Puritans and Revival X: Divine Initiative

Welcome back to the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Teddy James, content producer for MediaGracie with Dr. John Snyder, pastor of Christ Church New Albany and author of the Behold Your God study series. We're in the midst of a series on the Puritans, their influence on the 18th century revivals.

The Biblical Paradox of Sovereignty and Responsibility

John, last episode we said that we were about to give and present some practical applications of all of the things we've been talking about in all of our discussions on regeneration.

Yeah, the biblical paradox between God's sovereignty, man's responsibility, or perhaps between man's moral inability because of sin's influence on us and man's responsibility. It is a biblical problem that we're facing and the Bible gives us the answer to it.

I was thinking back on the book of Acts, Peter's first sermon, Pentecost there. In chapter 2, in verse 40, Peter really drives home the sermon with this command. The Bible says,. And with many other words he solemnly testified and kept on exhorting them, saying, Now I want us to listen really closely here.

Be saved from this perverse generation. So those first two words are a command, be saved. Now, we don't often talk a lot about grammar here, but this is really such a wonderful picture of man's dilemma and of the cure in the gospel.

So in the Greek, this is what we call an aorist passive imperative. I want to point out the last two of those, passive imperative. Now we have that in English, we have passive imperatives. So an imperative verb is a verb where you're receiving a command.

You have to go do something. And if you don't go do something, you haven't fulfilled this command. But this is a passive imperative, and that's where it gets weird. A passive verb is a verb that describes the subject risk being the recipient of an action.

So let's be very clear. At the end of the gospel sermon, the great preaching, you know, at the beginning of the book of Acts, Peter's application of the gospel is a command. You must do something, but it's a passive imperative.

You can only fulfill this command by going and getting someone else to act upon you. Now, it's life and death. You will spend eternity under the righteous judgment of God if you don't get someone to do something to you.

And that's pretty scary for a life and death command resting on the fact that someone else will act upon us, not just what we would do. But when you look at who we're being commanded to get to act upon us, when we look at the Savior and we realize that He is able and willing, then it's good news.

So the good news is this. You can't save yourself, but you must go and get Him to act upon you in a saving way, and He is willing and able. So that's really what, that's the whole picture of what we're looking at in here.

Divine Initiative and the Right Use of the Means of Grace

Now, one of the ways that the Puritans and the evangelical men dealt with this was, we could say, a theology of divine initiative, that when men and women listened to the gospel and were truly bothered and came to the pastor or came, you know, a child coming to a parent and said, this is me, what can I do about this?

There was the understanding that only those that God was already waking up would really be bothered about this and would really want to be saved from themselves and to live for Christ. And so this whole idea of divine initiative, you know, God won't stop here.

God is the one that's made you bothered and God is the one that will cure this. Well, they directed them to the right use of means of grace. So what are the tools that God has placed in the hands of humanity that we are to make the right use of as we are crying out for God's merciful gift of salvation?

And while there are many things we could mention, the main ones that the Puritans emphasized and then later the evangelical revival men emphasized were the word and prayer, the scriptures and prayer. Now, that's a pretty clear departure from the denomination that they belong to.

The Church of England tended to give a greater degree of emphasis to baptism for regeneration and the Eucharist, the Lord's Supper for growth. And so when we talk about means of grace, if our listeners are coming from a Roman Catholic background or an Anglican background, you might tend to drift toward that view of the means of grace.

We don't mean it that way. But the Puritan meant a right use of the tools that God has placed in your hand. And so the word and prayer. Now, when we talk about the word, listen to what one Puritan, Ezekiel Hopkins, wrote.

He says this,. So in modern language, how do you know that when you're sleeping in on Sunday, how do you know that you didn't just miss the preaching of the gospel that God might have used for your salvation?

That word is then spoken that possibly if you had paid attention to it, might have awakened you from the dead sleep of sin and security. Now, when they make these kind of applications, they're not saying that the Bible being preached in itself is enough to change our nature.

They clearly teach that the primary cause of regeneration is the Holy Spirit or the author of regeneration or the agent, the one that makes us alive, that wakes us up. That's the Spirit of God. But the instrument in the hands of the Spirit or the secondary cause is the preaching of the gospel.

So the preaching of God's word is essential in the Puritan understanding and the evangelical understanding. But in itself, without the work of the Spirit, it's not adequate to save a person. William Williams, the Welsh hymn writer, says this,.

For words to be effective, God must make them prevail. In a sermon called The Potter and the Clay, George Rootfield devotes a significant amount of time to explaining the interplay of laying arguments persuasively before people in a sermon and man's reason and the work of the Spirit and all of that.

In the sermon, he points out that in the Bible itself, we find God reasoning with humanity. You know, you think of Isaiah chapter 1,. Come, let us reason together. God lays out reasons. So he deals with man as a reasonable creature.

In other words, the grace of God and the sovereignty of God doesn't turn us into a robot that suddenly we robotically respond to the gospel. But God deals with us as reasonable creatures. The gospel itself, the scriptures, the preaching and applying of that, the witness of a Christian to an unbeliever, it contains these arguments which are laid out before a person and they ought to be laid out in a manner which is persuasive.

The truth ought to be laid out there in a way that entices the sinner. And so, Whitefield says that the most persuasive strains of holy rhetoric, these are a part of what God uses to save people. But at the same time, he says, I would as soon go to a church yard and preach to the cemetery and the people in the graves there and expect a response as to go to the church and preach persuasively the gospel and expect a response without the work of the Holy Spirit.

Prayer, the Sinner's Prayer, and Seeking God

Well, not only the word, but prayer. So the Puritan, the evangelical revivalist would say to those people out there listening to them, you are so deeply stained and ruined by sin that you can't even awaken yourself.

You can't really believe. You can't see. You don't understand. You don't want God. But that doesn't mean you're to be inactive. So put yourself by these right, the right use of these means, the right use of these instruments, put yourself in the way of God's mercies.

And the second one was prayer. Now, when we think of prayer, you know, TJ, we think of the sinner's prayer. So 1820s, a man named Charles Finney introduces what he called the prayer of faith, which since then has been nicknamed the sinner's prayer.

And most of us have grown up with that as our culture. If you pray a certain type of prayer with enough earnestness, then what you prayed for will be given to you. Now, there's there's a couple of differences between that and how these men were recommending a person seek the Lord.

And one of them is that when you think about the sinner's prayer, what we're talking about is if I pray the prayer, I automatically have the thing. And nowhere in the Bible do you see prayer treated that way.

Prayer is the communication between our soul and our God. And we're pleading with God and God may promise to answer. But simply saying the prayer itself doesn't accomplish it. But when Finney introduced the prayer of faith or the sinner's prayer, he guaranteed that if you could get your child to pray this prayer, it would it would do the thing.

It would accomplish the thing you're wanting accomplished.

He actually guaranteed the parents, give me 15 minutes with your teenage children and they will leave a Christian.

Yes. So if the child will just do the prayer, honestly, then it will regenerate them. It has to every time. Nowhere in the scriptures is prayer presented that way. That's a very, you know, it's it's treating prayers as if it's a magical talisman, as if it's a thing that twists God's arm.

Prayer is coming. The needy soul coming to the to the all sufficient and willing God and laying our neediness before him and pleading his mercies. And God does respond, but it's the response of God that accomplishes it and not the prayer itself.

But with the sinner's prayer, it's almost as if God becomes an impersonal machine, that if you put the right quarter, the right size coin in it, that every time it spits out the result. So say this prayer, mean it with all your heart and you are and you will have what you've asked for.

So when the Puritan and the evangelical leader said make use of prayer, they were not meeting the sinner's prayer in that way, but they were meaning for the seeker to really turn their heart to God. If it's God who gives a new heart, if it's God who opens our eyes, if it's God who frees us to run to him, then it only makes sense that the needy sinner would run to God and plead that.

Again, let me give you another quote by Ezekiel Hopkins, where he argues that no sinner should give themselves rest or give God any rest until God has answered the cry for mercy. And this is what he says, be instant with God.

Now, we had to look that word up because instant makes me think of, you know, a microwave, you know, instant food. All right, so the old use of the word instant means to be at hand, to be right there.

Be persistently face to face with God in the presence of God, he says, by prayer, in order that God would buy his omnipotent grace, his all powerful, undeserved love, that God would newly create you to himself, that God would give you the new birth.

Henry Schugel in his little book, The Life of God and the Soul of Man, ends his first chapter by giving people a prayer. Now, this is some old timey language, but I'll try to read it clearly. Listen closely.

This is what he suggests we cry out to the Lord as we're reading that book. Oh, that the holy life of the blessed Jesus may be always in my thoughts and before my eyes till I receive a deep sense and impression of those excellent graces that shine so eminently in him.

And let me never cease my endeavors till that new and divine nature prevail in my soul and Christ be formed within me. Now, perhaps the healthiest example of a prayer that might be recommended to one who is seeking God is a prayer that George Whitfield wrote, a prayer for one seeking the new birth, he says.

Now, we can put this in the show notes, but we're just going to, for the sake of time, let me just summarize the prayer. Whitfield opens the prayer with the acknowledgement that the individual does not have what it takes to enter God's kingdom by their own effort.

All right, I just can't make myself God's subject. I cannot migrate from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light by willpower and religion or anything. So that's where the prayer starts, confessing that to God.

The individual is directed to pray for the very things that sin has stolen from us. An internal holiness, God, make me clean within, not just outwardly. A circumcised heart, give me a heart that is responsive and soft, not the hard rock that it's become.

Spiritual sight, God, help me to understand what I'm reading. And then alertness, make me responsive in the whole of my person. Whitfield then directs them to confess the complete spiritual ruin that sin has brought and the danger of our soul, and this ought to move them to seek the Lord.

And so Whitfield writes in this prayer, suffer me no longer to sit in darkness, God, and the shadow of death, oh, prick me, prick me to the heart, strike me down to the ground with that all-quickening light, that all-awakening, reviving light, and make me cry out with a trembling jailer, what shall I do to be saved?

Well, what follows in the prayer next is Whitfield leads the prayer to confess the proud self-deceit in which they've been living, to say to God, well, I thought I was spiritually rich and I didn't know that I really needed a great physician of the soul, and that explains why it's just now that I'm crying out to you in this way.

Then the sinner, convinced by God of his moral poverty, is led to agree with God that God does not owe him any mercy, but because of God's past mercies to sinners that gives this sinner in this prayer hope that God might lead him to repentance or her to repentance by his kindness.

And then he closes his arguments with God in this prayer. You notice, I mean, this is very different than a sinner's prayer where you say, Jesus, I'm a sinner and I don't want to go to hell, and I want to go to heaven and be one of your children, so I'm asking you to forgive me and move into my heart.

This prayer is loaded with kind of theological argument.

And also, just again, if you want to read this prayer in its complete, we'll have a link to that in the show notes in the description of the episode.

Regeneration, Evangelism, and the Glory of God

Yeah, so he ends his argument that God would receive greater glory and praise from his life if God would save him from himself and transform him into that image of Christ by regeneration. So, God, you'll receive glory if you judge me.

That's true. But you would receive so much more glory if you would birth me again, if you would bring me to life spiritually and make me a citizen in your kingdom and show your greatness through your kindness.

Well, in these episodes, looking at the doctrine of regeneration, how God must do that, how we are completely reliant upon God to do that, and then how we're to bring that to play in our evangelism, we've been looking at using the proper means of grace, looking, even though we direct people to use the Scriptures and to cry out to God in prayer, we're pointing them not to those means themselves as the hope.

You know, if you do the Bible correctly, if you do prayer correctly, then it will accomplish the work. But these are just ways that God has given us to reach out to him. So we're using these tools, but our hope is not in the tool.

It's in the God that has given us these tools. And we're seeking a gift of purest grace from God who has demonstrated 10 ,000 times, 10 ,000 times that he delights to give this gift to the needy sinner.

And ultimately, you know, ending all their advice to the unbeliever in seeking God and the work of regeneration, ultimately giving them the greatest argument, and that is that God would be most glorified in conquering his enemy with the gospel rather than sending his enemy to hell, even though that's what we deserve.

Regeneration in Evangelism and Parenting

Now, when we look at all that we've talked about, this is not the stuff that we give to a person when we're evangelizing them. We don't say, well, before I tell you about the cross of Jesus and before I tell you what hope there is in him, let me explain to you all the aspects of regeneration and why you're not really able to hope in Jesus.

Let me give you the eight steps.

Right, and so actually that's the exact opposite of what we want to do. The things we've been talking about are what the Christian needs to understand as we're explaining the gospel to them. My job is to explain the gospel, and as I'm explaining the gospel, I am pleading with God, God, you open their eyes.

You show them their sin, not just the outward sin, but the inward sin. Show them the sin of their religion. God, show them the sin of unbelief that they thought was just kind of a, you know, a shortcoming.

You know, like, well, I have this character flaw. I find it hard to believe God. And then God, show them Christ. So, you know, it's for us as we're witnessing that we want to understand these things. But it is so helpful for church leaders, for Sunday school class teachers, for a witness at work, and for parents with children to be able to understand these are, this is generally how God deals with the soul to bring us from just utter indifference to crying out to him.

You know, please, God, you are my only hope. Save me. And so, and actually we want to talk about this in the next episode. How can a parent take some of these things and apply them evangelistically in the life of their children?

Because, you know, there's a lot of things that come to our mind and say, well, how does this work when it comes to a child? You know, does it work? Well, of course, same basic principles. But how do we apply that on a child's level?

One last word of advice would be that if you want to look at a resource that really kind of sums all of this up in a better way than we've been able to, look at Joseph Alain's little book, A Sure Guide to Heaven.

Banner publishes it as part of their Puritan paperback series. And really what you're seeing when you're reading that book as a Christian, you're looking at how he has taken all this stuff we've said about the Puritan understanding of the biblical doctrine of regeneration and man's need for that, and he is applying that in evangelism through the entire book.

So read through that and really wrestle with not just what he's saying, but why does he say it like this? Why in this order? And that'll probably be the most significant help in understanding how the Puritans felt that the doctrine of regeneration affected evangelism.

American Gospel and Calling Out False Teachers

There is an ideology today that uses the name gospel, but has none of the good news in it. And yet many of its ideas and doctrines are finding their way into more and more churches across America. That is why we believe the film American Gospel, Christ Alone, is an important film for every church, family, and Christian in America to view.

The Bible is explicit. False teachers must be called out by name. I mean, Paul called out Peter, you know, the top dog. He called him out when he was acting in such a way that was out of line with the gospel.

We are exporting the very worst of what Christianity has to offer.

I'm strong. I'm healthy. I'm blessed. I'm favored. I am a victor, not a victim. I'm going to live a long, productive, faith-filled life.

In terms of biblical Christianity, Christianity is about dying.

To learn more about American Gospel, Christ Alone, visit Mediagratia .org or click the link in the description below. As we like to end every episode with a prayer, let me read one this week from A Guide to Family Worship.

This is by Robert Hawker. By faith to possess in anticipation the joys of your redeemed, until I come through you and in you to the everlasting enjoyment of them in your kingdom of glory.