"God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.” John 4:24

To the Puritans, worship was the most important thing you will ever do in your life. The Puritans understood worship as bowing down before God, and bringing him - in spirit and truth - the honor and glory that is due to him. With this foundation and definition of worship, the Puritans sought to conform all parts of worship to the Scriptures, asserting that God alone has the right to dictate how he wants to be worshiped.

The National Center for Family Integrated Churches welcomes Joel Beekie with the following message entitled, Puritan theology of worship. John 4.19, hear the Word of God as it comes to us this morning. The woman saith unto him, Sir, you remember this is the Samaritan woman and she comes and Jesus has this tremendous dialogue with her and then exposes that she's had five husbands, is now living with another man. Sir, I perceive that thou art a prophet. Our fathers worshipped in this mountain and you say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.

Jesus said unto her, woman believe me the hour cometh when you shall neither in this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem worship the Father. Ye worship, ye know not what? We know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews. But the hour cometh and now is when the true worshipers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth for the Father seeketh such to worship him God is a spirit and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. Let's pray.

Great God of heaven, holy and transcendent, kind and sovereign, tender and merciful, we beseech of thee, be with us in this hour. Help us to catch the biblical vision, the Puritan vision, in all its word-centredness for true, genuine, spiritual worship. And even as we talk about worship, may we worship, may we worship thee in spirit and truth. We pray in Jesus' name, amen. Well the year is 1413, 600 years ago.

We enter a large cathedral where the bishop is about to celebrate the Roman mass. Before us is a highly decorated altar. At the center of attention is a cross with an image of Christ dying in agony. The bishop is robed in ornate vestments marking him as a very special priest to God. He enters the chancel of the church, the holy place set apart by a screen so that the people can't draw near.

And aided by the intercession of Mary and the saints and the angels, this priest has been authorized by the Church to apply Christ-saving power through the Church's seven sacraments. At the center of this Romish sacramental system is the Mass, the ceremonial observance that is a degeneration of the Lord's Supper. The bishop performs the rituals of the mass by reciting prescribed prayers, bowing, kissing the altar, sprinkling holy water, making the sign of the cross. And at its climax, the bread and the wine are said to be changed in their essence, though not in their appearance. And the priest then offers them up to God as the very body and the very blood of Jesus Christ.

And though much scripture is woven into the mass, no one understands it because it's in Latin. You see, worship in medieval Europe was a feast for the senses, but a famine for the soul." Now leap forward with me. The year is 1643, 230 years later. We're going to a Puritan worship service in New England. As we approach the building, we notice right away that it is remarkably plain, empty of images and visible art, yet clean and orderly and attractive.

There's no altar in the center of the far side of the meeting house, but instead a very high pulpit for the preacher. A table is placed before it at communion seasons to hold the elements of the Lord's Supper. The minister opens the service with about a 15-minute prayer or so. He then reads a portion from the English King James Version Bible, offers a brief exposition of its meaning. The congregation then sings metrical versions of biblical Psalms from the Bay Psalm book, the first book printed in America in 1640.

No instruments are played though they have such instruments in there for their enjoyment at home. And then the minister prays briefly for the help of the Holy Spirit and he preaches a richly biblical doctrinal experiential and practical sermon. It lasts for about an hour. People take notes, most of them, as they listen. After the sermon, the minister prays again on behalf of the congregation, the church, worldwide missions, families, maybe for 30 to 40 minutes, praising God and exalting the Most High.

At times his prayer expresses considerable emotion. Throughout his prayer, his words and his thoughts are marinated in the Scriptures. And then the congregation sings more psalms. If they take the Lord's Supper, they do it with great simplicity. They aim at spiritual fellowship with a crucified and risen Christ.

Then they sing another psalm or two. And the service is concluded with a benediction. The service lasts two hours, maybe two and a quarter. The congregation goes home, eats lunch, comes back, or else eats at the church and has another two to two and a quarter hours, very similar in order, very similar in length. How in the world in 230 years Did medieval worship change into Puritan worship?

What a difference. The Puritans re-established the biblical basis for worship, engaged the common people to praise God so that they said that worship was the highlight of their week, the Sabbath, the market day of their soul, and they greatly amplified and simplified the service, making the Word of God central and pervasive, emphasizing spiritual and heartfelt devotion, as opposed to ritual and set forms. What explains this tremendous change? Well, I want to look in this address with you at four thoughts about the Puritan theology of worship. First, its foundational roots.

Second, its foundational definition. Third, its foundational principle. And fourth, its foundational sermon. Its roots, definition, principle, and sermon. Well the roots of Puritan worship go back of course to Martin Luther and the true spiritual Luther and the true spiritual worship that Luther taught means to bow down before God and worship in spirit and in truth.

Worship in the hands of Luther was transformed greatly from Roman Catholicism. He saw that worship was not to win man's favor or man's work, but rather man's trusting response to God's promises in the gospel in Christ Jesus. Luther brought the Bible back to the center of worship. He translated the service into the language of the people. He engaged the congregation in singing God's praises and he transformed the mass from an atoning sacrifice into a thankful reception of Christ's grace.

Luther, however, as we heard last talk, did not go as far as Calvin and the successors of Luther in the reformed branch of Protestantism. Luther's view was that as long as something was not forbidden in the New Testament, And it was for the good of the church, supposedly, you could go ahead and tolerate that in worship. And his view shaped the Church of England through men like Thomas Cranmer, author of the Book of Common Prayer, that shaped English worship for centuries. But Calvin came along a generation later and said, we are not to seek from men the doctrine of the true worship of God, for the Lord has faithfully instructed us in the New Testament Scriptures how to worship Him. And therefore, we may not bring into the worship service anything that is not expressly commanded in the New Testament Scriptures.

So Puritan worship is at its core reformed worship. Reform worship that is conducted strictly according to God's written word that says God has decided how to worship him and therefore we have no choice in the matter whatsoever. The founder of Puritanism, William Perkins, put it this way, the worship or service of God is when upon the right knowledge of God, we freely give him the honor that is proper to him in our hearts according to his own will worshiping as he would have us to do. So that's the historical root of the big change in Puritan worship from the 15th to the 17th centuries. Now, what really is the foundational definition of Puritan worship?

Well, let me say it this way. For the Puritans, worship was the most important thing you'll ever do in your life. Worship is what God designed us for in paradise. He put us there to worship Him, to glorify Him. And so all our worship is to glorify God.

But what kind of worship does God find acceptable and pleasing to Him? Well, worship that prostrates ourselves before God and declares that He is worthy and honors Him. Acceptable worship, therefore, is always mediated by Christ, because only in Christ can we commune with God. Christ is the temple, Christ is the priest, Christ is the sacrifice, Christ is the altar, the everything in our worship. That's what the Puritans said.

And acceptable worship is always grounded in the scripture because in the scripture we have Christ revealed to us. Without the Bible we try to worship what we do not know and we offer up what does not please the Lord. So anything that is not grounded in the Bible is not worship. And finally all our worship must be offered in spirit and truth. Sometimes our bodies are not asleep on the Lord's day, but our minds are.

That is unacceptable to the Puritan way of thinking. Actually, if someone fell asleep in a Puritan church, there was a deacon that would come by and he had a little weight on the end of a pole and he would reach over you and tap you on the back of your head to wake you up. Because you couldn't possibly miss any part of the message because this is the very voice of God speaking to you so long as the preacher is bringing you the Word of God. So when you take these elements together, I've developed this definition of Puritan worship, and I think it's good for worship today as well. And I'll repeat it twice because it's bringing in all these elements in one sentence, but I think you'll grasp it.

To worship God is to bow down before his majestic glory, and in spirit and in truth, to bring him in and through Jesus Christ, and according to the Scriptures, the honor and praise which belong exclusively to him. That's worship, said the Puritans. Anything else is not worship. Let me repeat it. To worship God, you notice seven or eight elements brought together here.

To worship God is to bow down before his majestic glory and in spirit and in truth to bring Him in and through Jesus Christ, and according to the Scriptures, the honor and praise that belong exclusively to Him. Now you see, for the Puritans, worship then involves humbling myself before God, letting God be God, exalting Him, abasing myself at His footstool, and esteeming Him to be everything for my soul. So in worship I come as a sinner worthy of damnation, but I come in Christ, and so I'm an adopted Son of God according to His great mercy. And that means for a Puritan, worship is never just a matter of the mind. It is a matter of the mind, but it's also a matter of the conscience, the will, the affections, the whole man, the entire soul.

That's why they spoke so very much about worshiping God experientially. That is, your whole being is involved. It's a true experience of worship. Not in a Pentecostal sense, in which you leave the Scriptures often behind and you just have sheer emotion. But rather, it is a genuine mind, heart, conscience, transforming experience under the Word of God.

And so that is really the definition of Puritan worship. A definition that finds its foundation in the regulative principle of worship that we heard about so ably put last hour. And so I said already to Sam Waldron, he saved me a lot of time in this hour, so I can get to some of the stuff I really want to get to. But let me just say this. In the Westminster Confession that we heard last hour, of course, the men who drafted that were Puritans.

Basically they were fighting against all other kinds of principles of worship. Those same wars are going on today. Basically today we can say four things. There are four prescriptions that people go by when it comes to worship or four principles rather. The first is for some people worship is all about the past.

What we've always done is what we should always do. We want to worship the way we always have had it. Second, some people want to worship by preference. Preference. They say, I want to do what I want to do.

This is what I like. They write letters to the minister. I like to see this in worship. Why don't you do that in worship? And they just bring in innovative things to try things different because they like to do it.

Worship is all about them and their will. Third, some people have as their governing principle of worship pragmatism. If it works, if it's attractive, if it draws in more people, if it's popular, do it. They don't stop to think that whatever you do to draw people in, you've got to keep doing to keep them in. Pragmatism is the rule of the day in such cases.

And fourth, Other people use the principle of prohibition. That's the principle that says we can do whatever we like unless God has forbidden it. That's the Lutheran position we just mentioned. If God doesn't expressly forbid it, then it's okay to do. Well, against that, the Puritans do not worship by past or by pragmatism or by preference or by prohibition but by prescription.

The word of God alone is our regulative principle. And in that regulative principle, that's already been expounded for you so I won't go further there, but in that regulative principle, biblical worship is a three-fold dimension according to New Testament scriptures. First, there's the word, the word read and the word preached. So those are your two sub points under the first. Second, the sacraments, baptism and the Lord's Supper, two sub points.

And third, prayer, prayer spoken and prayer sung. So in Puritan way of thinking, this is worship. Word read and preached, sacraments, baptism of the Lord's Supper, prayer spoken and sung. And this regulative principle they found everywhere throughout the Scriptures. Deuteronomy 12, what things soever I command you observe to do it, thou shalt not add thereto, nor diminish from it.

Numbers 15, Ezekiel 20, warn us in our worship that we must not follow our own hearts or the ways of our Father. Jesus, Matthew 15 verse 9, in vain do men worship Me, teaching for doctrines and commandments of men. Romans 12, 12, reasonable worship requires knowing God's will. But what's at the bottom? What's at the bottom of this regulative principle is a profound sense of the holiness of God.

Puritans were fond of pointing to the Lord's killing two of Aaron's sons for offering him incense in a way he had not authorized. You know the story from Leviticus 10. We read in verse 3, among those who are near me, I will be sanctified and before all the people I will be glorified, God says. You see what happens is that Hophni and Phinehas just offered the Lord worship in a little bit different way than the Lord had commanded, and the Lord kills them for it. The Puritans are saying, we today, now in the New Testament age, must worship precisely in the way God has outlined in his holy word.

And so the regulative principle is grounded in the holiness of God, which means it produces reverence for God and simplicity in worship. Its whole focus is upon God in the face of Jesus Christ instead of ceremonies and physical objects. One Puritan, Stephen Sharnock, and all the Puritans I'll be quoting for the rest of this hour are all Puritan quotations. Sharnock said there's no need of a candle when the sun spreads its beams in the air. No need of those ceremonies when the sun of righteousness has appeared.

And so the Puritans said before us, just a beautiful map in the roots of worship, in the definition of worship, and the principle of worship, but their apex, the foundational element in their worship is the sermon, preaching. And I want to spend the rest of my time with you talking about their theology of preaching. This is so incredibly important. We could talk about their theology of song as well, but I did that in a sectional just moments ago. There are other aspects of worship we could talk on and we could skate over the surface, but I think the main thing the Puritans bring to us is this love, this passion, this integrity of preaching.

Preaching today has fallen on a hard time, so I couldn't better use our time than just setting before you their theology of preaching. For the Puritans, preaching is transforming. Puritan preachers lift up our gaze to the greatness and gladness of God. They open our eyes to the beauty and to the loveliness of Jesus Christ. They prick our consciences with the subtlety and sinfulness of sin.

They ravish and delight our souls with the power and glory of grace. They plumb the depth of the soul with profound biblical and practical and psychological insight. And they strengthen and sustain the soul through suffering by expounding the doctrine of the sovereignty of God. And more than anything else, they set our sights and focus our affections on eternal realities in worshiping the triune God. I want to look at five thoughts with you related to the Puritan program for preaching, the Puritan theology of preaching.

We're first going to look at its primacy, then its program, then its passion, then its power, and finally its plainness. Primacy, program, passion, power, plainness. Primacy of preaching. For the Puritan to preach is to be in the Bible. One of the contemporary Puritan listeners said, hearing a Puritan preach is like being inside the Bible.

One of the Puritans, John Preston, defined preaching this way, a public interpretation or dividing of the word performed by an ambassador or minister who speaks to the people instead of God in the name of Christ, the Word of God. Anthony Burgess stressed that a minister must dress every sermon in the mirror of the Word and must preach as if they're reading Scripture but expounding it. And ministers must preach the Word only, said Anthony Burgess, for God's sake, because it's His Word that they're proclaiming and his honors at stake, for man's sake, because there's no need for people to listen to anything if you don't come with the authority of God's word, and for the minister's sake, because the minister's called to be a servant of the Lord, not a servant of his own ideas. So the Puritans viewed preaching as the minister's principal work and the hearer's principal benefit. They called it the converting ordinance.

This is God's ordinary way of saving sinners. They said, seldom would anybody be converted apart from preaching. As the fire stirred gives more heat, said Thomas Cartwright, so the word when it is blown upon by preaching, flameth more in the hearers than when it is merely read. Preaching is the very word of God as long as the preacher doesn't contradict the word of God. And so the Puritans stand in awe of the highest calling in life, which is preaching, being the mouthpiece, the ambassador of the almighty triune God.

One Puritan said sometimes he would sit in his study and he'd just clap his hands for joy and then get on his knees in reverence and solemnity. And he's called to be an ambassador of the Lord Jesus Christ. Richard Baxter said it's no small matter to stand up in the face of a congregation and deliver a message of salvation or damnation as from the living God in the name of our redeemer. He said that every minister should preach every time as if it's his very last time. As a dying man to dying men preaching about the living Savior.

There's nothing more important in all the world than preaching. My own father used to say to me when I grew up, being a preacher is more important than being in the White House. Because you're dealing with the salvation, the eternal destiny of the souls of men and women. And their blood can be on your hands. You are a savior of death unto death, or life unto life through preaching.

That is what the Puritans realized. Speak to your people, said Thomas Watson, as to men that must be either awakened here or in hell when it is forever too late. Woe, said another Puritan, woe are they who go loaded with sermons to hell. Preaching is a momentous occasion. Every sermon, said John Preston, is a sermon which is heard not only, but sets us nearer to heaven or to hell.

You can never leave a sermon as you came, the Puritan said. Every sermon will harden you, or it will soften you. One of John Cotton's listeners wrote in response to a sermon, Mr. Cotton preaches with such authority, demonstration, and power that he thinks when he preaches out of any prophet or apostle. I hear not him, but I hear that very prophet.

I hear that very apostle. Yea, it is as if I hear the Lord Jesus Christ speaking in my heart. That was the Puritan goal. They wanted to preach in such a way that the hearers would walk out of the sermon and say it was if God and I were the only ones in that worship service. The minister spoke directly to my mind, to my soul, to my conscience.

So in this primacy of preaching, the Puritans were profoundly persuaded that their aim was to please God rather than people. God was their witness, all masks were stripped away, all flattery was abhorred, their goal was to labor to awaken hearts to the Lord Jesus Christ and to comfort the beleaguered warfare, warfaring people of the children of God. The primacy of preaching. Now the Puritans developed a massive program for preaching. Part of this is motivated, of course, by the fact that most Puritans ended up in jail at different points in their life for preaching.

And most of them were ejected by the act of uniformity or conformity in 1662. 2, 000 of them lost their pulpits in one day because they would not conform to all the rules of the Book of Common Prayer. And so many of them were taken in later by Anglican preachers because The Anglican preachers were so unpopular and didn't speak to people's souls that they kind of wanted a Puritan preacher alongside them in order to keep the church going. So what was the program? The program had five points to it.

Number one, to reform preaching itself. The big textbook here, it's actually a small book, but I mean big in influence, was The Art of Prophecying by William Perkins. The Father of Puritans wrote a 150-page paperback on preaching. Became the homiletics textbook for preachers. It's very concise, very powerful.

Still today Sinclair Ferguson has edited it, made it contemporary. It's published by Ban of Truth Trust, a great little book for preachers. And it sets forward the ideal of Puritan plain style of preaching. But secondly, the Puritans developed what was called lectureships. And what that meant was simply this.

Because they were thrown out of their pulpits, the Anglican minister was considered the pastor. The Anglican minister, however, not being very popular with the people, was wise when he brought in a Puritan lecturer. And he'd have the Puritan lecturer preach on Wednesday night, and they wouldn't call it preaching, they'd call it lecturing, but it was really a sermon. And the Anglican would preach on Sunday morning, of course, and administer the sacraments. The Puritan lecturer would lecture on Sunday afternoon, which was another sermon.

So really two-thirds of the preaching in that church was being done by the Puritan lecturer because he was gifted to preach. And these lectureships became extremely popular. And so what ended up happening, if you really feared God in those days, probably you'd come to church in the morning because the church required it, but you'd be famished and you couldn't wait until the afternoon service and the Puritan preacher would feed your soul with the word of God instead of ornate flowerly language. And thirdly, the Puritan program for preaching was promoted by what the Puritans called prophesying, prophesying or sometimes godly exercises. They got that from 1 Corinthians 14.

And what they would do, it was kind of a post seminary continuing education approach today. Ministers would get together, maybe 50 of them, around London, and they would have six ministers, or four or five, six ministers, preach on the same text. Four or five first preach on the text, and then the last one, who was usually the oldest, coming and giving the applications to the text. And then the ministers would discuss the pros and cons, the weaknesses and strengths of the sermon. So they would grow each other as preachers, being willing to be criticized by each other.

Those prophesies worked quite well for a while. After a while, Elizabeth got very uncomfortable with him, and she forbade them. All the archbishops didn't instill that rule, and so some of them stopped, some did not. But eventually they degenerated when the Puritans, unfortunately, started letting people in the back, lay people, to listen to them because people were so hungry for preaching, they thought, wow, we can get six sermons in a row. And so they would come.

But the problem was, you see, when Reverend So-and-So would stand up and accuse Pastor So-and-So of forgetting that point in his sermon, and that pastor knew he had seven parishioners in the back, he got a little queasy. And so things became a little more complicated, and eventually they died out. But during the high time of conversions and revival in Puritan life, prophesies were very important in London and in different places throughout England. And then fourth, Puritan preaching was greatly augmented by the preaching and publishing of sermons. This is amazing, a well-kept secret.

But did you know that in the 1560s, when Puritanism was born, there were nine Puritan volumes of Puritan sermons published. And by the 1590s, there were 140 volumes published in that decade. Now that's a huge number when you consider the amount of work that goes into printing a book in the 16th century. And here's what blew my mind away. Twenty percent of all material in the first decade of the 1600s, all material that came out of the press, secular material, religious material, were repackaged Puritan sermons.

That's like walking into a secular bookstore today and seeing every fifth book on the shelf being a Puritan sermon book. People loved these books. People read these books. They were reprinted. The Puritan sermons written transformed the lives of thousands of people.

And then fifthly, they promoted preaching through ministerial training. They believed in strong ministerial training. Puritan ministerial training. They would train the minister in his mind, train him in piety and godliness. And so 95% of Puritan pastors were trained at Cambridge, at Oxford, Trinity College in Dublin, and Harvard College in America.

At those times, those schools were bastions of reformed orthodoxy, a mighty force in shaping young men with staunch Puritan convictions about preaching. Now what about passion for preaching? The Puritans believed in the gospel so profoundly. They just loved to preach. They lived to preach.

Samuel Rutherford said, there are two things I love in this life. I love Jesus Christ, and my second favorite thing to do is to preach Him. You see, everything was focused on the Triune God saving sinners in Jesus Christ. The Puritans loved to preach the beauty of Christ, the loveliness of Christ, the sufficiency of Christ. They love to preach Christ biblically and doctrinally and typologically.

They love preparing for preaching. They spent long hours pouring over the meaning of the text of Scripture. They preached to themselves first. They detested cold professionalism. John Bunyan said, I never did preach a sermon that I did not smartingly feel in my own conscience before I ascended the pulpit.

Richard Baxter put it this way, Preach to yourselves first before you preach to the people, and preach to yourself with even greater zeal. Oh Lord, save Thy church from worldly pastors that study and learn the art of Christianity and the art of ministry, but never had the Christian divine nature or the vital principle which must difference them and their services from the dead. And they loved the act of preaching, not for its own sake, but because they believed that God would save sinners and comfort and strengthen saints when they got on the pulpit. They'd rather go to jail than give up preaching. The judge called John Bunyan out of jail to stand before him and he said, Bunyan, if you agree not to preach, I'll let you go back home to your four children, to your blind daughter Mary, and to your needy wife.

And Bunyan looked them straight in the eye and said, Sir, I would really appreciate my release, But I want to tell you, if you release me today, I'll be preaching tomorrow." They were passionate about it. They knew that the fail in preaching the Word of God was to fail in their calling. The fail in their calling was to fail in who they are. Today you get all this business about, well, your family's got to be first and then preaching is somewhere down the road after you feel you can do it. Preachers only want to preach once a week or maybe twice a week at the most, and they say no to invitations so often, and well, they don't want to work too hard.

Oh, the Puritans would say, hogwash. You love your family. You love preaching. There's seldom a conflict between the two. You show your children that you are a preacher.

And for them, their very identity was in preaching. They'd rather have you shoot them dead than not preach the gospel. Preaching is everything because Christ is everything. So they were passionate. The whole course of our ministry, said Baxter, must be carried on in a tender love for Christ and a tender love to our people.

And when the people see that you unfeigningly love them and yearn to bring them to Christ, they will hear anything, they will bear anything, and they will follow you the more easily. One of the greatest things missing in most pulpits today is this tender love for the beauty of Christ and this tender love for the eternal salvation of sinners. Fourthly, the Puritans had power in their preaching. They rejected the Anglican style of reading homilies. They preached with notes, yes, but primarily extemporaneously.

They detested, exposing their learning. They hid their learning in the study when they brought it to the pulpit. They detested ornate, oratorical, metaphysical, and moralistic preaching. Preaching must be evangelical, and experiential, and practical, they said. So how'd they do it?

Well, they wanted to reach the whole man. And they wanted to reach the whole man in a certain order. In worship, their theology of worship and preaching was that you would first address the mind, dress the mind with clarity. They said the Mind is the palace of faith. They refuse to set the mind and the heart against each other.

Yes, they said, having the truth in the mind is never enough, but it must be planted there first. John Preston said, reason is elevated in conversion. Cotton Mather added that ignorance is the mother of heresy, not of devotion. They understood, you see, that a mindless Christianity fosters a spineless Christianity. And then after adjusting the mind, they would confront the conscience pointedly.

They were so happy that everyone, by the light of nature as they called it, has a conscience. Instead of tiptoeing around the conscience, like most preachers today, and saying, I don't want to offend anyone, they purposely went after the conscience. When Puritan said, my goal in preaching is to beat behind every bush until I bring out those hiding atoms and bring them out naked before God. We must go with a stick, he said, behind every bush and bring them out. They preached urgently.

They preached directly. They preached specifically to the conscience that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in the name of Jesus Christ. So they mentioned specific sins. They didn't mention them. They pressed home the guilt of those sins.

They particularly exposed sinners to the core problem of their Adamic sin. That their entire being by nature did not love God above all as the first table of the law commanded and did not love their neighbors as themselves as the second table of the law commanded. And so they stressed pointedly that every single second, click of the tick of the clock, every single second the natural man is sinning. Think about that. Those of you here this morning who are not yet saved, for whom Christ really is not your life, when you're unsaved, every single second you're living for an opposite purpose of what God designed you here on this earth to be.

He designed you to live to his glory and you're living for yourself. And the Puritans stressed, you see, that that is an abomination in the sight of God. You need to flee, you need to fly immediately to the Lord Jesus Christ. And then they wooed the heart. They won the heart passionately.

They addressed the mind with clarity, confronted the conscience pointedly, and wooed the heart passionately. Their preaching was affectionate, it was zealous, it was optimistic, it lifted up the people of God, it strengthened them, but also it wooed is the word they often use. It wooed the unbeliever to Christ. Walter Craddock Said to his flock, we are not sent to get galley slaves to the oars or a bear to the stake but God sends us to you to woo you as spouses to marry you to Jesus Christ. And then finally plainness in preaching.

Puritans believed in a plain style of preaching, I said. First part of their sermon was exegetical, expositional. Second part was more doctrinal, didactic. The third part, applicatory. They developed good outlines, well-defined doctrines.

Their preaching centered upon Jesus Christ. Thomas Adams said, Christ is the sum of the whole Bible, prophesied, typified, prefigured, exhibited, demonstrated. He's found in every leaf, almost in every line, the scriptures being, but as it were, the swaddling bands of the child Jesus. Isaac Ambrosi, think of Christ as a very substance, marrow, soul, and scope of all the scriptures. Robert Bolton, Jesus Christ is offered most freely and without exception of any person in every Sabbath and in every sermon.

Then they applied the truths of the Gospel. Oh, how they applied them. They called the applications uses. Sometimes their applications were as long as their exegetical, expositional, and doctrinal parts. And in those applications, they were both experiential and practical and discriminated.

They discriminated, setting apart the precious from the vile, the saved from the unsaved. They even targeted their audiences within those two groups. They would speak to God's people and divide them into backsliders and speak to backsliders very often. Speak to beginners in grace. Speak to the well-assured and established in grace.

And they speak to the unsaved. Sometimes they'd speak to the hardened, who had no ear to hear. Sometimes they'd speak to people who have impressions but were still clinging to their human flippancy and their self-centered lifestyle. So they wrote books about these subjects as well. From their sermons, Matthew Mead, the almost Christian, discovered What a searching book it is.

But they also wrote books building up God's people, comforting them, showing them what believers experience so that believers could relish and bathe themselves in the glory and the beauty of Jesus Christ. Puritan preaching aimed to be transforming in this simple style. It aimed to build up the holy fear of God in people. They defined the fear of God this way. The fear of God is that which makes us esteem the smiles of God to be of greater value than the smiles of men and the frowns of God to be feared more than the frowns of men." And in all this simplicity of style, they had two things that ministers desperately need today that is so often missing in our day, a profound dependence on the Holy Spirit and a profound giving of themselves to prayer in the inner closet.

Well that is a Puritan theology of preaching. And all of this must be done then, the Puritan said, in spirit and in truth. So let me conclude by saying the Puritans were zealous. Zealous for pure worship because God is zealous for the glory of his name. And they stressed with their people that God is more concerned about his glory and loves His glory even more than He loves our lives.

Burroughs said that the glory of God's name is a million times more precious to God than the lives of a million people. They focused on God. God's zeal for God's glory is expressed in God sending His Son. And God's goal in sending His Son and in giving you the Gospel is that His Son might be glorified. And they stress as John does in his Gospel, seventeen times that God delights in the glory of his son.

What does delight the father more than to have his children gathered close to him in Jesus Christ so that his son is glorified and his people feel loved in Christ. Earl said, when this happens, there will grow a sweet and blessed and beautiful familiarity between God and thy own soul. That's where worship gains a sense of reality, a sense of holy expectation. And so they inculcated in their people that when they would come up to worship, they should have a holy expectation that they were going to meet with God, the living God, who would speak to them the words of life eternal. So true worship, the Puritan said, gives God his rightful place, his rightful place in creation, his rightful place in the church, his rightful place in our families, his rightful place in our personal lives.

True worship makes me fall hopelessly in love with the beauty of God in Jesus Christ. Ten minutes, said one Puritan, of true worship contains more joy than the world can provide in 10 years. True worship prepares us for eternity. When John Preston was dying, he said, I shall but change my place. I shall not change my company.

What about you, my dear friend? Are you a worshiper? Do you worship God by the Holy Spirit? Do you worship God in spirit and truth? Is the Word of God dear to you?

Is the Son of God your very first love? Are you betrothed to Him? Are you married to Him? Have you kept company with the living God and His saints now while you are on earth? And are you enjoying His presence in worship, in His church?

Worship that coincides with what He commands you in His Word. Is worship to you a foretaste of heaven? And do you long to worship God forever, the triune God in Jesus Christ in glory one day? What is your desire? What is your passion?

Do you ever say, come Lord Jesus, come quickly? I long to be sin free in Emmanuel's land. I long to see thee in thy beauty, and to glorify thee in all that thou art." Oh, to worship Jesus Christ forever as a perfect bride, worshiping a perfect bridegroom. And he's seen no sin in me. It's almost too much.

No sin in my Jacob, no transgression in my Israel. To be done with sin, to be done with temptation, to No more be tempted to be tempted, all good walled in, all evil walled out, and I may worship Him and never will He again be out of my eye or out of my heart or out of my affections. Oh, you see this whole life is but a preparation for eternal worship in glory. One day, dear child of God, you'll finally be there and you'll be married to Him spotlessly, forever. So, I'll close this talk with this illustration that is so critical to understand something of the beauty of Jesus Christ.

There was once a young man, 19th century, named William who was blind. And he fell in love with a beautiful young Christian girl who said, I love you, William, and I want to live with you despite your blindness. And the date of the wedding was set, and a surgeon came to William's father and said, I think there's a surgery I could do that may help William, but I'm not sure. They talked about it. William said, let's go through with it, but Since the bandages have to remain around my eyes for two weeks, I want the surgery two weeks to the day before my wedding because if I could see, I want the first thing I can see to be my bride." And that's what happened.

William appointed his father to be the best man. It was an august body, a aristocratic people. No one was supposed to say a word in the audience, but the day came and when the bride walked down the aisle, William's father turned to his son, unwrapped the bandages, and William could see. And when he saw his bride walk down the aisle, he could not hold back. He just blurted out, my dear, you are far more beautiful than I ever imagined.

And, dear child of God, that's what you will say one day when you enter into glory. And King Jesus, as Samuel Rutherford said, will stand with a soft cloth at the gates of the pearly bliss And wipe away every tear from your eye and you behold Him. And in one moment of beholding, you will understand that you never again have to see through a glass darkly, but now face to face, and you'll see Him in all His beauty and in all His loveliness. And you'll cry out, for the queen of Sheba, the half of it was not told me, thou art far more beautiful, Lord Jesus, than I ever imagined. Let's pray.

Great God of Heaven, we thank Thee so much for the gift of worship, which really is the restoration of what we've lost in paradise and brings us back into fellowship with Thee. We thank Thee for Thy Son as the object of our worship. We thank Thee for all His beauty and loveliness and glory. And we pray, Lord, that we may love Him increasingly all our lives, that He may increase and we may decrease. Do bless and guide us.

Help us to be more and more lovers of Christ and haters of sin and pursuers of holiness and admirers of Thy beauty in Thy well-beloved Son. Lord, help us to worship thee in spirit and truth. For Jesus' sake, amen. Articles and videos on the subject of conforming the Church and the family to the Word of God. And for more information about the National Center for Family Integrated Churches, where you can search our online network to find family integrated churches in your area, log on to our website, ncfic.org.