Learn from the Puritans

I hope giving you a taste of the writings and sermons of the Puritans will stimulate a passion in you for what they have to teach us.  They combine unswerving fidelity to Scripture with profound depth of insight.  They are strongest in the very areas we are weakest.  In the last fifty years there has been a great revival of interest in the Puritans. I thank God continually for leading me to their priceless legacy—their great books!  J. I. Packer has written an excellent introduction to the Puritans, A Quest for Godliness: The Puritan Vision of the Christian Life.  Packer likens the Puritans to the giant redwoods of California.  In comparing them with modern Christians, Packer rightly contends that “affluence seems for the past generation to have been making dwarfs of us all.”  So, what made the Puritans what they were—spiritual giants?  Packer gets to the heart of the matter when he attributes their spiritual stature to a radical God-centeredness.  In all of life, in thought and deed, the Puritans lived for God’s glory.  In this, we have much to learn from them.  They had a supreme reverence for God and His word.  Packer wrote his tribute to the Puritans because their lives and teaching had been such an important influence in his own growth as a Christian.  He hoped that a new generation of believers would find the study of the Puritans exciting—yes, exciting!—as forty years of discovering wonderful treasures in their writings had been to him!