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.   

God's Word is Pure

I am continually impressed by how profoundly Thomas Manton, John Owen, and other Puritan teachers considered each verse of Scripture.  Reading them is like striking gold on every page.  They continually emphasized that the written word God is perfect, sufficient for the Christian’s every need.  Scripture reveals to us the holiness, excellence, and glory of God in such a way that every heart influenced by grace must love it.  The human heart seeing the divine glory mediated through the written word can respond in no other way.  To a person who is very hungry, food is good to them.  To someone with a terrible thirst, water is exactly what they want and require.  Even so, the word of God meets the needs of our souls as nothing else can.  God knows everything about us; the deepest and most tangled parts of our lives are not hidden from Him.  The Lord’s blessed word is so filled with divine encouragement that it draws our hearts to love it.  But we must also love God’s word for its holiness.  In Psalm 119:140 David says “Your word is very pure, therefore Your servant loves it.”  When a person would not want God’s law to be less strict than it is, when a person loves it because it is pure, strict, and holy, then you know that God has been doing a mighty work in that person’s heart.