Puritans and Revival X: Divine Initiative

As we continue our series on the influence of the Puritans on the Great Awakening (US) and the Evangelical Revival (UK), we’re looking at God’s work in regeneration.

“Be saved from this perverse generation.”

This is a passive imperative. “Be saved” is a command. But it’s a passive one. You can only fulfill this command by having someone else act upon you. This is a matter of life and death, and only Jesus Christ is able and willing to save.

In Puritan and Evangelical theology, they understood the Divine initiative in regeneration. In other words, they recognized it is God’s work, not ours, in making a soul alive. But these men pressed our duty to make use of all proper means of grace while crying out for mercy.

What are the primary means of grace?

The Word

The Puritan Bishop Ezekiel Hopkins wrote: “Be exhorted, therefore, more to prize, and more to frequent the  preaching of the word. How knowest thou, O sinner, but, whilst thou art slothfully absenting thyself from the public ordinances, that word is then spoken, that might have been thy conversion? ”

William Williams wrote, “Whenever God is silent, the word of man will fail. For words to be effective God must make them prevail.”

George Whitefield wrote: “Nor are the most persuasive strains of holy rhetoric less needful for a scribe ready instructed to the kingdom of God . . . But at the same time, I would as soon go to yonder church-yard and attempt to raise the dead carcasses . . . as to preach to dead souls, did I not hope for some superior power to make the word effectual to the designed end.”

PRAYER

We can’t awaken ourselves see or make ourselves want God. But that doesn’t mean we’re inactive. Put yourself in these means of grace, in the way of God’s mercy.

Charles Finney’s “Sinner’s Prayer” is treated like magic, as if saying these words makes it true. The sinner’s prayer makes God into an impersonal machine. But true prayer is the needy soul coming to the all-sufficient God, laying our needs before Him.

Bishop Hopkins encouraged his readers to give God and themselves no rest until this work of regeneration be thoroughly worked in them. Recommending prayer, he wrote, “Be instant (persistent) with God, by Prayer, that he would, by his omnipotent grace, newly create you to himself, and stamp again upon you his effaced image.”

Henry Scougal ends the first chapter in his work The Life of God in the Soul of Man by giving a model prayer for the unregenerate to use in their search for this grace:

“Oh! that the holy life of the blessed Jesus may be always in my thoughts, and before mine eyes, till I receive a deep sense and impression of those excellent graces that shined so eminently in him; and let me never cease my endeavors, till that new and divine nature prevail in my soul, and Christ be formed within me.”

In George Whitefield’s Prayer for desiring and seeking after the New-Birth, he begins by recognizing that we do not possess what God has required for entry into the spiritual kingdom. He directs us to pray for those things of which sin has robbed us:

internal holiness,
a circumcised heart,
spiritual sight,
alertness.

The sinner confesses his complete spiritual ruin, and the danger of his soul moves the supplicant to plead with God:

“[S]uffer me no longer to sit in darkness, and the shadow of death. O prick me, prick me to the heart, strike me down to the ground with that all-quickening light, and make me cry out with the trembling jailor, 'What shall I do to be saved?’”

Convinced by God of his moral poverty, he agrees that God is not obligated to save him, but that His past mercies give the sinner hope that God intends to lead him to repentance by His kindnesses.

He closes with arguments that God would receive greater glory and praise from his life once transformed by this regenerating work.

Dear gracious Father, O for the grace to contemplate the love you have shown me in the Son. Lord, I would be lost, swallowed up day-by-day in the unceasing meditation of it. Dearest blessed, precious Jesus, give me to think of nothing else, to speak of nothing else, but by faith to possess in anticipation the joys of your redeemed until I come through you and in you to the everlasting enjoyment of them in your kingdom of glory. Amen.

This prayer is by Robert Hawker and taken from A Guide to Family Worship.

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