Dr. Joel Beeke's sermon, titled 'What Can We Learn from the Puritans about Reformed Experiential Preaching?,' explores the distinctive features of Puritan preaching. He outlines five key aspects: primacy, program, passion, power, and plainness. The Puritans valued preaching as the primary means of grace and emphasized delivering sermons that were biblical, doctrinal, experiential, and practical. They fostered a rigorous program for training ministers, which included lectureships and prophesying sessions for critique and improvement. Passionate about preaching, the Puritans aimed to address the mind with clarity, confront the conscience, and allure the heart. They advocated for plain preaching that was accessible to all listeners. Dr. Beeke advises contemporary preachers to learn from the Puritans' holistic approach while adapting to modern audiences, emphasizing the importance of clarity, simplicity, and focusing on the congregation's understanding. He cautions against overwhelming listeners with excessive points or applications. Lastly, he encourages taking a long-term view of a ministry's impact, trusting that the fruits of effective preaching may manifest over time.

Okay, so this morning I asked to give you two more addresses. And in the first one, we're going to take the principles of yesterday and apply that to the Puritans, or rather show you how the Puritans apply what we've learned yesterday in their own ministries. It might come across a little bit like a fire hose. I'm going to give you quite a bit of information in this first address. I really wanna look at five things, and then I want to address the question, should we preach like the Puritans today, yes or no.

And I'm going to give you four or five ways we should and four or five ways we shouldn't. And they're going to come at you pretty quickly because of the amount of ground I want to cover, but I think you'll find it, I hope you'll find it helpful. So I first want to look at the primacy of preaching in the Puritan mind, then their program for preaching, then their passion for preaching, then their power in preaching, and then their plainness in preaching. And then we'll look at the question, how should we preach like the Puritans and how should we not preach like the Puritans today? Okay, so five points to warm us up.

There are primacy of preaching, program for preaching, passion for preaching, power in preaching, plainness in preaching. That gives you the overview and then how do we preach like the Puritans and how do we not preach like the Puritans today? And that will give you, in the context of experiential preaching, this overall picture. Then in the second talk, I want to take one Puritan, John Bunyan, and show you how he did it, taking everything we've learned in these two days, hopefully, and applying it to you and showing you the uniqueness of and the wisdom of John Bunyan in his preaching. So I'm gonna read the first two verses of 2 Timothy 4 again, because they're so apropos to what I'm about to say.

I charge thee therefore before God and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing in his kingdom, preach the word." Coming from the word Kerox here. Be the herald, be the herald of Jesus Christ. One day, one day you're going to stand before him, I charge thee before God and the Lord Jesus Christ who judged the quick and the dead, preach the word. Think about that. The Day of Judgment.

You're going to give an account of how the congregation received the word you brought them. They're going to give an account of whether you were a faithful preacher and brought them the whole counsel of God and made yourself free from the blood of your hearers. So this is a judgment day examination of your preaching, your ministry as you stand before Christ but also of your people. What a solemn thing to preach. Preach the word, be instant in season and out of season.

You preach no matter what. Preaching is your calling. That's what the Puritans believe. Puritan said, don't turn down any invitation to preach unless you just can't do anymore. You know, I meet preachers quite often and they say, well, you know, I've really got it good.

I only have to preach once a week. You what? You only have to preach once a week? Preaching isn't a have to thing for a minister. You're a prophet.

The word prophet means to boil over. The word of God is in you. You're like Jeremiah, I could not forbear. You're like Amos, the lioneth roared, the Lord God has spoken, who can but prophesy. I'm going to preach in season, I'm going to preach out of season, I'm going to preach when I'm sick, I'm going to preach when I don't feel like it, I'm going to preach when I'm bound up, I'm going to preach, I'm going to preach, I'm a preacher, it's my calling, it's my life, it's who I am.

That's the Puritan conviction. There was an 18th century Puritan-like preacher by the name of John Barrage. I don't know if anybody heard of him, Baptist preacher. And he was one of those epagons, the second tier in the Great Awakening. You know history is not very kind to us for epagons.

You know they only we only remember Kelvin And we forget about Bullinger and Peter Martyr who were just as famous as Calvin and just as gifted in their own generation. Well there were a lot of men around Whitefield and the Westleys who were very gifted men, used for many people, thousands of conversions. John Barrage was one of them. And Barrage got called before a judge because he was preaching everywhere, outdoors and in unconventional places. And the judge reprimanded him and said, you've got to promise not to do this.

He said, sir, I can't do that. Wherever I'm called to preach, I will preach. Yeah, but you're preaching all over. You're preaching everywhere. You're preaching in so many different situations.

You're preaching on so many occasions out of doors against the church's rules. And, Your Honor, Barry said, I only preach in two different seasons. And the judge said, what in the world do you mean by that? He said, I preach in season and I preach out of season. We went to see his tombstone when we were in England.

It was amazing about how God used him even on his tombstone. But what he put on there, just a humble servant of God who loved to preach the word of God. Be instant in season, out of season, reprove, rebuke, exhort with all long suffering and doctrine. Lord, Please bless this talk. Please help us to drink in and to live out what I'm called to say now and let it begin with me in Jesus name.

Amen. So the Puritan Age has been called the Golden Age of Preaching. There's no age quite like it. I spent many years, well many many trips to the UK doing conferences over three, four decades. And whenever I go over there, I know all the old used bookstores and I find my way to them because I've been collecting all my life for our rare book room Puritan volumes.

And when you walk in and you see these old, old books and these old antiquarian bookstores with the old original vellum covers, I don't even open them anymore because I know they're going to be Anglican books. They're still in their original covers. Nobody read them. They're still in beautiful shape. I've never opened one of them and had it be a Puritan book.

But if I see an old book in those bookstores falling apart or rebound, my heart skips a beat. Is it going to be a Puritan volume I've never seen before? And often it is. You see, everyone loved Puritan preaching in those days in terms of everyone, I mean those that attended the church. For the people, the common people like Jesus heard the Puritan preaching gladly.

Many common people went to hear Puritans preach several times a week. There were the Puritan morning exercises at 6 o'clock a.m. Many people, hundreds of people, thousands of people sometimes went to 6 o'clock in the morning to hear preaching on a Thursday morning? Because he just couldn't get enough of this wonderful preaching. Now not every Puritan preacher was a profound outstanding preacher and yes it's true that the books they wrote, we tend to get the best ones today.

And not every Puritan book is worthy of a reprint, of course. But generally speaking, there's been no age of such great preachers as the Puritans. Henry Smith, who died when he was 31, sometimes called the golden-tongued Chrysostom of the Puritans, was so popular as a preacher that a contemporary historian Thomas Fuller said, persons of good quality would bring their own pews with them to church. I mean their legs to stand upon in the aisles of the church." Now you say, what in the world does that mean? Well that's just a Puritan-esque way of saying whenever people came to church they were standing room only because Fuller was such a powerful, popular preacher.

Puritan preaching is transforming and aims to be transforming. Brian Hedges puts it all in one sentence very nicely. He says, Puritan preachers lift our gaze to the greatness and the gladness of God. They open our eyes to the beauty and loveliness of Christ. They prick our consciences with the subtlety and sinfulness of sin.

They ravish and delight the soul with the power and the glory of God's grace. They plumb the depths of the soul with profound biblical, practical, experiential insight. They sustain and strengthen the soul through suffering by expounding the doctrine of the sovereignty of God. They set our sights and focus our affections on eternal realities. Well, let's look then, let this whet your appetite for us to look at these five points.

The first one then is Primacy of preaching. In the Puritan mind, you see, every single sermon, as Anthony Burgess said, by all the names I mention are all Puritans in case you haven't heard of them. Anthony Burgess said, ministers must dress every sermon in the mirror of the Word of God. They must preach what they read in Scripture in the word only. And they must do that, Birch has said, for three reasons.

For God's sake, because it's His word they're proclaiming. For man's sake, because if they don't preach what God says, it loses all their power and their preaching will just be hay and stubble. And for the minister's own sake, because the minister is given a ministry, not a magistrate, that is a calling to be a servant and not the Lord, so he must not endanger his own soul by bringing his own words." So the primacy of preaching is primary because it's preaching of the word, which is the primary means of grace for the believer. So they viewed preaching as the minister's principal work, this is a quote, principal work, and the parishioner's principal benefit. They call preaching God's great converting ordinance.

God's great converting ordinance. William Ames, preaching is that ordinance of God sanctified for the begetting of faith for the opening of the understanding for the drawing of the will and the affections to Christ. Thomas Cartwright, as the fire stirreth, give us more heat so the word when it is blown upon by preaching flames up more in the hearers than when it is read." So yeah you you need to read the Bible Cartwright is saying, but preaching that's the apex of it That's where you take the flashlight with the help of the Holy Spirit and you shine upon the word, let the word jump out at the people and screw it home, said Richard Baxter, into their minds and into their souls. Richard Sibbs preaching is the gift of all gifts. God esteems it so.

Christ esteems it so and so should we. Therefore the Puritans always put the pulpit at the center of the church, like this, front and center, because this is primary, rather than the altar or the sacraments. So such perspective, you understand, in the Puritan mind and in the mind of the people, made every sermon a special occasion. There's not a sermon that is heard said John Preston, but it sets every hearer nearer to heaven or nearer to hell. Or take this quote from the diary of a member in John Cotton.

John Cotton's congregation, Cotton being one of the most famous New England preachers. Mr. Cotton, this is just a guy writing a diary to himself. Mr. Cotton preaches with such authority, demonstration, and life that methinks when he preaches out of any prophet or apostle, I hear not him, but I hear that very prophet, that very apostle, yea, I hear the Lord Jesus Christ speaking from within the text to my heart.

Wow. That's what I want people to say about my preaching. You too? You're so in the text and you so expound the text that people forget who you are preaching. They see no man save Jesus only and it's as if Jesus is coming right to their heart.

I don't get this too often and probably you don't either but one of the best compliments I ever get and it always brings tears to my eyes when I get it is when someone says to me after a sermon, you completely fell away and it was as if I was all alone with God in that church and God was just speaking directly to me. That's what the Puritans wanted. I hear the Lord Jesus Christ speaking in my heart. So in preaching, the Puritans made it in their earnestness, their aim to please God rather than people. They stripped away every mask of the false professor and every weakness of a true professor.

All flattery was abhorred. In the name of God, brethren, labor to awaken your hearts before you come to the pulpit, said Richard Baxter, speak to your people as to men that must be awakened either here or in hell. Watson. Woe be those people who go loaded with sermons to hell. So gather from all these quotes and these comments that nothing in the Puritan mind is more important in preaching than preaching in this life.

This is the primacy. This is the event of every week. And my dad was quite pure to the skin. His books, his bookcases were full of Puritan books. But my dad exemplified this very well.

On Sunday morning, he would always pray at the table, breakfast table, a lot longer than usual. And he'd often say this, something like this, oh Lord, how wonderful, how exciting, how humbling, that we get to go to church now and hear the very voice of God through the minister speaking to us, the very Word of God, the God of the universe is going to speak to us and to our children. Praise the Lord! This is huge! Every sermon is a major event in life.

My dad also used to say, God will bring you into account on the day of judgment for every sermon you heard and for those sermons that you should have heard but chose not to hear. You're accountable for the word of God that's coming to you. That's number one. Number two, program for preaching. I'm going to just run through this quickly, but I'd love to spend a whole talk just on this alone.

Five parts to point two. First of all, They reformed preaching itself through their plain style, but I'm going to get to that later, so I'm going to pass that by. But that's really the right now. That's really the foundation of their program for preaching. And that's why they were motivated to train ministers so well in the plain style of preaching.

We'll come back to that. Part two of their program was what they called lectureships. And I'm going to skip a lot of history here, but just suffice it to say that 2, 000 Puritan ministers were ejected in 1662. And they were the greatest preachers of England. And the Anglican preachers knew it.

The Anglican preachers knew that the peer to preachers were much better preachers than they were, and that the people loved their preaching. So let's say you were an Anglican preacher and you wanted your church to grow, what would you do? Well, this is what you do. You'd preach the Sunday morning sermon. There's always two sermons every Sunday.

None of this one sermon business per Lord's Day because you want to get as much of the word as possible. And what you do is you'd preach on Sunday morning, you'd visit the people during the week, you'd be kind of like their pastor, and then you'd hire, either through a wealthy businessman in your church or the church would support, you'd call and hire a lecturer. That was the way of getting around their deep position. And the lecturer would always be a Puritan. And he would preach Sunday evening and Wednesday evening.

But he wouldn't call it preaching, call it lecturing. But it was a sermon, usually 60 to 70 minutes. And that was the only duty, that was the only duty of these lecturers. They weren't allowed to be the pastors. They weren't allowed to be called preachers.

So they were called lecturers. Well, these lectureships became very, very popular. And if you had a good Puritan lecturer, your church would probably grow. People would suffer through your sermon on Sunday morning with all its Greek and Hebrew and Latin and flowering ornate language and say, I didn't get anything out of that sermon. I can't wait till tonight.

I can't wait till tonight when I hear the Puritan lecturer." And you learn to live with that as an Anglican preacher and you appreciated the Puritan lecturer because the church flourished under his teaching. So that was called lectureships. A lot of Puritans were lecturers for many years. William Ames, Paul Baines, Lawrence Chatterton, John Dodd, Richard Greenham, William Perkins, John Preston, Richard Sibbes. But what happened, thank God, because they didn't have other duties, after they would deliver their sermons, they'd come back home and they'd write out their sermons in full.

Often there'd be someone taking them down in shorthand. That person would write them out and then they would enlarge them. That's why the sermons appear so long in their books. They often enlarge them because they had time to do that. And we are the recipient of all these books today, of all these lecturers.

God's ways are amazing. So the third part of their program for preaching was what they called prophesying. This is fascinating. Now in our seminary in Grand Rapids, probably if you ask the students what's the most valuable class in the entire curriculum, they'd say practice preaching. So what we do, and every student knows this, we're going to take you out to the woodshed after every sermon you preach, and we'll beat you up a little bit, but we'll also tell you some things that you said well and you did well.

And every student in our seminary will practice preach one time every seminary in front of the student body and in front of the professors. But more importantly, every student is required to come to that class to hear all the critiques on all the sermons. And that's where they learn the most. Now we have a professor who always does the exegetical critique. I'm using the second chair, the homiletical critique, because I'm the homiletical teacher.

And then the third professor judges the plamenics, the style of delivery. Now, 95% of our students, because they hear the other ones get beat up as well, accept it very well. There's a few that kick back sometimes. Yeah, yeah, but here, and they give some excuses. We say, no, no, no, don't defend yourself.

Just take in, take in what we're saying. You'll learn. If you follow what we're saying, you'll learn. Now, can you imagine doing that when you've been preaching for 15 years? Can you imagine you wanting that to be done?

Well, this is what the prophesies were. Here's how it went. An older minister, Scott's almost as old as I am. I'll use Scott Brown. So What he does is he gets four of you.

He contacts four of you and he says Will you come and preach on John 17 verse 3 at one of the prophesies and they all say yes they counted a privilege and Scott will do the closing sermon of the applications of the text, the concluding applications, and the other four will preach the text, the same text, four in a row, and they'll preach a whole sermon for say 60 minutes and Scott will do maybe 45 minutes of applications at the end. And those sermons will be back to back throughout the morning and the early afternoon. And then the rest of the day, every sermon will be picked apart by the other ministers present and examined. And you learn to improve your preaching that way. These prophesies were in great demand.

At one point there were a hundred different prophesies, little mini conferences, day-long conferences in London alone until the Queen got a hold of it. And she decided that she was suspicious of these things. You know, She was so scared of what the ministers would say from the pulpit in England that she actually had some of her own pastors write out sermons and give them to the Anglican preachers, and they were required to read them on Sunday. Can you imagine that? But none of the Puritans went along with that.

They preached their own sermons, you see. And so some of the archbishops enforced Queen Elizabeth's rule that these prophesies had to be banished, others just ignored what Queen Elizabeth said. And so the prophesies reached their peak just before Queen Elizabeth forbade them in the 1570s. And then they began to go downhill because sometimes they were forced to abandon them. But the other reason they went downhill by 1600 was because the people wanted to hear four sermons in a row so badly on the same text.

They take off work and they want to join and they allow them to sit in the back but they could not raise any questions. They could not do any critiquing. But it changed the flavor of the prophesies. So if you were going to be the preacher this coming Sunday, and you had 15 people sit in the back, I mean, this coming, say, Wednesday, Wednesday morning, when they beat up your sermon, how would you feel if you had 15 parishioners in the back? You'd be a little more touchy.

And that's what happened. It was great to have the people want to hear the sermons, but it was a bad thing because it should have just been restricted to ministers alone. Well, those are the prophesies that helped them become better preachers. They were hard on each other. Fourth, peer-to-preacher was greatly augmented by the printing and publishing of sermons.

Today, everything that comes off of a printing press, .0000001% are sermons. How many sermon books do people read today? Even Christians? Very seldom. By the 1560s, there were nine volumes of Puritan sermons printed per year.

That's a lot because every book printed in the 16th century was a huge venture And very expensive. A book would cost a man a whole week's wages. Only the wealthy could afford books in those days. And then the book would be passed around the whole congregation. Everybody would read it.

Nine books of sermons. 1570s, A.F. Her, by the way, did a doctoral dissertation on this. 69 volumes. 1580s, 113.

1590s, 140. By the 1620s, 20% of everything that came out of the printing press were Puritan sermons. They were read everywhere. And those Puritan sermons helped other Puritan preachers who read them become better preachers. And then fifth, the Puritan program also was grounded in ministerial training.

At Oxford or Cambridge, there were certain colleges within both, also Trinity College in Dublin and Harvard College in America, there were colleges within Oxford and Cambridge and at these other institutions that became known as hotbeds for Puritanism, which was a way of saying hotbeds for preaching, because it was the Puritans who emphasized preaching. And Lawrence Chatterton, for example, who lived to be 103, Can you believe that? In that day and age, that's like living to be 115 now. He was training men for the ministry for decades. The only reason you never heard of him is he didn't write any books.

But he was training men, Puritan men, in the Puritan way, it was called, of preaching for decades until he was about 90 years old. And he did a world of good. So this is the kind of program, the kind of emphasis for many different angles that they put on preaching. Thirdly, passion for preaching. What a difference between the Anglicans and the Puritans.

Oh my, The Puritans were passionate about preaching Christ. They loved to preach Christ, His beauty, biblically, dartrinally, typologically, experientially, practically. The Scottish Puritan, Samuel Rutherford said, I have but one joy in life beside Christ himself and that is preaching Christ. My two greatest joys, Preaching Christ and knowing Christ. They loved everything about preaching.

They loved preparing for preaching. They loved to preach to themselves first and foremost. They loved the very act of preaching. They'd rather go to jail. We'll see that with Bunyan momentarily.

They'd give up preaching. And they loved the people and the souls of the people to whom they were preaching. That's key. That's what made them passionate. They realized the momentousness of every sermon they delivered.

And that leads me to my fourth point, power in preaching. Power in preaching. The Peer Twins were so powerful because of their style of delivery. And it's basically a three-step process. First they would address the mind with clarity.

They'd address the mind with clarity. They understood that a mindless Christianity will foster a spineless Christianity. You've got to get the truth into the mind first. Then they would confront the conscience, step two, pointedly. Confront the conscience pointedly.

You'd never hear a Puritan minister say something like, we hear so often from the pulpit today, after you say something very convicting, the preacher today will say, but don't worry congregation, or church family, I don't mean by that, I don't want to buy this just to make you feel guilty. Churches will say, what? I Want to make you feel guilty. I want to drive you out of yourself to Jesus Christ One Puritan said we must go in our preaching with the stick of divine truth and beat behind every bush Which a sinner hides until like that old Adam who hid he stands naked before God That's what I want to do. I want to strip him of his righteousness.

I want him to cry out, I'm a guilty sinner, O God, I need the righteousness of Christ. So they would urgently, directly, specifically speak to the conscience and take seriously Christ's command that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name. Luke 24. And then thirdly, they would woo, that's their word, we would probably say allure. It would allure the heart passionately.

So they addressed the mind with clarity, confront the conscience pointedly, and then allure the heart passionately. Their preaching was affectionate. Their preaching was zealous. Their preaching was optimistic. A really great Puritan preacher named Walter Cradock said to his flock, We are not sent as preachers to get galley slaves to the oars, but we are sent to woo you as spouses, to marry you to Jesus Christ." And then, fifthly, plainness in preaching.

Plainness in preaching. What do the Puritans mean by that? Well, they didn't mean to preach unlearnedly, as they called it. But they meant to preach and explain things at the level people could understand so that it didn't fly above their heads but went through their ears and by the Spirit's grace down into their hearts. Henry Smith said, To preach simply is not to preach unlearnedly nor confusedly, but plainly and clearly, that the simplest which doth hear may understand what is taught, as if he did hear his own name from the pulpit.

Cotton Mather wrote in his eulogy for the famous Puritan missionary to the Indians in North America, John Eliot, that his way of preaching, quote, was very plain so that the very lambs in the flock might wade into his discourses as well as the elephants might swim in them." Now that's a gift, don't you think? That you preach in such a way that when people walk out, everyone, the children, the most advanced, mature believer feels they have something to take with them, feels they have something to do. The sermon was not just spoken, the sermon must be done, the sermon must be lived out. That's what they meant by plain preaching. And they usually did this in a threefold way.

First part of this sermon was exegetical, expositional. The second part of this sermon was often doctrinal, usually doctrinal and didache. And then the third part was applicatory. Now, it's not that they had no application before that, but you need to remember that in those days there was no modern entertainment media. People could remember things a long time.

We've lost that today. You know when I began preaching or began teaching in a seminary in my old denomination, say 37 years ago, I would say to people, you've got to have applications throughout your sermon. But I would say, you know, every 10, 15 minutes maybe. Now I say every five to seven minutes. Because people's attention spans, they forget what you said doctrinally by the end of the sermon.

Puritans didn't have that problem. They could bring in all their applications at the end if they wanted to and it'd be fine because people could remember all the points and all the sub points and all the sub sub points. That was how they learned. That was their education. It was rhomistic.

Even we ministers get confusing sometimes reading Puritan sermons like sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-points. You know, We can't go with our people more than a two-level subpoint ever and preferably only one level subpoints because people just can't take it in. They're used to watching tv and things flash like that and the attention span is gone. So we can learn from the Puritans. Here I'll talk more about that in a moment, but we can't copy this style here.

We need many more applications throughout the sermon, not just all at the end. But you see, the basic principle is a good one. You start with the scriptures, you expound it, then you pull out from that text the major doctrine, and then you apply, apply, apply. That was how the Puritans preach in the plain style. Always leading the people at some point in the sermon, sometimes more thoroughly in the sermon, sometimes less thoroughly, depending on the text, to Jesus Christ.

Thomas Adams said, Christ is the sum of the whole Bible, prophesied, typified, prefigured, exhibited, demonstrated, found in every leaf, almost in every line of Scripture. For the Scriptures are the swaddling bands of the child Jesus." Isaac Ambrosi, think of Christ as the very substance, marrow, soul, and scope of the whole Bible. Robert Bolton, Jesus Christ is offered most freely without exception of any person, every Sabbath, every sermon. So Puritan preaching was all the things I talked about yesterday. It was experiential and practical.

Talked about how the believer ought to respond to a text and how things really do go in the Christian life and the optimistic angle. It was discriminating. It was transforming. It was applicatory. It depended on the minister living in the fear of God himself and being entirely dependent on the Holy Spirit and pursuing holiness in his own life and giving himself to prayer for every sermon.

Now that then raises the question, how are we to preach like the Puritans today and how are we not? So let me give you these points very quickly. Do not preach like the Puritans in these ways. Number one, do not structure most sermons by theology, but rather by exegesis. So the way the Puritans did it was they would exegete for three, four, or five pages.

I'm speaking now of the written sermons. And then they would say, the major doctrine from this text is this. And they put that in the center of the page. You're familiar with that perhaps? And then the rest of the sermon would expound that doctrine.

There can be a place for topical preaching. We have that in our tradition with Heidelberg catechism preaching. But today it's better, more effective in the lives of people to make sure that even when you preach topically, it's exegetically balanced, it's exegetically grounded, and so it's more effective to preach in Expository fashion from one text to another often through Bible books not the only way to preach though some say it's the only way to preach but that's ought to be the Foundation it ought to be I believe the the default position for regular preaching So that doesn't mean that you don't say, for example, 1 Corinthians 1 verse 30, but of him are ye in Christ Jesus who of God has made unto us wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, that you can't develop a doctrine that Christ is all and in all, for example, and he's all and all because there are four benefits. Christ is made unto us wisdom, point one, righteousness, point two, sanctification, point three, redemption, point four. That's a very analytical outline for a sermon.

And at the same time, it's a topical outline because Christ is all of these things and this is a doctrine as well. So sometimes the Puritan doctrine that's pulled out of a text actually is in itself an exposition of the text. Then it works well. But other times, I think we're better off just having our structure of our sermon just following the text itself rather than a subject. Number two, do not multiply points and sub points but rather strive for simplicity.

Our children are not not trained in their education today in the remistic method. The remistic method you know, if you take a tree and you put it on its side, you've got one point here, and then you've got two branches coming out, and you've got two points that flow to that, and you've got two points that flow to that point, two points that flaw to this point, then you've got two points that flaw to that point, and that point, and that point, and that point, and they would go down to a fifth level point because that's the way the children were trained. Everybody understood that. That is impossible to do today. Impossible without losing people.

So don't even try it. So what we should do today, I believe, and you have your own opinions on this, I believe in giving out the title of my sermon at the beginning and two to four, rarely five major points. So people have some feel of where we're going. That's good for people as they listen. To have a general direction.

But don't give away the store. Don't give away your sermon in the points. So that the minister's told us everything because it's all in the five points or four points. So no need to listen. No, no.

You give just a basic outline so they get interested and they realize it's important and then they're ready to listen and then you flesh it out. I think that's the better way of doing it. I know that many ministers today, they give out points as they go along. In our tradition, we normally preach from 50 to 55 minutes right in there, It's a little longer than most traditions. That's a long time to sustain people's interests where they don't know where you're going.

So maybe you can get away with that if you preach 20, 25 minutes or 30 minutes, but I don't think you can when you preach 40 or more. I think it's much more effective to give your people some direction. But I try to keep my sermons with, say, the typical sermon would be three points, and then under each point I might have two or three or four sub points at that next level. But I try not to go even to the next level. I try to bring everything I need to say into those sub points.

So points, sub points, people can handle two levels, providing you do it simply and providing you point them into the text and say, you know, the next point is here. And you say, as you see it in verse seven, and they all look down and they see it and you read it and you're walking with them through the text. That's extremely helpful for people. Number three, do not overwhelm your hearers with applications but focus your sermon. Sometimes the Puritans had four, five, six, ten uses.

They called it uses. Those were their applications. Just like they had too many sub points, Sometimes they have too many uses for modern day preaching. For a minister studying the text, because you're preaching on that same text, it's wonderful because you read those 10 uses and you say, wow, three of these work beautifully. And you of course shape them yourself, but you get the ideas from them.

So it's like a storehouse of wonderful things that you can set aside as well as things you can use. And In preaching, of course, the preacher must always know more than he delivers to his people. So, I always say it this way, about one third of what you study actually comes out in the preaching. The other two thirds is left on the cutting floor. So the Puritans are wonderful to read that way, to give you all kinds of ideas but don't think you need to do seven or eight applications because I've read so much in the Puritans I probably this is one thing I still fight I still fight against cutting back enough.

Because I see so many applications are so good, what can I drop? But other ministers tend to be the opposite. They don't have enough applications. That's another problem. But don't try to imitate the Puritans in having too many applications.

Pick the main ones that are really helpful to your people for that particular text. And then also do not preach too many sermons on one topic or verse, but keep moving. I would say don't be Puritanesque here or don't be Lloyd-Jonesian here because Lloyd-Jones took over that from the Puritans, right? He could preach a whole book of sermons on Romans 12. On the other hand don't just skate over the surface you want to go deep you want to take the pericope Let's say you're going to preach on five verses from the Old Testament.

That's my average probably. And two verses from the New Testament. That's about my average there. Because it's more thoroughly doctrinal and in-depth in general. And you wanna keep moving.

You don't wanna have 12 sermons. You certainly don't wanna have 144 sermons like one Dutch Puritan. 144 sermons on, he doesn't break a bruised reed or punch the smoking flags. I mean, you're gonna wear out your people. They just cannot sustain it.

So, not too many sermons on one topic or one verse. Keep moving, but do go deep. Do go deep and don't try to, in my opinion, and you could disagree with me, take whole Bible chapters and skate over the surface. I know people like that in some ways because they feel like they got the whole chapter but you can't go deep. If you do take a whole chapter, however, maybe take a whole psalm that's seven or eight verses, maybe you can manage that, but then pick out the main thought of that Psalm, the main central verse of that Psalm, and go deep there.

Don't try to give an equal amount of time to each verse. That will not be helpful. Then you'll end up with more like a lecture or Sunday school class, not really preaching. Number five, do not preach with too many cross-references but use them judiciously. The Puritans probably use an average of 75 different texts per sermon And it's beautiful to see the biblical centricity of their messages.

It's great to study, but you're preaching one text and if it's a doctrinal text, yes you need to go to different stories of the Bible, maybe to support, to illustrate. That's good. But don't do too many. I teach my students this way. If you have a very, very main point in your sermon you need to prove, maybe you'll want to bring in two other Bible texts, not in your context, to nail it home.

If it's a subpoint and you want to go to another text to prove what you're saying, Maybe one, pick the best one, nail that baby home and move on. Because you don't want to have people flipping and turning in the Bible all sermon long. And again, it becomes more like a lecture and not a sermon and people are spending time trying to find the text and they're losing the momentum, the pathos, the ethos of the main point of the sermon. So don't fragment. Focus on the main things and bring them home with power.

And usually if you preach your text thoroughly, you don't need a whole lot of references to other texts because your text, you're preaching the main point of your text. All right, those are ways not to preach like the Puritans. In closing, let me just give you a couple quick ways to preach like the Puritans. Number one, I'll make no comment on this because I've been talking about it yesterday and today. Preach well-rounded sermons that are biblical, doctrinal, experiential, and practical.

Well-rounded sermons that are biblical, doctrinal, experiential, and practical. Number Two, preach the main text, the main doctrine of your text, thoroughly, thoroughly. But do it from the text, not just from the doctrine itself. Number three, preach the whole counsel of God over time. Preach the whole council of God over time.

I could give you many illustrations of this but Puritans were very conscientious about this. They didn't just pick, oh I'm going to preach sermons on the sovereignty of God because that's my forte. Or I'm going to preach sermons on the responsibility of man because that's my forte. They were concerned, also when they preached expository through Bible books, that they would have a variety to bring the whole council of God. They were concerned to include the children.

So they wouldn't preach, for example, four Pauline epistles in a row. They might preach Ephesians and then they go back and preach Genesis because Genesis is full of stories for children or Jonah. They would bounce from the New Testament to the Old Testament and back to the New. So they would be concerned about different themes and bring the whole council of God. They're masters at that.

I think we need to follow them there. Four, preach in a plain style that ordinary people can understand. I think I've said enough about that as well already. But I just want to stress one thing here. And I don't know why this is so, but there are so many preachers today who never or very rarely call out boys and girls and then say something to the children.

I am so mystified by how a preacher can do that and get away with it. If I had one sermon I preached from my pulpit and I never spoke to the boys and girls, I'd have mothers around me, especially mothers, afterwards saying, you know, you didn't say anything directly to the children today. My children need to understand. You see, now it's not that the children don't understand anything of your sermon, but you want to draw them in. You want to keep them beside you, you want to talk to them, you want to apply the word to boys and girls as well as the older ones.

So sometimes you're talking to five-year-olds, sometimes you're talking to teenagers, Sometimes you're talking to adults who don't have very good doctrinal knowledge. Sometimes you're talking to the whole congregation by talking to the boys and girls because when you talk to the boys and girls Every parent is all ears and every elderly person can understand. So, preach in a plain style that ordinary people can understand. Now, what's your default position? I teach my students, which a Dutch Puritan, Alexander Cummry, his wife, his wife, he was always tending to preach to a high level.

His wife would always say to him, honey, you preached above the 13 year old today. 13 year old should be able to stand 95% of what you say. That should be like a default position. An 8-year-old should be able to get at least 50% of what you're saying. And you should encourage parents to have those eight-year-olds, those nine-year-olds, taking notes of your sermons and talking about them afterward include things that people can really understand at a young age.

And my wife was really good that way. Even when our children were five years old, she'd have them taking notes under the sermon. You say, well, how could she do that? Well, she would just go like a dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, G, dot, dot, dot, O, D. Let's say she's, she'd spell out, God is powerful.

And then the child would fill in, draw the line, God is powerful. When the child actually began to learn to write six, seven, the child would just naturally keep taking notes himself or herself. And then in the evening after church, we would go over the notes of both sermons. Include the children. Include the children, please.

They're the future of the church. In fact, in one way, they are the church. And then number five, preach with your life what you preach from the pulpit. Preach with your life what you preach from the pulpit. Preach with your life what you preach from the pulpit.

That's where the Puritans excelled. And, oh, the Westminster Directory for Public Worship makes this so plain. It gives really what I call 10 commandments for ministry. I'm going to read them to you right now and then I'll close with prayer. We are to preach, to perform our entire ministry with our lives diligently.

They called it painfully but that means diligently, working hard at it. Second, faithfully. Third, with impartiality. So that means serving each person not not having favorites but I mean treating everybody well. Fourth, wisdom.

Fifth, with dignity. Sixth, with love for God and man. Seven, with conviction of truth. Eight with exemplary godly conduct. Nine with prayer.

And ten with Christ-centered doxology. I added the tenth one, it's not in the Westminster, but I think that's important too. But the first nine are all there in Westminster Puritan-esque language. So let these qualities in your own life adorn your ministry and give your ministry power and authenticity. That's what we can learn from the Puritans.

And I want to conclude with this one thought. If you're like me, you can get very discouraged in your church when you don't see fruit from week to week. When you don't, You can go a month and not hear of any new conversions or not really hear much from any of God's people that they've been wonderfully fed in that month. And then you wonder, like, is the Lord really using my ministry? But what I want to say to you is this I've been in my church for 38 years now and I find great comfort in this Don't take the short view when you think about your congregation.

Take the long view. If I take the short view, I can get very discouraged. If I take the long view, I can look at all those—our office birds sit in the front of the church—I can look at all those deacons and all those elders and I say, oh wow, there isn't a single one of them, not one of the 23 or 21 now, not one of them was in these positions when I came here. And God used my sermons for many, in fact most, of their conversions and now they're leaders in the church. Praise the Lord!

God is using me despite me. You see, the long-term view is very, very helpful. So you press on, you press on, keep on trusting the Lord. And don't forget, God can use a sermon many, many years later. I once got very discouraged at one point and I read this in John Flavel.

Do you know there's a man by the name of Luke Short who sat under John Flavel's ministry and he heard a sermon that Flavel preached when he was 15 years old. That made a deep impression on him, but he shook it off. And he lived on unsaved until he was 99. And the Lord brought back that sermon 84 years later to Luke Short and used it for his conversion. After the minister was long dead.

Isn't that amazing? And Luke Short lived seven more years to declare the wonders of God till he was 106. But Wow, converted at 99 from the sovereignty when he was 15. Cast the bread upon the waters, brothers, for thou shalt find it, the fruit of it, after what? Many days.

So trust the Lord that he will bless his own word. Let's pray. Great God of heaven, please teach us to preach like the Puritans and follow them in so far as they follow Christ where it will be beneficial in our generation. And please teach us also where not to follow their example specifically but do help us at all costs to be like them as they modeled their preaching with their own lives, their own prayers, their own fear of God, their own dependency on the Holy Spirit. Help us to be like that.

Oh, make us more like that Lord. Help us to follow the Puritans in so far as they followed Jesus Christ. In Jesus name we pray, amen.