Father, you have already blessed us this morning in the testimonies that we've heard of your grace and the opportunity to raise our praise before your face. We ask, Father, that you would continue that work in us. Lord, you have been so gracious. You have given us privileges far beyond any that we could imagine. You've given us the privilege of even now bowing our hearts and knowing that our prayers are heard before your throne. Lord, we come before you not dressed in our own righteousness, for we can only stand dressed in the righteousness of your Son, Jesus Christ. And Father, we give you thanks for the way that your grace has pursued us, that you have planted faith in us. And Father, for many of us, beyond any wild expectation, given us the privilege of speaking for you to your people. Father, your word is treasure to us. It's precepts, it's protections, it's promises. Lord, as it is opened before us today, we pray for our brother, Dr. Beeky. We ask for him what we would ask for ourselves that you would assist him in every way. And we pray, Father, that as he preaches, your word would be held clearly before our eyes. We pray, Lord, that you would enable us to glorify your Son, to see Christ even as we have been singing. Father, we pray that the approval of man would have no pull upon him, but that he would preach to reach the souls of men. And Father, we pray that through him you would encourage us to do exactly that thing. that we would worship you not only in the prayers that we lift up and the songs that we have raised, but especially in the way that we listen to, inwardly digest, and then respond to your word. Minister to us in this time as well. Use your servant to edify us, to build us up, to prepare us to go from this place, not forgetting what we have heard, but serving you. Give us one eye set firmly on your glory and another on our own need. For we ask these things in Christ's name. Amen. Well, it's great to be with you. This is not an ordinary conference for me. A great deal of work has gone into this conference, and there's been a very special time with Stephen in prayer, but also a special time in my own life as I had some basal cell skin cancer on my eye. And my plastic surgeon said, well, don't worry about it. You'll be able to do this conference because only 5% of the people who have this surgery need to have Something from above their eye brought below their eye. Their eyes sealed shut for three weeks, so don't worry about it. And well, I was one of those 5%. And for three weeks, I was winking at my wife, solid, for three weeks. And at the end of it, which was supposed to happen yesterday, my eye was going to be reopened. And I said to her, but I need it sooner than that. I need to go to this conference. And so this conference has been a huge trial for me. Am I going to be able to go? Am I not? And finally, the plastic surgeon said, well, I'll reopen your eye. last Friday, see if that works. And it did work, but unfortunately I can't see very well out of it yet, so I'm still a one-eyed preacher. I feel discombobulated, but I ask you for your patience and for God's. Ask the Lord to pray that God will help me deliver these messages. And I do feel that there's been so much involved in coming here, for me personally, but also other circumstances, that God is going to do something great in these days. That's my personal conviction, and I don't say that lightly. I do a lot of conferences, and I've actually never said this at the beginning of speaking. But do pray greatly in these days that God would do wonderful things and breakthrough in this city, which is the home of the very last major revival in the United States of America. I want to just read two verses from the Bible, 2 Timothy 4, verses 1 and 2. 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, be instant in season, out of season, reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine. Well, my goal with you in my two addresses is to speak to you about Puritans. Puritan preaching, which took hold by God's grace of men, and the Puritan view of prayer by which men, through grace, the same grace, take hold of God. So this morning, we want to look at this golden age of preaching. which we call the Puritan age. And through preaching and the publication of their sermons, the Puritans did more to reform the church and to transform individual lives of people than any other great preaching age in church history. And though ultimately they failed to reform the Church of England, they did transform thousands, tens of thousands of people by the Spirit's blessing upon their preaching. By the grace of God, Puritan preaching took hold of men and made them new creations in Christ Jesus. And the Puritans did that by preaching four ways. They preached biblically, they preached doctrinally, they preached experientially, that is the work of the spirit and the soul, and they preached practically. And the common people heard them gladly. Henry Smith, one of the Puritan preachers, called the golden-tongued Christostom of the Puritans was so popular as a preacher that a contemporary historian of his day, Thomas Fuller, wrote of him that persons of good quality brought their own pews with them to the church, I mean their legs, to stand upon in the aisles. That was a Puritan way of saying church was always overflowing. No wonder the Puritan minister was called the hero of 16th century reformation. Puritan preaching is transforming. And so what I want to do with you in this hour is I want to just give you quickly as an introduction five major thoughts about Puritan preaching. We'll have to look at the primacy of preaching in their thinking, their program for preaching, their passion for preaching, their power in preaching, and their plainness in preaching. That's the first half of my talk, really quickly. In the second half, I want to look at how one individual preacher called John Bunyan preached to the heart, not just the mind, to the heart of his people, and how God used that to take hold of man. So first then, just a quick introduction to Puritan preaching. The Puritans believed first then in the primacy of preaching, the primacy of preaching. They had a profound sense that God built his church primarily through preaching, preaching the word and nothing but the word. Anthony Burgess said, Preachers must preach only the Word, and their hearers must feel that they are inside of the Word when they hear the minister preaching. Preaching the Word in season and out of season. Even when you don't feel like it, even when there's opposition. You do nothing, nothing but preach the Word. If you're not preaching the Word, no one has any need to listen to you. And Burgess said, you need to preach the word for God's sake, because it's His word that ministers are proclaiming and His honor that's at stake. You need to do it for man's sake, because only God's word has power to save souls. And you need to do it for your own sake as a minister, because you're given a ministry and not a magistrate. That is, you're called to be a servant and not the Lord. And so the Puritans viewed preaching as the minister's principal work and the hearer's principal benefit. And such a perspective, you see, made every single sermon a momentous occasion. John Preston, there is not a sermon that is heard, but it sets every hearer nearer to heaven or nearer to hell. So Puritan preachers made it their aim to please God rather than the people. They stripped away all masks. They didn't stand on the pulpit like modern day preachers and say, well, I need to preach about something now today that's not going to make you feel too comfortable, but don't worry, I'm not here to make you feel guilty. They preached, as one Puritan said, to make your consciences stand naked before God. and to beat behind every bush that every Adam hid behind to bring that Adam out naked and stand him before God. They aim to produce guilt so that you would be driven to the glorious Savior. And they believe that under preaching that Savior would be made precious to hearers. And so they love to preach Him. And they believed in preaching. They believed in preaching. That preaching would change the world and change the church and transform the lives of men and women. He said to a Puritan, oh, you're preaching to me. I said, that's a great thing. What do you mean negative? The word preaching was always positive in their mind. The primacy of preaching. Secondly, they had an amazing program, amazing program for preaching. I call it a five-pronged program. First was reforming preaching itself by frequent preaching. They preached on Sundays, they preached during the week, they preached wherever they had opportunity. Unlike many preachers today who try to preach as little as possible, they try to preach as much as possible. Number two, they formed a thing called lectureships. You see, what happened was they got ejected from their pulpits because they wouldn't go along with all the rules and all the kind of halfway Roman Catholic things in the Book of Common Prayer. And so 2,000 of them got ejected one day in 1662. But the interesting thing is the Anglican preachers, at least those who wanted to grow their congregations, realized the Puritans were much better preachers than they were, so they would hire Or there'd be some lawyer in town who would hire, or some in the court who would hire Puritan preachers to be lecturers in that church. And so here's what would happen. If I was an Anglican minister, I would preach on Sunday morning. Everybody would be fairly bored at my oratorical skills and my bringing in Latin and Hebrew and Greek. But they'd suffer through it because you're supposed to be in church on Sunday morning. Then on Sunday afternoon, my lecturer would preach, and he'd be a Puritan, and the church would be packed out, and everybody would want to come to hear him preach. And he'd preach again on Wednesday night, and he'd teach a class or two, and I as the Anglican pastor would do some counseling. But the Puritan lecturer, would be the one that would really keep the church together and growing because people loved their preaching. Those were called lectureships. Most of the great Puritans were lecturers, so-called, in the 1660s and 70s, but really they were preachers. The third aspect of their program for preaching was called prophesying. And what that meant was, it was also called exercises or godly exercises. What that meant was that preachers would get together, usually an older preacher, like Steve Lawson, he would call six of us younger guys together and say to us, you all have to preach on 1 Timothy 1.15 on a given day. And what we would do then is we would all preach 50 to 60 to 70 minute sermons on the same text, one behind the other. And then Dr. Lawson would stand up and give all the applications in the last sermon. So you'd hear six or seven sermons, a whole day of preaching. And then Dr. Lawson would lead the discussion and every single sermon would be critiqued by all the other ministers. It's sort of like getting your sermons critiqued while you're in seminary, but we stopped doing that after seminary. The Puritans didn't. They wanted so badly to improve their preaching, they had these prophesians. And these prophesians worked really well for the first 20, 30 years until Queen Elizabeth got jealous of them and banished them, and some archbishops followed through with her rule. Others didn't, and they continued for a while. The bad news was that after a while, the people wanted to hear preaching so badly that they asked if they could attend. And so they would sit in the back. And that was not good because, well, it was good for them. They got to hear seven sermons. But it wasn't good for the local preacher who had his own people in the back because he got a little bit jealous when his sermons would be critiqued in front of his people. He'd be criticized. And so the things kind of wore out after a while. But in the heyday of Puritanism, prophesying were a big part of their continued improvement of preaching. And the fourth aspect of their program for preaching was the printing of sermon books. Do you realize in the 1620s that 22% of all literature that came off of the printing presses in England was nothing but Puritan sermons repackaged in the form of books? 22%. And then fifthly was ministerial training. The Puritans demanded a college-trained clergy. They were educated at Cambridge, Oxford, various colleges there, Harvard, Trinity College in Dublin. These schools were a mighty force in shaping young men with staunch Puritan convictions about biblical preaching. Thirdly, The Puritans had passion, passion for preaching. The great difference between Puritan preaching and Anglican preaching was grounded in this sense of passion. The Puritans could say with a Scottish, may I call him a Puritan with a small p, Samuel Rutherford, I have two great desires in life. One is to rejoice in Christ and the other is to preach Christ. That's how they were wired. They loved to prepare for preaching. They preached to themselves first and foremost. They despised cold professionalism. John Bunyan said, I preach what I felt, what I smartingly, that is painfully, did feel. Indeed, I've been sent as one unto them from the dead. I went myself in chains to preach to them in chains and carried that fire in my conscience that I persuaded them to beware of. You see, the very act of preaching was something they relished and cherished as God speaking to men. They believed what Calvin said in every sermon. There were two preachers, the earthly preacher speaking some words, the Holy Spirit taking those words and shooting them with arrows from his bow into the heart of every hearer according to that hearer's need. Puritans loved preaching. That's what gave them so much passion. But secondly, they loved the people and the people's souls to whom they preached. You know, when the great plague swept through London in the Puritan days, it was the Anglican preachers that left town because they were afraid of catching the disease. The Puritans would go right into their people's rooms. Some of them would die. But they preferred pastoring to their people. than to live and abandon like novices their sheep. And it's that combination, loving the truth, loving Christ, loving preaching, and loving the souls of their people that gave them passion and energy and zeal for the preaching of the gospel. Which leads me to my fourth thought, power in preaching. There was something about Puritan preaching that people understood five minutes into a sermon, this man had the anointing of the Holy Spirit. There was power there, power that people could not explain. The Puritans followed largely in preaching the method set forth in the most famous preaching book they used, which is a very small book of 150 pages by William Perkins, the father of Puritanism, called The Art of Prophesying. And basically, following Perkins, they said there are three parts of man to address in every sermon. Number one, you address the mind with clarity. Preaching is to be directed to people as rational beings. A mindless Christianity, they knew, would sooner or later produce a spineless Christianity. But secondly, Puritan preaching confronted the conscience pointedly. They saw the conscience as the light of nature. And they wanted to convict people, to show them their need, to reason with them, and so they pressed those consciences urgently, directly, specifically. And then thirdly they preached wooing the heart passionately. They addressed the mind with clarity, they confronted the conscience pointedly and they wooed the heart passionately. William Craddock, an unknown but very important Puritan 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 woo you as spouses to marry you to Jesus Christ. And then fifthly, plainness in preaching, plainness in preaching. The Puritans believe that they should address every kind of hearer plainly in their own language, not going above their heads, but shooting the word to their mind, their conscience, and their heart. That was critical. And so the Puritans believed in speaking to different groups of people in their church. William Perkins actually singled out seven of them. He said, we need to preach to the ignorant and unteachable. We need to preach to the ignorant but teachable. We need to preach to those who have some knowledge but are not yet humbled and repentant. We need to preach to the humbled who are repentant but don't have liberty in Christ. We need to preach to those who believe and are solid now in their faith and have assurance. We need to preach to those who are fallen, that is, backsliders, either in faith or in practice, and then, vintage Puritanism, we need to preach to people who are a mixed group, that is, a combination of any of the six above. And so what they were doing, you see, is they believed in cases of conscience. They actually believed that 95% of a minister's counseling should take place from the pulpit. And so what you did was you counsel, you exegeted the word, and then you counsel people, and you address different cases of conscience, so that by the time your sermon was over, 60 to 70 minutes after you began, so they had time to do the counseling as well, People would walk out feeling they had been counseled in their particular need. They didn't need to go see the pastor privately most of the time because they had their counseling session from the pastor on the pulpit. Now, that's not a dart against private counseling. It is, however, a promotion for pastoral counseling from the pulpit. Now, in plainness of preaching, The Puritans followed a threefold method. First, the sermon was to be exegetical and expositional. Second, it was to be doctrinal and didactic. And then thirdly, it was to be applicatory, experiential, telling them how to use the sermon and how it would profit them if the Holy Spirit would apply it to their souls. and all kinds of preaching to all groups of people had one goal, to center them, to bottom them, as the Puritans used to say, on Jesus Christ. Thomas Adams Christ is the sum of the whole Bible, prophesied, typified, prefigured, exhibited, demonstrated, 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 the whole Scriptures. Robert Bolton, Jesus Christ is offered most freely in every sermon and without exception of any person every Sabbath. They were preachers who loved to preach Jesus Christ, and their applications were to lead sinners to Christ, to get sinners to drink out of Christ, to be filled with the fullness of Christ, to experience Christ, and then to go out and live Christ. And so they preached with lots of application. And that preaching was transforming, it was discriminatory, it made them depend on the Holy Spirit in the act of preaching, and it made them pursue holiness in their own life. The Puritans believed that you could do everything right according to the textbook I'm preaching, but if you were not dependent on the Holy Spirit, and you did not lead a godly life itself, your ministry would lose its power, its savor, and its authority. And therefore, the life of the minister was so critical. As one of them said, the minister's life is the life of his ministry. Another one said, a minister's life must be a transcript of his sermons. Now, John Bunyan is a notable example of these five things. And I want to take the second half of this address to talk to you about how Bunyan particularly reached the heart. How through his preaching, God took hold of men. And that's critical to understand. And I focus particularly on the heart here because that's particularly where most modern day preaching is so very weak. There are many reformed preachers. who adhere to the Westminster standards, who adhere to the three forms of unity, who are reformed, confessional, solid, who don't preach to the heart. They preach exegetically, they preach expositionally, they walk you through the text, you get a basic understanding of the text as you leave church, great. But then they say amen before they bring it to the heart. And that's where we need, desperately today, the Holy Spirit to persuade ministers and to give them light and liberty and power and authority to bring the Word to the heart. And that's where John Bunyan, for example, excelled. In fact, John Owen, the Prince of the Puritans, once said to Charles II, that he went to hear the preaching of the unlearned tinker of Bedford, John Bunyan, because, may it please your majesty, if I could possess the tinker's abilities for preaching, I would willingly relinquish all my learning." Now, was that an exaggeration? I don't know. But certainly Owen, at the very least, was profoundly moved and impressed by the preaching of John Bunyan. When Bunyan started to preach, hundreds of people, thousands, were genuinely astonished. And no one was more astonished than John Bunyan. He said, it was incredulous at first that God would speak through me to take hold of the heart of any man. But his success in preaching actually became a reassurance for Bunyan that he was called to preach. Because it was so unusual in his day. I mean, the Puritans were great preachers, I said. But at the same time, they believed solidly in good education. And Bunyan was just one of those rare exceptions who didn't have that kind of education. So a lot of people said, he's not called to be a preacher. But when the hundreds and the thousands came, and they were convicted of sin, and they were led to Christ, and they became solid believers, and believers from the heart, God vindicated Bunyan's preaching. In the first couple years of his preaching, Bunyan himself was not experiencing much liberty in Christ, and so he preached more about law. But a few years later, when he experienced the fullness of Christ, the righteousness of Christ, He preached gospel to the full. You can't read Bunyan's come and welcome to Jesus Christ and not be moved by the freeness, the liberty, the largeness of this man in his preaching and his offering grace to the greatest of Jerusalem sinners. But prior to that time, he was already thrown in jail. And his godly young wife named Elizabeth and pleaded repeatedly for his release. And at one time the judge would come, call her to come into his presence and she would plead with him to release her. She said, I have one blind daughter, I have a recent miscarriage, we have four other children. Please, my children, my blind daughter needs her father. And the judge was a little bit touched and he said, if you can talk to your husband and get him to agree, get him to agree not to preach, I'll let him go, I'll let him go. And she replied, my Lord, he dares not leave off preaching as long as he has a mouth to speak. And once the judge called Bunyan himself. He said, I've decided to release you. All you have to do is say you will not preach. He said, sir, you release me today, I'll be preaching tomorrow. The judge said, back to jail with you. You see, for Bunyan, preaching, preaching, even when he was in prison and confined, was his love. And so while he was in prison, he took the sermons he preached and he wrote them out, and we have his 60-some books today, half of which were written while he was in prison. He loved preaching. He believed that the word was a burning fire in his heart and he could not contain that fire. And so when he came out of jail and he continued to preach, his popularity did not wane. In fact, he was so popular to the end of his preaching days that Robert Southey, a contemporary, says that when he visited London, where Bunyan's reputation was so great, He said, if a day's notice was given, the meeting house at Southwark, at which he generally preached, would not hold half of the people that attended. 3,000 people would gather there frequently, and not less than 1,200 would come out to hear him on weekdays and dark winter's mornings at 7 a.m. What was it about his preaching? that so captivated the people. Well, he preached to their heart. He preached to their heart as well as to their mind. In some gospel truths open, John Burton wrote of its author in his introduction, Bunyan hath through grace taken these three heavenly degrees. It's kind of a pun on the fact they didn't have any earthly theological degrees. to wit, degree number one, union with Christ, degree number two, the anointing of the Spirit, and degree number three, the experience of the temptations of Satan. And I say that these three degrees do more fit a man for that mighty work of preaching the gospel than all university learning and degrees that can be had in this world. Well, Bunyan had a high regard for the office of preaching and for education as well. But he was really a self-taught man. God brings along one or two of these men every century, doesn't he? Lloyd-Jones, last century. Spurgeon, 19th century. Bunyan, 17th century. Bunyan wasn't proud that he didn't have education. He just didn't have opportunity. But he had a heart for it. He had a heart for it. And you can see that in his picture of a minister in Pilgrim's Progress. It's a fascinating picture. He describes it this way. There was a grave person, that is a serious person, whose eyes are lifted up to heaven, and the best of books is in his hand. Bible, of course. The law of truth was written upon his lips. The world was behind his back. And there was a golden crown on his head. And he stood as if he were pleading with men. And the interpreter tells Christian, who sees this man, and asks about him. It is to show thee that his work is to know and unfold dark things to sinners, to show thee that slighting and despising the things that are present for the love that he hath to his master's service, he is sure in the world that comes next to have glory for his reward. Do you understand that? What Bunyan is saying through Pilgrim's Progress is saying, when you preach faithful, you've got to expect persecution. You've got to expect it. It won't go easy, but you'll have heaven. In heaven you'll have a sure reward for leading sinners to Jesus Christ. So it's this passionate zeal that kept him going, making shoelaces in prison so that his family would have a few more pennies at home in order to be able to eat, and writing books. Twelve and a half years in prison. crying, weeping over his blind daughter at home whom he missed like crazy and felt she needed him, but he couldn't do anything about it. But he couldn't abandon the call to preach the moment he would be released. Here's a man who had tasted the terror of the soul over conviction of sin. a man who had tasted many doubts about the gospel as he struggled to come to liberty in Christ, a man who knew the joy of grace as he read Luther's commentary in Galatians, heard his pastor preach on Song of Solomon 4 verse 1, Behold thou art fair, my love, behold thou art fair, and then was brought to full liberty in the gospel. These experiences of Bunyan in his own heart were behind. He's preaching to the heart of his hearers. When Banyan was finally delivered for his own soul, he tells a story in three or four paragraphs. I need to read it if you're going to understand the last 15 minutes of my address about how he preaches to the heart. This is what he says, one day as I was passing in the field, and that too was some dashes on my conscience, that is some convictions on my conscience, fearing lest all was not yet right with me after all I had experienced, suddenly this sentence fell upon my soul, thy righteousness is in heaven. And methought with all, I saw with the eyes of my soul Jesus Christ at God's right hand. dare I say, as my personal righteousness. So that wherever I was or whatever I was doing, God could not say of me, He lacks my righteousness, for that was just before Him in His Son. I also saw, moreover, that it was not my good frame of heart that made my righteousness better, nor yet my bad frame that made my righteousness worse. For my righteousness, you understand, was Jesus Christ Himself, the same yesterday and today and forever. And now did my chains fall off my legs indeed. I was loose from my afflictions and my irons. My temptations fled away, so that from that time Those dreadful scriptures of God, of warning, left off to trouble me, and now I went home rejoicing for the grace and love of God. I lived for some time very sweetly at peace with God through Christ. Oh, methought Christ, Christ, there is nothing but Christ that is before my eyes. I was now not only for looking upon this and other benefits of Christ apart, as meditating on his blood, and then his burial, and then his resurrection. But now I learn to consider him as a whole Christ. And it was glorious to me to see him both in his humiliation and his exaltation, and the worth and prevalency of all of his benefits as one package, and that because of this. Now I could finally look for myself to him and should reckon that all those graces of God that were now were green in me were yet but like those cracked groats and four-pence half pennies that rich men carry in their purses when their gold is in their trunks at home. Oh, I saw that my gold was in my trunk at home in Christ, my Lord and my Savior. Now Christ became all to me. So you see here an experiential knowledge of sin, of conviction, temptation, doubt, fear, Satan, but also forgiveness, Christ, grace, and these things. in a sense, were the Holy Spirit's education to prepare him to preach to the heart. Now, how did he do it? This is my last section. I like to put it in three thoughts. Participatory, pleading, and Christ-exalting. Participatory preaching, pleading preaching, Christ-exalting preaching. Bunyan believed that those listening to preaching should not only be spectators, but participants. And to that end, he always addressed his hearers in the second person. He was direct. He often called out various cases of conscience by name. And he used his great imagination. and his masterful ability to use illustrations, simple illustrations, in order to enlarge the souls of his hearers to take in what he was saying. George Wakefield says of his preaching, he was folksy and colloquial, even as he was sacred and reverent, as he confronted his hearers with the issues of life and death, heaven and hell, often using sanctified, imaginative, usage of the Holy Scriptures. Not in a negative way, not going beyond the boundaries of Scripture. Let me give you an example. He's preaching on John 6.37, the Father gave to Christ, all that the Father gives to Christ shall come to Him. And Bunyan turns the word, shall come, into a character by that name. You know, he's always, in his books, Holy War, all his allegorical books, he's using all kinds of names that catch people's attention. So he, in his preaching, he then answers all the objections of trembling doubters by assuring them that they need not worry, for Mr. Shalcombe has answered all their questions. Mr. Shalcombe can raise you from this death, he says. And he draws his hearers into the sermon, so that they become participants in this direct way of preaching. And he tells them, even if you're a Jerusalem sinner, Mr. Shelcombe offers you Christ freely. And one part of the sermon, he's depicting before his people, Peter preaching. And then the objector, the objector of course is the person in the pew, who has all kinds of reasons why the gospel cannot be for him, the greatest of sinners. And here's what he says. Peter's preaching to you now. Repent, every one of you, and be baptized, every one of you, in his name, for the remission of sins, and you shall come, every one of you, and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. Objector. But I was one of them that plotted to take away his life. May I still be saved by him? Peter says, every one of you. But you object, but I was one of them that bare false witness against him. Is there peace for me? Is there grace for me? Peter says, every one of you. But you say, I was one of them that cried, I'll crucify him and crucify him, and desired that Barabbas, the murderer, might live rather than him. What will become of me, do you think? Peter says, I am to preach repentance and remission of sin to every one of you. Ah, yes, but I was one of them that did spit in his face when he stood before his accusers. I was one that mocked him when in anguish he hanged bleeding on the tree. Is there still room for me? Every one of you, says Peter. But I was one of them in his extremity that said, give him gall and vinegar to drink. Why may I not expect the same gall and vinegar when anguish and guilt is now upon me? Repent of these your wickedness, says Peter, and here's your mission of sins for every one of you. I railed on him, I reviled him, I hated him, I rejoiced to see him mocked by others. Can there really be hope for me? Ah, yes, says Peter, to you today, for every one of you. Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. You see, Bunyan passionately reasoned with his listeners to respond to the truth of sin and judgment, as well as the truth of forgiveness and grace. Listen to him preach. Poor sinner. Awake! Awake! Eternity is coming, God and His Son. They are both coming to judge the world. Awake! Are you yet asleep, poor sinner? Let me set the trumpet to your ear once again this morning. The heavens will be shortly on a burning flame, the earth and the works thereof shall be burned up, and wicked men shall go into perdition. Do you hear me, sinner? You see, Bunyan isn't satisfied with simply asserting the truth. He put the trumpet to the ear of his listeners. He compelled them to respond. He dragged them into his sermon, as it were. Sinner, he says, be advised, ask again thy own heart and say to thyself, am I really come to Jesus Christ? For upon this condition, am I come or am I not? Have I listened to Mr. Shalcombe? Hangs heaven and hell as to thee. If thou can say, I am come, and God shall approve that saying, happy, happy, happy man art thou. But if thou art not come, what can make thee happy but coming? Yea, why can a man be happy than for his not coming to Jesus Christ for life? Who must be damned in hell? Will that be you? You see, He encouraged heart searching. He won't let a listener be content to hear only words. He prodded them, He challenged them, He invited them, He warned them, He allured them. Ah, friends, He says, consider there is now hopes of mercy, but then there will not be any more on that great day. Now Christ holds forth mercy to you, but then on that day He will not. Now there are His servants that beseech you to accept of His grace. But if you lose the opportunity that is now right in your hand, Thou thyself mayest beseech Christ hereafter, and no mercy shall be given thee. Urging, pressing for participatory preaching. And then, the pleading element that comes in such preaching is so powerful in Bunyan. He writes, oh, the rage and the roaring of this lion, Satan, and the hatred that he manifests against the Lord Jesus and against them that are purchased with his blood. He's out to destroy you. The devil lives to torment your soul, to induce your heart to forsake Christ, and to embrace the sin and temptation. The best way to respond to Satan's pleading said Bunyan, is for preachers to out shoot the devil in his own bowl by out pleading sinners on better grounds than Satan pleads for them to be lost. He did not merely set life and set death before the eyes of the people, but he implored them. He took Paul seriously. I beseech you, be ye reconciled to God. And Bunyan wasn't afraid. He wasn't afraid not only to preach glorious pictures of the beauty of Christ and the loveliness of being in Him, but he also wasn't afraid to paint terrible pictures of eternal condemnation. The soul that is lost, he said, will never be found again, never be recovered again, never redeemed again. Its banishment from God is everlasting. The fire in which it burns and by which it must be tormented is a fire that is everlasting fire, everlasting burning. That is fearful. He continues, now tell the stars, tell the drops of water, thou tell the blades of grass that are spread upon the face of all the earth, if thou canst. And yet sooner mayest thou do this than count the thousands of millions of thousands of years that a damned soul shall be in hell. He's speaking here on the eternality of damnation. Now Bunyan often impersonated God in his preaching. Sometimes he impersonated Christ, sometimes he impersonated the hell-bound sinner as he pleaded with the sinner to turn to Christ and live. There's a book called The Barren Fig Tree. It's a series of sermons he preached on Luke 13, six through nine. His impersonation is unbelievable. You feel like you hear the axe cutting down the tree and it's too late and you're going to hell. Well, God used those sermons for the conversion of many people. He even impersonates death. Death, come, smite me, this fig tree. And with all, the Lord shakes the sinner, and he whirls him around upon a sickbed, saying, Take him, death. He's abused my patience and forbearance, not remembering that it should have led him to repentance and to the fruits of repentance. Death, I call to thee. Fetch away this fig tree to the fire. Fetch this barren professor to hell. This death comes with grim looks into the chamber, the sickbed chamber. Yea, and hell follows with him to the bedside, and both stare this professor in the face. Yea, they begin to lay hands upon him, one smiting him with pains in his body, with a headache, with a heartache, with a backache, with shortness of breath, and fainting, and qualms, and trembling of joints. and almost all the symptoms of a man past all recovery. And now while death is thus tormenting your body, if you are outside of Christ, hell is doing with the mind and conscience, striking you with its pains, casting sparks of fire in dither, wounding you with sorrows and fears of everlasting damnation. Now you begin to think to yourself and to cry to God for mercy. Oh Lord, spare me, spare me, spare me one more year. Nay, says God, you've been a provocation to me these three years. How many times have you disappointed me? How many seasons have you spent in vain? How many sermons and other mercies did I in my patience afford you? But to no purpose at all, take him death, take him. Can you imagine sitting under a sermon like that? If you're not yet in Christ, You could not go to sleep under that sermon. You see, while Bunyan pleaded with people to see the severity of sin and hell, he also pleaded with them, however, equally strongly about the mercies of God in the face of Jesus Christ. cast up but thine eyes a little higher, sinner. And behold, there is the mercy seat and the throne of grace to which thou mayest come, and thou wouldst come, and thou shouldst come, and by which thou must be saved. O coming sinner, don't linger. What promise thou findest in the word of Christ? Strain it, strain it, use it, plead it, whithersoever thou canst. Just don't corrupt it, and His blood and merits will answer all for thee, and what the Word says, or any true consequence that is drawn therefrom. We may boldly venture upon it. Take those promises and use them, and plead them before God, coming sinner, so that thou wilt come freely to Jesus Christ. But if Satan will not rest for a moment in pleading with men's souls, preachers must not rest from their great duty to plead with men's souls as well. A minister's calling is to out-plead Satan, Banyan says. Listen to just one more example. He impersonates a great sinner, saying this. Say when thou art upon thy knees to thyself, Lord, here I am. I'm just a great Jerusalem sinner, a sinner of the biggest size, one whose burden is of the greatest bulk and the heaviest weight, one that cannot stand long without sinking into hell, without thy supporting hand. Oh, I say, put thy name in, into the throne of heaven, along with Mary Magdalene, along with Manasseh, that thou mayest fare as the Magdalene and the Manasseh sinners always fare when they come to Jesus Christ. There's room for the greatest of sinners. Christ exalting preaching, participatory preaching to the heart, pleading preaching to the heart, Christ exalting preaching to the heart. Bunyan said his first love was to exalt Christ through preaching, with passion, and he did it even with theological grandeur. He said, O son of God, grace is in all thy tears. Grace came bubbling out of thy side with thy blood. Grace came forth with every word from thy sweet mouth. Grace came out where the whip smote thee, where the thorns pricked thee, where the nails and spears pierced thee. O blessed son of God, thou art nothing but grace indeed, unsearchable riches of grace, grace enough to make angels wonder, grace enough to make sinners happy, grace enough to astonish the devils of hell. No one who comes to thee shall ever perish. Bunyan's preaching was also doxological to the heart in Christ. Lots of exclamation points in his preaching. Oh grace, oh amazing grace, to see a prince and treat a beggar, to receive an alms would be a strange sight. To see a king and treat a traitor, to accept of mercy would be a stranger sight still. But to see God, God, the God of the heavens and treat a sinner, and to hear Christ say, I stand at the door and knock, with a heart full and a heaven full of grace to bestow upon Him that opens, that is a sight that dazzles the very eyes of angels. O praise Him and preach Him to the full." And ultimately Bunyan has in mind that the saved will exalt Jesus Christ in glory forever. He says, then shall we have perfect and everlasting visions of God and that blessed one, his son, Jesus Christ, ensure our will and affections be ever in a burning flame of love to God and his son, Jesus Christ. Then our consciences will have that peace and joy that neither tongue nor pen of angels or men can express. Then will our memory be so enlarged to retain all things that happened to us in this world. And we will see Christ's work in all of them, working together for his glory and our good to the everlasting ravishing of our hearts. Finally, Bunyan repeatedly stresses that this glorious Christ-exalting salvation ought to move us with longing and excitement toward God. We ought to catch a vision of the warmth and the sincerity of our Savior and of His invitation to come to Him. O sinner, what sayest thou? How dost thou like being saved? Does not thy mouth water at Christ's salvation? Does not thy heart flutter at being saved? O come then, the Spirit and the Bride say come, and let him that heareth say come, let him that is a thirst come, whosoever will let him take of the water of life freely. Well, the Puritans knew how to take hold of man in preaching, and God blessed that preaching with a conscious sense that they would preach as if they could convert a sinner, even as they knew they could not do a thing to convert a sinner, but that the Holy Spirit would use their preaching as a means to do so. And that's why Bunyan was always amazed when God used him for the conversion of sinners. And remarkable conversions took place under his ministry. Bunyan was going to preach, one scholar writes, in a certain village church, rather the worse for drink. A Cambridge scholar said he was resolved to hear the tinker prate. So he went into the church to laugh and to mock and to disturb the service, but in the end he stayed to listen and as a result was himself converted and soon became a preacher. These are common stories under Bunyan's preaching. This participation in the divine drama of loving their souls and pleading with them to close with Christ in order to exalt King Jesus forever. This was the passionate zeal, the desire, the conviction, the energy of John Bunyan. I close with this quote of Bunyan. The battle is for the hearts of men. Their minds are in darkness because their hearts are in captivity. For Bunyan, the reality of that dreadful condition led him to use every weapon in his armory to assail the fortress and to break through to the inner being as he preached to the heart If we wish to cause a burning which will set the force of error on fire and warm the very soul of this cold earth, we must preach for the fire of hell behind us and the glory of heaven before us. May God help us today and may the Spirit be pleased today to give us men like John Bunyan, men like the Puritans, men like William Perkins, who at the end of his famous book on preaching which moved all these Puritan preachers, his last sentence is, so the summary of all is this, preach one Christ by the praise of Christ to all men. May the Spirit of God teach us, master us by His free and sovereign grace and fill us with a glow of divine truth that we would be made willing to be counted fools, even to be imprisoned for the sake of Christ. for the privilege of preaching as dying men to a dying people the beauty of the living Christ. Let's pray. Great God of heaven, we thank Thee so much for Puritan preaching and for how they reached the mind, the conscience, but also the inmost being, the depths of the soul, And we thank the Holy Spirit for taking that earnest, biblical, doctrinal, experiential, practical preaching and using it for the conversion of tens of thousands of people. And we thank the Lord for the 750 reprinted Puritan books in the last 50 years, as today many people are still being converted by these sermons repackaged as books. and we pray continue to use the Puritans in our day and help us learn how to bring the essence of what they brought in contemporary language to our 21st century world. So help us to stand on their shoulders and to apply the word in similar ways in our own day to make it effectual by the grace of thy spirit to the eternal well-being of men and women, and boys and girls. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.