Puritans and Revival VI: Rethinking Regeneration | Behold Your God Podcast

Welcome to the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Teddy James, content producer for Media Grazie, joined by Dr. John Snyder, pastor of Christ Church New Albany and host of the Behold Your God series. John, over the last several weeks we have been going back to the Puritan and their influence on the revivals of the 18th century.

So where is it? Now I'll say this before we even get started. I've said this before in previous episodes and it continues to be true. When you have the man whose PhD is in the topic of what you're discussing, it's best to kind of get out of the way.

So that is absolutely my intention today. John, I may sprinkle in a few questions here and there, but really I just want to hand it over to you and kind of let you run with it. So what, where exactly are we going today?

Well, we're going to look at the Puritan teaching on the doctrine of regeneration in particular, and it's going to take us a number of weeks to look at this, because of the centrality of that doctrine to the Puritan movement and to what the British call the evangelical revival, or what we call the Great Awakening here.

But not only because of that, but because it is one of the great doctrines of the Christian faith. What God does within a man, a woman, a child, to make them His child. The transformation of our nature, you know, the opening of our eyes, the changing out of a cold, hard, stony heart, the giving of a soft, responsive heart, the freeing of the will, everything is new now, a new creation.

And that's such a radical and significant change, and getting that doctrine correct is so significant for not only for our own souls, but, you know, if we are parents and we have children that, you know, that we're concerned about, if we're believers and we have co-workers we're concerned about, church members that we're concerned about, we really need to start here.

After getting the doctrine of God correct, we want to get the doctrine of salvation correct. And when we're talking about the application of that doctrine, regeneration is central. Now, when we talk about the Puritans and we talk about the evangelical revival in the 18th century, or the Great Awakening, there are often a lot of misconceptions, and I hope that our time together can cure some of those.

One misconception is that revival is primarily made up of extraordinary events, you know, phenomena that are not normal in Christian life. So it is a season of extraordinary grace, but also that revival is fueled by constantly talking about revival, and that really isn't historically true.

The most significant revivals that we've seen have not been fueled by talking about revival, but by talking about the great realities, the doctrines of Christian life, particularly God and redemption, that become the fuel for that passion or fervor or dedication.

Let me give you an example. Here is a book that I read in college, which really I've looked at it on my shelf recently and thought, I need to read it again. It's a book by Leonard Ravenhill, very famous book on revival in the last century, called Why Revival Tarries.

Now, Ravenhill, I would say, is like a flamethrower, you know, and I wouldn't agree with every doctrine that Ravenhill teaches, but I think he certainly is a therapeutic help to us, especially when we kind of become settled in our theology and sluggish and maybe a bit presumptuous and proud, you know, and he comes and he lights a fire under you.

So his book is classic, and it's just what you would think. It's all about unction and preaching and prayer that really grasps eternity, and, you know, where are the Elijah's of God? And another chapter is called Wanted.

Prophets for a day of doom. Fire begets fire. The prodigal church. Give me children or I die, you know, so really pretty stirring type of themes. But the themes are generally about revival. Why are we so dead?

What we need to do to be stirred. A good book, but limited in its benefit. Let me compare that to the most famous revival preacher in the Western world, and that's George Whitefield, and here we have a two-volume set by Crossway of Whitefield sermons.

It's hard to find Whitefield sermons in a nice set, and Crossway did a good job with these. These books are very recent. Yeah, these are in the last few years they've republished these, so it's a real gem.

When I look at the topics of Whitefield sermons, they're radically different. Now let me just read some examples. First sermon in this book, The Seed of the Woman and the Seed of the Serpent from Genesis 3 verse 15.

Now that is a very theological sermon on what happened in the garden and why are these two seeds so significant for the Christian. Not what you would think of as a revival sermon, or what about this, Christ the best husband, or another sermon, the Lord our righteousness, or another, the righteousness of Christ and everlasting righteousness, or another, the temptation of Christ.

I just wouldn't think if I were going to hear a revivalist today that he would preach on the temptation of Christ, or this, Christ the only rest for the weary and the heavy laden, or again, marks of true conversion, or another sermon, what think you of Christ.

So you know we don't really have time to go through all of them, but what we see in in the evangelical revival on both sides of the ocean is that the great focus was given to the doctrines of salvation, and that those became the fuel for what we would call historically a word-oriented revival.

Word-Oriented Revival Versus Experience-Oriented Revival

Now before we go any further in looking at the doctrines of the Puritans and the revival men, let's talk about two different types of revivals. Mr. Roberts is the one that summarized it like this, and I find it very helpful.

There's word-oriented and experience-oriented. Now the word oriented is pretty important. We're not saying that experience-oriented revivals never use the Bible, and we're not saying word-oriented revivals don't have experiences.

We're talking about what is the great focal point of the revival. So in a word-oriented revival, it is the it is the preaching of the great doctrines of Scripture that tend to have the lion's share of the focus, and while there are extraordinary levels of the work of the Holy Spirit, you know, so the numbers of conversions and the depth of sanctification are beyond what we would consider normal, that's not the focus of the work.

The focus is the great doctrine or the teaching of the Bible. In a word-oriented movement, what we tend to find is that they last longer. So the Great Awakening, ten years, you know, depends on how you look at it.

The Second Great Awakening, well, Ian Murray points out that in some places between 30 and 40 years of really a season of extraordinary work. And because they last longer, the word-oriented tend to penetrate more deeply in the fabric of society.

So while both types of revivals are real works of the Lord, and both types produce real conversions, the one that lasts longer and is fueled by great doctrines, rather than by focusing on the experiences, because they last longer, they tend to get deep down into the fabric of a society.

So it's not just that a million people have been converted in a year, like happened in the UK in the 1904 -1905 revival, which was a very experience-oriented revival, but it's that the entire the culture has been shifted.

And we see that in the American scene. The Great Awakening fundamentally impacted our view of everything. It didn't make us a completely Christian nation, but the impact went deeply.

Yeah, well, and it's things that we're still feeling the ripples from even today. I mean, if you look at it, you know, if that was the splash event in the pond that is America, even as far removed from it as we are now, we still feel the impact of that.

It's still in our culture. Yeah, and you know, in a sense, we're kind of down to the fumes, you know, as you see our cultural decline, but we have been the beneficiaries of that. And so, I mean, let's just stop and say, if it's right for us to pray for an extraordinary season of God's mercy in our nation, then it's right for you to know what kind of revival you're praying for.

We can have another work of the Lord that lasts a year, like the 1904 revival or the 1858 -59 revival, and it'd be a real work of the Lord, and maybe a million people are converted, and that would certainly be a sweet gift from the Lord.

But we really need something that lasts longer and penetrates our society and turns things back in a way that the individual conversion of many people doesn't do. So, the word-oriented, and that was what Whitfield and those men were involved with, and the Puritans were a real guide to that.

Now, I mentioned that there's some misconceptions before we talk about the experience-oriented. One misconception we have about Puritans and revival is that the Puritans were stodgy, old academics who wrote enormous books and had gigantic brains, but they weren't really like radical young guys, because all the book covers have them as old men, you know, and so you see a picture of John Owen or Rutherford, and they're older men, you know, it doesn't show them in college.

So, you get that impression, and they're very brainy in their books, but actually the Puritan movement was a movement like many other Reformation movements, like the Reformation, like the Great Awakening, like the Evangelical Revival.

There was fundamentally a movement that was carried on by the conversion of many young men and women, but the leaders being men, many young men converted in college under godly professors, and in college, and right out of college, the impact of those young people's lives.

So, many of the great Puritans that we admire, it was in their 20s that they were in the grip of these truths. Certainly, that's true of the Great Awakening and the Evangelical Revival. George Whitefield converted at age 21, and probably the best-known preacher in the Western world by the time he's 25.

John Wesley being the old man out, because he was in his 30s, you know, he was considered the old guy. So, the Lord used the Puritans, but the Puritans are not just stodgy, brainy guys that are old. They were very radical, but they were radical in the most beneficial way.

Think about the difference between the word radical and extreme. Radical means dealing with roots, all right. So, when we say someone's radical, what we ought to mean by that word, if we're using the word carefully, we mean, okay, so it's radical.

Yeah, it's kind of, you know, shocking that the depth of the change, the extent of the change, pretty shocking, but a radical change is one that starts with a whole new root, you know, these root issues.

So, there are root changes that cause astonishing, you know, outward external changes, but it begins with roots. Extreme is a word that deals only with degree. So, if we say someone's extreme, man, we need an extreme Christianity.

Well, that's talking about outward changes of an extraordinary degree. Extreme, in my opinion, is often not helpful. So, we find extreme changes in church that are not starting with the roots, a rethinking of God, a rethinking of what the Bible says about salvation, the work of Christ, and so all you have maybe is a lot of external changes that maybe aren't rooted in good thinking.

What we want is radical. We want a lot of changes. We need changes, but we want them to be founded in a root level shift. The Puritans were helpful for these young revivalists because they dealt with the fundamental, the root doctrines, and these root doctrines helped their writings on these things, helped guide Whitefield and these other men as they preached, and helped guide the revival.

And in the resurgence of an emphasis on Reformed theology in our own nation, surely as we look at this in the last 20 years, there's been a lot of immaturity. I mean, I look at my own life and see areas where I made a lot of errors in early days of zeal.

And the Puritans can be just as helpful for us today. There's a balance there. There's a root level change that's more solid than just being.

Extreme. And there's a warmth among them. I have not read near the Puritans that you've read. In fact, my exposure to them was in the working on the Puritan project for Media Gratia. I never read any of the Puritans before coming here to the church, and then getting to kind of live among the works of these men over the last couple of years has been incredibly helpful.

But one of the things that I found the most surprising and the most encouraging to me is just how warm.

So many of their writings truly are. Yeah, yeah. So that's where that wonderful combination of head and heart, which we've been talking about when we talked about the nature of true Christian knowledge, you know, the union of the head and the heart, the heat and the light.

The Puritans really do give us a balance there. So while they are radical, there's head at the heart of it, you know. And while they are theological, there's warmth in there. So really a very beneficial group of writers for the 18th century guys and for us.

The Warmth and Balance of Puritan Theology

Now, we talked about word-oriented revivals. Now, what about the other type? Well, experience-oriented. And that is, it's a revival where fundamentally the revival spreads by giving kind of testimonials or accounts of what God is doing in other places or what God has done in you.

So the 1904 revival is a classic example, a real work of the Lord. Some of the theology on the edges of that revival got kind of fuzzy and not as careful as it should have been. But before we fault them, you know, we do need to realize it was an extraordinary work of the Lord.

And like all works of the Lord, it is placed in our hands. And so we can mishandle some of these things if we're not careful. So an extraordinary season of grace, a million converted, they estimate, in Britain in a year.

Wonderful changes in the lives of these people that are converted. But as it went from church to church, town to town, it tended to be groups of young people, college kids, not the ministers who had become liberal at the time and kind of didn't want anything to do with it.

But a lot of university students going from church to church, place to place, saying, this is what God did in our church. This is what God did in my college. This is what God did in me. And just stories of amazing conversions.

Now, those are wonderful. You know, and they're not unimportant, but they're not the fundamental fuel of the Christian life. You can't live your Christian life on the wonderful stories of what God has done in other people.

So they tend to be short-lived revivals when they're experience-oriented. And because of the the shorter period of time, they tend not to really change the fabric of the society while they do change churches.

So when we pray for a revival, we want to pray for a word oriented. And if we labor for a reviving of the church or restoring of Christianity in our land, we want to labor in a way that's wise. We want the great doctrines to be at the heart of it.

That's why the 18th century revivals are so significantly helpful. Because we have, through the Puritans, so much healthy doctrine. But as you mentioned, brought to us in a warm way. Now, let's, since we've been talking in the previous weeks about the right type of knowledge, and a biblical and experiential knowledge.

So it starts with Scripture, starts with the head. The head is informed. The heart is inflamed with these truths. The will, under the guidance of new thinking and new desiring, the will chooses to apply these great truths in the life.

So, you know, we have this wonderful balanced picture of the kind of knowledge that only the Holy Spirit really gives. That as the Christian is pouring over the Scriptures individually, or as churches do, as we're making room in the life for the application of these great truths, so they don't just stay up here as beautiful concepts.

The Spirit gives us the kind of knowledge that's wed to humility. The kind of knowledge that captivates us. The kind of knowledge that transforms us, and doesn't leave us with giant heads, but tiny arms and legs, you know.

So, the first doctrine we're going to look at that we mentioned is the doctrine of regeneration. And when we talk about the experiential side of the Christian life, what God does in us, what we actually experience, regeneration is like that is opening the gate.

And everything will follow on that. You can think of regeneration as being the planting of a seed, and the plant of holiness, and perseverance, and ultimately the glorified or completed Christian when we see Christ face-to-face.

It all is rooted all the way back in this work of regeneration. God giving a new birth, a new nature, a new creation within. We can think of regeneration as being kind of the fountainhead, where the old nature is, you know, in a sense is set aside, and a new nature is given.

And so, there's still the remnants of sin, yes. We're still able to think that way, and act that way at times. But now it's not natural in the sense that it doesn't feel right to live for myself anymore.

It feels like things are jarring on the inside when I choose self. Now, as a believer, the new nature, things feel right when I live for somebody other than myself. And from out of that new nature, you know, flows all of these changes in the soul, all of the changes in our lifestyle.

So, it's like God coming to a desert land. That's a picture of an unregenerate, unconverted, lost person. And God plunges his fist into this sandy desert land, and plunging his fist in there, he plants life there.

And suddenly, a fountain starts to flow in the middle of a desert, and it becomes an oasis. And the oasis spreads, and life spreads across what once was just a barren, spiritually barren place. So, regeneration is the beginning.

Getting that right is so helpful. You know, as we talked about before we started filming, Bunyan's book, The Pilgrim's Progress, shows examples of people that skip this doctrine, and they just go right on to living a Christian life.

You need to believe these things, and do these things. Well, believing and doing is certainly important, but no matter how fast you run on the course of a Christian life, you know, those doctrines, those moral duties, if you don't have the right starting line, you're illegitimate.

Bunyan pictures people getting on to the path that Christians are on, not by going through that narrow gate and conviction, and seeing the cross, and the burden falling off, the new birth, all of that, conversion, but by jumping over a wall.

So, they live in this town, you know, let's say, the town of Good Works, or whatever, and they think, I don't have to go all the way back there, and I don't have to be stripped of my self-confidence, and come like the bad people do.

I can just, I just agree with these doctrines that I hear, and I just start doing better. But, have you ever been born from above? If not, you will eventually demonstrate that by derailing, you know,.

By getting off the path. So, we don't want... As those characters do, they don't last long on the path of Christians.

Yeah, they don't last long. You know, we see them, and then later we see their demise. Now, it is so easy, I know we wouldn't say, well, you can skip regeneration, but it's so easy growing up in church, like you and I have, in churches that talked about the new birth a lot.

You got to be born again. It's easy to assume that you understand what the Bible says when it talks about that. So, let me give myself an example. My last year of seminary with master's degree, I needed one extra course.

I was shocked to find, you know, like in the last semester, so the administrator comes in and says, it was a lady, and she says, okay, if your names are on this list, you'll be graduating in May. This was like, you know, January.

I'm like, all right, I'm getting out of here, and she reads the list. My name's not on it, and I think, well, what, what? You know, so I go to her office and say, I'm supposed to be on that list. I'm supposed to be graduating, and she looks and she says, no, you're one class short.

Like, I can't... I'm supposed to go to Britain and work on a PhD in, you know, in August and September. We're traveling, and I can't stay an extra year in the United States for one class. What are my options?

And they said, well, we can make an exception for you. You can do what they call an independent study, if a professor will take you on. So, the theology professor was willing to do that. He let me choose anything in the area of the doctrine of soteriology, of salvation doctrines.

So, I thought, well, I know what I'll do. I'm gonna do repentance, because that is like the John the Baptist kind of doctrine. That's what America needs to hear. Then I heard Mr. Roberts preach during this time that I was trying to make up my mind about which topic I would do.

And Roberts was preaching to a conference full of preachers, and he said, the single most significant doctrine for the American evangelical churches to rethink, because we're getting it wrong, is the doctrine of the new birth.

And I thought, come on, that's a no-brainer. You got to be born again. You got to believe and repent, and then you'll be born again. So, when he said that, it bothered me, because I take what Mr. Roberts says pretty seriously.

So, I thought, well, I'll study the doctrine of regeneration. Well, what books are there on the doctrine of regeneration? So, I look, you know, in the library, and I find out that the Puritans wrote a bunch of books on regeneration.

Now, one of them is right here. One of them is, and this was my main one, this is a book by Stephen Sharnock, a young assistant to John Owen, I believe. Sharnock is a very readable Puritan. This is volume three of his works, By the Banner of Truth, really worth its weight in gold.

And the whole book, I believe, is on the doctrine of the new birth, all right? So, I picked this book up, and I have to read it and a couple of other books, and then write like a 20-page paper to get my credit.

I think this is going to be a cakewalk. What I found was that I did not know what the Bible said about the doctrine of regeneration, that in fact, I had a mistaken view of the doctrine of regeneration.

The only thing I had right was the statement, you must be born again. Well, that was right, but what that meant, and how God did that, and what does it look like when God does that, and how can you see those evidences, how can you judge those evidences, and how does that change the way we do evangelism, and how does that change the way we think of assurance of salvation, and what about sanctification, and how does this opening of the gate in the Christian journey, how does it affect everything that follows?

I had no idea, except bad ideas. And in reading Sharnock, it forced me to go back to the Scripture, and from Old Testament and New Testament. Old Testament, you know, shadows of the new covenant, and how it would include a new heart.

New Testament, clarity on the new birth. It really made me rethink things, and so that whole semester, I spent the entire semester being shocked at how wrong I was, and thrilled with what Sharnock was pointing.

He's very biblical. You know, every passage he would take me to, and he'd explain it, and I would think, how did I miss this? And it really began, for me, what I think is the most significant shift in my thinking since becoming a Christian.

The most significant shift was not the doctrine of election or predestination. I certainly had to go to the Scripture and rethink that. I was definitely against it in the early days of being a Christian, except I knew that all my heroes liked it.

You know, Spurgeon taught it, Whitfield taught it. I thought, man, I don't want to be lined up against these guys, but I can't follow them. I have to follow Christ. So, you know, it was the Scripture that led to that shift, but I want to be clear.

The doctrine of election, as wonderful as it is when we hold it in a biblical balance, the doctrine of predestination, as shocking as those things are, the practical changes that flowed from them were much smaller in my life than rethinking the doctrine of regeneration.

It changed everything about my view of the Christian life. It changed everything about my view of pastoring. And so, when we look at the 18th century, as well as the Puritans, we end up finding out that really it was at the heart of that revival.

And so, before we kind of draw our first episode to a close, I want to read a definition from George Whitfield in his most popular sermon. And when we're talking about Whitfield, that's pretty big. His most popular sermon ever published, it remained that way for 50 years, was the second sermon he preached after becoming a believer, and it's called On Regeneration.

And this is what he writes about the doctrine of regeneration in that sermon. He says, the doctrine of regeneration or the new birth in Christ Jesus, though one of the most fundamental doctrines of our holy religion, the very hinge on which the salvation of each of us turns, yet it is so seldom considered and so little experientially understood by the generality of professors, of professing Christians, of church members.

That were we to judge the truth of this doctrine by the experience of most people who call themselves Christians, we would be apt to imagine that they had never even as much as heard that there was such a thing as the new birth.

So, certainly a wonderful opportunity as Whitfield began to preach this biblical doctrine again, and we'll see how it transformed the people, and how the Puritan books guided their thinking.

The name Charles Spurgeon can evoke countless stories and quotes, but how much do you know about the man himself? In the feature-length documentary, Through the Eyes of Spurgeon, get to know the man many consider the best preacher of the.

19th century. My text should be, unto you therefore which believe he is precious, and I would trust the Lord to open my mouth in honor of his dear son. He seemed a great risk, a serious trial, but depending upon the power of the Holy Ghost, I would at least tell out the story of the cross, and not allow the people to go home without a word.

To learn more about Through the Eyes of.

Spurgeon, visit mediagrazie .org, or click the link in the description of this episode. Well, I hope that this episode has been as encouraging and uplifting to you as it has been to me, and don't let it just end with, okay, I've listened to a podcast, and now I'm waiting for the next week's podcast.

But in the meantime, pray. Pray for revival. Study the Scriptures. Spend time diving in to the depth of the riches of the beauty of the Scriptures to see God there, and to meet God there. That's what we hope that talking about these things really leads us to, that you don't just end on what's said here, but that it drives you to prayer, that it drives you to the Scriptures.

And speaking of prayer, this week's is from August Toplady. Almighty Father, source of every good and fountain of every blessing, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, in Him our God and Father give us the spirit of adoption and enable us to cry, Abba, Father.

Help us to come and pour our hearts before you with the same confidence and affection a child brings before an earthly parent. Enable us to repose ourselves on your love, to tell you all our desires and all our sorrows, and from the heart to thank you for all your goodness to us.