a new heart and there may not be a lot of fruit on the branches yet but it's there, it's alive, it's real and it doesn't grow there without the work of God.

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That's a Christian. But having said that, if you see no tree at all month after month, year after year we want to be careful not to give people a false assurance.

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And I think, you know, we're both parents we care about the church we care about the church we go to we care about the churches at large you get to go to so many conferences and meet people you know, and it is a matter of love, not only to the honor of Christ and His Gospel but it's a matter of love to souls in front of us to be willing to look for concrete evidence that the great truths a person's talking about have actually taken root.

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So, we want to be gracious but as we deal with people's souls, we do want to look for the for the reality working itself out in new changes.

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Well, before we leave this topic, what happened to the Puritans? We hear people say well, this so -and -so was the last

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Puritan well, then so -and -so, it seems like every generation has a last Puritan including our own, and so there is a way in which we can talk about perhaps the spirit of Puritanism this desire to see the church conformed to Sola Scriptura, and that should be present in every generation it was certainly present in the first generation of believers, and it shows up in different movements and different men, but as we speak specifically about this historical movement called the

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Puritans, what happened to them? Well, in the early 1660's you know, political things change around again, and Puritans are out of favor and we have the act of uniformity, and this requires everyone in the established church to kind of toe the line, not just on some basic general doctrinal issues, hey,

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I agree with 39 Articles, well, yeah, but you're going to do this, and this, and this externally, like all these other people, and you're going to quit being so picky many of the things that were listed were particularly chosen because the people in power knew that no

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Puritan would be able with a clear conscience to do it, so it was a way of saying, you want to be a part of the church, fine, you need to conform to us otherwise you're out, and so about 2 ,000 ministers were ejected.

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We call this the Great Ejection, this is something that if you're want a good book recommendation, we have several coming up, but there's one that I would recommend to you,

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Great Ejection Sermons, that the Banner of Truth put together, when these men got the word handed down, look, this is your last

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Sunday, and then you're out, they preached so what would you say to the people that God has given you charge over their souls in a situation like that, when you know that the man coming after you is going to basically be a state flunky, it's a fascinating book,

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Sermons of the Great Ejection. Yeah, what follows that ejection then, of course, as the churches are gutted of some of the greatest ministers in the land, what follows is a season of persecution, it's called the

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Clarendon Code, and there were just a whole list of laws that really made life for a

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Puritan pretty difficult, they couldn't live within a certain distance of their old church, so that you wouldn't be able to meet with your old parishioners kind of on the sly, you couldn't, a

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Puritan, an ejected Puritan couldn't be a tutor to a rich man's children, he couldn't be a teacher in the school system.

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Any influence that he could have. Right, any area that they would give influence, they were restrained from, well, a

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Puritan pastor really, other than pastoring and teaching, he wasn't, that was kind of his livelihood, so many of the

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Puritan families suffered extraordinarily during this time, and there was some persecution and the rare death, martyrdom, but after a couple of decades of that, the act of toleration, and under the act of toleration, they're allowed to come back in, or they're allowed freedom, so they don't go back into the church of England, but these men who are now under, they're not called

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Puritans anymore, as much as, you know, a more precise title would be non -conformist, you didn't conform to the church, or a dissenter, you dissented from your church.

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But you are now allowed to do that. Yeah, so it's legal to be a non -conformist, it's legal to be a dissenter, if you register yourself in your little group, which they were little groups, with the state, you can have a dissenting, non -conforming church, and we don't know them, in our town, we don't have any first dissenter church, and second non -conformist, so they became

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Presbyterians, and Baptists, and Congregationalists, and in those denominations, some of them really flourished, some of them, in England, the

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Presbyterians, there was a continual move away from anything that brought more persecution, and a move toward a highly intellectual approach, and really heresy crept in, and almost killed

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Presbyterianism in England, by the end of that century, you know, and in others, there was a healthy maintenance of those great core values, which really resurfaced under the

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Evangelical Revival. Interestingly, the Act of Uniformities passed in the year 1689, which a lot of people, speaking of dissenters and Baptists, know about the 1689

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Confession, which wasn't actually written in 1689, it was written many years earlier, when it was actually illegal to be a

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Baptist, but it's known as the 1689, because that was the year that you could actually, they could actually publish it, without being arrested, and possibly killed, or given what was then called the

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Third Baptism, which was drowning for being a Baptist. So, these core beliefs that we discussed, these things continued, as we said earlier, they're present to some degree, to varying degrees, in every generation of the

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Church, sometimes we don't know about it, but it's surely there, because it's birthed from God's zeal for His own name, that He then gives

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His people to be zealous for His own name and His own worship. That's passed on through the denominations that are formed, that's passed on directly and indirectly through the books that they've written, which we've already said have made a massive comeback in Evangelicalism in the last 70 years.

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We hear people talk about Jonathan Edwards was the last Puritan, we hear people talk about, well,

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Martin Lloyd Jones was the last Puritan, I've heard, you know, well, J .I. Packer is still the last living

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Puritan, I think he went to high school with some of these guys, but what do you make of the ongoing legacy of Puritanism?

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Well, I mean, every one of us should be grateful that we haven't seen the last Puritan, you know?

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God works in the soul, it begins with a mighty conquest, and then the heart is in love with Scripture, and then the heart is in love with teachers that give me the clearest views, the clearest understanding of Scripture, the clearest views of God's most beautiful expression of Himself in the person and work of His Son, and so we begin to, you know, grab hold of those authors that help us that way, and what we find is year after year,

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God using these now gone to glory teachers that that the great truths of Puritanism are being reproduced and spread again in our own day, and so I don't suppose we'll see the last

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Puritan until we see Christ face to face. Well, one of our hopes in producing the film is not just that we'll clear up some misconceptions about, you know, are we just talking about the pilgrims, are we talking about the people who were scared to death that somewhere someone might be happy, might be having a good time, and they're not able to stamp it out.

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We do want to historically set some of those bad ideas right, but clearly there are some correlation between the days of the

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Reformation and then the days of the Puritan era in our day, and we are seeing something of a resurgence of men and women who are gripped by the truths of the scriptures, and they're finding like -minded men out there who are preaching and writing books, and in many ways in the way that the printing press really fueled one of the tools in God's sovereign hand of fueling this work of Reformation in the church.

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500 years ago we see the internet being the way that Reformed doctrine are reaching young men in towns where there's not a

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Reformed church for hundreds of miles, and so we want to see

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God continue to do a purifying work in our day, and so if you're listening to this, you're kind of in the target audience of the kind of people that we hope might be gripped by the truths of the scripture in such a way that you'll see the kinds of sacrifices that were made by these men, you'll be able to count the cost, this is not going to be something cool that I can put on social media, this might cost me everything, this might cost me my life, but you'll also be so gripped by the reality of as I said earlier,

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God's zeal for his own name that you'll count those things as a very small thing as you work out in every area of your own life and in the church that you've been given influence in, whether as a member or as a pastor, to see these

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Reformation truths, which are really just the truths of the scripture rediscovered 500 years ago, pressed out into every area of life, and so we do want to encourage you to go to Mediagratia .org

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take a look at the film there see the lessons but use those things as an on -ramp the on -ramp would be to maybe say, well look,

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I've heard about John Owen, I've heard about Thomas Brooks, but I've never really done a deep dive,

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I've just never stopped and said, okay, I'm going to read one and we hope that you will, we hope that that will also be an on -ramp for you to go back into the scriptures with some helpful perspective with some light and heat picked up from these preachers that God has blessed the church with many years ago and then go back out into your own life, as I said earlier, pressing these realities out into every area of the life also stay tuned for a little sneak peek of the film,

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Puritan All of Life to the Glory of God Thanks for listening In Samuel Rutherford, we find a rare combination of the precise mind of a theologian but also really the passionate heart of a poet when you read his descriptions of Christ, when you read his descriptions of the love of Christ for his church and his church for him, that imagery reminds me a lot of the

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Song of Solomon Now we don't know much about Rutherford's early life, but we do know that he went to the

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University of Edinburgh and graduated at age 23 He became the professor of what we would call today humanities

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He gets married and things go along well for a while until there's a scandal

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We don't know the exact nature of that scandal All we know is that it was connected with the marriage, but we do know that it sent

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Rutherford reeling and he began to really consider the problems of his own soul and to seek the

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Lord in earnest He said that this was the period that God worked in his heart and he was brought to a true knowledge of God through the work of Jesus Christ Now as a

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Christian, he began to become very serious about the study of theology and at age 27, we find that he's been ordained and appointed a minister of a small church in the south of Scotland in Anworth As a pastor, we know about his diligent life, it's convicting to me, but it's also encouraging, particularly his prayer life

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He says that he rose every morning at 3 a .m. to meet with the Lord for his own soul, but also to plead for his people, and this is how he described that prayer.