Puritans and Revival IX: God's Work in Regeneration | Behold Your God Podcast

Welcome to the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Teddy James, content producer for MediaGratia, with Dr. John Snyder, pastor of Christ Church New Albany and author of the Behold Your God study series. We're in the middle of a series where we're discussing the Puritan influence on the 18th century revival, evangelical revival, Great Awakening, and kind of a sub-series of the series is focusing on regeneration.

And John, where are we picking up today?

Well, Teddy, before we get started, I don't want to be rude. I've been drinking my espresso out of my New York Yankees cup, and I just think that Teddy should probably have his own cup right here, and that will help him feel better about the Atlanta Braves.

I appreciate that.

The Doctrine of Sin and the Need for Regeneration

Okay, so let's get to the important stuff. Last couple times when we talked, we looked at the fact that a person's doctrine of sin taken from Scripture will affect their view of regeneration. So if you have what Whitefield and the Puritans felt the Church of England had was an inadequate grasp of how deeply sin had affected humanity, that they weren't really being honest with the biblical descriptions, you know, they're treating them maybe as kind of merely metaphorical.

You're spiritually dead. Well, not obviously not really spiritually dead. You know, we're still able to reason through things and kind of make the right choices and put ourselves on a good track, and God's there to help us.

So if that's your view of the influence of sin in human nature, then your understanding of regeneration is going to be affected by that. Regeneration is just God kind of giving you a nudge, or maybe God responding to you.

I believed and repented of my own free will, so to speak, you know, or I pulled myself up by my own bootstraps, and God responded to me by making me alive.

And let me encourage you to go back and listen, because we spent probably two episodes really diving deep into that.

Yeah, so, but if you have what I believe really is a more honest biblical perspective on us, and I believe the Puritans did teach that, and later the evangelical revival leaders, then we realize that we really do need God to do something to us, okay?

I can't make myself spiritually alive, I can't birth myself, but God can. Now, we come to a practical dilemma, you know, an apparent problem. It's not a real problem, because the Bible answers this problem, but it is an apparent problem, and that is the apparent problem of a hyper-Calvinism, or maybe religious fatalism, where we say this, well, if I can't bring myself to life, and nobody really believes and repents until God awakens them, you know, and opens their eyes and softens their heart, then there's nothing for us to do but to wait on God.

So, this fatalistic kind of passive approach to religion, and it's really popular among those who misapply the doctrines of the Reformation. Or, if not a fatalism, then I think despair can creep in and say, well, you know, I want to be a Christian, but I can't make myself a Christian, therefore there's nothing for me to do, and you just kind of throw your hands up.

Now, we are very glad to see that in the 17th century, the Puritans, and in the 18th century, the evangelical revival leaders were about as far from that as can be, and still be biblical. While wanting to avoid the lies of Arminianism, they applied the doctrines of the Reformation in a balanced way, which was very aggressive and very experiential.

The Observable Pattern of God's Work in Regeneration

So we're going to look at that today. Now, the first thing that we want to look at is the Puritan understanding of how God has dealt with people, the observable pattern of God's work in regeneration. Now, there are some good things, and there are some bad things about this, and I think the good outweighs the bad, but I want to mention both, and we'll talk again a little bit later about this.

The good thing is that there is a wisdom that we get. If we can understand how God works, we can cooperate with the Spirit, and we can be co-workers with Him in the work of evangelism, and we talked a lot about that in our evangelism episodes.

But the bad thing is that we can become too rigid.

So, John, you've mentioned the observable pattern, and we're kind of introducing that, but before we kind of get into what the pattern is, I think it would be really helpful to ask the question, where do we find the observable pattern?

Yeah, where do you see a basic pattern of regeneration? Well, for the Puritans and the 18th century men, they started with the Scripture, or at least the Scripture was the foundation. Some of them kind of started with looking at how God dealt with them and moved to the Scripture.

The Scripture gives us this in the Gospels and in the book of Acts in particular, and so we see examples of how God saved individuals, whether it's the woman at the well or the Philippian jailer, whatever.

But also, the Scripture gives us biblical or doctrinal explanations about what we're seeing. So, we see God at work. God doesn't explain everything to us about this, but we see enough to understand some things, and then we have biblical, doctrinal explanations of what did you just see.

But another source other than the Bible was their own experience or human experience. So, their own experience of how God dealt with them when they were being brought to Christ, and also the many, many conversions they were watching and they were being a part of as an evangelist, and seeing how God had dealt with them.

Whitefield's Five Stages of Conviction and Faith

So, there is a basic observable pattern now. When we talk about a basic observable pattern, we have to leave a lot of room for different ways of describing that, since God doesn't save everybody exactly the same, and since we don't always see what God is doing in the same, to the same degree.

But the Puritans laid out a general pattern, and they had, there are some differences even in the Puritans. Isaac Ambrose, in a book on regeneration, talked about eight basic stages that he saw God working in a person to bring them from death to life.

But that was Isaac Ambrose. Other Puritans gave more than that, and other Puritans gave less than that. So, really, while they were agreed on the fundamental categories of what we're seeing God do, they might have differed on how precisely they wanted to define that.

When you come to the 18th century and you hit men like Daniel Rowland and Whitefield in particular, you find that almost always, invariably, the 18th century men take what the Puritans taught very well defined, well thought through, pages and pages, and they tended to kind of boil that down to the common man's level.

So, in each of the doctrines that we're going to be talking about in this series, regeneration just being the first, we're going to find that the 18th century tended to lean on the 17th century, but they also tended to simplify them.

And for that reason, I find the 18th century guys' writings really helpful as a pastor or as a dad or as a witness, because if I sit down with my children and say, well, actually, you know, Richard Sibbes had 10 stages, and you know, my kid's going to just, I'm going to lose him.

But Whitefield, when he talked about this, he cut it in half. He said, well, we could kind of combine some categories, and Whitefield talked about five. And we find this in his sermon, The Method of Grace, which is one of Whitefield's great sermons.

And so, I want us to walk through these and just kind of see what we're talking about when we talk about the observable pattern of God's work in regeneration. So, Whitefield lists five stages. Number one, a man must be made to feel and bewail his actual transgressions against God's law.

Well, that's pretty simple. God generally begins by opening our eyes to the fact that we have actually broken God's law, and that's where this whole thing starts, you know, a sense of our need. Second, a man must be convinced of the foundation of all of his sins.

Okay, so I see that I've done some wrong things. That's not enough, Whitefield said. Generally, what God does next is He shows you that it's actually worse than what you think. Down underneath those outward actions is a foundation, a root system, and that is the original corruption that has brought sin into the world.

In other words, your nature. Adam sinned, and from that point forward, every human has been born with a depraved nature, with a sinful nature.

Yeah, so it goes beyond just what you've done into what you are. Right. And I remember that distinct moment, even in my own journey of the Lord bringing me to Himself, of where, you know, I always thought, you know, I'm not the worst person in the world.

I've done some bad things, but it was that moment when God revealed, it's not about what you've done.

You have sinned, but you are a sinner. Yeah, and Robert Murray McShane, the Scottish preacher in the next century, the 19th century, pointed out that this really is a significant reality that the sinner has to grasp, because if he or she doesn't, there's always in the back of your mind the hope that if I can change the outward behavior, which I think, well, that's the problem, because that's my sin.

That's where I'm breaking God's law. I'm thinking wrong things, saying wrong things, wanting wrong things, doing wrong things. If you don't understand that the problem goes deeper than that, then you have this kind of this false dream, this fiction, that if I could only change those actions, then I would have changed my nature.

But actually, it's the exact opposite. God deals with our nature first, and then what flows out of that is a changed behavior. So, Whitefield said that oftentimes that's what God does next. Third, a person must be convinced of the sins that are entangled with even the best of their religious duties.

And again, really significant. We can think of the book of Hebrews, where the Bible points out that even the holy things in the temple, there had to be a sacrifice made for those, because even man's best efforts at worship are imperfect and have to be atoned for.

So, it's not just my bad things, but my very best things have to be washed in the blood of the Savior, have to be forgiven. You know, my best prayers have enough sin in them, the Puritan said, to damn me.

And it's true. Selfishness is mixed in with all of that. So, that was the third thing. Fourth, we must have a particular sense of the guilt of the sin of unbelief. Now, the reason that the Puritans in the 18th century men emphasized this, and I think it's genius that they did, is that we often treat unbelief as a sin that's in a special category of kind of, I can't help it.

So, it's almost like they used to say men tend to treat unbelief as a misfortune rather than a rebellion against God. So, God says these things about Himself, and I can't see Him, so I'm not sure it's true.

God says these things about His Son, and His death on the cross, and my need for that, and what the Holy Spirit will do in the life of a believer. And, you know, we see all these wonderful things that we say, but it just seems so good, it seems kind of hard to believe.

And since I can't believe, I'm kind of a victim of a spiritual disease, you know. I'm a victim of this inability to believe. Whereas the Bible always presents unbelief as a willful choice to call God a liar, and to believe everything else, to believe my feelings, to believe what people around me are saying.

So, in this process, Whitefield said, so God shows you that you're breaking His law, that your nature is what you are is wrong, that even your best religion is stained with sin, and you may think that unbelief is this kind of a spiritual disease that you're a victim of, but actually you are willfully choosing to call God a liar as you hold the gospel at arm's length.

Now, notice that all four of these deal with the emptying of a person, of all their supposed righteousness, before they are filled with the hope of Christ. And that's where the fifth one comes in. Whitefield says, then a person must lay hold of the all-sufficient righteousness of Jesus Christ.

So, having God opening the eyes to all these things, then God opens, He turns your face like a father turning the face of a child, and He has you look at the cross, and suddenly it all makes sense. And so, that's how Whitefield says, this is generally how we see God dealing with people, in bringing them from spiritual death to life.

Warnings Against Turning Description into Prescription

I think that, you know, the pattern can be abused, but there's a lot of wisdom there. So, let's stop and give a couple warnings. First, when we're talking about this observable pattern, we are not talking about things that an individual must do to kind of climb a ladder of righteousness, to reach a place where they say, okay, since I have, by my efforts, passed through these five stages, now I have the right to hope in Christ.

That would be a completely wrong view of this. We're not talking about what we do to make ourselves better so that God will let us embrace Christ. We're talking about what God does in a person to bring them to an end of themselves and to awaken them to the sufficiency of the gospel of Christ.

This is how Ian Murray says it. He says in the book, Revival and Revivalism, there's nothing a man must do before he comes to Christ, but there is a great deal God must do in a man before he is willing to come.

So, that's an important distinction. These men were not saying, these are things you have to do before you're allowed to believe. They would preach, believe now, repent now, but as a Christian, they understood unless God does these things in a person, they'll continue to reject the gospel.

Second thing that we want to be careful with is there is this misapplication that's possible, that once we realize, okay, there is an observable pattern that we see in the Bible and in our own experiences, but because the work of regeneration is a mystery, we don't see all of it all of the time.

In other words, some people's conversions, some people's new birth experience, they may not be able to see all five or all eight things occurring, and a misapplication of this would be to think that since I can't see all of them, I must necessarily not be a Christian.

So, let me give you two famous examples. One is the Puritan Richard Baxter, certainly a significant Puritan, wrote tons of books, 30 some volumes, well known as a pastor, extremely blessed in his labors in the city of Kitterminster.

Now, Baxter had some wrong views in the area of justification, but let me point out what he says in this area of regeneration. He said this. He agonized over his own conversion, and at the root, his anxiety was this.

He says, because I could not distinctly trace the workings of the Spirit upon my heart in that method which Mr. Bolton, Mr. Hooker, and Mr. Rogers and other divines prescribe. Well, that's old language, so let's put it in normal language.

Baxter says, I was bothered for a long time. I doubted I was even a Christian because I couldn't trace the exact steps that these three men he mentioned are just Puritans in his day, that these famous Puritan preachers mentioned.

Well, I didn't see.

Them. It's interesting that he uses the word prescribe as if they're saying this is what.

Should have happened. Right, rather than describe. This is what we generally see occur. Right, so that's a good way to put it. When you move from description, a general description, a general pattern, to prescription, this is what you have to have, then you've misapplied what the Puritans were trying to do.

Another example is Jonathan Edwards. Edwards was troubled because he found that his experience differed from a classic Puritan pattern, and so Edwards is looking at this pattern. He said, well, I didn't go through, you know, number two, and so for a long time he wrestled with the fact, was he a Christian or not, you know, that question, and he really was afraid that he was one of those self-deceiving people.

So, we have to be careful. When we try to understand God's dealing with people so as to help us to be careful evangelists, to know how to apply the gospel, we know that God must do these things in a person before they will embrace the gospel, but we are not to use that knowledge and make a rigid pattern, or worse, a ladder, construct a ladder for a person to climb.

Evangelism, Human Responsibility, and the Means of Grace

Now, let's look at another thing. How did they do evangelism in light of the fact of God's regenerating work? If God must do this before anyone will repent and believe, then, well, how does that affect evangelism?

You would think, well, does that kill it? Well, first of all, is it biblical? And the Puritans clearly believed it was. This is what one Puritan said, man must be constrained from above, and God alone can humble the sinner before he is willing to embrace the gospel, and we see that in the scriptures.

Let me give one example. Acts chapter 16 verse 14. Paul's preaching. Lydia comes and listens, and it says that as she was listening, the Lord opened her heart to respond to the things spoken by Paul. So, there's the outward word, the stuff Paul's saying, and then there's a spiritual inward voice, the voice of God, opening her ears, opening her heart to receive the things that Paul is saying.

So, that's true, but on the other hand, the Bible also emphasizes that just because God must do this, because sin has made us incapable of believing somebody above ourselves, of worshiping somebody above ourselves, just because it's made us incapable of embracing the gospel on our own, doesn't mean that we're no longer responsible to embrace the gospel.

So, in other words, the Reformed logic kind of goes like this, and I think it is biblical. Because of sin's terrible impact on you, you don't have any more. You don't have what it takes to make yourself alive to God and humble and receptive and trusting of someone above yourself.

Second, you cannot earn anyone else like God. You cannot earn God's work in you. You can't say, okay, well, I can't do this, but if I get really, really serious about religion, then I've earned this from God.

Well, you can't earn it. Third, the Bible has clearly explained to us who can give us this, God Himself. And so, fourth, the obvious outcome of all those facts is the sinner who wants to be saved from himself is then directed to run to God and plead with God that in the purest act of mercy, He would awaken them.

He would open their eyes and soften their hearts and free their will so that they might have everything they need to embrace the gospel. Now, I have to say as a pastor that sometimes we run into this situation where people will say, well, if I, because of sin, can't even believe and repent correctly, then what's the use of me reading my Bible or coming to church or trying?

And so, they kind of get stuck in this theological, philosophical quandary like, well, I need to figure this out first. I mean, so they want you to explain to them in a way that is above every objection the interplay between God's sovereignty and man's responsibility.

And, well, really, there's a lot of mystery there. And so, you know, I can't do that perfectly. But here's what I found that no sinner who is aware of their desperate need and is equally aware of God's willingness to give what they so desperately need to save them, no sinner sits around and argues theological niceties and philosophical quandaries.

It's like a starving man, not a man that's a little hungry and his belly's rumbling, but a starving man who has tried every other thing and he knows he's going to die, but he's run out of ideas of how to find food.

And he hears from someone that there's a man a little bit down the street in the city who always is glad to give starving men food if they'll come to him. That starving man, if he were just a little hungry, he might have a lot of arguments.

Well, what's he want from me? I'm not so sure that I don't know if I can trust a guy like that. I don't know if I trust your report of the guy. And I don't know if I'm that bad off. You know, I think there's still some other options.

And so, that's the person that sits around and argues with you. The man who's starving and he's tried every other thing and he's come to the end of his rope, he doesn't sit around. He doesn't have the luxury to get caught up in philosophical niceties and theological quandaries.

He just runs down the street and beats on the door until the man opens it. And he says, I don't know why. I have no idea why you would be this kind of man, but I've heard you're this kind of man and I'm a man that needs you.

And he finds what he needs. So, I don't think that even though there is a paradox here, how can God be the one that has to start this great rescue and yet man is commanded to believe and repent? That paradox, that apparent contradiction, I don't think that stops anybody from going to Christ who wants to go to Christ.

So, we have a hymn that we sing. It's in our hymn book. It's hymn 474. Let me read one verse because it talks about this. It starts off like this, Come you sinners poor and wretched, weak and wounded, sick and sore.

Jesus ready stands to save you, full of pity, joined with power. He is able, he is willing, doubt no more. And then it goes on to say this, let not conscience make you linger. You say, well, I don't know if I'm the right person.

Nor of fitness fondly dream. All the fitness he requireth is to feel your need of him. This he gives you, tis the Spirit's rising beam. That's his poetic way of saying, all you need to be is needy. And even the sense of need, God has put there.

And that was how the Puritan answered that quandary. You come to the gospel and you say, God, but how do I know that you'd be willing to save me? How do I know that you would be willing to open my eyes and stir my heart and free my will and to give me a new nature?

And well, actually, even that desperate longing and crying out to God demonstrates that God has already begun that wonderful work in us. So to kind of bring our podcast to a close, I want to give a number of examples from the 18th century men on how they took this understanding that God had to regenerate, but man was also responsible to believe and repent.

And there was no excuse that we could give to God that would suffice. So I want to give some examples of how they understood that. And the first comes from Daniel Rowland in a sermon called The Voice of the Turtle Dove.

This is what he says. He asked a question, if I am unable to convert myself, why should I be asked to open my heart to God when I cannot? And he goes on to answer this throughout the sermon. I'll have to summarize it.

His answer is that the acceptance of your absolute inability to fix yourself is a necessary step toward God, for only when a person feels that they are completely weak and poverty stricken will they turn to God.

And this is how he says it. He says, when I perceive my own extreme poverty and weakness, I will turn all God's demands into petitions. When God says, turn you, turn you, I will earnestly and eagerly cry out to God, turn me and I will be turned.

So that's just such a very practical thing. And we're going to talk a lot more about this in the next episode. But if you feel that what the Bible says about you is true, that you can't rescue yourself at all and you can't even seem to respond correctly to God, when the commands come to you, repent, believe, you take those commands and you run to the throne of God and throw them before God and say, help me believe, help me repent for your glory's sake, save me.

You know, one of the key truths there that we don't want to miss is that man's inability has not changed what God demands of us. Because sin has come and ruined us, it doesn't mean that God can adjust what we owe him.

Like, well, OK, well, if because of sin, you can't really believe, you don't really repent. Let me lower the bar some more, you know. It's like going to our banker and saying, I know that I bought the house and I have a mortgage with this bank, but you don't understand.

Last weekend, I went out and I was with some old friends and we were drinking a bit too much and driving home, I got in a terrible wreck and I'm crippled now and I've lost my job. I can't do what I used to do.

And so I'm going to have to be living off, you know, unemployment. And that's not enough to make the bills anymore. So since my ability to pay has changed, then your expectations should change as well.

And the bank, of course, would say to us, our expectations are based on the value of the house, not on how much money you're making right now. When God lays out before us what we owe him, his law, the command to believe and repent, it's based in God's character.

This is what we owe. The creature owes the creator. It's not based on how well the creature is doing right now. Well, before the fall, yeah, Adam could perfectly believe and trust you. But after the fall, well, you've got to lower your expectations, God.

But God doesn't. And that's where the gospel becomes good news. And another thing, you know, that comes into play here is that when the gospel is preached, going with the gospel, God sends forth an almighty power through his spirit.

That causes the word to be effective. Yeah. And we see that 1 Thessalonians 1, 4 and 5 says, For we know, brothers, loved by God, that he has chosen you because our gospel came to you not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction.

Right. So it's like when Christ says to the, you know, you might compare the paradox of a sovereign God and a responsible man and a sinful nature and all that. Compare it to Jesus's miracles. He comes up to a lame man and he doesn't say to the lame man, I just want you to trust me with all your heart and walk away.

He says to the lame man, get up and pick up your bed and walk. And the lame man could have cried out to him in frustration. But that's the one thing I can't do. I can trust you. I can love you. I can listen to your teaching.

I can believe it. But I'm a lame man. I can't follow you physically. I can't get up. But with the command from Christ comes a power that enables that man to be able to do exactly what Christ tells him to do, even though it's the very thing that he could never do on his own.

So with the preaching of the gospel, God will send out the Spirit and there will be, you know, such an enabling power, as Paul mentioned in 1 Thessalonians, that the sinner is able to do the very thing he would never do on his own.

I mean, consider Lazarus. I mean, Lazarus dead in the tomb and Christ gives the command, come out. There's no way that he could obey that command without God first working in him to do so.

Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing. Let me give a couple of examples from Whitefield. He's really the prince of preachers in this area. This is what he said in one sermon entitled The Gospel Supper. Perhaps you say you call the lame and the maimed and the blind and the poor, but we are lame and maimed.

How can we come? If we are blind, how can we see our way to you? If we are poor, how can you expect that we would gain admission to your great table? Ah, Whitefield says, happy are you if you are sensible that you really are lame and maimed.

For if you feel yourselves to be so and you are brokenhearted over it, who knows? But while I am preaching to you right now, God may send his spirit with the word and fetch you home. In another sermon called A Penitent Heart, The Best New Year's Gift, he challenged his readers.

In this way, he says, some of you may say you have no power, you have no strength, but then he presses them. But have you not been lacking in such things that are within your power? In other words, okay, but there's some things you could do that you're not even trying.

Have you not as much power to go hear a sermon as you have to go to a play or a ball or a masquerade? You have as much power to read the Bible as to read a novel, a romance, and you can associate as easily with godly people as with the wicked and the profane.

This is an idle excuse, my brethren, to go on in your sins. If you will be found in the means of grace, Christ has promised he will give you strength. And as a representative example of one of his evangelistic appeals, listen to what Whitefield says.

Do we constantly and conscientiously use all the means of grace required? Do we fast? Do we watch and pray? Do we not lazily but earnestly seek, laboriously, laboriously strive to enter at the straight gate?

If so, we are in the narrow way which leads to life. The good seed is sown in our hearts and will, if duly watered and nourished by a regular persevering use of all the means of grace, grow up to eternal life.

Means of Grace and the Next Step in the Series

So, great little snippets of the sermons. Next episode, we're going to spend time looking at exactly what they meant when they said, well, you can do some things,.

So make use of the means of grace. There are many ideas about God in our culture today. Many are not grounded in scripture and some are actually the opposite of what scripture teaches. The best way to identify these ideas is to go back to the Bible and allow God to speak for himself.

Learn how God describes his character, his work in salvation, his definition of repentance, and much more through the 12-week multimedia Bible study, Behold Your God, Rethinking God Biblically. The heart of this study is its daily devotional workbook participants study at home in preparation for the small group session.

Each session is led by a video containing three segments. First, a biographical sketch of an individual from Christian history who was gripped by the reality of God you were studying that week. Second is a sermon from Dr. John Snyder, pastor of Christ Church, New Albany.

Lastly, are interviews from contemporary Christian pastors and authors who help apply the lessons from the week. To learn more, to see what others are saying about Behold Your God, Rethinking God Biblically, visit mediagracie .org or click the link in the episode.

While we usually like to end an episode with a prayer, we thought it very fitting today to end the prayer with the last few verses of the hymn that John started in the middle of the episode. This is by a guy named Joseph Hart, who was a co-worker with George Whitefield, and he says this,.

Come ye weary, heavy laden, bruised and broken by the fall. If you tarry till you're better, you will never come at all. Not the righteous, sinners, Jesus came to call. View him prostrate in the garden, on the ground your maker lies.

Then on Calvary's tree behold him. Hear him cry before he dies,. It is finished. Sinner, will this not suffice? Lo, the incarnate God ascended, Pleads the merit of his blood. Venture on him, venture wholly.

Let no other trust intrude. None but Jesus can do helpless sinners good.