February 16, 2017 Show with C. Matthew McMahon on “The Puritans & Meditation”

Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors, Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another. Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions. Now here's our host.

Chris Arntzen. Good afternoon Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet earth who are listening via live streaming. This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Thursday on this 16th day February 2017, and I'm in studio with my co-host Reverend Buzz Taylor, and it's great to have you back on the program, Buzz.

Thank you very much, good to be here. And today we have returning to the program Dr. C. Matthew McMahon, or McMahon, a founder of Puritans Mind, and he is going to be addressing the Puritans and meditation, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron, Dr. C. Matthew McMahon.

Thank you Chris, thank you Buzz, happy to be here. It's great to have you here. Well, I think it'd be wise for us, even though this may seem repetitive, especially to those of our listeners who have heard you as a guest on Iron Sharpens Iron before, or if they already know this information, but I think it's very valuable to make it clear who the Puritans were, because Iron Sharpens Iron does have people joining us as new listeners, nearly every week it seems, perhaps even more frequently than every week, I just don't know about it.

They may be listening and I'm totally unaware of them, but I know that we have, especially with the new airing of the program in a pre-recorded version on Grace Life Radio 90 .1 FM in Lake City, Florida, we have a whole new batch of listeners, especially on top of that, since they air Iron Sharpens Iron in prime morning drive time, 8 to 10 a .m., as well as 8 to 10 p .m., but who were the Puritans?

And I know that they're not cookie cutters of one another, there are some differences among them, but tell us who the Puritans were, approximately what years the Puritans flourished, and what countries they came from, and some basic tenets about the Puritans.

Well, the Puritans, the doctrine of the Reformation, everything that Calvin and Luther stood for, everything that all of the Reformers stood for in bringing back skins of the people and recovering it from the darkness of the day, they took all of those basic doctrines and they began to apply them to every single area of the Christian life.

Now, this particular time period, because sometimes people will say, well, wasn't Jonathan Edwards a Puritan, and maybe Cotton Mather and some of these others that were in America, they wonder where those dates fall.

And just to be safe, to keep in the actual Puritan timeline, it runs from about 1559, where the Act of Uniformity was given, which required ministers in England at the time to use the Book of Common Prayer for public worship and things of that nature.

And it extended to 1662, and the Act of Uniformity was 2 ,000 ministers were ejected from their pulpits and from their churches as a result of the Restoration under Charles. A hundred years or so, sometimes people will think, this such man, last good providence, decided that preach and teach and write during that time.

Probably that particular era would have been the Westminster Confession, the Westminster Assembly. In 1643, Parliament called the Assembly of the biggest Puritan leaders of the day, and even some that weren't very well known, and they came together to produce a Confession of Faith, something that would tie Ireland and Scotland under a directory of worship, both for public and private, as well as a Confession of Faith, larger and shorter catechisms and the like.

And they did that over the period of four years, and in 1647, we have the Westminster Confession of Faith, and it sets down the basics, and you think very detailed, some of the information in each one of the paragraphs of the Confession.

You just can sit there, which would segue very well into the topic today, and just ponder those hours on end, the Confession. The Puritans were, they were excited about the Bible. They saw those, but in terms of the Christian life, there is no sphere of influence, not like each one of those pieces of pies or something different, and one sliver might be our job, and one sliver might be church life or something like that.

They saw the Christian life as... And judging by the dates you gave, you would not include Jonathan.

Edwards among the Puritans, even though he is frequently referred to as the last Puritan.

Yeah, they referred to him that way generally because Puritans were thinking what they came from and such. So it's not that you view the historical ecclesiastical aspect of what Puritanism was about in trying to purify the Church of England.

That's what these men were trying to do, bring the Church doctrine there. The understanding of Scripture goes on for, we're talking about it today, because of how biblical they were. So when we talk about Edwards, or we talk about people today who are Puritan-minded, so to speak.

One of the reasons why I have a Puritan's mind, the idea is that when you start reading them and you begin to study their writings, you come away with a mind like theirs, wanting to apply the Bible. Well, now you know as well as I do, I'm sure, that.

The common belief to the man on the street is that the Puritans were very harsh and narrow,.

And all of that. That is a false caricature, isn't it? Well, yeah, exciting people in the history of how could you not be? And God is your God, and you live to serve him every day. Get them and they'll say, well, whenever anybody says something like that, then follow what God had said.

We're going to go against the grain of the world, but so Christians should do that today as well.

I want to give our email address, it's chrisarnsen at gmail .com. If anybody would like to join us with a question, c-h-r-i-s-a-r-n-z-e-n at gmail .com. Please give us at least your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the USA.

We have Tyler in Mastic Beach who asks, Is it true that William Bradford, one of the first governors of Plymouth, is grossly misrepresented by secular historical scholarship?

Generally, yes. Grossly misrepresented in a number of ways. If you read Banner of Truth in a two-volume set, if you haven't read some of the writings of Bradford, that would be to begin looking at Samaritan and kind of writing.

I mean, he published everything from Case in Point, Godly Meditations on the Lord's Prayer, Godly Meditations on the Ten Commandments. He has a number of pieces that meditationally and thinking about the top and add in much of Bradford because I kind of stuck on the timeline.

Very devotional time to read him.

And if you could compare and contrast the Puritans with the Pilgrims and Nonconformists, are these just synonyms or are there differences or are they sometimes the same?

Well, the Nonconformists were the Puritans. Both of those are sort of synonymous in the sense that they didn't want to conform to the specific laws being put in the Church of England at the time, so they were in nonconformity to that.

Puritans looked at the Church of England and they said they became separate sometime in a couple of neighboring countries until they went to America. So when they get to them, they wanted to stay in. And the term itself, Puritan,.

Began as a pejorative term by those who opposed them, didn't it? Very much so. As we discussed.

On the last program, before the word Puritan actually came to light, the derogatory term was precisionist. And I mean, even today, you know, you start talking with somebody who maybe they're a new Christian or maybe they are not a Christian at all, and they hear the way that you talk toward holding scripture, wanting to be more godly, wanting to be more holy, and they're just like, you know, you're just too intense that way.

The idea of precisionist on the Puritans in that way, because they wanted to be precise according to what God said, and they wanted to follow what the Lord said. So they were first known as those precisionists, and later they became known as the Puritans because they wanted to...

And of course, although there are stereotypes about the Puritans, as we were already discussing, there are exaggerations and caricatures and stereotypes. It is true that there were Puritans that treated others outside their own communion with great harshness and hostility, like some of the Baptists who actually were martyred by some Puritans.

And of course, the Quakers and so on that were not treated very kindly by some Puritans. Not to say that this is a universal thing, that they were all equally harsh and cruel and tyrannical by any stretch of the imagination, but those things existed.

They were sinners saved by grace. And if anybody was aware of their remaining sin, it was the Puritans.

They were mastering and thinking through their position before God, pondering and thinking about the Word, knowing, you know, how much of a sinner they are before the Holy Majesty of God. Many of their meditations in general always begin with thinking about who God is and then who you are.

Before God. And we have Joe in Slovenia. He is asking a question that I have not heard about this connection myself. Well, I mean, there is some connection, obviously, because there is all all the progressions that developed in protest against the Church of Rome.

We have different strains of believers that are a part of that. But Joe in Slovenia says, I heard that there was a connection between Anabaptists and Puritans. Is this true? To what extent, how, if at all, did they influence one another?

Very much. In terms of just,.

I mean, the Anabaptists themselves, when they first sprung up, we generally call that time in history the Radical Reformation. People that would have dealt with them would have been far earlier, like Calvin and Zwingli and many of those who wrote and spoke with the Anabaptists quite a bit.

But in terms of the Puritans themselves, that would have been much later.

Yes, well, of course, there are even Mennonites and others that call themselves Anabaptists today, but you're speaking about a specific group in a specific period of Church history. And even when you're talking about the Anabaptists, they are not a monolithic group.

There were all kinds of Anabaptists, some who had Orthodox theology and others who were outlandish heretics. But there's a lot of mystery also because they were persecuted and a lot of their writings were destroyed and so on.

Well, thank you, Joe, in Slovenia. Please keep spreading the word to your fellow Slovenians and abroad and beyond, I should say. Thank you for joining us on the program. Well, I think we should now venture into the area of the Puritans and meditation.

This word meditation is a very popular word today. You have all kinds of Gnostics and New Agers and Roman Catholics and Protestants who are adopting Roman Catholic mysticism, who are in love with this concept of meditation.

And of course, you're speaking about something entirely different. If you could basically define what you mean by Puritan meditation and contrast it with some of the false practices that are actually dangerous and even border on, if not leaping over the border, of occultic behavior.

Godly meditation, assuming that we're defining it the right way, godly meditation is a requirement to be a Christian. People go, wait a second, I might not. People at that point kind of get bent out of shape and they think, well, I don't even do that.

I don't know what that is. You'll see as we talk about this, it's required as a believer to meditate and what that means. Now, exactly what you just said, people don't like the idea of meditating because it reminds them.

Of all the New Age ideas and things of that. Eastern religions, Buddhism, transcendentalism.

Correct. Correct. They picture a Buddhist monk chanting in a monastery, in some shrine somewhere, somebody sitting, having their eyes closed with their fingers touching, humming and things of that nature.

Now, the demonic nature of that kind of meditation is not what biblical godly meditation is about. So, those kinds of ideas, they try to impose them on themselves, seeking to empty their mind for personal calmness and, if you put air quotes around, connect with the universe in some way.

That is in contrast and opposite of looking to fill concerning scripture, which is where meditation is. We can see meditation, especially in the way that something that we're, because even in the last, there has been, and it was actually by, as we were discussing earlier, Don Quixote and Salideo Gloria, which was Nathaniel Renu's Solitude Improved by Divine Meditation.

Now, since the last few years, we've taken a number of, and we've republished in this work, the Saint Spiritual Delight and the Christian on the Mount. We've done Nicholas by Holy Life, Happiness, Divine Meditation.

We just recently did John Ball, A Treatise on Divine Meditation, and we have one by Thomas Jolly called A Treatise on Heavenly Mindedness. The reader, to understand what, I thought we were talking about godly meditation, well, about having devotions as a Christian, spiritually connects with their Lord Jesus Christ.

It's accomplished in three different areas that the Bible gives us, accomplished by meditation. And so, when we think about looking for things that a one-minute Bible, I want to read a little Paranormal Time, is not just a time of study, like studying in some kind of exam, in the sense that it's biblically intended.

People think, you know, they think about devotions as just, well, I read a little bit of the Bible, I say a few prayers, and I'm done. They've missed to have a time of devotion with God, which includes godly meditation.

One thing that he, in Volume 7, is when they are beat, have to be worked on in order to become useful. So, the idea that he's getting at, and he wrote the introduction just meditation, is that Christian Calame, in his work, which is in the midst of being printed now, he talks about a cow.

You know, have you ever seen a cow chomping on the grass in the field? He doesn't eat like we eat. A cow, over and over, chews its cut. It processes every mouthful of grass so that it's useful as food to the particular nature of the cow's stomach, in the Calamite 7 of those.

So, the Christian, with that continual contemplation, has to chew heartily on the Word of God. Calame said, it is the fuel that ignites and sparks his thoughts, and ultimately, is used in prayer to hold God to his Word.

Because we often have a wrong view of what prayer is about, and all three of these things, reading scripture, meditating, and praying, all go together. And so, when we think about having a devoted choir, we need to be thinking about the Bible as more important than, oh, I need to have my devotions today.

Let me just read a scripture verse, and I'll go with that. I got to get out the door. We need to be thinking of it like, Jesus Christ has communicated to us a love letter that's sent to Him, from Him, to us.

That's the idea behind that. So, if we look at scripture like that, if we're so in love with our spouse, or we've just fallen in love with somebody, and they write us a note, or they write us a letter, we really, and the Bible should be that to us.

So, whenever we think about having a devotional time before God, it's not just Bible reading and prayer. It's Bible reading, pondering what has been read, and then praying it back to God again. We'll talk about that in a minute, but listen to Genesis 24 -26.

And Isaac went out to meditate in the field in the evening. So, he had a specific time that he went out into the field in order to meditate. And the word meditate means, it's a combination between praying, and thinking, and pondering.

It's all mingled together. And so, for the Word of God to be mixed with kind of meditating on what it is that we read, because prayer is going to then be fueled by what we read, so that we know how to pray.

Because generally, we think prayer is, oh, hey, Lord, I need this, this, this, this, and this. Thank you very much. But that's not what prayer is. And there are petitions that we bring to Him. But when we hit the doctrine of meditation in this way, we think about John.

This is the central.

Verse that Puritans will leap from. In fact, let's go to Joshua 1 verses 8 and 9 when we return from the break. So, don't forget where you left off there in Joshua 1 verses 8 and 9. Don't go away. We will be right back with C. Matthew McMahon and our discussion of the Puritans and meditations right after these messages.

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If you just tuned us in, our guest today is Dr. C. Matthew McMahon, founder of A Puritan's Mind, and we are discussing the Puritans and meditation. If you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com.

Chrisarnzen at gmail .com. And several of you are waiting to have your questions asked and answered already. But before we go to those listeners, let's return to Joshua chapter 1 verses 7 and 8 or 8 and 9.

I'm sorry, I had you on mute, brother. I'm sorry about that.

That's okay. Joshua 1, 8 and 9. The book of the law shall not depart out of your mouth, but you shall meditate in it day and night that you may observe to do according to all that is written in it. For then you shall make your way prosperous, and then you shall have good success.

Have I not commanded thee? In this, a lot of the Puritans leapfrogged from this particular verse, which gives you a lot of information. One, the word is not supposed to depart out of the Christian's mouth, which means that he has to have it in his head in order for it to come out of his mouth.

And he's told Joshua in this particular instance is that he's supposed to meditate on it day and night. And then you have the hands wave up in the air and they go, are you saying that I need to meditate every minute of every day, in fact, day and night?

Well, Joshua gives a foundation for necessary directions about reading, memorizing, and thinking about scripture. And Christians should exercise themselves in that every single day. And this is not the only place because we have lots of different places like Psalm 1 -2, that he exercises himself in God's law day and night.

That is, in reading, in pondering what's read, they want to observe the most profitable things as they read, paying attention, marking down things that the Lord says to them as they read, because they're having communion with him when they do that.

And it's got to be so well known that the word of God's not departing out of their mouth. So they have to make the best use of it that they can for edifying themselves. And they're instructed today to encourage one another when they're in the assembly, when they're with one another at church.

So it's not only for the edification of themselves, but we're supposed to encourage one another and they have to do that through the word. So the word is going to inform them and it's going to reform them and it's going to cause God to direct them in everything.

It is. And we find that happening with all sorts of historical narratives that we have in scripture. Reading, considering, and praying, the goal to be singled out spiritual discipline by time in the evening in Genesis 24.

Hezekiah, he, in his heart, in deep silence in Isaiah 38, says that he meditated on the things of God. It forced David to ponder in the morning, even all day long. Psalm 1, Psalm 63, Psalm 119. And it also says in Psalm 16 that he, by night, had secret thoughts of God.

It caused, ponder the word of a saint. He even tells them, in 1 Thessalonians 5, to pray without ceasing. All of these particular spiritual disciplines in this way are all set in the constant attitude.

Even when Moses was about to save the law again, right before Joshua is instructed by God in the verse that we read, he says in Deuteronomy 6, these words must remain in your heart. You must meditate on them, both at home and abroad, when you go to bed and when you rise up in the morning.

Because if it's something that's done on a whim, or somebody just kind of tries it out, there is no trying it out in this way, because God specifically says, I command you to do these things. And so devotional time, our quiet time, needs to be something that's planned, and it needs to be something that's planned daily, and it's an exercise that's to provoke the Christian to practice things in a holy manner.

And what it does is, if we do it right, we have a zeal towards God in it, and it draws us closer to the Lord Jesus Christ. You know, anyone who's listening, listening right now on the radio, the psalmist says, my heart kindled in my meditations.

Just think to yourself, when was the last time you felt that way? Because that should be something that causes us to feel like that when we commune with the living God, right? A lack of, if you want to take it in the opposite extreme, Puritans, he said this, and I'm paraphrasing, but he said, I caused Adam to fall, yes, and all of his children into utter desolation, for no one considers deeply the things he ought in his heart.

If Cain had considered his heavy hand against the grievous sin he committed, he would not have slain his own brother. If Ponder, the mighty hand of God by the plagues brought against him already passed, he would have prevented those which followed, including his own destruction and all of his army in the sea.

Nadab and Abihu in Leviticus chapter 10, if they had regarded the fire that they put in their senses, instead of the fire that should have been in their hearts, zeal for God, they might have been saved by Jeremiah Burroughs on that particular scripture, which is what Leviticus 10, one to three is all about.

It's just 13 sermons on that one scripture in our heart that kindled our meditations. Otherwise, we have what the Puritans would always call frozen, you know, people will say, well, every day I kind of do the one minute thing.

Is that enough? No, that's not enough. You know, you can't, we can't neglect that devotional time because we'll overlook God's will in our life, his works and the providence around us. Uh, but at the same time, as we talk about this kind of devotional time needs to be, because if I don't understand it, I'm not going to be able to be able to do.

The Puritans would all say every single one of them in every single book that they ever wrote on this particular subject matter, it says, listen, you can't know how sweet and awesome this godly meditation is without doing it.

You have to do it. It can't just merely be head knowledge of something done because it cultivates in you an experience centering on God's word. So if we're going to glorify God and we're going to exercise ourselves in these three, pondering the word of God and praying, we're going to do that because we're thinking, okay, first in our head, we want to gain a higher degree of grace from God through Christ and the power of spirit.

But secondly, we want to experience the benefit of it. And so Christians have to.

Be able to practice it. My friend, Pastor Ron Glass, who is actually one of the biggest sponsors of Iron Sharpens Iron. He is the pastor of Waiting River Baptist Church. And I edit his sermons for a radio program called the River of Life.

And he was addressing the subject of biblical meditation. And I think it may have been even a two or three part sermon series. But I wonder if you agree with the way he contrasted biblical meditation, which would be of course, Puritan meditation, and the false meditation of the mystics and the Eastern religions and the new age movement.

He said that most of the meditation promoted by false religions is the emptying of the mind, whereas Christian meditation, biblical meditation is the filling of the mind with God's word, and outwardly, the communicating of the mind with God and prayer, so that there's an actual object, a focus of your mind.

It's not emptying your mind. It's actually focusing your mind on God and his word and filling your mind with his truth. Would that be an accurate, contrasting way to describe the differences between Puritan and biblical meditation and the false meditation.

Of the Eastern religions and mystics? 100%. Puritans would say exactly that. In the Christian zone today, what we tend to have happen is that in the Christian's mind, it's easier today to sit down and read a passage out of the Bible.

It doesn't matter even how long it is. It's just a whole chapter that they read, and then take some time to pray about things that may be going on in their life. And when they think that devotion in that particular way completed, they've missed exactly what your definition just was, because in order to pray effectively, you have to know what scripture says concerning the things that you're praying about, because it's not just, I need, I need, I need, I need, I need, I need.

It is really revolving around, and this is what all of the Puritans would define prayer as, taking the word of God, forming it into an argument, and retorting it back upon God again to seal him in his promises.

So if we don't know or have in our mind concerning those things that we need to have, meditation doesn't want an empty head. He wants someone that takes scripture and molds it over and places it in their mind and understands.

So when they get into really pondering, commanded duty, in Joshua says. It's done after we read, reading scripture, and then it uses because it's material, divine meditation. He said this, pondering or meditating of the mind into divine truth and what we understand, and four, laboring to affect all thinking, considering the things of, and that our hearts might be raised for God.

That's what, it is my meditation all the day. There's a 50 psalms that say that, almost that very same thing. So yes, it's taking and filling your mind with what scripture says. Sometimes people will say, well, at that particular point, this is going to be difficult for me because I'm not a very smart person.

Well, there's no place in scripture anywhere where God says you only meditate on the word if you're a smart person. He doesn't ever say that. What he says is, he will be with you as you read, as you think, as you ponder to make it, you have to engage in it.

You've got to be that you get it. It might be that lots of people that are listening right now, that they've neglected it, that they've never done it at all. Well, at that particular point, okay, we need to grieve a little bit before God about our neglect of what he specifically commanded us to do, and we've got to make a conscious decision to accomplish what God requires Christians.

That's why I said in the beginning, shake us up a little bit. This is a requirement. This is something that God says, I want you to do this because this is for your benefit. At least once a day, we should be spending time with him in meditation, you know, marching up that spiritual hill, so to speak, to reach the top, and when we hit the top, if we've meditated well, and we haven't even talked about it, but when we get to the top of that mountain, when we're meditating in the right way, what we find there is Christ in heaven.

That's where our mind goes in that particular way.

And Reverend Buzz Taylor, my co-host, has a question for you.

It's not so much a question. You were mentioning about praying the word back to God. It seems like they really mastered the real teaching of the Lord's Prayer. Of course, a good portion of the catechisms are devoted to the Lord's Prayer, but it seems like they figured it out because, as I heard one guy refer to, most of our prayers are sending God junk mail because prayer is supposed to be from God's perspective instead of ours.

You know, we don't go to him to pray about Aunt Susie's ingrown toenail. We go there to pray about the advancement of his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, and his will being done, and so forth. It's very God-centered,.

Not us-centered. I want to go to a listener. I want to go to a listener question. Tony in Rock Hill, South Carolina. And by the way, it was a very wonderful pleasure meeting you finally face-to-face at the G3 Conference in Atlanta, Georgia.

Tony, I met a number of the Iron Sharpens Iron listeners there at the conference, some of whom I had never even heard from before, who had never even submitted a question to us, but were approaching me after recognizing my name from the name tag or recognizing my face from the internet.

They were encouraging me about how Iron Sharpens Iron has blessed them. But Tony in Rock Hill, South Carolina says, Hi Chris, thanks for the show today. I wonder if your guest has paid much attention to the public school system's treatment of the Puritan legacy and the key role they have played to discredit all things Puritan.

The test study worksheet I saw was so outrageous that after doing a quick Google search and some brief research, I was able to sit my daughter down and completely dismantle all of the false statements on the sheet.

She was quite amazed at how far from the truth the school teachings were from how the Puritans actually lived and what they believed.

Thank you for your efforts to preserve the truth. I'm glad she corrected that. You know, the secular world desires to Christ and to disrepute any way that they can. We're dealing with the secular school system.

That's what they're going to do at every turn in every way. Denomination, the RPCGA, one of the things that we press is being able, as parents are able, to homeschool your children, you know, to teach them the Puritans did.

Well, for them it was a little different because the universities and such were actually founded to raise up ministers. And so when you have things like, you know, all the Cambridge schools and even Harvard, when President Thomas Shepard and President Samuel Willard, they were there to train ministers.