The gold standard

The second area of Puritan life we can learn much from is the quality of their spiritual experience, and that means their experience with God’s word.  J. I. Packer wrote: “In the Puritans’ communion with God, as Jesus Christ was central, so Holy Scripture was supreme.  Puritan meditation on Scripture was modeled on the Puritan sermon; in meditation the Puritan would seek to search and challenge his heart, stir his affections to hate sin and love righteousness and encourage himself with God’s promises, just as Puritan preachers would do from the pulpit.”  The Puritans had an unsurpassed reverence for the Bible, and they conscientiously tried to apply all that they read.  Many passages of Scripture, eminently so in the Psalms, describe the Christian’s love for and delight in God’s word.  Puritan literature echoes this emphasis and rings with a profound joy over God’s word. They found the disciplined self-examination required by that word to be a source of spiritual strength and joy.  Much of Christianity in our day has been so influenced by psychology that such self-examination is regarded as harmful introspection.  The Puritans were true to scripture and balanced in their approach to this.  At all costs, we must recapture the fervent love for God’s word that characterized the Puritans!  In this love, they are the gold standard.