Puritans and Revival VIII: Defining Regeneration

Welcome to the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Teddy James, content producer for Media Grazie, with Dr. John Snyder, pastor of Christ Church New Albany and host of the

Behold Your God study series. In the last several weeks, we've been looking at the 17th century

Puritans and their influence on the 18th century revivals, and particularly in these studies and what we've found in looking at these,

John, is the importance and the centrality of the doctrine of regeneration. Yeah, when you look at the

Puritan movement, and then again, you know, 50 years later at the Great Awakening or the Evangelical Revival in the

UK, a central doctrine of both movements was the doctrine of regeneration. What is it to be born again?

What is it to be brought into the kingdom of God through this radical transformation that God is responsible for?

Understanding that is pretty critical. Other doctrines like the deity of Christ, or even justification by faith, due to, you know, in large measure to the

Reformation. Those things were pretty settled, but the doctrine of regeneration, particularly in the Church of England, which accounted for about 94 % of the people in Whitefield's day in England and Wales, their doctrine of regeneration was pretty poor.

And so, due to the experience of these young leaders of the Revival, where they themselves were amazed to find that they still needed to be born again, even though they were baptized children and members of a church.

Due to that, and also due to, you know, the importance of the doctrine in Scripture and in the writers, the

Puritans, that they were reading, they gave a lot of time to it. One example of this has been pointed out by historians that George Whitefield, in his journals, which were later published, from 1734 to 1744, so this is the first ten years of his

Christian life, he mentions the doctrine of regeneration 46 times in those years, but he only mentions the doctrine of justification by faith eight times.

Now, one thing that, one way that's been read is some of those who were on the

Wesleyan side of theology, and anti -Whitefield, looked at Whitefield, and as later on as historians and biographers, and said,

John Wesley understood justification by faith, but George Whitefield didn't, and that's why he never mentions it.

And in truth, Whitefield did, but Whitefield admitted in his journals that it was later on that the significance of that doctrine was made more clear to him.

And certainly, we would have to be honest and say it was the doctrine of the new birth that was central and all -consuming in Whitefield's earliest years of preaching.

Shockingly, though, not everybody in his day is happy to find the doctrine of regeneration, especially as it was understood by the

Puritans, to find that that had, you know, found a resurgence, that it was now in vogue again.

Many people in the Church of England were offended at that, and we'll talk about those reasons in a minute. One expression of that, one of the most obvious ones, was the number of pamphlets and booklets and other ways that the people expressed their disagreement with Whitefield and these other men.

And I have a book here, big old fat book, and I have actually read this book. It's called Whitefield in Print.

Now, it is really not a devotional book. In fact, I know the author.

The author is actually Richard Owen Roberts. This is one of his more academic works. But nobody, he said that he read it and his wife read it, but he didn't know anybody else read it, because actually this book is just a large bibliography, okay?

There are over 8 ,000 entries in which Richard Owen Roberts has given us every book written by Whitefield or by Whitefield's co -workers or by Whitefield's opponents in the 18th century and later, and so we have 8 ,000 plus volumes.

I have read this entire thing for my PhD and marked every book that I thought was significant for the research, and then he gives what libraries in the world you can find these books in, and so it's really helpful for a student.

In this, though, you find all these books written against Whitefield, and the primary attack against Whitefield was on his doctrine of regeneration.

One of the most heinous, one of the most shocking was a very popular play at the theaters in London called

The Miner, M -I -N -O -R, and in this, they have this satirical mocking of Whitefield, and he's called

Dr. Squintum, because due to a childhood illness, he always had a lazy eye, a squint in one of his eyes.

You can see this in some of the pictures that have been reproduced of him drawn. And so there he is.

He's preaching to a crowd, and in the play, they have

Whitefield being a really immoral young man, and all these young women that come hear him, you know, they kind of disappear, and they come back, and she's pregnant, and they said, well, that's the new birth, you know, so that's how they mocked his preaching.

New birth was nothing more than immoral people, you know, and getting all excited young people getting together for these sermons.

Now, I didn't know anything about that until talking with you and preparing for this podcast, but one thing that came to my mind when you were sharing this with me is there's really nothing new under the sun.

Today, we still see this. When somebody, we see it in families, and we see it in churches.

When there's a person or a small group of people who are very serious about holiness and pursuing holiness, they get mocked.

They get attacked, and how are we supposed to respond to that kind of thing? Well, the scripture gives us the clearest pattern, and it's

Christ, you know. First Peter talks about Christ kept entrusting himself to the one who judges righteously, his father, and did not respond in the way that the world respond, you know, did not respond in kind.

But we do have many encouraging examples from history, and I think this is one of them. Whitefield and those guys oftentimes were physically assaulted as they were preaching.

There are many accounts where the Anglican minister of a town, offended by Whitefield's criticism of his own denomination, would pay for a couple of kegs of ale to be opened up and got a group of guys drunk, and then the guys would kind of cause a little riot, a protest, and sometimes they would throw, you know, bricks and sometimes dead cats at the preacher while he's preaching outside.

And there is a guy named Seward was actually killed in Wales preaching with George Whitefield, a young man,

William Seward. He was the first martyr of the movement. Not many times did that happen, but Hal Harris was hit in the head with a brick, and a lot of times, a lot of historians attribute some of the some of the bad decisions he made after that as part of a mental breakdown, really.

So, what's encouraging about it is, even though they could have used the law to prosecute that local minister, rarely did they do that.

They just continued to live the Christian life in light of the mistreatment, to preach the gospel, to love their enemies, and that's how, generally, that's how they won over those that had once been rioters.

Whitefield has an account of one man that came to one of these big meetings. So, there would be 5 ,000, 10 ,000, 15 ,000 people there at times, and he came with a gun hidden, a rifle hidden.

It wouldn't have been a rifle then, but, you know. So, he comes with a gun hidden, and he goes to shoot it, and he pulls the trigger, and it won't fire.

It, you know, malfunctions, and later he was converted. So, there were rare occasions that the local law, the sheriffs, and people were causing these riots, and they felt that for the safety of their listeners, they needed to take it to court and say, you can't do that.

But it's rare, you know. I mean, I don't know what the proportion would be, but if it was one out of ten,

I would be shocked if it were that high. Most of the times, they just decided to suffer for the sake of Christ, and I think that, you know, we're filming this in a time of COVID and our government trying to make decisions.

How far do we ask people to restrain themselves? How much is it just a governmental request, and when is it, you know, law?

And we're finding so many responses by those who claim to be Christians, and many of them,

I think, are not responses that reflect Christ. Some of them are proud, and some of them want to claim their rights, you know, and take it to court immediately, and I think that the 18th century men give us a good pattern there.

So not everybody reacted this wickedly, but a lot of people were offended.

One of the reasons they were offended is because Whitfield and those men were saying, our church, we're Anglicans, our church has it wrong.

And so that, of course, that offends a lot of people in the country when 96 % of the people are in that denomination.

But also, especially in America, but also Whitfield and in the UK, there was a lot of criticism of the clergy.

Our pastors don't preach this, maybe because our pastors don't understand this, because our pastors are spiritually blind.

They're not born again. How else could you preach against this? You've got to be born again to really understand this doctrine.

And so they said, so obviously they're not born again, and there was a lot of criticism. And sometimes, in the

American College in particular, Tenet and others kind of dialed it back a little, sometimes these 20 -year -olds, you know, railed against ministers who weren't really ready to support the revival, and they just assumed, well, it's because you're not born again.

And years later, they looked back and said, I was probably too quick to be that critical.

Yeah, they were 20s. Sometimes the criticism was overstated, and so the culture reacted.

Yeah, but it's so helpful to hear that, because it reminds us these were human beings. Yeah, yeah, and you know, and then others linked this with the

Puritan teaching on regeneration, which had kind of fallen into disrepute after the

Puritans were moved out of power, and the parliament, you know, wasn't ruling the land anymore.

So one of the things they did was, because they connected it with Puritanism in their mind, they would say, well, we want nothing of it.

And they thought that it was kind of a hyper -grace approach to religion, like you don't have to, you know, sanctification and growth and changes, those aren't important.

All that's important is you just, oh, yeah, you just have to say, I got born again, and that's the end of it.

Well, that's certainly not what Whitfield and those guys taught, but that was feared. So it wasn't popular with everyone.

Now, I want us to look at two things before we end our podcast. Two fundamental themes, and we'll get to more of them next time, but two of the themes that were so critical to the teaching, their teaching on regeneration, and one is

God's sovereignty in this work, and the other is man's absolute need.

So for God's sovereignty, like the metaphor teaches, birth. It's not something that we contribute to.

We must believe the gospel. We must repent. We must, you know, we must persevere.

But we don't birth ourselves physically, and we don't birth ourselves spiritually.

Now, there is a great mystery there, you know, John chapter 3, Jesus teaches and says we see the effects of the wind, but we don't see the wind.

We don't know where the wind's coming from or where it will end up. All we, you know, we see the tree moving in the wind.

Regeneration is like that. We don't know. It's an invisible work of God. We don't know when

God will start it. We don't know who he'll work it in, but we do see the effects of it.

So that was one of the key themes in the Puritan era, and it was a key theme for the evangelical revivalists, and I think it's a very biblical theme, and one that we've neglected.

We tend to treat regeneration and conversion as if they're exactly the same thing. So faith and repentance are the same thing as the new birth, but in the

Bible, it's not. Regeneration is the work of God, where God initiates this great salvation by awakening us.

It's like God shaking us on the inside and saying, open your eyes, look at what

I'm saying, listen, feel the weight of these words, and suddenly the sermon matters.

Suddenly the words on the page carry weight. So we go from being spiritually dead to spiritually alive.

That is, we go from being insensitive and unresponsive, like a corpse in a coffin, to being alive in the sense that we are now responsive, and the first response of the awakened soul is repentance and faith, is what we call conversion.

It's almost like that first breath if you were underwater for a long time. Yeah, and so we come, our eyes are opened, our heart is made soft, you know, the old stony heart is taken away, a new heart is given, and the will is freed from the chains of that old nature, and a new nature, a renewal has occurred within, and with that new nature we are free to look and understand the gospel and embrace

Christ. So it is a work of the Lord. Because it's a work of the Lord, it's mysterious. Because it's a work of the

Lord, it's effective. When God does it, it really happens, and we see the effects of that.

But because it's a work of the Lord, it's not something that we could do. Let me give you a couple of statements from the 18th century guys.

The Welsh preacher Daniel Rowland said it this way, he compared the need of a man to be rescued by this divine initiative to Lot, Abraham's nephew

Lot in Sodom being rescued. He says this, Lot tarried in Sodom till the angel was obliged to use force to thrust him out as it were against his will.

And in truth, if God did not pluck us as brands out of the burning fire by his free grace and remove by his spirit the veil of darkness and ignorance from our minds, none of us can be saved.

John Berridge speaking about Ezekiel chapter 36 verse 26, where God says in the new covenant

I will take out their stony heart and give them a new heart. He says, you know, this foreshadows the work of Christ in the new covenant.

This is what he says, now God makes this wholly his own act. He does not say

I will take away the stony heart if you don't resist me, nor does he say I will earnestly persuade you to remove your stony heart, but he says absolutely

I, myself will take this away, making it wholly his own act.

Hence the event is certain for God by the sweet and powerful operations of his spirit effectually or effectively overcomes the resistance of our will.

So it's a work of God. Like birth is not something I did. I didn't birth myself.

I didn't contribute to that. I didn't have a conversation with my parents about when I wanted to be born, how

I wanted to be born, you know, what genetic makeup I wanted to have.

I was the recipient. So in the spiritual new birth, we are the recipients of what

God does. He initiates that. He awakens us. He makes us alive to him. Second thing, the necessity of this.

And that's linked with our view of the doctrine of original sin. Now, in the Church of England at this time, there was a view of original sin that kind of was creeping in and it was a bit liberal.

And the idea was this, OK, the heart has been affected by Adam's sin and the will has been affected, but the mind is not as affected.

You know, so man's kind of sick or sickly or puny. But if you can just give him the right information, then intellectually he can understand those things and he can make the right choices and he can kind of pull himself up by his own bootstraps, so to speak.

He can hear this information. And if you give it to him clearly enough and persuasively enough, he'll make the right decisions and he'll make himself born again.

Now, if you have a view that original sin has only kind of made us sick and not made us unresponsive, then your idea of what is required in regeneration is directly affected by that.

You don't need God to awaken, to make new. We don't need a new creation, a new birth.

You just need a little help. But Whitefield, like the Puritans and the men that Whitefield worked with, like the

Puritans, they believed that original sin had thoroughly ruined man within.

That the mind, that the desires, the heart, and that the will had all been brought under this terrible dominion of sin and had become unresponsive to God.

So without God intervening, there would be no response from me. The gospel would be preached, the Bible would be read, and I would remain unchanged.

So listen to some of the things that they said when they talked about the effect of original sin.

One of Whitefield's early co -workers, a man named John Sinek, who later became a Moravian missionary, this is what

Sinek said. If there had been no ruining of all when Adam sinned, then all need not be renewed.

And if we had not a bad and corrupt nature, a heart which is not good in the sight of God, then there would never need to be a new nature given.

You know, sometimes we think of, well, I know that I need help in the areas of my life where sin is pretty ugly, but what about the good areas?

Well, the Scripture teaches that because of original sin, that even our best efforts have some contamination in them.

And, you know, I think a long time ago when we were talking in a series of evangelism about the nature of man's need, you know, we talked about the fact that even those areas which look pretty good, like our religion, even those are affected by our sin, our selfishness.

I mean, really, religion is kind of all about me until Christ conquers me, you know, until Christ opens my eyes, until the

Spirit of God, you know, invades and awakens. And one illustration we've used in the past that I think is helpful is an illustration from my own life.

I was hiking through Scotland with a friend from back in college days and seminary days who had come to Scotland, to the

UK to meet me when we were in school. So he came and he had money enough to pay for our travel.

So I volunteered to be the tour guide if he would pay for the expenses because I didn't have any money.

So we go to Scotland and we're hiking through the highlands and we brought food because we were kind of roughing it.

We brought food and tent and everything in our back and we were going through the highlands and we had some tablets for water purification in case we needed it.

But we were high enough up in altitude that we felt pretty safe about drinking from the mountain streams.

So I remember one day we were hiking and it was like day three or four and we reached a stream and we were thirsting.

Our water bottles were empty. So we were filling up our water bottles and my friend was in better shape than I was and he had hiked on up the mountain higher.

And just as I filled up my water bottle and was about to take a drink, I heard him yell down, hey, John, do not drink that water.

And I thought, come on, man, I'm dying. It's clean enough for me. I looked at the water.

It looked like one of these pristine mountain streams. And he said, don't drink the water.

And he came hobbling down the mountain. He said, up above where you can see where he was standing.

He said, over the ridge, there's this big, bloated, dead sheep in the stream.

And it had died and fallen into the stream. And the water was all running over this nasty, bloated, dead thing that had been there for weeks.

It's a flavor additive in the water. So sheep flavor. And the stream, a hundred meters down, the stream looks perfectly clean, but the source is polluted.

So every drop of water has some of that contamination. And it's the way it is with our sinful nature.

I may be at church. I may be singing hymns. I may be reading a Bible story to my children at night because I think that's what good people do.

I may even be a preacher. But without a new birth, without a new creation within, a new nature, every good thing that I do partakes of that contamination of self, self -reliance, self -sufficiency, self -centeredness, self -righteousness.

So they understood that and they understood that the only cure for that would be a new birth.

Let me read you what John Barrett said, another co -worker of George Whitefield. He talks about the sweeping view of the destruction of our nature by sin.

He says this, all the faculties of the understanding are disordered. All the springs of affection or our desires are enfeebled.

The disorder growing worse continually and no help is at hand. The whole head, that is your understanding, your imagination, your memory, your reason, the whole heart, your affections, your conscience, your will, all of these are ruined.

Thomas Charles, a second generation Welsh preacher at the end of the century, writes this, there is a darkness in the understanding, an obstinacy in the will, a carnality and earthliness in the affections, a vanity in the mind.

The whole man is a slave to numerous lusts. John Barrett again wrote that one of the most noticeable impacts of sin in our nature is this inherent self -deceit.

He says this, the mind is darkness. The will is forwardness. The heart is at enmity with God.

And the conscience is treachery. And the deceitfulness of the heart consists in keeping us always exerting their influence upon us and yet we're not aware of them.

And he's talking about the influence of sin through these faculties. So, it raises a question.

All right, in the beginning we were made in the image of God. So, there was good there.

So, does it mean that we're no longer made in the image of God? Does it mean that we lost that at the fall? Yeah, I think the best way to understand that is that we're spiritual beings who are capable of all creation, physical creation.

We're the only beings created in a way that we can hold communion with God. So, we have a soul, an eternal soul.

We have a mind, heart, a will, an imagination, memory and conscience.

You know, all those things are unique to us. And that is still there but it is now under the dominion of a new horrible master, sin.

And it's, if we can think of it, it's the beauty of what was there has now been warped.

And we can see in the restoration of that as God works in his children, you know, there's a new nature and the restoration begins.

It's like Christ reconquers the soul in that treacherous enemy sin is being pushed, you know, holiness is spreading.

Christlikeness is spreading in the life through sanctification. And the rule of the enemy is being pushed back. And one day when we see

Christ face to face, the believer will be made completely restored. And the beauty of that image of God in us will shine with no dark spots, you know, no shadows.

So, we still have all those faculties. We still have a soul. We still have all those abilities within us.

But they are, until regeneration, they are under the tyranny of sin. And after regeneration, you know, there is that mixture where Christ has re -established his rule in my soul.

But we do still have those old leftovers of sin that we have to put to death daily. So, when we think of the thoroughness of sin's pollution, we need to match it by the thoroughness of regeneration.

As bad as things are, with sin ruling in every aspect of my soul, all the faculties affected by sin, you know, the conscience is now twisted by sin.

The memory, obviously, drifts towards sin. You know, the imagination, my understanding, my desires, my will.

But if you think about that, then you have an idea of how wonderful regeneration is.

Regeneration is such a wonderful gift from God that he freely gives us a renewed nature in which he will rule through grace and love and the truth.

And the rule of sin will be put down. One man, a Welsh preacher,

David Jones of the town of Llangyn in the 18th century, he talks about the thoroughness of a man being under sin's rule for 30 years, 40 years or 50 years.

But nothing, he says, but the almighty spirit of God can free a soul from under the power of this sin.

And the spirit, he says, puts forth such a power whereby he makes mountains to become plains.

He cuts through the very rocks of our heart. He conquers all the host of sins within us which are mustered up against him.

And in spite of all opposition, he converts a sinner. He says, this is the law of the spirit that the

Scripture speaks about in Romans 8. He opens the understanding. He inclines the will.

And he fills the affections with a divine love. Whitefield wrote in a sermon called

The Almost Christian, and he said this, some people place religion in being of this or that communion.

You know, I go to this church or that church. More people place it in morality. Most people place it in a series of spiritual duties.

That's what a Christian is. Or, you know, some model performances. Few, Whitefield said, very few understand and acknowledge that true

Christianity is a thorough inward change of our nature, a divine life placed within us, a living participation in the life of Christ, a soul united with God in that sense, you know, through Christ.

So, I think it's good to ask ourselves before we go on and talk about, well, how do you do evangelism or how do you, you know, what about, how does this affect the way we understand the

Christian life? It's good just to stop and say, do I think of Christianity as primarily a list of doctrines that I agree with?

Do I think of Christianity as primarily as a list of duties that I do religious things at certain times in the week?

Or maybe a code of morality. I don't, you know, which usually is made up of don'ts. I don't do those things.

Or do I understand that Christianity, you know, at its heart, the Christian life is a new birth created within us, a new creation, a new nature that so transforms us that from the inside out, you know, there is an ongoing work of God so that day by day

Christ is being formed. Who were the

Puritans? Is the reputation deserved? And is there anything they had that you and I might need?

Are you interested in knowing the Bible? Are you interested in knowing Christ? Do you want someone to attend to the care of your soul?

Then you're going to want to get to know the Puritans. To learn more about Puritan All of Life to the

Glory of God, visit mediagracie .org or click the link in the description below. Well, at the end of every episode for several weeks now, we've been ending on a prayer and that every one of those have been coming from a resource that Mediagracie put out a few weeks ago called

The Family Worship Guide compiled by Ryan Bush. Now, this wonderful, wonderful little book, it's called

Piercing Heaven, Prayers of the Puritans, edited by Robert Elmer.

This is a fantastic book that I use in my personal quiet time.

I have found it incredibly helpful and we highly recommend it. I'll put a link to it down below in the description of the episode.

But I wanted to read this one today. It's from Robert Hawker. Oh, precious Jesus, may

I be no longer unfruitful in your garden. Lord, do as you have said, dig around me and pour on me all the sweet influences of your

Holy Spirit, which, like the rain, the sun and the dew of heaven, may cause me to bring forth fruit to God.

And Lord, if you will listen to an unworthy creature like me plead for others, let the coming year bring the same blessings to all your redeemed, even to my unawakened relatives and to thousands who are still in darkness.