Revisiting Puritan: All of Life to the Glory of God | Behold Your God Podcast

The Purpose of Revisiting Puritan Teaching on Revival

Welcome to the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Teddy James, content producer for Media Gratia. This episode is part of a series in which we wanted to present to you some of the teachings from previous projects and studies Media Gratia has produced over the years.

If you've been through these studies before, then we pray that these episodes are just a simple reminder of truths that God has taught you previously. If you've never been through the studies, we want to let you know what they are and kind of what they're about.

In this week's episode, we present to you a study session from Puritan, All of Life to the Glory of God. In this session, Dr. John Snyder teaches the Puritan understanding of awakening and revival. We pray it's a blessing to you.

Why Revival Matters and Why the Puritans Are Worth Revisiting

When we talk about true revival in the church, we probably don't immediately think of the Puritans. But the Puritans do have a great deal to offer us in this area. Their understanding of the way that God works in human history laid the foundation for a biblical theology of revival that lasted two centuries.

And it is an understanding that we need to revisit. It helps to keep us from two errors. First, the error of thinking that revival is something that we can schedule and manufacture. But there is another error, the error of considering the theme of revival as something that no serious student of the Bible would ever really give time to.

Part of our problem is that we may not be familiar with the Puritan vocabulary on revival. The term revival was not popularly used in the 17th century. That came about in the next century, when the great awakenings occurred in America and in the United Kingdom.

The Puritans did use the metaphor of God reviving His church, following the example of passages like Psalm 85, 6, where the psalmist says, Will you not yourself revive us again, that your people may rejoice in you?

However, they did employ other descriptions, and these emphasized the different aspects of this divine work. They referred to it as an awakening, because many slumbering Christians were shaken from their sleep.

They described it as an outpouring of the Holy Spirit, emphasizing who was the source of this divine blessing. Another description was a season of grace, highlighting the fact that revival is not a constant state of existence for the church, but it comes and goes like the seasons.

Revival as a Gift of God and the Need for Prayer

The Puritan understanding of a true revival of religion was based on a number of biblical assumptions, so let's consider them now. First, revival is a grace, a gift given by God. Like all true religion in the soul, it begins with God's grace, and it must also be sustained by God's grace, by an ongoing work.

And without a consistent dependence in us upon God, that religion will begin to decline. And when that happens, God must restore it, or revive it, and sometimes by an extraordinary exertion of mercy. The late 18th century Welsh preacher Thomas Charles, who was a spiritual heir of the Puritans, wrote this, I am persuaded that unless we are favored with frequent revivals and a strong, powerful work of the Spirit of God, we shall in great degree degenerate and have only a name to live.

Religion will soon lose its vigor, and iniquity will of consequence abound. Second, as true revival is a gift from God, these seasons of unusual grace are at His disposal. He is free to give them how and when He sees fit.

The Puritans taught that revival should be sought, should be prayed for, but it can never be demanded, and never manufactured by man. Third, the individual Christian, or church, has a right to plead for the reviving work of God because of the unfulfilled promises of Scripture.

Puritan Theology of Revival and the Fulfilling of Scripture

Now one of the earliest Puritan theologies on revival was written by a Scotsman named Robert Fleming. In 1689, during a time of suffering and setback for the Scottish Puritans, he wrote this little book called The Fulfilling of Scripture.

Fleming draws the reader's attention in the book to many unfulfilled promises of God regarding the future vitality and purity and efficiency of the church. He explains that no matter how spiritually dark the present day is, the Christian has reason to plead that God would fulfill His promises even if by sending extraordinary seasons of grace to His church.

Thus, God would not only preserve her, but raise her once again to her former state of purity. Now, Fleming also gives a number of historical accounts of revivals that demonstrate his points. Finally, the Puritans understood revival to be essentially the same kind of work that God did in His church in ordinary times.

Thus, the same means were to be used, prayer and preaching. Revival was different only in the degree of its effectiveness. So, as prayer and the Word of God were central to the ordinary working of a church, so they were central to the extraordinary times of revival in the church.

In other words, revival came when God did His normal kind of work in the church, but He did it with an extraordinary degree of energy. People were saved in the same way as before, but numbers were greatly increased.

People were sanctified in the same way as before, but the growth was accelerated. This means that the Puritans never felt the need to add any new methods when they sought revival. They used the ordinary means of grace.

The difference was that they did so with an extraordinary earnestness. It might help if we had some examples from seasons of grace that occurred under Puritan ministries. I want to give you three. The first is from Wales.

Revival in Wales, Scotland, and Kidderminster

Wales was considered by the Puritans to be the dark corner of the land. The Welsh had been largely untaught, incapable, as the general population were, of understanding a Latin mass or an English sermon.

The Puritans wanted to remedy this, and in 1649, through Parliament, they passed the Act for the Propagation of the Gospel in Wales. This provided funds for faithful ministers who were able to preach in the Welsh language.

Now, among them was a Puritan named Walter Craddock, and Craddock reported back to Parliament regarding the extraordinary success he was seeing in Wales at that time. He described it as a time wherein God comes and fills His people with the glorious light of the Gospel.

He says,.

I have observed and seen in the mountains of Wales the most glorious work that I ever saw. The Gospel has run over the mountains like fire in the thatch. Another example of revival occurred in Scotland at the Kirk of Shotts in June of 1630.

During a week of special meetings, a number of famous ministers were gathered to preach in preparation for the celebration of the communion service on the following Sabbath. A young preacher named John Livingston was also invited to take part.

Now, God so blessed their services together that they decided to extend the meetings to the following Monday. Many of those attending spent Sunday night in prayer. On Monday morning, the preacher who had been assigned the task to preach was ill and could not fill the pulpit, and so young John Livingston was appointed to preach at the last moment.

He felt unfit to preach and asked for a moment to get away and meditate in the fields. He was really hoping to silently slip away from the meetings. But God convinced him that he should preach and he did so.

Now, the service was held outside in the field because of the numbers of people and under a sense of God's extraordinary presence, the crowd hung on Livingston's words and they refused to leave even when it began to storm.

It was estimated that 500 were truly converted in that one sermon. Our last example is taken from the town of Kidderminster in England where Richard Baxter was pastor. He ministered there for 14 years and the majority of the 4 ,000 people in this busy industrial town were really biblically ignorant and indifferent.

Drunkenness was rampant. Baxter threw himself into the task of pastoring these people, especially in his efforts to visit and catechize the families in the church. In fact, he visited all the 800 families in his church at least once a year, closely examining each person in the family.

At first it was the younger adults who were converted, but as God blessed his labors, many more were brought to Christ and Baxter was soon able to report an extraordinary spiritual harvest. Now initially the church building only held 1 ,000, but God added so many souls to the church over those 14 years that they had to build five extra galleries to accommodate the crowds.

Baxter reported that even the least educated in his church were able to intelligently discuss difficult theological topics and their prayers, he said, far surpassed those of most pastors he knew. It's interesting to read his comment on the changes that were visible in the town on Sundays.

In a city that once had very few in church, Baxter reported that you could now shoot a cannonball down any street in the town on Sunday morning and no one would be in danger of being injured because they were in church.

How to Seek Revival in Our Own Day

Now these are only a few examples of the seasons of grace that occurred under Puritan leadership, but we still have one more question. What practical applications would the Puritans have us to make of all of this?

One of the great lessons for us is that seeking God for such seasons of grace in our day is built on the same realities that it was in the Puritans' day. First, there must be a sense of need that grips us.

Now not just the ordinary awareness of our need as Christians, but the awareness that things have reached such a low point in the church that if God is to be honored, He must work in an extraordinary way.

Second, there must be an equal sense of hope. We must acquaint ourselves with the fullness of the biblical promises regarding God's intentions for His church in our present day. And seeing all that a church can be, seeing all that the church must be, we plead with God that He would do again what He has done in the past, that He would draw near to His people, that He, as a captain, would take the field of battle again, purify His church, spread His kingdom.

Third, what about the methods we use? Well, while we are pleading for God to do an extraordinary work in our day, we continue to faithfully use the ordinary tools that God has given us. We don't need to add new methods, but we need to use God's methods.

With an extraordinary sense of earnestness. And, like the psalmist, we are able to boldly ask God, Will you not yourself revive us again that your people may rejoice in you?