Puritan Preaching

I'm enjoying attending my first conference since the girls were born, The Puritan Reformed Fellowship in East Kilbride where we are being treated to Joel Beeke's passionate wisdom and knowledge of the Puritans. I avoided the Puritans like the plague until fairly recently as the ones I had read seemed too wordy and cold. I just started in the wrong place it seems, I am loving reading the Puritans now on a daily basis.  Dr Beeke has unwrapped the Puritans for us in two talks so far. One of these on the topic of Puritan Preaching. Below is a summary:

The Puritans loved preached, their books are basically sermons and they were in print for a long time because people loved their preaching. They developed plans for preaching, the whole counsel of God. Their sermons were rich in exegesis, doctrine, devotion and application and in experience, they preached an experienced Christ. They sought to reform the church with their preaching, they failed. They did however succeed to transform people through their preaching. In fact people would flock to hear them, leaving standing room only.
Puritan books were loved and well read, because they preached Christocentric sermons stripping away man in his sinfulness. For the Puritan there was two preachers, the preacher and the Holy Spirit. Puritan preaching lifts our eyes to see Christ, it ravishes the soul, focuses the sight on eternal realities both heaven and hell.

The believed that the preached Word was God's usual means to convert people, where every sermon was dressed in the mirror of Scripture. Richard Sibbes said the second greatest gift that God has given the church after the Spirit of God is a sound minister. For them the pulpit was at the centre of the church because it was from there that God feed His people for the whole week.

Yet their aim was please God, not the audience, those they were concerned with the weight and preciousness of souls they aimed more than anything to please God and to preach for His glory.

At it's best they desired to labour to awaken their own souls before seeking to awaken other souls.

In preaching they aimed to: 1) Address the mind with clarity, 2) confront the conscience-pressing home the guilt of sins, 3) woo the heart passionately- zealous and optimistically urging people to be reconciled with a God would seeks you as a spouse to marry you to Christ. 4) A plainness in preaching to be clear.

Their method was to be both idealist like Romans 8, realistic like Romans 7 and optimistic like Revelation 21. He said they preached as though they could save people, but 'preached like they were knocking the door, knowing that only the Holy Spirit has the key'.

Dr Beeke showed us that the Puritans were great preachers but then encouraged us not to preach like them in some ways.

Don't preach like them 

Don't preach doctrinal sermons, preach a text and expound it.
Don't multiple points on points at lots of levels- we live in a different age keep it simple.
Don't overwhelm with application
Don't preach too many sermons on one text

Do Preach like them
Do preach  doctrinal rich experiential sermons with application
Do Burrow down deep into the doctrine of the text
Do Preach the whole counsel of God over time.
Do Preach in a style that everyone can understand.
Do live a consistent life, preach with your life. Our whole life should be a sermon.
Love your people.


They were known not only for their preaching though but also for their piety, their lives affected by the preparation for preaching gave them a love for people. It is said that many of them died in the great plague because they loved their people deeply and didn't abandon them.